Last Day (26 page)

“Maybe they were just friends.”

“I saw him kiss her when he handed her the cup,” Lulu said. “It was a real kiss.”

Kate stared out at the water, picturing her sister on the ferry, kissing a stranger. So Scotty had been wrong—they were more than just friends. And the baby? Could he have been Jed’s? She closed her eyes and tried to imagine how Beth must have felt. It must have been exciting. She must have been happy. Kate kept the small fat key in her pocket, and her hand closed around it now.

“Whose baby was it?” Kate asked.

“Where are you?” Lulu asked.

“New London.”

“At home?”

“On Pequot.”

“Stay there,” Lulu said. “I’m coming to get you.”

30

Kate had already decided what to do next. When Lulu picked her up, Kate asked her to drive her home. She needed to be behind the wheel of her own car, regain a feeling of power and control. “I need to get my car,” she said.

“To go where?” Lulu asked.

“Ainsworth.”

“Holy shit.”

“You can come if you want.”

So Lulu parked her Range Rover in Kate’s spot behind the loft building, and they took off in Kate’s Porsche. Kate had sworn she would never see her father again, but he was going to explain this to her—how he’d introduced Beth to a fellow inmate. Kate drove north on Route 9, following directions to the Ainsworth Correctional Institute.

“Why are we doing this?” Lulu asked. “I should be buying you martinis at the Ocean House and begging you to forgive me and understand why I didn’t tell you.”

“Yes, you should. But I want to find Jed.”

“Tell the detective. He’ll find him.”

“I plan to,” Kate said. “But this part’s on me. I want to know if my father introduced Beth to her killer. Do you think Jed did it, not Pete?”

“Well, he wasn’t happy with her.”

“What are you talking about?”

Lulu exhaled hard. “She was married. He wanted her not to be. They fought about it.”

“Was he the father?” Kate asked.

“I’d say it’s a distinct possibility.”

“Did you
ask
her?”

“She didn’t tell me everything, Kate.”

“And she didn’t tell me
anything
.”

“What the hell are we doing?” Lulu said. “Get the detective on this so you don’t have to see your father for the first time since . . .”

“He paid to have us tied up in the cellar,” Kate said, finishing the sentence.

Lulu had a point. Kate was so good at blocking out feelings she’d made herself dead from the brain down. This was tricky. Her father, her dad. She had loved him like crazy when she was little. They used to go on expeditions in the backyard, with him carrying her on his shoulders. They’d see their shadow cast by the house lights.

“A two-headed giant,” he’d say.

“Don’t scare me,” she’d say.

“Never,” he’d say. “What are we?”

“Sweethearts and partners,” she’d reply.

“That’s right,” he’d say, bouncing her up and down, tossing her up to the stars and catching her as she fell.

She sped along, the Connecticut River on their right, through Hartford. She and her father used to go to the Wadsworth Atheneum, and she felt her old daughterly love flooding back. She had been close to her father. Whenever they had stopped at the Atheneum, they had visited Andrew Wyeth’s
Chambered Nautilus
, a painting of a young girl in her gauze-canopied bed, looking out the window with unbridled longing, a luminous seashell on the hope chest at the foot of the bed.

“Why do you think it’s a hope chest?” her father had asked one time.

Kate stared, reddening as if he had caught her having a fantasy. “Because the girl wants to get married,” she said quietly.

“That’s her greatest wish?” he asked.

Kate stared at the painting, haunting in shades of white, wheat, and gray. The girl in the bed reminded her of herself: thin with long brown hair, filled with constant yearning. She could never have expressed that to her father or anyone. No one thought of her as a girl in bed; she was an athlete, always on a tennis court, a sailboat, or skis. She laughed; she didn’t moon. At least those were the things she showed the world.

“Kate?” her father prodded. He stood beside her, tall and lean, the handsomest man she knew. He wore a navy-and-black houndstooth jacket from Allen Collins, gray flannels, and loafers without socks. He had a narrow face with a crooked nose and deeply sensitive hazel eyes always ready to smile. His hair was short and full, brown with white starting to come in.
Silver threads among the gold,
he would joke.

“Her fondest wish is to get out of the bed and run,” Kate said. “And do something exciting.”

“That’s my girl,” he said. “You still think it’s a hope chest?”

“It’s a blanket chest. For when the nights get cold. When it’s winter.”

“That’s what I think too,” he said.

They always had lunch at the Hartford Club, with its brick facade and arched windows, just across Prospect Street from the Atheneum. He seemed proud to show her off—she’d wear a dress, and he’d ask people if they didn’t think she had long legs like a thoroughbred. She had often been conscious of thinking she had been lucky to be there alone with him, that he’d taken her and not their mother or Beth, but it had made her feel guilty at the same time.

Speeding past the Colt Armory with its dark-blue star-dazzled dome and the ghosts of makers of firearms, she couldn’t help glancing at the Hartford skyline, trying in a split second to locate the museum and the club. Memories flooded into her just like the dam her dad had told her about that had broken in 1936, nearly washed away Hartford
and his parents’ home, drowned an aunt he’d never meet. He had grown up with the family’s legacy and fear and hatred of that flood and all it had taken.

“We’re getting closer,” Kate said to Lulu.

“Are you okay?” Lulu asked.

“Yes.”

“Because it seems like you might not be. In fact, how could you be? It’s a big deal seeing him.”

As she listened to Lulu’s words, Kate’s heart began to harden again. To purposely do without someone you loved was a big deal. But so was setting in motion a crime that would destroy his family.

She took one of the last exits before the Massachusetts border. The maximum-security prison was set back from a main road, down a long driveway. Two rows of tall anchor fences topped with triple coils of razor wire surrounded the premises. The visitors’ parking lot was clearly marked. It was crowded, but Kate noticed a steady stream of people, mostly women, leaving the building, getting into their cars. Kate imagined them visiting husbands, boyfriends, sons, fathers—all incarcerated just like her father.

“I don’t know how to do this,” Kate said, staring at the brick building. “The procedures. I should have called to see about visiting hours.”

“I’m sure they’ll tell you when you get to the door,” Lulu said. “Are you nervous?”

Kate nodded.

Lulu hugged her hard. “I’ll wait in the car,” she said. “Take your time.”

Kate walked down a sidewalk, past a sign:

N
O WEAPONS

N
O CELL PHONES

M
ODEST DRESS

Despite the number of people leaving, there was a line, again mostly women, many holding grocery bags. One by one they went through metal detectors. Correctional officers stood talking to each other while watching the visitors enter.

“Who are you visiting?” a guard at the desk asked Kate.

“Garth Woodward,” she said.

“Your name?”

“Kate Woodward,” she said, watching him scan a computer screen. “Why?”

“You have to be on his visitors list.”

“I’m not,” she said.

“Then you can’t visit till you are.”

Kate wanted to argue with him, but she knew there was no point. Frustrated, she turned to go.

“Wait,” the guard said. “Katharine Woodward?”

“Yes.”

“You’re on here.” He handed her a pass and directed her to Garth’s cellblock.

She swallowed hard, walking through the metal detector. She hadn’t visited, written, or called for twenty-three years, but he’d kept her name on his list. She and the other women walked through a series of metal doors, one clanging shut behind them before the next opened. Correctional officers inspected the grocery bags, rifling through them. Kate heard potato chips crunch and break as one guard pawed through a woman’s bag roughly.

“Hey,” the woman said. “Don’t bust them.”

“What’s the difference? He’s going to eat them anyway.”

The woman turned to Kate, anger in her eyes.

“No respect here, none.”

“No talking!” a different guard barked.

It took thirty minutes to get from the prison’s front entrance to the last metal door.

A massive guard stood in the middle of the corridor, making the women go around him. He had the neck of a bodybuilder and the gut of a lazy slob. His brown hair was slicked back, his complexion sallow. He watched the women pass with half-lidded eyes, like a frog waiting to lap up a fly. His left thumb was hooked into his belt, his fingers dangling down the front of his pants.

The visiting room was full. Prisoners in bright-yellow uniforms sat facing their visitors across long tables that reminded Kate of the soup kitchen. Many of the men had tattooed arms and necks. Kate wondered what they had done to land here. She felt sick at the idea of a criminal from Ainsworth worming his way into Beth’s life.

Guards were stationed around the room, keeping watch. The door guard had followed the women in. Kate could barely breathe. She looked at all the faces, wondering if she’d even recognize her father. She thought maybe he was still in his cell, but in the half hour since she’d signed in, she saw the guards had gotten him.

He saw her approach and stood.

She held back a gasp. He was old. Her tall, handsome father was stooped and gray. His skin was pale; he had a white scar on his forehead. But he was beaming, his smile at the sight of her as delighted as ever. When she got close, she had to hold herself back from crashing into him with a hug.

“I never thought you’d come,” he said.

“Neither did I,” she said.

They stood facing each other for a minute, till a guard approached them and gestured to keep a distance apart, sit down on opposite sides of the table. Kate tried to keep her face from crumpling, but it was a losing battle. She felt like a little kid whose heart had been broken. She stared into her father’s hazel eyes, saw all the love and pride he’d always felt for her, thought of all the years he’d stolen from them.

“My name was on your list,” she said.

“I know, Katy. I never gave up hoping.”

“You probably should have,” she said.

“But I didn’t.”

She looked at his hands. Gnarled and veined, they were flat on the table, as if he wanted to reach across and take hers, reassure her like he used to when she was a little girl, let her know that everything would be all right. He’d been the best father ever, until he wasn’t.

“What happened to your forehead?” she asked.

“A fight,” he said. “Years ago, when I first arrived.”

“You fight in here?” she asked harshly.

“No,” he said. “I got beaten for what I did to you and Beth. People here don’t like fathers hurting their children.”

She braced herself, her whole body shaking, remembering the ropes around her wrists, the weight of her mother’s body.

“Do you know about Beth?” she asked.

“Yes, Kate,” he said, the smile completely gone. The moment rocked her. The horror of Beth’s death hit her again, seeing the grief in her father’s eyes.

“Murdered,” she said. “Just like Mom.”

“Who did it?” her father asked. “Her husband? I want to kill him, Kate. If he gets caught and winds up here, I will.”

“Your mind goes straight to that?” she asked. “That’s not how most people think.”

“It’s how fathers think,” he said.

She took that in and imagined how he must feel, trapped in here, unable to be with the family, to have protected any of them—to have put them in such danger. She had loved him so much. She wondered how he had lived through the last twenty-three years, knowing what he’d done to his daughters, to his wife.

“Tell me—do they think it’s Pete?” he asked.

“No one has been arrested.”

“I know, but you two were so close, and you have the best instincts. I don’t believe you don’t know—whether it’s been proven or not, you know in your gut. No one knew Beth better than you.”

“Actually, I think you knew her better.”

Her father sat back. She’d shocked him. “That’s not true,” he said.

“We weren’t close anymore. We haven’t been since the day Mom died.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It changed everything between us. We were never the same after that,” Kate said. She delivered the words like blows. She saw the pain in his face and didn’t care that she was being cruel.

“She talked about you every time she came here,” he said. “She told me about your job, all the famous people you flew, the places you visited. You always brought her presents. She told me about dinners you two had and what a great aunt you are to Samantha. How you and Lulu are still best friends. No, Katy, you’re wrong in what you’re telling me. She adored you as much as ever.”

Kate looked down. She hadn’t said that she and Beth didn’t love each other deeply. In fact, she thought they’d loved each other even more as time went on. But they’d been blocked by the trauma, a force field created by the violence of that day, impermeable to words. Each of them occupied her own dark solitude; feelings could break through, but language couldn’t.

“I don’t know if it was Pete,” Kate said, thinking of what Lulu had said.

“Then who?”

“Who is Jed Hilliard?”

“Jed?” her father asked, looking confused. “The kid who was here?”

“Kid?” Kate asked.

“Well, to me. Thirty, thirty-one, something like that last time I saw him. The artist.”

“Yes, an artist.”

“Why? What does he have to do with Beth?”

“She met him here.”

“Yes, but they barely knew each other. He’s a good artist; he has a fine eye. I told him if I still had the gallery, I’d give him a show.”