Chapter 3.

3.

After my shower, I put on some clean clothes and went downstairs to the living room. Abigail was standing on a chair in an ivory lace dress, arms stretched high above her head, while Tammy and Maggie made careful adjustments to her hem and sleeves.

“Can I put them down yet?” she asked.

“Five more seconds,” Tammy said. “Almost.”

“I’m tired!”

“I know, honey, hang on—”

“Done!” Maggie said. “You can relax.”

Abigail dropped her arms and exhaled with relief as I reached the bottom of the stairs.

“You’re just in time,” Tammy said. “What do you think of our little flower girl? Doesn’t she look wonderful?”

And I had to admit, the sight of Abigail brought me up short. I almost didn’t recognize her. She wore a crown of white summer daisies that concealed the sharp contours of her buzz cut, and her dress had little sparkles that twinkled when she moved. “It’s beautiful,” I told her. “You look like a princess.”

Her face turned red. “Aw, Mister Frank, stop!”

Maggie set down her sewing basket and rushed to my side. “How are you feeling, Dad? Is your head okay?” I just stared back at her. I supposed she was just going to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary happened last night. Reality was whatever she wanted it to be. “Can I get you some coffee? There’s still plenty of breakfast left in the kitchen. Croissants, fruit salad, some quiche—”

“Maggie, I just want to talk for a bit. Would that be all right?”

“More than all right,” Tammy said. “This is a big day for you two! A big day with big emotions.” She swept both of us across the room and out the front door. “Go have your conversation outside while I finish here with Abby. And then she’s going to help me fit into my dress. Because, let’s be honest, I’m going to need a lot more time!”

I followed my daughter out of the cottage and into the woods. We walked on a trail for a long time without saying anything. It was like that first out-of-the-blue phone call back in May, when she’d reached out with her big news. Clearly we needed to talk, but neither one of us knew where to start.

“I’ll answer your questions,” she finally said. “And I promise I’ll tell you the truth. But you have to promise to listen. You need to hear me out.”

“Is he blackmailing you?”

“Who? Errol? No! Of course not. Everything you saw last night was consensual.”

This seemed impossible. Maybe consensual didn’t mean what I thought it meant?

“We’ve been together awhile now.”

“How long?”

“Almost a year.”

“I don’t understand. How are you ‘together’ with a fifty-seven-year-old married man? What does that even mean? How in the world—”

“Dad, I will explain everything, but I need you to listen. Don’t judge, don’t criticize, don’t moralize. Just hear me out. Can you do that?”

I gritted my teeth and nodded, and she began to tell me her story. She said that during her first year at Capaciti, Errol Gardner barely spoke a word to her. He was the sort of CEO who rarely acknowledged or even noticed all the young assistants working long hours on his behalf—or so she thought.

Then one day she received an invitation to lunch. Errol described it as a new company initiative—an attempt to foster mentorship between senior executives and junior employees. Maggie said it was the least convincing pickup line she’d ever heard, but she was flattered that he’d taken an interest. She said there were a dozen other women he could have asked, and they would have all agreed to the lunch in a heartbeat.

What followed, according to my daughter, was an increasingly intimate series of encounters, all under the guise of career development. Brainstorming sessions, dinner after work, late-night drinks at sales conferences. A week in Chicago at the Auto Show. Trips to Munich and Singapore and Sydney on Capaciti’s private jet. “Discretion was very important,” Maggie explained. “We were never together in Boston or Cambridge. Only out of state and ideally out of the country. And I know these stories always sound cheap and tawdry, but I promise you, this is not a Harvey Weinstein situation. It’s a real relationship built on respect. We go to museums, we read the same books, we like the same TED Talks—”

I had to stop her right there. “You know you’re not the only one, right? Catherine says he’s been cheating on her for years. Dozens of women. You’re just his latest flavor of the month. You’re the new Dawn Taggart!”

“I’m getting to her,” she said. “You promised you would listen, remember?”

We had reached the clearing with Big Ben, the tall tree with the two wooden swings. No one else was around, so my daughter took one and I took the other, and then Maggie continued her story: “After we were together a couple months, Errol invited me to visit Osprey Cove. This place is so important to him. He’s had all of his best ideas here. All his biggest innovations were born on this lake. It was the first weekend in November and he promised the foliage would be beautiful. We left Boston on a Saturday morning, and when we arrived in New Hampshire, he showed me the back roads that he liked to use. So he could bypass Hopps Ferry and not draw attention to himself.”

But upon arriving at the camp, Errol realized that something was amiss. The first sign was the empty guard station. Hugo, the property manager, was absent from his post. Errol proceeded into the camp, and when he arrived at Osprey Lodge, there were two other cars parked in the driveway. A black BMW belonging to his wife and a silver Toyota Corolla that belonged to Dawn Taggart.

“As soon as I saw the cars, I knew something was wrong. Errol turned white as a sheet. He drove all the way around the rotary and started making excuses, saying we’d have to visit some other time. But it was too late. Catherine heard his car and opened the front door. She was standing there with Aidan and they both looked awful. I assumed it was because of me. I thought we’d been caught red-handed. But then I looked past them and saw a third person in the doorway. Sprawled at the bottom of the staircase with a broken neck. If we’d arrived ten minutes earlier, we could have stopped the whole thing from happening.”

Hugo was already at work inside the lodge, assessing the situation and plotting the best course of action. Maggie explained that he had experience with these kinds of situations, from his work in Congo-Kinshasa. He assured the Gardners that everything would be okay, that he could make the girl and her car disappear. But Errol knew that Linda Taggart would report her daughter missing, and she would point the police to Aidan as the most likely suspect. His son needed an alibi from a third party. Someone outside the family willing to testify he wasn’t anywhere near Osprey Cove. So Maggie raised her hand and volunteered.

“We were back in my apartment by four o’clock that afternoon, and we stayed up half the night talking. Aidan felt terrible about what happened. He thought we were all going to jail. But Hugo promised the local police wouldn’t look too hard, and he was right. The town has too much to lose if Osprey Cove goes dark. I bet Errol Gardner could walk into Hopps Ferry and shoot a person in broad daylight and everyone would just look the other way.”

While Maggie and Aidan were hunkered down in the basement apartment, Errol and Catherine were at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts; they had several friends on the board who recalled spending the entire afternoon with them. And all the while, Hugo was cleaning up the camp and relocating the body to some unknown location. “He waited until dark and then drove Dawn’s Toyota to the state forest. Then he put some of her clothes on the trail, just to confuse the police.” Maggie laughed. “It’s very easy to conceal this sort of thing, if you’ve got enough resources. That’s why the jails are full of poor people.”

I couldn’t believe the levity in her voice. She almost sounded boastful—proud of her role in the cover-up. “There was quite a bit of acting involved, but I’m getting pretty good at it.” Then she transformed her expression, widening her eyes and clutching her hands to her chest, like she was Cinderella meeting her fairy godmother. And in a singsong voice she quoted an old conversation back to me: “‘Sometimes we’re talking and I feel like Aidan can read my mind. Like we have a telepathic connection. Did you and Mom ever feel that way?’”

I stared back like I’d been slapped, and she laughed at my reaction. “Oh, Dad, come on! Have I ever talked that way about anyone?”

“I thought you’d fallen in love. I was happy for you.”

“I never said I loved him. You assumed I loved him, because I am excited for this wedding. But the marriage is strictly business. We’ll make public appearances as husband and wife, but in private there’s no commitment. Aidan can sleep with whoever he wants. Not Gwendolyn, unfortunately, and that’s a shame. I think he always had a little crush on her. But he’s rich and good-looking. He’ll find someone new.”

She seemed oblivious to the cruelty and callousness of her words. “Gwendolyn was murdered ,” I reminded her. “And now you’re an accomplice to her murder.”

Maggie shook her head. “No more than you or Tammy. Or anyone else at the camp. I don’t know what they did to her. I never saw anyone lay a hand on her.”

“What if Aidan changes his mind?” I asked. “He’s looked miserable all weekend. What if he goes to the police and confesses?”

“Never gonna happen. He loves his mother too much. He doesn’t want to see her go to jail. This is his only viable option.”

“And you? What are you getting out of this?”

“Well, I’m not Dawn Taggart, I’ll tell you that much. Forty-five grand isn’t going to cut it. I insisted on an ironclad prenuptial agreement. Following a period of at least six months and no more than twelve, Aidan and I will announce our separation and file for divorce. We’ll split all our combined assets fifty-fifty, including his penthouse apartment and his eighty thousand shares of Capaciti stock. At which point I promise you will never have to work another day in your life. You can wave a giant middle finger at UPS and tell them all to go to hell.”

“I like UPS, Maggie. UPS has put food on our table for twenty-six years.”

“Fine, Dad, whatever. Run your body into the ground if it makes you happy. I’m just saying you’ll have a choice.”

“And in the meantime you’ll keep sleeping with Errol Gardner? While you’re married to his son?”

“I’m not asking for your approval,” she reminded me. “I’m asking you to respect my decisions.”

From our perch on the swings we had a partial view of Lake Wyndham and we could see dozens of brightly colored sailboats moving across the water. All these happy families spending time together—parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. I found it hard to square the beauty of my surroundings with all these ugly confessions.

“Maggie, we have to leave.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“You can’t go through with this. It’s a perversion of marriage. The opposite of everything your mother and I believed in. We forbid this marriage.”

She laughed an ugly laugh—a short, harsh bark. “Oh, you forbid it? What is this, a Jane Austen novel?”

“Let’s get out of here. Quit your job at Capaciti and come home. Stay with me until you get back on your feet and I promise I will never breathe a word to anyone. But if you don’t, if you go through with this wedding and marry Aidan Gardner, I am going straight to the police—to real police, not the local Keystone Kops—and I will tell them everything.”

Maggie glanced around, checking to make sure no one was walking nearby, and then she lowered her voice. “Dad, please don’t make threats like that. I know you’re not serious. But the wrong people could overhear you and jump to false conclusions.”

“I am serious. I can’t stay here and watch you do this.”

“You don’t have a choice. They have your Jeep. They have your keys. And Hugo knows what happened last night. You’re not leaving this camp without his permission. And even if you did, where would you go? You have no proof and no evidence. Errol and Catherine have donated millions of dollars to hundreds of charities and you’re just the UPS guy. No one is going to believe you.”

I pointed out that Linda and Brody Taggart would help support my story.

“Sure, a second-grade teacher and a drunk janitor. And meanwhile Gerry and his team will get to work and they will absolutely destroy you. They will take you apart brick by brick. You’ll lose your job, your house, your reputation. I’ve seen them do it to other people, Dad, and it’s brutal.”

“It’s a risk we have to take. You can’t trust these people. What if they’re playing you? What if they turn around and try to pin this whole thing on you?”

Maggie was confident this could never happen. “We spent a long time planning this wedding and I’ve got hours of conversations on tape. Me, Errol, Catherine, Aidan, even Gerry. If they ever tried something, I’d bring them all down with me.”

This was a revelation. “Maggie, if you’ve got those conversations on tape, you’ve got all the power in the world. You can turn them over to the FBI. You could be their star witness.”

She stared back at me like I was missing the point. “If I go to the FBI, I get nothing. I’ve invested a whole year with this family. I’m two hours away from lifelong financial independence. And you’re suggesting that I quit?”

“I’m begging you to quit.”

“Dad, I’m going to say something, and it’s going to hurt, but you need to hear it: I am never coming home to Stroudsburg. It’s too small. It’s too cheap. And all the people are too sad. You all have no idea what you’re missing. This world we live in—it’s so much bigger and more amazing than any of you realize. It’s like—how can I put this? You don’t even know what you don’t know .” She shook her head. “I’ll never go back. I’d rather put a bullet in my brain.”

I heard footsteps, and we turned to see Sierra Levinson sauntering up the trail, dressed in a wide-brimmed straw hat and a slim-fitting floral dress. “Sorry to interrupt y’all’s daddy-daughter time, but I wanted Margaret to know the stylists are here. To do everyone’s hair. They can start with other people, but we thought you might want to go first.”

“Thank you, Sierra,” Maggie said. “I’ll be there in five minutes. Have her wait for me, okay?”

“Of course, no rush,” she said, and then she swatted a playful hand across my shoulder. “Don’t look so nervous, Frank! You’re going to do great today!”

Maggie waited until Sierra was down the trail before speaking again. “I know you’re unhappy. But if you love me as much as you say you do, you’ll respect my decision. Put on your tuxedo, walk me down the aisle, and say something sweet during the reception. That’s all I’m asking. You’ve spent the last three years saying you would do anything for me. Well, this is what I need. Today. Right now. Are you going to support me or not?”

And when she framed the question like that, I didn’t have much of a choice.