She texts Jenkins. The computer is here.
She migrates back to the kitchen, where at last McKinnon has decided to eat his cold scrambled eggs. Pointing the fork at her, he says, “Was it—his computer—there?”
“Yes, it was.”
McKinnon shrugs and says, “Okay,” with an air that signals he is beginning to detach from the fate of his roommate. Sensing this, Kennedy says, “Back to what you and I were discussing before. Let me ask you this. If you had to come up with a reason, why would Taft go back to Skylight Pond on the night of February eleventh?”
McKinnon grabs a tall glass of whole milk and drains it. She watches his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing. “He probably had something to talk to Flanders about.”
“Like what?”
“Let’s put it this way: Charlie was really revved that night.”
“Revved?”
In burst of frustration, McKinnon says, “I don’t mean that. I don’t know what I’m saying here.”
Kennedy scrutinizes him. “You don’t mean what you’re saying? So what are you saying? He wasn’t revved up that night?”
Pausing for a moment McKinnon is considering something and finally blurts out,“Taft’s in love with Flanders, okay? So now you know!”
“In love with Flanders,” Kennedy repeats.
“Yeah, and I think Taft despises himself for it.”
“Why would he despise himself?” Kennedy asks, reflecting on the brutality of what went on up in Newport.
“Because Taft just can’t admit it to anybody, let alone to himself.”
“And how about to you?”
“Not to me. He probably thinks I’d hate him for it.”
“Would you?” Kennedy asks.
“Of course I wouldn’t. I’m not a homophobe.”
“You’re not?” Kennedy says, thinking: Not so fast, buddy. “Okay, so did Luke ever mention he was involved with another man?”
“No.”
“Any reason why you think he didn’t mention it?”
“Because no matter what anybody says, more often than not, it makes you ‘less than’ when you admit to being gay.”
“Okay, then how would you know about Taft?”
“Way easy if you saw Taft’s face whenever he was looking at Flanders. It was all there. He loves Luc. But of course, Taft will never admit it. Just like Flanders will never admit to being in love with his older guy.”
“Won’t he?”
“I don’t think so.”
“So Taft might have been jealous of . . . that relationship?”
“Yes. I think he was.”
“Other than pure observation, do you happen to have any proof . . . of Taft’s romantic interest in Flanders?”
“I don’t think anything ever happened between them. But I did see something . . .” McKinnon hesitates and then divulges. “Back in the fall. I believe Charlie followed Luc down to Woodstock, at least once.”
“And you know this how?”
“Because around the same time, Charlie and I went to have dinner at Prohibition Pig in Waterbury. We took his car, and I noticed a gas receipt on the floor of the passenger side. From a Sunoco station in Woodstock, Vermont.”
“So you think he might have followed Luc down to Woodstock.”
“Yeah.”
“And yet you don’t think he had anything to do with Luc’s disappearance.”
“I don’t think so. But I guess I honestly don’t know.”
“But do you think Taft might be capable of doing something to Luc?”
“Like you just said, he’s got a side to him, a side full of anger. Sometimes he explodes.”
“Maybe it’s ’roid rage?” Kennedy says.
McKinnon smiles grimly. “Maybe.”
“Well, let me ask you this. Do you happen to know why Luc went back to Skylight Pond?”
McKinnon nods. “He asked to borrow a flashlight, so I assumed he lost something.”
“Any idea what he might have lost?”
“No.”
Kennedy now sends a text to Jenkins.
Taft followed Flanders down to Woodstock. Back in the fall. McKinnon found a gas receipt from Woodstock Sunoco.
The reply: Good to know.
When Kennedy looks up at him, McKinnon, of his own volition, says, “There’s something else you should probably know.”
“What else should I know?”
“Late this afternoon, I saw Taft get into his car. He was gone four hours. Didn’t get back until nine. He seemed in a weird frame of mind when he came home. But then maybe it was because . . . you said he had the argument with Elizabeth.”
Kennedy grabs her phone. Taft went MIA today for four hours.
Kennedy is considering her next question when another text comes in. Okay, warrant is signed, sealed, and delivered: take the computer AND check the car.
“I’ve been cleared to take the computer,” she says to McKinnon.
McKinnon nods. “Okay.” He hesitates a moment and then asks, “So I’m being cooperative?”
“Yes. You’ll get a star for your cooperation.” She smiles at him. “Now where are Taft’s car keys?”
“On that hook next to the front door.” He beckons Kennedy to a window looking down on the lamp-lighted street. “You can see his car from here. It’s that gray Subaru right under the light pole.”
The first place Kennedy looks is the trunk of the car. Nothing there. Then she goes directly to the driver’s seat, reaches under it and feels a small nylon drawstring bag shaped around something heavy and hard and cold and metallic. She pulls out a .38 caliber revolver. And just as she does, another text comes from Jenkins. Shit has hit the fan.
February 23; South Woodstock, Vermont; 0 degrees, light snow
The house is strangely quiet when Sam gets home, and yet outside the wind is bellowing. He calls out to Panda. At first there is no response, not so unusual. Sometimes she jumps up on his bed and waits for him to come upstairs, where he’ll find her, looking at him whimsically, tail thumping on the sheet he spreads over the bed to collect any hair she might shed. But because of his bum leg, he doesn’t climb the stairs right away. He goes into the kitchen and puts the kettle on for tea.
As he listens to the heating water beginning to stir, he finds it odd that Panda hasn’t come downstairs to find him. He walks out into the hallway and, listening to the silence, decides to go back into the kitchen, turn the flame down beneath the kettle and make his way upstairs. Using his crutches, he climbs slowly to his room, where he finds the bed vacant. He calls out, “Panda? Panda!” But the only response is the shuddering old farmhouse windows lashed by frightening blasts of wind.
And then it happens again, the sudden breathlessness, the flash of heat on his face, the ionic presence of someone or something brushing against him, simultaneously urging him on, trying to soothe him just by being there.
But Sam throws off this feeling. As well as he can, with the impediment of his cast, he makes his way downstairs again, pushing himself to get to ground level as quickly as possible. She’s got to be somewhere. Maybe she went to sleep on the downstairs bathroom floor and got shut in, something that has happened a few times before. Sam limps there, flips the light switch and checks, but no Panda. The white tiles on the shower backsplash and the tub gleam with menacing emptiness. He calls everywhere for her and then a terrible shattering presentiment comes over him, that despite the fact that the house was locked and secure, Panda somehow ended up outside. But then she’d have been waiting near the door or somewhere close and surely would’ve come running when he pulled up in the driveway.
Opening the door, he calls out into the vortex of cold, assaulting wind, and then he ventures out into the bitter elements, yelling for her. But the hostile gusts and the freezing slant of snow drown out
his summoning, and he knows that even if she’s farther out there, she won’t be able to hear him. Maybe she’s gotten outside and, drawn by the scent of a nocturnal animal, has gone too far and got somehow hurt or temporarily lamed and stranded in the deep, accumulating snow. But there is no way that he can go through the drifts on crutches to look for her. Whom can he call? The only person that comes to mind is Heather Finlayson.
They’ve spoken only once since she was run off the road, when he’d reassured her that his car was stolen and he wasn’t behind the wheel. When she answers the phone now, her voice is chilly, no doubt having recognized his caller ID. In his frantic state of mind, it briefly dawns on Sam that she might be at the very least displeased to have been run off the road and now involved in his personal nightmare. But when he tells her about Panda missing, reminding her that he has difficulty moving around, she is soon on her way over to his house to help.
So many possible grim scenarios flutter through his thoughts: Panda being stolen; Panda being hit by a car and thrown where it might be difficult to find her; Panda perhaps marooned in the farmer’s field across the road; or perhaps most distressing, Panda harmed by somebody who presumes Sam has harmed Luc Flanders. It’s an interminable twenty minutes of waiting, every possibility of misfortune flitting through his mind. Sam’s world seems to be caving in, he’s losing purchase on everyone and everything he loves, made all the worse by having to hobble around inept and unable to move easily from place to place. His febrile thoughts revert back to Panda, bewildered how this usually sensible dog could have wandered outside.
“She’s way too smart to do anything like go trekking around in the snow,” opines Heather when she arrives with a grave face in an oversized Army-issue P-coat, knee-high muck books with snow pants gripping the tops of them tightly. “Especially tonight. It’s crazy out there. Wind chill way below zero. I just hope somebody didn’t come in here and take her.”
The gruesome possibility of abduction certainly can’t be ruled out.
“Just stay here and let me go check,” Heather says, moving back toward the front door. “You can’t drag that leg through the snow.”
Sam sits down, overcome with a worry that somehow transmutes into fatigue. It’s as though he loses consciousness for a minute or so, because Heather is now standing before him weeping quietly and managing to articulate, “She’s barely alive, Sam. She’s at the bottom of the driveway. I couldn’t lift her. I tried to.”
“Oh my God!” Sam cries. “Bottom of the driveway. Did . . . could I have run her over?”
“No, she’s off to the right. Doesn’t appear injured. But I don’t know what’s happened to her.”
“Then how did she get out there?”
He hardly hears what Heather says, her admonitions as he launches himself out of the chair and limps toward the door. He doesn’t bother to grab his crutches; they will only get in the way. And then outside in shirtsleeves, zero temperature and the flailing wind. He doesn’t feel the cold, unaware it’s snowing harder, and his eyes focused ahead of him where the orb of the motion detector spotlights illuminate a dark welter against the floury white. Hobbling desperately with Heather behind him, Sam hears her saying something he doesn’t understand, almost in another language. Nothing will derail his purpose. Moving inexorably forward, he loses his balance at one point and slams down on the driveway, his face hitting the snow, which softens the impact of the fall. He feels pain rocketing through his injured leg and cries out in surprise and rage. And Heather is there, helping him up and ordering him to let her take care of Panda, to go back inside, but he shrugs her off and forges ahead. This is his ritual, his rite. At last he reaches his dog.
She is very still, her slight graying brow furrowed in worry, her eyes weakly scanning the darkness until they fix on him. And then he sees the soulful reflection, the purity of emotion, the dubious, pained trust as she looks up at him, as though to say how could this have happened, and how could you have let it happen? Tears are streaming down Sam’s face as he holds her head in his hands and softly kisses her snout. He feels a rattle in her throat as though she’s trying to speak. The wind is animating her fur, her eyebrows, snow feathering through her tail, and he gains an inkling of the agony a parent must feel when holding a dying child. Panda quivers violently. He can feel her letting go of him, of her life, and that moment of passing is anything but a relief. It is a torment, a slice deep into his heart. He cries out and then weeps unabatedly.
Tapping into an instinct deeper than thought, he bends down and lifts her up as all the living do with their dead. Her body is remarkably heavy and slack as it settles into his arms. He knows he probably won’t be able to carry her all the way back to the house, and yet he begins his own little cortege. He just wants her inside, where it’s warm. Her limp body somehow becomes the weight of her life. And before his complete and utter abandonment to grief, he comes to understand why there are death marches and why mourning is very much part of surviving.
February 24; Carleton, Vermont; 19 degrees, overcast
At 3 a.m. Charlie Taft is sitting opposite Kennedy and Jenkins at Carleton police headquarters. Taft grabs the paper cup of coffee brought to him and, drinking it like water, clears his throat. Kennedy says, “So you can’t pinpoint exactly when Elizabeth got to the pond herself but you say you arrived pretty much the same time.”
“Yes.”
“And your purpose in going back to the pond?” Jenkins asks.
“I was going to”—Taft swallows—“talk to Luc. But then I saw him—Sam—walking away from the pond.”
The statement would contradict Heather Finlayson’s assurance that she spoke to Sam Solomon at his house at 6:28 p.m. on the night of February eleventh. However, upon their return to the police station, Jenkins and Kennedy were given a report from Fairpoint Communications, the local telephone company, that Sam Solomon in fact, received a single call from Heather Finlayson’s landline number at 5:15 p.m. on the night of February eleventh. Jenkins and Kennedy have decided, for the moment, not to go back to Heather Finlayson and ask her to amend her testimony, the lie she may have told to protect her friend. They certainly cannot accuse Sam of lying since the phone record matches his original statement. Now, of course, the time frame does make it possible for him to have driven up to Carleton before heading to Logan Airport.
“How clearly could you have seen Sam if it was so dark?” Jenkins says.
“He had a flashlight. But the moon was out.” Taft looks up at the ceiling, squinting at it as though gauging something in the light fixture not quite identifiable to the other two.
“Moon or not, you’d still have to be pretty close to him,” Kennedy points out.
Now Taft stares at them. “At first I thought I was seeing Luc. Then when I got closer—”
“How much closer?” Jenkins asks.
“I don’t know, twenty-five yards away. But then I realized the person was shorter. And that it wasn’t Luc.”
Jenkins is thinking to himself, We will have to examine a pair of Taft’s shoes. “What size shoe do you wear?” he asks.
Pushing back in his chair, which scrapes loudly against the floor, Taft shows them the underside of one of his feet and says, “Ten and a half.”
“You know,” Kennedy says, “there’s a whole wide world of men shorter and stockier than Luc Flanders. There is something called Craigslist, where shorter and stockier men put up ads.”
The arrow hits its desired mark. Taft’s face flushes and he suddenly rants, “I know that happens on Craigslist. That’s how they met!”
Kennedy replies, “And my point is he could have been meeting somebody else at the pond that night. And maybe it just didn’t work out. Or maybe that unknown person ended up having an altercation with him.”
Taft almost says something but then clamps down.
Jenkins nods to Kennedy, who says, “Our forensic computer guy just
told us that there is a folder on your computer called ‘Luc.’ And in the folder are two passwords—which correspond to both of his email accounts.”
Taft nods his head. “Yeah.”
“You also hacked into Sam’s account. You read Luc’s emails to him and then deleted them after you read them.”
Taft looks at them blankly.
“Did you tamper with those emails?” Kennedy says.
“Okay, yeah, I did.”
“Why?” Kennedy asks.
“Because it was gross.”
“What was gross?”
“I mean, come on, the guy was way old. Almost thirty years older.”
“And it made you upset enough to commit computer fraud?”
“Well, they broke it off so obviously they didn’t care that much. It made Luc miserable.”
Jenkins and Kennedy look at one another.
“When did you start hacking into their computers?” Kennedy persists.
Taft runs his fingers through his hair and then rubs his scalp. “Around November.”
“And after it ended between them in December, you made sure Sam Solomon never got Luc Flanders’s messages,” Kennedy says.
Taft nods his head but doesn’t answer.
“So why exactly did you go back to the pond?” Jenkins says. “On the night of February eleventh.”
“Because I wanted to talk to Luc.”
“About?”
“To tell him that I deleted the emails.”
Jenkins’ cellphone rings, and he digs into his pocket and harshly silences it.
Kennedy continues, “So why didn’t you say what you had to say after the pickup hockey game?”
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