by Wendy Webb
Next, Kate had watched her own hand grab the drink of the person sitting next to her, saying as an aside, “Sorry, Bob, the next one’s on me,” as she threw it at Kevin, shouting, “and that’s for having an affair with this skanky tramp in front of all of our friends.”
Kate stormed out of the Tavern then, crying tears of bitter resentment. Kevin ran after her.
“Kate! Let’s talk about this!” he called across the rain-soaked parking lot. But Kate simply opened the car door and climbed inside.
“I don’t want to hear anything you have to say,” she shouted as she drove away.
When she got home, she packed a few suitcases and Alaska’s favorite toys, piled the dog into the car, and the two of them drove across town to her parents’ house. It had felt to Kate as though she was operating on autopilot, moving through the events with a will that wasn’t her own. It was so wrong, all of it—how could Kevin have had an affair? How could she be making up the bed in her old bedroom at her parents’ house? How could her marriage be falling apart? Was everything she thought she knew about her life with her husband a lie?
A few days later, she called Stan to resign her position at the newspaper. He did not accept it.
“Listen, Kate, I need you,” he said. “Why don’t you take a few weeks off to think things through? Maybe you two can work it all out.”
Kate didn’t know it then, but Kevin had come into the office that Monday morning, hung his head, and told Stan—and the entire staff at the Monday meeting—that Kate had been having emotional problems since having a miscarriage. It was a convenient lie.
He’d sighed deeply and shaken his head. “You all know she accused me of having an affair, which is obviously false. But I can sympathize with her, can’t you all?” His eyes had traveled to everyone sitting silently around the table. “She’s still grieving for our lost baby. She’s not herself; you all can see that, can’t you?”
Nods and murmurs from around the table.
“I know the scene looked pretty crazy, but it’s not her fault. Please just understand that she’s going through a really rough time and, maybe, pray for her? For us?”
Amid tears and hugs, they all said they would, and they left the meeting pitying the steadfast and loving husband and his “grieving, if not totally sane” wife. Valerie resigned her position in light of all the fuss. Stan was sorry, if relieved, to see her go.
Nobody, of course, knew about the scene that had taken place between Valerie and Kevin after the incident at the Tavern. He had just denied their relationship in front of all their friends, and Valerie was stunned. It had been the most intimate, deep relationship of her life, even though they’d had only a few months together. Kevin knew everything about her—she had told him all her deepest feelings, secrets, and fears—and the attention that he had lavished on her was intoxicating. Like Kate, Valerie did not know that it was the very act of that revelation, the intimacy of getting to know another person’s soul, that Kevin loved. Not her, per se.
Valerie demanded to know why he hadn’t just taken the scene—as unfortunate as it was—as the opportunity for them to come out of the closet as a couple, as it were. For the past few months, he had told her he was simply waiting for the right time—well, wasn’t this it? Was he really going to leave his wife and marry her, as he had promised? If not now, when? Were they really going to have a life together?
When Kevin said that they needed to put all those plans on hold now, for the sake of propriety, Valerie watched his lies evaporate into thin air like fog rising from the lake. That this man would choose his mousy, boring wife over her elicited a rage deep inside Valerie’s wounded soul the likes of which she had never experienced.
But Kate knew none of this on the morning that Stan asked her to reconsider her resignation.
“Sure, Stan,” she said to him. “I’ll think about it and call you in a few weeks, then.” But she knew she’d never go back to the paper. Her work there was wrapped up in her relationship with Kevin. She couldn’t possibly continue in her job without her marriage, too. And with every day that passed, she realized what a mistake that marriage had been.
After Kate and Simon finished laughing and crying about the scene at the Tavern, Simon took Kate’s hands.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m going to say something that sounds very callous and mean.”
“That’s nothing new,” she snorted.
“Seriously,” he said, squeezing her hands. “Don’t get mad at me for bringing this up, but you got quite an inheritance when Granny died, just like I did.”
“And?”
“And—I certainly hope you got a pre-nup.”
“It’s written on stone tablets, I think,” she chuckled. “That was the one thing my dad insisted on when I told my parents we were getting married after such a brief courtship.”
“Thanks, Uncle Fred.” Simon smiled. “What are the terms, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“It stipulates that, in case of a divorce, our marital assets would be divided—what we earned and accumulated together after our marriage, in other words—but the trust was off-limits.”
Simon had a dark thought. “What about if you died?”
“The trust would go to any children we had. If we had no children, half would go to Kevin and half back to my parents.”
Simon squinted at her over the rim of his coffee cup.
“I didn’t want to leave him with nothing if he were a grieving widower.”
As Simon brought their dishes into the kitchen, he was suddenly very glad his cousin had come to Wharton. He made a silent vow to keep her safely under his roof until those divorce papers were filed.
Johnny Stratton’s team was running into a brick wall with their investigation of the murder. They knew only the cause of death. Nothing more. No missing persons reports, no clues as to who the woman was, who killed her, or how she had ended up in the lake. Kevin Bradford’s polygraph proved that he had nothing to do with this woman or her baby—DNA results might tell them otherwise, but those weren’t in yet.
There was no love lost between Johnny and Kate’s husband, but Johnny was literally breathing easier since he saw the man’s polygraph. If Bradford didn’t know this woman and wasn’t the father of that baby, then Kate had no motive for killing them.
Still. He knew Katie was hiding something. He had seen it clearly in her eyes that morning at Fred’s kitchen table. It was a cloud, the same cloud he had seen seep into the eyes of hundreds of liars even as they were professing the truth. If it were anybody else, he would have kept after her until she told him what it was. But Katie Granger? He was tempted to just let sleeping dogs lie. And because of that, he knew he needed to step back from this case. He was too close.
He dialed the number of the precinct in Wharton.
“Nick Stone.”
“Stone! It’s Johnny Stratton. How are you settling into police work in a small town?”
“Keeping Wharton safe from jaywalkers and speeders,” Stone said, a chuckle in his voice. “And getting to know everyone in town. It’s a nice change, actually.”
“That’s the spirit,” Johnny said, knowing why the cop had requested a transfer from the city. “But I’m calling to change all of that, I’m afraid. I’ve got a murder case I need your help with.”
CHAPTER TEN
Great Bay, 1901
October 30
Dear Jess,
I find myself wondering about you constantly. I’ll be walking through town thinking, Does he like his courses? Has he made friends? What is the university like? Most of the time, I’m not even looking at what’s in front of me, so entranced am I in the world that I am imagining for you. I’m even wondering about what you’re eating. Do they have different, wonderful foods in the city that we don’t have here?
As you can see, I’m still a curious cat.
Life at home is the same as it has always been, with one major difference: you are not here. You can’t imagine how odd the same o
ld life seems without someone who was always there by my side. The school year has started, as you probably know, and our new teacher, Mrs. Patterson, is fond of piling on the work.
I have reluctantly had to put the bicycle away for the winter. I’ve so enjoyed it these months, even though my father says it’s not ladylike.
Well, that’s all for now. Please write and let me know how you’re getting on.
Your friend,
Addie Cassatt
Addie folded the letter into its envelope and walked out of the house toward the post office, buttoning up her coat all the way to the neck, winding her scarf snugly around her head, and pulling on her hood for good measure. The first gale of the season was upon the tiny fishing village, and, as with many late fall storms on this Great Lake, it was punishing.
Snow and hard pellets of sleet plummeted down, coating everything they touched in a slick layer of ice. Worse even than that, the wind caught those tiny frozen shards in its breath and blew them in fierce gusts into the faces of those fool enough to venture outdoors. After walking in one of those ice storms, it was not uncommon to find one’s face covered in razor-thin cuts.
Any sensible person would be safe and warm inside, reading by the fire or cooking in front of a hot stove. Indeed, many eyes were delivering sidelong glances from their warm rooms behind frosty windowpanes, wondering what that foolish Cassatt girl was up to now, out walking on this kind of day. But for Addie, she was finished with her letter, and that meant it was time to walk to the post office. The weather simply didn’t enter into it.
She had been waiting almost two months for a letter from Jess. Why hadn’t he written immediately as he’d said he would? Addie ruminated on this for a while and concluded that he must be consumed with his new life, his college classes and a roommate, everyone and everything around him fresh and new and exciting. Home must seem quite dull indeed.
Addie had imagined they would be writing letters to each other as fast as the post could take them, and through those words and descriptions, she would experience a bit of his newfound life. She had further imagined that waiting for those letters—words from a faraway love—would add some excitement to her everyday existence. It was a romantic notion of a naïve young girl. Waiting this long for letters that never came was a tedious exercise in frustration. At this rate, Jess’s four years of college would drag out to eternity for Addie.
Head down, eyes nearly closed, Addie slogged her way through the punishing sleet to the post office. Grateful for the brief respite indoors, she mailed the letter, exchanged a few pleasantries with the postmistress, and headed back outside toward home. She was distracted midway by the waves on the lake, enormous whitecaps roiling and bubbling on the surface of the water only to crash mightily and furiously onshore. Addie loved the lake in all its moods, but perhaps its fury most of all. The anger and power of the waves made her shudder. She felt small and helpless in the face of such power, yet she knew somehow that she would always be safe within it. She scrambled down the rocky embankment toward the lakeshore, and there she sat just out of the water’s grasp.
As little as a year ago, Addie might have been tempted to peel off her coat and walk into the water, knowing its anger and chill would warm her like a hot bath. But now that she was growing up, Addie didn’t let herself be drawn to the lake the way she had when she was a young girl.
It wasn’t suitable for a young woman to be seen playing and splashing like a baby, her mother had said when Addie turned thirteen that year. Although she still felt much like a child, Addie liked being referred to as a young woman and saw the wisdom of acting as though she was old enough for that title.
Addie always did her best thinking on the shoreline. There, with the lake’s tenor lapping in her ears, Addie found herself wondering about the life she would have when Jess finished college. Would he come home to her? Would they marry as they had planned? Or would he find another girl, someone pretty and exciting and closer to his age, at the university? She knew that’s what her parents hoped. But Addie could not even summon the image of Jess loving someone else. It seemed to violate the very order of things.
The waves were stronger now, louder. Amid this sound and fury, Addie concluded that all was well with the only man she would ever love, letters or no letters. She was worrying needlessly. Have faith, girl. Things are what they will be. She stood and turned toward home just as an enormous wave crashed into the shore where she had been sitting only seconds before, as if to weigh in on her decision. Had she not moved, it certainly would have engulfed her. The thought took Addie’s breath away. As she watched the wave recede, Addie was struck with a pang of doubt at the truth of the conclusion she had just reached. Something gnawed at her as she scrambled back up to the road, and it kept gnawing at her as she walked home.
Addie had no way of knowing that, at that very moment, Jess Stewart was hundreds of miles away, sitting across the table from a young woman named Sally, who he very much hoped would be completely taken with his charms.
On his first day away from home, as he stepped into the city from the train, Jess Stewart awoke to a new life. Great Bay, and everything in it, seemed so small and far away. College, a roommate from another town, classes, parties, tall buildings, people bustling here and there—Jess was entranced by it all. But especially by the women. This new breed of girl—worldly, sophisticated, lighthearted, fun—was so different from the sensible wives of the fishermen in Great Bay. Oh, he hadn’t forgotten Addie, but she was just thirteen years old. A child, really. Addie was not like these college girls. With distance, he could see it clearly. It wasn’t proper for a grown man to be carrying on a relationship with a child of Addie’s age. Their childhood closeness faded from his mind as he began to discover intimacy of another kind.
Back in Great Bay, Addie shuddered, and for the first time that day, she felt cold deep inside. She tightened her scarf, buttoned her coat, and pulled the hood closer around her face in preparation for the walk home.
A few weeks later, Addie came home from school one afternoon to find a letter waiting for her on the table in the hallway. She squealed and ripped it open, dropping her schoolbooks in the process.
December 1
Dear Addie,
Thank you for your letter. I’m sorry it has taken me so long to write. You can’t imagine how busy I’ve been! This university life is exhausting!
To answer your questions, I am indeed enjoying my classes—history, literature, economics, and science—but, like you have found with your new teacher, I’m finding that my courses are a great deal of work. After classes have concluded for the day, I spend the rest of the afternoon in the library studying until dinnertime.
My roommate is a fellow from the Dakotas whose parents own a farm in the midst of the flat prairie. His descriptions of the landscape make it sound austere and empty, very different from what we’re used to—no lakes nearby, a stream here and there, flat land as far as the eye can see. He says you can see miles and miles of horizon. Can you imagine great fields of sunflowers? He plays the trombone as well—enough said about that! Now you can see why I spend so much time in the library.
About the food—nothing here is as good as my mother’s pasty. Write again soon and tell me about life at home.
I regret to tell you that I will not be coming home for Christmas this year. My roommate and I have been invited to the home of a man who lives here in town. It just seemed easier this way. My parents are unhappy about this, and of course I wished to see you, but the idea of a long trip in the dead of winter convinced me to remain in town.
Your friend,
Jess Stewart
Addie slumped onto her bed. Jess wasn’t coming home for the holiday, after all.
She read the letter over and over before putting it in a wooden box with a velvet lining, which she thought would be a perfect place for such correspondence. She kept the box on the writing desk by the window in her bedroom and had hoped to fill it to bursting with his letters over
the course of these four lonely years.
“I thought that boy would’ve outgrown her by now,” Marcus grumbled to his wife as he donned his coat and hat to shovel the driveway one snowy morning. “Girls her age shouldn’t be writing to college men.”
What could they do about it, he wanted to know. Forbid her from writing? Intercept any more letters that came? Marcus lobbied for that course of action, but Marie saw the folly in it.
“He’s not coming home for Christmas,” Marie whispered, not wanting Addie to hear. “Maybe he’s got a sweetheart at the university.”
Marcus’s eyes lit up at this suggestion.
Marie continued, “Whether he does or doesn’t, he’s going to be there for four long years. He’ll come home now and then, to be sure, but by the time he leaves that place for good, Addie will be old enough to make her own decisions. Maybe he’ll come home and marry her. Or maybe he will have met someone, a grown woman, who will take his eyes away from our daughter. You never know.”
“Marry her!” Marcus was aghast. “She’s just a child!”
“She’s thirteen years old, Marcus,” Marie said. “When Jess Stewart is finished with college, she’ll be seventeen. That’s plenty old enough.”
“That’s still too young,” Marcus grumbled some more.
“Oh, you,” Marie laughed. “Need I remind you that I was but eighteen when we married?”
The couple shared a laugh, then marveled at how many years had passed in an instant. Their daughter, meanwhile, was upstairs in her bedroom, sitting at her writing desk, believing time had slowed to a crawl.
December 12
Dear Jess,
Your letter came in the mail today. It’s a bright day here on the lakeshore. The water has not completely frozen over, and it’s wonderful to hear the ice patches wash into the shore here and there. Slush, slosh, slush. I remember how you used to love listening to that.