In the Dark aka The Watcher

46

Serena stood apart from the cluster of mourners while they prepared to bury Finn Mathisen in the Riverside Cemetery. She tugged her trench coat tighter. Her black hair swished around her face. They were beyond the southern edge of Superior, out past the railroad tracks and landfill, in sloping fields dotted with pines whose branches reached for the gray sky like praying angels. Water gurgled over stones in a creek beside the path. The lawn was lush and neatly trimmed.

She stood fifty feet away from the ceremony, beside one of the larger marble headstones on the wooded slope. Finn didn’t have a big crowd. Rikke was there, ramrod straight, her face a severe mask. Everyone kept their distance from her. Serena didn’t recognize the dozen or so strangers, but she saw Jonny, Maggie, and Tish standing in a trio. She knew she should be at Jonny’s side, but she had never met Finn or Rikke and didn’t want to intrude on anyone’s grief. The truth was that it gave her a convenient excuse to be far away. She liked cemeteries but hated funerals. She didn’t mind death but hated dying. If something had to end, she simply wanted it to be over.

Serena heard footsteps behind her and was surprised to see Peter Stanhope. The lawyer’s mane of silver hair barely moved in the wind. His lip showed a reddened scar.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Serena told him.

Peter stood beside her and made no effort to get any closer to the funeral. “I suppose I feel responsible.”

“Why?”

“Because I sent you off to expose Finn’s secrets, and now he’s dead.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” Serena told him. “Finn’s probably better off this way.”

“That’s true.”

Serena turned and met his eyes with her own. “That doesn’t mean you walk away with a clean conscience, Peter. There’s still Laura and what you did to her.”

“You mean the stalking? I already told you that I was a crass, stupid kid.”

“Don’t make it sound like you were a boy stealing gum from a drugstore. You tried to rape that girl.”

Peter rubbed the scar on his lip. “So that’s it? You’ve decided I’m a monster?”

“I don’t know what you are.”

“And that means you can’t work with me?” he asked. “You’re turning down the job because of a mistake I made as a teenager?”

Serena looked up at the profiles of the trees, which were like spiny bottlebrushes. She heard the murmur of solemn voices near the grave. “I’m sorry. It doesn’t matter if it was yesterday or 1977. The answer is no. Keep your job, Peter. I don’t want it.”

“You’re walking away from a lot of money.”

“It’s not about the money,” Serena said.

“I thought you were different. I expected better from you.”

Serena shrugged. “Well, don’t let me spoil your moment.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is your independence day,” Serena said. “With Finn dead, Laura’s case dies with him.”

Peter nodded. “Okay, yes, it worked out fine for me, but I’m not getting a free ride. I didn’t kill anyone.”

“No?” Her voice betrayed her suspicion.

“You sound as paranoid as Tish,” Peter said.

“Your own father didn’t believe you,” Serena told him.

Peter’s eyes turned black. “He was never my biggest fan. I told Randall I didn’t kill her, but he knew what happened between me and Laura in the softball field. I suppose he figured I was a liar. Or maybe it was all about protecting the Stanhope name. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The easiest thing for Stride and Pat Burns and everyone else in Duluth is to believe that Finn swung that bat. Just like it was the easy thing back in 1977 to assume that Dada killed her. We believe whatever makes us feel safe.”

“Aren’t you afraid of what Tish will say in her book?” Serena asked.

Peter studied Tish, who stood next to Stride among the people near the wooden coffin. It was as if she could feel eyes on her back, because she turned and saw Serena and Peter standing together up the hill. Her lips folded into a frown.

“Tish can write what she wants,” Peter said. “I don’t care. Sometimes the easy explanation is the right one, Serena. Finn was in love with Laura, and Laura didn’t want him. So he decided that no one else was going to have her, either.”

“Except some people might think you felt the same way,” Serena said.

“Maybe I did, but Laura’s big mistake wasn’t saying no to me.”

“Then what was it?”

“It was letting Rikke get her tangled up with Finn. That was like buying a ticket to a house of horrors.”

He nodded his head toward Finn’s sister, who stood with her hand resting on the coffin, but with her face turned toward Tish. Serena could see fury in the woman’s taut skin. Her eyes never left Tish, and Tish stared at the ground rather than look up at her.

“Rikke knows what Finn did,” Peter said.

Serena pursed her lips and thought about the macabre striptease that Stride had described on the beach between Finn and his sister.

“Finn and Rikke were a strange family,” she agreed.

“You’re right, but don’t forget one thing,” Peter told her.

“What’s that?”

“Back in 1977, Laura was in the middle of that family.”

47

Stride and Serena led a parade of cars away from the cemetery. They headed north on Tower Avenue and turned into the parking lot of a bookstore and cafй where they often stopped for soup and coffee when they were on the east side of the Twin Ports. Maggie followed them into the lot, and so did Tish. The four of them went inside together, where nutmeg and blueberries wafted in the air. Amanda, who ran the store, waved at them and broke off from the stacks of books long enough to get a hug from Stride.

They took chairs in the cafй at a table by the window. Stride leaned his head against the wall. The sky through the glass was gray and burgundy, as dusk sped quickly into night.

“What can I get everyone?” Maggie asked.

Stride shrugged. “Coffee.”

“You, boss? Plain old coffee? I figured you for a moka-loco apple fritter latte.”

Stride gave her a withering stare.

“How about you, Serena?” Maggie asked. “You want to join me in a chai tea?”

“I’d love one, but you may as well take a hypo and shoot it into my thighs. Get me a bottled water.”

Maggie rolled her eyes. “Tish?”

“Nothing, thanks. I have to head to the airport soon.”

Maggie sighed and went to the cafй register. She placed their order and wandered over to the books counter to chat with Amanda.

“How’s the book coming?” Serena asked Tish.

“It’s almost done.”

Tish tugged nervously at the sleeves of her burgundy blouse. Her blond hair was pulled back away from her face and pinned behind her head.

“Do you leave tonight?”

Tish nodded. “My suitcase is in the car.” She added, “I suppose you’ll both be happy to see me go.”

Stride and Serena didn’t say anything.

“When I came here, I didn’t really think about what would happen,” Tish went on. “I was naive. I should have listened to you.”

She waited, but the silence stretched out.

“I know you feel bad about Clark Biggs,” Tish told Stride. “And Finn, too.”

“I don’t think you know how I feel at all,” Stride replied.

He saw the cafй manager put their drinks on the counter, and he retrieved his mug of coffee and Serena’s bottle of water and sat down again. When he took a sip, the coffee was smoky and hot. Over Tish’s shoulder, he spotted movement in the foyer and was surprised to see Rikke Mathisen enter the store from the parking lot. Her upper lip was sucked between her teeth. She saw them in the corner, and her stare lingered with venom before she disappeared into a row of biographies in the bookstore.

They sat in silence.

“Maybe I should go,” Tish said finally.

Stride shrugged. “Then go.”

“I know you blame me,” Tish said. “I get it.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Then explain it to me.”

Stride put his coffee down and leaned forward with his elbows on the table. “Do I think things might have been different if you had been honest with me? Yes. Do I think things might have been different if you had come forward when Laura was murdered? Yes. But I don’t know any of that for sure. The truth is, I had no idea Finn was involved until you came to town. I didn’t know anything about the murder of his mother. He was sick. He was desperate. A combination like that can leave someone dead. So no, I don’t blame you for what happened to Finn. And Clark Biggs? That’s a tragedy, but he put himself on that beach. I didn’t. You didn’t.”

Tish folded her arms. “So what is it then?”

“Oh, come on, Tish,” Serena murmured.

Tish looked at her and understood. “Cindy.”

“I’d like to know why she never told me about you,” Stride said.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

Stride scowled and stared at the night sky outside. “I deserve more than that.”

“I know you do.” He watched the struggle in her face. “Look, please don’t blame Cindy. Blame me. When we reconnected, I asked her not to tell you about me. I knew you’d find out that I was in Duluth that night. Cindy didn’t want to keep secrets from you, but you weren’t just her husband. You were a cop. She couldn’t ask you to ignore it if you knew. You’d have to be on my doorstep the next day, and I wasn’t ready for that. It was something I needed to come to in my own time.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it.” Tish clutched her purse and stood up. “I really have to go to the airport. I’m grateful to you, Jon. You could have shut me out. I would have understood if you did.”

She turned for the door, and Stride got up and walked beside her. His hands were in his pockets. He escorted her as far as the outer door that led to the parking lot and opened it so she could pass him. The warm air spilled in with the breeze.

“We’re alone,” Stride said. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

“There’s nothing,” she replied.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Stride frowned. “Good-bye, Tish.”

She took a step closer. Her eyes reminded him of Cindy’s eyes again. She laid a soft hand on his face. “You know that Cindy loved you, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Then nothing else matters, does it?”

Tish backed up awkwardly, tucked her head into her neck, and marched toward her car. Stride let the door swing shut and returned to the interior of the bookstore. Serena was watching him, but he didn’t go back to their table. Instead, he wandered idly down the aisles of the store, occasionally reaching out and touching the spines of books without really seeing them. He tried to understand what he was feeling and decided it was loss. He remembered telling Tish that the one thing he feared in life was endings, and this was a door shutting in his soul.

Maybe, on some level, he had wanted Laura’s murder to remain unsolved. As long as the case was out there, open, then Cindy would be there, too. She would be young. They would be first-time lovers. Ray would be incorruptible. Life would be a mystery. Now that he had the answers, they didn’t give him peace. They simply left him mourning another ending.

Or was it something more than that?

He spied Rikke near the lobby of the bookstore. She stared at him defiantly before she left the shop. He turned a corner and found himself face to face with Maggie and Amanda, who were poring over a book on child rearing. Maggie looked up and read his face.

“You okay?” she asked.

Stride shrugged and shook his head. Maggie squeezed his shoulder.

He pointed at the book she was holding. “What’s this about?”

Maggie shared a secret glance with Amanda. “Think I should tell him?”

Amanda laughed. “Oh, why not.”

“I’m going for it,” Maggie told Stride. “I’ve decided to pursue the adoption thing all the way. I don’t care what it takes. I want a kid.”

Stride smiled. “Good for you, Mags. I couldn’t be happier for you. Really.”

“I just hope it’s a boy.”

“Why is that?” he asked.

“Are you kidding? Me with a little girl? That poor kid would be scarred for life having a parent like me. I couldn’t do that to a child.”

Amanda rolled her eyes. “He’s a man, darling,” she said, with a British accent full of exasperation. “He doesn’t understand the curse we women face and the terrible legacy we pass on to our daughters.”

“Curse?” Stride asked.

Maggie spread her hands, as if it were obvious.

“Sooner or later, we’re all destined to become our mothers,” Amanda whispered in his ear.

Stride grunted and decided this was a conversation that didn’t need a man in it. He turned away to let Maggie and Amanda continue talking about mothers and daughters, and then he froze in his tracks. He spun around so quickly that both women jumped.

“What did you say?”

Tish reached behind her head and undid her ponytail, letting her blond hair blow loosely in the warm wind. Her leather purse dangled from her shoulder. She was angry at herself and felt guilty for walking away. When she gazed at the back-and-forth parade of traffic on the street, she almost turned around and went back inside the store. The letter from Cindy was inside her purse, and she knew she should give it to Stride. She owed it to both of them, but she felt as if she were on a high bridge, paralyzed as she looked down. She couldn’t face the truth.

She unlocked her car and got inside. She threw her purse on the opposite seat and put the key in the ignition, but she sat there without moving or starting the car, wrestling with whether she should stay. If she went to the airport and got on the flight to Minneapolis, she knew she would never come back to Duluth. Not ever.

Maybe it had been a huge mistake to come back in the first place.

Tish turned the key, and the engine fired. She put the Civic in reverse, but when she backed up, she heard metal grinding on asphalt and felt the car lurch as if it were bouncing over something heavy. She stopped, shut off the engine again, and climbed out, leaving the driver’s door open. When she went around to the front of the car, she cursed, seeing the hood slumped to one side. Through the glare of the headlights, she saw that the right front tire was flat on the ground.

“Oh, hell,” she murmured.

She squatted by the tire and checked her watch. She knew nothing about changing tires, and she had no idea if there was a service station nearby. The answer was obvious. Go get Stride. Even so, she hesitated to see him again when she had just shut the door in his face.

Tish got up, turned around, and screamed.

Rikke Mathisen stood directly behind her, so close that their bodies were nearly touching.

“Are you having problems?” Rikke asked.

Tish backed up to give herself space. “Flat tire,” she said.

Rikke towered over her by nearly a foot. Her eyes flicked to the disabled tire, and her face was impassive. “Do you need to be somewhere?”

“I’m heading to the airport.”

“Leaving town?”

Tish nodded.

“I can drive you,” Rikke told her. “Put your things in my car.”

Tish attempted a smile. “You don’t have to do that. I can get the tire changed.”

“It will give us a chance to talk,” Rikke said. “Don’t you think we should talk, Tish?”

Tish rubbed the skin on her forearms. She was cold. “Sure, but it’s a rental car. I can’t just leave it.”

“This isn’t the big city. You can call them. They’ll send someone to get the car.”

“I have friends inside,” Tish said, glancing at the entrance to the bookstore and suddenly wishing she could see Stride’s face. “I’m sure one of them can drive me. You probably want to be alone.”

“I said I would drive you, so let’s go.”

Tish hesitated for another second. Rikke was angry about the death of her brother, but if she wanted an opportunity to vent her poison at Tish, so be it. Tish didn’t care. On some level, she deserved it.

“Sure, okay,” Tish said. “Why not?”

She retrieved her purse, turned off the lights on the Civic, and popped the trunk. She removed her suitcase and relocated it to the trunk of Rikke’s tan Impala, which was parked next to her. Rikke made no move to help. She waited until Tish had closed the trunk and then climbed inside the driver’s door and started the engine.

Tish got inside the Impala and went to put on her seat belt. The strap was broken.

“Sorry, I’ve been meaning to get that fixed,” Rikke said.

She drove out of the parking lot, leaving Tish’s stranded Civic behind them.

“Which bridge do you want me to take?” Rikke asked.

“Whichever is lower,” Tish said. “I hate heights.”

48

Stride leaned closer to Maggie and Serena across the table at the cafй. “How did Finn get home?” he asked them.

Maggie sipped from her cream-colored mug of chai tea and raised an eyebrow at him. “What are you talking about?”

“On the night Laura was killed, Finn was in the park watching her. How did he get back home to Superior?”

Serena shrugged. “By car.”

“Yes, except Rikke never let Finn drive himself,” Stride said.

“Well, Rikke swore that Finn wasn’t in the park at all, but we know he was there,” Maggie said. “So he must have had a car.”

“Or maybe Rikke picked him up,” Stride said.

As soon as he said it out loud, he realized that was what had happened.

After Amanda’s offhanded comment about mothers and daughters, Stride had found himself looking at the circumstances of Laura’s murder from an entirely new perspective. In a case with too many suspects already, he had overlooked one other person who must have been in the park that night.

“Does that really change our theory of the crime?” Serena asked. “If Rikke picked him up, that means she must have suspected all along that Finn killed Laura. So she lied to give him an alibi.”

Stride leaned back in his chair. “That’s what I thought, but it works both ways. By giving Finn an alibi, she also gives herself one.”

Maggie shook her head. “What are you saying, boss?”

“I’m saying if Rikke went to the park to pick up Finn, maybe she came upon the baseball bat lying in the field.”

“Or maybe Elvis found it,” Maggie suggested. “Maybe he was so wracked with guilt about killing Laura that he OD’d a month later.”

Stride nodded. “Yeah, I could be crazy, but Finn’s prints aren’t on the baseball bat. We’ve got prints from Peter, Dada, and Cindy, but not Finn. If he killed her, why wouldn’t his prints be on the bat? Instead, we’ve got a set of prints that we can’t identify.”

“Why would Rikke kill Laura?” Maggie asked.

“That depends on what was really going on between the two of them,” Stride told her. “Amanda said that every daughter becomes her mother sooner or later. We see it all the time in abusive relationships, right? Abuse begets abuse. Rikke admitted to us that her mother sexually molested her. The question is, did Rikke take after her mother and become an abuser herself?”

“You think that Rikke had a sexual relationship with Laura?” Maggie asked.

“I think it’s not impossible. Laura spent a lot of time there when she was struggling with her sexuality. After her breakup with Tish, maybe she was confused and vulnerable and needed someone to confide in. So she went to her favorite teacher for help. What if Rikke took advantage of her trust? We already know she got kicked out of the school district later for an affair with a student. We’ve been saying all along that Finn was insanely jealous of Laura’s relationship with Tish, but maybe we’ve got it backwards. Maybe Rikke was the one who was jealous.”

Maggie took time to think about it, but then shook her head. “Even if Rikke did seduce Laura, why would she kill her?”

“If she was abusive and obsessed, who knows what she would have done when she found out Laura was running away from her?” Stride replied. “You’re talking about a brother and sister who were raised on violence and incest. We know what it did to Finn. Do you think Rikke doesn’t have demons, too?”

“Except we know that Finn is the one who’s capable of murder,” Maggie said.

Stride had a vision of a lonely North Dakota farm, glowing faintly in the center of miles of nighttime fields. It was like being on the moon, Rikke had said. His eyes grew hard.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Do we?”

Maggie opened her mouth to protest and then clamped it shut.

“Son of a bitch,” Serena gasped. “No, we don’t.”

“I want to talk to Rikke,” Stride said, standing up. “I want to get her prints to match to the murder weapon, and I want to know what was really going on in that house.” He stood up and looked around the bookstore. “Is she still here?”

Serena shook her head. “Rikke left right after Tish. I saw her go.”

“All right, let’s see if we can catch her,” Stride said.

The three of them headed for the exit. In the parking lot, Stride turned left on the sidewalk toward his Expedition, which was parked next to Maggie’s yellow Avalanche, but he stopped when Serena took hold of his shoulder.

“Wait a minute, Jonny,” she said, pointing. “That’s Tish’s car.”

Stride recognized the Civic on the far side of the parking lot and immediately spotted the odd angle of the chassis caused by the car’s flat tire. He frowned as he studied the rest of the lot. “Where’s Tish?” he asked.

Maggie jogged over to the Civic and got down on her knees to examine the tire with a penlight on her key chain. “This was cut,” she called to them. “Somebody slashed it.”

Stride looked at Serena. “Rikke.”

The Blatnik Bridge loomed ahead of them beyond the sweeping curve of the highway, its arch illuminated against the night with blurred rows of white lights. Tish grew nervous as they neared the span, anticipating the rope of fear that would twist around her insides as they made the crossing. She wanted to look away, but she couldn’t; instead, she stared at the hump of steel as if it were a sea monster arching its giant back over the water. Her tension broadcast itself through the car.

“Is something wrong?” Rikke asked. Her voice was cool.

“It’s just bridges,” Tish said. “They scare me.”

The windows on both sides were wide open, ushering in a fierce breeze that rattled the frame of the car. They climbed the sharp angle toward the summit of the bridge, and the crisscross steel of the span rose ahead of them like the tracks of a roller coaster. Rikke drove slowly. Traffic soared up behind them, filling the car with headlights and then passing impatiently on their left at almost twice their speed. On either side of them, far below, industrial lights marked the edge of the land, and the blackness signaled the channel of Superior Bay. Tish wrapped her arms tightly across her chest. Her breathing was fast.

Rikke reached out and rested a warm hand on Tish’s thigh, and Tish flinched.

“The view is amazing,” Rikke said. “You should look.”

“I don’t want to see it.”

Rikke slowed even further as they crept skyward. Tish felt sweat on her hands, and her left arm twitched involuntarily.

“Can’t we go faster?” she asked.

“No, I love it up here,” Rikke told her. “Sometimes I think that’s the best way to die. Just let yourself drive off the edge of a bridge.”

“Don’t talk like that, it scares me.”

The car drifted toward the right shoulder, grinding on loose gravel. Tish was conscious of the three-foot ribbon of concrete stretching along the bridge deck, which was the only barrier between the car and one hundred feet of air dropping toward the water. It was inches from her window.

“It’s hard not to think about death when you know you’re dying,” Rikke said.

“Dying?”

Rikke nodded calmly. “The doctors tell me the cancer has come back. Metastasized, they call it. That’s an ugly word. I only have a few months.”

“I’m sorry,” Tish said.

“So you see, it’s a choice I have to think about. That’s what I face. A death that’s fast and free, or one that’s slow and painful. What would you do?”

“I don’t know.”

Rikke’s hand tightened on Tish’s thigh. She squeezed hard, her nails cutting into skin. “I never understood what Laura saw in you. I know you were beautiful, but you never understood her like I did. I was the one she came to for comfort. I was the one who helped her understand who she was.”

“You’re hurting me.”

“Good. You deserve to be hurt.” She took her eyes off the road. “Look at you, you’re still so attractive. Me, I’ve gotten old. My body is a joke now. My breasts are ruined. My thighs are all pebbled over with cellulite. I can hardly bear to look at myself. I was beautiful then, do you remember? My students all wanted me.”

Tish sat frozen, saying nothing.

“Laura wanted me, too,” Rikke said. “Did you know that?”

“That’s not true.”

“Oh, but it is,” Rikke went on. “Laura told me about your affair. She told me how she ran away from you. She came to me because needed a friend. A mother. She was so scared, so lonely. I was there for her when you weren’t. I spent hours letting her cry in my arms. We became close. And one night, when I knew she was ready for it, I showed her that I could love her in a special way.”

“Oh, my God,” Tish said. “No, you’re lying.”

Steel cables dropped from the span around them as they neared the summit. Ghosts of fog drifted around the car and reflected back in the headlights. She could hardly see the road. Overhead, the diamonds of steel looked like spiders viewed through a gauzy web.

“There was nothing evil about it,” Rikke said. “Laura never should have run away from me. Not to you.”

Rikke spun the wheel and jammed her foot on the brake, turning the nose of the car until it bumped against the concrete shoulder. The car jerked to a stop at the peak of the highway. They were at an angle, with barely two feet of rock and dirt outside the door between Tish and the long drop. Other cars buzzed by like hornets, their horns squealing.

“What are you doing?” Tish held on to herself, trembling. “Keep going, keep going!”

“It was always you, wasn’t it?” Rikke snarled. “Laura didn’t care about me. Or Finn. It was you she wanted.”

“Drive, drive!” Tish screamed. “Please!”

Rikke turned off the car.

Tish felt herself hyperventilating. She squirmed away from the car door. She couldn’t stop looking at the steel overhead and the shining rows of white lights. She felt the pull of heights again, the insane urge to leap from the car, to jump.

“Are you crazy? Go, go now, please! I’ll do anything!”

“Why did you come back here?” Rikke asked. “Was it revenge? Is that what you wanted? I tried to scare you away, and you stayed.”

Tish shook her head mutely. Panic and terror ripped through her nerve ends.

Rikke slid the keys out of the ignition and opened the driver’s door and got out, slamming it behind her. Traffic wheeled around her through the fog and night. She walked around the back of the car and came up to the open window on Tish’s side. Inside, Tish cowered near the opposite door. Rikke sucked in a lungful of the whipping breeze and peered over the barrier at the inky blackness of the channel. Then she reached her upper body in through the window, grabbed Tish’s wrist, and yanked her bodily across the car.

Tish wailed. “Don’t do this!”

“Look at me!” Rikke insisted. When Tish buried her face in her chest, Rikke grabbed Tish’s chin and wrenched it up until their eyes met. Tish’s stare was glazed with tears. She saw violence and desire fighting in Rikke’s face. “This is what you deserve for coming back to torture me. For driving Finn crazy. You killed him, do you know that? It was you. You may as well have been the one to put the bullet in his brain.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Rikke took Tish’s skull in both hands, twisted her face, and forced her mouth up, then bent down and covered her lips in a fierce kiss. “Is that so horrible? Does it scare you? Laura was afraid of me after we made love. Afraid! That was Finn’s fault. He never should have interfered, but he was jealous that I was the one she chose.”

Tish wiped her mouth. “Stop this!”

“Finn watched us make love in his bed that night. I knew he was there. But the next day, he went and told Laura what happened in Fargo. It was our secret, his and mine. He had no right to tell her. He just wanted to split us apart. To scare her away.”

Rikke’s face was black. Horror descended on it like a shadow off the bridge.

“Finn never told Laura that I did it for him. For him! I knew what our mother was doing. I had to put a stop to it, and I knew Finn would never lift a finger to protect himself. He just crawled into his little hole and let her keep coming back for more. So I was the one who had to be strong. I was the one who had to save him.”

If Dad were abusing me, could you kill him? Do you have to be insane to do it?

Tish finally understood. Laura wasn’t talking about her father. She was talking about Rikke. About her secret.

“I came back to our farm,” Rikke went on, “and I took that bat, and I beat our mother until she was nothing but mush and pulp. Finn watched me do it. He knew I didn’t have a choice. No one was ever supposed to know. But then he went and spilled his guts to Laura. I heard him. The stupid, jealous bastard! Laura should have let me explain, but she ran away. What was I supposed to think? If she had stayed, I would never have hurt her, but she left.”

Tish’s eyes were wild. “She never told me.”

“Oh, but she would have told you eventually,” Rikke said. “I don’t blame her. I don’t blame Finn, either. We could all have worked it out if it weren’t for you. You’re the one who destroyed us. Now it’s my turn.”

Rikke let the car keys dangle from her finger in front of Tish’s face.

“This is the end for both of us.”

As Tish screamed, Rikke casually flicked the keys out over the side of the bridge, where they fell in a silver flash.

49

As Stride and Serena drew closer to the glowing white arch of the Blatnik Bridge, brake lights turned red, and traffic around them ground to a dead stop. The bridge lights over their heads were bathed in fog. Ahead of them, horns blared in a singsong whine as cars trickled forward, slowly merging into a convoy over the span. He lowered the window of his truck and leaned out to study the highway, but he couldn’t make out the summit of the bridge through the white cloud.

“Is it an accident?” Serena asked.

“I don’t know. Every time the fog rolls in, people start running into each other.”

Serena peered over the edge. “Long way down.”

“One hundred and twenty feet to the water.”

On the opposite side of the center barrier, traffic streamed toward them out of the haze. In the westbound lane, people jostled for position and cut each other off as they merged. He didn’t like the speed or impatience of the other drivers. He reached behind his seat for an emergency flasher and slapped it magnetically to the top of his Expedition. The red light turned and shot a beam around them. He turned on his four-ways and shut off the engine.

“You want to come?” he said to Serena.

“Out on the bridge?”

“You can stay here if you want.”

“Hell, no, I’m with you.”

He opened the door and stepped out onto the bridge deck. Serena did the same on the other side of the truck. She was closer to the edge, where the dirt and gravel of the narrow shoulder bumped against the concrete barrier.

“Be careful,” he said.

“Now you tell me.”

He waved his hands to alert drivers around him and walked up the highway, following the white paint marking the two lanes. Serena veered away from the shoulder and marched beside him. They could only see a few cars at a time in the swirling fog. On their right, steel girders sloped upward toward the semicircle of the bridge arch. Lights came and went over their heads as the mist drifted in pockets. He slapped the metal frame of each car they approached, so the driver knew they were there. He didn’t want anyone bolting across the lane as they came up from behind.

Inside his pocket, his phone rang. He flipped it up. “What’s up, Mags?”

“I’m at Rikke’s house. No sign of her here.”

“Get an ATL out on the tan Impala.”

“Already done. Where are you?”

Stride shook his head. “You don’t want to know. We’re hiking up the bridge deck on the Blatnik.”

“Hiking?”

“Yeah, traffic is almost stopped. Something’s going on.”

“Watch your ass, boss. That’s a mean bridge.”

Stride hung up. He and Serena threaded their way through traffic, but the fog grew thicker as they increased their altitude over the water. Cars pushed and shoved around them as if they were trapped in an amusement park ride.

“Let’s get back to the shoulder,” he told Serena. “I don’t like being in the middle of traffic.”

“Great,” she said without enthusiasm.

He held up his hands and crossed in front of a Chevy minivan that was angling toward the left lane. When they reached the shoulder, he increased his pace, marching faster.

“Watch your step, the gravel’s loose here,” he told her.

“You, too.”

He passed the first of the thick girders that sprouted upward like an erector set into a tree of beams and rivets. Circular holes allowed the wind to pass through the steel. Twin sets of cables hung elegantly from the top of the span like piano strings, suspending the roadbed on which they walked. From the lake, gusts pummeled them, dancing around the towers like sprites. He steadied himself against the concrete barrier, but the sensation of height briefly took his breath away. He could feel the rocking sway of the bridge up here.

Traffic accelerated around them. Cars that had merged into the left lane squealed and left rubber on the asphalt as they roared out of the clogged pipeline of vehicles. Stride made a frantic downward motion with his palms, trying to slow them down. No one paid attention. They sped by like giants.

He heard something. Not the howl of the wind. This was a scream.

An updraft separated the fog like a curtain. Thirty yards away, he spotted a tan Impala, half blocking the right lane of traffic at the very peak of the bridge. A trail of restless cars sped around it, sailing down the open space of the highway toward Duluth. A tall woman stood outside the car, buffeted by the wind. She was dressed in black, and she came and went in the cloud like a witch.

Rikke.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

Serena saw her, too. “What do you want to do?”

Stride grabbed his cell phone and pushed it into her hand. “Call Maggie and get Duluth cops up here from the other side of the bridge. Then see if you can stop these goddamned idiots and shut down the traffic.”

He jogged away from her, then turned back and shouted. “Tell Maggie to get hold of the Coast Guard, too. I want them under the bridge right now in case we need a rescue operation in the water.”

He pulled his gun. He ran.

Rikke gazed downward into the windy stretch of air leading to the bay. “Fast and free,” she murmured.

A wild impulse almost made Tish bolt from the car and push her, but the roadbed vibrated, and the Impala began to move, inching along the highway. Tish screamed, scrambled across the seat, and jammed the emergency brake with her foot.

Rikke ripped open the passenger door and yanked her across the torn vinyl. Tish clutched the steering wheel, but Rikke was stronger, and when Tish felt her fingers torn away from the wheel, the two of them lurched backward. Tish spilled out of the car onto the bridge deck. Rikke cursed and lost her balance, nearly tumbling over the edge.

Tish flattened herself facedown on the ground and covered her head with her hands. She heard a roaring noise from the wind and traffic. Every muscle in her body tightened like a spring. Her fear of heights thumped in her head, shooting panicked impulses to her brain. The voice was seductive, like a Pied Piper telling her to get up, run, and leap for the water. Jump. Make the terror stop.

Rikke squatted beside her. She took a fistful of Tish’s coat and wrenched her up, propping her back against the side of the car. Tish closed her eyes, but Rikke pushed them open with her fingers, and Tish saw the concrete barrier and the open air beyond it, beckoning her with open, breezy arms.

Rikke clutched her face with both hands. “All these years, I wondered if you knew. If you’d seen me. If Laura had told you what I did. I kept waiting for you to come back and expose me. And then, after all these years, you did.”

“I didn’t know,” Tish said. “Please let me go. I can’t take this.”

“I went to pick Finn up in the park that night. He was stoned out of his head, babbling about Laura, about the two of you in the woods. I found the baseball bat in the field, and I knew what I had to do. Silence Laura. And pay her back for leaving me.”

“I loved her!” Tish screamed. She beat her hands ferociously on Rikke’s chest, driving her back toward the edge of the bridge. “You goddamned bitch, how could you!”

Rikke recovered and stumbled forward on her knees. She bunched the lapels of Tish’s jacket in her fists. Their faces were an inch apart. “What about you? I spent my whole life looking over my shoulder because of you. You ruined my life. You ruined Finn’s life.”

Tish slapped her hard. “You took Laura away!”

Rikke pushed herself to her feet, swaying and towering over Tish. “Get up.”

Tish wrapped her hands around Rikke’s ankles and pulled violently. Rikke shouted and tumbled like a tree, landing in the gravel. Tish crawled away toward the speeding cars on the highway, but Rikke threw herself onto Tish’s back and drove her to the asphalt. Rikke rolled her over. Sharp rocks sliced into Tish’s skin. The older woman’s face was blood red and twisted with fury.

Rikke’s fingers curled like talons and seized Tish’s neck. Her thumbs drove into Tish’s windpipe, making her gag and choke. She couldn’t breathe. Her body spasmed. She tore at Rikke’s hands, but they were two blocks of granite.

“Rikke!”

They both heard the voice.

Rikke let go of Tish’s neck and peered through the fog on the bridge deck. Tish gasped for breath and twisted away. Behind her, she saw Stride, his gun out, sprinting toward them. Tish tried to wriggle free, but Rikke came off her knees and stood up, wrapping another choke hold around her neck and dragging Tish to her feet. Tish struggled and kicked, her eyes growing white and wide as Rikke inched toward the edge of the bridge. Tish clawed for the safety of the car, but Rikke held her tight, forcing her to stare into the black abyss below them.

Tish could see it clearly. In her head, she was already falling. Her breath left her chest, and she thought her heart would burst.

“Stop!” Rikke shouted at Stride. “I’ll kill us both.”

Stride stopped. He holstered his gun and held up his hands. “Let her go, Rikke.”

Tish squirmed like a frightened animal in Rikke’s arms. Her fingers tore at Rikke’s clothes.

“If I let her go, she’ll jump,” Rikke said. “She’s out of her head.”

“Put her back in the car.”

Rikke’s legs nudged against the concrete barrier on the edge of the bridge deck. The height of the barrier barely came up past her knees. She leaned into the wind, carrying Tish’s torso with her. Tish wailed, a noise so primal and terrified that it made Stride flinch.

“I’ll do it,” Rikke said. “I’ll take her with me. I don’t care.”

Stride’s mind shut out the world. Distractions fell away. He didn’t notice the wind or the height or the thumping of the highway under his feet. He took two steps closer to Rikke. She was six feet away.

“Stay back,” she warned him.

He was conscious of the fact that Serena was behind him, stopping the flow of cars heading west. On the opposite side of the bridge, he heard the siren of a squad car speeding from Duluth. The squad car stopped twenty yards away at an angle across both eastbound lanes, and a young policewoman bolted out of the car, her gun drawn. He slowly brought up his hand, keeping her where she was. The cop held her ground, and traffic from the Duluth side bled away to nothing as cars backed up behind her car.

They were alone up here.

“I want you both to get back in the car,” he told Rikke.

Wisps of fog floated lazily between them. The bridge was in and out of the flow of clouds. Far below, Stride heard a boat whistle. He recognized it as the call of a Coast Guard rescue cutter, churning toward the span of the bridge and positioning itself in the bay. He had been on that boat many times. Most jumpers didn’t come out of the water alive.

He took another step.

“Let her go,” he told Rikke. “Give her to me.”

Rikke’s eyes were like blue stones. “Don’t move,” she said.

Stride put his hands up. “I’m not moving.”

One of the twin sets of vertical cables supporting the roadbed was immediately behind Rikke. She slid her left arm around the cables to brace herself and hoisted Tish bodily off the ground with her other arm. Tish’s legs kicked madly, and her blond hair twirled around her head in the back-and-forth of the wind.

“Go ahead,” Rikke told Stride with scorn. “Come get me.”

“Tish never did a thing to you,” Stride said. “Whatever happened between you and Laura has been over for years.”

“Then she should have stayed away.”

Stride saw the policewoman on the opposite side of the bridge climb silently over the barrier between the lanes and sidle into his line of vision. She was thirty feet behind Rikke. She signaled Stride with her left hand, then pointed at herself and aimed her gun where it would fire harmlessly over the water. She looked at him with a question in her eyes.

Fire or not fire. Create a diversion.

Almost imperceptibly, Stride nodded.

The policewoman held up her left hand and lifted one finger into the air. Then two. As she lifted the third, her finger depressed the trigger on her gun, and a sharp report cracked on the bridge.

Rikke flinched, and at the same instant, Stride dove. He wasn’t fast enough. Rikke launched Tish violently against the concrete guardrail, where she lost her balance and toppled forward. Rikke turned and ran. Stride clawed for Tish and nearly had her, but her torso slipped through his grasp, and she kept falling. His right hand grazed her thigh, and his left hand caught behind her knee, but she stripped past him, picking up speed on her drop toward the bay. She was sliding, falling, and wailing, until his hands locked around her thin calf and her right foot caught on his clenched fingers, and she finally jerked to a stop.

Tish hung suspended over one hundred and twenty feet of air between the bridge and the water.

Her weight pinned Stride against the concrete barrier. He felt her squirming, fighting him, almost as if she wanted to fall. His upper body was bent over the bridge; he was being pulled, dragged down. He couldn’t lift her up. All he could do was hold on to her ankle, but the muscles in his arms groaned and weakened.

“Serena!” he shouted. He could hear her running behind him.

“Hold on!”

Stride tried to make time stop. He tried to clear his mind of everything except the lock-hold of his hands around Tish’s ankle. They were like handcuffs. Tight. Not giving up.

“Hold on, Jonny, I’m here.” Serena leaned over the edge, stared down at the dark water, and cursed. “Oh, son of a bitch, I don’t know if I can do this.”

“You have to. I’m losing my grip.”

Serena bent over and hunted for a hold on Tish’s body. She bunched Tish’s blouse between her fingers, but the fabric tore away when she pulled, and Serena gasped and fell against Stride. He staggered, and the vise he kept around Tish’s ankle nearly broke apart.

“Your hand, give me your hand!” Serena shouted at Tish, whose arms made a Y below her head, reaching toward the bay.

“No, no, no, I can’t!”

“Reach back, Tish, you can do it.”

“No!”

Stride’s fingers grew numb and sweaty, and pain screamed along the nerve ends in his shoulders and neck.

“See if you can get her other ankle,” he said. They were running out of time.

Tish’s leg spun along with her body. The wind played with her like a toy, pushing her back and forth in circles. Serena grasped for her flying ankle, missed it, and tried again, and finally she shouted, “Got it! Pull! Pull!”

Stride yanked upward with a shout, scraping backward from the edge of the bridge. Serena was beside him, doing the same thing. Inch by inch, they fought their way from the concrete barrier, and Tish came with them. They saw her knees, then her thighs, and when they saw her waist clear the bridge, Serena took one hand, grabbed Tish’s belt, and spilled her back onto the highway, where she twitched like a fish pulled from the water.

Stride let go and fell backward against the Impala. His chest heaved. Pins and needles assailed his arms.

Tish was incoherent, moaning and crying.

“Get her in the back of the Impala, make her lie down,” he mumbled to Serena. “She’s going to need to be sedated before we can move her to our truck.”

“Lieutenant!”

Stride’s head snapped up.

Thirty feet away, the policewoman who had fired the warning shot lay on her back on the asphalt, entwined in a violent struggle with Rikke. The two bodies rolled and fought, and as he watched, the gun skidded away across the lane, out of reach. Rikke reared back and chopped the officer’s face with a crack of her elbow. The cop’s head snapped against the pavement, and she went limp.

Stride swore, pushed himself off the car, and ran. His legs felt like gelatin. Beside him, he was stunned to see cars whipping down the slope of the bridge deck toward the Duluth side as if it were a racetrack. The fog made him almost invisible, and he dodged cars that began to merge into the right lane before they saw him. He charged down the shoulder, gaining ground on Rikke, who staggered to her feet. When he thrust out his tired arms to stop her, she swung wildly at him with both fists. She connected with his jaw, and there was surprising strength in the blow. He grabbed for her wrists, but she shoved his chest, and he skidded backward, losing his balance.

Rikke bolted away.

Stride heard horns and saw dazzling white lights. Cars stampeded like blind elephants. He sprinted after Rikke, but she weaved away from him and darted to his left out into traffic. He shouted a warning, but she didn’t stop. Like a cannon barrel coming out of the fog, a huge black Escalade rocketed down the highway in the left lane, and Rikke stumbled directly into its path. Stride saw the red flash of brake lights. Tires screeched and burned. Rikke screamed, but her cry was chopped short as the SUV hammered her torso and nearly cut her in two.

Rikke’s crushed body spun off the grill of the truck and rolled to a stop twenty yards away. She didn’t move.

Before Stride could react, he felt the presence of something giant and dangerous behind him. He turned to see a white sedan sail like a pirate ship out of the fog. When the driver saw the Escalade stopped in the left lane, he swerved right, coming directly at Stride, who leaped and rolled onto the hood as the sedan struck him. His body bounced on the metal. The windshield hit his chest. He felt air burst from his lungs. He hung on to the hood with his fingertips as the car slammed into the concrete barrier on the side of the bridge, and then his hold gave way.

Stride flew.

He was a bird in the air, shot from the hood of the sedan, launched out over the side of the bridge into nothingness.

Then he was falling.

50

Time stretches out on a long fall.

In Stride’s brain, he knew that it was one hundred and twenty feet to the black water and that he would plummet through that distance in about three seconds. Even so, his thoughts accelerated like shooting stars, giving him enough time to watch himself fall and be acutely aware of his sensations. He had no time at all to be afraid.

As he was thrown into midair, he thought he heard Serena cry, but her voice was gone instantaneously, and the only noise around him was the deafening roar of the wind. Air hurtled against his body, cold and fierce, as fast as a bullet. Its wail sounded like a scream, shouting out from his chest. He hoped it wasn’t. He didn’t want to die screaming.

He caught a last glimpse of the bridge as it disappeared above him. Its lights were a half-moon of blurry white, and then the lights blinked out, and he was enveloped in blackness. He saw nothing below him, no water, no light, and he realized he had squeezed his eyes shut. He forced himself to open his eyes, to take advantage of the strange elongated sensation of time to orient himself. When he did, he could see the lights of the Point, where he lived, and something about that glimmer on the narrow strip of land made him want to see it again.

He tried to breathe, but he couldn’t. His lungs had been hammered by the impact of the hood of the car, and they refused to swell to take in the speeding oxygen around him. He felt light-headed, swimming, dreaming, as if he were already underwater.

Three seconds.

He had time to think about the fact that he wasn’t seeing his life pass before his eyes. No clickety roll of images like film on an old movie projector. No recollections of Cindy, Maggie, or Serena. No voices, sounds, memories. No angel caressing his arm and showing him the loved ones who had gone before him. He was in a vacuum filled with air, about to hit water that was not soft like a knife cutting through butter but was solid like concrete and would savage his bones and tissue and kill him instantly, the flicking of a switch from alive to dead.

That was the first conscious thought to penetrate his mind in that first long second.

He was about to die.

He thought about people jumping from towers. People in planes about to crash. They must have had that same brilliant moment of clarity. You are alive now, and in another moment, you will be dead. He was almost curious about what it would be like, and he realized that death had a strange seduction to it.

But he had time enough to realize that he didn’t want to die, not now, not for a long time, and he had time enough to remember that the Golden Gate Bridge was a lot taller than the Blatnik Bridge, and people had been known to survive the big drop into San Francisco Bay, even when they didn’t want to. Not a lot. But a few.

And those that did went in feet first.

Feet first.

His brain began screaming at him. Feet first.

If he hit the water with his head or his shoulder or his chest, he would die hitting the water as if it were made of brick. His only hope was to cut a little tear in the liquid concrete and slip through. With his eyes open, and that odd, elastic time stretching out like a pink roll of taffy, Stride uncurled his body into the straightest line he could make it, pointed his toes toward the water, lifted his arms straight over his head, and tilted his chin toward the sky. In the lightning span of less than a second, he twisted himself into an arrow heading for a bull’s-eye.

Don’t tense. Let it happen.

You’re going to die.

No, you’re not.

He exhaled the last gasp of breath that was left in his chest and let his muscles go soft. He closed his eyes again, and just as he did, time finally caught up with him. His toes parted the seas. His body fired through the water like a rocket. He was conscious of pain, bones breaking, clothes ripped from his skin, water flooding his lungs. He saw the lights of the world wink out into night. He felt hot agony turn cold, felt himself descending and descending and descending, as if he could travel right through the earth and wind up in hell.

Except the deep channel was not bottomless, and after he had gone down as far as he could go, he hung suspended, a moth enrobed in a cocoon, before his body began to coil and climb. The bay that sucked him in found him hard to swallow and decided to spit him out.

Later, he would remember none of it. His last memory would be of running toward Rikke Mathisen on the bridge. There, the film ended. He would have no recollection of the car that hit him and drove him from the bridge, of falling, of time stretching out, of the impact that broke his left leg and collapsed both lungs, of bobbing to the surface on his back, of the searchlight of the Coast Guard boat bathing like a warm glow over his body. No recollection of ever thinking to himself that if he had made it this far, he was going to live.

51

When Stride saw the glass door open, he realized that the woman who had stepped out onto the restaurant patio was his late wife, Cindy.

For an instant, he felt as if he were falling again, long and hard toward the water. 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.

It wasn’t her, of course. It was Tish.

She joined them at the same table where she had met them for the first time three months earlier. Stride sat with Serena and Maggie on either side of him. The heat of summer had yielded to September evenings, when darkness ate away the daylight. As he watched, the last sliver of sun dipped below the western hillside, and the lake grew gray and unsettled. Tish shivered as she sat down.

“How are you?” Stride asked her.

Tish sized up his condition. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

Stride’s right leg was encased in a cast. His crutches were balanced against the railing of the patio. He fingered the brace on his neck. “Physical wounds heal,” he said. “Yours may be a little harder to deal with.”

Tish put on a brave face and smiled. “You know how they say you have to face your fears to overcome them? That’s a load of crap. I never want to cross a bridge again in my entire life.” She reached out and took Stride’s and Serena’s hands. “I haven’t had a chance to thank you both properly. I should be dead now. You saved me.”

“It’s over,” Stride said. “Try not to think about it anymore.”

It wasn’t really over, though, not for any of them. Serena had nightmares where she relived his fall from the bridge. She would wake up in a sweat and hold on to him. For himself, he was surprised and a little anxious that he had felt no emotional response to his own near-death experience. He felt strangely empty, as if the fall had happened to someone else. He feared that the emotions would build silently like an avalanche and someday overtake him with a roar.

“Seriously, how are you?” Tish asked him.

“It’s going to take me a few months to fully recover,” he admitted. “The doctors don’t want me to come back until the end of the year, but I’m not going to wait that long.”

Maggie winked. “I’m the interim head of the Detective Bureau. He’s afraid I’ll take over.”

“Be my guest,” Stride said.

“I already gave away your chair,” Maggie told him. “It was too big for my ass.”

“Go away, Mags.”

She laughed.

“Did you finish the book?” Stride asked Tish.

“I’m on the last chapter.” Tish tugged nervously at her hair. “I feel guilty writing it. Like it was partly my fault. I drove Laura into Rikke’s arms back then.”

Stride shook his head. “Rikke knew how to manipulate young girls. She was responsible, not you.”

“I know, but maybe if I had been more patient with her, Laura would have stayed with me all along. She would never have fallen into Rikke’s trap. I wish she had told me what happened between them.”

“She was scared,” Serena said. “Laura found out that Rikke was a murderer, and she ran away.”

“And when I came back for her, she died,” Tish said.

“Don’t blame yourself for surviving,” Stride said.

Tish’s eyes pierced him. “That’s good advice.”

An electronic alert chirruped under the table. Stride automatically reached for his belt, but he wasn’t wearing a pager. Maggie pulled out her own pager and studied it. “That’s me, boss,” she said. “We’ve got an armed robbery at a gas station on the south end of Michigan Street.”

“You want me to come with you?” Stride asked. “Unofficially, that is.”

Maggie sighed and looked at Serena. “Do something about him, will you?”

“I’ll try.”

Maggie pushed her chair back and got up. She waved at the three of them and headed for the restaurant door.

“I should be going, too,” Tish said.

Tish stood up from the table, but she didn’t leave. Her mouth became frozen and sad. Her eyes grew glassy, and she blinked back tears. She sat down again, but when she tried to speak, the words caught in her throat.

“There’s something more,” she admitted finally.

Stride felt a sense of uneasiness. He knew without Tish saying anything that whatever she had to share with him involved Cindy. All along, there had been a missing piece. A secret. He wasn’t sure anymore that he wanted to know what it was.

“I have something for you,” Tish told him. “I feel bad that it took me so long to give it to you, but I hope you’ll understand when I explain.”

She slipped an envelope out of her purse and pushed it across the table to Stride. He saw the words written on the outside in black ink. For Jonny. He had no trouble recognizing the tight, precise handwriting he had known for years.

“Cindy gave this to me the last time we were together,” Tish said. “She told me if I ever came back here and decided to be up-front about my past, I should give this to you. I never opened it. I never read it.”

Stride didn’t pick up the envelope.

“Your past?” he asked.

“Yes. Before Cindy’s father died, he told her something about me. Something important. That’s why Cindy reached out to me. I didn’t think I ever wanted anyone else to know, but I guess the two of you deserve to know the truth.”

Stride waited.

“Cindy’s father knew about me and Laura,” Tish continued. “He overheard Laura on the phone, and he knew we were planning to run away together. He went berserk.”

“I knew William Starr,” Stride said. “The idea of his daughter being gay would have been horrifying to him.”

“It was worse than that,” Tish said. “It wasn’t just Laura being gay. It was me. It was the two of us being in love.”

“You?”

Tish slid something else from her purse. A fragile piece of newspaper. When she unfolded it carefully, Stride saw the headline. So did Serena, who caught Tish’s eye. Tish nodded at her, embarrassed.

“I didn’t lie to you, Serena, not really,” she said. “The robbery where my mother was killed had nothing to do with Laura’s death. Cindy found this clipping in her father’s Bible shortly before he died. He had kept it for years. She asked him why, and he finally told her the truth. He finally admitted the affair.” Tish shook her head with fierce bitterness. “That selfish, hypocritical son of a bitch. I hate him. Nothing will ever change that.”

“Your mother?” Serena guessed.

Tish nodded. Tears pooled on her eyelids and ran over to her cheeks. “She was the honorable one. More honorable than he ever deserved. She never told a soul. Not even when she was fired from her job at the store. Not even when she was drummed out of their church. She never admitted that he was the father.”

Stride closed his eyes. He had never liked William Starr. He didn’t like him now.

“All those years, he never acknowledged me,” Tish said. “Even when my mother died, he was too gutless to admit who I was. I’m glad he thought he was being punished by God for everything that happened.” She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “Cindy told me, and I begged her to keep it between the two of us. Can you imagine what it did to me? I found out I had a sister. A half sister. I also found out that the great love of my life was something terrible. Something immoral. Me and Laura. I was in love with-”

Tish stopped. Her voice seized again.

“You didn’t know,” Serena murmured.

“No. We didn’t know. Even after Cindy told me, I tried to pretend to myself that it wasn’t true. I still loved Laura. I still ached for her. I wanted it to be the way I remembered it. I didn’t want to give up what we had.”

Tish fingered the note that lay in front of Stride.

“Cindy wanted me to tell you,” she said. “She hated the idea of keeping part of her life hidden from you, but I insisted. When she knew she was dying, she made me promise to come back here. She wanted me to do it for Laura, but I think she also wanted me not to be alone. She thought maybe I could find some kind of family here.”

Her eyes formed a question.

“You do have family here,” Stride said.

“Thank you. To both of you.” She stood up. “I really do need to go.”

“Don’t stay away forever, Tish.”

She came around the table and bent down to wrap her arms around Stride’s neck. She embraced him and whispered in his ear. “I keep part of her with me, even though I lost her.”

Stride didn’t say anything. Tish gave Serena a brief hug and then slung her purse over her shoulder. The wind mussed her hair, and she fixed it. She gave Stride a broken smile and left the way she had come. Stride followed her with his eyes until she was gone. From the back, she looked like Cindy again, walking away, leaving him.

Stride held the envelope in his hands and thought about letting it go and losing it in the wind. He didn’t need a message in a bottle washing ashore right now. He didn’t need a resurrection.

He and Serena sat together, not talking, as the evening grew darker around them. Most of the other tables were empty; it was too cold now to be outside. Out on the Point, beyond the lift bridge, white caps crested and lapped at the sand. The air smelled like fall.

After a space of silence, Serena got up and kissed his cheek and put her cool fingers on his bare arm. “I’m going to walk on the boardwalk for a while,” she told him.

Their eyes met, and he nodded. She left him there, and he was alone with Cindy.

Stride traced the sides of the envelope with his fingertips and wondered how long he could wait without opening it. He wasn’t sure if he was ready for Cindy to be alive again, even for a moment. Not when his grief was over. When he couldn’t hold back anymore, he used a knife from the table to slit the envelope at the top and slide out the single sheet of paper inside. It was ordinary typing paper, and when he unfolded it, he found a few handwritten lines inside.

Dear Jonny,

If you’re reading this letter, it means Tish finally told you the truth, and you know why I kept you in the dark for so long. It also means I lost the battle with cancer. I’m so sorry, my love, for leaving you earlier than we had planned.

Stride took a labored breath. His eyes burned, and the words blurred on the paper as he tried to read.

Not a day went by that I didn’t long to tell you about Tish, but it was never my secret to share. It was hers. My sister’s. And it was a secret born in too much blood and pain for anyone else to reveal. I hope you can forgive me.

I’m gone now, so tell me that it didn’t take too long to let go of me. I know what kind of man you are, Jonny. When you hit a brick wall, you beat your head against it with your suffering. I hope you didn’t do that for me. Tell me you’re not alone and that you’re in love again. That would give me peace.

I don’t really know what else to say. God may not have given me all the time I wanted, but how can I complain? For the time I had, I had you.

With all my love,

Cindy

Stride folded up the note and slid it inside his pocket. He made a pyramid with his hands and buried his face inside, and he no longer felt empty or dead. He cried one last time for his wife, and then he stared up at the heavens hidden behind the charcoal sky, and he exhaled a ragged breath, and he let go. When he turned and watched the quiet boardwalk on the lakeshore below him, he saw Serena sitting on the rocks amid the long shadows, her back to him, her black hair flying. Seagulls soared and cried around her, floating on the wind with their wings spread. He knew it was time to go. She was waiting for him.