He put a hand on his uncle’s shoulder. “That I’ll do.”
Half an hour later, Stride lay on an old twin bed in the musty darkness of Richard’s attic. An open window let in cold air. Richard was something of a hoarder, and the small attic space with the peaked roof was cluttered with decades of broken furniture, old clothes stuffed into moving boxes, and a teaching career’s worth of schoolbooks and yearbooks. Before turning out the light, he’d explored the room and discovered stacks of yellowing postcards and photographs on a walnut bureau. He found a picture of his mother, Beatrice, as a teenager in Shawano. She was a pretty girl. Happy. A shy smile. Frozen in youth.
He thought about her face as he stared at the ceiling. Hours earlier, he’d been standing over her remains in the earth. The girl in the photograph. The woman in the ground. The journey didn’t seem very long.
He drifted to sleep, and he had bad dreams. He was back in the cold cemetery, and his mother was there, and Cindy was there, and he heard laughter that had a weird, wicked childishness to it. He asked Cindy, “Who’s that?”—but she just shook her head, as if it were the silliest question in the world, and told him, “You know who it is, Jonny.”
He did know. He recognized the laughter haunting the hallowed ground. It was Der Teufel.
Then a cop drove up in a black Ford Expedition, but the cop was not Percy Andrews but himself. He stood there, watching himself draw his own weapon. His mother and his late wife looked on with sadness, and just like Percy, he didn’t hesitate to do what needed to be done. Stride watched himself put the gun to his own head and pull the trigger.
He started awake. Light streamed through the tattered curtain, and the dream slipped into dust. He was disoriented, but then he remembered where he was. The sweet smell of cinnamon drifted through the house.
Stride changed and went downstairs, and in the kitchen, he found his uncle, wearing an apron, using a knife to spread a sweet white glaze on his freshly baked rolls. Richard wasn’t alone.
A young woman stood near him, reddened eyes focused outside onto the street, pretty face streaked with dried tears. Her chocolate hair was a mess, knotted into dirty, spiky bangs. She wore what had to be yesterday’s clothes. She hadn’t slept. Looking at his uncle, Stride didn’t think Richard had slept either. He’d gone right across the street to his neighbor to comfort her, and that was where he had been all night.
His uncle met his eyes and nodded. “Kelli Andrews,” Richard said, “meet my nephew, Jonathan Stride.”
She turned slowly. Her eyes searched his face and sized him up. He remembered that she was a psychologist, and he could feel her brain taking the measure of all the non-verbal signals he sent. He wondered if she was waiting for him to talk about what she’d been through. I’m sorry for your loss. The usual platitude. Somehow, he sensed that she was beyond that and that the words wouldn’t have meant anything to her at all.
“You were there,” she said finally. “You saw it happen.”
“Yes, I did.”
Kelli nodded. There was a link between them because of what he’d seen. An indelible bond. Stride was the last thread tying Percy and Kelli together. He’d been there at the end. He knew things she could never know.
“Richard says you’re a detective,” she murmured.
“That’s right.”
“A detective is what I need, Mr. Stride,” Kelli told him. “I need to know why my husband killed himself.”
4
They walked by the Wolf River.
The morning was cold but bright. Low sunshine over the trees had replaced the snow. Kuckuck Park followed the ribbon of the water, which Stride could see through a gnarled web of branches and brush. Much of the river was still frozen, but he saw places where the current had worn away the ice, leaving open patches of water near the wooded banks. Spring waged a slow battle against the paralysis of winter.
The sloping parkland was covered with the overnight snow, but the asphalt trail had already been cleared by the town. Kelli said little as they walked. She had her hands shoved in the pockets of her sleeveless down vest, and under the vest, she wore a long-sleeved navy top and gray jeans studded with bangles. She was tall—not quite six feet—and her arms and legs were full-figured and strong. Her ears and eyebrows were a pincushion of multiple piercings, and she wore earrings dotted with cheap amber stones. She had a stylized M tattooed on the side of her neck, which was formed by two intertwined green serpents. There was a little bit of the biker chick about her, which Stride found an unusual fit with the conservative cop she’d married. As tough as she was, she also wore a delicate floral perfume that wafted over the cold air. It was a pretty scent that made him think of warmer days.
She noticed him staring at her. “I stand out in Shawano,” she said.
“I imagine you do.” He pointed at her tattoo. “M?”
“Marina,” she replied. “My cousin. We were very close growing up. She died when I was twelve. Suicide. She was bullied by other girls at school, and it got so bad she hung herself.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Marina and now Percy. What does it say about a person who loses two loved ones to suicide?” she asked.
“I don’t think it says anything at all,” Stride replied.
“That’s kind of you to say, but I’m not sure I believe that. Marina is the reason I went into counseling. I specialize in abuse issues on both sides. I work with those who have been abused and those who do the abusing.” She stopped on the trail, and her red lips pressed into a thin line. “I assume you know about me. About the Novitiate.”
Stride nodded.
“People can’t believe I stayed in the profession after that. God knows Percy wanted me to quit. I guess I’m naïve enough to believe that what I do matters. I focus on the success stories and try not to dwell on my failures.”
“That sounds admirable.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Most counselors are simply in the business to find people who are more screwed up than they are.”
He smiled. “Did you grow up around here?”
“No, I followed a boyfriend here after college. Eventually, he left, and I stayed around. I like the small town life. I have to travel a lot for my job—Milwaukee, Madison, Wausau—but this gives me somewhere to come home to. Of course, it was easier when I was anonymous. The Novitiate changed everything.”
Stride thought it interesting that she identified her kidnapping and torture with the place where it had occurred, rather than the man who had assaulted her. To her, the incident was simply The Novitiate. He wondered if it gave her some kind of emotional distance from what went on inside the walls. Victims found different ways to cope.
“It’s a bizarre kind of celebrity,” Kelli went on. “People are still uncomfortable around me, even after four years. They don’t know what to say. When Percy and I moved in here, your uncle was the only one who really welcomed us.”
“Richard is good that way,” Stride said. “He takes people as they are.”
“Well, I don’t blame the neighbors. We made their lives difficult simply by being here. Reporters would show up around town. Total strangers would drive by. Creepy. Percy and I didn’t want the magazine covers and the morning shows. We wanted to be left alone.”
“America loves a fairy tale romance,” Stride said.
Kelli frowned. “Fairy tales are just that. Fairy tales.”
She didn’t elaborate. She bowed her head, letting her dirty hair fall across her face. Stride wasn’t sure whether her anger or her grief held the upper hand. He’d seen it many times before. Suicide crashed through those left behind like a tidal wave of guilt and fury.
“Kelli, I realize how difficult this is for you,” he told her, “but I have to be honest. I don’t think I can help. You know as well as I do that there aren’t any easy answers when someone makes this choice. Everybody wants to know why, but most of the time, there really is no why. I’m sorry, but you probably need a minister or another therapist, not a cop.”
She took a deep breath. With both hands, she brushed the bangs away from her eyes. “Richard tells me you’ve lost people. Your wife died.”
He didn’t acknowledge that she was right, because his uncle had no right to share his personal life with a stranger. His annoyance showed in his face, and she didn’t miss it.
“I’m not asking you to share the details of your loss with me,” she went on. “It just helps me to know that you understand. You know who to blame for losing your wife, Mr. Stride. You can blame a heartless, horrible thing called cancer.” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, they were aflame, and her voice hardened like the river ice. “Me, I want to know who to blame, too. Maybe most of the time with suicide, there’s no why, but this time, there is. I know my husband. I know the man he was. Something changed. Something happened. There is a reason he did this, and I want to find it, and no one else is going to help me. I know it’s not a crime to kill yourself, Mr. Stride. Sheriff Weik made it very clear that there’s nothing to investigate. A thorn in his side just got plucked, and he’s ready to close the book. ‘I’m very sorry, ma’am, but that’s the way it is.’ Right now, nobody cares but me, and nobody ever will.”
She stopped on the trail and took his arm. “Except you know what? I said that to Richard last night, and he said I was wrong. He said, you don’t know my nephew. He told me that the man who stood in that cemetery and watched a fellow cop put a gun to his head is not going to rest until he knows why. So I’m asking you if that’s true, Mr. Stride. You saw a good man kill himself right in front of you. Can you walk away and never know what really happened to him?”
Kelli wasn’t shy about what she wanted. Stride respected women like that. Women who wore their toughness on their sleeves. Cindy had been that way. So was Serena. His uncle was right about him, too, because he couldn’t let it go. Walking away wasn’t an option. The scars he wore were all from people he’d failed, and he didn’t want to add Percy Andrews to that list. If he had any faith that things happened for a reason, then he had to believe he was meant to be in that graveyard at that moment on that night. He was destined to be a witness.
“Tell me more about Percy,” he said.
Satisfaction rose like a cold red flush in her cheeks. A smile of relief flitted on and off her face. He hadn’t said yes, but he hadn’t said no—and that meant yes. They brushed snow off a park bench and sat down next to each other. She pulled her long legs underneath her.
“We were very different,” she told him. “That was hard. Percy was conservative. Never missed church. Me—well, you can look at me and figure out I’m not like that. The age difference was a thing, too. He was ten years older, and it made him insecure. I don’t know, I think what really bothered him was wondering if I loved him or if it was just—gratitude. You know, that I felt obligated to be with him because of what he did. Because he saved me.”
“Did you love him?” Stride asked.
Kelli nodded fiercely. “I did. I really did. Age, temperament, religion, none of those things mattered to me at all. I fell in love with Percy because he was decent to his core, and there are so few decent people in this world. I’m not saying it was always easy. Relationships are never easy, but I loved him, and he loved me.”
“You said something changed about him.”
“Yes, but I don’t know what it was. The last few weeks, he was acting strangely. Distant. Afraid. I asked him what was wrong, but he wouldn’t tell me anything. He seemed to be avoiding me.”
“You couldn’t trace it to anything specific?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“What was going on in his life?” Stride asked. “I heard he lost a good friend.”
“Tom Bruin? Yes, that was awful. It was really hard on Percy. They’d been best friends for twenty years. They would have done anything for each other. It’s been lonely for Percy since then. There are things that friends share that spouses don’t. Ever since Tom died, he’s been there for Tom’s wife Anna and for their little girl. I called Anna overnight to tell her what happened. She was a wreck.”
“When did Tom Bruin pass away?”
“Last year.”
Stride knew from his own experience that it was hard to lose friends, but he didn’t think that was enough to drive Percy Andrews to suicide months later. “What about at work? Did he have problems on the job? I heard he and the sheriff didn’t get along.”
“Yes, Percy and Sheriff Weik didn’t like each other. There’s no secret about that. Percy made noises about running against him in the next election, but that was just talk. He hated politics.”
“What about his case load? What was he working on?”
“Well, it’s not like this is the big city. Percy was a small town cop. Most of his calls were the usual thing. Kids stealing cars. Drunks getting into bar fights. Domestic violence. He’d been spending a lot of time on one particular case, though. He seemed obsessed with it.”
“What was the case?”
“A local man disappeared last month. Greg Hamlin. He’s kind of a big shot in town, both him and his wife. They’d be the first to tell you how important they are. He runs a real estate office, and she’s a bank manager, so around here, that means some serious influence.”
Stride nodded. The size of the town didn’t matter. Money and land always talked. “What happened to Hamlin?”
“Nobody knows,” Kelli replied. “He vanished. So did his car. Percy was spending day and night on the case, but I don’t think he’d found anything. He wouldn’t talk to me about it, but he didn’t seem to be working on anything else. I figured he was getting pressure from Sheriff Weik to figure out what happened.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” she said.
Stride chose his words carefully. “Suicide is usually personal, Kelli. It’s not work or friends. If there’s a motive, it’s closer to home. It’s rooted in depression.”
“I know that,” Kelli insisted. “Percy wasn’t depressed. Something was bothering him, but he wasn’t depressed. I know the difference.”
“I have to ask. How were things between the two of you?”
“Fine.”
She answered too quickly.
“In other words, not fine,” he said calmly.
Kelli tilted her head back and stared at the blue sky. “Yes, okay, it was difficult between us.”
“In what way?”
“Every couple struggles,” she replied. “When you’ve been through what I went through, you don’t necessarily embrace intimacy too well. Add in a straitlaced Lutheran husband, and let’s face it, you don’t have a recipe for a couple that’s going to talk out their emotional problems.”
“Were you faithful to him?” Stride asked.
“Yes,” she snapped.
“Was he faithful to you?”
“Percy would never cheat on me.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” she insisted. She read the look on his face and added: “I know where you’re going with this, Mr. Stride. You think I should open up my Psychology 101 textbook. Intimacy issues, emotional struggles, loneliness. Percy couldn’t deal with his problems, and he wound up with a gun to his head.”
Stride frowned. “Sometimes it happens exactly like that, Kelli.”
“I know it does, but not this time. This was something different. If I never find out what it was, then I’ll spend the rest of my life seeing the same look in people’s faces that I’m seeing in yours right now. Everyone will think my husband killed himself because of me.”
5
Standing in the corridor outside Sheriff Weik’s office, Stride heard shouting. He couldn’t make out the words, but it was a woman’s voice, angry and shrill. The heavy oak door flew open, and a petite blond charged into the hallway like a racehorse out of the gate. He didn’t have time to dodge her, and she barreled headlong into him, bouncing off his chest and spilling the contents of her clutch purse on the marble floor.
> “Watch where you’re going!” she shrieked.
Stride smiled patiently. “Actually, I wasn’t going anywhere.”
The woman huffed in exasperation. She squatted awkwardly in her dress and began to retrieve items from her purse: coins, lipstick, pocket mirror, ballpoint pens, and dozens of business cards. Stride bent down to help her, but she interrupted him sharply.
“I can do this myself!”
She gathered most of what she’d lost and stuffed items haphazardly into her purse. Loose change littered the floor, but she left it where it was. When she stood up, she smoothed the lines of her peach dress and patted her poufy helmet hair. She was small, no more than five-foot-four even in pumps, and probably a size zero. Her face was buried under makeup, with lips as red as Door County cherries. Tiny wrinkles surrounded her blue eyes. The perfect color of her yellow hair didn’t match her age, which he guessed was late fifties.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “Are you a cop, too? I don’t know you.”
It sounded like an accusation, as if she knew everybody in town and everybody should know her.
“I am a cop,” he acknowledged, “but not in Shawano.”
She opened her mouth to bark at him and then snapped it shut. She let loose with another irritated yip and clicked away on top of her high heels. Stride had one of her business cards in his hand, and he glanced at the name: Hope Hamlin. She was a loan manager at the Shawano Bank.
“Stride,” said a gravelly voice from the office doorway. Sheriff Weik, his uniform crisp and pressed, stood with his beefy hands on his hips.
“Hello, Sheriff.”
“I thought you’d be heading north on Highway 53 by now. Didn’t you say you were on your way back to Duluth?”
“Change of plans,” Stride said.
Weik didn’t look happy, but he waved Stride into the office and closed the door. The sheriff sat down and folded his hands in front of him. His brown beard made a trimmed line along his neck, which was pinched by the collar of a white uniform shirt. A mustache hid his upper lip. His hair was cut so short that it was mostly a shadow on his balding skull.
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