“Come on home, baby,” his mother said. “I’ll make a special dinner. Your brother can’t wait to see you.”
Sonia and Bob Brigham and their son walked back to the car. The father’s arm rose and slipped around his son’s shoulders. Briefly. Then it fell away. Kathryn Dance noted the tentative contact. She believed not in divine salvation but in the proposition that we poor mortals are fully capable of saving ourselves, if conditions and inclinations are right, and the evidence of this potential is found in the smallest of gestures, like the uncertain resting of a large hand on a bony shoulder.
Gestures, more honest than words.
“Travis?” she called.
He turned.
“Maybe I’ll see you sometime… in Aetheria.”
He held his arm over his chest, palm outward, which she supposed was a salute among the inhabitants of his guild. Kathryn Dance resisted the temptation to reciprocate.
Chapter 44
DANCE WALKED ACROSS the yard to Donald and Lily Hawken, her Aldo shoes gathering dust and plant flecks. Crisp grasshoppers fled from her transit.
The couple sat on the front porch steps of Chilton’s vacation house. Hawken’s face was harrowing to see. The betrayal had clearly affected him to his core.
“Jim did this?” he whispered.
“I’m afraid so.”
Another thought shook him. “My God, what if the children had been here? Would he have…?” He couldn’t complete the sentence.
His wife stared at the dusty yard, wiping sweat off her brow. Hollister’s a long way from the ocean, and summer air, trapped by the knobby hills, heated up fiercely by midday.
Dance said, “Actually, it was his second attempt to kill you.”
“Second?” Lily whispered. “You mean at the house? When we were unpacking the other day?”
“That’s right. That was Chilton too, wearing one of Travis’s hoodies.”
“But… is he insane?” Hawken asked, mystified. “Why would he want to kill us?”
Dance had learned that in her line of work nothing is gained by soft-pedaling. “I can’t say for absolute certain, but I think James Chilton murdered your first wife.”
A heartbreaking gasp. Eyes wide with disbelief. “What?”
Lily now lifted her head and turned to Dance. “But she died in an accident. Swimming near La Jolla.”
“I’m getting some details from San Diego and the Coast Guard to be sure. But it’s pretty likely that I’m right.”
“He couldn’t have. Sarah and Jim were very…” Hawken’s words dissolved.
“Close?” Dance asked.
He was shaking his head. “No. It’s not possible.” But then he blurted angrily, “Are you saying they were having an affair?”
A pause, then she said, “I think so, yes. I’ll be getting some evidence in the next few days. Travel records. Phone calls.”
Lily put her arm around her husband’s shoulders. “Honey,” she whispered.
Hawken said, “I remember that they’d always enjoy each other’s company when we’d go out. And, with me, Sarah was a challenge. I was always traveling. Maybe two, three days a week. Not a lot. But she sometimes said I was neglecting her. Kind of joking — I didn’t take it all that seriously. But maybe she meant it, and Jim stepped in to fill the gap. Sarah was always pretty demanding.”
The tone of delivery suggested to Dance that the sentence could have ended with “in bed.”
She added, “I’m guessing that Sarah wanted Chilton to leave Patrizia and marry her.”
A bitter laugh. “And he said no?”
Dance shrugged. “That’s what occurred to me.”
Hawken considered this. He added in hollow tones, “It wasn’t a good thing to say no to Sarah.”
“I thought about the timing. You moved to San Diego about three years ago. It was around then that Patrizia’s father died, and she inherited a lot of money. Which meant that Chilton could keep writing his blog — he started working on it full-time then. I think he was beginning to get a sense he was on a mission to save the world and Patrizia’s money could let him do that. So he broke it off with your wife.”
Hawken asked, “And Sarah threatened to expose him if he didn’t leave Pat?”
“I think she was going to broadcast that James Chilton, the moral voice of the country, had been having an affair with his best friend’s wife.”
Dance believed that Chilton lied to Sarah, agreeing to get the divorce, and met her in San Diego. She could imagine his suggestion of a romantic picnic, at a deserted cove near La Jolla. A swim at the beautiful seashore preserve there. Then an accident — a blow to the head. Or maybe he just held her underwater.
“But why was he going to kill us?” Lily asked, with a troubled look back at the house.
Dance said to Donald Hawken, “You’d been out of touch for a while?”
“After Sarah died, I was so depressed I gave up on everything, stopped seeing all my old friends. Most of my time went to the children. I was a recluse… until I met Lily. Then I started to resurface.”
“And you decided to move back.”
“Right. Sell the company and come back.” Hawken was understanding. “Sure, sure, Lily and I would get together with Jim and Patrizia, some of our old friends around here. At some point we’d have to reminisce. Jim used to come to Southern California a bit before Sarah died. He would’ve lied to Pat about it; it’d only be a matter of time before he’d get caught.” Hawken’s head swiveled to the house, his eyes wide. “The Blue Swan… Yes!”
Dance lifted an eyebrow.