Chapter 11

I was crossing over the Hudson River on the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge when my phone made a sound. I was so unused to receiving messages that I didn't know at first where the singsong alert had come from, but when I looked down at my phone that was lying across the unused cupholder, I saw that I'd received a text from Martha. She'd written, I think I found something.

I almost picked up the phone to call her right then and find out what she'd discovered, but I'd gotten a late start that morning and was rushing to get to my lunch with Travis Nixon in Woodstock. Over breakfast I had told my parents that I was meeting a friend, and that I'd be gone for some of the day. It probably would have been fine, but my mother, unbeknownst to me, had also made lunch plans, meeting one of her old college friends two towns over in the town of Bethlehem. My father, for most of his adult life, has had a deep phobia about being left alone, especially overnight (pretty much unthinkable at this point), but also around any mealtime. He claimed it was because he didn't believe drinking to be a solitary act, and any meal naturally involved drinking. He generally had his first cocktail of the day, a single malt with water, around eleven thirty, after spending the morning reading and dozing in his office. Neither my mother nor I had a drink at that time but usually one of us was there to keep him company.

This morning, when he'd figured out that we were both going to be away, I saw a startled look in his eyes, a combination of fear and sadness. The closest I can come to describing it is that it looked like grief. And I think in a way it was. I spend too much time with my father to waste time analyzing him, but I do think that when he is alone, he is consumed with visions of death, both his own and those of the people he loves, and it's too much for him to bear.

"Mom," I said, "why don't you bring Dad to lunch?"

She looked horrified, so I said, "Or maybe we could see if Stanley wants to come over?"

"I'll be okay," my father said, not very convincingly. "I'll make myself a ham sandwich."

Nevertheless, I managed to get Stanley, David's friend and the owner of the Stone's Throw Bookstore, on the phone and he agreed to come over around eleven thirty and have a drink with David. He's a slow talker, Stanley, and we were on the phone for about ten minutes while I convinced him he didn't need to bring anything in particular, or to wear a collared shirt. And because of all that, I was late heading into Woodstock, and then it took me about ten minutes to find the Dove and Hare, an ivy-covered one-story brick restaurant just off Main Street.

"I thought you weren't going to show," Travis Nixon said. He'd been waiting for me at the front entrance. Because I'd looked at so many pictures of him on Instagram, mostly posing with Josie, I was startled by how thin he was now, a ghost of himself.

"Sorry," I said. "Late start, but I'm here now."

I followed him to a table in a nook just past an ornate bar decorated with twisting branches and Christmas lights.

"This was our favorite place," he said, taking a seat across from me.

"Yours and Josie's?"

"Yes." Even though he'd lost weight, apparently, he hadn't gotten new clothes, and his T-shirt, with an image of a crow under the words say nevermore, swam on him.

"First off," I said, "I'm really sorry for your loss." He nodded at me. "And I also want to come clean. I'm primarily a fiction writer, poetry mostly, but I went to school at Shepaug University, and when I heard about Josie... I don't know, I just kept thinking about her. So the thing is, I asked around a little, just people I used to know from there, and I started to think that maybe it wasn't what it seemed. I mean, that it was more likely a murder than a suicide, and that meant that someone had got away with it. Then I looked you up, and it's clear that you feel the same way."

"I do," he said. A waitress was hovering near us, but she must have seen the intense look on Travis's face and she backed away.

"I didn't know Josie, and I don't know you, but I thought that maybe I could write a piece about what happened, and try to get it published. And that way I could help you out a little."

"That would be great," he said, leaning across the table between us. "It's actually good that you don't know us, that you didn't know Josie. I keep telling the world that she was killed, but I'm biased because I was her husband. No one believes me. But if you said something..."

"I agree," I said.

The waitress finally approached, and I quickly looked at the menu, ordering some kind of mocktail that was made from a blackberry shrub, and the chickpea burger. Travis ordered a dark ale and the soup of the day. While we were ordering I started to feel a little guilty about lying to this man, but I also told myself that I was trying to find Josie's killer and if I managed to do that, it would be worth a whole lot more to him than an article.

"So why don't you believe Josie kill herself?" I said after the waitress left with our order.

I expected him to talk about how much she loved life, or how she wasn't the type, but the first thing he said was, "She was scared of heights. Deathly scared. There's just no way in hell she would have gone out on a balcony, let alone jumped from it. I mean, that was the first thing I thought when I heard what had happened. Also, if she had been so unhappy that she wanted to kill herself, then I would have known about it. I know you won't believe that, no one does, but she would have told me. I know it.

"We even talked about suicide once. She said she used to think about it all the time back in high school. She said that if she ever did it, it would be with drugs, something that would put her to sleep. There's just no way she would jump from a balcony."

"What would you have thought, then, if she went to this teachers' conference and took an overdose and died there?"

He pursed his lips so hard that his upper lip pressed up under his nose. "That's a good question that no one has asked me. And I'll say this: I still think that she wouldn't have done it. Our lives were good, and she was really excited about that trip."

Our drinks arrived, and after tasting the blackberry mocktail I was a little regretful I wasn't drinking a beer. Travis's had come in a glass shaped like a shoe. "Cool, huh?" he said, catching me looking at it. "This place is so awesome. Josie didn't like beer, but she ordered it here because of these glasses."

"Why was she excited about the trip?"

"Can I ask you something? You said you talked with some people at Shepaug. What did you hear? What's the gossip from there? Was it just that she was some freaky goth girl who jumped from her dorm?"

I had been expecting Travis to ask me this question, but I hadn't decided yet what to tell him. But knowing him for five minutes I thought that he could handle what Libby Frost had told me. "What I heard," I said, "was that maybe Josie had hooked up with someone at the conference, or that she was looking to hook up with someone at the conference. And if that was the case, then I think people feel like maybe she was consumed with guilt and jumped, or maybe someone pushed her. Had you heard this before?"

I asked because he was nodding solemnly while I spoke.

"Yes. And those rumors are correct. Not that she would have felt guilty, but that she was probably looking for someone to have sex with."

"You knew about that?"

"You've heard of polyamory?"

"Sure," I said.

"I don't know that we were calling our marriage polyamorous, exactly, at least not yet, but we had started to experiment with being with other people. I went to a comic convention in Las Vegas and hooked up with someone and told Josie about it and it made her really excited. I'm sure you're judging us—"

"I'm not judging you. I promise. My parents were polyamorous long before there was a word for it, but for them a lot of it was about hurting the other person. Revenge. One-upping one another. This new version seems preferable."

"Josie and I just knew that we were going to spend our whole lives together no matter what, and that we were going to share everything with each other, so why not openly expand our sex lives? It seemed a natural thing to do."

"Josie was interested in finding someone during the conference at Shepaug?"

"Yeah, she was psyched about it. I was, too."

Travis was halfway through his beer but hadn't touched his soup. He seemed grateful to be talking about Josie, but his eyes, with deep shadows around them, were frightened and sad. I thought of my father's eyes that morning.

"Did you tell the police this?"

"Of course I did. And the way they looked at me, I knew what they were all thinking. That I changed my mind about the whole thing and drove down to Shepaug and killed her myself."

"You think that's what they were thinking?"

"Sure. But they checked my alibi and I was here in Woodstock, at a friend's game night. Lots of witnesses."

"It didn't bother you thinking about what Josie might be doing at her conference?"

He shook his head. "It didn't."

"But there's still a possibility, right, that Josie was excited about having a sexual adventure, and then after she did, it made her feel terrible? It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened."

"I think it's much more likely that she picked the wrong guy, or maybe even the wrong girl. And then something went wrong. But I know in my heart that it wasn't something that went wrong with her, it was with the other person."

I was nodding, and he continued, "Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I pushed her into this thing and it freaked her out. It's not like I haven't had a few sleepless nights wondering about that. But let's say she did meet someone and something got triggered inside of her, something so terrible that she decided to take her own life. She was never going to go over a balcony."

I believed him, maybe not that he knew everything about his wife, but that he knew that she wouldn't jump from a building.

"Let me ask you," he said, "what do you think happened?"

I finished chewing a bite of my chickpea burger and said, "She met the wrong person. And now that I'm talking to you, I feel like I know more about this person."

"Like what?" Travis said.

"Well, I know that whatever happened to her wasn't a spur-of-the-moment, impulsive thing. It wasn't some guy who suddenly went into a rage. Because if that had been the case, then there would have been a fight, and there would have been evidence of that fight. No, I think that whoever killed her was someone very smooth who knew what they were doing. Maybe they lured her out on the balcony, said that the railing was really high and she'd be fine, and it was a beautiful night. Something like that. She was unaware of what was about to happen. She was taken by surprise."

I was worried that I'd said too much, but Travis was rapt, nodding his head. "That's what I think. Someone clever killed her. And he got away with it."

"You said earlier that she might have hooked up with either a boy or a girl..."

"I just said that because it's a possibility. Josie pretended she liked girls, just to be open to them, but I don't think she really did."

"It was a guy, then," I said. "Statistically, that makes the most sense."

"I'd agree with that," he said.

"Travis, did you have much contact with her while she was on this trip?"

"Yes and no. The first day, yes. We texted back and forth some. She sent me pictures of the campus, stuff like that. But the day it happened there wasn't much contact at all. I thought she'd probably met someone, and I didn't want to bother her." Travis cupped his mouth and nose with one of his tattooed hands, and squeezed his eyes shut. I thought he was about to cry, but then he took his hand down and said, "It's actually good talking to you about this. I know that my friends want me to move on, but I can't."

"It's hard to move on when there are unanswered questions."

"It is."

"If I find any answers, you'll be the first to know."

"Okay," he said. I ate some more of my burger and he moved his spoon around his soup bowl. "You'd have liked her if you met her," he said. "You'd have liked Josie. She was fire."