“Just letting you know I’m heading into the office to drop some things off. Then I’m coming straight back here.”
The man in the driver’s seat was familiar to her as a new agent at her office. He had the wide shoulders and distant eyes of a former member of the military. “That’s good timing, actually. I’m at the end of my shift.”
“You spot anything last night?”
“Just a late-night skinny dipper.”
Jessica laughed. “You mean Bob. Every night at midnight until about October. Sorry you had to see that.”
“Me too.”
“Are you heading back to the office?”
“I’ll follow you there, then return the car. You’ll be checking in with Agent Berlin, right?”
“I will.”
Jessica drove to the office, keeping an eye on the agent behind her. She pulled into the visitor’s lot, and he veered away to park where the company cars were kept. She swept the car around in a U-turn and exited out of the lot, then headed north on 787. She planned on working her way across Vermont and then New Hampshire and then into Maine, staying away from toll roads. She’d brought her old road atlas with her and was actually looking forward to finding a place using a physical map instead of GPS.
She got mildly lost around Concord in New Hampshire and stopped for lunch at a diner. Sitting in a booth, waiting for her hamburger and drinking her Pepsi, she honestly had no idea what to do without her phone. Normally she’d be scrolling through the news or playing Threes or just checking out the weather. She felt unmoored, and focused instead on what was around her, the worn vinyl table, the waitress with a noticeable limp, the older couple each eating soup silently together. She wondered what it was going to be like in Maine at Gwen’s cottage. She knew it had wireless, and she’d brought her personal laptop so she’d be able to follow any public information that was reported about the people on the list. The one concrete thing she planned on doing was calling Arthur Kruse’s father, and finding out if he’d known her own dad. Other than that line of inquiry, she didn’t know what her plans were, except to be invisible until the killer was apprehended. Hopefully, there were some good books at the cottage, since she’d neglected, stupidly, to pack any.
After eating her hamburger, Jessica went back outside to her car, and studied the map, figuring out the best route. It had begun to rain, a thin mist that swirled through the air, turning everything slightly out of focus. She found a college radio station that was playing a Valerie June song, put the wipers on the lowest setting, and set out for Maine.
She arrived at the cottage on the St. George Peninsula just after dusk. The thin rain had turned into driving sheets and high winds. She pulled the car as close as possible to the front door of the shingled cottage, but it took her five minutes to find the key that was hidden under the heart-shaped rock along the front garden. By the time she was inside with her box of clothes, she was soaked through and shivering. Before exploring the house, she stripped out of her clothes and took a long hot shower in the downstairs bathroom. Afterward she got into her flannel pajamas, unpacked her box, and went and looked through the kitchen for something to eat. The refrigerator was filled with mostly condiments, although there was one bottle of beer that turned out, after she’d taken a shockingly unpleasant sip, to be a hard cider. In one of the cabinets there was a can of Italian wedding soup, and she heated it up in a pan. That and the cider would have to be her dinner.
The two-bedroom cottage was small, with exposed ceiling beams that had been painted white, and lots of abstract paintings on the wall that on closer inspection all seemed to be seascapes. Jessica unpacked her things in the larger of the two bedrooms, then went and checked the bookshelf in the upstairs hall for something to read. She normally liked thrillers, but most of Gwen’s books were contemporary literary fiction. She plucked out a book with an interesting title called Started Early, Took My Dog and decided to give it a shot. She read a quarter of the book tucked up in the unfamiliar bed, then turned out the bedside lamp, and listened to the wind for the hour it took her to fall into a shallow, nervous sleep.
5
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 3:33 P.M.
Hey, detective,” Clara said.
Sam Hamilton had been surprised to see her behind the front desk of the Windward Resort. Last time he’d run into Clara she’d been waitressing at the Kennewick Harbor Inn.
“You’re back here now, Clara?” he said.
“I’m just filling in because Karen’s on vacation. I’m still at the Inn as well.”