Georgie set the parking brake and sat with her fingers looped through the door handle. Just breathe, she thought. Think. She knew she would never see Donna Green again. With Donna gone, so was her story. Without anyone official to confirm it, it would take time to document that Abbie Green was Carson Ward’s sister. She wasn’t even sure where to start. Adoption records? The university? Social Security office? She would need to talk to Elizabeth, but after finally getting through to the receptionist at the newspaper, she learned that Elizabeth and her boyfriend were spending Christmas at a cabin in the Bob Marshall Wilderness—far out of cell-phone range. There was just a skeleton crew at the paper putting together the Christmas Day issue. Nobody who could help her. Nobody she’d trust with the information.
She felt angry with Voelker, though she knew he was just doing his job. Surely, the night they’d met in the bar he’d already known who Abbie Green really was. Now the silence coming from the police in the wake of her death made sense. It still pissed her off, but she understood. The cops wouldn’t want the connection between Abbie and Carson to be public until they could put it in context. The best play was to keep quiet and hope detectives figured it out quickly. Now Voelker wasn’t picking up his cell. She needed to talk to someone who could start putting the pieces together, but after spending an hour driving aimlessly from street to street, she had wound up here. Something about the tree-lined streets made her feel at ease. It wasn’t quite dinnertime but fully dark when she climbed out of the truck and walked up to Chris Dorne’s house.
No one answered her knock. She strained her ears for movement inside, but the house had the silent, hollow feeling of a derelict building. Through the gap in the front curtains it looked like every light was on. She walked through dry leaves to the driveway, finding the garage door open and Dorne’s car gone. An interior door to the house stood ajar and from somewhere inside she could make out the distant crackle of voices.
“Hello?” she called, ducking inside. The murmur of conversation didn’t slow or stop and she realized it was the canned sound of a radio or TV.
She moved deeper into the house, her footsteps sounding like gunshots on the bright hardwood of the hall. She tried to walk normally, but couldn’t shake the seasick feeling that she was unwelcome here. Past the sunken living room and into the kitchen she found a small radio playing on the counter. Public Radio broadcasting an opera—the cry of foreign tenors lamenting unknowable tragedy. A paring knife lay on a cutting board, browning chunks of apple next to it. She picked up the knife, felt it light and deadly in her hand, and set it down. Admonishing herself: it was a betrayal to be here, touching things that didn’t belong to her.
She called out again but got no response. Dorne wasn’t there. She tried to imagine what sort of business could summon him away at this time of night on Christmas Eve, leaving doors open and lights on. Climbing down the stairs into the living room, she noted how clean and empty it looked compared to the night of Abbie’s memorial. The coffee tables were scrubbed shiny, the bricks in front of the fireplace whisked clean of soot and ash.
She had never liked this house. She always thought it was a strange choice for Dorne, who had made his name as an advocate for the town’s poorest families. This place was too big for a single guy living by himself, too showy for the man who used to write guest editorials decrying gentrification and ballooning property values. When Susan left him and he moved out of the Pullman houses, he could’ve gone anywhere. He could’ve gotten the best house on the Northside, something with history and character. He could’ve kept his original seat on the city council, kept plugging away in the old neighborhood. Instead, he moved to one of the richest parts of town, as far away from the Northside as he could get and still be in the same city.
Dorne probably spent close to a million dollars on this house. It was so modern, all clean lines inside—wood, rock, and glass everywhere you looked. There was something lonely in it, something desperate. Like buying a sports car. A middle-aged man still trying to be sexy. Maybe it worked. Maybe Dorne could bring grad students here and seduce them with his rock gardens and fruit trees. His little landscaped nooks for contemplating. Did he do things like that? She didn’t know.
He had invited her to dinner once, just after she came back from college in Oregon. It was the hot heart of summer, light outside until almost eleven o’clock. Scott had come, too, and Dorne slid back the big glass doors to the deck so they could barbecue. They ate flatiron steaks and grilled corn on the cob and he poured wine and Scotch from a stash he kept in the basement. They all got a little tipsy talking, laughing, listening to birds clucking in the pines. Even then Georgie thought it was sad that he was living here by himself. She couldn’t help but notice how happy he was to have the two of them there—or the small fracture of regret in his face when it was time for them to go.
From the edge of the living room she turned and noticed something strange inside the fireplace. At first she thought it was the carcass of a small animal and the surprise brushed her back against the cold glass wall. As she stooped to stare through the fireplace’s scorched double doors, the object took shape as a small clump of hair half buried in the char. A potato-sized knob, wiry black and artificial-looking. The bricks dug into her knees where she squatted to open the doors. The fireplace was cold, as if nothing had been burned in there for days. She drew back her sleeve and leaned in, plucking the object out of the ash and shaking it. The thing was light and silky, no sharp bones or waxy skin. It was a fistful of hair hanging in her hand, but it had never been alive. The texture was synthetic, fried stiff in places, smelling of burned plastic. Drawing it out, she felt the rough web of netting underneath and knew she was holding the remains of a wig.
Her mind flashed to Matthew’s mystery man: the long-haired guy in the trench coat he’d seen the night Abbie Green died. The same one he’d chased through the dark while her own house burned. She flung the wig back into the fireplace. It couldn’t be Dorne out there, dressed up and sneaking through the old neighborhood. That didn’t make sense, though she couldn’t think of another reason why a cheap wig would wind up in his fireplace.
Her mind rejected the logical leaps it wanted to make, but suddenly she needed to get out of there. She floated past the kitchen on legs she couldn’t quite feel, the opera still warbling out, and down the hall. In the garage she paused on the top step. The space was tidy and full of outdoor gear—bikes and backpacks and twin kayaks packed neatly against one wall. Everything with its own shelf or hook. To her left two large plastic garbage cans stood together on a wheeled cart. The lids were off and she could see they were empty. On the opposite side of the garage she noticed another pile of trash bags. These slumped fat and full on the floor, as if waiting to be taken out. A green tube of heavy cloth poked out through one’s fastened top. A jacket sleeve.
She tore loose the knot in the bag’s red tie handles, pulling out a dark green coat. She held it up in front of her like the hide of a trophy animal. She knew that coat. It was threadbare but still heavy, dotted on the sleeves with coffee and ink. Inspecting the lining, she found Scott Dorne’s name scrawled inside, confirming it was the same coat he’d worn nearly every day as a senior in high school. It had been years since she’d seen it and now she caught a whiff of something chemical coming off it.
Tucking the coat to the side, she yanked the bag open wider to reveal the stippled surface of a red plastic gas can. She felt like she had been stabbed with a very cold knife. The warmth drained out of her, seeping through the bottoms of her boots to puddle on the floor. Chris Dorne killed Abbie Green. He must have shot Detective Phan, too. He tried to burn down her house. In the next breath she realized it could have been Scott—that the wig, the coat, and the gas can could just as easily be Dorne covering for his son. But she knew Scott better than almost anyone—or at least thought she did—and couldn’t reconcile any of this with him. He was a brooder, a moper, a self-righteous asshole, but he wasn’t a doer. He wasn’t a killer.
Her next thought was: Get out. Get out, get out, get out.
The urge seized her to throw the trash bag into her truck. She could go back and drop the wig in a Ziploc bag if Dorne had any in his kitchen. She could take them to Voelker. Dorne’s DNA would be all over them. But at that moment headlights swept across the front of the house and Chris Dorne’s black SUV rounded the corner at the end of the block. The SUV was going fast, skidding on the turn. She felt the weight of a trap fall over her. With nowhere else to go, she stuffed the trench coat back into the bag and retreated into the house, leaving the door open, as it had been when she first came in.
She quick-stepped back through the living room, but froze again with one hand on the sliding glass door. She heard the car rumble into the garage, the engine shut off, and then nothing. Dorne wasn’t getting out. He would’ve seen her truck in the street, would know she was there somewhere. Maybe now he was staring at the garbage sack torn open at the back of the garage. When she finally heard the door open and close, she moved again, going out onto the deck. The wood planks were slippery, dusted with powdery snow. She slid the door closed and risked one last look over her shoulder just as Dorne came into the house from the garage.
He was dressed in sweats and a long winter coat, his horseshoe hair mussed on the sides as if he’d been hard at work out in the cold. He carried what first looked like a cane, but she realized it was a golf club. A rusted iron with green wrap on the handle. His cheeks were flushed, his mouth was locked in a hard scowl. He called her name in the empty house, eyes wide and searching, scanning the kitchen and living room. He might have missed her and walked right past, but her cell phone rang. The bleating tone sounded as loud as a bullhorn. She grabbed it from her pocket and silenced it—seeing on the caller ID it was the newsroom calling—and his head snapped up. He saw her through the glass and blinked, his face easing back to normal. He smiled, friendly, and tried a wave. She turned and ran.
She made it to the far end of the deck before the glass door opened behind her. She took the stairs in a jump, skidding on one knee at the bottom, her phone flying out of her hand. She scooped it up and kept moving. At the entrance of the wilderness trails Dorne called her name again. “Wait,” he said, his voice the rap of a drum. “Please.”
She had written a story about the wilderness area once. There were miles of walking and biking trails hugging the northern lip of town. In the summer they would be crowded with people finishing up hikes and taking their dogs for evening walks. Now there was no one. She looked back and saw Dorne was no longer on the deck. It was even colder here than in town, the snow starting to come down harder. She braced herself against the sides of trees where they grew within arm’s length of the trail. A few times she stopped to rest, her lungs straining, ears burning for sounds coming up behind her.
It felt like she was lost deep in a thick forest, but she knew that was just an illusion. The wilderness area folded around the town like a ribbon, but no matter where you were inside it, you were never far from people. The trail wound down the hill and she knew if she just kept heading south, it would eventually spit her out at a road or house or park. As she got closer to the trailhead she saw backyard fences, an old gazebo littered with trash. All at once she could hear the sounds of the highway and then at the top of a hill she saw it—the dark slash of asphalt, headlights streaking by. A surge of relief spurred her forward, but she slowed again at the tree line. She didn’t know if Dorne was out looking for her. She didn’t want to stumble out to the road just as he passed by in his SUV.
Her face burned, half from running, half from the anger and sadness welling up inside her. She swallowed those feelings, refusing to stand there shivering and crying in the cold. She stepped out of the trees to scramble down to the highway and flag down a car and nearly screamed when her phone rang in her hand. She had forgotten she was carrying it. She wiped condensation from the screen with her thumb and saw Matthew’s name on the caller ID.
Her breath clouded the line as she answered, nearly shouting with so much to say. The panic she heard on the other end of the line stopped her. The call lasted less than a minute, but when it was over she had no more time to think. She sprinted toward the highway, eyes fixed on the lights streaming by there. She made another call just as she got to the crest of the road, pressing the phone to her ear so hard it hurt, willing that this time Voelker would answer.