The Lake Did Not Keep Him
Chapter 04 - The Lake Did Not Keep Him
Harriet Kessler refused coffee. She accepted a glass of water and carried it into Adrian's office without waiting to be asked. Her boots left little crescents of mud on the polished floor. Sophie almost reached for a cloth out of habit, then stopped herself.
"Victor spent twenty-nine years repairing your father's ships," Harriet said. "He used to come home smelling like rust and peppermint. He kept peppermints in his pocket to cover the cigarettes he thought I didn't know about. When the crane fell, Mr. Moretti sent flowers so large the funeral director had to move a pew."
Adrian had been at that funeral. He remembered a little boy rubbing the sleeve of a black suit against his eyes. He hadn't known whether to offer his condolences. He'd shaken hands with men who'd worked beside Victor for decades and watched them look away.
"What do you want from me?" he asked.
"The same thing I wanted then. A date, a signature, somebody willing to tell the truth when it will cost them something. Your father knew the crane was unsafe. He needed the insurance money. Howard knew, too. Daniel found the maintenance reports."
"How?"
"Victor taught him to use the yard's old darkroom. Daniel liked photography. He came looking for pictures and found a locked cabinet open. He copied what was inside." Harriet's mouth tightened. "A fifteen-year-old boy did what the men collecting salaries from that company wouldn't."
Adrian rubbed his jaw. His father had maintained separate ledgers, one for the accountants and another for everything else. Adrian had spent the years since Lorenzo's death trying to close that distance. He had replaced officers, hired independent auditors, sold two suspect subsidiaries. He'd also signed annual statements prepared by Howard's firm because they came with the right letterheads.
"If you're right," he said, "I benefited from what happened to your husband."
"Yes."
She said it without the smallest pleasure. That was harder to bear than an accusation delivered with anger.
The old tape recorder arrived in Ellie's shopping bag, wrapped in a dish towel. It required batteries, and when the play button finally clicked down, Judith Bennett's voice emerged from the speaker with the thin, underwater sound of a person calling through twenty-two years.
*Tuesday, August twenty-fourth. Doctor says the boy needs quiet. Lawyer says he needs a different name. I think he needs his mother.*
A second voice followed, young and shaky. *I don't want to go with him.*
Judith said, *Who, honey?*
*The man in the brown car. He said Addie told Dad about the pictures.*
Adrian shut his eyes. He could remember his father's brown Lincoln, parked under a willow tree at their summer house. He could remember Daniel refusing to join them for supper the last evening. But he'd never seen the copied records, never been told there was anything to find.
*Did your brother tell your father?* Judith asked on the tape.
The boy's answer was barely audible. *I saw the envelope in his hand. I thought he was helping. Maybe he wasn't.*
A click, a scrape, and the recording ended. Sophie turned the cassette over. The second side contained an hour of ordinary nursing notes, dates and meals and medications, until Judith's voice returned: *If anyone asks, the patient was moved for observation. I have kept the chart copy with me. They cannot erase a body by changing a name.*
Margaret had been looking at the carpet. "I knew there was a recording," she said. "Judith told me she had the boy's voice. I was afraid to ask for it."
"You were afraid for your daughter," Sophie said.
"Yes. And I was afraid of losing my job, my little pension, my place in a world where people like Howard Cross could make you unemployable by lunchtime. Both things were true."
There was no noble story available to make that confession prettier. Adrian found himself grateful she hadn't attempted one.
Harriet took a photograph from her coat pocket. It showed a small sailboat tied alongside a weather-beaten dock. On its stern was painted EVELYN, in blue letters. A date was written on the back: August 18, 2004. The boat looked undamaged.
"The police said the sailboat capsized in a storm," Adrian said.
"There was rain. No storm. Victor's cousin worked the harbor and took this picture the following morning. The boat had been moved there overnight. Somebody cut its mooring line and told a story about the lake."
"Why would my father stage Daniel's death?"
"Because Daniel had proof the crane collapse wasn't an accident. And because he knew your brother wouldn't keep quiet just because somebody asked nicely."
Sophie noticed a mark on the photograph: a fresh white scratch along the stern. She took the picture nearer the window. "This isn't the sailboat in the photograph from the envelope," she said. "The first boat had a black cleat near the rail. This one doesn't."
Adrian looked closer. Sophie was right. He and Daniel had owned a little fiberglass boat with a black cleat his brother had installed badly. The boat in Harriet's photograph was nearly identical but not theirs. A replacement. The staging had been more elaborate than he could bear to imagine.
Outside, the sun moved across the lawn where he had played catch with Daniel. It was a beautiful morning, and he resented it.
Harriet slid another picture toward him. It was much newer: a gray-haired woman standing in front of a marina office with a man in his thirties. The man was tall, dark-eyed, leaner than Adrian remembered his brother ever becoming. He held the hand of a little girl in a yellow raincoat.
"This was taken in Wisconsin three years ago," Harriet said. "The man calls himself David Mercer."
Adrian touched the corner, careful not to leave fingerprints. The man had his mother's eyes. More than that, he had a small crescent-shaped scar beneath his chin, made when Daniel fell off a bicycle at nine.
"He's got a child," Adrian said, surprised that this, of everything, was what hurt him.
Harriet nodded. "A daughter. Her name is Rose."
He had spent twenty-two years mourning the boy he'd lost. Now he was looking at a man who had learned to be a father without him.
"Tell me where he lives."
"I can tell you where he lived," Harriet replied. "But he moved after he received a letter in your handwriting."
May you like
Adrian looked up. "I never wrote to him."
Harriet put down the photograph. "Then somebody wanted your brother frightened enough to run again."
