Flat Lake in Winter (15 page)

It was quickly established that nobody with the name Jennifer Hamilton and the birthdate September 6, 1967, had a criminal record - in either New York, Vermont, or New Hampshire, or with the federal authorities. Nor was any Jennifer Hamilton a licensed driver, or the owner of a motor vehicle registered in any of the three states. No phone company had a record of her, and no gas or electric company was supplying service to her.

But computers, Pearson Gunn had discovered a while back, were funny things, which could be made to work backward as well as forward. Thus, if you had someone’s date of birth, you could sometimes plug it in, and get the machine to spit out the names of all the people on various lists who shared that particular birthday. Gunn didn’t tell Hillary about this little trick right away. He figured he’d try it with New Hampshire first, and see if he got a hit. If he struck out, then he could always suggest she try it with Vermont.

He knew an investigator over in Manchester, who had a friend in Laconia, who in turn had a contact in Concord, who agreed to let them into his office that Sunday morning and run the date of birth. There the two of them spent four full hours running drivers’ licenses, car registrations, criminal records (though Gunn had done that once already), jury rolls, state employment rosters, gun permits, hunting licenses, fishing tags, doctors’ and nurses’ registries, welfare recipients, and lists of teachers, barbers, and beauticians. Thousands of 09/06/67’s came back, but none for a Jennifer Hamilton.

It was only when they ran a list of licensed day-care-center operators that they came up with anything of interest. That particular printout was one of the shorter ones, actually, containing only seventy-two names. (By way of contrast, there were some 1,860 state employees, 2,356 gun owners, and 3,111 fishermen.) It wasn’t until they got to the third and final page of day-care operators that they hit what they considered a “possible.”

It wasn’t a lock by any means, but any “Jennifer H.” born on September 6, 1967, certainly was worth checking out. They did just that by pulling up her file. It dated back to July of 1991, when she’d applied to run a Class 3 center, for five children or less, out of her home in Keene. She’d been given a temporary provisional certificate to begin operating that September, and a full Class 3 license the following May. But she’d failed to renew it in 1994, and there’d been no activity since. Still, she’d provided an address, a tax number, and a telephone. And, best of all, her original application listed her full name: Jennifer Hamilton Walker

Evidently, Jennifer had gone and gotten herself married. The problem was, when Gunn and Hillary called the phone number, nobody there had ever heard of a Jennifer Walker, or a Jennifer Hamilton, or a Jennifer Hamilton Walker. The man who answered said it was a new listing they’d obtained when they moved in two years ago. And it was in Portsmouth, not Keene.

They didn’t do any better with the phone directory. But, by running the name Jennifer Walker forward through the computer, they came up with all sorts of stuff: a driver’s license, a welfare identification number, a jury summons (never answered), and - best of all – a current address. It seemed that Jennifer Hamilton Walker lived in Nashua, at 14 Nightingale Court.

The phone was an unlisted one, but that didn’t stop them for long. Within twenty minutes, Gunn was listening to a woman’s voice on an answering machine recording. “Hi,” it said. “You’ve reached Jennifer. Leave a message at the tone, and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

Gunn hung up without saying anything. He couldn’t think of anything clever, and he preferred to catch Jennifer Hamilton in person. But the real reason was that he was too busy tasting his winnings.

IN MATT FIELDER’S book, there were two types of lakes. The first type was where they let people build roads and houses right up to the edge of the water, and - as if that wasn’t bad enough - then they let them build docks and rafts right out
on
the water. The second type was where they left the lake alone, where if you wanted to see it you had to hike through the forest to reach it, and if you wanted to be on it you had to remember to pack a canoe on your back. To Fielder, the difference meant everything in the world. It was that difference, in fact, that had brought him to the Adirondacks in the first place.

Flat Lake was definitely of the second type.

Anyone who spends only summers in Ottawa County - and the rigors of the winter months make it easy to forgive one for doing so - could easily assume that Flat Lake derives its name from how still its waters are in summer. And indeed they are, the result of an unbroken barrier of foliage that grows right up to the shoreline. Oak, maple, and ash form a backdrop to cedar, pine, spruce, and fir, which in turn frame shorter juniper, mountain laurel, andromeda, and wild fern. Sprinkled throughout is a generous helping of birch, slender trunks so white against the darker shades as to be almost startling when first seen. In autumn, the deciduous trees are well enough sheltered from the wind that they hold their leaves long after they’ve dried and turned. The overall result is a rich riot of color, spectacular enough in itself, but more often than not doubly enhanced by the presence of a perfect reflection on the still surface of the lake.

Yet the stillness is only an illusion. In fact, Flat Lake is constantly fed. But its nourishment comes not from the muddy spill-off of some sediment-filled creek or debris-choked brook. Instead, a natural artesian spring, located at the very center of the crater that carved out the lake in the last ice age, forever bubbles up from the bottom, supplying a constant source of water so cold and clear and pure that the freeholders in Cedar Falls long ago declared it a permanent county treasure, so as to protect it from the greed of outside bottling companies that have coveted it since the turn of the century.

And because any body of water that is continuously fed must have a runoff of its own, Flat Lake has a dam at its very southern tip, a steel gate that, if one knows exactly where to look, marks the only visible evidence of man’s intervention. The gate is mechanically lowered each spring. The process is a laborious one, requiring two strong men, since the operation must be done entirely by hand, as no power supply is permitted to reach the lake. The height of the gate is set just below that of the water line itself, so as to act like the skimmer of some huge swimming pool. The result is that any leaf, twig, acorn, or other matter that alights on the surface is swiftly swept over the dam and out of sight, restoring to the beholder the illusion of a perfect, unbroken stillness.

Fielder found a large boulder at the edge of the lake and sat, enchanted by the beauty, mesmerized by the quiet. In the short space of an hour, he counted two deer, three rabbits, and an entire family of seven raccoons, all of them drawn there to drink from the water. He would have stayed longer, but he’d called ahead to make an appointment with Klaus Armbrust to see the Hamilton estate, and he didn’t want to be late. Rising, his boot broke off a sliver of the rock he’d been sitting on. He decided it must be slate of some sort, the way it was formed in thin layers. He picked up the sliver and nestled it into the curve made by the thumb and index finger of his right hand. Then, with a sidearm delivery so pronounced that his knuckles brushed the ferns by the water’s edge, he skipped the stone across the lake. One, two, three, four, five, six,
seven!
He watched with a broad smile as the ripples spread and collided, until the surface of the water gradually healed and grew still once again.

KLAUS ARMBRUST UNLOCKED the front door of the main building and stood aside, letting Fielder enter first. A faint musty smell greeted them, a suggestion that Nature had already begun the process of reclaiming the now empty house.

“This place has certainly seen its share of tragedy,” Fielder observed.

“It surely has,” Klaus agreed.

The tour took no more than twenty minutes. Fielder hadn’t expected to uncover any revelations. After all, the state police had been over the scene three times, each time more thorough than the one before, and Pearson Gunn had been there twice on behalf of the defense. Still, Fielder wanted to get his own feel for the place where Carter and Mary Alice Hamilton had been murdered, and where, eight and a half years earlier, their son and daughter-in-law had lost their own lives in the fire.

The interior was all stone and wood, built a century ago at a time when craftsmanship was a virtue to be cherished. From the massive oak timbers and beams, the huge stone fireplaces, the recessed bookshelves and cabinets, all the way down to the wide-board pine floors, everything whispered of a day in which fine homes had been built with painstaking, loving care, instead of being slapped up to meet calendar deadlines and avoid cost overruns. Here there was no evidence of Sheetrock, plastic, vinyl, or Formica. Everything was
real.
Everything had come from the earth and when in due time it would finally collapse and crumble under its own weight, everything would return to the earth.

Upstairs, Fielder could see that Elna Armbrust had succeeded in washing away most of the carnage, but even her best efforts had failed to hide the faint remnants of bloodstains on the walls and floors of the master bedroom. What possible madness, Fielder found himself wondering, could have possessed Jonathan that night? What unimaginable rage could have taken such a gentle child of a man, and turned him into a machine of murder?

From the main house, they walked to the cottage that had been Jonathan’s. By comparison, it was tiny, but the same care in construction was evident. Fielder was struck by the sparseness of Jonathan’s quarters, by how little he’d chosen to surround himself with. Someone had made up his bed, even fluffed his pillow and turned down the covers at one corner, as though expecting he might return any day. Lastly, they stopped in the bathroom, where Fielder examined the vanity cabinet that housed the sink. Only a fool would be stupid enough to hide a murder weapon there, a fool or a child. In Fielder’s eyes, Jonathan Hamilton fit into both categories pretty well.

It was something of a relief to step back out into the sunlight, and Fielder breathed the autumn air deeply into his lungs, as he waited for Klaus to padlock the cottage door behind them.

“Tell me, Klaus,” he said. “What was Jonathan’s sister like?”

“Jennifer?”

Fielder nodded.

“Pretty girl,” Klaus said wistfully, almost as if he were trying to picture her after all these years. “Very pretty.”

“What was she like?”

He seemed to reflect for a moment. “Quiet. . . . Smart,” he added.

“Anything else?”

Klaus looked down at his shoes. “Unhappy,” he said, with visible difficulty.

“Oh?”

“Unhappy,” Klaus repeated, as though there was simply no more to say on the subject.

But Fielder wasn’t quite finished. “You and your wife told Mr. Gunn about Jonathan’s brother, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why didn’t you ever mention his sister?”

Klaus shrugged easily. “He never asked us about her, sir.”

And though Fielder would think about that response more than once on the drive back home, he was finally forced to acknowledge that it made pretty good sense. Here were two people who’d spent their entire adult lives in the shadows of those they served, who’d probably been taught to keep their silence around strangers, and whose command of English was limited to begin with. They hardly would have been the sort to volunteer information.

But if that part made sense, what of the comment that Jennifer had been an unhappy girl? Why had that been so? What was it that had driven one son of a wealthy, privileged family to a life of drugs, alcohol, crime, and finally prison? What was it that had brought a full measure of physical beauty and material comforts to a daughter, only to leave her unhappy enough to disappear with hardly a trace? And where in the strange puzzle that was Jonathan Hamilton did that particular piece fit in?

It was, as they say, something to think about.

AS IT TURNS OUT, there are two New Hampshires. One is the New Hampshire of picture postcards, movie backdrops, and travel videos. It is the New Hampshire of the north, dominated by the sprawling White Mountain National Forest, an area that covers tens of thousands of acres and contains some of the most ruggedly beautiful terrain in all of North America. Here the traveler comes upon such sights as Mount Washington, the tallest peak east of the Rockies, which boasts the highest wind velocity ever measured on the face of the earth, and which each year claims the lives of climbers foolish enough to underestimate its dangers. Here, too, are the state’s world-famous tourist attractions, bearing names like the Old Man of the Mountains, the Cog Railway, the Flume, Franconia Notch, Cannon Mountain, Mount Conway, Tuckerman Ravine, Lost River, and Castle in the Clouds. Here lakes and rivers of every imaginable size, shape, and temperament abound, from the raging white water of the Androscoggin to the vast expanse of Winnipesaukee.

But there is another New Hampshire as well.

To the south, no mountains soar. No
flumes
, ravines, notches, lost rivers, or castles in the clouds are to be found. Wake up in Manchester or Concord or Keene or Jaffrey or Derry, and you might as well be in suburban New Jersey or Long Island. Here the mother-daughter houses sit side by side on quarter-acre lots, the blacktop driveways sprout basketball hoops, and the fastest-moving water can be found down at the local car wash. Here the sights have names like McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Texaco, and Jiffy Lube, and the prime attractions tend to be shopping malls, bowling alleys, and pizza joints. And it is here that the city of Nashua is to be found, less than ten miles from the Massachusetts line, and light-years away from the White Mountains.

Matt Fielder hadn’t known any of that, of course, when Pearson Gunn and Hillary Munson had come to him to announce that they’d located Jennifer Hamilton in Nashua, New Hampshire, living at someplace called 14 Nightingale Court. Since it had been Gunn and Munson who’d made the journey to Atlanta, Matt Fielder had argued that it was now his turn for a road trip. “Besides,” he’d pointed out, “I need a break from working on motion papers.”

“‘Besides,’ my ass,” Gunn laughed. “You just want to go ‘cause you hear this Jennifer is a babe.”

“Leave him alone,” Hillary said. “If anyone needs a babe, it’s Matt. Trust me.” Fielder shot her a look, and she’d said no more.

Two days later, he was on the road.

NIGHTINGALE COURT, WHICH held such promise with its fetching name, turned out to be a small trailer park located off Route 3A, on the northern outskirts of town. Fielder pulled up to the place around three, having been on the road for almost five hours. He spotted number 14, a small but well-kept white trailer, its cinder-block foundation tastefully hidden by white wooden trelliswork, and decorated with potted red chrysanthemums.

Fielder had passed the time on the way over trying to come up with the best plan on approaching Jennifer. Gunn, ever the sleuth, had advised him to “sit on the place” until she either came out or showed up. Then, once he saw her, if he had any doubts about whether she was the right person, he had several choices: He could call out her name and watch to see how she responded. He could find a cop to pull her over on some pretext and, in the process, check her identification. Or he could drive up behind her car and tap her just hard enough so that they’d have to get out and exchange licenses.

All of this seemed a bit too cloak-and-dagger for Fielder, however, and he’d decided instead on a more direct tack. He climbed down from his Suzuki, and was about to head for the trailer, when a slowing school bus pulled up so close to him that he had to step back to avoid being brushed by it. The door hissed open, and five or six children, ranging in age anywhere from around six to sixteen, poured out and dispersed in the direction of various trailer sites. One of them immediately caught Fielder’s eye. He looked to be about twelve or thirteen, with striking facial features capped by blond hair that fell across his forehead. Even before he got close to his destination, Fielder knew exactly where he was going. He watched as the boy passed numbers 11 and 12 - there was no number 13 - and headed directly for the small white trailer with the trelliswork and the red mums. Just before he reached it, the door swung open, and out stepped Jennifer Hamilton Walker.

Despite his desire to avoid staring, Fielder found himself incapable of looking away from her. She was tall, perhaps five-eight or -nine, and slender. Like the boy, she was blonde, with hair worn long and straight. And, like both her brother and her son, she was beautiful, arrestingly beautiful. Pearson Gunn’s prediction that she’d turn out to be a “babe” failed to do her justice. P. J. Hamilton’s characterization of his sister as “drop-dead gorgeous” was closer to the mark, perhaps, but even his phrase fell short. It didn’t capture the evenly tanned skin, the wide-set blue eyes, or the mouth that was just a bit too full for the rest of her face. It didn’t take into account the way she cocked her head just so, causing her hair to fall to one side. Or the way she instinctively drew her son around behind her, so that she ended up standing protectively between him and the stranger. And it didn’t say anything about how she stood her ground, almost defiantly, as Fielder began approaching them.

IT IS DIFFICULT to be a serious student of sports without at the same time being a firm believer in momentum. For the easiest lesson on the subject, simply turn on a basketball game on your TV. You’ll soon learn that teams don’t tend to
trade
baskets so much as they do to score in spurts. “
The Knicks are on a 17-2 run,”
the announcer will tell you, or,
“The Bulls have scored twelve unanswered.”
There even is a tailor-made antidote for such sprees - a momentum-stopping device called the twenty-second timeout.

As far back as high school, Fielder had learned firsthand how crucial it was to seize control of the flow of a baseball game, and how hugely and decisively doing so could affect the outcome.

He’d been playing in a Saturday-afternoon pickup game, batting with one out in the bottom of the third. Fielder’s team was down 6-0. In fact, they didn’t have a single hit to that point. Fielder’s best friend, Whitey Ryan, had just earned a walk, and had advanced to second on a wild pitch. Fielder, batting next, worked the count to two-and-two. The pitcher, a tall, gangly kid with a big-league fastball, threw him a high hard one. With a different count, Fielder would’ve taken it. But, with two strikes on him, he knew he had to protect the plate. He chopped at it and managed to get his bat on it, but could do no better than to send a soft grounder between first and second. The second baseman, a little kid called Goober Wilson, scooped it up cleanly. But instead of throwing Fielder out at first, he decided to get cute and make the play at third. His hurried throw sailed over the third baseman’s head and on into the parking lot. Whitey Ryan scored, and Fielder was awarded second. But far more significantly, in that instant, Fielder’s team had seized the
momentum.
The next eight batters reached base safely, five of them tagging the previously untouchable pitcher for clean base hits. By the time the inning was over, Fielder’s team had scored seven runs. They went on to win the game 8-6.

Afterward, Fielder boasted that it had been his hit that had broken the ice. But Whitey Ryan, who knew even more about the intricacies of the game than Fielder did, was quick to correct him. “That doesn’t get scored as a hit,” he said. “Goober coulda got you at first, easy. So it goes down as a fielder’s choice, is all. Same as an out.”

Never mind that for weeks, Fielder had gone around thinking the term was a personalized one, custom-tailored to whoever happened to have been at bat. As he understood it, it got called a “Fielder’s choice” because he’d been the one who’d hit the grounder; had it been Whitey, it would have been a “Ryan’s choice.”

But the real lesson he’d learned that day wasn’t about which base to throw to, or about the virtue of playing it safe and going for the sure out. It wasn’t even about the strange language of official scoring. It was about
momentum
- about how a snap decision on a routine play could decide not only the fate of a particular batter, but could sometimes change the course of the entire game, and determine its very outcome.

It was a lesson he’d never forgotten.

TO MATT FIELDER’S way of thinking, the point at which the momentum in Jonathan Hamilton’s case first began shifting toward the defense will always be the instant he first locked eyes with Jonathan’s sister, Jennifer.

It is entirely possible, of course, that the initial look that crossed Jennifer’s face at that moment reflected nothing more than the predictable level of concern a mother might be expected to feel at the sight of a total stranger staring at her and her child. Who was this man? What was he doing there? Did he mean them some harm? Was he a police officer of some sort? Had he followed her boy home from school? Had he spent the past week stalking one or both of them?

Any of those reactions would have been ample cause for alarm. But to Fielder, Jennifer’s look went way beyond mere alarm; it went almost to the point of panic. And in the weeks and months that followed, Fielder would find himself drawn back again and again to the moment, as he struggled to fathom this strange and striking young woman who would have such a profound effect on both the case and him personally, and as he tried his best to understand just where she fit into the growing mystery of the Hamilton family. And the answer that he would eventually come to settle on went something like this: It had been nearly a decade since Jennifer had left home. She’d moved two states away, changed her name, and begun life all over again. In the years that followed, she hadn’t gone back home once for so much as an afternoon’s visit, picked up a phone to call, or even dropped a postcard in the mail to say that she was alive. She’d taken a life of plush comfort and certain affluence, and traded it in for a concrete slab in a trailer park.

And she’d stuck it out.

But now, hard as she’d worked to put her former family behind her, it was suddenly apparent that they’d succeeded in hunting her down and finding her. For Jennifer no doubt had heard the sound bites and read the news stories. She’d seen that her younger brother had been arrested in connection with the brutal murders of her grandparents. And she’d known it would be just a matter of time until they came to her. The police, the press, the defense - it didn’t matter who. What mattered was that her ten-year struggle to recreate her life had come to nothing. Despite everything - her flight and her fight, her adopted state, her new home and her changed name - the sight of the stranger standing there staring at her, told her that she was about to be drawn back into the web of the family she’d tried so hard to leave behind.

For in the split second in which Jennifer had looked up and locked eyes with the tall, dark man standing by the funny-looking car, she’d known full well that whoever he was, it could be only Jonathan that he’d come about. And for Matt Fielder, his response to her reaction, as he later would put it, was, “There was something there, all right. I knew right away I hadn’t driven all those hours for nothing.”

THEY SAT AROUND a fold-down aluminum tabletop and drank tea from mugs that didn’t match. The boy had gone out back to play with friends, promising earnestly to be back before dark. He was nine, it turned out, and his name was Troy. People took him for older because he was tall for his age, she explained.

“My name is Fielder,” he’d told her when he’d first walked up to them. “Matt Fielder. I’m the lawyer for your brother Jonathan.”

He’d half expected her to deny that she had a brother named Jonathan, to tell him there must be some mistake. Or, at very least, to feign surprise that her brother would need a lawyer. But she hadn’t. Instead, she’d simply turned to the boy and told him to go inside and wash up.

Now Fielder sat sipping his tea. It was bland and lukewarm, but he was grateful to have something to distract him from the face he found so hard to look away from.

“How long have you lived here?” he asked her, taking in the interior of the trailer. It was all Formica and plastic and aluminum, benches that opened into beds and hid storage bins beneath them, tabletops that swung up to reveal cooking surfaces, and chairs that folded flat for stowing. The best that could be said about it was that it was compact, functional, and clean.

“About two years,” she said, without apology.

“And before?”

“Different places.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. They both knew he hadn’t come to talk about her travels.

“How’s my brother?” she finally asked.

He assumed she meant Jonathan. Fielder figured there was enough family tragedy to talk about without bringing up P. J. and the thirty years he was doing for the feds in Atlanta. “About as good as can be expected,” he said. “He seems to share your ability to survive in small spaces.”

“We share lots of things,” she said.