“Christ, no!” Pete shouted. “You’re lying. You’ve got to be. God, Beth!” The phone clattered, as if he had dropped it.
Over the course of Reid’s career, he had had occasion to play 911 tapes to juries: perpetrators phoning in supposed discoveries of their own crime scenes. You could almost always tell real from manufactured shock. Pete’s reaction was so instantaneous, so canned, it came off as rehearsed.
“What is your position?” Reid asked.
“We’re approaching Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard,” a different voice said.
“Who’s on the line?”
“Leland Ackerley. A friend of Pete’s. And Beth’s.”
“What’s the nearest Coast Guard station?” Reid asked.
“Menemsha.”
“Okay, then. Go to Menemsha, and I’ll meet you there,” Reid said.
4
Sisters were forever. They were made from the same blood and bone. Kate remembered when she was six and Beth was five, Beth had pointed at their mother’s belly and said, “We came out of the same stomach!” It was true. Since the minute Beth was born, until today, Kate had never known a moment on earth without her sister. She had always been able to feel her sister’s breath in the summer breeze, hear her voice whenever their favorite songs played on the radio, hear her laughter when anything reminded her of one of their private jokes.
Kate had to tell Sam. That’s what kept her going right now—the fact that Sam would need her, and Beth would want Kate to take care of her child. But even that thought was too insane—the fact that Kate had to tell Sam her mother was dead—because Beth couldn’t be dead. Kate couldn’t stand it if she was: this could not be true.
Pretend she’s not,she said to herself.Talk to her as if she is here. Right here with me. Sisters together forever! Right, Beth? Are you with me?
But then Kate pictured her sister on the bed, the expression on her face—that was barely a face anymore. Beth’s skull, shattered like broken glass. Kate had stared into a hole in her sister’s head and seen pieces of white bone clumped in her blood.
Sam was at camp, and she didn’t know. Stories like this made the news and spread fast. Kate had firsthand experience of that fact—nothing went viral faster than small-town crimes, murdered mothers. If she didn’t get to Sam fast, some kid would read about it on Facebook. So she called the camp and asked that Sam be kept away from the media, and then the camp manager reminded her that cell phones and laptops and iPads weren’t allowed, that Sam would hear nothing until Kate arrived.
The last time Kate had visited Sam at camp was two years ago, and Beth had been with her. Sam had just been a camper then, but now she was a junior counselor. The sisters had driven north in Kate’s Porsche with the top down and the radio on. They’d traveled almost the whole way on back roads, through pine woods, past farms and wide-open meadows. Although they lived relatively near each other, they didn’t get enough time together—Kate’s flight schedule was intense, and Beth was so busy with Pete and Sam and running the gallery. The road trip had been just what they’d needed: nonstop stories and laughter.
Kate couldn’t stop feeling the need to talk to Beth. She wanted to tell her about Detective Reid, how he’d tried to be circumspect but had been so clumsy that Kate had no doubt he knew every detail about what had happened to them. Probably every cop in Connecticut did. Sometimes Kate could still feel the ropes around her wrists, forearms, chest, and ankles. She flexed her right hand now. She could still smell the blood, all her mother’s body fluids pooling around them. She and Beth almost never spoke about those hours at the gallery—they had locked the experience in a vault, just to stay sane and move on.
Camp Orion was in Down East Maine, on an island off Roque Bluffs. Kate had thought about driving today, but it was a seven-plus-hour drive, not counting the ferry ride. She needed to get to Sam right away. And the idea of retracing the route she’d driven with Beth, with the seat empty beside her, pierced her heart clear through.
She drove to the Groton-New London Airport, where early that morning she had landed the Citation X chartered by the Higginsons. She and Tallulah Granville, her best friend since childhood, co-owned a single-engine Piper Saratoga and kept it there. Lulu was a captain on Delta, active in the pilots’ union. Normally Kate would check with her to make sure she didn’t have plans to fly. Last week Lulu had been in Atlanta training on a new aircraft. Kate wasn’t sure where her schedule was taking her today. The idea of having to tell her about Beth right now, when she hadn’t yet seen Sam, was too excruciating to think about.
The Saratoga was high performance, an all-metal beauty with retractable landing gear and tapered wings. Kate removed the chocks from around the plane’s wheels and climbed into the cockpit. She ran through the preflight check, put her headphones on, and called the tower to request clearance for takeoff.
The airplane taxied down the runway, took off like a dream, banked over Long Island Sound with a view of three states—Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York—and began to climb into the clear blue sky.
Kate had caught a tailwind back from LA, landing less than five hours after taking off from hot Van Nuys Airport in the San Fernando Valley. Because there had been a second pilot in the cockpit, her max allowable hours today were nine instead of eight, and that would give her just about enough flying time to get to Maine and back. Rules were important in the air and everywhere. Her grandmother had taught her that.
Her grandmother had also taught Kate to fly. Mathilda Harkness, even at eighty-two, had been the best pilot Kate had ever flown with. She had served in the WASP in World War II, but she’d never earned her wings.
“We knew our stuff as well as any man,” she’d said on Kate’s fifth lesson in a chartered Cessna. Kate was seventeen. It was the summer she should have been getting ready to go to college—she’d gotten into Sarah Lawrence—but she had deferred attending. She couldn’t stop reliving those hours in the gallery’s basement. Missing her mother and facing her father’s legal troubles made the idea of going away to college unbearable. And Mathilda had insisted she and Beth get intense therapy for what she said was trauma—and Mathilda would have known. She’d been in the war.
“I am sure,” Kate had said to her grandmother, loudly enough to be heard over the noisy single engine, “you knew your stuffbetterthan the guys.”
“You’re right,” Mathilda said. “We trained as hard as they did. Eleanor Roosevelt said we were ‘a weapon waiting to be used.’ Instead, they kept us off to the side, never sent us overseas. They expected us to come home from the war and take care of the men, have their children.”
“But you did have a kid,” Kate said. “Mom.”
“Yes,” Mathilda said. “But I did it without getting married, and I was damn glad she was a girl, because I wanted to raise someone strong and independent enough to know the idea this is a ‘man’s world’ is a bunch of bullshit.”
“Why did you join the WASPs?”
“I wanted to serve my country,” she said. “And live up to Jacqueline Cochran.”
