Desire Lines (44 page)

Finding Kathryn’s door locked, Hunter pounds his fist on the windshield. His face is terrible, his eyes wide and his mouth contorted in fury. He presses his nose against the glass and Kathryn shrinks back in her seat. “You fucking bitch!” he spits, bashing his fist against the window, as if he’s punching her in the face.

“Hang on,” Jack says through gritted teeth. He pulls off the shoulder and onto the dirt and gravel road with Hunter close beside them, walking and then jogging and finally running to keep up. Kathryn watches Hunter’s hand on her window, the white pads of his fingers gripping the glass and then sliding as Jack turns the wheel and the car veers to the left, cutting sharply across the road and sideswiping a cluster of bushes, the branches squeaking as they scrape along the side. Jack guns the engine and the car jumps and jostles over the rutted road. In the side-view mirrow, Kathryn sees Hunter looking after them as they drive
away, his figure getting smaller and smaller until they go around a bend and it disappears.

AT THE POLICE
station Kathryn gives a statement with as much detail as she can remember. “Her body is buried in that clearing,” she says. “I’m sure of it. There’s a path leading to it from the cabin, but it’s hard to see.”

“We’ll find it,” Gaffney says. “Now, are you going to be willing to testify against this guy in court?”

“Whatever it takes,” she says.

“Good.” Gaffney smiles broadly. “Now go get that bum ankle looked at, and we’ll do the rest. I don’t want to see you nosing around here again anytime soon.”

In the car on the way to the emergency room, Kathryn leans back and closes her eyes.

“Tired?” Jack asks.

“No. Not tired.” She looks over at him. “It’s just a weird way for this to end. It feels… unfinished.”

“You solved it, Kathryn. The mystery is over.”

“But it isn’t,” she says. “We still don’t know why.”

Slowly, he shakes his head. “I hate to say it, but I doubt we ever will.”

She gazes out at the streetlights gliding by her window.
Facts will only take you so far,
Hunter said.
You can have all the facts and still not know what happened.

But maybe, she thinks, that’s the wrong way to think about it. Maybe you have to have the facts before you can even begin to make sense of the story.

She turns to look at Jack, and he leans over and kisses her on the neck, keeping his eyes on the road.

“I do love you, Jack,” she says.

He grins and lightly squeezes her knee. “You’ve had an exciting day,” he says. “I won’t hold you to that.”

EPILOGUE

A
s summer draws to a close, the night air sharpens. Mornings are bracingly cool. Kathryn has a cast on her leg for the broken ankle, and she’s getting quite adept at hobbling around. She spends a lot of time on the front porch of her mother’s house, sitting in the swing and working her way through
Anna Karenina,
which she was supposed to read for a class in college but never got around to. After work Jack comes over and makes dinner for her and her mother, or they order a pizza, or they go down to the Sea Dog to sit on the deck and watch the boats go by. Inevitably, by the end of the evening they’re back on the front porch of her mother’s house again.

When the police went to Hunter’s property to look for a body, Hunter was gone. An hour later they tracked him down at Bangor International Airport, where he was sitting in the TV lounge with a standby ticket to Mexico. He didn’t seem surprised to see them, and he didn’t put up a fight. He got up, gathered his bags, and led them all down the escalator and through the electronic doors to the police cars lined up by the curb. They didn’t even bother to handcuff him. People who witnessed the arrest said at first they couldn’t figure it out; they thought maybe he was working undercover, he seemed so unfazed by it all.

Kathryn doesn’t know if everything Hunter told her is true. But the police did find a body in the clearing, and dental records confirmed the identity as Jennifer’s, so that much, at least, is known. Hunter isn’t saying much; he’s got a smooth-talking lawyer and even an alibi, the waitress from Raymond’s, who swears she remembers that he took her home that night ten years ago after closing the place down at two.

So the truth about what happened will probably never be fully revealed. But for some reason, Kathryn finds, it doesn’t matter so much to her anymore. Whatever Hunter’s lies and distortions and backtracking, whether he panicked, letting Jennifer die out of negligence and fear, or whether he killed her with his own hands, at least they’ve found her. She’s not missing any longer. They can lay her to rest.

AFTER THE FRONT-PAGE
articles have been written and filed away, Jennifer’s family holds a small memorial service at Mount Hope Cemetery, where her remains are buried under a simple stone marker. It’s a clear, cool day; looking around as Will is speaking, an open Bible in his hands, Kathryn is aware of the sharp edges of things: the cut marble headstones, the dry, brittle leaves rustling overhead, the black spiky fence, the lines of age and grief etched on the faces around her. Jennifer’s mother, usually so nervous, exhibits a strange, watchful calm. Rachel looks as if she’s been crying for days.

As they were standing around before the service, Mrs. Pelletier came up to Kathryn and hugged her fiercely and wordlessly before taking her face in her hands and drawing her close. “I underestimated you,” she whispered. “It’s all right,” Kathryn said, and Mrs. Pelletier just smiled sadly and took her seat. Will enveloped Kathryn in a full body hug. “This is tough,” he said, choking back tears. “I hated what Rachel said that night at the reunion, but in a way she was right. This has consumed me.” Rachel was icily cordial, as if she’d been deeply, gravely wronged.

Standing beside her at the grave site, Jack slips his hand into Kathryn’s and laces his fingers through hers. “I never understood what it meant to say ‘rest in peace,’” Will is saying. “Now I do. In burying my sister today I am finally letting go of the past, not because questions don’t remain, but because I acknowledge that no one can ever adequately address the one question that matters: why she was taken from us, why her life had to end so early. As long as we need an answer, we will have no peace. So we make a choice, and that choice is to put to rest the questions that remain.

“So, Jennifer,” he says, not looking down and not looking up, but somewhere in the middle distance, “rest in peace. And forgive us for not knowing you better.”

At the end of the service the small crowd disperses, and the five friends linger behind. “We should be better about staying in touch,” Brian says, and they all nod in wistful acceptance of the fact that their friendship, rooted in a specific time and place, will probably survive mainly in memory. Brian looks at his watch and excuses himself with promises of wedding invitations and pints of Geary’s the next time any of them are in Portland. Rachel says she has mountains of papers waiting to be graded; she needs to get back to her desk. At the path toward the gate she turns back to look at the ones who remain. “I loved her too,” she says, holding her chin out as if she’s balancing something fragile on it, and there is a long pause before Will nods and Jack says, “We all know that.”

Will, Kathryn, and Jack talk about logistics for a while. Will is going down to Florida for a few weeks to stay with his mother before heading back to Boston. Hunter’s trial is scheduled for late January at the moment but likely, through defense maneuverings, to be delayed and even moved. “I don’t even care when it happens,” Will says. He clears his throat and looks at them, a small smile softening the intensity of his words. “I just needed for her to be found.”

After a while they leave him standing there by the stone marker in the weak sunlight, tilting his head and leaning forward slightly on the balls of his feet as if engaged in conversation. “He’ll be all right,” Jack says as they make their way to his car, and Kathryn answers, a little quickly, “I know,” though neither of them actually does. Their exchange isn’t disingenuous, exactly; it’s just shorthand for so many things. These discussions will come, but not today. For now they’re content to keep things simple. This moment, they know, is fleeting, and they want to hold on to it as long as they can.

THE SKY
is the color of skim milk most mornings; at night the moon lights the sky like a giant strobe. Kathryn buys a green Polartec sweatshirt from T.J. Maxx and takes to wearing it every day. After a week of this, her mother says, “Let’s go shopping. My treat,” and pulls out a pile of catalogues. They sit on the living-room couch together and leaf through the pages, and by the end of it Kathryn has a new fall wardrobe for the first time in years, suitable for a long, cold descent into winter.

Her Virginia driver’s license expires, and she renews it in Maine. She gets a check-cashing card at Doug’s Shop ‘n Save and transfers her checking account to Fleet Bank. When her mother offers to buy season tickets to the Bangor Symphony—something they can do together—Kathryn agrees. Frank repossesses the yellow Saturn, and she takes a loan from her father to buy a used Toyota from a lawyer in his firm. She starts to scan apartment listings in the paper. And though she tells herself she can leave anytime, it’s getting harder to imagine doing so.

She calls her brother, Josh, and leaves a message on his machine telling him that she’s staying in Bangor longer than she’d thought, and she hopes he’ll come up for a weekend. He calls back with a date: the first week in October, will she still be there? “It looks that way,” Kathryn tells him. “I don’t have plans to leave.”

“Face it, my dear,” her grandmother says one afternoon when Kathryn begins to make noises about moving to a city—Boston, maybe, or Washington, D.C.; she has a friend there who writes for the
Post—
“you’re not going anywhere.” She gestures toward a pile of books Kathryn has stacked on a chair. “You have a library card, for goodness’ sake. If that’s not a sign of permanence, I don’t know what is. But I’ll just say one thing,” she says, leaning closer. “If you do intend to stay in this town, you must make a commitment to it. None of this moaning about other places and missed opportunities. I don’t want to hear it, and neither does anybody else. If you stay here, it should be because you want to, and not out of a failure of nerve or imagination.”

“What a
ridiculous
thing to say,” Kathryn’s mother says, dramatically rolling her eyes, when Kathryn reports her grandmother’s view. “This does not have to be a lifetime decision. It’s the end of the twentieth century, for God’s sake—we’re not homesteaders roaming around in covered wagons looking for a place to put down roots for generations. You can stay here for a few months or a few years, even,” she says, shrugging lightly, “and then go somewhere else if you want to. Last time I heard, you didn’t need to sign a long-term contract to live here!” She laughs, but Kathryn finds her words unsettling. She imagines herself ten years from now, still restless, still uncommitted, telling herself that Bangor is okay for the time being, but one day she’ll discover the place she really wants to be and move on. She wants to feel like she belongs somewhere, that there’s a place she can be that will become a part of her.

“How did you know you wanted to stay here?” she asks Jack, in different ways, again and again, and the answer is always the same: “This is home.” He shrugs, his certainty a given, like air. “I never had any desire to live anywhere else.” His assuredness both fascinates and repels her. What’s wrong with him, that he doesn’t dream of a different life, that he can be so easily contented in this small corner of the world?

Early one morning, just after dawn, Jack takes her to Ebemee Lake to go fishing. Mist rests on the surface of the lake like meringue; the trees behind are distant smudges of gold and green and red. A loon sounds its low and mournful call, another echoes back. In the soft gray light Jack’s face is sharp and clear, like a studio portrait. Kathryn watches him bending over his rod, concentrating on his line, his careful hands gently threading the lure into place. She looks at the red-checked wool scarf wound around his neck, his fleece-lined jacket, the gray ragg socks pulled up to his shins under thick leather boots. Glancing up, he catches her eye.

“What are you thinking?” he says.

“I’m not thinking. I’m watching.”

“You’re always thinking,” he says, going back to his reel. “Tell me.”

In another part of the lake a motorboat starts up, tinny and low, like the hum of a mosquito. The air smells like cold, wet stones. Kathryn remembers this lake. She’s been here before. The summer after seventh grade, she and Jennifer spent three weeks here at Camp Keonah. Kathryn had detested every minute of it—the wake-up call at dawn, early-morning swim practice in the frigid water, the hokey Indian-themed art projects featuring beads and feathers and Elmer’s glue. But Jennifer was in heaven. She woke up before the trumpet to go on long nature hikes; she starred in the camp musical and taped the satiny blue ribbons she won in canoe races to the rafters of her bottom bunk. When it was time to leave, both of them cried—Kathryn because she was so relieved it was over, and Jennifer because she dreaded going home.

Thinking back, Kathryn realizes that something was already happening to them then. Their lives were moving in different directions. It would have been easy to let circumstances come between them; they shared so few interests or desires. But for some reason it didn’t matter. They were two young girls struggling to make sense of a world they didn’t understand—a world that would only become more complicated and less comprehensible as they grew older—and they needed each other. Whatever else happened, that simple fact remained.