Chapter 6.

6.

I returned to Blackbird cottage and found Tammy and Abigail on the porch making last-minute preparations for the hike. My sister was never the outdoorsy type, but she was embracing the spirit of the event. She’d dressed in an old Dolly Parton concert tee and capri pants and gray Dansko sneakers—the official footwear of home healthcare aides everywhere. Abigail had changed out of her blue Stitch pajamas and was finally dressed like a normal kid. But she’d done a lousy job of applying her sunscreen, and there were gloopy streaks of zinc oxide all over her face. She welcomed me back with a big toothy grin. “Are you coming, Mister Frank? Maggie says that if we climb to the top, we can see all the way to Maine.”

I told her that I hadn’t slept well, that I was going to stay home and get some rest, but Tammy didn’t seem to believe me. “Life is for the living, Frankie. I feel terrible about this accident, but Errol says we all need to forge ahead.”

“You go forge ahead,” I told her. “I need some downtime.”

I went inside the cottage and watched through the window as Tammy and Abigail walked off to join the others. Then I moved to the kitchen and forced myself to eat an apple and a banana and a couple of slices of cheese. I knew I would be gone for a couple of hours, and I didn’t want to be distracted by hunger. I also didn’t want to be spotted by anyone in the hiking party, so I waited another ten minutes before leaving the cabin.

Instead of taking busy Main Street and passing Osprey Lodge, I followed the lake loop back to the beach and arrived to find the staff opening umbrellas and arranging the lounge chairs. All the police officers and EMTs were gone, and there was a large depression in the sand where Gwendolyn’s body had been dragged ashore.

I crossed the beach and continued around the shore of the lake, passing more cottages and even a small spa, where guests were invited to register for hot stone massages and pre-wedding pedicures. Then I veered back into the woods, walking for another several minutes until I’d arrived at the entrance of the camp—the small wooden structure where we’d signed our privacy docs. Two security officers were drinking from sports bottles and having an animated conversation, but at the sound of my approach they stopped talking.

Then Hugo himself emerged from the shelter.

“Mr. Szatowski, you’re going the wrong way! Cormorant Point is the other direction!”

“I need to go into town. How do I get my car?”

“Oh, I’ll have Oscar drive you. Where would you like to go?”

“I can drive myself.”

“Is there something you need?”

“Just odds and ends. Tylenol and what-not.”

He smiled at me, revealing the whitest teeth I’d ever seen. “Our clinic has Tylenol. I’ll send a bottle to your cabin and save you the trip.”

“Well, there’s still the whatnot.”

Hugo encouraged me to elaborate. He explained that the camp received deliveries throughout the day and he could procure anything I wanted within an hour. “Batteries, computer chargers, extra clothing, personal items—”

“All I want is my Jeep,” I told him. “How long would I have to wait for my Jeep?”

Nothing I said could dampen Hugo’s cheerful enthusiasm. “Only a minute or two, sir.” He ducked inside the hut and spoke into a radio, giving some whispered instructions I couldn’t make out. Then he returned and announced the Jeep was on its way. “Would you like to wait inside my shelter? You might be more comfortable in the shade.”

“No, I’m fine.”

I asked Hugo if any police were still at the camp; he explained they’d worked quickly to minimize the disruption to the family. “Drugs are such a scourge in our rural communities. The police have seen enough overdoses to recognize the signs.”

I looked around and saw that the other guards had walked off into the woods, following the border of the ten-foot fence. I pointed after them. “Does that go all the way around the property?”

Hugo nodded. “I know it’s unattractive, but the camp is a serious target during the offseason. It’s full of computers, kitchen gadgets, bedsheets, towels—there are thieves who will steal just about anything. And I’m just one man. I can’t be everywhere at once.”

“So you’re still here in November?”

“All year round, Mr. Szatowski. Osprey Cove is my home. I have a little cottage called Nuthatch about a hundred meters into these woods.”

“And it’s just you? All winter long?”

“Oh, no, not by a long shot. Any given day I’m calling plumbers, painters, landscapers, gardeners, snowplows, you name it. With all these buildings, there’s always something that needs fixing. But I keep everything tip-top so the place is ready when Mr. and Mrs. Gardner need it. They love visiting in the offseason. Especially when the leaves start turning.”

“How about Aidan? Does he ever visit in the offseason?”

Hugo’s smile faltered just a moment, like he was contemplating the question behind my question. “Almost never. Aidan’s so busy with his artwork and his teaching in Boston. No time to relax and enjoy the finer things.” Then the smile flickered back on. “But maybe that will change after his wedding. Your daughter seems very happy here.”

I heard my Jeep before I saw it, heard the tires crunching gravel as it lumbered up the driveway. Hugo asked if I needed any directions but I told him I’d manage fine. I recognized the young man behind the wheel from the beach earlier that morning. He was the one who’d used the canoe paddle to poke and prod Gwendolyn’s body back to shore. He shifted the transmission into park and left the vehicle running. “Have a good trip, sir.”

As I pulled away from the entrance, I stole a glance at Hugo in my rearview mirror. He was reaching for his phone and pressing it to his ear.

I followed the winding gravel driveway back to the long, potholed access road, then turned onto a highway that brought me back to town. Once again, the parking lot of Mom and Dad’s Restaurant was nearly full—a welcome sight, because I could leave my Jeep without drawing attention to myself. There was no trace of Brody Taggart (or anyone else) on the porch, but that was okay because I knew he lived nearby. In a trailer on the banks of Alpine Creek, or so I’d been told. I waited for a gap in the highway traffic and then hurried across the road and walked into the woods.

There was no obvious path to follow, so I just trampled along, stepping over ferns and fallen limbs, and sidestepping past sticker bushes. After a minute of walking, I heard the distant crack of a rifle shot. There were black-and-yellow NO HUNTING signs stapled to a few of the trees, but the signs were bleached by the sun and the staples were rusted, and I wasn’t sure if the old rules still applied.

And then I found myself descending a steep and slippery hill— I fell from one tree to another, slamming into the trunks to steady myself, and repeatedly exacerbating the dull, throbbing pain in my lower back. For the umpteenth time, I silently cursed Abigail for leaping out of the tree and falling onto my shoulders. I knew I’d be scheduling a chiropractor visit as soon as I got home to Stroudsburg.

At the bottom of the valley, I stopped at the bank of a swiftly rushing brook, which I suspected was Alpine Creek. There was a narrow path alongside it, with footprints going in both directions, so I wasn’t sure which way to go. But as I stood there, trying to make up my mind, I heard the bark of a dog from the west, and this settled the matter. The dog must belong to someone, and maybe that someone was Brody Taggart.

I walked about the length of a football field—just long enough to second-guess myself and wonder if I should have chosen the other direction. And then I spied the back of a small house. Based on everything Maggie had told me, I’d been expecting something like a FEMA trailer, one of those cramped metal boxes with all the furniture bolted in place. But this was a fairly large modular home, a double-wide-plus, with bright yellow aluminum siding and white trim around the windows. The whole structure was two feet off the ground on concrete supports, and someone had built a strong, sturdy porch on the front and filled it with houseplants and wind chimes and a United States flag. There were three vehicles parked in the gravel driveway—a Snowcat shrouded in a moldy black tarp, a silver Chevy Blazer, and a beat-up Toyota Corolla. And as soon as I saw the Corolla, I knew I’d come to the right place.

I climbed the steps of the porch and heard the dog barking again—inside the house now and going ballistic, snarling and snapping and flinging its body at the door. I thought I saw a flicker of movement in the big picture window, but it was covered by lace curtains and I couldn’t be sure. The dog barked and barked, and I wondered if it had been a mistake to come. I was nervous about the encounter because I still remembered how my daughter described Dawn’s mother: She’s drunk all the time; she spends the whole day in her nightgown. And she wears this horrible orange pancake makeup.

I was reaching to knock again when I heard a soft little click . If you’ve spent any time in a combat zone, I guarantee you’re familiar with the distinctive sound of a fire selector clicking from “safe” to “semi” or “burst.” Moving very slowly, I raised both hands and turned toward the noise. Brody Taggart was holding an AR-15—the civilian equivalent of the M16 rifle that I carried all around Iraq. He’d equipped the slide with a special scope and laser sight, and now it was pointed right at my chest.

“I’m going to count to three,” he said. “And then I’m going to fire at anyone standing on my porch.”

I didn’t make him count. I backed down the steps and past the cars and walked all the way to the end of his driveway. Only then did I stop and turn around. “We met at the restaurant yesterday,” I reminded him. “You told me about Dawn, remember?”

“One,” he said.

“I’m off your porch. Why are you still counting?”

“Changed my mind. Keep walking.”

“A girl died last night. At Osprey Cove. They’re saying she drowned in the lake. They’re calling it a drug overdose, but I think they’re lying.”

“Not my problem,” he said. “Two.”

I raised my hands, imploring him to hear me out. “Is your sister here? Dawn’s mother? Could I please talk to her?”

The front door swung inward, revealing a large woman dressed in a men’s flannel shirt and blue jeans. She said something to her brother that I couldn’t make out, and he lowered his weapon. A fluffy brown-and-white cocker spaniel charged outside and bounded over to me, circling my legs and leaping up at my knees. I reached down to let her sniff my hand and the dog immediately flipped onto her back, showing me her belly and pleading for affection.

“That’s Bongo,” the woman called out, “and I’m Linda Taggart. Dawn’s mother.”

“Frank Szatowski. My daughter’s marrying Aidan Gardner.”

“Oh, I know all about it, Frank. I’m the one who sent you the picture.” She called me up to the porch and encouraged me to have a seat in one of the rocking chairs. To my relief, she seemed perfectly sober—and if she was wearing any makeup, it was so subtle I couldn’t tell. Linda said she’d be right back, she was going to fix us something to drink. Then she looked sharply at her brother and told him to put the weapon away, because China wouldn’t be invading anytime soon. Brody flashed a look suggesting this fact was debatable, then grudgingly followed her indoors.

I moved to the porch and sat down, and Bongo settled happily at my feet. I gave her a good back rub and looked around at all the different houseplants. There were maybe some two dozen of them, wisterias and Boston ferns and a bunch I recognized but couldn’t name. Linda must have had a real green thumb because everything was thriving.

She and her brother returned with three glasses of iced tea and a large glass bowl of animal crackers. “I teach second grade,” she said with a shrug. “I wish I had more to offer you but I never imagined you’d actually visit us.”

I sipped the iced tea—homemade, refreshing, and greatly appreciated after my short march through the woods. “I’m the one who should be apologizing,” I said. “I’m sorry for barging in on you like this. I’m just scared and I don’t know what to do.”

“Tell us about the girl. What happened?”

I knew I was probably violating the terms of my nondisclosure agreement (or “privacy doc,” as Hugo had so carefully described it), but I told her the whole story anyway, beginning with my introduction to Gwendolyn on Thursday afternoon and ending with the discovery of her body. Followed by the immediate assumption that she’d died of a drug overdose, despite the bruises I’d spotted on her neck.

“That’s just how the Gardners work,” Linda explained. “They think they can will any statement into fact, just by saying it out loud. Reality is whatever they say it is. If they want the time to be eight o’clock, they call it eight o’clock and expect you to adjust your watch. And the crazy thing is, people are happy to do it!”

“Gardner Standard Time,” I said.

“Exactly. I’d call it a conspiracy but they don’t even hide their actions. They just lie and expect you to go along with it.”

“Aidan says your photo is a fake,” I told her. “He says he never invited Dawn to Osprey Cove.”

“Aidan’s a goddamn liar,” Brody said. “I’d like to rip off his head and shit down his neck.”

He’d been leaning into the conversation, looking for a chance to contribute, and I suppose he couldn’t hold back anymore. Linda shushed him and said he wasn’t helping.

“It helps me , trying to imagine it,” Brody explained. “I got a bunch of different visualizations. Like, say I shoot off his gonads and feed them to Bongo here.”

At the mention of her name, the dog perked up, but Brody shook his head and urged her to be patient, saying that she’d need to wait a little longer.

“Tell me about Dawn,” I said. “How did she meet Aidan in the first place?”

The first thing Linda Taggart explained to me was that every young woman in Hopps Ferry knew about Aidan Gardner. She said he was the closest thing the town had to a royal prince—young, educated, handsome, and wealthy beyond estimation. “We used to watch The Bachelor on Monday nights and Dawn used to joke that none of these TV bachelors held a candle to Aidan Gardner. And she’d never even met him! But if you grew up here, he was a kind of living legend.”

Their chance encounter came in July of the previous year, Linda explained. Dawn was juggling two different part-time jobs—cleaning rooms at a Hampton Inn and stocking shelves at the Dollar General, both thirty minutes away toward Lake Winnipesaukee. One afternoon she was driving home from work when she found Aidan and his car on the side of the road with a flat. He didn’t have a spare, so Dawn offered to loan him the one in her trunk. And when it became clear that Aidan didn’t know how to operate the jack, Dawn knelt down in the road and quickly changed the tire herself. “And when she was finished, Aidan held out some money. Like a gratuity? But my daughter waved it off. Said he should buy her a glass of wine instead. A nice dry pinot grigio.” Linda laughed at the recollection. “And I swear to you, up until that moment, my daughter never drank pinot grigio in her life. It was just something she heard about on TikTok.”

Dawn came home feeling elated about the encounter, and soon she was seeing Aidan on a regular basis. He was a generous boyfriend and he showered Dawn with expensive gifts—a laptop computer and scanner, a Patagonia jacket, a Tiffany bracelet. Luxury items and appliances that a motel housekeeper could never afford.

“I suppose a lot of mothers would have been thrilled,” Linda said. “But I didn’t like it.”

“Why not?”

“It never felt like a healthy relationship to me. They never did anything socially. With other people. None of her friends ever met him. And they never went out to restaurants or movies because Aidan didn’t like ‘the locals’ all staring at him.”

“Meaning us,” Brody explained. “Like we’re all so frigging impressed by his royal highness, we’re just going to gape at him.”

“I’ll give you another example,” Linda said. “Every year I do a cookout for Dawn’s birthday. Nothing fancy, just a small get-together in the yard, but Dawn wouldn’t invite Aidan over. Said she was too embarrassed to show him our house. And I said to her, ‘Honey, if this man loves you, he’ll love where you’re from, because your home is always part of you.’ But then I came to realize the truth,” she said, and here her voice broke a little bit. “And the truth is I think she was just ashamed of me.”

I knew a little about this feeling myself. Even before Maggie left home for college, I could feel her pulling away, distancing herself from our family norms. She’d started criticizing the way I’d pronounced certain words, like tortilla and supposably . And she poked fun at my Timex wristwatch and Kirkland blue jeans, both purchased at discounts in the aisles of a warehouse store. I told myself it was healthy teenage behavior, that every generation needed something new to strive for. But her comments still stung.

“Aidan says there was just one date,” I told her. “He swears they went out to dinner and that was the end of it.”

Linda shook her head. “Then how does he explain the photo? I told my daughter, if you won’t bring this young man to meet me, you can at least show me a picture. So she went to her computer and looked through her albums, and she printed out the one I sent you. It’s plain as day they’re on Lake Wyndham. Right on the Gardners’ beach.”

“Aidan says you photoshopped it.”

Brody laughed. “There they go, bending reality again. Look where you’re sitting, Frank. Do you think we know how to use a photoshop?”

“Dawn was seeing Aidan all summer,” Linda insisted. “Then around mid-September it started to fizzle out. She said Aidan got too busy with his teaching. It was harder for him to get out to Osprey Cove. And I was like: good riddance. I thought she was done with him. But she saw him one last time on November 3. And that’s the day she disappeared.”

It was a Saturday morning, Linda continued, and Dawn was up early. She’d run out to the store because (she claimed) she needed shampoo. She was back within the hour but never took a shower, and Linda could hear her crying in her bedroom. She tried tapping on the door. Asking Dawn to open up and talk. But Dawn was on the phone. Linda could only hear one side of the conversation. “Aidan, I need to see you,” Dawn said. “No, not next week, and not tomorrow. Get up here and talk to me right now. This is an emergency.”

It was another two hours before Dawn finally left her bedroom. Linda tried to coax the truth out of her, but she wasn’t interested in talking. She said she was going shopping for new winter boots.

“And I knew my daughter, Frank. I knew she was lying, just like every parent knows when their kid is lying. And I wish I’d stopped her from leaving. I wish I’d forced her to tell me the truth. If only I’d stopped her—”

Brody put a hand on her knee. “Don’t go down that road,” he said. “Just tell him what happened next. What you seen on your phone.”

Linda took a deep breath. “Right, I guess I need to explain that part. The thing is, I’ve always paid Dawn’s cell phone bill. Ever since she was in high school. I just got in the habit and I didn’t mind. I tried to make her life a little easier. One less bill to worry about and all that. Plus I liked knowing her whereabouts. Anytime she’d stay out late, I could open my phone and look at the map and there she’d be, this blinking blue dot.”

I knew exactly what she was talking about. Maggie and I used to share a cell phone plan, and I tracked my daughter’s location all through high school, always making sure she was getting to class on time and staying out of trouble.

“So when Dawn left the house, I had a pretty good idea where she was going. But I opened the map just to be sure. I watch the blinking blue dot, and I see it go right up the highway to Osprey Cove. I see Aidan’s agreed to come meet with her. And then I felt guilty for spying on her. I knew I ought to mind my own business. So I put away my phone and started doing my chores. I went around my house and emptied all the trash cans. And while I was in Dawn’s bedroom, emptying her wastebasket, I found something.”

She slowly pushed herself out of her chair, stood up, and encouraged me to follow her inside the house. The three of us walked down a short hallway and then squeezed inside a very tiny bedroom; the door only opened halfway before colliding with a bed. It looked like a space in transition, with ivory-white walls and white curtains. But when I peered closely into the corners, I could see glimpses of the previous color, little spots of hot pink that were mostly painted over. Here and there were other remnants of a younger teenage girl: Polaroid photos of teenage friends. A medal from a high school volleyball tournament. A postcard of a goofy grinning polar bear.

Linda brought my attention to a wastebasket next to the bed. “I looked in here and I found this.” It was the package for a Walgreens one-step pregnancy test, promising early detection with 99 percent accuracy. “Just the box but not the actual test, so I assumed Dawn brought that with her. To show to Aidan. Now, my first impulse was to text her and tell her to come home. I wanted her to know that she didn’t have to beg Aidan for help. We could give her all the support she needed. But the blue dot said she was already in Osprey Cove, so I figured I was too late. I’d just have to wait and see what happened.”

Simply being in her daughter’s old bedroom seemed to overwhelm her, and I suppose I could relate to those feelings a little bit. She sat at the edge of Dawn’s bed and gestured for me to sit beside her. Brody remained standing in the doorway, like a sentry, and Bongo turned around in a circle before settling onto the rug. Linda quickly summarized the next part of the story: Dawn never came home on Saturday night—and when Linda checked the map to determine her daughter’s whereabouts, the blue dot had disappeared. LOCATION UNKNOWN. Linda didn’t panic right away. She said it wasn’t the first time Dawn had stayed out all night, and it wasn’t the first time her phone ran out of battery. She imagined there might even be good news—maybe the kids were talking to each other and possibly working things out. Linda went to sleep hoping for the best and then woke the next morning to an irritable phone call from the manager of the Hampton Inn, complaining that Dawn was late for work and did anybody know where she might be?

Linda called all Dawn’s friends, but none of them had seen her all weekend. And no one had Aidan’s phone number. But one of them knew Osprey Cove had a landline, a general number for deliveries and such. Linda tried calling, and a man with a Dutch accent answered the phone. He said he’d been working the entire weekend and the camp was empty. He said the Gardners were all in Boston and there hadn’t been any visitors. Instead of expressing sympathy or concern, he simply advised Linda to dial 911.

The police found Dawn’s Toyota Corolla in a state forest twenty miles south of Osprey Cove, in a parking lot with a popular trailhead. They took a pair of dogs up and down the mountain. They never found Dawn, but they did find her sweatshirt, a little gray hoodie—she’d been wearing it when she left the house. So when Linda insisted that her daughter vanished at Osprey Cove, no one took her seriously.

“The chief of police came here to talk with me, and I told him everything I just told you. I showed him the pregnancy test box, and I told him about the little blue dot. And then I did the dumbest thing I could have done.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I gave him my phone. For evidence. He said maybe my phone could prove that Dawn had visited Osprey Cove. He said maybe her trail was still in the memory chips and they could fish it out. And I desperately wanted to believe him, so I turned it over.” Linda shook her head. “A week later, he brought it back. Said no one could find anything. But I think they did find something, and they erased it.”

“You have to remember,” Brody said, “a lot of these cops work part-time for the Gardners. Off duty, they’re private security guards. Sixty bucks an hour. That’s a lot of reasons to look the other way.”

“But they must have talked to Aidan,” I said. “Didn’t the police interview him?”

“Sure, they interviewed him. He claimed he hadn’t seen Dawn all summer, and no one could prove otherwise. The day she disappeared, he says he was in Boston with your daughter. And now nine months later they’re getting married. Doesn’t that timing seem unusual?”

I agreed it was a little disconcerting, and Linda warned me that Maggie was in real danger. “If anything happens to her, no one in this town is going to help you.”

“What about the security cameras? I’ve seen them all over the camp. Did the police ask to see the footage?”

“Oh, sure, the Gardners were very cooperative. They turned over a whole weekend of video. All time-stamped and dated. But I think anyone who invented a Miracle Battery could probably forge a time stamp, don’t you?”

I agreed that these days it seemed possible to fake just about anything. I’ve seen a video going around YouTube where Joe Biden’s talking and Donald Trump’s voice is coming out of his mouth. You used to be able to trust your own eyes and ears, but these days it’s getting harder and harder to believe in anything.

Linda must have seen the uncertainty in my eyes because she doubled down on her statements. “I know my daughter went to that camp. They moved her car, and they moved her sweatshirt. But I’m convinced she’s still there.”