Turn to Stone

by Brian Freeman

  Stride grabbed Hope under both arms and dragged her off Kelli, which was like wrestling a feral cat. The older woman’s legs kicked wildly, her heels flying off. She shrieked and flailed as Stride carried her in mid-air out the front door, nearly colliding with his uncle, who was running up the Andrews driveway.

  “What the hell is going on?” Richard bellowed. “Was that a shot?”

  “Get inside,” Stride told him. “There’s a gun on the floor. Make sure it’s not touched. Help Kelli, okay?”

  His uncle disappeared, and Stride dropped Hope Hamlin into a snow bank on the lawn and braced her to the wet ground. She squirmed against him, but the cold, dampness, and alcohol bled the fight from her quickly. When she finally lay still, he felt confident enough to let go. Hope lay on her back, staring at the sky. Her elegant bankers’ clothes were grimy with snow and mud. Her helmet hair had sprouted messy wings. She looked every year of her age now, and her anger had bled into grief. She sobbed, unable to talk. Tears poured down her contorted face, glistening under the moon. When she could finally speak, she mumbled her husband’s name over and over with each stuttered breath: “Greg, Greg, Greg.”

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said.

  Hope’s head slipped sideways. Her cheek was in the snow. She seemed to realize who he was for the first time. “He’s really dead? You saw him?”

  “I’m sorry,” Stride repeated.

  She closed her eyes. Flurries off the trees landed in white flecks on her skin.

  “I thought he ran away,” she murmured. “I didn’t tell anyone, but that’s what I really thought. I thought he finally got sick of me. But this—”

  He said nothing. Her eyes opened again, and they were empty.

  “Greg was the first person I ever met who was like me. Someone who didn’t want to lead a small, weakling life. We knew people hated us. We didn’t care. If you let people push you around, that’s your problem. You don’t survive if you’re not strong.”

  Stride still said nothing. He knew too many people like Hope and Greg Hamlin who thought life was a sport to be won. As if there were some special prize at the finish line for coming out ahead. He’d seen for himself that winner and losers died the same way.

  “He was so handsome,” Hope went on. “I remember when I met him. Tall. Chiseled. Lean. Tight mustache. No time for fools. When we played tennis, he crushed me. Most men would let me win, and he said if I wanted to win, I needed to beat him. I was so turned on.”

  Her eyes focused, and she stared at Stride, suddenly sober. “I told that cop about it,” she snapped. “He knew the truth.”

  “Percy?” Stride asked. “Told him what?”

  Hope propped herself on her hands. “Greg was having an affair. That bastard. You may think I’m the world’s biggest bitch, but I never cheated on him. Never.”

  “Are you sure about the affair?”

  “Do you think I don’t know my husband?” Hope snapped. “For months, he’s been disappearing on Tuesday evenings. He told me it was to play tennis at the gym, but that was a lie. I went to find him there, but they said he hadn’t been there in months. I knew what was going on. I knew it was another woman. One of the customers in the bank, she told me she saw Greg in Green Bay. Little bitch, she was all sweet and innocent. ‘Oh, he had a woman in the car with him, but I’m sure it was all above-board.’ All the while smirking at me.”

  “Did you talk to Greg?” Stride asked.

  Hope’s eyes flashed with violence again. “Of course, I talked to him! I broke a wine bottle over the hood of his car, and I talked to him. Screamed at him is more like it. Lying bastard denied it, but I didn’t believe him. And then do you know what he said to me?”

  Stride waited.

  “He said he wanted a divorce. He said he couldn’t live with me anymore. I was too angry for him. Thirty years of marriage to a man with a backbone, and he turns into a fucking pussy when his daddy dies. Going to church. Never raising his voice. Finding some young chick to stick his dick into. Throw the angry old wife into the trash. Bastard.”

  She cursed him, but she began to cry again. He gave her a minute as her emotions rose and fell. She wiped her pert nose on her sleeve.

  “You told Percy what you suspected?” he asked.

  “I told him everything. Greg’s little Tuesday getaways. The woman in Green Bay. If Greg ran off, I wanted to know the truth, because I was going to track him down and shake his body upside-down until I had every penny he’d ever earned in his whole fucking worthless life.”

  Phlegm caught in her throat, and she spat in the snow.

  “What did Percy say?” Stride asked.

  “He said he couldn’t find Greg. Not a clue. He was gone. No idea where he was. I was just going to have to live with that. ‘Sorry, ma’am, but people who don’t want to be found usually don’t get found.’ And all the while, the son of a bitch figured out what was really going on.”

  Stride eyed the shattered window in the Andrews house. He thought about Hope threatening Kelli with the revolver. “What do you think Percy discovered?”

  “He found out it was his own wife!” she screamed. “My husband was fucking his wife, and so the cop went and killed him. And then the little pussy-coward killed himself.”

  Stride watched her face, which was contorted with fury. He had dealt with his share of difficult victims, but Hope Hamlin was among the most hateful women he’d run across. He had to remind himself that she’d lost her husband in a terrible way.

  “Mrs. Hamlin, even if your husband was having an affair, why are you so sure it was with Kelli Andrews?”

  She took hold of his wrist. Her grip was tight, and her nails bit into his skin. “Because Percy lied to me! He lied to my face! He knew!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Percy had all of Greg’s records!” Hope snapped. “Cell phone records! Credit cards! He told me there was nothing in any of it. That was bullshit. I checked! I dug up Greg’s last cell phone bill, and I checked it myself. The night he disappeared—the last call my husband ever made. Guess who he called?”

  Hope’s face turned wolfish. Stride didn’t like it.

  “It was her,” she told him. “That bitch. Greg called Kelli Andrews. And Percy knew all about it.”

  12

  “It isn’t true,” Kelli told him.

  She sat on the sofa with her hands in her lap, and she was an oasis of calm. Her perfume, an essence of spring flowers, rose from her skin like a whisper. The house was cold as night air screeched through the broken window. She’d just had a woman fire a gun past her head. Her husband was dead and a suspect in a horrific murder. And yet Kelli Andrews was zen-like in her patience. She seemed to gather strength as events closed in around her.

  Stride had secured Hope’s revolver. His uncle had taken Hope back to his own house and was sobering her up with coffee. Stride was alone with Kelli, but that wouldn’t last long. The police would be here any minute, and he wanted answers from her before Sheriff Weik arrived.

  “Hope Hamlin says she called the number on her husband’s cell phone statement,” Stride told her. “You answered.”

  Kelli nodded. “Yes, she called me today. I had no idea what it was about. The next thing I knew, she showed up at my house, screaming and threatening me with a gun.”

  Stride watched her face, looking for a lie. “Did Greg Hamlin call you a month ago?”

  “No.”

  “The statement says he did.”

  “Well, if he called, it must have been a wrong number. I get unwanted sales calls all the time. I usually don’t even answer.”

  Stride shook his head. “If Hope is right, this was the last call Greg made before he disappeared. He called you. No one will believe that’s a coincidence or a mistake. You have to be honest with me, Kelli. Is Hope right? Were you having an affair with her husband? Did Percy find out about it?”

  Kelli stood up from the sofa. She shivered as the breeze touched her skin. She
retrieved a photo of Percy from a nearby table and cradled it in her hands. She didn’t duck her head or avoid his gaze. “I wasn’t having an affair, Mr. Stride. Not with Greg Hamlin. Not with anyone. I loved Percy.”

  “The police will be here soon. They’re going to search this house from top to bottom. Computers, too.”

  “Let them search. There’s nothing to find.”

  “You need to understand that this isn’t just about Percy. Not anymore. It’s about you, too.”

  Her forehead wrinkled with confusion. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “You’re going to be a suspect in Hamlin’s murder,” he said.

  “What? That’s crazy!”

  “No, it’s not. Percy was the cop investigating Hamlin’s disappearance. Now it looks like Percy dragged Hamlin’s dead body into the woods to hide it, and Hamlin’s wife is suggesting that you and Greg were having an affair. If I’m Sheriff Weik, here’s what I’m thinking. Either Percy killed Hamlin himself—or you did. Then Percy covered up the crime to protect you, but he couldn’t live with what he’d done.”

  He saw something in Kelli’s face now. A stirring of concern. Her calm had begun to fracture. “That isn’t what happened.”

  “Weik is going to ask you about that phone call. He won’t believe it was a wrong number.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t explain it.”

  “Did Percy ask you about the call?”

  “He didn’t,” she said. “He never mentioned it.”

  “Did he ask you whether you knew Greg Hamlin?”

  Kelli nodded. “Actually, yes, he did, but he didn’t make a big deal of it.”

  “What did you tell him?” Stride asked.

  “I said no. I didn’t know him.”

  Stride thought about the woman in front of him and what she’d been through. She was strong—to do the work she did, to survive what she had at the Novitiate. There was steel inside her, and yet steel also locked out emotions. She had to be immune to pain. He assumed there was no other way to deal with the people she met. The abusers and the abused. The bullies and the bullied.

  He remembered what his uncle had said about Greg Hamlin. Hamlin was a hard man. A hot-tempered teacher who didn’t belong in the schools. A husband in a combustible marriage. Recently, however, he’d changed. He’d softened. As if he’d gotten help.

  “Was Greg Hamlin a client of yours?” he asked Kelli. “Did he come to you for counseling?”

  Her eyes widened with surprise. “I—I can’t say anything about my clients. You know that.”

  “Did Percy ask the same question?”

  Kelli chewed her bottom lip. “Yes.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Just what I said to you. I can’t confirm or deny that anyone is a client. If I did that, you could assume that I’m counseling someone simply because I won’t give an absolute denial about it. Even so, I had already told Percy what I told you. I never met Greg Hamlin.”

  “Except if he was a client, would you acknowledge knowing him? A lot of therapists won’t say hello to a client on the street.”

  “Oh, God.” She held up her hands in exasperation. “Don’t you see the impossible position I’m in? I’m trying to deny something I can’t ethically deny.”

  Stride wanted to believe that Kelli didn’t know Greg Hamlin. That his death was a mystery to her, even if her husband was at the heart of it. He felt an urge to help her, but that urge had betrayed him in the past. Sometimes he’d let his sympathy for victims get in the way of his better judgment. He was getting mixed signals from this woman.

  Trust her—but don’t trust her.

  “If you didn’t know him, Kelli, explain the phone call,” Stride said.

  “I’m telling you, I can’t. I don’t understand it.” She shook her head and searched for an answer. “Look, I don’t know, maybe Hamlin wanted therapy. Maybe that’s why he was calling me. Everyone in town knows what I do.”

  Stride stood up and put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m not trying to accuse you, but I want you to understand the questions you’re going to face from the police.”

  “I realize that. I appreciate it.”

  “Nothing you tell me is privileged. If the sheriff asks, I have to tell him everything you say.”

  “I know that.”

  Stride eyed the window and the quiet Shawano street. “We don’t have a lot of time. I want to be gone before the sheriff arrives.”

  “Of course.”

  “You say you didn’t know Greg Hamlin,” Stride said. “What about Percy? Did he know him?”

  “He never mentioned him to me.”

  “Could they have known each other in the past? Before you met Percy?”

  Kelli shook her head. “I don’t see how. Percy wasn’t from around here. He grew up near Janesville. I’m telling you, Greg Hamlin was as much a stranger to Percy as he was to me. This was a missing persons case for Percy. Nothing more.”

  “Did he talk about it?” Stride asked.

  “No, but he never talked about his work with me. Just like I never talked about my work with him. Neither one of us really liked what the other did, Mr. Stride. I hated the danger of him being a cop. He hated the kind of people I had as clients. It was sort of an unspoken rule between us. We didn’t go there.”

  “Except you said he was obsessed with Hamlin’s disappearance. How did you know?”

  She pointed at the hallway that led to the house’s small bedrooms. “Percy spent hours in his office. He brought home boxes of papers and pored over them. Whenever he wasn’t there, he locked the door. That was unusual. He had never done that before. He was being really secretive about it.”

  “Show me,” Stride said.

  Kelli hesitated. “I can, but it won’t do you any good.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s nothing left,” she said.

  Stride saw the discomfort in her face and didn’t like what it meant. He headed down the hallway, which was lined with family photographs, and he paused to study them. Percy and Kelli were an odd couple in the pictures, not really looking like they belonged together. Percy didn’t smile. Kelli smiled, but it looked like the nervous smile of someone whistling in a graveyard. He saw their master bedroom on the left, which had an unmade king bed. He passed a narrow bathroom with a frosted window leading outside. Opposite the bathroom was a small bedroom crowded with an oak desk and lacquer bookshelves.

  The desk was empty. Swept clean.

  He took a step into the office. Kelli was behind him.

  “I unlocked the room today and found it like this,” she said. “There’s fresh ash in the fire pit outside. I think he burned all of his notes before he killed himself.”

  Stride turned around and stared at her. “Or did you burn them?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Weik will think you did.”

  “I swear I didn’t. This is the way I found his office. I hunted through the desk, and it’s empty. The only thing I found was a piece of paper that had fallen behind one of the drawers.”

  “What was it?” Stride asked.

  “It was a page copied from a credit card statement. Percy had highlighted a couple entries.”

  “Was it Greg Hamlin’s?”

  “I didn’t look that carefully.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  She nodded. She left the room and went into their bedroom, and she returned a moment later with a folded piece of paper in her hand. He studied the page and saw that it was an excerpt from an American Express bill. The accountholder was Greg Hamlin. Two entries from the previous month had been marked in yellow: a charge from a locksmith in Appleton and from a Green Bay restaurant named Kroll’s.

  Percy had also scrawled an acronym in the margin: FOB.

  “Do either of these charges mean anything to you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “What about FOB?”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  “
Hope Hamlin told me that one of her customers saw Greg with a woman in Green Bay. Was it you?”

  “It wasn’t. I told you, I didn’t know him.”

  Stride was frustrated. “Kelli, can you think of any reason at all why Percy would have killed Greg Hamlin?”

  “No, because I don’t believe he did. That’s not the man he was. Whatever happened to him, you’ll never convince me that Percy was a killer.”

  Stride studied the rest of the office. Percy had been thorough in cleaning up. He’d left nothing in the desk, nothing in the wastebasket. Only the bookshelves had been left behind. He saw an unsorted collection of hardcovers and paperbacks. Mysteries. Law books on criminal procedure. Religious fiction. On one shelf, he also spotted several books with titles in German. The German volumes were a mixture of textbooks and Thomas Mann novels, as well as a collection of Grimm’s fairy tales. Stride pulled the book off the shelf and noted the contents. The collection included a story that Neal Gandy had mentioned: Der Teufel mit den drei goldenen Haaren.

  “Did Percy speak German?” Stride asked.

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Then why the books?”

  “They’re mine. I learned German for my degree. Many of the best psychologists were German, so I wanted to be able to read their theories in the original language, not in translation.”

  “So you speak German?”

  “Yes.”

  Stride closed his eyes. She sensed his anxiety.

  “I don’t understand,” she went on. “What difference does that make?”

  When he opened his eyes again, she’d already backed away from him. She was in the doorway of the bathroom across the hall, and her face was white. Somehow, he thought she knew what he was about to say, and that was a bad thing. A very, very bad thing.

  “Hamlin’s body,” he said.

  She swallowed hard. She touched the tattoo on her neck, as if the snakes were alive. “Yes?”

  “His killer carved a word into his chest. A German word.”