“I’m not too sure I could pick them out of a lineup. They looked like my own parents, and they all played cards together. And I remember my mother complaining that they’d overstayed their welcome.”
“How long did they stay?”
“I have no idea. A couple of weeks, probably, and Gary stayed the whole summer.”
“Gary stayed the whole summer?”
“Yeah, he got a job up there at the gas station on the lake, and he stayed with us.”
“So you must have known him pretty well.”
“Like I said, not really.”
Jessica asked him a few more questions, hoping to shake something loose, but he either couldn’t remember much about her father or he wasn’t saying. Before ending the call, she told him again how sorry she was about his son.
“Right,” he said.
“I spoke with him, on the phone, less than a week ago. He seemed very nice.”
“Yeah, well, I guess he made his choices.” Jessica imagined she heard a little crack in his voice, some vestige of emotion, but maybe it was just the hoarseness of his voice. Like her own father, he’d probably been a heavy smoker.
10
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 3:03 P.M.
Fischer had been in his car for the majority of the day, systematically working his way south from Rockland, checking every small coastal village, every side road, every dead end, for any sign of Jessica Winslow or her car.
He was beginning to worry that whoever had tailed her as she fled to Maine, then lost her south of Rockland, might have truly lost her. If she’d continued to head north, and the tail had missed her on Route 1, then she could be anywhere. She could be in Canada for all he knew. And if that was the case, then Fischer was going to need either a miracle or some outside help to locate her.
But for now, he was operating on the assumption that she had turned off Route 1 somewhere between Damariscotta and Rockland. He was in Damariscotta now, sitting in his parked car, studying a map he’d bought at a general store called Renys, when his cell phone rang. It was Brandon.
“Hey,” Fischer said.
“Hey. Any luck?”
“No, nothing.”
“It’s possible I have something,” Brandon said.
“Please tell me.”
“It might be nothing, but I’ve compiled a list of all of Jessica Winslow’s contacts from her defunct Facebook page, plus also her LinkedIn page that she doesn’t use anymore, and I even managed to scrape a few names from her old Friendster account. I’ve been going through the social media accounts of everyone on that list, and one of her contacts, a Gwen Murphy, who was in her graduating class at college, has an Instagram account. Murphy lives in Boston now but there are a lot of pictures of Maine on her feed. Looks as though she has a house there. The majority of the pictures are from Port Clyde, which is a village—”
“On St. George Peninsula.”
“That’s right. You’ve been there already, I take it,” Brandon said.
“I have but I’ll go back and give it a second look.”
“It’s not much but I thought I’d report it.”
Fischer started his car, very happy to have a lead, even if it turned out to amount to nothing. All along he had thought that Jessica Winslow might have borrowed a summer place that belonged to one of her friends. It made sense. And maybe Gwen Murphy was that friend. He turned off the main road back onto the peninsula, passing through the now-familiar landscape of rolling meadows and early fall color and low afternoon light. It was nice here, in Maine, and he’d already been starting to think about taking the family on a vacation, maybe next summer. They usually rented a house in the Smoky Mountains, but Maine would be a nice change of pace. Being close to the ocean did remind him of his shitty childhood in Florida, but he could get over it. Besides, his youngest daughter, like him, loved any kind of seafood.
When he reached the outskirts of Port Clyde, Fischer slowed down so that he could look at all the cars in the driveways. He drove toward the lighthouse again, wanting to get a look at it when the fog wasn’t so thick. He parked and got out of the car. He was amazed how many islands were visible, some not too far from the shore. The water was speckled with lobster buoys, catching the remaining light in the day. He wanted to stay for a while, just take it all in, but got back in his car and drove into the center of the village, looking for any side streets he hadn’t tried yet. The first left heading northwest from the general store was Horse Point Road, and he turned down it. The road rose slightly to provide expansive views of the harbor, and several of the quaint shingled cottages had signs out front, advertising themselves as rental properties.