by Jen Blood
“Go on ahead—I think they’re ready for you.”
I put my twenty on the counter without speaking, aware that Ashmont’s eyes were still on me.
“It’s the Jetta at pump three,” I managed. I headed for the door before the girl behind the counter could respond. I was still pumping my gas when Ashmont came out and headed straight for me.
Einstein growled at sight of him, his teeth bared, his nose quivering at the window I’d left cracked in the backseat.
“I told you people don’t want you here,” Ashmont said when he was still a few feet away.
“I hadn’t noticed.” I replaced the nozzle in the pump, screwed the gas cap back on, and tried to hide the fact that my knees were knocking together like castanets.
“You must get that spine of yours from your mum—your daddy was a pussy from the word go. Anybody’d think twice before they’d mess with Kat, though. And now, we’re all gonna pay for that—for the way she used people up, got ‘em to go her way.”
He stepped closer. Einstein started barking, doing his damnedest to squeeze through the narrow opening I’d left for him.
“I’ll tell you a secret, though.” I could smell him—salt and whiskey, cigarettes and lobster bait. He smiled at me. His eyes were as hard as black jade. “Your mum’s not getting out of this one. You take anybody down, she’ll be first to fall. You remember that, when you think about whether this story you’re telling is worth it.”
He turned and left before I could ask him what the hell he was talking about. I got back in the car still shaking, thinking once more about the attack the day before. Could it have been Ashmont? Juarez had asked me about size and smell—Ashmont might be the right size, but you could smell him coming from a mile away. I would have known if it was him. Wouldn’t I?
I was feeling a whole lot less confident about that by the time I pulled into Noel Hammond’s driveway a few minutes later.
Hammond opened the door before I had a chance to knock. He took one look at my face and the color drained from his own. He stepped aside and motioned me in.
“I guess Diggs must have mentioned I’d be stopping by,” I said.
“He didn’t mention you’d look like you just went three rounds with Tyson when you did, though.”
“Yeah, well…He wasn’t trying to keep you out of the loop, he just doesn’t know that part yet.”
Hammond’s house was small and tidy, with a potbelly stove in the corner of the living room, one plump cat curled up on the windowsill, and another on the sofa. I could smell homemade bread baking in the next room. The walls were covered with pictures of a younger Hammond and a pretty blonde woman I assumed was his wife, along with framed photos documenting the growth of a cute blonde girl who grew into a cute blonde woman with two cute blonde babies.
I motioned to one of the photos. “Your daughter?”
“Jasmine. Those are her kids—Winnie and Ephraim. Twins.”
“Nice.”
We stood there for a few seconds in silence, our eyes fixed on the same photo.
“How old is she?”
He hesitated. “Twenty-one.”
Born after the fire. And the affair with my mother, one assumed.
“Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee? I think I have a beer in there somewhere.” He motioned to a spot on the sofa.
“I’m fine.” I took a seat, doing my best to avoid disturbing the cat as I did so. Hammond turned a rocking chair by the stove so that it was facing me and sat down.
“Diggs said you had a conversation with Jim Abbott.”
“That I did.”
The cat opened sleepy eyes and gazed at me from half-shut lids. He stretched double paws, arched his back, and flicked his tail at me as he hopped down and headed for Hammond’s lap.
When I didn’t volunteer any further information about my meeting with Abbott, Hammond shook his head.
“You’re as stubborn as your mother.”
I looked at him. His eyes remained level with mine, as though he knew exactly how big a can of worms he’d just opened with the statement.
“Abbott said he thought you two were having an affair, back when he was doing the investigation.”
“We weren’t.”
I looked at him doubtfully. For the first time, his cool demeanor wavered.
“It wasn’t an affair.” He scratched his chin and stared at the floor. “It was an indiscretion, no more. Alice—my late wife—and I were having a hard time. I came here to get away for a while; she stayed in the city. I got the call to come out and help with the fire that day.”
“Were you and Kat already together at that point?”
“I never met her before that day. I was one of the first firefighters out there—when I got there, Kat was having a knock-down, drag-out with Joe Ashmont and Matt Perkins.”
“The fire chief and the constable,” I said.
“Yeah. I wasn’t clear on why your mother was even there—there obviously weren’t any survivors. There wasn’t anything she could have done.”
“What were they fighting about?”
Hammond ran his knuckles along the cat’s spine; I could hear purring from my seat across the room. The other cat—a long-haired, marmalade butterball—got up from his spot at the window and threaded itself between his legs.
“You should talk to your mother,” Hammond finally said.
“I don’t want to talk to my mother. I’m here—just tell me. I know her. Nothing you say could shock me, trust me.”
He smiled at that, like I was a kid who’d said something cute.
“She’s a good woman. A hard person to know, it’s true—but she loves you. And she loved your father. She was just doing what she could to protect you both.”
“By sleeping with you.”
He sat up straighter. He looked more tired than he had when we first met, though it had only been a few days ago. I seemed to have that effect on people lately.
“Yeah.” He smiled faintly. “You look like her, you know. Your eyes.”
Another second of silence passed before he made up his mind. “I never found out exactly what the fight was about. It was early afternoon. The Fire Marshal and his team, along with the investigators and the ME, didn’t get out there ‘til the next day. We were supposed to keep watch over the place until everybody got there. Preserve the scene.”
I nodded, recalling Sergeant Flint’s account of the story. “So, this was after my father and I got there.”
“Yeah. Long after. I don’t know where Adam was by then. You were there, though.” He looked at me with pity, like he was seeing the child I’d been instead of the woman I’d become. Or maybe seeing both.
“Ashmont looked like he’d had the snot kicked out of him, and Perkins just looked like…a beaten man. Like everything worth living for had just gone up with that church. Kat was the only one in control.”
“That sounds like my mother.”
“The fire died down, and most of the crew left. It was early evening by this time. The second they were gone, Kat started moving the bodies. She told Ashmont and Perkins to shovel the remains into a pile, everything together. I don’t think she even realized I was still there.”
“And so the padlock…”
He nodded. “Everything. Anything that made it look like what it was—the position of the bodies, the locked door…It all got shoveled away. It was all a mess anyway, of course—soaked and destroyed. But she wasn’t doing it to be helpful.”
“And Ashmont and Perkins just went along with this?”
“I told you—they’d already checked out. You ask me, they were as invested in covering things up as she was. When they realized I’d gotten some photos of the scene, Ashmont threatened me. I managed to back him down, though.”
I thought of the man who had accosted me at the general store—his sour breath and cruel smile, the violence he wore like a badge. “How’d you do that?”
“I think a couple of swings might have been exchang
ed.”
“But Kat was more persuasive.”
He stopped again. Looked at the floor. “It was the next night. I had a cabin out on West Shore Road for the summer. Your mother showed up with a bottle of tequila and two shot glasses. She’d been crying.”
This was the least plausible thing Noel had said so far. He saw the doubt on my face and shook his head.
“She’s not as hard as you think. It wasn’t an act—trust me, nobody’s that good. She might have come there to seduce me, but the tears were real. The fear.”
“She thought Dad did it,” I said suddenly. It shouldn’t have been surprising, but it was—I’d just assumed somehow that I was the only one with doubts about my father.
“Did he?” I prompted, when he didn’t say anything.
He continued to stare at the floor. My eyes watered. When I wiped the tears away, I forgot about the bruises; the physical pain pushed the emotional crap away, and I was back in control.
“I didn’t think so at the time,” he said. “I don’t know what I think anymore. But your mother believed he did. We…Everything just kind of happened from there. Two days later, Alice called and told me she was pregnant.”
“And Kat told you to keep your mouth shut or she’d call your wife and tell her all about your little indiscretion. And you agreed. Said nothing, leaving the murders of thirty-four people unsolved.”
“I didn’t see it that way.”
I tried to read him, figure out what it was he thought had happened out there. Then, suddenly, it hit me.
“The man who was out there—did you see him?”
He looked up, unable to hide his surprise. “What man?”
“There was a man—my father told me he wasn’t real, that I imagined him. Kat told me the same thing. Made me promise never to mention him. But there was a man who chased my father and me once we got on the island.”
“You’re sure about that?”
I was, suddenly. For the first time in my life, I was positive. The man I’d seen on the island that day had been real, no matter what my parents might have said to the contrary. “Yeah. I’m sure.”
He got up from his rocking chair so fast both cats skittered away, their tails twitching. He went into the other room without a word, then returned a minute or two later with a thick manila file folder. He opened it and selected three photos.
A blackened body half-covered in charred wood and debris, one hand raised as though in supplication. “It’s a burned body. What else am I supposed to be seeing?”
“Look at the placement—it’s a burned body on the other side of the wreckage. Not everyone was locked inside the church.”
I wasn’t following him.
“It was Isaac Payson,” he said before I had to ask. “Our theory was that he’d drugged everyone, locked them in the chapel, and then sat outside the door and waited for the flames to take him, too.”
“These are more pictures no one saw, I take it?”
“I took them afternoon when I first showed up, before Kat and the others got to the bodies.”
It was a good minute or more before I could say anything. In the meantime, I sat in shocked silence while the cats purred and Hammond waited for me to pull myself together.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“This isn’t just some little white lie,” I said finally. “She destroyed evidence. She obliterated it, for Christ’s sake.” I thought of Ashmont’s words about my mother earlier that morning: You take anybody down, she’ll be the first to fall. I had no idea what the penalty for this kind of thing might be, but I couldn’t imagine it would be light.
I cast an accusing eye at Hammond. “You were a cop—how could you just let her do that? You had proof, and you just let the killer go. There was a mass murder and no one was ever held accountable for that. That man I saw on the island—”
“The man no one else ever saw—the one both your parents said you imagined? Listen, your mom gave a hell of a good argument for why burying the evidence was the best thing for everyone. I could’ve fought her on it, but thirty-four people were dead. Including Isaac Payson, who as far as I could see was the one who set the fire in the first place. Your mother was right about one thing: a big investigation would have led right to your father’s front door.”
I felt sick. Sick and tired, and the more answers I got, the less any of this made sense. “So you did all this for my father? You and my mother and Joe Ashmont and Matt Perkins all risked your careers to save my father—that’s the story you expect me to believe?”
“I expect you to believe whatever the hell you want. I’m just telling you what I thought was the truth at the time.”
“But you don’t think it’s the truth anymore?”
He actually laughed at that—a tired, disgusted laugh that made me think Noel Hammond had been wrestling with the truth behind this fire for as long as I had. “I don’t know what the truth is anymore. I’m working on a theory, though.”
“Involving the man who chased me on the island that day?”
He hedged. “I don’t know.” I had the feeling he was telling the truth. “Give me a couple of days, though, and I think I’ll have some answers for you.”
I tried to imagine my mother doing everything Hammond said she’d done: sleeping with a stranger, destroying evidence, blackmailing a man who just wanted to get on with his life. From the time I was a child, my mother had been a mystery to me—a driven, ambitious woman who rarely let anything get in the way of a surgical career that eclipsed everything else in her life. She loved me—I knew that, because I had seen her give up that career to stay in Littlehope when we both probably would have been better off somewhere else.
Would she have done those things?
There wasn’t a question in my mind. If it meant protecting me and my father, she would have done them without hesitation. Without remorse.
I took out the rosary Juarez and I found on the island the night before, and handed it to Noel.
“Do you know anyone from the Payson Church who might have had a rosary with the initials ‘RW’ carved in it? There was only one RW that I can remember—Rick Wallace.” I might not have been completely honest when I told Juarez I couldn’t remember all the members of the church.
“And it couldn’t have been him?” Hammond held the rosary in his beefy hand, his gaze fixed on the crucifix.
“Rick was two years younger than me, born on the island. Trust me, the Paysons weren’t huge on Catholicism—no self-respecting member of the church would have kept this.”
He nodded. After a second or two, he stood and returned the relic to me. “If you have half an hour, we can go talk to somebody who might have some answers.”
He didn’t wait for me to agree, already shrugging on his coat. He returned the photos to his manila file folder, put it back in the other room, and we walked out together.
Chapter Fifteen
The Littlehope Residential Home for the Mentally Ill was a massive old Victorian at the end of Seaside Lane, not far from the town landing. When I was a kid, the house had been rumored to be haunted. A fresh coat of paint, new windows, and a wheelchair ramp had done little to change that impression.
When Hammond and I arrived, three men sat together on the porch smoking. Their shoulders were curled in, their bodies tucked against a chill I didn’t feel in the bright sunshine. I apologized to Einstein for being the worst dog owner on the planet and once more relegated him to the car while I went inside.
Edie Woolrich was in the kitchen when we arrived. The place smelled of homemade chicken soup and hot yeast rolls. If this was where one went when insanity came calling, I sincerely hoped I’d be next on the list. She didn’t look surprised to see us when she looked up from the stove—in fact, she acted like she’d been expecting us all along.
“Erin Solomon,” she said, with a long, low whistle. Edie was maybe five feet tall, with a pink scalp visible through thinning gray curls and a penchant for saying whatever came into
her head at any given time. At least, she’d had that penchant when I was a kid; I supposed she could have changed over the years.
“Now who would’ve thought a little moppet like you’d grow into a gorgeous thing like this. You look just like your mum.” She shook her head, eyeing me with furrowed brow. “How is the old battleaxe, anyway?”
Of course, it was possible time hadn’t changed Edie in the least. “She’s good—still in Portland.”
“Good place for her,” Edie said, with a hint of a harrumph. Edie had been the first in a very long line of nurses who had assisted my mother at her beloved clinic; clearly, there was no love lost between them. “Noel said you were coming by—you’ve got some questions?” She turned to Noel with the air of someone accustomed to being obeyed. “Take her on into the dining room, hon. I’ll be right with you.”
A few minutes later, I was sitting in the belly of the old house with Hammond across from me at a massive antique dining room table. Edie sat beside me. Through glass French doors leading into a stately living room, I could see the residents sitting down to watch an old television in the corner.
Edie took one look at the rosary before she nodded to Hammond, as though confirming a question I hadn’t realized had been asked.
“Rebecca—I’d bet money on it. That would’ve been hers.”
“You’re sure?” Hammond pressed.
“Sure as I’m sitting here,” Edie said.
“Rebecca who?”
“Rebecca Westlake,” Edie said.
Hammond stood and took his coat from where he’d draped it behind his chair.
“Wait—where the hell do you think you’re going?” I asked.
“I’ve got a couple errands to run,” he said. “I’m just gonna walk back into town. Edie’ll tell you the story.”
“I think you should stay and fill in the blanks,” I said. Hammond shook his head.
“She knows it better than I do. I’ll give you a call later today and we can compare notes.”
I thought about putting up a fuss, but Edie was watching me like I was a child on the brink of a tantrum. Based on Hammond’s face, he was bracing himself for the same. I decided to go the high road.