Griff woke from a troubled sleep. Thoughts of Kate rushed in, and it took a couple of minutes before he could breathe again. The last thing he remembered was Aubrey feeding him soup and promising to find him a lawyer. She’d neglected to bring any booze, however. He hadn’t had a drink since Sunday and it was—what, Tuesday? Wednesday? He wasn’t feverish any longer. His mind was clearer than it had been in a while. That was not necessarily a good thing.
In the quiet of the cabin, he heard the soft lapping of the lake against the dock. A ray of light from the picture window pierced his eyes, irritating them. The sunlight forced him to sit up; otherwise he might not have found the will. He felt Kate in it, calling him outdoors. Pulling the afghan tight around his shoulders, Griff stepped out onto the back deck, and the cold enveloped him. It was a damp, blustery day, with a taste of snow in the air. Was Kate out here? He saw no hope in this dead landscape. The sky was silver, the lake was black, and the bare trees made ugly slashes against the sky. All around, piles of wet leaves gave off the sickly-sweet smell of death. Maybe that was her message to him.
He was staring at the lake, thinking about Kate’s body in the freezing river, when the phone in his back pocket rang, making him start. Aubrey brought him a charger, he remembered. He pulled the phone out and saw that it was Jenny calling.
“Hello?” he said.
“Griff. I can’t believe I reached you. I tried so many times.”
“My phone was dead,” he said, and his voice was dead, too.
“Are you all right?” Jenny asked.
The question was so surreal that he couldn’t answer.
“Griff?” she said.
“No, Jenny. I’m not all right.”
“Everybody’s been looking for you. A lot is going on. I can’t get into it over the phone. When the medical examiner’s office couldn’t get in touch with you, they had to call Kate’s brother to make arrangements for her body.”
“Her brother? Why?”
“Because they couldn’t find you, and Keniston was in the hospital.”
“Oh. Kate said he was going in for tests.”
“Well, he has cancer, so they talked to Benji Eastman instead, and Benji called me, trying to find you. I arranged for Kate to be moved to the funeral home in town, but now the funeral director wants to meet with you.”
“That’s terrible about Keniston.”
“Yes it is. But Griff, where the hell have you been?”
“At Aubrey’s cabin, at the lake.”
Jenny made an annoyed noise. “I can’t believe she didn’t tell me that.”
“I haven’t been feeling well. She was letting me rest,” Griff said.
“There’s no time for that now. I hate to be blunt, Griff, but if you don’t show your face, it looks bad. You need to make your wife’s funeral arrangements, or else people might draw the wrong conclusions.”
He paused. She was implying that people thought he killed Kate. If that’s what they thought of him, why was Jenny even bothering to help him? He wished she would leave him to his fate.
“Are the police—?” he began.
“Are they what?” she asked. But he let the question lie there.
“Let’s talk in person, all right?” she said. “Stay where you are. I’m coming to get you. We’ll go to the funeral home together.”
She hung up before he could say no. It would take her half an hour to drive to the cabin from Belle River. Griff had no car to make his getaway. But he found that he no longer wanted to run. He didn’t want to die either. It hadn’t occurred to him before Jenny’s call, but Kate was still here, not just in his mind, but in body. He could see her, touch her, talk to her, say the things he’d been longing to say but thought he’d never get the chance to. Maybe if he said them, he would be able to go on. There was a small part of him that still imagined a future.
Suddenly Griff couldn’t wait. He went back inside and tried to take a shower, but the water that came out of the shower head was ice-cold and rusty, so he settled for washing his face. That bruise was fading, and the swelling on the left side of his jaw had gone down. He was ravenously hungry. He made scrambled eggs and wolfed them straight from the pan. By the time he was done, Jenny’s minivan was in the driveway. She honked. He threw the pan in the sink and ran out.
The road down from the lake was narrow and winding, and for the first bit Jenny concentrated on her driving. Once they hit the highway, she stepped on the gas, and glanced over at Griff with concern.
“Nobody told me you two were splitting up,” she began.
“It came as a surprise to me, too.”
“You asked me on the phone about the police,” she said. “They think it’s suspicious that Kate went missing immediately after filing for divorce.”
Griff shrugged. “I don’t know why they think that. She served me with papers and then she took off. She wasn’t about to come back home like nothing happened. I assumed she left town.”
“Well, you were wrong. She didn’t go off on some Caribbean cruise. She turned up dead. Aren’t you worried they’ll come after you? Because you should be.”
“I have no control over what the cops do. Aubrey told me they already searched my house.”
“Anything I say about that, I’d be disclosing confidential information.”
“Don’t tell me then. I don’t want to put you in a bad position,” Griff said.
“I’ll do it, Griff. I just want you to understand, you can never say I told you.”
“Honestly, Jenny, it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care what happens next. I just want to see Kate.”
“I have a contact inside the police department. He called me a little while ago with the results of the search. You should know, the police found a shirt of yours, with bloodstains on it.”
He leaned back in the passenger seat and closed his eyes. “It’s not Kate’s blood. It’s mine. I didn’t kill her, Jenny. I loved her.”
“I know that.”
He opened his eyes. “But somebody killed her?”
“The chief of police thinks so. He’s a royal terror. I wish I could control him, but I can’t. Honestly, he’s focused on you, Griff.”
“Figures.” Griff shook his head in disgust. Fucking cops. “What about you? What do you think?”
Jenny sighed. “Personally, I hope it gets ruled a suicide. That would be best for everybody. Let her rest in peace.”
He didn’t contradict her. By the time they reached the funeral home, it had started to snow, in sharp, icy crystals that struck the back of Griff’s neck and chilled him to the bone. The funeral home was new construction, meant to look quaint and New Englandy with white-clapboard siding and green shutters, but inside, smelling of cheap carpeting and air freshener.
“Who picked this place?” Griff asked.
“It’s the only funeral home in town. Once the medical examiner released her body, she had to go somewhere.”
“It’s so bleak,” he said, and his voice caught.
“You don’t have to do the service here. We can do it at a church and go straight to the cemetery, then do a reception at my house, if you like.”
“Mem Church?” Griff asked.
Memorial Church, in the center of the Quad, with its soaring transept and stained-glass windows, was where Carlisle held its sacred events. Graduations, swearings-in, weddings. Griff had wanted to get married there, but Kate wouldn’t hear of it.