The Widow (2 page)

An anonymous tip.

It wasn’t the first in seven years, and it wasn’t the craziest—but she didn’t need two trusted colleagues, two unwavering friends, to talk her out of following up on it.

Her spatula struck a half-burned page pasted to the bottom of the grill, the words jumping out of the ashes at her in thick, black marker, as if somehow she needed reminding.

I am a widow.

T
he tip had come to her the night before in theatrical fashion.

It was the second Saturday in July, the day Abigail and Chris had chosen for their wedding seven years ago. She had spent the day alone. She always did, despite her friends and family who would call and invite her to barbecues and dinners, a movie, a Red Sox game.

Once, her mother, a corporate attorney with a high-powered husband, a woman who’d learned how to relax, had offered to book Abigail a spa day.
“Get a massage. Get your toes done. You’ll feel better.”

Only her mother, Abigail had thought. But Kathryn March had made her widowed daughter smile with that gesture—mission accomplished.

Her father was a different story. He never tried to make his only daughter smile on her anniversary. He knew he couldn’t. Abigail had told him he couldn’t.

“Was Chris killed because of you?”

“Abigail…don’t…”

“Was he?”

“I was the father of the bride on your wedding day. That’s all.”

“Did you put him up to something on his honeymoon? You’ve seen the file on his murder. What’s in it? What aren’t you telling me?”

The truth was, there was nothing in Chris’s file. Otherwise his murder wouldn’t have remained unsolved. Investigators wouldn’t release certain details to a family member—in their place, Abigail wouldn’t, either. But the Maine State Police and the FBI weren’t hiding anything from her. Although he was a director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a hard-driving, self-made man, a former Boston cop himself, John March had no advantage when it came to his son-in-law’s murder.

He couldn’t produce a killer any more than she could. The evidence just wasn’t there. He couldn’t even console his daughter.

Not that she needed consolation. Not anymore. What she needed was resolution.

Answers.

But on the second Saturday in July, Abigail thought only of the man she’d loved and their time together. She didn’t think of Chris as the FBI special agent brutally murdered on his honeymoon, nor did she let her mind wander to the stack of materials she’d collected herself for her own investigative file on his death.

She’d landed at their favorite restaurant on Newbury Street and asked to sit by the window, where she could see the outdoor tables, crowded with diners enjoying the warm July evening, and passersby, young lovers holding hands, older couples out for an evening, perhaps celebrating their own wedding day.

Abigail wasn’t celebrating, but she wasn’t mourning, either.

“I love you, Abigail. I’ll always love you.”

She wanted to crawl back in time and tell him…don’t! Don’t love me! Love someone else. Live, Chris. Live.

But, because she couldn’t, she ordered a glass of Pinot Noir and thought of her wedding flowers—hydrangeas, roses—and that sparkling Maine afternoon, and how handsome Christopher Browning was as he’d waited for her to walk up the aisle on the lawn of the quaint seaside inn where they were married.

“Excuse me—ma’am? Are you Detective Browning?”

Her waiter’s words yanked her out of her memories and dropped her back into the real world. “Why—”

“You have a phone call.”

A call? Why not reach her on her pager or cell phone? She eyed the waiter. He was young, unfamiliar. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know. I just—” He gestured back toward the bar. “Someone gave me the phone and said it was for you.”

“All right. Don’t go far, okay? I might want to talk to you.”

He nodded, retreating fast.

Abigail held the phone to her ear. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry to disturb your dinner.” The voice was unrecognizable, barely a whisper. She couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman speaking. “Are you having your husband’s favorite wine?”

“Who is this?”

“Pinot Noir, correct?”

Damn.
She pushed back the emotion of the evening and called on her law-enforcement training and experience.
Keep whoever it is talking.
“That’s right. Are you here? Join me.”

“Another time, perhaps.”

“Did you know my husband?”

“Shh. Shh. Just listen. Your husband turned over too many rocks. Bad things crawled out. He was eliminated.” The static whisper made the words seem even creepier, more menacing. “His death wasn’t a random act of violence.”

“I need you to be more specific—”

“You need to
listen
.” It was the first time the caller had put emphasis on any one word. “Things are happening on Mt. Desert. Again.”

“Is someone else in danger?”

“You’re the only person the killer fears.”

“Are you suggesting I’m in danger?”

“I’m suggesting you’re the one who can find the answers.
Detective
.” A brief pause. “You’ve gained experience over the past seven years. You haven’t lost your determination to solve your husband’s murder. The killer knows you won’t stop until you do.”

A cold finger of emotion penetrated her cloak of professionalism. “How do you know what the killer knows?”

“I have to go.”

“Wait—you said ‘things’ are happening. What kind of things?”

“No more.”

“What about the rocks Chris turned over—what crawled out? Give me an idea. Otherwise, once I hang up, I drink my wine, have a nice dinner and dismiss this as another crank call. I’ve had several over the years, you know.”

“This is the call you’ve been waiting for. You know it is.”

“Don’t—”

Click.

It was done. The call was over. Abigail set the phone on the table and dug her detective’s notebook out of her handbag and tugged off the Bic pen she kept attached to it. The waiter, who must have been watching, wandered back to her table, but she held up a hand, silencing him as she wrote down every word the caller had said to her.

When she finished, she flipped the pad shut and sat back, eyeing the waiter. A kid, really. “What’s your name?” she asked him.

“Trevor—Trevor Baynor.”

She took down his address and phone number, learned that he worked at the restaurant twenty hours a week—the rest of the time, he studied jazz at the Berklee College of Music. Piano.

“I need to get back to work,” he said.

“Sure. First tell me who took the call I just received. The bartender?”

He nodded. “Her name’s Lori.”

“What did she say to you when she handed you the phone?”

“She said—I don’t remember.”

“Try.”

He shoved a hand through his tufts of thick blond hair. “She said to give you the phone. That you had a call.”

“She knew my name? How?”

“The caller, I guess.”

“There are a hundred people in this restaurant, Trevor. How did Lori know I was Detective Browning?”

“Oh. Yeah.” He grinned a little. “I didn’t think about that. She gave me your table number, said, ‘I think that’s her.’ It’s not like she knows you.”

“Did you see anyone else on a phone while I was taking my call?”

Trevor’s eyes widened in surprise or possibly fear. “No—I mean, I didn’t notice. I wasn’t looking. People talk on cell phones all the time.”

“Okay, Trevor. Thanks.” Abigail got to her feet. “I’ll go talk to Lori. Don’t throw my wine away. I haven’t given up on dinner yet.”

Lori, a sleek, black-clad woman in her early forties, didn’t know much more than Trevor did. The caller had spoken to her in a whisper, too. “I just figured it was someone with a voice problem—throat cancer, laryngitis, whatever.”

“Man, woman?”

“Could be either. Why, don’t you know?” She frowned, her black eyeliner giving her a dramatic but raccoonish look. “Maybe I should get the manager.”

“Sure. That’d be fine. In a sec, though, okay? While your memory’s fresh, tell me exactly what the caller said to you.”

“Exactly? Well—I picked up and said hello. I’m informal. And the person on the other end said, ‘I’d like to speak to Abigail Browning. Detective Browning.’ That’s you, right?”

“Just go on, please.”

“I said, are you sure you have the right number, and the caller said, ‘She’s dining alone. She has short dark hair.’” Lori shrugged, easing back from the shiny dark-wood bar. “I looked around, and bingo. There you were.”

“Then what?”

“I told the caller I spotted you and gave the phone to Trevor.”

The manager, a middle-aged man in an overly formal black suit, appeared and asked what was going on, and Abigail let Lori fill him in, watched both of them for any indication either one had been part of the setup. But they seemed as caught off guard by the call as she was. They didn’t know the caller. They hadn’t agreed—for money, for grins, for love—to tip off him or her when Abigail arrived at the restaurant.

And the restaurant didn’t have Caller ID, either.

Abigail called her partner, Lucas Jones, because he was experienced—if not as experienced as Bob O’Reilly and Scoop Wisdom—and because he didn’t live above her. While she waited for him, she pushed her wine aside and ate half a piece of warm bread, staring out at a young couple walking hand in hand down Newbury Street, the woman’s wedding ring glinting in the streetlight.

Abigail wanted to tap her on the shoulder and ask her what she would do if the man she loved was murdered four days into their honeymoon, if, after seven years, his murder remained unsolved, his killer at large?

Would she lie awake nights, worrying whether or not the killer no one could catch had killed, would kill, again?

Would she read about murders in the paper, hear about them on television, and wonder if they were the work of her husband’s killer—if she’d done enough, worked hard enough, fought hard enough, prayed hard enough, to find the killer?

Or would she put her husband’s death behind her and try to lead a normal life?

But the couple wandered out of sight, just as Lucas arrived. Lucas was in his late thirties—not particularly handsome. He had a wife in law enforcement, and a young son—a normal life. He sat across from her. “Abigail, what is it?”

“Probably nothing,” she said, and told him about the call.

The next day she burned her journals and made plans to go to Maine.

After she’d burned her journals and scooped their ashes into her coffee can, Abigail drove out to the gold-domed Massachusetts State House and parked in front of a brick townhouse across from Boston Common. She could still smell lighter fluid on her fingers. The elegant house had black shutters and a brass-trimmed glossy burgundy-painted front door, with just enough room on either side of its front steps for a rhododendron and a few evergreen shrubs.

Above the single doorbell was a discreet plaque. The Dorothy Garrison Foundation. Since it was Sunday, the offices were closed.

“Doe,” as her family called her, had drowned in Maine when she was fourteen. Owen Garrison had been just eleven and witnessed his sister’s drowning, helpless to save her when she slipped and fell off the cliffs, not far from where he found Chris’s body eighteen years later.

Abigail eyed the tall, spotless windows with their sheer curtains and heavy drapes, the old-Boston formality of the place a contrast to the physical, unrelenting, unforgiving work that Owen did as a specialist in disaster response. Three years ago, he founded Fast Rescue, a nonprofit organization that fielded highly trained, volunteer search-and-rescue teams prepared and equipped to arrive within twenty-four hours of any disaster, manmade or natural, anywhere in the world.

They weren’t spontaneous volunteers, and they didn’t respond to situations that could be handled by local organizations. They were part of an intricate network of national and international emergency responders. Hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fires, tornadoes, mudslides, bombings—if people were missing, trapped, swept away or otherwise in need of being found and rescued, Owen and his teams would be there.

Abigail ran her fingertips along the cool black-iron fence. When Edgar Garrison had bought his Boston dream house a century ago, had he imagined his great-grandson dangling from a helicopter to pluck desperate survivors of massive flooding from rooftops, or digging through the rubble of a collapsed building, working his way to a trapped six-year-old?

Hard to say. The Garrisons were an unpredictable lot, as far as Abigail could tell. But the men were all handsome. Very handsome, in fact. She’d seen pictures of old Edgar, the money-maker, an avid outdoorsman who’d teamed up with the Rockefellers and other wealthy summer residents to turn much of Mt. Desert Island, Maine, into a national park. Quite attractive, if a little stuffy. The good looks of his son, Brennan, were softer, more refined. He’d surprised his family by marrying a boar-shooting Texas beauty twenty years his junior.

Now eighty-two, Polly Garrison still could grab headlines. Their son, also named Edgar, was the quiet one, although just as startlingly handsome, in his own way, as his father and grandfather. He and his wife had established the foundation in their daughter’s memory and donated their Boston house for its headquarters not long after her accidental death. They moved to Texas and raised Owen there.