He never checked into a motel. He spent the remaining hours of the night driving, got halfway to Liz’s house before he turned around and worked his way back along the coast, chasing moonlight along the back roads, and as dawn broke he went to a Dunkin’ Donuts in Rockland and drank coffee and thought about calling Liz, or Roxanne Donovan, or Don Johansson. He knew that he should make someone aware of his return and of what he’d just been told by Howard Pelletier.
He didn’t make any calls.
I’ll speak to Kimberly first, he told himself. I’ll do that much, and then let people know.
It could cost him his job. That idea should have seemed threatening, but after all the months in Bozeman, it didn’t. The career he’d anticipated with the Bureau was gone, and he saw his FBI future clearly: a succession of satellite offices, waiting to become pension-eligible in someplace like Iowa or Indiana.
There were other options. The damage he’d done to his future as an agent wouldn’t reach back to his reputation as a professor. But he’d wanted to do the work, not write about it or lecture about it.
He’d wanted to close cases.
Most of America was still asleep by the time he reached the wharf at Port Hope, but there the day was already well in motion—the only fishermen who hadn’t headed out were the ones who wouldn’t last more than a season or two. Howard Pelletier’s boat—the Jackie II, named after her as a reminder of what he was working for, what kept him heading out on rough water and in harsh winds—was gone from its mooring, but his skiff remained. He’d have rowed out so Barrett could have the skiff, which was a fourteen-foot aluminum boat with a small outboard, not so different from the one that Barrett’s grandfather had owned.
The water was different, though. Even on a calm day in a sheltered bay, and even across so short a distance as Port Hope to Little Spruce, the North Atlantic could remind you of what it really was beyond that pretty face.
As Barrett cast off from the dock and motored away from Port Hope, farther out into the bay, toward the open sea, the morning sun was winning the fight with the fog and the breeze had come to its aid, pushing back the fog in long gusts like strokes of a whisk broom. Each gust seemed to reveal a little more of the coast—high, packed pines that appeared black where they grew thickest, and gray granite cliffs carved jagged by wind and water. This ocean always whispered reminders of its power. It was beautiful, but it was also brutally honest. There were few sandy beaches; there were many battered rocks. It was an ocean that seemed intent on announcing that it hadn’t been conquered, only coped with. Anyone who told you that it had been conquered had not sailed out of Bar Harbor or Belfast in foul weather.
It took him twenty minutes to make it to Little Spruce, and he was freezing in his jeans and chambray shirt and sneakers, the lazy casual attire of the airport rendered ridiculous out here on the water, as if he were wearing a sandwich-board sign identifying himself as a rube. The good news was that all the locals had headed out earlier, leaving nobody to gawk at the sight of a tourist stealing a workingman’s boat.
When he arrived at Little Spruce, the dock was empty. The island was home to only summer cottages and a dozen diehards like Jackie Pelletier, but it was too small to offer any of the year-round potential of Vinalhaven, Islesboro, and Monhegan, with their fishing communities and ferries. Little Spruce was about beauty, plain and simple, and it held no shortage of that.
The last time he’d been on the island it was to notify Howard Pelletier of Kimberly Crepeaux’s confession. Now he tied up and climbed the ladder to the weathered pier and headed back up the slope to find the same woman and tell her that he was going to listen again—just one more time, that was all.
Just once more.
The studio looked as he remembered it except for the addition of a set of gleaming padlocks on steel hasps. The ancient but solid cottage beside it offered no trace of change, and when he knocked, there was no sound inside, and for an instant he thought that either she was gone or she’d never been here at all, that it was all a cruel tease designed by Howard Pelletier as repayment for the one Barrett had given him. Then the door opened and he stood face-to-face with Kimberly Crepeaux for the first time since he’d visited her in jail on the day the divers had searched the empty pond.
Unlike Howard, who’d seemed to age years in the past few months, she looked unchanged, the short and slight girl with a fragile, almost birdlike bone structure. She seemed likely to blow away in a strong wind, but she was also the only person who’d ever sat across from Barrett and confessed to plunging a knife into a wounded man’s stomach before drowning him.
“You’re back,” she said matter-of-factly. The lack of surprise gave him a sudden realization.
“How does Howard contact you? There’s no cell reception out here.”
“He gave me some kind of radio. He called it ship-to-shore or something? That way I can talk to him and to my little girl, you know?”
Ship-to-shore phones were expensive. Howard’s investment in Kimberly Crepeaux was growing quickly.
“I guess he can get your attention,” Kimberly said with a touch of petulance. “I never got a call back when I needed help.”
Her tone-deafness was astonishing. Barrett said, “Your story and your recanting—do you understand what those meant to people other than you? Do you even think about that, Kimberly? Ever?”
She blinked her pale green eyes at him in confusion. “Of course I do. It’s why I went to see him. To make things right.”
“To make things right.”
She nodded. Her pupils were pinpoints, and he wondered if she was using again.
“I thought my only option was to pretend I’d lied. Once you couldn’t find the bodies, what other choice did I have?”
She said that like an accusation, like it was Barrett’s fault that she was in this fix.
“I could not find the bodies,” he said, “because they were not where you promised they would be. I am also now supposed to believe that your original story was the truth, despite all the evidence to the contrary, despite the fingerprints and DNA linking Jeffrey Girard to those murders.”
“Oh, I think I understand that now.” She leaned against the door frame, regarding him with pride. “He might’ve helped move them. See, I heard all sorts of stuff you don’t know about.”
“Where did you hear all this?”
“In jail, mostly.”
Barrett nodded and looked away from her, out to the glittering sea, the adrenaline fading into fatigue. Here we go again. Kimberly and her jailhouse stories. What sort of idiot do you have to be to come all the way back out here and listen to more of them?
“Mathias is going to kill me,” she said. “Or have somebody do it. Just because he got out of it, that doesn’t mean he’ll let it go. Me talking to you, telling you how it happened? That’ll get me killed.” She rubbed her arms, shivering in the wind off the ocean. “Come on inside so I don’t freeze, would you?”
“No.”
“What?”
“Go get a jacket if you need one. We’re taking a field trip, Kimberly.”
She looked more fearful at this prospect than she had when she proclaimed that Mathias Burke intended to kill her.
“What are you talking about? I don’t want to go talk to more cops. Nobody listens, and they’ll just—”
“We aren’t going to see any cops. We’re going to the pond.”
She stopped rubbing her arms. “I don’t want to go back there. Not ever again.”
“That’s why we’re going,” he said. “It’s what I should have done the first time.”
He’d made his academic reputation by critiquing the police obsession with physical reactions of suspects. He was convinced that he needed only the words. Now, in practice, he was not so sure. Kimberly was a fine storyteller, but he didn’t think much of her as an actress. If that place mattered to her, he thought she would show it.
“I’m not going,” she said, jutting her chin like a pouting child, but her eyes were wide and truly afraid.
“Then I’m leaving.”
She bit her lower lip and stared past him, back toward the mainland. The wind picked up and tousled her hair and she reached up and pushed it back from her face. Her shirtsleeve slid up when she did that, and he looked for needle tracks but didn’t see any. That didn’t mean much, though. She could be snorting or smoking.
“Okay,” she said then in a soft but firm voice. “I’ve got her ghost all around me out here already. If I can stand it here, I can stand it out there.”