Death Notice

“It was a wooden box, not a coffin,” she said, not even convincing herself.

She expected Martin to bring up the premature death notice that had been faxed to his own newsroom. When he didn’t, Kat realized Henry Goll was telling the truth. He hadn’t informed anyone at the Gazette about it.

Thinking about the obituary writer created a question of her own, which she immediately posed to Martin.

“How much do you know about Henry Goll?”

Martin gave her a sly smile. “You’re the second person to ask me that today.”

“Who was the first?”

“My sister,” he replied. “She said he had a cute phone voice and wanted to know if the rest of him matched it.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Yes, but only if his voice cracked.”

Kat frowned at his cruel reference to Henry’s scar. Martin noticed and quickly apologized.

“That was mean of me. The guy can’t help how he looks.”

“Do you know what happened to him?”

Martin shook his head. “No idea. Henry Goll is pretty much a closed book.”

“I thought that was the case,” Kat said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get moving.”

She shifted the Crown Vic into gear and started to slowly pull away. Martin followed next to the open window, keeping pace with the car.

“Come on, Chief,” he begged. “I have to file a story by seven and I have nothing to go on.”

“I have nothing to tell you. I wish I knew more.”

Martin had fallen behind. He was now beside the patrol car’s back window, but Kat could still hear him call out, “Are there any suspects?”

Kat called back: “We’re looking at all possibilities.”

Although the reporter tried, he couldn’t keep up anymore. He stopped in the middle of the street and, with labored breath, yelled, “Tell me as soon as you find something!”

Kat stuck her arm out the still-open window and gave him a thumbs-up sign before speeding up the street. In the rearview mirror, she watched his retreating figure return to the sidewalk, shoulders slumped in disappointment.

At the end of Main Street, Kat turned onto Old Mill Road, which ran as far as Lake Squall. Perry Mill still stood there, now only a shadow of its former glory. Despite the town’s revitalization, no one had thought to restore the one thing that had led to its formation in the first place. So the mill was left in ruins. Its crumbling outbuildings had collapsed into piles of rotted wood. Its roads became pockmarked with gullies and potholes. Its long dormant railroad tracks vanished into the weeds.

All that remained of the compound was the mill building itself, a formidable structure that measured seven stories from base to rooftop. It hovered over the trees in the distance, the muted sun slipping behind its angled roof. At one point, hundreds of people worked there. Now it was a ghost from the past, shrouded in the fog that rose off the lake.

Although Kat had never stepped foot inside the mill, it had haunted her imagination ever since she was a little girl. When she was growing up, her father would occasionally come home and announce that another accident had happened there. He never filled in the grisly details, which made Kat’s imagination spin madly. Late at night, hunkered down beneath her covers, she pictured a mill full of deformed men working the same saws that had snatched their limbs.

She had quickly grown out of that phase, thank God. But now the horrors of her youthful imagination had come to life in adulthood. Only George Winnick’s murder was more disturbing than anything she could have come up with as a girl.

Kat shuddered as she drove past the area where she had found George’s body, still marked by a banner of police tape. Although the coffin and its grisly contents had been hauled away, she could still see them there, lying in the snow. She hoped the image would fade with time and that eventually she could drive Old Mill Road in peace. Yet she suspected the image would be like Perry Mill—always present, unchanging, and waiting to be revisited.

SEVEN

That afternoon, Nick drove to the county morgue. Cassie Lieberfarb rode with him, fiddling with the radio. Flitting from station to station, she found nothing to satisfy either of them.

“We’ve got country, country, Muzak, and more country.”

“No classic rock?” Nick asked.

“No, but if you’d like, I could sing ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ I learned it in the girls chorus at Temple Beth El.”

“As tempting as that sounds, I’ll pass.”

“Then instead of singing,” Cassie said, “how about you tell me why you lied about going to Florida on vacation.”

She was using her analyst’s voice, which contained no judgment, no amusement. It was a flat, neutral tone that Nick had heard hundreds of times. Although normally when he heard it, the voice was directed at suspects, not him.

“I didn’t lie,” Nick said.

“Did you go to Florida?”

Eventually he shook his head.

“And was it really a vacation?”

Another more reluctant shake.

“See,” Cassie said, “that means it’s a lie.”

Caught in her inquisitive gaze, Nick felt like a specimen beneath a microscope, wriggling and defenseless. He straightened his spine in a show of strength. It didn’t work.

“I was interviewing killers,” he said.

“Who?”

“Edgar Sewell. Mitchell Ramsey. Frank Paul Steel.”

Cassie processed the names a moment, matching them to the unspeakable crimes they had committed.

“Those cases are thirty years old,” she said. “Why were you talking to them?”

But she knew the answer. And Nick knew that she knew. But Cassie wasn’t going to let him off the hook. She thought it helped to talk about his past, that it was therapeutic. Nick disagreed, so he said nothing.

After a full minute of silent détente, Cassie declared defeat.

“We won’t talk about it anymore,” she said. “But you know how I feel about this. I understand it’s hard for you to deal with, but digging into your past like that won’t—”

Nick stopped her with an upraised hand. “I thought we weren’t talking about it.”