Quinn picked up the glass animal, a caramel-colored doe with tiny white spots on it, and turned it over in her fingers. She’d owned one almost exactly like this when she was a child. She put it back on the mirrored shelf, with the rest of the glass animals on display, and looked around Butternut Drugs. Why, exactly, had she come here? She wasn’t sure. But after she’d left Gabriel’s cabin, this was the place she’d wanted to be. And she’d thought, Why not? It wasn’t as if she was in a hurry; she’d decided she would leave Butternut tomorrow morning. Now she had the whole rest of the day to fill.
The drive into town had been interminable. She’d cried, silently, the whole way, letting the tears drip down her cheeks. She picked up another glass animal now, this one a blue jay, and then gently put it back down. There was a little dust on her fingertip, and she blew it off and wandered over to another display, this one a selection of North Woods–themed shot glasses. She wanted to be with Gabriel. How exactly she wanted to be with him, she wasn’t sure. But the knowledge that he didn’t want to be with her brought with it a fresh wave of pain. She picked up a shot glass with a loon on it, thinking that she might give it to her dad and Johanna, who, for some reason, collected shot glasses, but when she went to the register to pay for it the man behind the counter was giving directions to an older couple.
“You know how I’d get there?” he was saying to them. “I’d take Scuttle Hole Road. It’s not well traveled, but it’s fast. Mostly, it’s just locals who use it. You go down Main Street, take a right, and . . .” Quinn didn’t hear the rest. She returned the shot glass to its shelf and headed for the door. She’d thought all she had left to do before tomorrow morning was to pack, tell Annika she was checking out, and say good-bye to Tanner. But it turned out there was one more thing she needed to do. She was going to the house on Scuttle Hole Road, the house where Jake was parked on the day of the accident. If possible, she was going to find out why he’d been there that day. And if she couldn’t find that out, she’d at least find out whose house it had been then.
QUINN SAT IN her car, parked on the shoulder of Scuttle Hole Road, and looked out at the house’s desolate front yard. She was nervous. This place looked even worse than she’d remembered it looking ten years ago. Then it had been a small gray ranch house with peeling paint, a junk-strewn yard, and a mailbox with the name McGrath painted on it. And although those features were still evident, at this distance she also noticed the grayish bedsheets tacked up in the front windows in place of curtains, and, in the side yard, a disemboweled washing machine that someone had left open, as if they’d recently tried to put a load of laundry in it. Why didn’t I come here after the accident? she asked herself. But, in truth, the thought had never even occurred to her. Somehow the reason for Jake being here that day had become unimportant after his death. And besides, in the aftermath of the accident, Jake’s and Dom’s and Griffin’s deaths made the lie Jake had told her seem almost trivial. How could it possibly compete with what had happened next? No, all she could think about back then was keeping herself pulled together long enough to graduate from high school and leave Butternut.
She got out of the car now and started up the front walk, careful to step over some broken glass. When she pressed the doorbell, she heard it ring inside the house, barely audible over the blare of a television set. But someone heard it. A moment later, a corner of one of the bedsheets in the window moved, and then the front door swung open. A woman whose age Quinn couldn’t determine—forty? forty-five?—stood in front of her. She was thin and dressed in a dirty sweatshirt and blue jeans. Her long blond hair was lank, her blue eyes bloodshot, and her eyelids were heavily lined with black liner. She had the complexion of someone who’d spent too many days in the sun, and too many nights drinking. Still, there was a kind of ruined beauty about her, and an odd familiarity, too, that Quinn found so disorienting she wasn’t even aware of the woman’s hostility until she spoke.
“What do you want?” she asked Quinn, and then she stuck her head out of the house and looked around, as though Quinn might have brought company with her. “If you’re here to sell me something or talk about God, I’m not interested,” she added, closing the door a few inches.
“No, wait,” Quinn said quickly. “I’m not here to do either of those things. I know this is going to sound a little strange,” she said—and she smiled, hoping to put this woman at ease, but she only looked blankly at Quinn. “Do you know who lived here ten years ago?”
“Yeah. I lived here,” the woman said. “I’ve been here for eleven years now. Why?” She sounded defensive, suspicious even.
“I’m from Butternut,” Quinn explained, backtracking. “I went to Northern Superior High School and—” But the woman’s implacable hostility stopped her midsentence. “Did you know Jake Lightman?” Quinn blurted out.
“Who?”
“Jake Lightman.”
“I don’t know anyone by that name,” the woman said. “And, like I said, I’m busy.” She gestured back into the house, where Quinn could hear Judge Judy on TV. The woman closed the door a few more inches, but then paused and watched, eyes narrowed, as a car came around the bend and drove past the house. “Huh,” she said, as if something about this car or its driver confirmed a suspicion she’d already had. She looked back at Quinn now and started a little.
“What do you want again?” she asked Quinn now, with slightly more interest, and slightly less unfriendliness than before.
“I’m sorry. I won’t take up much more of your time,” Quinn said. “My name is Quinn LaPointe and ten years ago, on March twenty-third, my boyfriend, Jake Lightman, came here and I was wondering why.”
The woman tilted her head. “What? Hell if I know why. Ten years ago? March? I can’t remember two weeks ago. A lot of people came and went back then,” she added, searching in her back pocket for something.
“But Jake would have been in high school, his last year. You don’t remember him?” Quinn persisted.
“I told you, I don’t know who that is,” the woman said. She extracted a crumpled pack of Pall Malls from her back pocket and jiggled the contents, pulling out one slightly bent-looking cigarette. “Maybe he was a friend of my sister,” she conceded. “She stayed here sometimes then. Before she moved.” She put the cigarette between her lips but didn’t light it.
“Your sister?” Quinn repeated. But even as she said this it dawned on Quinn who her sister was. Of course. That’s why she looks so familiar.
“Annika Bergstrom. She’s my sister,” the woman said, leaning on the doorframe. “She lived here with me for a while once. Maybe it was around ten years ago. Now she lives at Loon Bay. I think. I don’t know. We don’t talk much. Are we done here?” she asked, the unlit cigarette still between her lips.
But before Quinn could say anything, the woman slammed the door shut. Quinn heard her retreating footsteps, and the television set being turned up louder. She backed away, then, trying to make sense of what she’d just learned.
So, that was Hedda, the sister whom Annika had mentioned a couple of nights ago. Had Jake been here to see Annika? Had he been cheating on her with Annika? No, she couldn’t picture this. He’d never even mentioned her before. Or had he, for some reason, been here to see Hedda, and she couldn’t remember him? Or was Jake here to see someone else, one of the people who “came and went back then”? Quinn went down the front steps and almost tripped on some debris as she crossed the ragged yard to her car. She had to talk to Annika. She might shed some light on this.