Hawk didn’t answer at first. He was trying to figure out how to tell her the story he’d been attempting to tell her all along, and now he didn’t know where to start.
As they passed Waterside Cemetery, where Lilly was buried, she stopped him. “You were sleeping with her.” She’d heard Lilly’s stories about Adam in almost as much detail as she’d heard Maureen’s stories. Now it made her sick to think about what Lilly had described.
“We were friends,” he said. “I can’t tell you I didn’t think about it. When I first met her…But no. I never slept with her.”
They drove in silence for a moment.
Then she remembered contacting the police. “Mattei and I called the police in Marblehead to file a report. Because Lilly told me that a man named Adam had threatened her.”
Hawk finally understood why the police kept driving by his house, why the cop had acted so strangely the last time he was in town. After Roy had jumped him that day, Hawk had beaten him up. They were on the job site when it happened. Everyone on the crew thought it was payback for Roy’s attack, but it wasn’t. It was about Lilly. The cops talked to both of them, then talked to some of the other guys on the crew. They decided that it had been a jealousy thing and let it go. But the police had started watching him after that, which was one of the reasons he left when he did. “What did the cops tell you about me?”
“Only that you had left town. And that you weren’t the only guy that Lilly was involved with.”
He’d seen what Roy had done to Lilly when he got her to run away with him and then dumped her back on her doorstep three days later. The whole crew was talking about it.
“Next time you want to hit somebody,” Hawk told him right before he threw the first punch, “don’t pick on a woman.”
The guys had just watched as he hit Roy. No one helped. No one came to Roy’s defense or to Hawk’s either, though he didn’t really need it. It wasn’t a long fight. But it was brutal. And it went all the way back to childhood. Every punch he’d wanted to deliver then on his mother’s boyfriend, he delivered that day on Roy.
Hawk left his job after that. Roy had been there for years and was the foreman, though no one liked him very much. And hell, Hawk was glad to get away. Lilly had taken to sitting on his doorstep sometimes when he got home. It wasn’t safe. He didn’t mean not safe for him. He meant for her.
The truth was, he was angry at Lilly. Though he’d never met her husband, he’d gotten to know her kids while working at their house, and they were great. He didn’t understand why she would risk everything, especially for someone like Roy. It was too close to what he’d seen growing up.
But he could also see how frightened she was. There wasn’t anyone else she could talk to about this, she said. She felt safe only when she was with him. “I’m afraid he’s going to do something terrible,” she said.
“Has he threatened you?”
He couldn’t tell if she was lying when she said no, or if she was just backing away because she knew he would take it to the next level, either to Roy himself or to the police.
In the end, feeling bad for her, Hawk gave her his cell number. He promised he’d come get her if she got into trouble, but he told her to go back to her husband and children, not to go near Roy again.
“You think I want to go near him?” She was crying.
The last time he saw her, she was in his apartment. He wasn’t certain, even now, how she had broken in. He was living on his boat, and the place was empty. He’d come home one afternoon to find her there. She was wearing one of his T-shirts, and her hair was wet as if she’d just gotten out of the shower. From the look of things, she’d been there for a while.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“I’m leaving William,” she said. “I want to live with you.”
Hawk was taken by surprise. He’d known for a while that something had shifted, that she had somehow transferred any feelings she’d had for Roy to him, but he didn’t want that. Not that he didn’t have feelings for her, too. Hawk had always been a sucker for a woman in trouble, especially a beautiful woman like Lilly. But he wasn’t about to break up a family. He’d had too much experience with that as a kid. And he’d also begun to realize just how much was wrong with her. He was happy after that when she called and told him she was seeing her therapist again, and she called him a lot. Too much, really, because the guys on the Friendship had started to tease him about the number of calls and texts he got from her.
“I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea,” he’d said. “That was never what I intended.”
“I’m afraid,” she’d said.
“Go home to your husband,” Hawk said. “Tell him what happened between you and Roy. Then go to the police.”
“I can’t do that,” she said.
THE LAST DAY SHE CALLED, when she told him she was going to jump, he’d gone after her. Tried to talk her out of it, to get her to meet him somewhere, but she was already headed to the bridge. He’d gotten her to pull over for a while, into the McDonald’s parking lot on the Lynnway. He’d told her to wait for him there, that he was on his way. She tearfully agreed. But then she got scared. Said she couldn’t wait. Someone was after her, she said. There was nothing anyone could do.
He drove so fast. He would have called the cops, but he didn’t want to get off the phone with her.
When she jumped, he was only six cars behind her.
“I can see you,” he said. “Pull over and I’ll pick you up.”
She did pull over, but she didn’t look back. When she went up and over the side, he was still on the phone with her. He could see the phone fly out of her hands as she went down. It all happened so fast.
He wondered every day what he could have done differently. He went over it and over it in his mind. It bothered him so much he had considered seeing someone to talk it through. But then he met Zee, and everything seemed different. The fact that she felt as guilty as he did about Lilly’s death had actually helped him feel a bit better. She hadn’t told him how she felt, of course-she was far too professional for that. But he knew.
HAWK TOLD ZEE THE WHOLE story. At the end of it, she told him what she’d told the Marblehead police.
Hawk’s blood chilled. He didn’t move. Lilly had been troubled, he’d always known that. But her jump up and over the railing had begun to make sense to him in a way it hadn’t before. He knew that Roy was a dangerous guy, an abusive guy, and he also knew that the most dangerous time for a victim is when she tries to break up with her abuser. He’d read an article about it in the Salem paper just last week, something that the local shelter had put out, or maybe it was that woman on Yellow Dog Island, May Whitney. He couldn’t remember.
Hawk sat very still. He looked directly at Zee in a way that made sure she wouldn’t look away. He didn’t reach out to her, just said as calmly as he could, “I never slept with Lilly Braedon… And I sure as hell never threatened her. I was trying to do the same thing you were,” he said. “I was trying to save her.”
He’s not who you think he is. Ann Chase’s words came quickly back to Zee.
THEY DROVE THE REST OF the way to Salem in silence. Hawk pulled Zee’s Volvo into Finch’s driveway and shut off the engine. He turned to her. “I need you to believe me.”
No one spoke for a long time.
“I do believe you,” she finally said. “But I can’t see you anymore.”
PART 4: August 2008
Only when one learns to determine his true location by looking at the stars will he be able to chart an accurate course to his final destination. The tools needed are simple enough: the chronometer, the sextant, the almanac, the charts, and some relatively simple method of mathematical calculation.