Page 8 of Nine Lives

“No, you’re right. It just feels like something else happened here.”

As soon as he’d said the words, Sam wondered if he actually was imagining a crime where there was none. Frank Hopkins was not a young man. Not healthy either, judging by how much time he spent drinking at his own bar. The most likely explanation for what had happened was that he’d been on a morning walk and his heart had simply gone out. Sam knew that he was prone to see criminal activity where there was none, and maybe he was doing it again.

Lisa shrugged, then turned back to look toward Micmac Road. She thought she heard a vehicle and she was right. Three metallic-blue SUVs were pulling up along the edge of the road. There was also a local news van arriving from the other direction. “They’re here,” she said, stretching out the vowels and Sam laughed because she was imitating that little girl from Poltergeist. He began to take long strides toward the arriving officers.

It was much later in the day when Sam, back at the station, learned about what had been found in Frank’s hand. A torn envelope addressed to Frank. There’d also been a piece of paper, damp from the sea but still legible, and presumably originating from inside the envelope. On that piece of paper was a list of nine names, including Frank’s. The letter had been taken directly to State Police headquarters, but Sam saw a photograph and read through the names twice. None were immediately familiar to him. There was also a photograph of the front of the envelope. No stamp, no postmark, just an address label. It was bewildering, a true mystery. Not that it wouldn’t have been a mystery had the envelope not been there. The initial, unofficial coroner’s report stated that there were bruises on the back of Frank Hopkins’s neck indicating that someone had held his face down in the water until he’d drowned. Who would want to kill Frank Hopkins on his morning walk? A mugger? A jilted lover? Both seemed highly unlikely.

Sam, who had been a police detective in Kennewick for fifteen years now, knew Frank Hopkins fairly well. He’d been one of the first citizens Sam had had contact with when he’d moved to Maine from Houma, Louisiana, back in 1999. He’d interviewed for the job on a sunny October weekend, then arrived for it five weeks later in early December, and Kennewick was already encrusted in a grungy layer of hardened snow. His new colleagues told him it was slightly early to feel like Siberia in southern Maine, that they’d just been ambushed by an early nor’easter followed by a long cold snap. There’d been lots of jokes along the lines of “Welcome to paradise,” and “I hope you brought your long johns,” but, secretly, Sam was thrilled to be greeted by the snowy beauty of New England. He’d spent his first thirty-five years either in Louisiana or Jamaica, where his family was from, and neither truly felt like home to him. He’d longed, for reasons mostly mysterious to him, for somewhere else. And the weathered houses of Kennewick, the low gray skies, had felt right.

His first official act as Kennewick’s only police detective had been to visit the Windward Resort to follow up on a suspected theft. He’d been greeted by Frank Hopkins, a man with a Maine accent so thick that it sounded just a little bit fake to Sam’s untrained ear. The cash register at the bar of the Windward had been cleared out—no more than a couple of hundred dollars, Frank said—and he suspected a recently terminated employee named Ben Gagnon who’d been working as a busboy in the dining room. Ben, a local kid, had been let go for calling in sick one too many times.

“I fired him yesterday,” Frank had said, “but Barbara, one of the cleaning women, told me she saw him this morning, and he told her he’d come in for his last paycheck. Anyhoo, he did no such thing because we mail out all the paychecks, and Barbara, another Barbara, the one who works the bar, said that all the paper money was gone from the register.”

“Was the cash register locked?”

“Well, yeah. Except that the key to unlock it is hanging off a hook right below the back of the bar, so it wouldn’t take a genius to pull off this particular crime. Look, I’m friends with Ben’s mother and to tell the truth, I’m not sure I even want to press charges. I’m just worried that if he thinks he got away with it once he might try to get away with it again. Does that make sense to you?”

“It does,” Sam said. “Where do you think Ben is now?”

“Probably at Cooley’s. It’s a bar down the other end of the beach. He’ll be spending my money and badmouthing me all at the same time.”

Sam had gotten a pretty good description of Ben Gagnon, then gone down to Cooley’s and brought him back to the station for questioning, where the kid made a full and weepy confession. Frank hadn’t pressed charges, and Ben had returned the money. It had been Sam’s first case in Kennewick and that was probably the only reason he’d remembered it. But since then, Sam had regularly gone to the Windward for a scotch and soda on a Friday night. And occasionally, over the years, he went to Cooley’s for a beer, despite the fact, or maybe because of the fact, that it was the only place in his new town in which he’d experienced any kind of racism. A very drunk real estate developer from Wells, the next town over, had said to Sam, sometime during his first winter in Kennewick, “Anyone tell you you’re the wrong color for Maine?”

“What’s your name, son?” Sam had said, aware that he was letting a little of his Jamaican accent slip into the question.

“I don’t have to tell you that.”

“No, you don’t. I’ll remember your face. And one of these days I’ll arrest you, probably for drunk and disorderly, and when that happens, you’ll be glad to know that I forgot you ever said what you just said to me.”

The man had looked confused. He’d looked confused, too, when Sam had, in fact, arrested him about two years later after he’d gotten drunk, this time at the Kennewick Harbor Hotel, and reached across the teak bar top to grab the breast of the college girl who’d been working behind the bar. True to his word, Detective Sam Hamilton acted as though he’d never met the real estate agent named Harvey Beach before. It had been the only time anyone had said anything racist to him in the state of Maine. In fact, most people he’d met had been perfectly friendly, despite the reputation New England had for unfriendliness. And that had included Frank Hopkins, ever-present owner of the Windward, who’d been murdered on his morning walk.

Sam thought back and was pretty sure that Frank had been married when he’d first met him. A dark-haired woman who worked at the post office. He thought her name might have been Sheila. She’d left town to move to Florida and had not invited Frank to go with her. That was years ago, and Frank was now a confirmed bachelor and a man of strict habit—the walk on the beach each and every morning unless the wind was just too much, then most likely a half-day spent working on the daunting task of keeping the Windward Resort profitable and running, then a long evening spent in the Windward lounge, quietly nursing a succession of Bud Lights—and as far as Sam knew, there was no room in that schedule for love affairs. Not only that, but Frank did not make enemies. He was an easygoing boss, friendly to everyone. Which meant that what happened to Frank on the beach felt like something else altogether, something, for lack of a better word, wrong. If it hadn’t been for the letter, Sam would have thought that Frank had been killed by accident, a mugging gone wrong maybe, or, who knows, maybe someone who just wanted to experience how it felt to kill a man, press his face into the sand. But what about the letter? That list of names?

Sam did a search of the other names online, to see if any of them had come up in a murder investigation, but there was nothing. Still, he was just searching through Google. The state police would be looking at their own database. Something—some connection between the names on the list—would come up.

2

Friday, September 16, 12:30 p.m.

Jessica Winslow almost always went to Cece’s for lunch on Fridays, usually with Mary from the accounting department, but Mary was on vacation this week, and Jessica thought she’d try that new lunch place over on Congress Street, the one with the rotisserie chickens in the window.

All the tables were taken but there was a seat at the back counter. She ordered iced tea, a smoked chicken leg with rice and beans, and fried plantains on the side. The old Latino guy behind the counter scanned her face, then asked her one of her least favorite questions. “Where you from, chica?”

She hadn’t heard this particular question in a while, but she’d heard it enough in her life. That and “What are you?” or, the less rude but just as condescending “Aren’t you pretty?”

“Maryland,” she answered.

“No, I mean before that.”

“Maryland, far as I know.”

The old man raised one eyebrow, but gave up, and went down the counter to take another order. Jessica had been adopted, but all her parents knew for sure was that she’d come from Vietnam. There was definitely some Vietnamese in her, but there was also some African blood, and white blood as well. She wasn’t certain, but she assumed she was the product of a Vietnamese woman and an African-American soldier. And if that was the case, then it was possible that her mother had been a prostitute. Honestly, she didn’t care that much. She never thought about it till some stranger decided they’d love to know all about her ancestral history, as if it were any of their goddamn business. She felt the anger rising up and tamped it down. The old guy was probably harmless, just wanting to figure out if she spoke Spanish. Lots of people took one look at her and assumed she did.

The geezer brought her the chicken leg, and it was much better than she’d been told. Halfway through her lunch, her phone, turned upside down on the counter, buzzed twice, and Jessica ignored it, partly because her fingers were covered in chicken grease, but mostly because she just wanted to enjoy the remainder of her food. But the third time her phone buzzed, she put the chicken leg down, wiped her fingers on her napkin, and looked at the screen. Two of the calls were from Aaron, and one was from Stephanie, the receptionist. There was also a text from Aaron. Where are you?

She was about to text him back but called instead. He picked up right away.

“Where are you?” he asked, some annoyance in his voice.

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