Page 66 of Coram House

“You saw the canoe from the dock that morning? Before the police brought you into the station?”

“Yeah. I was sort of just, you know, sitting on the dock—well, no, I was probably lying down, to be honest. Anyways, yeah, the canoe was out there, off the point.”

He sounds so embarrassed that I feel a trickle of guilt. I plug it up. A girl with her finger in the dike.

“What time was it?” I ask.

He clears his throat. “I don’t know exactly. I was pretty out of it.”

“But you saw it across the water, off the far shore. So there must have been some light.”

“That’s true,” he says, with effort, as if pulling the memory up from a hole. “I don’t know. Seven, maybe?”

I run through the timeline in my head. I got up at six that morning,was heading into Rock Point around six thirty, just like I told the police. The timing works.

“Did you see who was paddling it?”

Xander laughs. “Alex, I was shit-faced. It was barely sunrise. And it was half a mile across the lake.”

“Just—try. Please.”

He sighs. “I don’t know? A man? It was just a dark shape.”

“But just one person?”

“Yeah, that part I’m pretty sure of.”

“Did you tell the police?”

“About what? About the canoe?” He sounds baffled. “I don’t know, to be honest. I mean, I’m pretty sure I gave them my whole life story. I don’t remember much.”

“Thanks, Xander. I have to—”

“Wait, Alex—what is this about?”

I owe him an explanation, but right now I’m itching to get off the phone. “Maybe nothing. I just—I don’t know exactly. Not yet. Look, I have to go. I’ll call you.”

I hang up before he can say anything else. Then I exhale a long, slow breath and go back in time to last week. The quiet, still woods. A single set of footprints on the trail ahead. Dim, predawn light. The scream. I shut my eyes—Garcia’s trick—and hear the other sounds too. The scrape of something against a rock. A hollow thunk.

I play it again, this time with a figure, a hood pulled up so their face is in shadow. But with blood on their hands. After all, they just smashed a woman’s head on the rocks. There would be blood. The figure drags a canoe over the rocks with a long scrape. Once it’s in the water, they lift a leg over the side and step in. Thunk. Then they paddle away, emerging from the cove just in time to be seen by Xander, half passed out on his dock. They stash the boat back on the beach in front of Coram House, where it has been sitting unused for months.

Fred Rooney could have left that canoe on the beach and been back in the office in minutes. No footprints in the woods. No witnesses. The lake froze over a few days later. No one would have suspected. Except Xander happened to be looking in that direction.

Before I can change my mind, I pick up the phone again and dial Parker. He answers on the second ring. “Sorry,” I say. “I know you’re busy.”

“It’s all right,” he says. I hear muffled voices in the background.

“I know how he did it, Parker.”

“How who did what?”

“Fred Rooney. How he killed Jeannette Leroy.”

He inhales sharply. “Hang on a second.”

The click of a door shutting. The background noise disappears.

“You still there?”

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