Turn to Stone

by Brian Freeman

  Her lips moved. She spoke, but she barely spoke at all. Even so, he knew the word that escaped her mouth. “Teufel.”

  “How did you know that, Kelli?”

  She slammed the door of the bathroom shut without answering him. He heard the twist of the lock. The ceramic lid of the toilet seat banged open, and he heard the unmistakable noise of Kelli Andrews vomiting out the contents of her stomach. He heard something else, too. Down the hallway, through the broken window, sirens rose in the distance. The police were coming for her.

  “Kelli?”

  She was quiet. He listened at the door.

  “Kelli, are you okay?”

  She didn’t answer, and he grew concerned. He pounded on the frame, and when there was still no sound from inside, he lurched his shoulder heavily into the rickety door, which gave way under his weight. He punched it open.

  The bathroom was empty and freezing. The aroma of sweet sickness blew toward him. The window was open, its curtains flying like the cape of a witch sailing across the moonlit sky.

  Kelli was gone.

  13

  In the morning, Stride faced a choice.

  He got out of the bed in his uncle’s attic at dawn. Richard was still asleep downstairs. He made coffee and poured a large cup into a travel mug, then grabbed a bran muffin and ate it standing up. He left a note for his uncle—thanking him, saying goodbye, telling him he was welcome to visit in Duluth. With his suitcase in the back of his truck, he followed the dark, empty streets of Shawano to the east-west ramps of Highway 29.

  With one turn, he would be on his way home.

  Stride stopped on the overpass near the westbound ramp. There was no one else on the road. The morning was gray, and the woods were a nest of shadows. He tried to turn the wheel. He told himself that it didn’t matter what had happened to Greg Hamlin. It didn’t matter where Kelli Andrews was. It didn’t matter that Percy Andrews had put a gun to his head while he was standing only twenty feet away from Stride.

  He didn’t belong in Shawano. This was someone else’s problem.

  He told himself all of that, but then he took the opposite ramp, heading east on Highway 29. Not toward home. Not toward Duluth.

  The cop in the cemetery deserved another day of his life.

  Stride used his cell phone to call his partner, Maggie Bei. He reached her voice mail, which was fine, because he didn’t want to talk to her. Things had been awkward between them since the break-up of their affair over the winter. They still worked together every day, but it was hard to call them friends. Not enemies, not lovers, but not really friends anymore.

  “Mags, it’s me. I’ve been delayed another day in Shawano. Something came up with my uncle. I’m hoping to be back tomorrow. Call me if you need me.” He didn’t provide details or admit that he was marching onto land that had been clearly labeled No Trespassing by Sheriff Weik.

  A few miles east on Highway 29, he headed south toward the town of Appleton.

  Percy Andrews had highlighted a charge on Greg Hamlin’s credit card statement for a locksmith in Appleton. One hour later, Stride found the home of Buddy Crown, owner of Buddy’s FastLocks. The locksmith lived in a quiet neighborhood near the shore of Lake Winnebago. His white van was parked in the driveway.

  He caught Buddy as the man was heading out of his house to drill a safe deposit box at one of the local banks. The locksmith wasn’t in a mood to chat. He didn’t remember Hamlin—“I average a dozen calls a day every day”—but he did remember Percy Andrews making the same inquiry as Stride. After expressing his annoyance that the left hand of the police didn’t know what the right hand was doing, Buddy retrieved his log book and gave Stride an address where he’d opened a locked car for Greg Hamlin on a Tuesday evening nearly two months earlier.

  Tuesday.

  Stride remembered what Hope Hamlin had said. 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.

  In reality, Greg Hamlin had been an hour away in Appleton. Why?

  Stride used the GPS navigator in his Expedition to find the address that the locksmith had given him. He imagined Percy Andrews following the same trail to the same place, and he knew what he expected to find. A home. A condo. A motel. A woman who was intimate with Greg Hamlin, or a get-away where they’d met for their affair.

  He was wrong.

  The directions took him to an unassuming Baptist church in a building that could have been an auto repair shop in a previous life. It was about the last place that Stride expected to find a commercial real estate millionaire like Greg Hamlin. His first thought was that Hamlin had parked here and walked to his real destination, but when he got out of his truck, he didn’t see any obvious alternatives in the neighborhood.

  There was one other vehicle, a tan Buick, in the small church parking lot. As Stride studied the building, a man emerged through the two glass doors and locked them behind him. He was in his forties, medium-height and burly, with thinning black hair and glasses. He was dressed in a business suit and wool jacket. He saw Stride and approached him with a polite smile.

  “Can I help you?”

  Stride shook the man’s hand. “I’m not sure. Do you work here?”

  “I’m on the church board. My name’s Rich Johnson.”

  Stride introduced himself. “This is in conjunction with a homicide investigation,” he explained. “The victim’s name was Greg Hamlin. He’s from Shawano, but he appears to have spent some time here. ”

  “The name isn’t familiar,” Johnson replied. “He’s not a member of the church. And there’s a Baptist church in Shawano itself, so I’m not sure why he’d come here.”

  “This man locked his keys in his car a couple month ago. The locksmith gave me this address. It was a Tuesday evening.”

  Johnson adjusted the glasses on his face. “Ah. Tuesday.”

  “Does that mean something?”

  The man hesitated. “We rent out our space on Tuesday evenings. It’s not a church gathering.”

  “What kind of gathering is it?” Stride asked.

  “I’d rather not discuss it, Lieutenant. I’m sorry.”

  Stride didn’t understand the man’s reluctance, but then he remembered the acronym that Percy Andrews had scrawled in the margin of Hamlin’s credit card statement. FOB. The abbreviation took on new meaning in a church parking lot.

  FOB. Friend of Bill.

  Greg Hamlin had been going to AA. He’d been trying to get sober.

  “My girlfriend goes to the same kind of meetings,” Stride told the church board member. “She’s been sober for more than a decade.”

  The words were out of his mouth before he remembered that Serena was no longer his girlfriend. She’d walked out months ago. He hadn’t adjusted to his new reality, and he missed the way things used to be.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Johnson said, “but then you understand why I can’t reveal any information about the people who attend our gatherings.”

  “I do, but I hope you understand that one of them was murdered in an extraordinarily brutal way. I need to know whether his alcoholism was somehow connected to what happened to him.”

  Johnson frowned. “What was the man’s name again?”

  “Greg Hamlin.”

  “Greg H,” Johnson murmured. “Okay, yes, he hasn’t been here in a few weeks. I was concerned. And yes, you can draw the obvious conclusion. I’m part of these meetings, too. I’ve been sober for four and a half years.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “I don’t deserve any praise. If I consider myself done, then I’m halfway to relapsing. It’s a day-to-day thing.”

  “Of course.” Stride added: “There may have been a Shawano policeman here recently asking about Mr. Hamlin. His name was Percy Andrews. He followed the same lead I did. Do you remember him?”

  Johnson shook his head. “No, but he could have talked to someone else at the church. It wouldn’t really be hard to figure out
what we do on Tuesday nights. We post it on the bulletin board. He may have guessed that Greg H was a part of our group, but I doubt he would have learned anything about him. No one would have breached the confidences shared by another member.”

  “Did you know Greg yourself?” Stride asked.

  Johnson looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know who he really was. I only knew him as the man in the chair next to mine.”

  “I think that means you knew him pretty well,” Stride said.

  “Unfortunately, sitting in the chair means you take a sacred oath not to reveal what someone else says.”

  “Greg Hamlin is dead.”

  “Then he would probably want his secrets to die with him,” Johnson said. “I know I would.”

  Stride ran his hands back through his hair in frustration. “Mr. Johnson, it pains me to ask these questions. Really. All I can say is that if you sat next to Greg Hamlin in these meetings, you probably have some measure of sympathy for who he was. Frankly, you’re the first person I’ve met who has stood up for him in any way. It sounds like he was trying to turn his life around, but instead, someone killed him. He was tortured, Mr. Johnson. Terrible things were done to him. I’d like to know why.”

  “Tortured?” Johnson asked.

  “In unspeakable ways.”

  The man in the suit looked sick. He braced himself against the hood of his Buick and held a clenched fist against his mouth. He stared at the ground and took a slow breath. Then he looked up at Stride.

  “How much do you know about the twelve-step program of AA?” he asked.

  “I’m familiar with it, but I couldn’t recite it.”

  “Some people, especially newcomers, feel a need to rush the steps. They think they can get through them in a few months, whereas for most of us, it’s a question of years. A lifetime even.”

  “Greg Hamlin was in a rush?” Stride asked.

  Johnson unzipped his wool coat and removed it, as if he were warm now. His face was flushed. “The death of Greg’s father prompted him to re-evaluate his life. He saw how a strong man can be brought low. I think Greg genuinely wanted to change, but when you take that first step, it can be like staring into a well that has no bottom. It’s the well of all your past sins, and you need to lower yourself slowly, because otherwise, the sheer enormity of regret can overwhelm you. Unfortunately, some people jump.”

  Stride felt as if Johnson were speaking of his own sins. He had an image of himself and Maggie, together, in a sexual way that never should have happened. He saw Serena leaving and the hurt in her face. The weight on him was just as Johnson described—the sheer enormity of regret. Sin was a deep well, and you could fall into it and hear your own voice echoing all of your failures.

  “Hamlin jumped?” Stride asked.

  “Yes. Greg believed he could bull his way through the steps. That just makes them harder. He didn’t seem to realize that the very strength of his personality was one of his problems. It’s very common. These are people who think they can do everything themselves, with no help from others. That’s the antithesis of what we do here. After all, step number one is to admit you are powerless, and that goes against the grain for someone like Greg.”

  “Where was he having difficulties?”

  “He wanted to make amends to the people he’d harmed,” Johnson said.

  “That sounds like a good thing.”

  “Of course, but there’s a reason it’s the ninth step out of twelve. It’s fraught with peril, not only for yourself but for others. To get to that point requires an extensive reassessment of who you are as a person. It involves finding faith, acceptance, humility. If you go to someone you’ve harmed and you can’t truly show that you’re a changed man, you’re likely to be bitterly rejected. What’s worse, you can open up old wounds and victimize people all over again.”

  “Who did Greg feel he’d harmed?” Stride asked. “His wife?”

  “Yes, we can’t help but hurt our families. I gather in Greg’s case they were co-dependent, each making the other worse. I don’t think he’d even told her he was in the program. He thought she would have ridiculed it.”

  “Did he mention anyone else?”

  “Greg told us one painful story,” Johnson replied. “He used no names, of course, but the incident seemed to gnaw at him more than anything else. I think he’d been harboring guilt about it for a long time.”

  “What was the story?” Stride asked.

  Johnson looked as if he had to dig deep for the courage to talk about it. Stride knew how he felt. One person’s mistakes always made you think of your own. “He said that he had harmed someone in a previous career and that that person had gone on to commit a grievous crime.”

  “Did he talk about the nature of the harm he’d done?”

  “Greg was a teacher,” Johnson said. “The boy was a student. I gather he was deeply cruel to the boy on many levels. Greg was troubled by his own responsibility for what the boy did years later. He asked us our thoughts about when an innocent man becomes responsible for what a guilty man does. He wondered: If you make someone into a monster, does that make you a monster, too?”

  Stride knew who Greg Hamlin had harmed. He’d lit the fire in a boy who later took out his fury on his wife. His son. His counselor.

  Jet Black.

  He’d brought back to life a man who should have remained dead.

  “Did Hamlin say what he planned to do next?” Stride asked.

  “Greg said he couldn’t make amends directly, but there were other ways. Other people who’d been hurt. He said he was going to talk to the boy’s victims. Seek them out. We advised him to tread carefully, because it was a dangerous path. When you open up old wounds, you never know what people will do.”

  14

  Stride sat in the parking lot of Kroll’s restaurant in Green Bay, which was a diner immediately opposite the Packer shrine of Lambeau Field. Football season was months away. He finished the last bites of a cheeseburger wrapped in wax paper as he watched Ginnie Black cross toward him from the stadium. She wore a winter coat, hands in the pockets, and she had her head tucked against the wind, which swirled strands of her long brown hair. Her lips were turned downward in a perpetual frown. The cold had sucked color from her face.

  “I don’t have much time,” she said when she joined him inside his Expedition.

  “I appreciate your meeting me. You’re sure I can’t buy you lunch?”

  “I’m sure. I need to get back to my desk. The phone never stops ringing.”

  “You work hard.”

  “I do what I need to do,” she said.

  She smoothed the tangles in her hair, using a brush from inside her purse. It seemed to offend her to think that her appearance was at all untidy. She checked herself in the mirror on the sun visor, and then she noted the time on her watch. Her manner was impatient, as if a minute not on the job was a minute wasted.

  “What do you want, Mr. Stride?” she asked.

  “I think you left out some things when we talked yesterday,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Greg Hamlin,” he said.

  “What about him? You didn’t ask me about him.”

  “You heard that I found Hamlin’s body? He was murdered.”

  “Yes, so what?” There was no emotion in her voice. His death didn’t mean anything to her.

  “Percy Andrews was investigating Hamlin’s disappearance. I don’t think that comes as a surprise to you. I think you knew about it.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “It matters because Percy had a copy of Hamlin’s credit card statement. There was a charge shortly before he disappeared that was made right here at Kroll’s. I also heard from Hope Hamlin that one of her customers saw Greg with a woman in Green Bay. Hope thought that it was Kelli Andrews, but it wasn’t Kelli, was it? Hamlin met you.”

  Ginnie pinched her thin lips together. She studied him silently before replying. “Yes, he did. So?”

  “I
t wasn’t an affair.”

  “Hardly.”

  “What did Greg Hamlin want with you? I heard he was looking to confess his sins.”

  Ginnie let out a hiss of annoyance. “Yes, he said he hoped he could make amends for the damage he caused me because of Jet. I told him if he wanted absolution for what a bastard he was, he should go to church. I’m not a priest.”

  “You knew him as a teacher?” Stride asked.

  “Sure. He was a first-class prick. Now twenty years later, he sits here crying about how bad he feels about what he did to Jet. Like that changes anything.”

  “What exactly did he do to Jet?”

  “Hamlin was a gym coach, Mr. Stride. Tall, cocky, arrogant, huge ego. An alpha male. He enjoyed humiliating the kids who weren’t jocks like him. One time Jet missed his goal time on a sprint because he twisted an ankle. Hamlin made him put on a girl’s swimsuit for his next run, because he said only girls complained about injuries. Another time Jet said he needed to go to the bathroom during practice. Hamlin made him stand there until he shit his pants. And what lesson do you think the other kids took away from that, huh? They piled on Jet, too.”

  Stride shook his head. “Jet never told anyone? Hamlin would have been fired if someone had known.”

  “Back then? In a small town? Dream on. If he’d complained, it would have gotten worse. There was a conspiracy of silence at the school. People knew, but they didn’t care.”

  “So what did Hamlin want from you? Forgiveness?”

  “Forgiveness. A clear conscience. Things I couldn’t give him. He said he felt responsible, like he made Jet who he was.”

  “Do you think that’s true?”

  Ginnie shrugged. “Whatever bad blood Jet had in him, Hamlin made it worse. I told you, I felt bad for Jet, but excuses don’t mean anything. You don’t give murderers a free pass because they had crappy childhoods, do you, Mr. Stride?”

  “No.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “What about you?” Stride asked. “If Hamlin harmed Jet, he harmed you, too.”

  “Yeah, that’s what he said, and I didn’t argue with him. If you’re feeling sorry for what Jet went through, don’t worry. He gave as good as he got. Mike and I paid the price.”