“You’ll have to handle Sunday,” I tell him, speaking more as superior than friend. It is intentional. No more discussion of his worry, certain to be compounded now, will assuage it. Nor will it stop me.
He gives no response, just steps into his room and closes the door behind. In this moment I wonder if a fracture has opened in our friendship that will never fully mend. Or mend at all. I wish I could say that someday I hope to tell Tim all that has transpired to bring me to this place which has painted me in a light that troubles him deeply, but I cannot. When all is done, should it even be possible, some things, I fear, will remain untold.
I tramp fast down the stairs and back to Chris. She is standing, the green envelope in hand, fingers kneading it.
“We’re getting out of here,” I tell her. She sees my duffel and laptop slung, puzzled. “We’ll stop by your place and get you some—” She shakes her head, cutting me off. For a moment I fear I have been too presumptuous. There is nothing beyond innocent in what I am suggesting. “Chris, all I want is to get you somewhere away from this.” I take the green envelope from her. “Someplace we can look at Katie’s murder, Hammond, James Estcek, everything, and find the thing that will make this stop. That thing is going to be tying the Hammonds to her killers. Somehow. That’s what I want, Chris. That’s all.”
She eases closer a half step. “I didn’t mean I don’t want to go. I just don’t want to go back home. Not after knowing that someone was…”
Is it more telling that I was wrong about her reluctance, or that she is not hesitant to leave with me to points unknown? I do not know, but either case heightens the rising closeness I feel toward her. A closeness I must keep in check until I can be certain that it is real, not situational.
“I have a bag in my trunk,” she tells me. “Extra clothes in case of an all-nighter at work.”
I smile lightly at her. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Chapter Twenty Six
To Hide No More
Quick jockeying in the rectory driveway freed Chris’ car and we drove northwest, dodging overzealous drivers piled into drifts and snow screaming across the highway. A trip that would take three hours in crisp summer today takes nearly double that, and we pull onto the gravel drive after dark, snow a quarter way up the wheels, the bumper serving double duty as plough in some spots as we finally reach the house at Arrow Lake.
I take a few minutes to shovel the path between car and house as Chris gets our things inside. Headlights from the far side of the lake shine briefly upon snow laying a rolling carpet of white on the water. It is a hushed, solitary sight, too few people at their summer houses now to bask in its almost imperceptible, fleeting beauty. But I see it, and watch for a moment until the headlights swing away from the water.
I finish and head inside. Along the way we had stopped for gas and groceries, and I find Chris making sandwiches, plates and a bottle of wine on the table, glasses already filled. We eat and drink and relax. For a while, odd as it may seem, all thoughts of my sister are set aside. All worries and frustrations over what has transpired these past weeks absent from our talk over passable wine and ham on rye.
Then Chris quiets, and smiles, and as she averts her gaze I can see a memory rising. She half shakes her head toward the fireplace in the next room, logs wrapped in orange flame. “She was pissed at you.”
“What?” I am taken aback. “Katie was? Why?”
“After you decided to become a priest she said all the burden was on her to give your mom grandkids.”
I laugh, curious. “What made you think of that right now?”
“This place. She would say your mom wanted her grandkids to splash around in the lake like the both of you did.” Chris seems to consider this for a minute, reaching for some deeper meaning to the desire. “I wonder if she found it hard, you know. When you and Katie stopped being kids.”
I had never considered that.
“I mean, to hear Katie talk about it, it sounded like your mom was obsessed with grandkids,” Chris offers. “To have that would be like reliving what she had with you both. That innocent, unconditional love.”
“She always loved us that way,” I counter, but Chris shakes her head.
“No, the other way around,” Chris corrects, and I understand. We love, but we judge as we mature. We test. We push. And though the love is there, for a woman like my mother, whose own being existed within a stricture of behaviors and expectations, its fullness may seem diminished in comparison.
Might have seemed, I correct myself. I wonder if, within whatever mental construct my mother now exists, her decaying mind has allowed this perfect vision to flourish with some semblance of comfort. A dreamland where these wants and wishes have come to pass.
“I think the thing she hated most was the idea of getting married,” Chris shares.
“Why do you say that?” I ask, surprised. It seems such a natural thing to assume, beyond any pressure to produce a brood of grandchildren, that Katie would find the right man, a good man, and settle down.
Chris chooses her words now. She was the friend and confidant, whereas I was family. “Katie was always more into being pursued than caught. To her it was kind of a game, having guys want her. The harder to get she played, the more they wanted her. It built her up.”
I do not discount what Chris is suggesting. I can recall few serious boyfriends which my sister had. Even her date to the senior prom was more an arranged outing with a friend, one I assumed was planned to make the night about fun instead of forced teenage romance.
Somehow, though, in her college years, it appears she gave in to a pursuer. Allowed herself to be caught, by John Hammond.
* * *
We bring our wine glasses and the skim remaining at the bottom of the bottle into the great room. I plant myself on the couch, laptop before me on the coffee table, Chris cross legged on the floor next to my leg, hearth to our right spitting warmth into the space.
“There has to be something in Hammond’s past, some person he was associated with, that would at least hint at how this all was set in motion,” Chris says, scrolling through pages I have saved on the laptop, no wi-fi or cell coverage available to allow a current connection. “Ranking guys in the business world and politicos, they have ‘fixers’. People who take care of problems, before or after they develop.”
“You think Hammond’s that desperate? Or stupid?”
“It’s not desperation—it’s prudence.” She moves through pages at a fast clip, trained eye scanning for the relevant and discarding the frivolous. “As for stupid… He has a guy, and this guy knows a guy who knows a guy. Somewhere down the line one of those guys in James Estcek.”
Still, though the parts add up, the whole I find flawed in one glaring respect. “So Hammond, or someone working for him, arranges for two guys to kill Katie. How does she end up at that market? She’s not going to let some stranger drive her there. So does Hammond risk that? Meet Katie at her apartment and drive here there to be killed? That seems like a huge risk to me. He could have been seen, his car recorded by some traffic camera. I mean, you have to agree that’s a huge leap to take.”
But Chris isn’t listening to me anymore. She’s fixed on a page on my laptop screen. A photo of John Hammond and an accompanying blurb.
“What?” I ask, focusing on what she is. Looking for whatever has given her pause.
“John Hammond,” she begins, reading the blurb aloud, “attends the groundbreaking ceremony for the Hammond Industries Research Center in Marietta, Georgia.”
There John Hammond stands in the staged photo, shovel in hand, surrounded by other official-types with their own spades jabbed into a soft mound of dirt. He is smiling beneath a gleaming silver hard hat. “And?”
“Look at the date.” Chris extends a finger toward the screen, small caption below the blurb identifying the photographer and giving the date the photo was taken.
“May 9
th
, 2005,” I say, the words mostly breath. The day Katie was murdered.
Chris skims the accompanying article, pulls relevant points out. “…Hammond attended Sunday services at…met with managers at Hartsfield-Jackson airport…spoke Tuesday at the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce…” She looks back to me. “He was there for several days.”
What she is relating is clear—John Hammond could not have been with Katie the night she was killed. Could not have driven her to the market and abandoned her to die. Neither seemed likely to me when considered with all surrounding factors, but the possibility, if true, would have added some of the final pieces to the puzzle.
And it does, without doubt, now cement the question of who drove Katie to the market as foremost to be answered. One step forward, one step back.
“So he’s harder to connect to this,” I comment. Chris doesn’t respond. She quiets, looking away from the screen for a moment, following some cascade of thoughts. Reaching some unseen conclusion, or possibility, neither of which, by the look about her, are anything she’d anticipated. “What’s wrong?”
She scrolls away from the page, to collections of Hammond I have saved from various publications. Dozens of photos showing the businessman turned legislator attending functions from Rotary Club luncheons to the governor’s inauguration. “In every picture, look who’s with him.”
It takes just a quick scan of the photos as she runs through them for me. In every one his wife, Michelle, is by his side, or deferentially just behind, but always close. Always watchful.
…
do anything to protect
…
Chris returns to the Atlanta photo from the day of Katie’s murder. “Every picture except this one.”
John Hammond shovels dirt, others crowded close, beaming with him. But not Michelle.
I take in the image, the others, the suggestion of it all. He was in Atlanta when Katie was murdered. She was not.
Who drove Katie to the market?
I ask the question silently, a new answer possible.
Chris looks to me, considering something. She slides around the table, to the far side where my laptop bag rests, and reaches in. The stack of Katie’s cards and envelopes come out in her hand. She sets them on the coffee table and opens one, ignoring the card and focusing on the red envelope. On the flap in particular, where it has been peeled away after being sealed, splotches of adhesive dried opaque, tinged red in places. A deeper red than the stiff paper envelope, waxy smear dragged along as the sender moistened the flap. Put tongue and lips to it.
“Lipstick,” Chris says, showing me. I could guess that, and I have, but she knows. A woman would know.
The mark of another woman.
I take another envelope, this one white, and examine the flap myself, a vague reddish pink streak traced along the edge. On another, the same, with hints of some darker shade. And another. And another. As I grab frantically for the next envelope Chris stops me, clasps her hand to mine.
“Michael…”
I let my hand accept her touch as my head swims.
“These are from Michelle.” She states what has just been made obvious, and though she is reassuring me I can sense she is shaken. That the friend she had believed so close, so understood, so known, was half that at best, even to her.
“Katie was gay?” It comes out a question when I say it, though there is a small measure of revelatory relief. Things written off, as early as an hour before over sandwiches and wine, now begin to seem as parts of my sister that were more explanatory than quirk. Instructive of a self she held close. The lack of serious boyfriends, and those that did pop up seeming arranged for show. Her apparent obsession with my mother’s dream of grandchildren. And likely a myriad of other things that, should I now dwell on the whole of her life as she matured, might reveal themselves to my curiosity.
“I should have known,” Chris says. “I mean, before we drifted apart, I should have…”
“She could have told you,” I remind Chris, trying to relieve some of the sudden distress filling her. “She could have told me, or my parents.”
Chris reacts obviously to my last words, nearly rolling her eyes and releasing my hand. “And how would that have gone with your mother? Her good little Catholic daughter a lesbian?”
It is rhetorical and harsh. My gaze fixes hard on Chris.
“Are you serious, Michael?” She puzzles at the defensive expression that has come over me. “What do you think your mother would have done?” Recognizing her vehemence, misplaced now in relation to my mother’s condition, which had begun to display itself during Katie’s college years, Chris dials it back a notch. “You have to see some of that, right? How would she have felt? How would she have treated Katie?”
The truth is, I don’t know. It would be easy to toss about a term like ‘disown’, but would my mother, when all is said and done, have cast the angel she brought into this world out like some leper? Would she have let her adherence to dogma, which even those in my position as servants of God and the church realize has consequences unfair to those who do not fit the mold of truly, absolutely pious? And if she would, how far beyond God’s vision of man, and woman, would that place my mother and her embrace of judgment over acceptance?
We could tread this ground back and forth, Chris pointing out the obvious against my natural tendency to defend my mother. But we can’t. That is not why we have come here. We have come to inch closer to the truth, and have unexpectedly just sprinted to a grander understanding.
“What does this mean to that night?” I ask, bringing focus back to Katie’s murder. “Did Michelle drive her to the market? To be killed?”
Chris thinks on this, seeming to struggle with the logic.
“She said she would do anything to protect her husband,” I remind Chris. “Anything. Do you think John Hammond would have been elected to Congress if it somehow came out his wife was having an affair with another
woman
?” I shake my head. “He would have never made the primary.”
“I don’t know,” she says after a moment. “It’s different. Protecting her husband from his own idiocy is one thing. She’d have no love lost for Katie in that situation. But here…” She eyes the cards scattered atop the coffee table. “She loved her, Michael.”