“I may be in touch even sooner than that,” Peter said.
“Oh?”
“I have another freelance job for you.”
“What’s that?” Serena asked.
“Well, if Tish pursues this book, it could start causing me problems in the media. They’ll drag up old lies again. I need your help.”
“What can I do?”
“You can find out who killed Laura,” Peter told her. “Or barring that, you can prove it wasn’t me.”
11
Tish was late.
Stride sat on a stone bench amid the rose gardens of Leif Erickson Park. He ate a roast beef sandwich and inhaled the floral aroma of thousands of red, yellow, and white roses surrounding him. Nearby, a white gazebo overlooked the lake, on a bluff adjacent to the boardwalk that followed the cliff’s edge and wound down along the shore to Canal Park. At lunchtime, with a huge blue sky overhead, the park was crowded with people picnicking in the grass and admiring the flowers.
He saw Tish park on the opposite side of London Road and get out of a navy blue Honda Civic. She waited while a package delivery truck passed her and then crossed the street to the park. She waved at Stride and followed the cobblestone path through the garden to join him.
“Hi,” she said breathlessly, sitting down. She had no lunch with her, but she carried a white takeaway cup of coffee. She wore sunglasses, and she was dressed in a white Georgia T-shirt and gray sweatpants. She wore Nikes with no socks.
“Hello, Tish.”
“Sorry I’m so late. I was at the city engineer’s office, and I had to wait for their copy machine.”
“What did you need there?” Stride asked.
“Aerial photos of the city from the late 1970s.”
“For the book?”
Tish nodded. “I wanted to see exactly what the terrain looked like back then.”
“The Duluth paper ran a story about you and your book today,” Stride said.
“Yes, I thought it might flush out more people who remember what happened back then. There aren’t too many still around.”
“A heads-up would have been nice,” Stride said. “I’m getting calls.”
“I’m sorry. You’re right. I didn’t think about that.”
Stride took another bite of his sandwich and didn’t reply. He saw the delivery truck that had passed Tish return down London Road in the opposite direction and pull into a no-parking zone across from them.
“I heard about the break-in at your condo,” Stride said.
“The cops who showed up thought it was just kids.”
“Probably,” Stride told her. “They may have seen you move in and figured they could make a quick score. Those lakefront condos usually go to people with money.”
Tish shrugged. “No such luck. I’m doing a spread on Duluth for a Swedish magazine, and the condo managers let me use an unsold unit for the summer. That’s one of the perks of being a travel writer.”
“We’re still looking into the break-in, but it sounds like nothing was taken.”
“Right, my laptop was in my car,” Tish said. She added, “I don’t think it was kids, though.”
“No?”
“I think someone’s trying to scare me off.”
“Because of your book?”
“Yes. I suppose you think that’s paranoid.”
“A little,” Stride admitted. “It’s been thirty years, Tish.”
She didn’t answer.
“Tell me about the life of a travel writer,” he said, changing the subject. “It sounds glamorous.”
“Not as much as you might think. Sometimes I feel permanently homeless. Whenever I fall in love with a place, I leave.”
“What was your favorite place?”
Tish blew on her coffee and then took a sip. “Tibet. I love the mountains, but I couldn’t live there.”
“Why not?”
“Heights,” Tish said. “I hate heights. I always have. I had to cross this rope bridge over a canyon, and I swear they had to sedate me and pull me across on my ass with my eyes closed.”
Stride laughed.
“What about you?” Tish asked. “What are you afraid of?”
“Me? I don’t know.”
“Come on, there must be something,” Tish said. “Or do tough guys like you never get scared?”
“I’m afraid of a lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“Loss.”
She looked at him. “You mean like losing Cindy?”
“I mean like losing anything. I hate endings, good-byes, funerals, everything like that. The ends of books. The ends of movies. The ends of vacations. I like it when things keep going, but they never do.”
“How about you and Serena?” Tish asked.
“What about us?”
“Will the two of you keep going?”
Stride frowned. “Why do you care? Do you need to flesh out our characters in your book?”
“No, it’s not that. I think a lot about you and Cindy, so I wondered if Serena makes you happy.”
“She does.” He was curt.
“I’m sorry, is that too personal?”
He shrugged. “I’m a Minnesotan. We talk about the weather and the Twins, Tish. That’s as personal as I get.”
“Oh, I forgot,” Tish said. She added, “Beautiful day.”
“Yeah.”
“How about those Twins?”
“This could be their year.”
“You’re right, this is much better,” Tish said, smiling.
Stride winked and finished his sandwich. He crumpled the wrapper into a ball, got up, and deposited it in a wastebasket twenty yards away. He returned and sat down next to Tish again.
“Are you expecting a package?” he asked her.
“What?”
He nodded at the delivery truck parked illegally fifty yards away. “The driver in that van is watching you. He was following your car when you arrived.”
Tish stared. A face appeared in the window of the truck and then disappeared. The man had wraparound sunglasses and a shaved head.