This other problem, right before him, couldn’t wait.
He went to Craig’s door, knocked, and said, “Hey, bud, can I come in?”
There was a grunt and Ted walked into Craig’s room. He was impressed by how clean the boy kept it, compared to the shithole his own bedroom had been back when he was Craig’s age. Jessica always complained about how cluttered it was, but she really, really didn’t know boys now, did she? Craig was in bed, wearing gray shorts and a Warner T-shirt, and he was sitting up reading one of those Batman graphic novels that seemed so popular nowadays.
Ted pulled the chair away from Craig’s small desk and sat down. “Time for a chat?”
Craig lowered the graphic novel. “I guess so.”
Ted said, “I didn’t see you at the town common. Were you there?”
“No,” Craig said. “I was over at Mark Borman’s house.”
“Doing what?”
“Just hanging, that’s all.”
“Don’t you think you should have been at the common?”
“Why?”
“Because Sam was a fellow student, that’s why. To show respect.”
Craig rolled his eyes. “Dad, Sam was an asshole.”
“Craig . . .”
“Sorry, okay, Sam was a jerk. You know how he and the other members of the wrestling team treated me and lots of others—like Percy, the guy who works at Jessica’s bank.”
“Mom’s bank,” Ted said.
“Dad, Mom is in California. Jessica isn’t my mom. She never will be.”
Ted didn’t want to restart this old argument. His first wife, Amanda, said she had “grown” in her marriage and was now living in a lesbian pottery co-op in California. Ted always hated remembering and talking about Amanda. Now he said, “Still, it would have been good for you to show up. Make you look like the better man, the bigger man. Do you understand?”
Craig kept quiet and Ted added, “I was pushed around and bullied when I was your age. I didn’t really get my shit together until I started working, until I started making deals. You know what I found out, Craig? When you get older, the people who tormented you in high school, they end up as losers. I saw it myself.”
Craig scratched his nose. Ted went on. “But you know I’ve got your back. Always. No matter what.”
His son just nodded. Ted continued, “Now, the police are going to be looking into Sam’s murder thoroughly, and the reason that detective was in here yesterday was because of the bullying you experienced from Sam.”
“It wasn’t bullying.”
Ted held up a hand. “Okay, I hear you, bud, but according to the police and the school, it was bullying. The police are going to be looking into other things as well, like that scavenger hunt you and Emma did.”
Craig’s eyes flicked back to the graphic novel, as if his entire life, his hopes and dreams, none of that mattered except for his father leaving him alone so he could go back to his Batman comic.
Ted went on. “I’m sure the police are going to find out about that scavenger hunt. Word gets around. It’d be helpful for you and Emma to be proactive, to come up with the names of the students who sent you the invitations.”
“I told you, we don’t have the invitations anymore,” Craig said. “We tossed them.”
Ted stared at his son and said, “Craig, listen to me, and listen to me very, very carefully. If the police are investigating, we want them to widen their search. We don’t want them coming back to you for any reason, any reason at all. Okay? We don’t need them poking around you and our family.”
He was surprised at what Craig said next: “You mean you, right, Dad?”
His skin felt much warmer, like a sunlamp had just switched on. “What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing.”
“Craig . . .”
“I hear things,” Craig said. “I see things.”
“Like what?”
“Like your business isn’t great. Might go bankrupt.”
“Who told you—” Ted caught himself. “Forget that. I’m not going bankrupt. But again, listen to what I’m saying. We don’t want the police focused on you, or me, or anyone else in the family. If other people were out there on the night of Sam’s murder, as part of this ridiculous scavenger hunt, then I need to know about it. Got it? Some names, that’s all.”
Craig shifted his long legs and said, “Okay, Dad. I’ll do it.”
Ted nodded, got up, and patted his boy’s knee. “Good. Do that and we can get all this behind us. And Craig?”
“Yeah?”
Ted was stunned at how quickly his eyes filled and his voice choked. “I will always protect you. I swear to God. Don’t you ever forget that. You’re my son, I love you, and I’ll be with you until the end.”
His words seemed to slip past his boy’s defenses. Craig wiped at his eyes and picked up his graphic novel, and Ted turned and left, wiping at his eyes as well.
Downstairs in their bedroom, Ted crawled into bed, thinking Jessica was asleep, but she moved around and said in a soft voice, “Everything okay?”
Holy shit, how to answer that question? His business was on the cliff edge of diving into bankruptcy, the murder of Sam Warner was like a bomb tossed into their family, he was having an affair with his office manager, and . . .
“Things are fine,” he said.
Then a sliver of ice dipped into his throat when she said, “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
Almost on automatic, he said, “No, not at all. Things are okay.” He reached over and touched her shoulder. “Things okay with you?”
“Sure.”
As an afterthought, he added, “Anything you’d like to tell me, hon?”
Her answer was brief, quick, and to the point. “No.”
During her morning break the next day, Friday, Jessica went out to the rear parking lot. The morning had passed by in a long, shadowy daze. Rhonda had done her best to talk to her about last night’s memorial at the town common, and she had just answered with “Yes,” “No,” or “Uh-huh.” Rhonda had noticed her mood and had left her pretty much alone. The other two tellers, Amber and Percy, stayed away from each other during the morning. Amber’s face was still swollen from last night’s weeping, and Percy had a sly little smile on his face, as if he had been at Gillette Stadium at the fifty-yard line to personally see the Patriots win another Super Bowl.
It was a fine crisp morning and Jessica’s hands were cold as she took her iPhone out of her slacks pocket.
What now?
It was hard to believe, even to imagine, that the next several minutes were going to determine her life’s future and that of her marriage. Jessica took a long breath. She could recall only a few times when she had thought, This is it, things are going to change, there is no going back. The night after graduation when the stick from the pregnancy kit in her bedroom made a line. The day her father died of a heart attack in the backyard as he was dragging heavy broken pine branches from a winter storm, and how her mother laughed and cried when she realized that her tormentor was now gone. That night years later when she walked out of an ICU unit at Mass General, having watched her mom gasp out the last few minutes of life, now knowing she was terribly alone. The phone call from the Maine State Police telling her that Bobby was dead.
All of those moments had come at her hard and fast. Now it was time for another moment.
She switched on her iPhone, flipped through the directory, called up a familiar name and number, and tagged it. Jessica stared at the line of parked cars in the small lot, wondering whom the vehicles belonged to, if they had problems like hers, if they were waiting on something that would change their lives forever.
The phone rang once and was answered. “Harry’s Place, Sue speaking.”
“Hey, Sue,” she said, trying to keep her voice upbeat and cheerful. “Jessica Thornton here. Is Brad around?”
“Hold on,” the young woman said, and there was a clunk-clunk as the phone was put down and voices
in the distance, and then it was picked up and a familiar male voice came on the line.
“Hey, Jessica, how’s it going?”
“Not bad,” she said. She and Ted had often stopped at Harry’s Place when they were a bit more flush. It served pub food, nothing fancy, but it was a nice place to relax and have a craft cheeseburger and homemade fries, drink a local brew, and watch the Red Sox or Patriots play.
“Glad to hear it,” Brad said. He was the son of Harry Blair, the original owner of the place. “How’s Ted doing? Business picking up?”
“Oh, you know how real estate is, always up and down,” Jessica said. “But I think things are really turning around for him.”
Brad said, “Hey, that’s good to know. Ted’s one of the best guys I know.”
“You’re not the first to say that,” she said, “but I’m afraid he’s forgetful. He called me this morning, said he can’t find his wallet.”
“Okay.”
“So he asked me to call you to see if he left it at your place two nights ago.”
“Really?” Brad asked.
“That’s right. He said he was there having dinner with a couple of business associates. He’s pretty sure he left his wallet behind in one of the booths. Could you check that out?”
The line went quiet, so quiet she could hear the bar’s TV set in the background.
“Brad?”
He cleared his throat. “Jessica, are you sure he was here two nights ago?”
The air suddenly got chillier, as if a thick cloud had suddenly obscured the sun, even though the sky was a clear, crisp blue. “Yes, of course I’m sure.”
“Ah . . . well, he wasn’t here, Jessica. Maybe he made a mistake.”
She strained to make her voice light and lacking any concern at all. “Oh, maybe it was my mistake. It’s been pretty busy at the bank the past few days. I’ll call Ted and see if I can find out where he really was.”
“That sounds good, Jessica, and hey, we’re starting a new brunch this Sunday. Maybe you and Ted and the kids could stop by.”
“Thanks Brad, I’ll keep that in mind.”
She disconnected the call and put the phone back into her slacks.
Jessica closed her eyes for just a moment. She felt like she had entered a zone, a new place, a new territory, one she wasn’t familiar with. What to do now? What options? Choices? What were the rules?
She wiped at her eyes, surprised to see that her hand was trembling. Took a deep breath. She had to get back to work.
Just after signing off, locking her drawer, and putting up her next teller please sign, Jessica took a moment and dug through her purse to find her black folding wallet. She opened it up and flipped through the little plastic sleeves, looking at photos of Emma growing up, her face getting cuter with each passing year, her body in gymnastics tights and soccer uniforms until she was in junior high, when she found that running was what she was destined for. Even in these days of the cloud and iPhones and photo hosting services, Jessica liked printing out new photos, trimming them, and putting them in her wallet.
She flipped through some more, as if she were in some miniature time machine, until she got to her favorite photo of her mother, taken on a family trip to Hampton Beach at least twenty years ago. Mom had on a one-piece black bathing suit and a wide straw hat to protect her fair skin, and she was smiling at the camera. One of Jessica’s aunts had taken the photo, and Jessica had carefully trimmed away Dad so only Mom was there, smiling forever.
Poor Mom. Unlike her granddaughter, she had had no talent for running, no talent for getting away. She had been a hairdresser who had barely gotten through high school and loved reading Harlequin Romances. She was fierce in defending her daughter, and now, looking at that smiling photo, Jessica once again saw the darkness and depth in her mother’s eyes.
Your men will always disappoint you, she had told Jessica once, after another late night when Dad had come home drunk. Prepare yourself for that, honey, that your men will always disappoint you. Remember that always—you can survive that way. But never tell them how they disappoint you. They should never know.
Jessica closed the wallet. She had made a mistake with Bobby Thornton, sticking with him as a teen bride—such a cliche!—but she had been seduced by his promises that eventually the dealership would thrive, would bring in lots of money, so he could really take care of her and Emma. Then he had died, and the insurance money, which she had used to pay for coaches and additional training for Emma and other expenses, was long gone.
Oh, how right Mom had been about Bobby. And Jessica had had some dreams as well. She ran track in high school—not as well as Emma—but Dad had worked for Hewlett-Packard, and for a while, fascinated with computers, she had dreamed of a high-tech career after college.
That career never happened. Emma happened, and then Bobby got himself killed, and she was alone for a few long and empty years until the day of that softball game. And with Ted, she had thought she had found a man who would eventually prove her mother wrong. But Mom, dead for so many years, had been right once again.
She closed her purse, checked the time, said, “Later, Rhonda,” and walked out of the bank.
The Warner police station was less than a ten-minute walk from the bank. It was part of a brick-and-white-clapboard building that held the town hall, the town offices, the fire station on one side, and the police station on the other. It was on the other side of the town common from where last night’s ceremony had been held.
At the entrance to the police station, Jessica halted for a moment. It just seemed so absurd, so unreal, that she would be going in there to talk to a police detective about a murder and the investigation that had apparently caught up with something connected to her family.
To the rear of the building was a small parking lot, with blue-and-white police cruisers and cars that she assumed belonged to the department workers. The building looked so simple and plain, but for some reason it looked like a haunted house to Jessica. At some point she had read an article or book about haunted houses, and one theory was that the apparitions people saw in these houses were those of deceased men or women who had left behind some sort of energy trace from some bloody, powerful event.
Now she thought of all the violent tales that must have been heard in the rooms of this building. The people arrested for crimes, from burglary to rape to murder, being interrogated and processed. The trembling victims of assaults, who had to report what had happened to them through tears or sore jaws. Or parents who were ushered into a small office to be told that their love, their child, their gift, was now dead.
Jessica took a breath, went to the door, walked in. One more ghost story, ready to be told.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
She was in a small lobby with two light-orange plastic chairs to the left and a heavy gray metal door in front of her. A sign on the door warned that ALL CONVERSATIONS BEYOND THIS POINT MAY BE RECORDED, and there was a bulletin board with various town notices and flyers about two lost cats. Another sign said VISITORS NEED TO SIGN IN. There was also a display cabinet with old police memorabilia.
To the left was a glassed-in area with an opening at the bottom to slide paperwork back and forth. An older woman got up from her desk and came over, and Jessica said, “I have an appointment with Detective Rafferty.”
“Just a moment,” the woman said, and she went back to her desk, made a call, nodded, and then came over again, holding a lanyard with a green-and-white plastic badge that said visitor. “He’ll be here in a sec,” the woman said, pushing the lanyard through the opening.
Jessica slid the lanyard over her neck just as the door opened and Detective Rafferty stepped in, holding the door open with one hand.
“Mrs. Thornton? Thanks for coming by.”
She walked in, and, smiling, he said, “This way.”
Jessica followed the detective down a tiled hallway, past an open door that said bci—authorized personnel only, then to some head-high cubicles. He usher
ed her into one that had rafferty on a nameplate.
“Not so luxurious, is it?” he said, his voice almost apologetic. “We’re one of the richest towns in eastern Massachusetts, and each year when the chief makes a budget request for a bigger building . . . Well, enough about that.”
Jessica was surprised at how small his work area was. It was a third of the size of Ellen’s office. There was his chair and the one she was sitting on, a cluttered desk, a metal wall shelf filled with binders and files, and a computer. Rafferty’s suit jacket was hanging from the metal edge of the cubicle, and he had on black shoes, gray slacks, a white shirt, and a plain blue necktie. At his belt were a gold detective’s badge and a holstered pistol.
She was scared around guns, even though Ted was an avid hunter.
“What does BCI mean?” she asked.
“Oh,” he said, picking up a file folder and turning the swivel chair around so he was facing her. “Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Pretty pompous-sounding, isn’t it?”
She sensed he was trying to put her at ease, but she sat there with her purse in her lap, clenched with both hands. This was huge, something big, something scary, but the detective with the short brown hair, pug nose, and slightly round face didn’t seem that dangerous or intimidating.
Among the clutter on his desk was a small framed photo showing an attractive dark-haired woman with two very young girls in formal wear standing to each side of her. A dad with two daughters. A detective, looking into a murder.
Remember that, she thought. Remember that point only.
And also remember that he wanted to talk to her alone, without Ted, without her husband. Which probably meant that this young man was going to set some traps, some contradictions, and she had to be on point.
A bank teller versus a police detective.
Detective Rafferty moved again in his chair. “Thanks for coming in on your lunch break. I appreciate it. I’ll try to get you out of here as soon as possible.”
“Thank you.”
He flipped a sheet of paper. “What happens in an investigation like this, you’ve got a lot of threads drawn out, about the victim, about his last hours, where he was, who he saw, and then you backtrack a day, and then another day. And you also talk to the family, his friends, even folks he didn’t get along with. And you try to connect these threads together, have some sort of clear picture emerge about what happened.”
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