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CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Begin Reading

Also by David Rosenfelt

About the Author

Copyright

The dam broke at three
AM
, four hours after the storm hit. Fortunately, only the North Dam was affected, leaving the other two intact. Had they been breached as well, the eighteen thousand residents of Wilton, Maine, would be former residents of a town that no longer existed.

The destruction came as a surprise to everyone, especially the engineers that had certified the dams as “low risk” just eighteen months before. Certainly Hurricane Nicholas was a powerful storm, especially for early August, but no more so than others that had struck the area in recent years.

But the dam completely came apart from the pressure and flooded the areas in Wilton it had sworn to protect. Because it was the least important dam of the three, this meant that three streets on the outskirts of Wilton were flooded and badly damaged, as was the park and the small, private airport.

The only citizen to lose his life was seventy-three-year-old Warren Simpson, who suffered a heart attack during the chaotic evacuation process. He was flown to Bangor Hospital, but was pronounced dead on arrival.

The people of Wilton were resilient and had no doubt they would bounce back from the storm damage. It would cost money and take time, but the town whose charter had been ratified in eighteen forty-eight made plans to persevere and overcome.

Of course, they had no idea what was coming.

I have a lot of anniversaries. I try not to pay attention to them, but sometimes it’s hard. Dates are everywhere, from the TV when you switch channels, to the front of cell phones.

March thirty-first is my birthday. January fourteenth is the day that Jenny and I were married. September seventeenth is the day I joined the force. April first is the day I was promoted and officially became Chief Jake Robbins. My real name is Jason Robbins, but how Jason became Jake is a puzzle my parents never adequately explained.

August seventh is the day Jenny was murdered; I try not to change channels or look at my cell phone that day.

Of course, there are some anniversaries whose actual date I don’t even know. For instance, I have no idea when I got to Afghanistan, or when I left. I don’t have a clue when our old friend Katie Sanford introduced us to Roger Hagel, the guy she would eventually marry. Nor do I know the date that Jenny and I first went out with them, although I do remember that the four of us went bowling and then to dinner.

While I know the date Roger murdered Jenny, and even know that it happened at 3:00
PM
, I don’t know the date he was convicted, nor the date a few months later when he was murdered in prison. I know that I learned of their affair on June nineteenth, but I don’t know exactly when it began.

I was tempted to leave Wilton after Jenny died, but I never took any action toward that end. I had the job I always wanted, more good friends than I could ever need, and was living in a town that I liked a great deal. For a person who never had much of an interest in putting down roots, I somehow found myself rooted.

All I didn’t have was Jenny, but no matter where I went, she would never be with me. Roger Hagel saw to that.

Pretty much everything in Wilton reminds me of Jenny, but that’s okay. I want to remember her, the good times and the bad. Especially the good.

So I stayed, and life went on.

They were heady times for the Wilton Journal. It’s a long accepted fact that the media, be it television or print, prosper in the face of disaster and tragedy. For example, in the days after 9/11, not too many people were tuned into
I Love Lucy
reruns; they were watching CNN.

That meant that for the
Wilton Journal
, Hurricane Nicholas was quite literally the perfect storm. While a huge event in the life of the town, it wasn’t much more than a blip on the national scene. The hurricane was national news, but even that only got significant coverage for forty-eight hours. And Wilton was just one of many areas to be greatly affected.

So if anyone in or around Wilton wanted to know what was going on, the
Journal
was the place to find out. Circulation was up seventy percent in the two weeks following the storm, and the paper’s website reported a six hundred percent increase in “hits.”

And, by all accounts, the
Journal
did a terrific job. Under the leadership of publisher Katie Sanford, it presented the facts accurately and concisely. It also covered the human interest side of the disaster quite well; the reporters stepped up and wrote with a professionalism not usually associated with small town papers.

Each morning at seven, there would be a meeting of the ten reporters working the story. The paper actually only employed five full-time reporters, but freelancers were called in and put on what they called “temporary permanent” assignment, at least until the storm story had run its course.

One of the reporters, Matt Higgins, also held the title of managing editor under Katie. He chaired the meetings, often with her present, though sometimes not. She liked to give him some autonomy, and he always briefed her fully on the sessions that she missed. When Katie was going to attend, she occasionally held the meetings in her home, helping to preserve the family feeling she liked to cultivate among the staff.

Ever since Jenny Robbins’s murder, and Roger’s conviction and imprisonment, Katie had pulled back somewhat from the journalism side of the paper. Roger had handled all of the paper’s financial and HR stuff, so Katie became responsible for that as well. Even for a paper as small as the
Journal
, that was no small task.

It was a tough time for newspapers, and the
Journal
staff was, of necessity, lean. The business had been in the Sanford family for decades, but Katie was the most hands-on of all of them, partly because she had to be.

Disaster emergency teams will often talk about the gradual move from rescue to recovery, and it was the same for the
Wilton Journal
after the storm. As the crisis lessened, the stories naturally gravitated toward the recovery effort, which was going to be a long-term proposition. The damage to the affected areas was severe, and though federal money was sure to be appropriated, it would still take quite a while for Wilton to be whole.

After a morning meeting that Katie missed, Matt came in with his typically comprehensive update, running down the assignments he had given out. It was about three weeks after the storm, and good angles were in short supply. “We’re starting to scrape,” he said, grinning.

“What did you come up with?” she asked.

“More human interest stuff, continuing to follow our people.” They had focused on a few families that were particularly hard hit, providing daily updates on how they were coping. “A few more pets have been found; those stories seem to play.”

Katie nodded her agreement.

“And someone brought up the capsule,” Matt said. “It’s right in the flood area; the thought was it might not have been watertight, since no one could have expected it would need to be. It’s never flooded there before.”

There was a tradition in Wilton, literally since the town was founded, to bury a time capsule every fifty years. It included artifacts from its time, but mostly predictions by prominent townspeople about what life would be like fifty years hence, when it was opened. The newspaper always supervised the process, and got a bunch of stories out of it. The last capsule had been buried almost five years earlier.

“Is there any way to test for that?” Katie asked.

Matt shrugged. “I guess just dig it up, and if it’s okay, bury it again.”

“Or let our great-grandkids open the thing and find it’s a soaking mess.”

He laughed. “There is that option. Who’s going to care either way?”

She thought about it and shrugged. “Might as well dig it up and take a look. You can write about it.”

“Me?” he asked, clearly not pleased at the prospect.

She smiled. “I sense a Pulitzer.”

For reasons that were mostly contrived, Matt put off the mini-excavation for a few days, until Katie reminded him that if the capsule was really suffering water damage, delay might only make it worse. He prevailed upon a local construction company, already up to its ears in work, to spare a couple of guys for a few hours to do the deed.

They went out to the scene, along with Matt and the paper’s only staff photographer, Jimmy Osborne. They brought maps to show them the exact location, but that proved to be unnecessary, as the plaque that had been placed there was still intact. It was near the small airport, but no one would be bothered by any noise from departing or arriving planes. It would be a while before the water-damaged airport runway was functional again.

The workers had brought heavy equipment with them, but soon decided that the softness of the ground in the area would make that kind of operation unnecessary. The capsule was said to be buried only seven feet deep, and ordinary shovels would make short work of it.

As the two men started to dig, Jimmy Osborne positioned himself alongside the hole, so as to get a shot of the capsule when it was first visible.

“I hit something,” one of the workmen said, as a signal for Jimmy to get ready.

Matt walked over as well, and the next thing the workman said was, “What the hell is that?” Then the other said, “Oh, my God.”

Both men clawed their way out of the hole, leaving a clear view for Matt and Jimmy. But Jimmy didn’t take the photograph.

First he dropped the camera.

And then he ran.

I didn’t get many calls from Katie Sanford. We’d had plenty of contact with each other the last few years, both because of our jobs and because Wilton is too small a town to expect otherwise. But our history was such that we weren’t likely to be hanging out together very much, at least not on purpose.

The ironic thing is that Katie and I dated in high school, going so far as to get “pinned.” I don’t think boys give graduation or fraternity pins to girls anymore; I can’t say for sure. But our being pinned meant to us that we would always be together, a commitment that lasted until we left Wilton for different colleges. Katie was beautiful then, and she’s beautiful now.

She and I actually lost our virginity to each other; it may sound like a cliché, but it happened the night of our prom. As I recall, she said that it was her first time, while I claimed the opposite. It’s possible we both were lying.

I got her call this time, patched through to my cell phone, while I was at the firing range. I was teaching a class on the proper use of firearms to kids from the local high school. A lot of them had been hunting with their fathers pretty much since they were born but had never used handguns, and that’s what I was instructing them on.

It was basic stuff, but the school, and I, felt it was important that they hear it. So I loaded my gun with blanks that I kept in the car for such occasions, and was firing and babbling away when Katie’s call came through.

She wasn’t calling to reminisce. “You need to come out here right away,” she said. Her voice sounded tense, maybe even frightened.

“Where are you?”

“Out near the airport, where the time capsule is buried.”

“What’s going on?”

“We found something. You might want to bring some forensics people with you.”

We only have one forensics team, and they were out checking for prints at a robbery scene. There had been some looting in the storm’s aftermath, a sorry but seemingly inevitable reflection on the human condition. I left instructions for the team to get out to the airport ASAP. Katie wasn’t the type to issue false alarms; if she said they needed to be there, it was a good bet that she was right.