Leah blinked, read it again, and said, “What in the hell happened?” aloud. She was sitting at the desk in the small library room off the living room, and the doors were closed, but the doors were glass, so the kids could see her. She looked to her right and saw Nick’s feet protruding from the end of the recliner. He was facing the TV. Hailey, however, was on the love seat, staring directly through the glass doors at Leah.
“Everything okay?” Hailey called, loud enough that Nick turned and leaned over in the recliner until Leah could see his face too.
Get it together. Act normal, and remember you’re not alone in the house, Leah!
“It’s nothing,” she called, offering a dismissive wave of the hand to prove the point. “Some silly stuff with the…with the guy who checks in on the cabin when I’m gone.”
“What happened with the cabin?” Hailey was sitting straight up now, looking at Leah intently.
“Oh, nothing. The generator might be broken, and the generator is almost new, so I can’t believe…”
Can’t believe I keep lying to my own children.
It was the right thing to do, though. For their protection. The truth would terrify them more than any fiction she could spin. For the time being, silence was better.
It’s not just silence, Leah. It’s active, not passive. You’re lying to them.
“Did it blow up?” Nick said, sounding almost hopeful.
“No. It did not blow up. I bet it’s just the battery.” She waved her hand again. “Anyhow, it’s no big deal, guys. Sorry.”
Nick, satisfied by the explanation if disappointed by the lack of an explosion, faced the television again. Hailey kept her eyes on Leah. She always seemed to be watching. That shouldn’t be a problem, except that…
You’re lying to her, and you don’t want to get caught.
Except for that, yes. Lying was a bad thing but still the right thing. Lesser of two evils. She would tell them the truth in time. Right now wasn’t the time. Right now, she wanted to get away from her daughter’s watchful eyes.
She closed the laptop and went upstairs to her bedroom, where the iPad waited. There, out of sight of her children, she opened the e-mail again, read the client letter once more, then opened Google, went to the news search page, and entered Spoonhour’s name.
Heart attack, car wreck, hunting accident, please let whatever awful thing it was be an isolated awful thing…
The results loaded, and Leah’s blood seemed to thicken and slow in her veins.
Louisville attorney Everett J. Spoonhour, 52, was found dead in his office Wednesday night, and the Louisville Police Department has termed the situation an active homicide investigation.
Spoonhour’s body was discovered in his office shortly before midnight, after a coworker unlocked the door following a call from Spoonhour’s wife, who was concerned that he hadn’t come home. The coworker found Spoonhour dead at his desk and summoned police.
LPD detective Richard Jackson stated that Spoonhour had died from a knife wound to his throat and that the weapon was not present at the scene.
“It was a brutal crime,” said Jackson.
Security cameras that show the building’s lobby entrance were apparently either malfunctioning or disabled. While police have declined to say whether there are initial suspects in the case, Detective Jackson acknowledged that investigators will “likely” be in contact with “clients or potential clients.”
Spoonhour, a Louisville native who took over his father’s practice, did not practice criminal law. According to his website, his areas of concentration were real estate and probate.
Leah’s heartbeat was steady but loud in her ears, a bass drum building to a crescendo.
“Nothing to do with me,” she whispered. Of course it had nothing to do with her. It was a tragedy, but tragedies happened everywhere, every day.
You’ve got exactly one lawyer, Leah. A man who specializes in real estate and probate and dusty old deeds, and he’s been found at his office with his throat cut. How many of Spoonhour’s clients were involved with the throat-cutting kind of people, do you think?
She felt bile in the back of her throat and swallowed it. Questions rose up and vanished in her mind like road signs along the route of a speeding driver: How many clients did Spoonhour have? How much were the police legally allowed to learn about the clients? How would they attempt to make contact with clients? Would they be content with a phone call?
The only number that Spoonhour had for her went directly to the satellite messenger. She’d given him that simply because she’d had to give him something. The messenger wouldn’t ring, of course, but she’d told him she preferred text messages. If he’d sent any, she hadn’t gotten them, because the messenger had been forgotten once Hailey and Nick were with her. They were the only ones for whom it had ever existed, and the kids wouldn’t be using it again. The magic talisman had served its purpose and she’d not bothered to look at it since.
She set the iPad down, rolled onto her shoulder, and removed the DeLorme messenger from the top drawer of the nightstand. The screen showed several notifications: a low-battery alert and four messages. Four phone numbers to which she’d never responded. She scrolled through, recognizing the first three: Spoonhour, Spoonhour, Spoonhour. Dead man, dead man, dead man. The fourth, though, the most recent, was an unfamiliar number with an area code that wasn’t Kentucky. She reached for the iPad, intending to look the number up. That was when Hailey spoke.
“Is that how I got you?”
Leah swore and fumbled the messenger and the iPad, dropping the first onto the bed and the second onto the floor. She whirled around and saw Hailey standing on the other side of the partially opened door.
“My goodness, you surprised me,” Leah said, trying to recover her composure while her mind whirled with questions. How long had Hailey been standing there? Was the murder story visible from that angle? “You’ve got to learn to knock. It’s the polite thing to—”
“Is that how I got you when Dad died?” Hailey said.
Leah fell silent. Looked at Hailey and then down to the messenger, which rested on top of the comforter. She picked it up, then leaned over and grabbed the iPad from the floor. It was still open to the browser, the headline Louisville Attorney Murdered in Office in bold font.
She flipped the cover shut.
“Yes,” she said. “This is what you called. I’m very glad you did.”
“What is it?”
“An emergency messenger. It relies on satellite so you never have to worry about a cell phone signal. When you’re in Maine, not having to worry about a cell phone signal is pretty important.” Leah forced a laugh.
Hailey didn’t match it. Just stared at Leah with those ever-scrutinizing eyes. “But you’ve got an iPhone,” she said. “And an iPad and a laptop and an Amazon Fire Stick. You’re not using old-fashioned stuff. Why is that thing the number I had to call?”
“Like I said, cell signal where I lived could be pretty—”
“I didn’t know your other numbers. I didn’t know your address. I didn’t know anything about you except for that one number. And why did Dad make me practice calling it? I had to memorize it, and I knew it wouldn’t ring. He made sure I understood that. He made sure I knew that I would have to leave my number and press the pound key and hope that you called back.”
Leah held the DeLorme tight in her palm, looking back at her daughter and feeling the distance that lies and secrets had built between them and was threatening to widen now. There was no way to close it except with the truth, but—
Louisville Attorney Murdered in Office
The truth needed to be delivered at the right time.
“Your father and I were not particularly close,” she told Hailey at last. “But we were family, and it’s such a small family that you have to plan for the worst because…well, because there just aren’t many of us. He wanted you to call me because he knew that I would take care of you and Nick. He was right.” Her eyes searched Hailey
’s. “Do you understand that?”
Hailey said, “What did my dad do?”
Leah pulled her head back. “What?”
Hailey took a half a step into the room. “He did something, didn’t he? Something bad, I bet. And nobody wants to tell me.”
Leah was shocked. She’d never thought suspicion would boomerang back to Doug. “He didn’t…no, honey. He was a very good man. Your father loved you and he was—”
“I know he loved me!” Hailey snapped. “I don’t need you to tell me that! I didn’t ask if he loved me. I asked what he did.”
“He didn’t do anything. I promise.”
“Something is wrong here. You know that.”
Leah was looking at her with slightly parted lips and the truth waiting just behind them when there was a clatter of nails on hardwood and then Tessa burst into the room, tail wagging, snout raised, tongue dangling. The dog looked from one of them to the other with a goofy Why didn’t you guys tell me there was a party? face. Immediately after the dog’s arrival, Nick shouted, “Where is everybody?”
“Upstairs, hon!” Leah called, trying to keep her voice light. She stood up, slipped the satellite messenger back into the open nightstand drawer, and grabbed the iPad with her free hand as if afraid Hailey might snatch it, flip back the cover, and find the murder story.
“We will talk about everything,” she said in a low voice. “I promise you, Hailey, we will talk when the time is right. Until then, I need you to work with me. And the one thing you need to remember is that your father was a good man who loved you.”
“What about you?”
“I love you. Of course I do.”
“That’s not what I meant. Are you a good person?”
“I certainly try to be.”
“We have a lot of secrets for a family full of good people,” Hailey said.
A rush of footsteps on the creaking stairs, slapping tennis shoes, and then Nick was shoving into the room behind Tessa, wrinkling his nose and staring at them in confusion. “What’s wrong?”
Leah waited. Hailey waited. Tessa whined, as if sensing the tension. Finally, Hailey spoke.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “Don’t you know that, Nick? Nothing is ever wrong in this family. We are all just good people. It’s a shame that there aren’t more of us, considering what good people we are.”
She walked away, leaving Leah standing in front of the nightstand clutching the iPad with its bloody news.
21
The lights went out one by one in the Trenton house, but Dax Blackwell maintained his watch in the dark rain.
Someone had to. Leah Trenton seemed determined to push her kids out into the world and ignore the risks. Dax appreciated this. There were two ways to live when there was a high probability of finding yourself in someone’s crosshairs: boldly or fearfully. Only one allowed you to have much fun.
The only problem with Leah Trenton was that Dax didn’t believe that she really appreciated those risks. Her protective measures were minimal at best—renting the house under a business name instead of her own, for example, and buying new phones for her kids—and she did not seem willing to draw the children into the game. That was a shame, Dax thought. The family unit was so much tighter and the emotional bonds so much greater when everyone understood his or her role. When danger was present, it should be acknowledged, and then the lessons could begin. Constant threat was a unique gift, one that enhanced every experience and certainly provided an impetus for swift learning.
Perhaps Dax should open a charter school. They were popular in some places these days, and tuition was sky-high for the elite academies. Dax Blackwell’s academy would be very elite. I want you kids to understand that at any hour of any day, someone may be considering ways to kill your family. Now, let’s talk about the survival probability of low-IQ humans versus high-IQ humans, with a particular focus on problem-solving abilities. Shall we begin?
You had to coddle these kids, though. There probably wasn’t a school around, private or public, in which the book Countering the Threat of Improvised Explosive Devices was required reading. What a loss. Dax had learned a good deal about basic chemistry and physics from that starting point. His aunts and uncle had been sticklers for the STEM side. His father had been more interested in the humanities and had a particular fondness for philosophy.
Another required text, Kill or Be Killed, had been the first of many primers on hand-to-hand combat, although Dax had favored one titled The Little Black Book of Violence. He believed that should be mandatory in every child’s education. It showed the reality of fighting, the gravity of injuries that could be inflicted with a simple exchange of punches, the way lives could end or be forever altered by physical conflict. Dax thought there’d be fewer fistfights in middle schools if kids were required to read that book. If he were on social media, perhaps he could be one of those ballyhooed influencers. Really change the system from the outside in. Alas, social media wasn’t ideal for his line of work.
He stood in the rain, listening to the water sluice through the needles of the fir tree above him, and watched as the lights went dark in the house. It took a long time for Leah Trenton to shut off the faint blue light in her room. It was probably from a computer or a tablet. What was she reading? Dax wondered. What was she planning?
If she was planning to stay alive, she was doing a very poor job of it, with one notable exception: she’d made the call that led to Dax’s arrival.
What better choice could one make?
As baffling as her behavior seemed for a woman on the run, it was less perplexing than that of Marvin Sanders and Randall Pollard. At least when it came to Leah Trenton, Dax could understand why she trusted in her safety—she’d vanished ten years ago and had been safe for all that time. The children were now in her care, and nothing bad had happened. Easy—albeit foolish—to believe that would continue. She wasn’t an operator, Doc Lambkin had said. She was a civilian who’d crossed paths with some dangerous folks.
Marvin Sanders and Randall Pollard, however, were operators, men who knew the killing game well, and yet they hadn’t found their quarry yet. That was surprising. The task hadn’t been hard. Nicholas Chatfield had downloaded both the streaming app and the game app he’d been sent. He’d been rewarded with access to expensive pirated content on both fronts, and Dax had been pleased to see him enjoying the latest theatrical releases and the FIFA soccer game. In exchange, Dax had been rewarded with the ability to monitor the entire family. Nicholas’s phone had granted him access to the router, which Dax had infiltrated to gain access to the cameras and smart speakers of any device in the network.
Simple stuff. Quite literally child’s play. And yet Mr. Sanders and Mr. Pollard hadn’t arrived at the same solution, it seemed. They’d been slicing a lawyer’s throat in Louisville, an absolutely needless crime. Even with that achievement under their belts, they somehow hadn’t made it to Camden. What was taking them so long?
Lightning strobed and illuminated the stormwater running down a steep, rock-lined ravine into a holding pond at the base of the slope. The running water was a beautiful sound, like a conversation between rocks that were usually silent but now seemed happy to raise their voices together and catch up on all that had passed since they last spoke. Dax swiveled his head slowly, taking in the quiet, tranquil neighborhood.
Perhaps he was giving Sanders and Pollard too much credit. They were pros at the killing game, yes, but that didn’t require the same skill set as the hunting game. Their competency with automatic weapons did not mean they were proficient at electronic-tracking techniques. Once again, a failure of education. At the Blackwell Academy, one would not be allowed to graduate until one had demonstrated a varied and versatile range of skills.
The culprit might be standardized testing, Dax mused as the rain kept falling. If teachers aren’t given a chance to really take ownership of their product, things are bound to fall between the cracks.
If they’d followed the trai
l from the lawyer, they’d be in Maine soon. The first addresses they’d find affiliated with Leah Trenton would lead them to Greenville, and from there they’d determine where she owned property with Ed Levenseller, and they would head through the wilderness checking those locations, which was a sad waste of their time but not an entirely foolish choice. Dax could wait. He was a patient man.
He withdrew his phone from his pocket, shielded the screen with a gloved hand, and checked the video feeds from the Trenton and Chatfield devices. Nick was asleep, his phone charging—and watching—from the nightstand. Hailey’s phone was on the floor, but Dax could hear her regular breathing. And Leah Trenton lay awake, shifting from side to side in the bed, as if searching for comfort.
“Relax, my dear,” Dax whispered. “I’m right here.”
She turned onto her other shoulder.
Where, oh, where might the Lowery boys be?
En route, Dax knew. He pocketed the phone. They were late, but they were undoubtedly headed this way.
22
There were plenty of things Becky Conway had come to loathe about Greenville, Maine, during her two-year tenure as postmaster, but the most prominent among them was the residents’ overwhelming tendency to use the word moose when naming a business.
From her counter at the post office, she sorted parcels for the Moose Mountain Lodge and the Moosehead Vista Motel, the Cozy Moose Cabin, the Stress Free Moose Pub and Café, and Crazy Moose Fabrics. Within a block of her, there was the Moosehead Historical Society, the Moosehead Marine Museum, and Moosehead Motorsports. After work on a Friday, with her head pounding, she’d go into the bar and look at the specials board advertising a moose-cow mule cocktail.
We get it, people, she thought. Enough with the friggin’ moose.
Maine had more moose than the rest of the Lower 48 combined, and that meant that assholes from away liked to venture up to see them, and that meant you worked a moose into your seasonal business name if at all possible.
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