George was the exact same way, looking everywhere but at me, because the whole deal was clearly too sophisticated for Mathias Burke.
By the time police got involved, George knew someone out there could expose his family for what it was—affairs and drugs, corpses and lies. Not a nice story. It was an interesting test—would he tell you guys about that right away? Later? Never?
Turned out to be never. Turned out he was willing to go pretty far.
I was always going to let Kimmy live. She had to live so she could tell the story, that was the whole point. But then she brought you back into it. I wasn’t scared of that, but it was frustrating. It was clear that she thought you were in control, not me. So I sent Ronnie out with something special for her. She always trusted Ronnie. That’s how you get to people—who do they trust, who do they love? If you want to own someone, you start there.
Now, you’re looking at me and thinking this is a win. It’s not. You should understand that by now. You never caught up. But I will not…I cannot tolerate sitting in the courtroom listening to a judge send me up with all of you smug assholes sitting out there thinking you got it right.
You were never close. Do you see how far out in front I was? Do you finally fucking fathom who was rigging the game, and how? Do you understand who was in control? It wasn’t you, it wasn’t any of your people, it wasn’t George Kelly or his baby boy. It was always me. Every step. I made the rules. All of you played by them.
You better remember that, Barrett. From the first day to the last, I decided how it happened.
59
Howard Pelletier asked Barrett to come to the island to share the story. He would hear the second confession in the same place he’d heard the first.
Liz took Barrett out, and Howard’s boat was already tied up at the wharf when they arrived.
“You want to go with me?” Barrett asked Liz. “Maybe it’ll help him, having somebody else there when he hears it.”
Her eyes were tender when she shook her head. “It’ll help somebody,” she said. “But not Howard.”
He nodded and went up the hill alone.
Howard was waiting with a screw gun. When he saw Barrett, he went wordlessly to the studio door. The screw gun howled as he zipped twelve long wood screws out, and the stainless-steel hasps that held the padlocks fell free. Howard swept them aside with his foot, put the screw gun down, and unlocked the door.
“Go on up,” he said.
Barrett crossed the threshold and faced the hand-laid, curving stairs. The ascending stairs. His throat felt tight and his mouth was dry as he went up. The building still smelled of sawdust and paint, somehow both fresh and stale, stillborn.
At the crest of the stairs, sunlight filled the room from panoramic windows. You could look out to sea, back toward the mainland, or north or south. You could watch the sun rise and watch it set, and you’d never miss a cloud or a storm or a curious shaft of light. You would see it all from up here.
There were two easels set up, empty, waiting for canvases. There was a daybed beneath one of the windows, positioned so the afternoon sun would fall on it.
Howard sat on the daybed. He took his weathered ball cap off and set it on the floor between his feet and then leaned forward and clasped his hands together. His head was bowed when he spoke for the first time.
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me.”
Twenty-three months after his daughter had vanished and sixteen months after he should have experienced the birth of his first grandchild, Barrett told Howard Pelletier how they’d been taken from him.
Howard didn’t speak while Barrett told it. He made a few soft sounds, little grunts of pain, but he never spoke, and he never looked up.
“That’s how he explained it to me,” Barrett said, and then he took a breath before he broke the rest of the news. “But he recanted before I made it into the parking lot. Turned right around and told the next cop that it wasn’t true. That he’d just wanted to jerk me around.”
Howard looked up, his face stricken not by surprise or even pain but a simple and profound confusion. “What is the point of that?”
“To make us wonder. To leave some doubt. He knows he’ll be convicted, but he wants us all to know that he is the smartest person in the room. He also hated to tell me. I think that decision was a tough one for him. He could not abide watching us believe we’d reached the truth, but he also hated to remove the questions.”
“Well…was he lying about any of it?”
“Maybe.”
“What? You’re not sure?”
“There are holes,” Barrett said. “There are some gaps. But memory is an inherently unreliable narrator, even for people with good intentions. Mathias is not a man with good intentions. He might have filled in some of the truth with a lie where it made him look smarter, and he might have forgotten some of the truth. But I believe I heard most of what happened, and how, and why.”
Howard seemed unsatisfied. “You believe it was true. You don’t know.”
Barrett took a deep breath. Howard was asking him the question he’d been asking himself for most of his life: How can I be certain?
“I think that’s all we’re promised here,” Barrett said. “We gather as much evidence as we can, and then we choose what to believe. We can’t always know. At some point, some of it is going to have to ride on faith.”
“I think we got it right,” Howard said.
“I do too.”
Howard ran a hand over his face, shook his head, and then reached down and picked up his baseball cap and tugged it on.
“You stayin’ on through trial?”
“I’m staying.” That would require a resignation from the Bureau, most likely, but at this point Barrett didn’t think he’d find much resistance there. He was neither sure of his next steps nor concerned about them. Until a verdict was issued, he had no thoughts of leaving.
“Good. I’ve been thinking about moving myself.”
“Leaving Maine?” Barrett was shocked, but maybe he shouldn’t have been. What was left for Howard in Maine but a lot of painful memories?
“No,” Howard said. “Leaving my house. I’ve been thinking about coming out here. I’m not sure yet. It’d be hard. No question about that. But…she loved it for the right reasons. It’s a special spot.” Howard spread his hand to the expansive horizons in all directions. “Ain’t another place in the world that gives you the same views as an island.”
“That’s the truth.”
Howard got to his feet and then turned slowly, taking in the light-filled room with its freshly painted trim. He spoke with his eyes on one of the empty easels.
“I can’t tell you how much I loved my daughter.”
Barrett could only nod. He couldn’t have spoken right then even if he’d had any idea what words to use.
Howard gazed back across the water toward the mainland. “She liked to be in a cemetery at sunrise. A lot of people thought that was strange. But I liked that she could look at the world a little differently than most. See a better version of it, maybe.”
He gave a broken smile. “Wonder how much of her I got left in me.” He looked around the studio, from mainland out to the endless sea, and when he said, “I’ll try,” Barrett knew that he wasn’t the intended audience.
Howard took a deep breath that gusted at the end, like the sound of a lit match. Then he said, “We ought to get going. The sun goes down on you fast out here.”
Barrett followed him down the stairs, descending out of the light and into the shadowed room below. When they were outside, Howard gathered the locks and hasps and carried them. He wasn’t wrong about the sun—it was dropping quickly, the bay falling into shadows while the sky over the low mountains went crimson and tinted the clouds above with rose-colored wisps. It would be night before they reached the mainland, but Howard had navigated these waters at night before.
They walked down the hill together and on toward the darkening sea that lay between them and Port
Hope.
Acknowledgments
Richard Pine shepherded this one along from a conversation into a draft and then into a book. Joshua Kendall’s exemplary, insightful, and patient editorial work made all the difference. And my wife, Christine, not only read more pages than anyone and made them all better but somehow dealt with me at the same time.
The always incredible Little, Brown and Company and Hachette team: Reagan Arthur, Michael Pietsch, Sabrina Callahan, Heather Fain, Terry Adams, Craig Young, Nicky Guerreiro, Alyssa Persons, Maggie (Southard) Gladstone, Ashley Marudas, Karen Torres, Karen Landry, Tracy Roe, Nick Sayers, and so many more. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to work with so many great people.
Friends and first readers who endured either early drafts or me during the process, or, in some terrible cases, both: Bob Hammel, Pete Yonkman, Tom Bernardo, Laura Lane, Jayd Grossman, Stewart O’Nan, Ben Strawn, and my parents. Thanks to Ryan Easton and Seth Garrett and David Lambkin for technical expertise.
Lacy Nowling-Whitaker single-handedly allows me to preserve an illusion as a functional member of computer-based society. She only rarely throws chairs at me.
A special thanks to the great state of Maine, which dug deep into its bottomless wells of inspiration during the writing of this novel, providing record cold, record heat, record snows, record power outages, and even raccoons in chimneys. And to the people in Maine who went out of their way to be helpful and welcoming, particularly Bob and Cecile Caya, Brian Wickenden, Rob Dwelley, Adam Thomas, Robyn Tarantino, Israel and Kathryn Skelton, and Melinda Reingold.
About the Author
Michael Koryta is the New York Times bestselling author of thirteen novels, most recently Rise the Dark. Several of his previous novels—among them Last Words, Those Who Wish Me Dead, and So Cold the River—were New York Times Notable Books and national bestsellers. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has won numerous awards. Koryta is a former private investigator and newspaper reporter. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, and Camden, Maine.
michaelkoryta.com
twitter.com/mjkoryta
facebook.com/michaelkoryta
Books by Michael Koryta
How It Happened
Rise the Dark
Last Words
Those Who Wish Me Dead
The Prophet
The Ridge
The Cypress House
So Cold the River
The Silent Hour
Envy the Night
A Welcome Grave
Sorrow’s Anthem
Tonight I Said Goodbye
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How It Happened Page 32