In the Dark aka The Watcher

1

Lieutenant Jonathan Stride shielded his eyes as the glass door shot a laser beam of sunlight at his face, and when he could see again, he realized that the woman who had stepped out onto the patio was his late wife, Cindy.

For an instant, time slowed down the way it does on a long fall, while the buzz of conversation continued around him. He forgot how to breathe. The enigmatic smile he remembered from years ago was the same. When she lifted her sunglasses, her brown eyes stared back at him with a familiar glint over the heads of the others in the restaurant. She was in her late forties, as she would have been if she had lived. Small, like a fairy, but athletic and strong. Suntanned skin. An aura of intensity.

It wasn’t her, of course.

More than five years had passed since Cindy died of cancer as he sat beside her hospital bed. The pain of her loss had retreated to a distant ache in a corner of his soul. Even so, there were moments like this when he saw a stranger and something about her brought it all back. It didn’t take much, just the look in her eyes or the way she carried herself, to stir his memory.

This woman was looking back at him, too. She was small but a couple of inches taller than Cindy, who had barely crossed five feet four on tiptoes. Her blond hair fell breezily around her shoulders, and her sunglasses were now tented on top of her head. Her earrings were sapphire studs. She wore a blue-flowered summer skirt that hung to her knees, baby blue heels, a white blouse, and a lightweight tan leather jacket with a braided fringe. She balanced one hand on a narrow hip as she watched him. The ties of her jacket dangled between her legs.

He knew her from somewhere.

“Your five seconds are up,” Serena Dial told him.

Stride broke away. “What?”

Serena sipped her lemonade and eyed the woman in the leather jacket as she was shown to a table on the patio. A gust of wind blew off the lake and rustled her own silky dark hair. “You get a free pass to look at any woman for up to five seconds. After that, it officially becomes flirting.”

“She reminded me of someone,” Stride said.

“Sure she did.”

Serena was an ex-cop and now a private investigator. She and Stride had shared a bed for almost two years.

Stride turned to his partner in the Detective Bureau, Maggie Bei, as if consulting an Olympic judge for a ruling. “Is this five-second thing commonly known?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” Maggie said, with a wink at Serena.

Stride knew when he was on the losing end of an argument. “Okay, I was flirting,” he admitted.

Serena stretched out her arm lazily and used the back of her hand to caress Stride’s cheek, which was rough with black-and-gray stubble. She sidled her long fingers through his wavy hair and leaned forward to plant a slow kiss on his lips. She tasted like citrus and sugar.

“Most animals mark their territory by urinating,” Maggie remarked, with her mouth full of a large bite of her steak sandwich. She batted her almond-shaped eyes innocently at Serena and grinned.

Stride laughed. “Can we get back to work?”

“Go ahead,” Serena told him. She swiped a French fry from Maggie’s plate and bit into it while baring her teeth.

“What’s the latest on the peeper?” Stride asked Maggie. He stole a sideways glance across the restaurant at the other woman and noticed that she was doing the same thing to him from over her menu.

“He struck again on Friday night,” Maggie replied. “A sixteen-year-old girl in Fond du Lac noticed a guy in the trees outside her bedroom when she was getting undressed. She screamed, and he took off.”

“Did she get a look at him?”

Maggie shook her head. “She thought he was tall and skinny, but that’s it. It was dark.”

“That’s nine incidents in the last month,” Stride said.

“It’s summer. Time for the perverts to come out.”

The calendar said June 1. It was late Sunday afternoon, but the sun was warm and high over the steep hillside on which the city of Duluth, Minnesota, was built. It wouldn’t be dark until after nine o’clock. After the usual long, bitter winter, the tourists were streaming back on the weekends to watch the ore boats come and go through the narrow channel that led out into Lake Superior. The Canal Park area, where the three of them sat on the rooftop patio of Grandma’s Saloon, teemed with lovers and children feeding noisy gulls by the boardwalk. As tourists and locals collided, and the weather got warmer, Stride and his team got busier. Crime was creeping up for the season, but so far, it was nothing more than the usual run of thefts, break-ins, drunks, and drugs.

Plus a peeping tom with a fetish for blond high school girls.

Stride had overseen the city’s Detective Bureau, which handled major crimes in Duluth, for more than a decade, and he had steeled himself to human behavior that defied all rational explanation. Sexual abuse. Meth labs. Suicide. Homicide. The peeper had shown no inclination to violence, but Stride didn’t minimize the danger of someone who liked to watch young girls undress in their bedrooms. It was a short trip through the looking glass to molestation and rape.

“He’s been stalking the south side, right?” Stride asked.

Maggie grunted affirmatively and pushed her black bangs out of her eyes. She was a diminutive Chinese cop who had worked side by side with Stride since he took over the major crimes unit.

“Yeah, all the reports have been south of Riverside,” Maggie said. “He’s crossed the bridge into Superior a couple times, too.”

The great lake that loomed over Stride’s shoulder narrowed into the jagged bays and harbors of the St. Louis River as it wound southward between the cities of Duluth and Superior. On the scenic drive along the river, Duluth broke up into small towns like Riverside, Morgan Park, Gary, and Fond du Lac. None of the towns was large enough to afford its own police force, so the Duluth police stretched its enforcement coverage all the way along the river’s twisty shore.

“You know what it’s like down in the river towns,” Maggie said. “People leave their shades up and their windows open. For a peeper, it’s like a cat with a goldfish bowl. Lots to look at.”

“Do we have any leads on an ID?” Stride asked.

“Nothing yet. We have no description and no idea how old he is. We’re working our way through the sex offender list, but no one looks like an obvious suspect.”

“How about a car?”

“We’ve had reports of a small SUV-something like a CRV or a RAV4-near three of the peeping locations. Maybe silver, maybe gray or sand. No one in the area would claim it. That’s as close as I’ve got to a lead.”

“What about the victims?” Stride asked. “How does this guy find them?”

“The girls range in age from fourteen to nineteen,” Maggie said. “They go to different schools, and I haven’t found any overlap in their social lives. They’re all blondes, though. I don’t think this guy is just going from house to house, trying to get lucky. We’d have caught him by now if he was simply trolling through backyards. When he hits a house, he already knows there’s a girl there with the right look.”

“Has he made any attempts to get inside?” Serena asked.

Serena wasn’t a member of the Duluth police, but she was a former homicide detective from Las Vegas, in addition to being his lover. Stride considered her one of the sharpest investigators he had ever worked with. He and Maggie consulted her unofficially on most of their cases.

“No, he just watches,” Maggie said. “The girl’s window was open in several of the incidents, but he stayed outside.”

Serena stole another fry from Maggie’s plate. “Yeah, but he might be getting his courage up. Along with other things. Peeping’s a threshold crime.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Maggie said. “I want to catch this guy before fore he moves on to bigger things.” She glanced at the opposite side of the restaurant patio and added, “By the way, boss, you’re about to understand why women adopted that five-second rule.”

“What do you mean?” Stride asked.

Then he looked up and understood.

The woman in the fringed leather jacket, the one who reminded him of his late wife, Cindy, was coming over.

“You’re Jonathan Stride, aren’t you?” she asked.

Stride pushed his chair back and stood up. He was over six feet tall, and when he looked down at the top of her head, he saw silver roots creeping into her blond hair. He took her offered hand and shook it. Her long nails dug into his palm. “Yes, that’s right.”

“I’m sure you don’t remember me, but we were in high school together. I graduated a year before you and Cindy did. My name is Tish Verdure.”

Her voice had a seductive, breathless rumble. Her clothes smelled of violet perfume covering cigarette smoke. She was perfectly made up, but under the foundation, age and nicotine had carved winding paths into the skin around her brown eyes and above her forehead. Even so, she was very pretty, with a tiny, tapered nose, a pale pink oval at her lips, and a pointed chin.

Stride remembered her name but nothing else, but it explained why she had looked familiar to him. “It’s been a long time,” he said in an apologetic tone.

“Don’t worry, I knew Cindy before the two of you ever met.”

“I don’t recall Cindy ever mentioning you,” he said.

“Well, back then, I was Laura’s best friend.”

At the sound of Laura’s name, Stride felt a rush of memories storm his mind. Himself and Cindy, naked in the water, making love. Ray Wallace checking his gun. The huge black man, Dada, escaping on a train car. Most of all, the whooshing sound of a baseball bat in Peter Stanhope’s hands. It might as well have been 1977 again.

Serena cleared her throat loudly. Stride burst from his trance.

“I’m sorry. Tish, this is my partner, Serena Dial, and this is my colleague on the police force, Maggie Bei.”

Maggie waved with half her sandwich without getting up. Serena stood, dwarfing the other woman, and Stride felt the air blow cold like dry ice between Serena and Tish. They didn’t know each other, but with a single glance, they didn’t like each other.

“Do you live in the area?” Stride asked.

Tish studied Lake Superior with wistful eyes. “Oh, no, I haven’t been back to Duluth in years. I don’t really have much of a home base. I’m a travel writer, so I’m on the go most of the time. When I stay put, I live in Atlanta.”

“What brings you back here?” he asked.

“Actually, I was looking for you,” Tish told him.

“For me?” Stride asked, surprised.

“Yes.”

Stride exchanged glances with Serena and Maggie. “Maybe you should sit down and tell me why.”

Tish took the empty chair at the table for four, facing the lake. She slid a leather purse off her shoulder and put it on the table in front of her. She pulled out an open pack of cigarettes. “Can you smoke outside at restaurants here?”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” Serena told her.

“I’m sorry,” Tish said. “I know I should quit, but smoking’s one way I handle my nerves. The other is drinking. Not very smart, I guess, but what can you do?”

“I’m a reformed smoker myself,” Stride said.

“Well, I don’t mean to be such a mystery,” Tish told them. She smiled at Maggie and Serena, but the two women wore stony masks. Tish ignored them and focused on Stride. “First of all, I want to tell you how sorry I am about Cindy’s death. I know the two of you were a real love match.”

“It was several years ago, but thank you,” Stride said.

“I would have come to the funeral myself, but I was in Prague on a story at the time.”

Stride felt suspicion poking like a spring seedling out of the ground. “That’s kind of you to say, Ms. Verdure, but you knew Cindy back in high school. I don’t think anyone would have expected you to go to her funeral twenty-five years later.”

“Oh, Cindy and I stayed in touch,” Tish said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Not very often, but we wrote to each other now and then.”

“Really.” He didn’t say it like a question. He said it for what it was-disbelief. He added, “Do you mind showing me some identification?”

“Not at all.” Tish dug in her purse for her wallet and extracted her driver’s license, which she handed across the table. The silence from the other three people didn’t appear to bother her. “I understand how odd this is, me showing up after all these years,” she continued. “Cindy and I wrote to each other at the hospital where she worked. It was only the occasional postcard or Christmas card, that kind of thing. For me, it was nice having a little connection to my life back here. I left Duluth after graduation and never came back, but that doesn’t mean I forgot about it. And of course, whenever I wrote to Cindy, it made me feel a little closer to Laura. Do you know what I mean?”

Stride studied the Georgia driver’s license carefully and confirmed that the name Tish Verdure and the photo matched the woman sitting across from him.

“Who’s Laura?” Serena asked.

Stride felt as if a scab were slowly being pulled away from a deep wound. “She was Cindy’s sister.”

Serena’s eyebrows arched, with a look that said unmistakably, Why haven’t you told me about her?

“Laura was murdered,” Stride went on. “Someone beat her to death with a baseball bat. It was July 4, 1977.”

“Did they catch the guy who did it?” Serena asked.

“No, he got away. Because of me.”

He didn’t say it in a way that invited questions. Serena opened her mouth and closed it again. Maggie pushed the food around on her plate, not looking up.

“Maybe you should tell me why you’re here, Ms. Verdure,” Stride said. “And what you want from me.”

“Please, call me Tish.” She leaned forward with her elbows on the table. Her brown eyes were dark and serious. “In fact, I’m here because of Laura. It’s obvious that her death still weighs on you. Well, it does on me, too. She and I were very close in high school.”

“So?”

“So I’m writing a book about Laura’s murder.”

Stride’s weathered face wrinkled into a scowl. “A book?”

“Exactly. Not just about her death, but about the people around her. How their lives changed. It’s a nonfiction novel, sort of an In Cold Blood thing, you know? I mean, look at you. You’re the man in charge of the city’s major crimes unit. Your wife’s sister was killed when you were all of seventeen, and the case was never solved.”

“I think this conversation is over,” Stride declared.

“Please, wait.”

“I won’t be part of a book about Laura,” Stride told her. “I have no interest in dragging up that part of my life again.”

“Just hear me out.” Tish held up her hands. “It’s not just a story about Laura’s death. There’s more. I want the book to be a catalyst to reopen the investigation. I want to solve the case. I want to find out who murdered Laura.”

Stride folded his arms. “You?”

“That’s right. Look, I’ll do it on my own if I have to, but I want your help. What’s more, I think you want to help me. This is a chance to put this case behind you once and for all. Cindy told me what kind of person you are. How every death takes a piece out of your soul.”

He was angry now. “Ms. Verdure, don’t you think I would have reopened this case years ago if I thought there was more to be done? Laura’s murder was never unsolved. We know who did it. He got away. He disappeared.”

Tish shook her head. “I don’t believe that’s what happened. I don’t think you do, either. There was a lot more going on in Laura’s life that summer. It was easy for the police to pass it off on some anonymous vagrant, a black vagrant. Talk about your stereotypical bogeyman. No one wanted to deal with the fact that it was probably someone close to Laura who killed her.”

“Do you have a suspect in mind?” Stride asked.

“Well, you could start with Peter Stanhope.”

Serena’s head snapped around at the mention of Stanhope’s name. “Peter was involved?” she asked Stride.

“Yes, he was the prime suspect for a while,” Stride admitted.

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” Serena asked.

Stride was silent. Peter Stanhope was an attorney from one of Duluth’s most influential families, but more important, he was one of Serena’s clients as a private investigator.

“I’ve done my homework,” Tish continued. “Randall Stanhope had the police in his pocket back then, and it wouldn’t have been hard for him to shift the focus away from his son. Somebody needs to take a close look at Peter Stanhope.”

Serena pushed her chair back with an iron screech and stalked away from the table.

Maggie watched her go, then leaned forward, shaking her head. “Look, Trish.”

“It’s Tish.”

“Tish, fish, knish, whatever. Let me give you a reality check. You can’t go around making accusations about anyone, let alone a rich lawyer like Peter Stanhope, without evidence. You can’t expect the police to help you.”

“Unless you’ve got something new to add to the investigation, we can’t do anything,” Stride added. “Even if we wanted to.”

“I do have something new,” Tish said.

Stride’s face was dark and suspicious. “What is it?”

“I know Laura was being stalked.”

WHO KILLED LAURA STARR?

TWO

May 20, 1977

Laura showed me the letter today. I caught her reading it on her bed when I went into her room, and I saw what it was before she could hide it. I could tell she was upset. I wondered how long she had been staring at it before I came in.

The note was written on ruled white paper, the kind we use in school. The edge was jagged where it had been torn out of a binder. Someone had used red lipstick to scrawl the message.

WHERE DO YOU WANT IT, BITCH?

“What the hell is this?” I demanded. “Where did this come from?”

Laura snatched the note out of my hand. “Someone put it in my locker.”

“Do you know who?”

“I have no idea.”

I wanted to see it again, but Laura hid it away in the drawer of her nightstand before I could ask.

“You have to tell someone about this,” I said.

Laura ignored me. She hummed along to a Hall and Oates song on her record player. “Sara Smile.” Her fluffy blond hair jiggled as her shoulders swayed, and she rubbed her index finger nervously as if she were trying to wipe away a stain. She acted as if, by putting the note away, it didn’t exist anymore.

“Laura,” I chided her. “This is serious. If you won’t tell anyone about it, then I will.”

She wagged her finger at me. “Oh, no, you won’t, little sister. I don’t want to make a big deal about this. You know what boys are like. It’s just a joke. It would make it worse if I acted like I was scared.”

I didn’t think it was a joke.

I flopped down into Laura’s white beanbag. I knew there was no point in trying to change her mind, because she didn’t call me “little sister” except when she was being stubborn. Most of the time, Laura liked the fact that I was the one in charge of the house. I could boss her around when it came to chores, and she didn’t care. She was like a sailboat drifting on the lake, letting the wind decide where she would go and not really minding where she ended up. Me, I revved my motor and followed the shore.

I stared at her on the bed. She wore a V-necked white T-shirt and cutoffs with a thick black belt. She was much prettier than I was. She had the curves and the boobs and the big Farrah hair. Jonny told me last week that my face was much more interesting than Laura’s, because it wasn’t symmetrical and perfect like hers was. He thought that was a compliment. I told him he needed to do better.

My own hair is so dark it’s almost black, and I keep it straight as an arrow, with a perfect part down the middle. I have a sharply angled nose, like a little shark’s fin jutting off my face. My irises are so large and dark that they crowd out the whites of my eyes. I have two little peaches for breasts.

Hey, I knew who the guys went for. It was Laura, not me. Maybe that’s why Laura was much less comfortable with guys than me. She kept her distance. She rarely went out on dates. During the winter, she went to the movies with Peter Stanhope a few times, but she broke it off when he wanted to get into her jeans. As far as I knew, Laura was still a virgin. Not that she would tell me that kind of thing.

“You haven’t been around much lately,” I said. For more than a week, Laura had been disappearing after school. Coming in late or staying out all night. Acting quiet and brittle. Twice I heard her crying in her room.

“So?”

“So are you okay?”

Laura shrugged. I didn’t really expect her to tell me anything. We didn’t confide our secrets in each other. Even so, I wasn’t going to let it go. She could pretend all she wanted, but I knew something was wrong. You had to look for little things with Laura. When our mother died, the only hint about what was going on inside her head was when I found a ceramic statue of Jesus, in pieces, underneath her window.

I looked for a clue. Something different. It didn’t take me long to realize that she had flipped a photograph facedown on her nightstand. When I saw that she was still tugging at her finger, I noticed something else, too. No silver ring on her index finger, just a pale white band of skin. Laura saw where my eyes had gone, and she sat on her hands to cover them up. I knew there was no point in asking her about it, so I went another way.

“Who have you been hanging out with?” I asked.

Another shrug. “I’ve been over at Finn’s a lot.”

“You and your lost causes,” I told her.

That was the wrong thing to say. Her eyes flashed at me with annoyance. Even so, I was right. Laura had a weakness for people who were damaged. She always believed she could find a way to lift them up. It was one of her best qualities, but Laura was too naive, too trusting. I must have gotten the cynical genes, because I don’t think people ever really change.

Finn was a good example. He lived across the bridge in Superior with his older sister, Rikke Mathisen, who was Laura’s favorite teacher at our high school. I knew Finn only because Laura brought him around now and then. He was an addict. Always into drugs. Creepy eyes staring at you when he thought you weren’t looking. Miss Mathisen knew Laura was a soft touch, and she thought Laura could help Finn battle his demons. So Laura spent hours over there. I thought it was a mistake, but you couldn’t tell her anything.

I opened my mouth to push Laura again about what was wrong, but she cut me off with a question of her own. Out of the blue.

“So have you slept with Jon yet?” she asked.

I made sure her bedroom door was closed, so my father couldn’t hear. “No.”

“But you’re gonna, right?”

“Yeah, over the summer, I think. He knows I want to. But I told him I didn’t want to have sex until we were so close it felt like we were having sex already.”

“I like that.”

“Plus, I have to start taking the pill.”

“You could use condoms,” she said.

It was the strangest conversation she and I had ever had, because it was such a normal sister-sister kind of thing. We just didn’t talk like that. But I knew what she was doing. She had changed the subject from her to me.

“I don’t want to,” I said. “If I’m going to have sex, I want to really feel it, you know?”

Laura laughed. “No, I don’t know.”

“Are you on the pill?”

“Don’t need it.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say next. “I’ve got a job for the summer.”

“Yeah? Doing what?”

“Waitressing at that new place by the bridge. Grandma’s.”

“Good for you.”

“They need people. I can get you in there if you’re thinking of sticking around.”

That was as close as I had come to asking flat out if Laura was planning to leave home after she graduated next month. For months she had told Dad she was going away as soon as school was out. Travel. Work. See the world. Now I wasn’t so sure. No ring.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do yet,” Laura said.

I got out of the beanbag. “I’m going for a run,” I said.

“Have fun.”

I decided to stick my nose a little further into her business. “Listen, I really think you should tell someone about that note. Whoever this creep is, he sounds dangerous.”

Laura slid open her nightstand drawer and looked inside. The letter was on top. I saw the lipstick through the thin paper. “He’s just some freak,” she said. “I’m going to throw them out.”

She took the note and tore it over and over until the pieces were the size of confetti. Then she sprinkled them into her wastebasket.

I felt uneasy. “Them? Are there more?”

“Yeah.” Laura shrugged.

“How many?”

“I don’t know. Ten maybe.”

“Ten? When did this start?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“Do you still have them?”

She nodded.

“I want to see them,” I told her.

Laura sighed theatrically, as if I were making a big deal over nothing, and dug inside the drawer. She came out with a small stack of papers tied together with a rubber band. She pulled them apart and spilled them onto the blanket.

I couldn’t believe what I saw.

Some were written in lipstick like the other one. All of the messages were obscene and violent.

I’m going to fuck you.

Keep your door locked.

Are you going to be alone tonight, whore?

There were photographs, too. Whoever had done this had cut them out of porno magazines. I saw black-and-white shots of men with huge penises and women servicing them with their mouths. More messages were scrawled on the photos.

You’ll suck mine, too.

Is your ass still a virgin?

“Are you crazy?” I nearly screamed at her. “You have to go to the police with this.”

“I don’t want to make things worse. School will be done soon, and he’ll stop.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Come on, he hasn’t done anything. He’s just trying to creep me out. He’s like some peeping tom trying to get under my skin. Well, I won’t let him.”

“Do you have any idea who’s doing this?” I asked again.

“No. I talked to a few guys, you know, to see if they’d heard anything. I thought maybe he’d be bragging about it to his buddies. But nobody knew who it was, or if they did, they wouldn’t tell me.”

“Did you tell Dad?”

“Are you kidding? He’d flip. And don’t you dare breathe a word, little sister. Somehow it would wind up as my fault.”

While I watched, Laura began tearing up all of the notes and photographs. I wanted to stop her. I told her I thought she was making a big mistake, but Laura shredded and ripped and tore until she had a small mountain of remnants that she slid off her bed into the garbage.

“So much for that,” she said.

3

Stride and Tish left Grandma’s Saloon together. Tish lit a cigarette when they were alone on the concrete pier that jutted out into Lake Superior. Her muscles unwound. She tilted her chin and exhaled a stream of smoke like a sigh. The breeze caught and dispersed it, but Stride could taste the ghost of smoke in the air, and he had to jam his hands in his pockets to beat down the craving.

She leaned against the wall bordering the canal. Stride was next to her. The deep, narrow channel led from the lake to the inner harbors of Duluth and Superior. A century-old lift bridge, resplendent in gray steel, rose and fell over the canal when the boats came. On the opposite side of the bridge was the area known as the Point, a tiny finger of land jutting out like a natural shelter for the harbor. Stride and Serena lived there, in a lakeside cottage that dated back to the 1890s. The city side of the bridge was known as Canal Park, and it had become a haven for restaurants and hotels in the last twenty years. Tourists came to Canal Park to watch the big boats because it was like seeing living dinosaurs from the city’s past. Once upon a time, Duluth had been an industrial boomtown, whose economy was linked to the fate of hundreds of great boats carrying iron ore. The downtown area was filled with Victorian-style mansions that were reminders of a time when the city was rich from mining and shipping. Not anymore.

“I can’t believe how this area has changed,” Tish said. “When I was a kid, there was nothing but old factory buildings down here. Now it’s like Coney Island.”

“Yeah, there’s a lot of money in Canal Park, but it doesn’t trickle down,” Stride told her. “They’re building condos to lure people up from Minneapolis, but the city is struggling. Like always.”

“You live out on the Point?” Tish asked.

Stride nodded.

“Nobody lived out there in the old days. The Point was where kids went to smoke dope and have sex on the beach.”

Stride laughed. “It still is.”

Tish zipped up her leather jacket. The early evening breeze off the lake was cool. “I forgot that the summers aren’t hot here.”

“We’re counting on global warming,” Stride said. “In a few years, we’ll be the new Florida.”

“You sound cynical.”

“You can’t live your whole life in Duluth and not be a little cynical,” Stride said. “Everyone here is always looking for the next big thing, but no one wants to admit that our time is past. Back when you and I were growing up, shipping was already on the way out. Nothing ever really took its place. The politicians keep selling dreams, but most of us have learned to tune it out and get on with life.”

“There’s a big world out there,” Tish said.

“Yeah, well, don’t get me wrong. I love this place. I tried to move away once, and I had to come back.”

Tish nodded. “I know. I read up on you. You’ve been a cop your whole life. You’ve been in charge of the Detective Bureau for more than ten years, and you could probably be the police chief if you wanted, but you like it on the street. A couple of years ago, during an investigation into the disappearance of a teenage girl, you quit your job and followed a cop named Serena Dial to Las Vegas. That didn’t last long. A few months later, you were right back in Duluth, and Serena came with you.”

“Is this all research for your book?” Stride asked.

“Yes,” Tish admitted. “Plus, I was curious about you. I felt like I knew you through Cindy. I wondered what happened to you after she died.”

“Let’s make one thing clear,” Stride told her. “Anything I say is off the record. Okay? I only agreed to talk with you because you’re right. Laura’s death still bothers me. But nothing I tell you goes into any book unless I give you the green light.”

Tish frowned. “That ties my hands.”

“You’re right, it does. You probably don’t work with sources when you’re writing travel essays, but this is how it goes in the real world. If you want my help, then you’ll have to hope I say yes at the end of the day.”

“You don’t trust me, do you?” Tish asked.

“No.”

She threw the cigarette at her feet and crushed it. “I understand,” she said. “I was naive coming here, figuring you’d open up to me. I keep forgetting. Cindy knew me, but you didn’t.”

Stride said nothing. He didn’t know what to think about Tish. He didn’t hear any guile in her voice, but he didn’t believe that Cindy would have carried on a relationship with a woman from their teenage years and never told him about it. Even so, he found himself liking Tish. Maybe it was because she reminded him of Cindy, and maybe it was because he sensed that her passion about Laura wasn’t faked. This was about more than a book. This was personal to her. He wanted to know why.

“What can I do to make you trust me?” Tish asked.

“You can start by telling me your story,” Stride said.

“What else can I do?” she said, smiling.

He didn’t smile back.

Tish sighed and studied the hills of the city, where the streets climbed from the water like terraces on the face of a cliff. “You’re right, the city hasn’t changed much in thirty years. All the old buildings, all the old houses, are still there. I could close my eyes and be a kid again.”

Stride heard a tremor in her voice. “Is that not a good thing?”

“Not really. Most of the places I go, people complain about too much change. Nothing’s the way it used to be. I guess I expected Duluth to be different, too. I wasn’t ready for the memories to hit me in the face.”

He waited.

“Back then, I couldn’t wait to get out of Duluth,” Tish continued. “I left the city the day after I graduated from high school.”

“What year was that?”

“It was June of 1977, the month before Laura was killed. I moved to St. Paul, got a job, got an apartment. I never wanted to see Duluth again.”

“Why were you so anxious to get away?”

Tish hesitated. Stride watched her carefully, wondering if she was about to lie. He had interviewed suspects for years, and most of them got that same look on their faces when they made up a story. It was as if they needed those few seconds to play the lie out in their heads to see if it hung together. He expected a generic lie from Tish that didn’t tell him anything about her life. I was a kid. I was born to run. Something like that.

She surprised him.

“Look, I was screwed up, okay? My mom was killed when I was eleven. For the next few years, I bounced around the city in foster homes. I was an angry girl. I felt homeless. I don’t blame it on any of my foster parents. They did their best, and I didn’t make it easy for them.”

“What about your father?” Stride asked.

“He wasn’t in the picture. Mom got pregnant when she was only twenty-two. She sold perfume in a department store back then, so she met a lot of married men. When I was a kid, she told me that she dated a handsome Finnish sailor who came to the city one day on an ore boat. To me, that sounded romantic. She didn’t bother explaining the truth. It wasn’t until much later that I realized what a coward I had for a father.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry for me,” Tish said. “Mom was the one who had it tough. Being single and pregnant in the 1950s was like having the plague. She got run out of her church. Got fired from her job. She was out of work for months before she landed a teller position at a bank. We were always scratching to make ends meet. But she was great. Very proud. Very independent.”

“I’m sure it was hard to lose her.”

“It was.”

Stride knew a little of how she felt. He had felt homeless himself when his father died. He was sixteen. If he hadn’t been rescued when he met Cindy a few months later, he might have wound up a lost child, like Tish. Bitter. Lonely. Looking for escape.

“Anyway, I try not to dwell on it,” Tish said. “That’s just how it was. I’ve lived a pretty amazing life, and that wouldn’t have happened if I had had a normal childhood. We all pay our dues.”

“What did you do after you left the city?” Stride asked.

Tish leaned on the wall of the pier and stared down into the chocolate brown water. “If you’re running away from Duluth, St. Paul isn’t far enough to get away, so I decided to go someplace warmer. I went down to the Caribbean and did odd jobs, buzzing from island to island. Eventually, I wrote an article about my experiences, and I sold it to a travel magazine in the UK. That was what got me started. I began to do more articles, and I built relationships with other magazines around Europe. They started paying me to go all over the world, so I did.”

“Sounds nice.”

“It was. I did it for a long time. Then I met someone, a photographer who worked with me on a piece from Tallinn in Estonia. We fell in love. That was how I wound up in Atlanta. We both got jobs at the Journal-Constitution. It was great for a while, but it didn’t work out. I mean, we’re still friends, but we realized after several years that we weren’t going to make it as lovers. So I started traveling again, but my heart just hasn’t been in it. That was when I decided to take some time off. When I did, I realized I was thinking a lot about Laura.”

“Laura died a long time ago,” Stride said.

“I know, but some wounds never really heal.” Tish slid a silver chain away from her neck and let it swish against the white silk of her blouse. She fingered a slim ring that dangled on the end of the chain. “See this ring? Laura had one just like it. We got them together at the Grandstand at the State Fair. That was the summer before she died. It’s cheap, but I like to keep it with me.”

“You two were close?”

Tish nodded. “Inseparable.”

“So how come I don’t remember seeing the two of you at Cindy’s house?”

“Oh, that. You were never a teenage girl.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we had a fight. That was probably around the time you and Cindy got together. We didn’t talk to each other for a few weeks. It was May, not long before school let out. I went to the Cities right after that.”

“What was the fight about?”

“I don’t remember. Something stupid.”

This time, Stride thought she was lying.

“How did the two of you meet?” he asked.

“We were both in Rikke Mathisen’s geometry class in our junior year,” Tish said. “Laura and I sat next to each other. It was like we were kindred spirits. Laura was restless, like me. She had lost her mom, too, and her dad was a piece of shit, so she could relate to what I was going through.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry, I guess I shouldn’t have said that. He was your father-in-law.”

Stride shrugged. He and William Starr had never been close. The man had dealt with the tragedies of his life by taking his anger and his Puritan guilt out on everyone around him. Except Cindy. He knew better than to tangle with his youngest daughter. Cindy had pretty much run her dad’s life for the next fifteen years after his wife’s death, until William Starr succumbed to cancer. Just as Cindy would do ten years later. Stride finally understood how easy it would have been to end up like his father-in-law, when he lost his own wife in the prime of her life.

“I think Cindy was a little jealous of me in those days,” Tish said. “You know as well as I do that Cindy and Laura were never really the same after their mom died. Cindy took over, and Laura let her, but that’s not the same as being sisters. So when I came along, it was like I was the sister Laura had been looking for. Cindy never said anything, but I don’t think she liked it. I was always there. I slept over a lot. Laura and I shared everything. We were going to run away from Duluth together, see the big wide world, you know?”

“Except you moved away, and Laura didn’t,” Stride said.

Tish’s face clouded over. “Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“I told you, it wasn’t important.”

“No, you told me you didn’t remember,” Stride said.

Tish looked at him. “You’re right, I don’t.”

She was still lying.

“Anyway, we were past it,” Tish went on. “I wrote to her when I moved to St. Paul, and she wrote back, and we became friends again, just like before. Laura was going to join me in the Cities. She never got the chance, though. She was killed before she could get away. I guess that’s why it’s gnawed at me all these years. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. She and I were supposed to escape together. Instead, we let some silly argument come between us, and she stayed behind. And she never made it out.”

She made it sound as if Duluth were a war zone, and Laura had been a soldier trapped behind enemy lines.

“When did the stalking begin?” Stride asked.

“During the spring. Late April, early May.”

“Did Laura have any idea who was doing this to her?”

Tish shook her head. “No, but it must have been someone at school. Most of the notes wound up in her locker. She thought it would all go away after graduation.”

“It didn’t?”

“No, the letters and photos started arriving by mail after school let out. Laura told me about it when she wrote to me in the Cities. I was scared for her.”

“Why did you bring up Peter Stanhope’s name? Do you have any reason to believe he was the one who was stalking her?”

“He was one of the last people to see her alive. I know he was a suspect in the murder.” She added, “Does your girlfriend have some kind of relationship with Peter Stanhope?”

“He’s a client,” Stride said.

He didn’t tell her that the relationship went deeper than that. Stanhope had asked Serena to be a full-time investigator at his law firm, and Serena was wrestling with the decision. Stride thought she was planning to say yes.

“Is that going to be a problem?” Tish asked.

“Peter’s rich and powerful. That’s always a problem.”

Tish shrugged. “I’m not afraid of him. Look, I know that Peter was after Laura. They dated for a while that spring. Peter was looking for another conquest. If Laura had put out, that would have been the end of it.”

“But she didn’t?” Stride asked.

“No way. Peter was hot for sex, but Laura didn’t want to do it. So she broke it off. He took it badly. You know how rich young punks like Stanhope can be. They think they can have whatever they want because their daddies have money. He wanted Laura, and he was furious when she turned him down. The letters started arriving not long after that.”

“That’s not enough to make a connection,” Stride said.

“Well, I know what Peter was like. He came after me before Laura, and I didn’t want anything to do with him. He got nasty when I told him no.”

Tish shivered as the sun sank below the crest of the hill. Long shadows accompanied a damp chill off the water.

“Listen, Tish,” Stride said. “I’m going to tell you a couple things, but like I said before, it’s off the record. Okay?”

Tish nodded unhappily.

“I need to hear you say it,” Stride said.

“Yes, this is off the record.”

“Good. You have to remember that I know this case inside and out. I lived it back then with Cindy and with Ray Wallace, who was the cop in charge of the investigation. When I took over the Detective Bureau, I went through the file page by page. I reviewed all the evidence, because I had my doubts, too. I didn’t find anything new that pointed at Peter or at anyone other than Dada, the man I confronted near the railroad tracks.”

“So what did you find?” Tish asked.

“First, there was a fingerprint report. There were prints on the baseball bat that matched Dada’s.”

“Except it was Peter Stanhope’s bat,” Tish said. “I read about that in the paper. His prints must have been on the bat, too.”

“Yes, but his prints made sense. Dada’s prints didn’t.”

“Laura was being stalked,” Tish insisted. “Someone had been pursuing her for weeks. That wasn’t a stranger. It was someone who knew her.”

Stride put a hand lightly on her shoulder. “The police knew about the stalking.”

“Are you sure?”

“Cindy told them. I was there when she told Ray. Look, Cindy thought the same thing you did-that whoever had been pursuing Laura was the one who killed her. She even had one of the notes that this guy sent her. A porn photo with a warning scrawled on it.”

“So?”

“So there weren’t any fingerprints on the photo,” Stride said. “It wasn’t helpful.”

“That was then. Don’t they have better techniques for raising prints now? Maybe there’s still something there.”

Stride nodded. “We have much more sophisticated techniques for that kind of thing, but what we don’t have is the photograph. It’s gone, along with the other crime scene photos they took back then. So’s the bat. Somewhere along the line, much of the physical evidence from the case was lost.”

“Son of a bitch!” Tish exclaimed. “Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”

“You’re talking about a case from thirty years ago. Things get misplaced.”

He didn’t tell her his own suspicion that Ray Wallace was the one who had made the evidence disappear.

Tish walked away. They were near the lighthouse at the end of the pier. She climbed the steps and leaned back against the chapped white paint of the light tower with her arms folded. Her purse was slung over her shoulder. Stride followed her up the steps.

“I’m sorry,” he told her.

Tish looked up at him. “Can I trust you?”

“What?”

“You said you don’t trust me. Can I trust you?”

“I think you can. There will always be things I have to keep confidential, but I won’t lie to you.”

Tish unzipped her purse. She slid out a small, clear plastic bag that contained a yellowed envelope. He could see block handwriting, and even without taking it in his hand, he saw the name written on the front.

LAURA STARR.

“Here,” Tish said. “Physical evidence.”

“What the hell is this?” Stride asked.

“It’s one of the stalking letters that Laura received. She sent it to me while I was living in St. Paul.”

“You’ve had the letter all this time, and you never told anyone?”

“In the old days, I didn’t think it mattered,” Tish said. “Then I put it away and forgot all about it. I was clearing out old boxes in Atlanta a few months ago when I moved out of my partner’s apartment, and that’s when I found it again. Don’t you see? This changes everything. That’s when I started thinking about the book again, because I knew I had something that could reopen the case.”

Stride did see.

The letter to Laura wasn’t a note that had been pushed through a school locker. Whoever sent it to her had put it in the mail, using a stamp and licking an envelope. Even thirty years later, that meant one thing.

DNA.

4

Clark Biggs watched his daughter squirm on the living room floor with her legs tucked underneath her. Mary picked up her colored blocks and carefully stacked ten of them one on top of the other, until she had built a rainbow tower. When she was finished, she beamed at Clark with the biggest, most beautiful smile he had ever seen, the kind that made his heart ache every time he saw it. Then she toppled the tower by blowing on it like the big bad wolf, giggled at him, and began setting up the blocks again. She could do it over and over and never tire of the game. She was like every other five-year-old girl in the world.

Except Mary was sixteen.

To anyone looking at her, she was a typical teenager. She had a curly mop of blond hair and eyes that Clark thought of as Caribbean blue. Her face was round and bright. She was almost six feet tall, with a stocky frame. A big girl. She could have been a runner or a wrestler. It seemed so wrong and unfair that she kept growing into a pretty young woman while remaining trapped in the mind of a child. Clark lay awake nights blaming himself and God for the accident in the water. He consoled himself with the belief that Mary would be perpetually happy, perpetually innocent, without the awkwardness, pain, doubt, and self-consciousness of becoming a real teenager. It was little comfort.

“It’s bedtime, Mary,” he murmured.

She pretended not to hear him. She kept playing with her blocks and humming a tune to herself. Clark realized it was the theme song to a television show they had watched earlier in the evening. He was always amazed at the things that made it inside her brain, when so many other things did not.

“Bedtime, Mary,” he repeated without enthusiasm.

Mary stopped and frowned. Her lips turned downward like a clown’s. He laughed, and she laughed, too.

“Five more minutes,” he said.

Clark hated Sunday nights. At ten o’clock, Mary would go to bed, and he would be alone in the small house for another hour while he watched TV and poured himself a last beer. In the morning, his ex-wife, Donna, would come by the house, and they would silently make the exchange. Mary would cry and go with her, and Clark would cry and watch her go. Then he would pour coffee into a Thermos, silently wrap up a turkey sandwich for his lunch, and head off to his construction site on the Duluth harbor, knowing that the house would be empty when he returned home. Five long, lonely days awaited him. During the week, it was as if he were in a trance, waiting for that moment on Friday evening when Donna’s SUV pulled up in front of his door, and Mary ran up the sidewalk to get folded up in his arms. His beautiful girl. His baby. He lived for the weekends with her, but they were over almost as soon as they began, leaving him right back here, dreading her bedtime, feeling his soul grow cloudy at the thought of a week alone.

“Come on, honey,” he told her, his voice cracking.

Clark got off the sofa. Mary got her big bones from him. He was burly and strong. He had worked construction since he was eighteen, and after twenty years laboring outside through bitter cold and ninety-degree summers, he woke up every morning with his muscled body stiffened into knots. In his twenties, he could take a hot shower and come out refreshed and limber. Not now. Pain dogged him through his days.

Mary bounded up and held out her hand. He took it to lead her to her room. Her skin was pink and soft, and his own skin was like leather. She knew he was sad on these nights, and she tried to cheer him up by making faces. He smiled and let her think it was working, when the truth was that nothing could lift him out of depression at these moments.

“Blocks, Daddy,” she said.

“Yes, honey, I’ll take good care of your blocks. They’ll be here for you next week.”

Her bedroom was at the rear of the small house, with two windows looking out toward the woods at the back of the lot. Mary danced into the bathroom behind him to brush her teeth. It was dark, and Clark went up close to the windows and studied his reflection in the glass. Puffed-up brown pouches sagged under his eyes. His sandy hair was too long; he needed to cut it, which he usually did himself to save money. His jeans were fraying. He could poke a finger through his left pocket to his skin. He wore a NASCAR T-shirt and a camouflage baseball cap.

“Meeeeeeee!” Mary shouted, flouncing back into the room and jumping onto the squeaky frame of her bed. She slept in a twin bed that was too small for her, but she didn’t mind that her feet dangled off the end. There was barely room for Mary among the beanbag animals she collected. She wore a frilly nightgown that came to her knees. That was one thing that worried Clark whenever Mary was out in the world without him. She had no concept of sexuality, but her body said otherwise. She looked like a normal, healthy, attractive girl. She had no embarrassment, and she often stripped off her clothes and wandered around the house naked and couldn’t understand why Clark insisted she stay dressed.

“That was quick,” Clark said. “Did you really brush your teeth?”

Mary nodded seriously.

“Really?” he repeated.

She folded her arms tightly and nodded again, her whole body quivering like gelatin.

“Okay,” he said.

Clark turned off the overhead light but left the lamp lit by her bed. Mary liked the room bright throughout the night. He checked her windows and locked them, because otherwise, Mary had been known to climb outside and run through the backyards of the neighborhood. She didn’t sleep well. She might close her eyes for an hour, and then she would get up, and Clark would hear her bouncing an inflated ball against the bedroom wall. If he wasn’t too tired himself, he would get up and play with her, until finally she grew drowsy again. Sometimes she simply curled up on the floor, and he would pull the blankets off the bed and cover her.

He tucked her into bed. Her eyes were bright. “Good night, Mary.”

“I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you, too, honey.”

The ache in his stomach at the thought of her leaving in the morning was so great that he couldn’t say anything more. He kissed her forehead, and as he closed the door, he saw her waving her hands at the ceiling in bed, as if she could see the stars and conduct them like an orchestra.

Clark returned to the sofa and finished his beer and opened another one. He thought about seeing Donna in the morning when she came to collect Mary. Donna lived across the bridge in Superior and worked as a legal secretary. Clark was in Gary, living in the white concrete block house that had once belonged to his parents. For five years, he had shared Mary with Donna from a distance, and for five years, he had hated the arrangement so much that it felt like a disease inside him.

It wasn’t Donna’s fault. The bitterness between them had long ago died into loneliness. They had married young and tried to make a go of it, but the pressure of raising Mary together had destroyed them. They each loved their daughter, but Mary demanded so much that they had run out of energy to love each other. Donna thought they should try again. She had made noises about making a fresh start. Two weeks earlier, when she had come to his house to drop Mary off, she had stayed there all evening, the three of them together like in the old days. After Mary went to bed, they had drunk wine, and laughed, and wound up sleeping together. They were kids again, the way it was before Mary, before the divorce. The sex felt warm and familiar. But when he awoke, he was alone. Donna couldn’t face him. That told him all he needed to know.

He knew he should go to bed, but he didn’t get up from the sofa. He watched television until his eyes began to blink shut and his head fell forward on his chest. He slept heavily, as if he had been drugged by exhaustion and alcohol, and had no sense of time passing.

Clark woke up to Mary screaming.

A terrible, wailing, nightmare scream.

He was instantly awake, but he was disoriented, unsure what was real. At the end of the hall, in shadows, Mary’s door flew open and banged against the wall. His daughter was silhouetted against the pale light in her room.

“Him him him him him!” she shouted.

Clark dove over the back edge of the sofa and pushed himself off his knees, shaking his head to drive the sleep from his brain. He spread his arms wide. Mary bolted for him and grabbed his body so hard he nearly spilled over onto the carpet. Her skin was wet with sweat and fear. Her blue eyes bulged, and her nose flared as she sucked air into her lungs. Clark felt her fingernails digging like knives into his back. She held him with such fierce strength he could hardly breathe.

“Mary, what is it? What’s wrong, baby?”

“Him him him him him him him him!”

“Oh, Mary, it’s okay, it’s okay, there’s no one there.”

“NO NO NO NO NO.”

Clark stroked her hair and sang to her under his breath. She trembled like a bird. This had happened the previous weekend, too. She had had a bad dream and imagined there was someone in her room and refused to go back in there for the rest of the night. Mary didn’t know what was real and what was not. When she imagined something, it was the same as if it were really there.

“Shhh,” he murmured over and over.

She cried into his shoulder. He grabbed a fleece blanket from the sofa and wrapped it around her skin, covering her. Her tears were damp on his neck.

“Come on, I’ll show you it’s okay,” he told her. “I’ll show you that no one’s there.”

“No, Daddy, no, him him him him.”

“Oh, I know, I know, but it was just a dream, honey, that’s all it was.”

Mary shook her head while it was buried against his chest, and then she looked up with a panicked face, put her mouth against his ear, and whispered so clearly it made him shiver: “Window.”

Clark felt chilled.

His fists clenched, and adrenaline made him alert. Clark’s eyes streaked to the living room windows, which he had left open. They looked out on dark squares of night. The curtains breathed with the wind. He smelled pine and rain. He didn’t understand what had happened, but Mary wouldn’t use a word like that unless it meant something important.

Clark lifted Mary off her feet. She was heavy, but she wrapped her arms around his neck and let herself be carried to the sofa. He laid her down among the cushions and kissed her and looked deeply into her eyes, trying to understand her, trying to make her communicate with him. He always cherished the idea that there was a place somewhere in both of their minds where they could come together and erase the canyon that her disability put between them. He just wished he could find it.

“I’m going to close the windows now, Mary. I’ll still be in the room.”

She pulled the blanket over her head. He went to the four windows that looked out on the front yard and slammed them shut and locked them. He saw spatters of rain on the glass. He went back and slowly peeled the fleece down from half of his daughter’s face.

“Did you dream that someone was in your room, honey?”

She said again: “Window.”

“Did you see something outside?”

“Him him him him him.” She pulled the blanket up again, hiding.

“You stay right here, honey. Daddy will take a look.”

Clark returned down the dark hallway to Mary’s room. It was past midnight. He turned off the lamp by her bed, and with the room black, he went to the window and looked out at the back lawn and the woods a few feet away. He didn’t see anything. He stayed there for several minutes, watching, but nothing moved outside.

When he returned to the living room, he found that Mary was asleep again, with her blond hair messily sticking out of the blanket. He could see half her face, which looked peaceful and angelic. His own heart was racing, and he knew he would be up into the early hours. He sat down beside her, caressed her cheek with one calloused finger, and was rewarded with a sigh. She made little noises of happiness.

Clark eased himself off the sofa again without disturbing her. He was nervous, and he wasn’t sure why. Children had bad dreams, and that was that. Even so, Mary rarely used such a specific word. Window.

He retrieved a heavy flashlight from the kitchen and went to the front door and let himself outside. He locked the door behind him. When he stepped down off the porch, drizzle spit on his face. The leaves murmured with the night breeze. He switched on the yellow beam and waved it around the yard, seeing everything that should be there and nothing else-the weeping willow, the swing tied to the branch, the three old cars he scavenged for parts, the long grass that needed to be mowed. He stepped silently and carefully toward the rear of the house. He held the flashlight in a tight grip and led the way around the corner with the light.

Clark examined the backyard carefully. He didn’t come back here often, except to push the mower around every few weeks. There was only a narrow strip of lawn, and behind it, the dense stand of birches and their white bark peeling like paint. He stared into the woods and had the strangest feeling that someone invisible was staring back at him.

He shrugged. His mind was playing tricks on him.

Clark went over to Mary’s window and shined the light on the sill. He realized that he could stand here with half his body above the height of the window, and if the light was on, he could stare inside and see everything.

He turned the flashlight down to his feet.

Near his own boots were damp indentations in the grass, and behind them, he now saw a track of other footsteps, running away and disappearing into the protection of the trees.

5

Stride swung into the driveway of their cottage on the Point at midnight. There was no garage, just a muddy patch of ground where they parked. During the winters, they strung power cords from the house to plug in the vehicles and keep the engines warm through the frozen night hours. He squeezed his Expedition into a gap near the fence beside Serena’s Mustang and got out. Light rain tracked him as he tramped through the grass and up the steps of their front porch.

The lights were off inside, but when he opened the door, he saw a fire glowing in the fireplace on the opposite side of the living room. The log had burned down to ash and embers. A ballad by Patty Loveless played on the stereo. Stride heard Patty singing about a woman dying and going up to the stars. He had listened to that song over and over when Cindy was dying, and even now, it made his heart break.

Serena sat in a lotus position on the floor, her eyes closed, her face calm. She had taken up yoga as part of her recovery plan from burns she had suffered during a fire a few months earlier. The mental intensity of the exercises also helped her manage the memories of abuse she carried from her childhood. It seemed to be working. She was more at peace with herself than at any time since they had met.

Serena was totally different in appearance from Cindy. She was tall and full-figured. She had shoulder-length dark hair, but it was fuller and wavier than Cindy’s. Her face had a high forehead and emerald green eyes. Her skin glowed, but he could see the damage where her legs had been badly scarred. She was healing from the fire-she could run again without her legs or her lungs giving out-but she had come to accept that her body would always be flawed now. Not perfect. Not forever young. It was the devil’s bargain that everyone made with age, but Serena had put it off longer than most. She had covered herself up after the fire, even to Stride, but she was wearing shorts again, not caring if people saw. She had also gained a few pounds over the spring, when she couldn’t work out with the intensity she had in the past. She was dieting to shed them, but Stride didn’t care. He thought she looked voluptuous.

Her eyes opened as he took a seat in the leather chair near her. She carefully unfolded her legs and stretched them. Above her shorts, she wore a black bra over her full breasts. Her hair was tied into a ponytail behind her head.

“It’s late,” she said.

“Yeah, sorry, time got away from me.”

“Were you with her?”

He didn’t hear any jealousy in her voice, but he wanted to reassure her anyway.

“No, I left Tish down at the boardwalk hours ago. I went over to the police archives and pulled the material on Laura’s murder and began going through the file again. The next thing I knew, it was almost midnight.”

“She got to you, didn’t she?” Serena asked.

“I guess she did.”

“What do you think of her?”

Stride rubbed the brass studs of the red leather chair under his fingertips. “She’s keeping things from me. I don’t know what, but I don’t like that.” He added, “I can tell that you don’t like her.”

Serena shook her head. “You’re wrong.”

“Come on. I saw your hackles go up.”

“No, it’s true. She doesn’t like me. Big difference.”

“How can you tell?”

“Women know, Jonny.”

He wasn’t about to argue.

“Was there anything in the police file?” Serena asked.

“No, but Tish had something new.”

He told her about the letter Tish had given him and about the possibility that they could find DNA on the postage stamp or the flap of the envelope.

Serena digested this and then studied him with thoughtful eyes. “I’m surprised you never told me anything about Laura and her death. We’ve been together a long time now, Jonny. Is there a reason you didn’t want to share it with me?”

He didn’t know what to say, because he wasn’t sure why he had kept the story to himself. That week in July had changed him so profoundly, in so many ways, that he was never the same person again. He had realized during that week that he was going to spend the rest of his life with Cindy. He had decided during that week, as he got to know Ray Wallace, that one way to fight back against death was to become a cop. He had also discovered how much it hurt to make mistakes and that some mistakes could never be erased. When he thought about who he was today, he could draw a straight line all the way back to that summer. Even so, he had never been able to talk about it. He rarely talked about the passions that drove him. He realized that in the two years he had been coaxing Serena to share secrets about her past, he had rarely spent any time sharing secrets of his own.

Serena saw in his silence that he wasn’t ready to say anything. She didn’t push him. Instead, her face softened into a teasing smile.

“Guess what I did this evening?” she said.

He cocked his head with a silent question.

“I went to the library and found a copy of your high school yearbook from 1977,” she told him.

“Oh, no,” he said.

Serena leaned closer and whispered, “Nice hair.”

“I kept it long in those days.”

“You and Shaun Cassidy.”

“It was the 1970s, for God’s sake. It was the decade that taste forgot.”

“No, no, I like it. What a heartthrob you were. So intense. And those eyes! What did Cindy call them? Pirate eyes? I can really see it, Jonny. Smoldering, brooding, the future wounded detective.” Serena covered her mouth and started laughing.

“You’ve been spending way too much time with Maggie,” he told her.

“I saw a picture of Cindy, too. I’ve never seen a photo of her when she was young. She was amazing.”

“Yes, she was.”

“She had such an interesting face.”

“I told her that once, and she almost decked me.”

“No, really, with those big eyes and that sharp nose, and with the raven hair, she was something to look at. I see why you fell for her. I mean, Laura was a typical teen beauty, but Cindy was distinctive.” She let the silence linger, and then she added, “So tell me about Laura. What was she like?”

“I didn’t really know her all that well,” Stride admitted. “She wasn’t home a lot when I was around. I always thought she was one of those girls who was uncomfortable being as pretty as she was. She didn’t like the stares from the boys.”

“Were she and Cindy close?”

“No. Not really. They weren’t enemies the way sisters can be, but they both led their own lives. Cindy really regretted the distance between them after Laura was killed. She thought she had missed out on having a sister.”

“I saw Tish in the yearbook, too,” Serena told him. “She’s not lying about her relationship with Laura. I spotted them together in three separate photos, and they were hanging on each other like BFFs.”

“Score one for Tish,” Stride said.

“Except you never saw them together, did you? You didn’t know Tish. Why not?”

“Tish says she and Laura had some kind of fight, and she moved to St. Paul by herself after graduation. That would have been in May and June, when Cindy and I began dating.”

“Did Tish say what the fight was about?”

“She claims she doesn’t remember but that it wasn’t anything important. I think she’s lying on both counts.”

“So what was it?”

“I don’t know, but what do teenage girls usually fight about?” Stride asked.

“Boys.”

“That’s my guess.”

“Do you have any idea who it was?”

“Tish says that Laura dated Peter Stanhope for a while. She all but accused him of being Laura’s stalker.”

Serena frowned. “Peter.”

“Sorry, he was up to his neck in this case,” Stride said.

“Why didn’t you tell me? I knew you weren’t happy when I started doing work for Peter’s law firm, but I didn’t realize you had this kind of history with him.”

“It was thirty years ago. I’ve barely spoken to him since then. People change.”

That was a lie. Stride didn’t think anyone really changed. He wasn’t crazy about the idea of Serena taking a job at Peter Stanhope’s law firm, but he also wanted her off the streets. Somewhere safe. The fire in which she had nearly died during the winter hadn’t been an accident. Her career had put her in the path of a stalker, and Stride found himself struggling with his anxiety whenever she was back on the street. Serena was a former homicide cop from Las Vegas, which was one of the toughest beats he could imagine. Her background made her fiercely independent. Even so, he understood now the emotions that Cindy must have felt whenever he left the house and the fear that would have flitted through her brain whenever she picked up the phone. For the spouse of a cop, the call could come anytime.

“Can I tell Peter about Tish and her book?” Serena asked.

Stride shrugged. “If Tish keeps digging, Peter’s going to hear about it sooner or later. You can tell him. For now, I’m not involved.”

“Do you really think that Peter could have killed Laura?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible, but no one wanted to go down that road back then.”

“Because of Peter’s father?”

“Yes.”

“Who worked the case?”

Stride rubbed the scar on his shoulder where a bullet had violated his flesh. The wound twinged like a reminder. “Ray Wallace.”

Serena let out a slow breath. “You think Ray gave Peter a free pass?”

“Maybe.”

“I think you should tell me exactly what happened that night,” Serena said. “Don’t you?”

“Yeah.” Stride steepled his fingers and stared at the fire and didn’t say anything more.

“I could read the police file if you want,” Serena said. “Or talk to Maggie. But I’d prefer to hear it from you.”

Stride ran his hand through his wavy hair, the way he did when he was tense. He thought about the long hair he had worn back then. About Cindy’s fingers running through his hair while they were in the water.

“Cindy and I felt guilty for a long time,” he told Serena.

“About what?”

“About leaving Laura alone that night.”

“You couldn’t possibly have known what would happen.”

“Yes, but it was dark, and it was raining, and kids had been drinking, and we just let Laura go off into the woods. It was stupid. We should have stayed with her.”

Serena waited.

“A few of us were playing softball that night,” Stride continued. “I was there. So was Peter Stanhope. Cindy was supposed to meet me afterward, and the two of us were going to hang out by the lake. I didn’t even know that Laura would be with her, but she and Cindy stopped by the field while we were playing, and then they headed off by themselves. I was a little pissed. I didn’t want Laura around.”

“Why not?”

“That was supposed to be the night. The night. Cindy and I were planning to have sex for the first time.”

“Oh,” Serena said, drawing out the word. “Now I understand.”

“So I wasn’t exactly thinking with my brain.”

“I’m sure.”

“The thing is, Cindy and I talked about it later, and we knew something was wrong, but we didn’t care.”

“What do you mean, something was wrong?”

Stride frowned. “Someone was in the woods that night.”

WHO KILLED LAURA STARR?

SIX

July 4, 1977

I heard a growl of thunder beyond the trees, as if the storm were an animal getting closer. The path was dark, and that meant the sky over our heads had turned black, shutting out light through the trees. I felt the thick air like a weight on my chest when I breathed. You could almost see humid haze hanging in a cloud over the trail. My skin was dewy with sweat, and my long hair clung to it like vines. I wore a bikini top, shorts, and bare feet.

Laura was jittery as she walked beside me. She kicked impatiently at the dirt with her pink Flyers. Her eyes darted back and forth into the woods, as if she expected to catch someone spying. She wore jeans and a blue checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up past her elbows. Her backpack was slung over one shoulder. She twisted the silver ring on her finger.

“I hope the rain holds off for the fireworks,” I said.

Laura looked up at the tops of the trees. She made a noise in her throat and didn’t reply.

I knew the Fourth of July parties would be washed out. It would be night in less than an hour, but before then, the deluge would begin. The air was perfectly calm now. Nothing moved. The brown birds that normally hopped around us in the dirt, looking for crumbs, had taken shelter. Every birch and pine looked as if it were holding its breath.

The summer storms always came quickly. One moment it would be still, and then in an instant, the wind would come alive, bending the young trees. The heavy clouds would sag open, gushing out rain. The night would turn to day in flashes as branches of lightning cracked from the ground to the sky.

Laura stopped on the trail. I gave her a questioning stare. Her lower lip trembled, and her eyes were frightened.

“What is it?”

She didn’t say anything. The trees around us were already a black parade of soldiers. I followed her eyes, but I didn’t see anything in the shadows.

“What?” I repeated.

“Someone’s there,” Laura said.

I looked again. I took a couple of steps closer to the trees. I didn’t smell anything but pine, like Christmas in July.

“Are you sure?”

“I heard someone,” she insisted.

I thought she was wrong, but it was easy to feel like you weren’t alone in the park. There was a bigness about it. It felt primitive, like we were miles from the city. People came here to do secret things. You never knew who was around.

“Come out!” I shouted. “Hey!”

A violent rustling shook the brush, and I froze, completely startled. A wild turkey lurched out of the woods in front of me, wings flapping excitedly. He was a quivering bundle of striped brown feathers with a cherry-red neck, who beat his way across the path and buried himself in the tangle of leafy bushes.

Laura and I both jumped and screamed. We scrambled away, nearly falling. Laura hugged the strap of her backpack tighter to her body. My heart galloped. It was silly, but it’s the kind of thing that pumps you with adrenaline and leaves you feeling keyed up. When the turkey was gone, we kept walking, but Laura continued to turn every few steps and look nervously behind us.

I could hear boys’ voices ahead of us as we got closer to the softball field. We had parked near the field an hour earlier. I wanted to sit and watch Jonny play, but Laura didn’t want to hang around the boys, and I didn’t blame her. They had beers at every base, and several of them were already drunk. We were the only two girls around, and they didn’t take their eyes off us when we arrived. Some girls preened and puffed up at attention like that, but Laura wilted and wanted to run.

Even now, as we reached the end of the trail that looped back to the field, she hung back.

“Let’s go down to the lake,” she said.

“Why don’t we wait until the game’s over? Then Jonny can come with us.”

“No, I know the two of you want to be alone.”

That was true. I felt bad, but I wanted Jonny to myself that night. Him and me. Out in the water and then on the beach together. Still, I didn’t want to leave Laura by herself.

“It’s okay. You can stay with us.”

“Say it like you mean it,” Laura replied. She finally smiled.

“No, it’s just-”

“Don’t worry, I’ll leave when you guys get together. Let’s go.”

“I need to tell Jonny where to meet us.”

I led the way out of the woods. Laura folded her arms over her chest and followed tentatively behind me. The voices and laughter got louder. There were a couple dozen boys in a rough diamond in the field, some playing, some sitting in the dirt near the parking lot. Cars were parked haphazardly in the weeds behind them, beside a winding road that led down from the highway. The field was nothing but grass and brush, small enough that a solid hit would pitch the ball into the marshland. Over the cattails, I could see a creek winding toward the lake.

The sky was like charcoal to the west. Bursts of lightning made the clouds glow, and I could smell rain. Somewhere nearby, on one of the other trails that made a web through the large park, I heard firecrackers.

I saw Jonny playing first base. The trees ended at the edge of the softball field, and Laura and I came up behind him. He turned as he saw the other boys waving to us. Some of them made catcalls. There were empty beer bottles thrown aside everywhere.

Jonny had a serious face, but it softened when he saw me. Whenever I was with Laura, I was used to being invisible, but Jonny looked at me as if he didn’t see anyone else. I’d like to tell you what the connection was between us, or why it happened so quickly. The truth is, I have no idea. Sure, he’s handsome. Tall and lean, still a little short of meat and muscle, like most boys. He’s got that long, wavy hair that looks untamed. And those amazing eyes. That was what I first noticed, his eyes, which are dark and deep. I could see everything in them. Pain. Loss. Black humor. Seriousness of purpose. He is so intense that I just have to cut him down to size every now and then, and he doesn’t seem to care when I wound his ego.

Right now, he is searching. I understand, because that was me, after my mom died. I was fourteen then, and I spent a lot of time searching, wondering where to go, what I would do, who I would become. I feel as if I’ve found my answers, but Jonny only lost his dad nine months ago, and he’s still looking. He grew up wanting to go to sea like his dad, but not anymore. His mother won’t let another Stride step on board an ore boat. I don’t think Jonny wants it now, either. It’s like the lake betrayed him when it took his father. Now the lake is an enemy.

I don’t know what he will do, but when he figures it out, I know he’ll pour his whole heart and soul into it. Like he’s poured his heart and soul into me.

Jonny shouted something to the pitcher, who held the ball and waited for him. He came off the base and jogged up to us. He wore shorts and sneakers. His chest was bare. He kissed me.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

We were awkward around each other, because we both knew what we were thinking. It’s exciting, unsettling, and unnerving when you know you’re going to do it.

“We’re going down to the lake,” I told him. “Meet us there, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Will you be long?”

“No, we’re almost done, and the rain will probably wash us out in a couple minutes anyway.”

“Okay, love you.”

“Love you, too.”

Jonny kissed me again. He waved at Laura, but I could see him wondering if the two of us would be alone. Part of me wanted Laura to stay, because I was nervous about what was going to happen. Part of me couldn’t wait to jump off the cliff.

We continued by the side of the field to where another trail led down along the creek toward the lake. The eyes of the boys followed us. They made jokes. Laura stayed on my left and stared at the ground.

I noticed Peter Stanhope among the boys. He was coming up to bat next. We had to pass within a few feet of him, and he leaned on his bat and watched us the whole way, his head swiveling to track us, his eyes gleaming. Laura didn’t look up at all, but I could tell she knew he was there. It was Laura he wanted. He didn’t say a word to either of us, but we felt him. Peter had a presence, because he was so sure of himself. He wasn’t as tall as Jonny, but he was beefy and strong. He had bushy blond hair, parted in the middle, swept back in two waves. He chewed gum relentlessly, and his lips were always parted in a perpetual smirk that dimpled his cheeks. His skin was ruddy and freckled.

Most of the girls chased after him. They wanted a ride in his Trans Am. They wanted to swim in the Olympic-sized pool in his father’s backyard. Peter went from one girl to the next, doing what he did with Laura, pushing them to have sex. Most said yes. Rumor is, he even bedded down a couple of the married teachers at school. That’s the way life is when you’re a Stanhope. The word “no” isn’t in your vocabulary. Peter’s father, Randall, owns a big mining operation in the harbor. People are afraid of him. He’s the kind of man who can get what he wants by picking up the phone. So Peter lives that way, too. Taking the things he wants.

I resented him, because we never had much money in my house, and I figured anyone with that much money probably got it by stepping all over other people. I also didn’t like the way he treated Laura. I was never sure why she went out with him. But he didn’t care what I thought. I was nothing. He looked right through me, and I could see him stripping off Laura’s clothes in that horny brain of his.

“Come on,” I said to her.

We hurried out of the field. It got dark again as we entered the forest. Laura glanced behind her, as if Peter might be following us.

“He’s a creep,” I said.

Laura didn’t say anything at all.

The stream tumbled over stones beside the path. We walked beside it for ten minutes until the creek split out of the trees into a furry brown nest of cattails, where we could see the midnight blue waters of the lake pooling at the shore just past the weeds. We both ran out onto the beach. My toes bunched the sand as I headed for the water, where I splashed in the foam. A handful of ducks lifted off noisily.

“You want to swim?” I asked Laura.

“I don’t have a suit.”

“So?”

She shook her head.

I came out of the water and sat down in the sand. Laura slid the backpack off her shoulder and sat down next to me. We didn’t talk. I watched the black stain in the sky grow as it blew closer. The north side of the lake was already obscured by nightfall, and the line where the water became the trees was impossible to distinguish. There was another beach on that side and more trails that wound down from the other end of the park.

The warm breeze turned cooler. Laura sat with her hands around her knees, staring at the water.

“You and Dad really went at it last night,” I said.

Fights weren’t new between them, but this one was worse than usual.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Laura said.

“What was it about this time?” I persisted.

“Nothing.” She looked away, shutting me down. Her legs twitched. She twisted her neck to stare over her shoulder, and I thought she might get up and run away.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing’s wrong,” she said.

“You sure?”

Laura shrugged. “Life’s weird.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know. Just weird.”

“You’re pretty weird, too,” I told her, smiling.

She didn’t smile back at me.

“Sorry,” I said. “It was a joke.”

“That’s okay.”

I felt a spatter of raindrops on my skin.

“Seriously, what’s wrong?”

“I’m just thinking about stuff.”

“Like what?”

Laura hugged her knees together. The drizzle ran like tears on her cheeks. “Do you think you could ever kill someone?” she asked.

I stared at her. “What kind of question is that?”

“I mean, do you think only an insane person could do it?”

I tried to read her face, which was a mask of shadows. I realized it wasn’t rain. She was crying.

“You’re scaring me, Laura. What is this about?”

“What if Dad were abusing me?” she asked. “Could you kill him?”

I felt a chill. “Oh, my God, did something happen between you two?”

Laura shook her head. “No, it’s not that.”

“Then tell me.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

I was afraid she had opened up to me as much as she ever could. “Laura, please.”

“I just wish everything weren’t so complicated,” she said.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Everything.” Laura looked at me. “Can you keep a secret?”

“Of course.”

“Even from Jon?”

“If I have to, sure. What is it?”

She didn’t tell me. She never got the chance. This time, we both heard it. Something snapped in the woods behind us. We spun around, and I heard Laura suck in her breath. We couldn’t see anyone, but someone was there.

“Jonny?” I called.

No one answered.

“Wait here,” I said.

I didn’t shout this time. I charged the woods, sprinting through the sand onto the trail, where I skidded to a stop. I listened but heard only the wind as it landed with a frenzy, kicking the forest to life. I made a slow circle, my eyes narrowing as I tried to penetrate the darkness. I stared where I thought I had heard the branch break and was rock still.

I knew I wasn’t alone.

I heard a shout from Laura, and when I turned back toward the beach, I could see that the rain had come. It was sheeting down. Lightning sizzled, and the forest shook with thunder. The noise covered everything else. Whoever was near me could use the storm to escape.

I waited a few more seconds, and then I smelled something odd and sickly sweet above the freshness of the rain.

Marijuana.

7

Tish Verdure nursed a gin and tonic and studied the row of aging high school sports photos hung above the booth in the downtown bar. One was a group photo of a state championship hockey team. Another was an action shot of two tall white boys fighting over a basketball layup. In a third, she saw a cheering section of baseball players in a stadium dugout, with bats strewn around them on the ground. Some of the photos were from the 1970s, and she saw faces that looked familiar. For all she knew, some of the boys were in the bar right now. She wouldn’t recognize them today.

The waitress, a bored UMD student in a Rascal Flatts T-shirt, told her that one of the men at the bar wanted to buy Tish a drink. Tish waved her off without giving the man a look. It wasn’t the first time tonight. Men assumed that a single woman in the bar was on the prowl, when all she really wanted was to get drunk. She knew she drank and smoked too much. It was a way to get through the days and nights.

Tish wondered if she had made a mistake by coming back. Stirring up her life wouldn’t accomplish anything, and she was already lying about her past. Stride knew it-she could see it in his eyes when he looked at her. A part of her wanted to pack up and go before things got worse, but she owed it to Laura to be here. She owed it to Cindy, too. She had foolishly made a promise to her, and she couldn’t put off any longer her need to honor it.

She paid her bill. It was one in the morning. She left the bar through the crowd of smokers outside the door and strolled past dark storefronts toward her rental car. Rather than get in, she continued past it, down the sharp slope of Second Avenue toward the corner. She stood by a parking meter on the curb and stared diagonally across the street, where a crumpled piece of newspaper blew up against a brick building like a tumble-weed. The ground floor of the building housed a wireless phone store behind its big windows. Neon glowed brightly in the display.

Back then, when she was a child, the same space had been a bank office. The bank where her mother worked as a teller.

Tish had been in school when it happened. The policeman who came to get her had a black mole on his cheek and breath that smelled like burned coffee. He took her to the station and put her in a white room, and then a woman in a flowery dress came in and told her. That was it. She slept with strangers that night.

“I’m home, Mom,” Tish murmured to the air.

She turned around, leaving the old bank building behind, and stalked briskly to her car. The fresh air had burned off some of the alcohol clouding her brain. She drove north out of downtown through streets largely empty of traffic. The lights stayed green. She turned right at Twenty-first Avenue, crossed over the freeway, and curled around a sharp curve to the cliffside road that led to the condominium she was borrowing. She parked under the trees at the end of the street and got out. She lit a cigarette and stood there, smoking, letting it burn down. The lake twinkled below her. The birches were silhouettes with a thousand arms, moving and alive. Behind her, the freeway overpass rumbled on its stilts like a concrete giant. She felt strange. As if eyes were watching her. That was how Laura must have felt. Tish shivered, but she finished her smoke before crushing out the butt in the street and continuing to her front door.

She stopped. Froze.

One of the miniature square panels of stained glass in the door was shattered, letting out a square of white light. The broken pane was near the dead bolt.

Tish backed up, listening. Everything was quiet. She looked behind her, feeling a stab of panic. The sensation of being watched had fled. She was alone now, but she felt violated. With her cell phone, Tish called the police. They told her a car would be there soon. Knowing that help was close by gave her the courage to return to the door, which was unlocked, and nudge it open. She took a cautious step into the foyer, listening for anything that would betray a stranger. She breathed the air, trying to smell an echo of whoever had been here, but all she detected was a lingering paint smell from the work that had been done on the place before she arrived.

Nothing was disturbed that she could see. Nothing taken. But she had only been in town for a few days, enough time to get up her courage to see Stride, enough time to visit the north beach in the park. A pilgrimage to feel Laura’s spirit again.

All she had in the condo was her suitcase and some food.

Tish waited for a long time by the front door, and when she was convinced she was alone, she went to the bedroom. Her papers were strewn over the bed, not the way she had left them. Her clothes were in and out of the drawers. The closet was open, and so was her suitcase. Tish caught her breath and immediately went to the case and unzipped the netting over the main compartment and found the hidden pocket inside. She reached in as far as she could and exhaled with relief.

The letter from Cindy was still there. Untouched. So was the clipping about the robbery.

She returned to the living room to sit down and wait for the police. It was obvious that no matter how little time she had been here, someone already knew she was back.

Someone already wanted her gone.

Stride lay in bed on his back and stared at the ceiling. The bedroom window was open, and he could hear the surf on Lake Superior where it assaulted the shore on the other side of the sand dune. The narrow strip of beach was only steps from their back door. Tish was right that hardly anyone lived on the Point year-round in the old days. Cottages like this one were mostly summer getaways then. Today, it was prime real estate. The old houses were being torn down and replaced by castles and condos. Anything on waterfront anywhere was gold. He liked it better when he and Cindy had first moved out here, when people wondered why anyone would want to live in the eye of the Superior storms. Stride wasn’t always sure himself, except that the lake was so vast that he sometimes felt as if he were staring at eternity.

Serena sat cross-legged on the bed, watching him. The lights were off. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he expected that he would open them again and see Cindy sitting there, in the same pose, a crooked smile on her face. As if all the time that had passed had been in his imagination. He wasn’t really closing in on fifty years old. He wasn’t really bruised by death and loss. He was a teenager. A new cop. A young husband. Everything that was going to be lay ahead, not behind.

“You know what I remember about that night?” he told her. “Other than me and Cindy, I mean. I remember the bat.”

Serena didn’t say anything. He could see it like a video clip on a loop that played over and over in his head. Close up. That bat going around and around.

“It was Peter’s bat. One of those aluminum ones. Bright silver. He never let anyone else use it. I remember him taking practice swings at home plate and hearing the whoosh of the bat. I can still see that bat in his hands. All I can think about is that, not long after, someone used that same bat to beat an innocent girl to death. A girl who would have been my sister-in-law. Someone hit her and just kept swinging and swinging.”

“If it was Peter’s bat, how did it get into someone else’s hands?” Serena asked. She spoke so softly that she was almost whispering.

“You’re assuming it did.”

“Well, you said someone else’s fingerprints were on it.”

“Yes, that’s true,” he admitted. “Someone else had it. Someone who killed Laura. That was the only explanation that made sense to me all these years.”

“How did the bat wind up at the murder scene?”

Stride remembered. He saw the bat again in his mind. Close up. In the field.

“The rain came,” he said. “We all went running. The storm was severe. Everything turned black. It sounded like a train, the way a tornado does. I went to the woods to find Cindy and Laura down by the lake. Peter was on second base, and he took off as the storm hit. As I ran for the trail, I saw Peter’s bat lying in the weeds. He must have forgotten all about it. So anyone could have picked it up. There were a lot of guys with us in the field.”

“But?” Serena asked, hearing him hesitate.

“But I remember thinking that Peter was going to come back for that bat.”

Stride was distracted, watching Cindy and Laura go. He was anxious for the game to be over. He could still taste her lips, which always tasted the same way, like a cherry Popsicle. When they kissed, they were connected, electricity passing between them. He had an erection, thinking about what they would do later. If they really did it. If she really meant it. He could tell she was nervous. He wondered if she had brought Laura with her as a shield, so that she had an excuse not to go all the way. As the two girls disappeared into the trees, though, he saw Cindy look back at him, and her face told him that nothing had changed. She wanted him. She was waiting for him.

He glanced at the black sky. Time was short. He hit the pocket of his mitt impatiently. Dave McGill was at the plate, and he kept tipping foul balls that dribbled to the edge of the field, where Raymond Anderson, who was the catcher, had to retrieve them. Stride thought they should call the game right now. He could taste rain, and he already felt the sky leaking drops onto his face. No one else paid any attention.

McGill finally struck out. Peter Stanhope took his place, swinging his silver bat theatrically, sporting an arrogant grin. Stride didn’t really know Peter, other than by reputation. They weren’t friends. They didn’t hang out together. The only thing they had in common was baseball. The longest conversation he could remember having with Peter was about Rod Carew.

Peter swung violently and missed. Strike one.

Stride saw a bright flash and imagined Peter’s bat, held high over his head, attracting the current like a lightning rod. Less than five seconds later, thunder washed across the field in a drum roll.

Peter swung again. Strike two. His face contorted in effort and frustration. His jaw worked his gum furiously. He was a good hitter, but overeager, always looking for the home run on every pitch. He struck out as often as he connected.On the third pitch, though, his aluminum bat swatted the ball with a loud ting, and the ball lofted over Stride’s head into the outfield, where it dropped for an easy single. Peter loped to the base. He bent down and picked up a half-full bottle of Grain Belt and swigged it empty, then tossed the bottle toward the weeds. He wiped his mouth with the bottom of his red tank top.

“So it’s you and Cindy Starr, huh, Stride?” he said.

“That’s right.”

“You know, her sister is the real prize.”

Stride didn’t reply.

“Laura’s the one with the tits,” Peter continued. “Half the guys here got boners when she walked by. Why aren’t you going after her?”

“Because I like Cindy.”

“Yeah? What’s she like?”

“Why do you care?” Stride asked.

“I’m not hot for her, if that’s what you think. I just wondered if the princess act runs in the family.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I mean that Laura walks around like some kind of ice queen,” Peter replied. “Somebody needs to thaw her out.”

“Shut up,” Stride said.

“So how about Cindy? Is she a frigid queer like her sister?”

Stride threw off his baseball glove and shoved both bare hands against Peter’s chest. Peter stumbled backward, lost his footing in the damp grass, and landed on his ass in the mud. Stride stood over him, fists clenched and cocked, ready to fight. He heard shouts from some of the other boys in the field. The pitcher dropped the ball; the batter threw the bat away; they all began to converge on Stride.

Peter laughed and got up, brushing dirt from his skin. He waved them away. “Hey, it’s okay, I had it coming.”

Stride watched carefully, expecting a sucker punch.

“Don’t sweat it,” Peter said. “I like to see how far I can push people before they push back. It’s a little lesson I learned from my dad.”

“Apologize,” Stride told him.

“Yeah, all right. I’m sorry. That do it for you? You need to lighten up, Stride.”

Stride ignored him. The game continued. The batter at the plate struck out, and another took his place. One inning to go, and it was over. He could barelymake out the action on the field, as the night drew closer and the dark clouds massed.

“You seen The Deep yet?” Peter asked.

Stride grunted. He and Cindy had seen it the previous weekend.

“Saw it three times,” Peter said. “Fuck, Jackie Bisset in that T-shirt? Holy shit. I wish porn actresses looked like her. I saw Teenage Sex Kitten downtown last week. What a bunch of losers. Pimples and no tits.”

At the plate, Gunnar Borg punched a ground ball past the pitcher that took a jagged leap as it bounced off a half-buried rock in the field. Stride bounded to his right and scooped up the ball. He yanked it out of his glove and prepared to toss it to Nick Parucci at second for the out. Then he saw stars. Peter Stanhope ran over him, slamming Stride’s body into the dirt with his right shoulder and jarring the ball out of his hands. Stride recovered quickly and grabbed the ball out of the grass again, but by then, Peter was standing on second base, grinning, and the other runner was at first.

Stride’s right side was black with dirt. He felt as if someone had hit him with a shovel.

“Don’t mess with me, Stride,” Peter called.

Stride fired the ball back to the pitcher, turned on his heel, and marched back to first base. Gunnar Borg laughed.

At that moment, the sky finally opened up.

The wind blew in, and with it, the rain bucketed down. The pelting drops felt like needles. Lightning came, like flashbulbs popping, and the boys sprinted for the cars parked haphazardly in the weeds. Stride ran, too, but in the opposite direction, toward the woods and the lake. Toward Cindy. The field was already sodden, a river of mud. Stride saw beer bottles, a fallen baseball glove, and empty bags of chips. Peter Stanhope’s aluminum bat lay where he had thrown it as he ran for first base. Stride heard shouting a hundred yards away and then the roar of car engines. Headlights streaked across the field. Horns honked.

The downpour followed him into the forest. Rain beat down on a million leaves. His long hair was plastered against his skin. He ran, but it was too dark to see where he was going on the path, and he put a foot wrong and stumbled, cutting his knee. It stung, but the rain washed away the blood. He wiped moisture out of his eyes and pushed through the branches where a bent tree hung over the trail. The spindly twigs slapped back and scraped his face.

He smelled scorched wood and thought that part of the woods close by might beon fire. When the next flash of lightning struck, he could see the orange streak reflect on the surface of the water and see the silvery curtain of rainfall beyond the trees. The lake wasn’t far. He hurried.

Then Stride heard something strange.

Whistling.

It was so close that someone had to be standing almost at his shoulder. He turned and pushed his way through the brush lining the path and broke through into a tiny clearing. A campfire had been built there. A few warm embers remained, throwing up smoke where the rain had doused them. That was the burning smell he had noticed. He didn’t see anyone in the clearing, but then a shadow large enough to be a bear detached itself from one of the birch trees and approached the dying fire. Instinctively, Stride retreated. The man didn’t see him at first. He was a huge black man, at least six foot five, with dreadlocks down to his shoulders and an oddly colorful beret of red, green, and gold. His limbs were as thick as some of the larger tree trunks, with well-defined muscles. He wore a white T-shirt and loose-fitting black pants that had the same tricolored stripe as his hat.

Stride recognized him. They called him Dada. He was one of the vagrants who hung out near the railroad tracks during the warmer months. Dada was whistling, not like a nervous man in a cemetery, but like a cardinal at winter’s end. Free. Loud. Stride backed up silently, but Dada saw him. Their eyes met. The music from his mouth stopped. Stride saw the man’s lips curl into a smile, revealing white teeth against his coal skin. Dada didn’t look afraid or surprised. He laughed as Stride made his way back to the trail without saying a word. His laughter lingered in Stride’s ears, growing fainter as the storm drowned it out.

He continued toward the lake, making his way by feel as he slogged through the trees. Water streamed down his face. Mosquitoes harassed him, and he squashed them with his fingers. He didn’t know how many minutes passed before the path opened onto the sandy clearing and his eyes could see what was ahead of him.

He found Laura first. She had taken cover under one of the older pine trees, its outstretched branches forming a green roof over her head. Her clothes were soaked. She clutched her backpack against her chest and gazed across the dimpled water. In the inch of skin between her shirt and her jeans, he could see the colors of her butterfly tattoo. She looked bottled up and anxious. When he touched her shoulder, she screamed, then clapped her mouth shut.

“It’s just me,” he said.

“You scared me to death.”

“Where’s Cindy?” he asked.

Laura pointed. He looked out onto the beach, and there she was. She had taken off her shorts and was in her bikini, dancing in the rain. That was Cindy. A water sprite. A free spirit.

“Hey,” Stride shouted.

Cindy stopped when she saw him and bounded up the beach in her bare feet. “Hey, you.” She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. Her skin was wet and soft. Her long hair fell across his face.

“Do you want to go home?” he asked her. “We weren’t counting on a storm.”

“No, no, let’s stay,” she insisted.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Really. I want to, Jonny.”

Laura slung her backpack over her shoulder and put her thumbs in the pockets of her jeans. She gave the two of them a strange smile. “You guys be good, okay? I’m going to go.”

Cindy looked torn. She bit her lower lip. “No, you better not, Laura. Not by yourself.”

“I’m fine, little sister.”

“Stay with us. It’s okay.”

“You two don’t need a chaperone. Not tonight. I told you I’d leave when Jon got here.”

“We’ll go with you,” Stride said. “All of us.”

“Yes, we’ll all go,” Cindy said.

Laura hugged Cindy hard. “You two stay. Don’t worry about me.”

“No way. How will you get home? You can’t get a ride now. I’m sure everyone left when the storm hit.”

“I can hike up to the highway and catch a bus.”

“No, no, no, that’s crazy. Come on, we’re all going.”

Laura detached herself from her sister and put a hand on Cindy’s chest. “Look, I’m not being noble. I love you, but I have to go.”

“Not alone,” Cindy repeated. “I won’t let you go alone.”

“I won’t be alone,” Laura said.

“Not alone?” Serena asked. “She was meeting someone?”

Stride nodded in bed. “That’s what she told us.”

“Who?”

“Peter Stanhope said it was him. He told the police that he and Laura were dating.”

“Did you believe him?”

“His story fit the facts, but Laura told Cindy she had broken it off with Peter because he was pressuring her for sex. Tish told me the same thing.”

“Unless Laura didn’t want anyone to know that they were seeing each other.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“What happened next?” Serena asked.

Stride listened to the waves outside the window. The old house rattled in the wind. “I don’t know. That was the last time I saw Laura. Something happened to her in the softball field, where her shoe was found. But that’s not where she was killed. She took another trail from the field and wound up on a beach on the north side of the lake almost a mile away. That’s where Cindy found her.”

“So Peter’s bat wasn’t found in the softball field where you last saw it?” Serena asked.

“No. It was on the beach by the body. Someone took the bat, followed the trail from the softball field to the beach, and killed Laura there. There was something else, too.”

“What?”

“No one knows about this,” Stride said. “It was never released to the press. I only found out when I took over the Detective Bureau and pulled the file. The police found semen near the body.”

“Laura had sex that night?” Serena asked.

Stride shook his head. “Not in the body. Near the body. In the woods near the beach where Laura was murdered. Whatever went down that night, someone was there watching. Either he killed her, or he saw who did.”

WHO KILLED LAURA STARR?

EIGHT

What do I remember about that night?

I remember the two of us alone, after Laura left to follow the trail back to the field. Me and Jonny. I know it was wrong to let her go, but back then, we were all blinded by our desires. Any one of us could have made a different decision. If we had, the night would have gone another way. I try not to dwell on it. Life happens the way it’s going to happen. So does death.

I remember us walking hand in hand out of the shelter of the trees. The rain came in sheets, but there was no more lightning, no more thunder, just wind and water. It sounds romantic, but it was funny, actually. We were laughing. We blinked our eyes and gulped air like fishes, as if we were breathing under a waterfall. We shivered in the cold. The wind whipped us around like dolls.

I remember saying, “Let’s swim.”

I had to start. If Jonny had reached to remove my clothes, I would have let him, but he would never do that. I unhooked my bikini top in back, let the straps slide off my shoulders, and saw my white breasts come free in the darkness. My long, wet hair covered them. I pushed my hair out of the way so he could see me. My pink nipples and the little bumps around them were swollen. I took his hand to make him touch me, and I showed him how, guiding his fingers with mine, caressing and rubbing the way I liked it. When we kissed again, I remember the feel of our wet, bare chests pressing together.

I remember stepping back and staring at my feet as I peeled my bikini bottoms down and feeling nervous and self-conscious when I was finally naked in front of him. I couldn’t look into his eyes. I felt an urge to cover myself, which was stupid. I remember finding the courage to look up, spread my arms wide, and say, “Now you’ve seen the whole deal.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. He was transfixed. His face was in awe.

“You’re beautiful,” he told me.

I was, but how can you not be beautiful when you’re seventeen? I wasn’t a model, but I was the girl he loved. I remember folding my arms over my breasts and saying, “Your turn.”

He had it worse than me. Guys do. I was intensely curious, without wanting to show him how much. He stalled. He fumbled with his shorts. When he got them off, his underwear was even whiter than my sun-starved breasts. It jutted out because of his erection. He looked nervous like me as he went the rest of the way, and it took him even longer to meet my eyes again.

I remember wanting to reach out and touch it, but I didn’t.

“Are we ready for this?” he asked.

“You sure look ready.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.”

No, I wasn’t ready. I was scared to death. I knew he was, too. But I wasn’t going back.

I remember us swimming. We waded out naked into the dark lake, with the rain cascading over us. The lake bed under our feet was a slippery mix of sand and stones. The water wrapped around us and rose up to our necks. You feel so exposed and vulnerable like that, naked and submerged, with the whole sky stretching over your head. You think strange thoughts about what might be in there with you. I remember yelping as a fish brushed my stomach, swimming between us, and then, of course, I realized it was not a fish at all, and it was a good thing Jonny couldn’t see my face turn red.

I remember floating, my small breasts like little snowy peaks above the waterline. Jonny held me. His hands explored. It felt good.

I remember finally touching him and watching his eyes close and his mouth fall open.

We could have stayed out there all night, postponing what both of us really wanted to do. Out in the lake, we were in a kind of frozen world, nothing behind us, nothing ahead. The splashing rain and the whistle of the wind blocked out every other sound. There was no moon to glisten on the surface, just complete darkness. I was blind to reality. Blind to the violence I had let my sister walk into.

I remember us lying on our backs on the beach. No stars. Fog and mist rising like clouds out of the low lands. The rain no more than spatters on our skin now. Hungry mosquitoes starting to wake up, buzz, and hunt for blood. If we didn’t do it now, it wouldn’t be tonight.

I remember him on top of me. I felt crushed and didn’t care. Our kisses were urgent. We were both clumsy. I remember my legs spread wide like wings. We were laughing and struggling. I helped him, and somewhere after the pressure and pain, somewhere after our hands, feet, and knees found their right places, we both realized that we were really doing it. There was this little pause in the middle when we caught our breath and our eyes met with a kind of amazement. Then I felt his muscles all bunch into one, and I wrapped my legs tight around him, and I watched his face as it happened.

I remember we stayed like that for a very long time. I remember sweat and rain. When he withdrew, I showed him with my hands how to touch me, and I watched him watching me right up to the moment when our fingers working together pushed me over the top, and I closed my eyes, and it happened to me, too.

I remember thinking that in the morning, the world would be a very different place.

And God help me, it was.