He closes his eyes, and his head sinks onto her chest. Struggling against her own revulsion, she reaches up to touch his hair. It’s softer and finer than she’d imagined.
“This is between us, Rick,” Kathryn breathes. “No one else needs to know. Nobody else can understand what that means.”
“I thought I was losing her,” he says.
“You probably were.”
“I never meant…”
For a moment she thinks he’s going to say more, but he doesn’t. She touches his neck with the flat of her hand, feeling the fine sandpaper of his skin, his strong jawbone, his pulsing jugular. “I believe you,” she says. She’s not lying; she does believe him. She believes him in the moment, knowing that a split second later it might not be true.
He lifts his head to look at her, then pulls himself up to sit beside her. “This is strange,” he says. “I’m not sure what to do.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” she says.
Reaching down, he traces the side of her face with two fingers, gently brushing the hair off her cheek. “You are … like her,” he muses. “It’s not just the hair. It’s as if you had to go through the experience of losing her in order to find her in yourself—the part of her you always wanted to be.”
She turns away. It’s a grotesque justification. It may be true. “Which one of us is going to be famous? Who’s going to be the alcoholic? Which one of you girls will ditch your husband for me when we come back for our ten-year reunion? Who’s dying young?”
“You could stay here,” he says.
She nods. “I could.”
For a few moments neither of them speaks. The afternoon light is fading quickly now, the forest floor around them becoming dense and shadowed. “We should get back,” he says finally.
Sitting up, she rubs her leg. “My ankle is killing me.”
He prods her ankle gently, touching different places. “Does that hurt?” he asks. “Does that?”
She grimaces. “It all hurts.”
“It’s swollen,” he says. “I can take a look at it at the cabin.”
“Oh. Thanks,” she says, trying to sound nonchalant, “but I need to get home. My mother is expecting me.”
“You can call her.”
“We have plans,” Kathryn says.
“So tell her something came up.” He smiles at her, a bland, steady smile, a challenge.
She shakes her head. “I can’t. It’s—it’s her birthday.” Her mother’s birthday is actually in May, but it’s the only thing Kathryn can think of.
“Really? Why didn’t you say so before?”
She starts to answer, then realizes the question is rhetorical.
He reaches for her hand and pulls her to her feet. Gingerly she puts pressure on the hurt ankle and finds that she can limp-walk well enough. “I think I can make it,” she says.
“No, let me help you.” Hunter leans his shoulder against hers, coaxing her to put her arm around his neck. It’s a high and uncomfortable angle, and Kathryn finds herself off balance, dependent on him for support.
They make their way slowly through the woods, and after a few minutes Kathryn realizes that Hunter has steered them back to a trail. It’s easier to walk two abreast now; the branches and bushes have been cleared from the path.
When they get to her car, she turns to face him. Over his shoulder she can see the faint glimmer of headlights through the trees. Jack, she thinks, and prays silently that Hunter doesn’t turn around.
“When will I see you again?” he asks.
“Whenever you want,” she says, trying to keep the alarm out of her voice.
“Tomorrow.” He moves closer.
Butterfly wings flitter in her stomach. “Fine,” she says, inching back.
“Tonight.”
“It is tonight.”
“Later,” he says.
“Let me go home first, see about this ankle.” She smiles apologetically. “I’ll call you.”
He looks at her as if he’s not sure whether to let her go. “You’ll be fine,” he says. “You don’t need to worry.”
“I know.”
She opens the door to her car, and then remembers the bag. Her car keys and the tape recorder are in it, and it’s sitting on his couch. “I—my bag,” she says. “I need to get it.”
“I’ll get it for you.”
“No,” she says, a bit too quickly, “I know right where it is.”
He grins. “The house isn’t that big.”
Her palms are sweating. “But—”
“Stay here,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”
Watching him trot around to the front of the cabin, she is lightheaded with panic, as if terror has replaced the blood in her veins. She imagines him sliding open the glass door, entering the house, looking around for the bag, and spotting it on the couch, then picking it up. Curious. Looking inside. Pulling out the small black cassette player, turning it over, seeing the blank tape inside. Considering. Realizing exactly what it was intended for.
She might tell him that she is using the tape player for a story, or that she carries it everywhere she goes, or that she left it in the bag the day before and forgot about it. She could come up with all kinds of excuses, but he’d never believe her. He’d jump to conclusions; he’d assume she was planning to trap him, to get his confession on tape, and of course he’d be right.
She turns around and looks blindly at the tangle of evergreens, trying to make out shapes in the foliage. “Jack,” she stage-whispers.
Ahead of her, somewhere in the trees, she hears her name. She narrows her eyes and limps forward a few steps, pausing to listen. She sees a dark form moving in the trees and then Jack steps forward. He gives her a once-over and glances up at the house.
“Oh, God,” she breathes, relief washing over her. Looking hastily over her shoulder, she moves toward him. “We’ve got to get out of here, fast.”
“Are you all right?” he asks, coming to meet her.
“I think so,” she says. “We have to get to your car.”
“What about yours?”
“I don’t have the key.”
He puts his arm around her waist, and they move as quickly as they can down the driveway to where Jack’s car is parked. When they’ve almost reached it, they hear a yell.
“Hey!”
Kathryn turns to see Hunter’s dark form poised at the edge of the cabin. The tape recorder is clenched in his hand.
“Hey!” He throws the tape recorder down and begins running toward them down the driveway.
Kathryn wrenches open the passenger’s side door. She heaves herself inside, locking her door and the one behind it as Jack jumps into the driver’s seat. He fumbles with the keys, dropping them on the floorboard and scrambling to retrieve them. Just as Hunter reaches the car, Jack starts the engine.
Finding Kathryn’s door locked, Hunter pounds his fist on the windshield. His face is terrible, his eyes wide and his mouth contorted in fury. He presses his nose against the glass and Kathryn shrinks back in her seat. “You fucking bitch!” he spits, bashing his fist against the window, as if he’s punching her in the face.
“Hang on,” Jack says through gritted teeth. He pulls off the shoulder and onto the dirt and gravel road with Hunter close beside them, walking and then jogging and finally running to keep up. Kathryn watches Hunter’s hand on her window, the white pads of his fingers gripping the glass and then sliding as Jack turns the wheel and the car veers to the left, cutting sharply across the road and sideswiping a cluster of bushes, the branches squeaking as they scrape along the side. Jack guns the engine and the car jumps and jostles over the rutted road. In the side-view mirrow, Kathryn sees Hunter looking after them as they drive away, his figure getting smaller and smaller until they go around a bend and it disappears.
AT THE POLICE station Kathryn gives a statement with as much detail as she can remember. “Her body is buried in that clearing,” she says. “I’m sure of it. There’s
a path leading to it from the cabin, but it’s hard to see.”
“We’ll find it,” Gaffney says. “Now, are you going to be willing to testify against this guy in court?”
“Whatever it takes,” she says.
“Good.” Gaffney smiles broadly. “Now go get that bum ankle looked at, and we’ll do the rest. I don’t want to see you nosing around here again anytime soon.”
In the car on the way to the emergency room, Kathryn leans back and closes her eyes.
“Tired?” Jack asks.
“No. Not tired.” She looks over at him. “It’s just a weird way for this to end. It feels… unfinished.”
“You solved it, Kathryn. The mystery is over.”
“But it isn’t,” she says. “We still don’t know why.”
Slowly, he shakes his head. “I hate to say it, but I doubt we ever will.”
She gazes out at the streetlights gliding by her window. Facts will only take you so far, Hunter said. You can have all the facts and still not know what happened.
But maybe, she thinks, that’s the wrong way to think about it. Maybe you have to have the facts before you can even begin to make sense of the story.
She turns to look at Jack, and he leans over and kisses her on the neck, keeping his eyes on the road.
“I do love you, Jack,” she says.
He grins and lightly squeezes her knee. “You’ve had an exciting day,” he says. “I won’t hold you to that.”
EPILOGUE
As summer draws to a close, the night air sharpens. Mornings are bracingly cool. Kathryn has a cast on her leg for the broken ankle, and she’s getting quite adept at hobbling around. She spends a lot of time on the front porch of her mother’s house, sitting in the swing and working her way through Anna Karenina, which she was supposed to read for a class in college but never got around to. After work Jack comes over and makes dinner for her and her mother, or they order a pizza, or they go down to the Sea Dog to sit on the deck and watch the boats go by. Inevitably, by the end of the evening they’re back on the front porch of her mother’s house again.
When the police went to Hunter’s property to look for a body, Hunter was gone. An hour later they tracked him down at Bangor International Airport, where he was sitting in the TV lounge with a standby ticket to Mexico. He didn’t seem surprised to see them, and he didn’t put up a fight. He got up, gathered his bags, and led them all down the escalator and through the electronic doors to the police cars lined up by the curb. They didn’t even bother to handcuff him. People who witnessed the arrest said at first they couldn’t figure it out; they thought maybe he was working undercover, he seemed so unfazed by it all.
Kathryn doesn’t know if everything Hunter told her is true. But the police did find a body in the clearing, and dental records confirmed the identity as Jennifer’s, so that much, at least, is known. Hunter isn’t saying much; he’s got a smooth-talking lawyer and even an alibi, the waitress from Raymond’s, who swears she remembers that he took her home that night ten years ago after closing the place down at two.
So the truth about what happened will probably never be fully revealed. But for some reason, Kathryn finds, it doesn’t matter so much to her anymore. Whatever Hunter’s lies and distortions and backtracking, whether he panicked, letting Jennifer die out of negligence and fear, or whether he killed her with his own hands, at least they’ve found her. She’s not missing any longer. They can lay her to rest.
AFTER THE FRONT-PAGE articles have been written and filed away, Jennifer’s family holds a small memorial service at Mount Hope Cemetery, where her remains are buried under a simple stone marker. It’s a clear, cool day; looking around as Will is speaking, an open Bible in his hands, Kathryn is aware of the sharp edges of things: the cut marble headstones, the dry, brittle leaves rustling overhead, the black spiky fence, the lines of age and grief etched on the faces around her. Jennifer’s mother, usually so nervous, exhibits a strange, watchful calm. Rachel looks as if she’s been crying for days.
As they were standing around before the service, Mrs. Pelletier came up to Kathryn and hugged her fiercely and wordlessly before taking her face in her hands and drawing her close. “I underestimated you,” she whispered. “It’s all right,” Kathryn said, and Mrs. Pelletier just smiled sadly and took her seat. Will enveloped Kathryn in a full body hug. “This is tough,” he said, choking back tears. “I hated what Rachel said that night at the reunion, but in a way she was right. This has consumed me.” Rachel was icily cordial, as if she’d been deeply, gravely wronged.
Standing beside her at the grave site, Jack slips his hand into Kathryn’s and laces his fingers through hers. “I never understood what it meant to say ‘rest in peace,’” Will is saying. “Now I do. In burying my sister today I am finally letting go of the past, not because questions don’t remain, but because I acknowledge that no one can ever adequately address the one question that matters: why she was taken from us, why her life had to end so early. As long as we need an answer, we will have no peace. So we make a choice, and that choice is to put to rest the questions that remain.
“So, Jennifer,” he says, not looking down and not looking up, but somewhere in the middle distance, “rest in peace. And forgive us for not knowing you better.”
At the end of the service the small crowd disperses, and the five friends linger behind. “We should be better about staying in touch,” Brian says, and they all nod in wistful acceptance of the fact that their friendship, rooted in a specific time and place, will probably survive mainly in memory. Brian looks at his watch and excuses himself with promises of wedding invitations and pints of Geary’s the next time any of them are in Portland. Rachel says she has mountains of papers waiting to be graded; she needs to get back to her desk. At the path toward the gate she turns back to look at the ones who remain. “I loved her too,” she says, holding her chin out as if she’s balancing something fragile on it, and there is a long pause before Will nods and Jack says, “We all know that.”
Will, Kathryn, and Jack talk about logistics for a while. Will is going down to Florida for a few weeks to stay with his mother before heading back to Boston. Hunter’s trial is scheduled for late January at the moment but likely, through defense maneuverings, to be delayed and even moved. “I don’t even care when it happens,” Will says. He clears his throat and looks at them, a small smile softening the intensity of his words. “I just needed for her to be found.”
After a while they leave him standing there by the stone marker in the weak sunlight, tilting his head and leaning forward slightly on the balls of his feet as if engaged in conversation. “He’ll be all right,” Jack says as they make their way to his car, and Kathryn answers, a little quickly, “I know,” though neither of them actually does. Their exchange isn’t disingenuous, exactly; it’s just shorthand for so many things. These discussions will come, but not today. For now they’re content to keep things simple. This moment, they know, is fleeting, and they want to hold on to it as long as they can.
THE SKY is the color of skim milk most mornings; at night the moon lights the sky like a giant strobe. Kathryn buys a green Polartec sweatshirt from T.J. Maxx and takes to wearing it every day. After a week of this, her mother says, “Let’s go shopping. My treat,” and pulls out a pile of catalogues. They sit on the living-room couch together and leaf through the pages, and by the end of it Kathryn has a new fall wardrobe for the first time in years, suitable for a long, cold descent into winter.
Her Virginia driver’s license expires, and she renews it in Maine. She gets a check-cashing card at Doug’s Shop ‘n Save and transfers her checking account to Fleet Bank. When her mother offers to buy season tickets to the Bangor Symphony—something they can do together—Kathryn agrees. Frank repossesses the yellow Saturn, and she takes a loan from her father to buy a used Toyota from a lawyer in his firm. She starts to scan apartment listings in the paper. And though she tells herself she can leave anytime, it’s getting harder to imagine doing s
o.
She calls her brother, Josh, and leaves a message on his machine telling him that she’s staying in Bangor longer than she’d thought, and she hopes he’ll come up for a weekend. He calls back with a date: the first week in October, will she still be there? “It looks that way,” Kathryn tells him. “I don’t have plans to leave.”
“Face it, my dear,” her grandmother says one afternoon when Kathryn begins to make noises about moving to a city—Boston, maybe, or Washington, D.C.; she has a friend there who writes for the Post—“you’re not going anywhere.” She gestures toward a pile of books Kathryn has stacked on a chair. “You have a library card, for goodness’ sake. If that’s not a sign of permanence, I don’t know what is. But I’ll just say one thing,” she says, leaning closer. “If you do intend to stay in this town, you must make a commitment to it. None of this moaning about other places and missed opportunities. I don’t want to hear it, and neither does anybody else. If you stay here, it should be because you want to, and not out of a failure of nerve or imagination.”
“What a ridiculous thing to say,” Kathryn’s mother says, dramatically rolling her eyes, when Kathryn reports her grandmother’s view. “This does not have to be a lifetime decision. It’s the end of the twentieth century, for God’s sake—we’re not homesteaders roaming around in covered wagons looking for a place to put down roots for generations. You can stay here for a few months or a few years, even,” she says, shrugging lightly, “and then go somewhere else if you want to. Last time I heard, you didn’t need to sign a long-term contract to live here!” She laughs, but Kathryn finds her words unsettling. She imagines herself ten years from now, still restless, still uncommitted, telling herself that Bangor is okay for the time being, but one day she’ll discover the place she really wants to be and move on. She wants to feel like she belongs somewhere, that there’s a place she can be that will become a part of her.