How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

  I don’t understand your brain, Barrett’s grandfather would say over and over. How in the hell did I raise a kid who can’t think better than you? And you get paid just to think!

  Barrett’s grandfather took to staying at the house, telling neighbors and friends that he was there for his grandson and wouldn’t go until the boy was doing better. He didn’t have much interaction with his grandson, though. During those days, he mostly sat alone, drinking and waiting.

  The next time the lieutenant dropped by, Barrett’s grandfather was there to greet him. He didn’t shout at him. His voice started out low, and when it rose, it was more in timbre than volume, a resonance that boomed out of his broad chest. To this day, it was a voice that Rob Barrett wished he could match, a soft tone but one that clearly said, You had best step out of my way. And people did.

  The lieutenant had too. Eventually. It had taken a trip by Rob’s grandfather to the university police headquarters, an attorney in tow. Rob and his father stayed home and watched cartoons and played checkers for hours, game after game. Rob would always remember that day. His father had smiled and laughed but said very little. When he was convinced Rob was spellbound by the television, he’d gone into the kitchen to clean up the remnants of Ray’s latest visit, not realizing Rob was watching him. He counted the beer cans under his breath as he gathered and bagged them, counted every single can, and then he had gone to the cellar door, opened it, and stared down the old limestone steps for a long time. He didn’t turn on the light, just stared into the darkness, and then he closed the door and took the beer cans outside and put them in the recycling bin. The recycling bin was outside now; it had previously been in the cellar.

  Then he went down into the cellar. He closed the door, and after a few minutes of silence, Rob got up and opened it cautiously. His father was standing above the old workbench not far from the foot of the stairs, a workbench that he forbade his son to go near—everything there was old and rusted. Tetanus Central, Rob’s mother had called it.

  His father was turning a tool over in his hands, studying it as if he weren’t entirely sure of its purpose. The tool had a bright red handle and looked like a hybrid of a wrench and a vise. Rob was about to call out and ask about the tool when his father shifted, and his face moved more directly into the light of the single bare bulb at the base of the stairs. His expression was entirely unfamiliar to his son—a mask of deep anger, of hate.

  Rob closed the door softly. Ten minutes later, his father came upstairs. He wore his standard semi-distant smile and said in a low, easy voice, “One more game?”

  They were still playing checkers when Ray Barrett returned, took his son into the kitchen, and announced that his meeting with the university police chief had been successful and there would be no more harassment, no more bullshit. He boasted of his remarkable use of cunning and threats, and he didn’t mention the attorney, as if the man had come along just to listen—or maybe to study.

  Glenn Barrett didn’t say a word during this tale. He just sat and watched his father as if seeing him for the first time. When Ray was finally done revisiting his triumph, he came out to the living room to say good-bye to little Robby. He’d be back in a day or two, he said, and they’d throw the football around.

  It was eight months before they saw him again.

  After that it had been just father and son or grandfather and grandson; the three of them were never together again. Rob was passed back and forth in the summers like a baton in a relay.

  Rob never asked his father anything about the cellar. A few days after his grandfather left, he’d gone in search of the strange tool with the red handle, but he couldn’t find it. They moved three months later, to a newer home with none of what his mother had called the special charm of the restored Colonial but with bright lights and no basement.

  Rob had intended to ask his father about that day, about the way he’d counted the beer cans and studied the strange tool, which Rob later learned was a pipe cutter. He never got around to it. There would always be a better moment than the present one, it seemed.

  The last time he talked to his father was the morning after his twenty-first birthday. Rob was deeply hungover; his father spoke quietly and briefly into the phone, gave his trademark low laugh, promised a card with some cash was in the mail, and told him to buy stock in Excedrin.

  The card arrived the next day. Barrett called his father but missed him and then forgot to call back in the days that followed.

  He was playing pickup basketball outside his apartment when his grandfather showed up to tell him about the heart attack. It was one of the first warm weekends of spring, and Glenn Barrett had embarked on cleaning out a shed, a task that had been on his to-do list for years. The next-door neighbor had found him lying there among the old card tables and lawn chairs and toys as if he’d been preparing for a yard sale and decided to put himself out with the rest of the items.

  Behind him, the once-filthy plywood floor of the shed had been vacuumed, swept, and mopped; the boards were still drying, and the smell of Murphy Oil Soap was in the air. He’d been trying to clean up everything right until the end.

  Barrett probably thought about that symbolism more than he should have.

  He was a junior that year, double-majoring in psychology and history. He was planning to apply to law school but was also enrolled in ROTC. Always and in everything, he was split between the competing forces of Ray and Glenn Barrett. The slim potential for combat that came with ROTC was just enough to silence his grandfather; the idea of law school keeping him surrounded by open books was just enough to make his father smile.

  He never told either of them that the reason he’d chosen psychology was that it had been his mother’s major.

  Just before Barrett’s senior year, the university started a new cadet program for its own police department, and Barrett joined immediately. It required additional criminal justice courses that would delay his graduation, but it also mandated hours around men with guns, so Barrett’s grandfather made grudging peace with the news. It wasn’t until later that Ray found out that the program was run by the lieutenant who’d visited the family’s home in the days after the tragedy and taken photographs of the pipe in the cellar. His name was Ed Medlock, and Barrett made it a point to seek him out as a mentor.

  Ed Medlock’s theory, when Barrett finally got him to share it, was that Ray’s temper had gotten away from him, as it had often been known to, and he’d swung at his own daughter-in-law. When Ray saw the results, he broke the pipe above the stairs. They were rough stone steps, the area was poorly lit, and if there was a leaking pipe, well, it would be hard not to take a nasty fall.

  Ed Medlock was convinced that the pipe break wasn’t from natural deterioration. There were fresh, bright nicks and scrapes on the copper right where it had supposedly ruptured. He gave Ray Barrett credit, though—that damage was hidden by plumber’s tape, and the tape was coated with grease, so to the first officers on the scene, it looked like an old repair that had finally failed. Medlock was the one who’d peeled the tape back to reveal what was beneath.

  His advice to Rob was to let it go. There was no prosecutor who would touch it at this point, he said. Not without a confession.

  It was this last phrase that had redirected Rob’s career, redirected his entire life. He didn’t rush the issue. He studied it. Only when he felt confident in the art of the interview, only when he believed he understood how to apply the psychology of leverage and logic, did he finally return to Port Hope to confront his grandfather.

  Ray Barrett listened, and then he began to cry. Rob had never seen him cry, had not even imagined that it was possible. Ray sat in the old armchair in his apartment above the bar and tears ran down his cheeks, and Rob sat across from him and watched him and thought, Good, you son of a bitch.

  Then Ray lit one of his unfiltered Camels and embarked on another tale.

  He told Rob that his father had called him in a panic that day, begging for Ray’s
help, and that by the time Ray arrived, Rob’s mother was already dead. His father admitted hitting her. She’d gone down hard and cracked her head on the steps. They’d been arguing, Ray explained, about an affair Glenn had had with a department secretary.

  “He called me to fix it for him, Robby,” Ray said. “And I did. The pipe, the tape, the grease stains on the tape. Your cop buddy is correct about that. What he doesn’t know is who did the killing. Now, what I did, was it right? No. But I was protecting my son. And my grandson.”

  By then, the tears were gone and Ray was getting a little bit of his old anger back.

  “Remember who your old man called when there was trouble,” Ray said. “That’s all I ever wanted for you. For you to be the type of man who people call when there’s trouble.”

  Rob got to his feet and called his grandfather a lying son of a bitch, promised that the police would be coming for him soon, and left.

  The police had never come for Ray. Rob didn’t call them. There was no evidence to challenge his grandfather’s version of events. He thought he’d get him eventually, thought at some point, the old man would crack and tell the truth.

  Then on an early December morning, Rob’s phone rang and the police told him that his grandfather had been found in his car in the woods in central Maine. He’d been driving at night through a snowstorm when he’d apparently lost the road and flipped into the trees. It was hours before anyone saw the wreck, and by then he was dead of internal bleeding and exposure. There was a half-empty flask of bourbon in his jacket pocket and two beers left from a six-pack.

  No one seemed to know why he’d set out from Port Hope in the middle of the night in a snowstorm. Nobody knew where he’d been going, although a few people observed that he’d been driving in the direction of Hammel College in southern Maine, where his grandson was enrolled.

  Whatever he’d been prepared to tell his grandson had died with him.

  11

  Barrett’s official place of residence for the duration of the investigation had been a hotel room in Port Hope, but he hadn’t spent many nights there, and he didn’t go there after leaving the jail following the arrest of Mathias Burke. Instead, he headed north, to Camden.

  Camden was a uniquely beautiful town even by Maine Midcoast standards, with an idyllic harbor offset by forested mountains that crowded the waterfront, sloping streets lined with brick buildings, and sidewalks chasing the Megunticook River through a series of stepped-down waterfalls that had once powered mills and, thus, the town.

  Barrett had no interest in Camden’s beauty tonight, though. He passed by the harbor and parked in front of the library that stood as a central feature of the town, a carefully preserved and expanded structure built on land donated by the family of a long-ago publishing mogul. He didn’t get out of the car, just stared out at a sailboat that was moored in the bay and searched for lights on board. The boat was dark, so he pulled away from the harbor and drove back through the town, past the old paper mill, and into the nearby hills. If Liz Street was not working on her boat, then she’d be at home.

  Liz had been fifteen when he’d met her nearly two decades earlier, an object of desire to most of the local boys. Rob had only two advantages, but they were critical: he was from away, someone different in a small town, and he had a driver’s license. Barrett had never wanted to linger near his grandfather’s town in Maine before Liz, let alone return to it when his summer sentence as a ward in his grandfather’s custody was done, but falling in love had the remarkable effect of making the unbearable seem little more than a trifling nuisance.

  He’d come back to Maine for college, joining Liz at Hammel College, the small liberal arts school where Barrett’s father had once taught.

  It was Maine that brought them together, and Maine that broke them. As a teenager, he’d understood her love of the place but also believed her devotion to it wouldn’t last. Sure, she’d said she’d never live anywhere else, just stay in Maine except for long sailing cruises, but every sixteen-year-old was certain of things like that—I will live here, work there, become this, become that. Then you met reality.

  In this regard, he’d underestimated Liz Street and bruised both their hearts. To say he’d broken her heart would have been arrogant—she’d been dating someone else within months of their separation and was married and then divorced before he reached Quantico. He’d had a brief engagement that ended when his first field office was announced; Little Rock, Arkansas, did not fit into his fiancée’s vision of the future. He’d gone on alone, and when he sought placement with the Boston division, he’d promised himself it had nothing to do with it being a three-hour drive from Liz Street.

  He’d lasted two weeks before taking his first road trip north.

  She was living in Camden again, earning her money as a reporter for the small local newspaper and spending most of it on the rehabilitation of an ancient but beautiful wooden sailboat. The life plans she’d offered to her sixteen-year-old boyfriend hadn’t been jokes.

  Eighteen years later, when the boyfriend returned, she’d greeted him cautiously. She hadn’t been divorced for long, and she seemed wary of starting any relationship, let alone rekindling an old one. Her ex-husband had left a beautifully remodeled but never opened restaurant in the heart of downtown Camden—Liz had to pass it daily—and gone to Florida, where his next waterfront vision of craft cocktails and tapas was being built with the assistance of a much wealthier woman.

  She and Rob caught up awkwardly and laughed easily at old memories, as people with shared pasts tend to do. After that first visit, she’d promised to go down to Boston sometime but hadn’t. He’d gone back to Camden after she’d failed to come south, claiming he wanted to do some hiking. Instead, he’d ended up at the waterfront, looking at her new boat. She showed him the charts of her intended course for a six-month cruise, the various ports of call, everything settled about the voyage except the date of departure. He helped her sand layers of brine off the decking, and then the sun went down behind Mount Battie and an impossibly large, crimson-tinted moon rose over the bay, and they’d opened a bottle of wine and that night they’d made love for the first time in nearly a decade.

  One last time for old times’ sake, they’d said the next morning when they were drinking coffee instead of wine and the moonlit sex was already a memory; their bodies moving together with the gentle pitch and roll of the sailboat seemed like something from another lifetime instead of a few hours earlier. It had been a reunion, not a rekindling. They agreed that was the right approach, the only approach.

  But, as often happened with good, right, and only approaches, they hadn’t held that course long, and they’d been in the awkward dance of dating without discussing the future for four months now.

  It was through Liz that he’d learned of the disappearances of Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly, and it was through Liz that he’d learned of rumors that a local girl currently in jail on other charges was the subject of interrogations that hadn’t led anywhere. All of this was interesting, but more interesting was the source of the rumors: a bar in Port Hope called the Harpoon.

  I have some familiarity with the place, he’d told Roxanne Donovan.

  He was bone-weary and reeling from the day when he arrived at Liz’s small house in the Megunticook River valley, the winding drive unfurling in front of him like a silver ribbon in the moonlight.

  Liz was sitting on the porch.

  “Long day,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  She searched his face in the dark. “Do you have enough to keep him in jail?”

  “I have a confession.”

  “From Kimmy. Not from Mathias.”

  He ran a hand over his face and leaned against the railing. A fresh, cool breeze was blowing up out of the bay, carrying the smell of the sea. Overhead, the skies were as clear as they’d been all day, but the harsh sun was gone, and that was comforting. People understood when it took you a long time to find something in the dark.

/>   “I think he will break,” Barrett said. “I think we’ll find something in that pond, and between that and a few nights in jail staring at a double-murder charge, he will begin to talk. Maybe he’ll blame Kimberly or Cass. He can come up with any number of stories.”

  “But so far he hasn’t offered one.”

  “No. He hasn’t offered anything. Just asked for a lawyer.”

  “People around here aren’t buying Kimmy’s story,” she said. “Not the drugs, or the level of rage, or even him being with those two girls. They say it doesn’t fit him, it’s not his character.”

  He leaned back and looked at the stars. The night sky was so clear that you could make out the painter’s brush smears of light of the Milky Way. He wondered what it looked like out on Little Spruce Island.

  “He told me he’d like to hear what my grandfather would have said about it.”

  Liz made a barely perceptible shift in the darkness. “You can’t let yourself go there, Rob. Can’t conflate this thing and that one.”

  “I’m not. My grandfather has nothing to do with my work.”

  But she knew better than that, of course. She was one of the very few people who understood just how intertwined the man and the job were.

  “How much credibility would you give Kimberly Crepeaux?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer right away, and he liked that, because it meant she was actually giving it some thought. He didn’t like her answer much, though.

  “Slim to none.”

  “That’s the community consensus.”

  “She’s a storyteller,” Liz said. “A liar, to be less polite.”

  He nodded, still looking at the sky, and then stepped away from the railing and moved toward the door, withdrawing his keys from his pocket.

  “You’re right about that,” he said. “But you know what? Even liars tell the truth sometimes.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Twice a day, even broken clocks are right. But did you catch Kimmy at the right time, Rob?”