“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Maybe.”
He stopped using the tree to support himself and looked me in the eye. “You think I did it. That I somehow did this thing to the water, so I could rush in and be the white knight.”
“Maybe,” I said again.
“If I was going to kill hundreds of people to save my political career, you don’t think I would have made sure my wife wasn’t one of the casualties?”
I searched those eyes. I didn’t know the answer to that question. It was possible he was telling me the truth.
It was also possible Jane was already deathly ill, her days numbered, and in Finley’s mind, letting her go a little early was justifiable to advance his political objectives.
But for the love of God, he was only running for mayor of Promise Falls. This wasn’t the goddamn presidency. How could someone want something that insignificant that badly?
On top of that, Jane’s death really did come down to Lindsay going against her employer’s wishes, and not being aware of what was happening in the town.
No, Randall Finley did not intend for his wife to die.
I held out a hand. He looked down at it, puzzled, then slowly took it in his and gripped it.
“I believe you,” I said.
THIRTY-SEVEN
JOYCE Pilgrim started with a call to the woman in charge of summer athletics. Thackeray ran a number of programs from May through September. They were open to any students taking courses during that period, as well as people from beyond Thackeray. In addition, Thackeray rented out its various fields to local baseball and soccer clubs through the summer.
The summer athletics director was Hilda Brownlee, and Joyce tracked her down at home.
“I’m looking for a jogger,” she said.
“A jogger?” said Hilda.
“Someone who likes to take a run around the campus late at night. I wondered if you have any students training for any track or long-distance running events.”
“I can’t think of anyone off the top of my head,” she said. “Can I get back to you?”
In the meantime, Joyce had compiled a list of all the young people who were living in Thackeray residences over the summer. There were seventy-three of them. She went through the list, name by name. Fifty-eight of the residents were female, fifteen male.
She made a list of the fifteen men.
Then Joyce went through the Thackeray student database and found the e-mail addresses for all of them, and prepared to send out a group message.
She had written something about trying to find the person who was running through the campus on the night of May 20 and into the morning of May 21. But before she hit the send button, she thought for a moment. Up to now, her suspicions were focused on the man in the car that had edged into the frame of the closed-circuit television footage. And she wanted to find the jogger who might have gotten a better look at that car, and the driver.
But what if, Joyce wondered, the jogger had killed Lorraine Plummer? What if the man in the car had nothing to do with it? She could hardly expect a possible suspect to write back and say: “Yeah, that was me! I was running around at that time and have no alibi!”
Maybe an e-mail wasn’t such a good idea.
So, name by name, she began researching the fifteen students. She started with Facebook, but she found only a couple of them there. It was Joyce’s experience that while it was young people who’d turned Facebook into a social media phenomenon, now that all their parents and grandparents were on it, posting pictures of their cats and grandkids and dim-witted sayings like “Click Like If You Love Your Niece,” it was no longer the place to be.
Joyce did broader Google searches on them all.
She didn’t turn up much of interest on any of them, at least nothing that mentioned whether they were track stars or marathon runners. And the thing was, just because a guy went for a jog at midnight did not mean he was competing for the Olympics. He might just be out for exercise.
Joyce was at home, having a late dinner with her husband, when Hilda called her back.
“I don’t have anything for you,” she said. “I mean, I don’t have anyone who’s specifically in a track program who’s attending Thackeray. I’d say eighty percent of the kids enrolled in summer stuff are from the town, anyway.”
Joyce decided she had to come at this from a different direction.
“I’m going back out,” she told her husband late that evening.
“Are you kidding me?”
She had told him about finding Lorraine Plummer, of course, but had decided not to dwell on it. She did not want to be the wife who came home and went to pieces about what had happened at work, even if discovering a murder was not the sort of thing that happened to most people encountered on the job.
“Do you want to talk about it?” her husband kept asking.
“No,” she said. “I do not want to talk about it.”
What she found, oddly enough, was that she wanted to be at the college, not at home. When Clive Duncomb had been her boss, she hated every second she was there—the guy was such a sexist asshole—but now that she was in charge, she felt a new commitment. A responsibility.
Thackeray was—she almost felt embarrassed to say this to herself because it bordered on corny—her beat. She knew she wasn’t a cop. Far from it. But she was in charge of security, and the death of Lorraine Plummer meant Thackeray wasn’t secure.
She wanted to do something about that.
Joyce was certainly not going to try to track down a killer. If she found out anything, she would pass it along to the Promise Falls police. That Duckworth guy. But given what the town had been through today, she knew the Plummer murder wasn’t going to get the attention it normally would.
At least the coroner finally showed up. Wanda Something. After she’d finished her examination of the body, she had a pretty grim look on her face. At first, Joyce figured in that line of work, everything you had to do put you in a foul mood. But Joyce could tell this was different. And when Wanda got on the phone to tell someone about what she’d found, Joyce listened in, and picked up a vibe that whoever had killed Lorraine, this was not his first outing.
Jesus.
Once the sun had set, Joyce indicated she was heading back out to the campus. Her husband said he would come with her.
“No way,” Joyce said. “Unless you’d like me to come to work with you on Tuesday morning. Hold your hand while you plaster and drywall.”
Soon after, Joyce Pilgrim was sitting in her car, parked on the street in the exact same place where that vehicle had been parked during the period Duckworth believed Lorraine had been murdered. She was, admittedly, early. If—and there were several ifs—this particular person did his run at the same time every night, she had several hours to wait. This was, of course, if he ran every night. And if he took the same route.
And, if all those ifs aligned, he’d be useful to Joyce only if he remembered seeing that car that night. Even then, he’d be useful only if he was good at telling one car from another.
Still, it was all she had at the moment.
Thackeray was a quiet place this time of year. The occasional student walked past. Once in a while, a car drove by.
Joyce was thinking she should have brought along some coffee, but that would mean, at some point, having to run to the nearest available bathroom. Just like when you’re waiting for the cable guy to show up, the two minutes you leave the house to mail a letter, that’s when he rings the bell.
At least she had music.
She had no way to run her iPhone through her old clunker’s stereo system, but she did have CDs. She opened up her folder of discs, found her favorite, and slipped it into the slot in the dash.
Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life.
Joyce loved Stevie. No other artist—not since the dawn of time—even came close.
She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, bounced her shoe off the side of the transmission hu
mp. She played the entire disc, popped it out, replaced it with Original Musiquarium, which was made up of hits from 1972 to 1980.
Joyce was halfway through Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants when she saw him.
It was nearly ten, and he was running toward her on the other side of the street. Not flat out. A steady jog, pacing himself. As he got closer, Joyce sized him up. Late twenties, early thirties. Too old to be a student, she thought, and a little on the young side to be a professor, although she had to admit there were a few on campus who’d never seen a first-run episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
She couldn’t be certain this was the same guy she’d seen in the video, but it was certainly possible. He had the earbuds trailing down to a music player clipped to the band of his running shorts.
Joyce killed the music and got out of her car. She stood in the middle of the road, waved her hands at him when he got to be about sixty yards away.
He slowed, stopped about twenty feet from her, and pulled the buds from his ears. Between breaths, he said, “You okay?”
“Yeah.” Joyce showed him her ID, told him she was with Thackeray College security.
“Am I not allowed to run here?” he asked. “I didn’t think it would be a problem.”
“You’re not affiliated with Thackeray?” Joyce asked. “Enrolled here, or work here?”
The man shook his head. “No. But come on, it’s not really private property, is it?”
Joyce smiled. “I don’t care about that. But I need to ask you some questions.”
The man glanced at his watch. “I’ve been trying to beat my previous time.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s important. So you don’t live on campus?”
“No, I live in town. But I like running through here. It’s pretty. And I only just kind of started doing it. I used to run years ago, but I’m trying to get myself back in some kind of shape. More exercise, less drinking, if you know what I mean.”
“Sure, yeah. Listen, were you running here the other night? Around midnight?”
The man asked her which night, exactly, and she told him.
“Yeah,” he said. “That was my first or second night, I think. How would you know that?”
Joyce pointed to one of the buildings. “Security camera up there.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Anyway, that night, around that time, do you remember seeing a car parked right where mine is now?”
The jogger shrugged. “Not that I . . . I don’t really recall.”
“It was there for about an hour. A man got out, went in that direction, then returned to the vehicle, and then backed up that way. Turned around, I guess, and drove off.”
“So you’re looking for that car?”
Joyce nodded.
“And that guy?”
She nodded again.
“What are you looking for him for?”
Joyce said, “It’s just important that I find him.”
The man appeared to be thinking. “Actually, yeah, I do kind of remember seeing somebody around then.”
“Really?”
“Maybe.”
“Okay,” Joyce said, starting to feel excited. “Listen, I didn’t even ask. What’s your name?”
“Rooney,” the jogger said. “Victor Rooney.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
DAVID Harwood had felt a little stupid when Cal Weaver had asked him whether he’d spoken to Samantha Worthington’s neighbors about where she and Carl might have gone. David was no licensed private detective, but he had been a reporter, and he’d done some investigative journalism over the years—particularly back before the Promise Falls Standard started slashing staff and could still afford to do that sort of thing—so not to have considered something as basic as asking the folks who lived on either side of Sam if they’d seen her packing up was pretty embarrassing.
David decided to chalk it up to having too much on his mind.
Now he was going to do what he should have done the first time.
He was back at Sam’s place. He’d hoped that maybe when he got here, she’d be back. That he would find her car in the driveway, that she and Carl would be fine.
But the car was still gone when he parked on the street in front of her house.
He rang the bell on the house to the right first. It took a second ring to draw out a woman in her eighties, who, it turned out, lived alone, and had not seen Sam or Carl, and did not, in fact, even know who lived on either side of her.
Then he tried the house on the left.
It didn’t take long before a woman came to the door, opened it wide, and said to him, “I was wondering when you’d show up.”
“Excuse me?” David said.
“You’re here looking for Samantha and her boy?”
“Uh, yes, I am.”
A man appeared, standing behind the woman. “What’s going on?” he asked.
The woman looked over her shoulder and said, “This is the real one.”
“Oh,” the man said. “You figured he’d get here sooner or later.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” David said.
“I’m Theresa and that’s my husband, Ron,” she said. “Jones.”
“Okay.”
“And you’re David Harwood, right?”
David nodded. “How do you know that?”
“I’ve seen you dropping by to see Sam and I recognized you. From the TV, and the paper, back when you were having all that trouble with your wife.”
“That was years ago,” David said.
“Well, I remember,” she said.
“What did you mean,” David asked Theresa, “when you said ‘the real one’?”
“You’re not the first one named David Harwood to come to our door today,” she said.
David felt his stomach drop. “Who was here?”
Theresa told him about the man who’d come around earlier in the day looking for Sam and Carl. How he’d identified himself as David.
“That had to be her ex-husband,” David said. “He just got out of jail. I mean, he fled. They didn’t let him out on purpose.”
“Good Lord,” Theresa said. “We had no idea.”
Brandon Worthington probably knew all about him, David thought. His parents would have filled him in. That David had been seeing Sam, that he was the one in the picture having sex with her in her kitchen, that he was the one who’d fucked up Ed’s attempt to grab Carl at the school that day. Sam might have spoken about David, in a favorable light, to her neighbors. Or maybe Sam had told the Joneses that if someone named David came around, it would be safe to tell him where she’d gone.
Except, because Theresa Jones knew Brandon wasn’t who he claimed to be, it didn’t work. And besides, Sam hadn’t told her where she was going, anyway.
But it had looked, Theresa Jones told David now, like they were off on a camping trip.
“Good thing you didn’t tell him that,” David said.
“Well,” Ron Jones said slowly, “that’s where I might have let the cat out of the bag. Just a bit.”
So it was possible Brandon had figured out his ex-wife and son had packed their sleeping bags and planned to live in a tent until his recapture. But even if Brandon had put that much together, he wouldn’t have any idea which campsite they might go to.
But David did.
What was it Sam had said to him? She’d been talking about how, once their relationship had progressed to the point where they didn’t care if the boys knew they were sleeping together (which, let’s face it, they had probably already figured out), it would be fun to take them on a camping trip.
Sam had said that she and Carl had gone camping a couple of times since moving to Promise Falls. It was something she’d done back when she was married to Brandon, and she’d enjoyed it more than he had. Carl loved everything about it. Exploring the woods, cooking over a fire, burning the marshmallows until they were black ash.
“There’s a nice place up ar
ound Lake Luzerne,” she’d told him.
David said to Theresa and Ron Jones, “Thanks very much for your help. I appreciate it more than you can know.”
When he got back into his car, he got out his phone and opened a Web browser. He couldn’t remember the name of the campsite Sam had mentioned. But he thought if he could find a list of places in the Lake Luzerne area, he’d recognize it when he saw it.
It didn’t take long.
Camp Sunrise.
He was sure that was the place.
David considered driving up there now. But it would be dark by the time he got to Lake Luzerne, and he didn’t know where, exactly, Camp Sunrise was. Traipsing around the campsite late at night, surprising Sam and Carl in their tent when they were probably worried about Brandon finding them—assuming they were actually at Camp Sunrise—might not end well.
David could very well end up with a shotgun in his face once again. This time, it might go off.
First thing in the morning. That was what he’d do. He’d head up first thing in the morning.
THIRTY-NINE
Duckworth
I stayed for a while with Randall Finley.
First, I went back into the house and took a more formal statement from Lindsay. She related the events of the day a second time, and her story held together. I don’t know why I felt the need to apologize on Randy’s behalf, but I told her he’d been upset, and he understood she had not set out to murder Jane. I suppose I did it for her more than him. Still, Lindsay remained distraught, and I wasn’t convinced she could drive herself home safely. She called her twenty-year-old son, who took a taxi over, then drove his mother back to her place in her car.
I asked Randy, who had dropped himself into a wrought-iron chair outside near the front door, if he wanted me to do anything with Bipsie. He shook his head sorrowfully and asked if I could put her into a garbage bag until he decided what to do with her. He muttered something about burying her in the backyard next to Jane, given how much she loved that dog.
Gently, I told him town bylaws prevented him from burying Jane on the property.