Eight

Erika

MONDAY AFTERNOON

After returning from the hardware store with a gallon of Benjamin Moore’s Saybrook Sage in pearl for the painters and a small container of vanilla Greek yogurt for her lunch, Erika enters Holly’s office and closes the door.

Erika likes this room because Holly insisted on keeping a log wall, the only remnant of the original cabin built by the Stricklands, over Robert’s protests that the logs were energy inefficient. To Erika, the logs are authentic Vermont and homey, especially juxtaposed against Robert’s cherished concrete.

The three other walls are painted a calming blue—Healing Aloe—that goes well with the wide-plank floors in southern pine. Holly brought in wrought-iron daybed with a locally stitched quilt in a print of pale yellow flowers to match the pots of kalanchoe by the one window, and once Erika found her napping there, hugging a worn stuffed bear. She looked like a little girl, small and vulnerable.

A bamboo standing desk with Holly’s iMac takes up most of the far wall. Erika lowers it to a sitting position, pulls up a chair, and goes to work, buoyed by her unexpected success with LuAnn this morning.

First on her to-do list is checking the status of the Lacanche Cluny Classique model gas range in french blue with brass hardware. It was ordered in June with the understanding that it could not be delivered for six weeks. Now it’s October and allegedly the range is being held up in a container port outside Newark. This has been an ongoing headache. Customer service has started answering her calls with, “Sorry, Erika, no developments,” before she even has a chance to speak.

To her delight, the news is for once positive. The French range has been sprung from captivity and is on I-91 rolling toward Vermont. All Erika has to do is beat the bushes for skilled laborers to install the foreign stove—no easy feat with this short notice. Fingers crossed, the $16,000 range will be front and center by the reveal.

Next up, Colton and the table. This has her worried. He was supposed to have it delivered before the wedding. However, he messaged her during the wedding that he’d run out of the heirloom beeswax he uses to finish the wood, so it wouldn’t be ready until Tuesday.

His attitude was annoyingly blasé, which might mean the table’s as exquisite as he’s been boasting or it’s still a pile of sticks in his mother’s basement. The longer Colton takes to produce the goods, the more Erika fears it’s the latter. She has her reasons.

For starters, he didn’t take measurements of the dining area until last month and even then the lumber wasn’t cut. He told Holly he was trying to choose between two maples to determine which wanted to be immortalized as a center of familial “break fasting.” Instead of Holly cracking the whip, as any right-minded customer would do, she poured him a cup of yerba maté and they discussed wood spirits and modern Druidism. One of those maples could have been down and split in the time it took to hold their impromptu tea party.

Despite Colton’s promises at the farmer’s market to keep Holly apprised of his progress, it’s been mostly crickets since then, though not for lack of trying on Erika’s end. She leaves yet another message on his mother’s home phone urging him to confirm he’ll deliver the table tomorrow, but she’s not holding her breath. Colton went AWOL when he dumped her via text last year, too. When it comes to confrontations, Mr. Naturalist prefers to hide under a rock.

Those tasks done, Erika devotes the rest of the afternoon to hunting down Holly and Robert. On LuAnn’s advice, she launches her search by calling Montreal’s choicest hotels. None of the top ten hotels on Tripadvisor claims to have guests registered under those names, though Erika realizes that might be because Robert booked them under pseudonyms to avoid being spotted by fans . . . or maybe the head honchos at TMB.

On a hunch, she loads Holly’s app for the security cameras at the house and is puzzled to find all four have been deactivated. The last images are from Saturday morning around eight a.m., when the rental company arrived to deliver the folding chairs.

Because of the wedding activity, Robert or someone must have turned off the cameras and then forgotten to turn them back on. He’s usually hyper alert for saboteurs, a holdover from working on his father’s gentrification projects in Roxbury, Massachusetts, where the elder Barron’s cameras regularly caught protestors trying to tamper with equipment. Perhaps there was an electrical malfunction or maybe Holly accidentally switched them off. Erika moves on, another question to ask the couple when they return.

Having exhausted all other options, Erika debates calling their parents. She doesn’t want to unnecessarily spike alarm by reaching out to Robert’s father, but she is running out of ideas. As for Holly’s mother, that’s a dead end. Those two haven’t spoken in ages, apparently.

Holly must not totally hate her mom, though. Otherwise, why would she keep a small silver-framed photo of her on the shelf?

Erika picks it up and runs a finger along the silver frame. Tammy Beauregard looks not much older than Holly herself in this picture. Thin with the sun-kissed skin of a lifelong Floridian, she’s at a beachside bar, her lips a coral pink smile, her french-manicured nails stroking the stem of a chemically green margarita. She looks nice enough. Kind of fun, actually.

Too fun, perhaps. Holly once quipped that her mother “was always out drinking and entertaining clients, never at home taking care of me” when she was growing up. Erika didn’t know Holly well enough then to press for more details and didn’t want to upset her further by trying, especially since, after making the comment, her boss grew very quiet.

The office phone rings, jolting Erika out of her revery. Her initial hopeful thought is . . . Robert!

“I’m looking for my son, is he there?” The dictatorial tone is unmistakable. The two men sound identical when they’re in a mood.

“Hello, Mr. Barron,” Erika says, relieved he, not she, is doing the reaching out. “Robert’s not here right now.”

“Where is he? He’s not answering my calls or texts and I’ve been trying since Sunday.”

Well, that answered that question. “He’s on his honeymoon, though no one appears to be able to contact him or Holly. I suppose they want to be alone?” She puts that in a question to avoid an argument.

“That’s no excuse. I’ve got a bone to pick with him about underpaying the security team I brought in at not inconsiderable effort at his insistence. Of course, the eleventh-hour security wouldn’t have been necessary if he’d taken my advice weeks ago and nipped the problem in the bud.”

Having never had a father she remembers, Erika isn’t used to the startling effect of a man in full-throttle indignation demanding accountability from an offspring. It’s almost as if she were his daughter and he’s furious at her for something she did wrong. It’s not fair.

“I’m, I’m sorry,” she stutters. “I don’t know anything about this. Was there a problem weeks ago?”

“I thought for sure you knew. Robert said that jackass sent the photo to your phone. You’re his assistant, no?”

“Yes, but . . .” Her head is swimming in confusion. “Robert said he requested security out of an abundance of caution. He never mentioned anything specific.”

“Because he was ashamed of being outed as a wimp and rightly so. A Barron would handle this himself like a real man, I told him. We don’t go running to the police so they can air our private affairs in a public report. Go root out this Strickland fellow and show him who’s boss. That’s how you deal with bullies who are too chicken to meet you mano a mano, who have to resort to sending anonymous letters in the mail for chrissakes!”

A cold, clammy sensation is rippling through Erika’s entire body as the elder Barron gleefully goes on and on about how he would have taken “the hillbilly” in hand. She can barely pay attention; all she can think is . . . What letters?

A tickle rises up her neck. Robert never mentioned anything about Zeke Strickland other than referring to him as “the prior owner,” and that was usually in the context of the rehab: “The prior owner’s well is inadequate.” “The prior owner should have put the stone wall here.” “The prior owner butchered that orchard.”

Most of what she knew about Zeke Strickland was from conversations with her mother at the dinner table, and that wasn’t much, except that he’d suffered a traumatic brain injury from falling off a ladder and lost his ability to work. Then he lost his family and finally his property. Her mom felt really bad about his string of bad luck.

Bert down at the general store was far less generous. Months before, when he learned Holly and Robert had hired her as their assistant, he said, “I’d think twice about working for them flatlanders, dear. They had the sheriff drag the guy who lived there out of his own cabin and from what I heard he vowed to get back at Barron for stealing his land and may I say I can’t blame him. Still, he ain’t right in the head, you know. Used to take potshots at hikers for trespassing. No telling what he might do to Barron.” Then he mimicked a shiver.

Erika had dismissed him as Bert being Bert, as usual trashing his favorite targets—flatlanders—despite their being his best customers.

After assuring the elder Barron his son will call him as soon as he gets in, she hangs up and goes to her purse to fetch her keys, one of which is small and made of silver metal. It fits in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet reserved for Robert’s Robber Barron material. Not even Holly has access.

She wouldn’t have access, either, except Robert gave her the key so she could leave the contraband Cuban cigars there. With all that was going on with the wedding, she never had a chance to give it back. The drawer slides open partway, far enough to see the cigars are gone.

Robert’s black Dell laptop is there, but she can’t wedge it out, because the drawer appears to be stuck. Papers sticking out of a manilla folder under the laptop have gotten caught in the groove on the track, making it impossible to open. She pushes the drawer in and out, trying to dislodge them, and winces at the sound of the paper tearing.

Frustrated, she sticks her hands under the laptop and yanks out the whole file. It’s not thick, but it’s messy, filled with envelopes shoved in haphazardly, as if Robert had to hide them quickly and shut the drawer before anyone saw.

All are addressed to THE SO CALLED ROBBER BARRON in dark blue ink, the author pressing his pen so fiercely into the paper, it’s made tiny holes. She’s come across them before in her daily mail runs. They’re the ones that instantly turn Robert’s mood sour, worse even than when he has correspondence from the IRS. These must be the letters Robert’s father was referring to.

These might explain why Robert was so antsy and restless throughout the ceremony, eyeing the hill as if a sniper were lurking there and then rushing Holly away from the arch once her mother pronounced them husband and wife. Perhaps more disturbing was how he’d arrived unannounced on her doorstep at midnight, demanding to borrow her car so he could hustle his wife to Canada.

What was it he said exactly? “It’s got an international border crossing . . .” As if the restrictions of going through customs at Highgate, Vermont, were the appeal of the trip instead of visiting a romantic European-style city.

And now he and Holly have gone dark.

Erika gets up and flips the lock on the office door. She’s not sure why she did that, except she has a prickly sense she’s not alone. Returning to the file, she opens one of the envelopes and removes a piece of graph paper. She does the same with the next and the next. Hands shaking, pulse racing, she lays them out on the southern pine floor, where they make a square of monomaniacal madness.

Though they’re unsigned, she can see why Robert told his father they were from Zeke Strickland.

“He’s moved on,” Erika overheard Robert comment once when he and Holly were discussing whatever happened to the “prior owner.” “Heard he went back down south somewhere. Or was it out west?”

But this most recent envelope, like all the others, was mailed from Burlington, Vermont, and only days before the wedding. And, like all the others, it’s spelled out in letters cut from magazines and pasted onto the graph paper, old school.