She got a little flush on her face. “Actually, no. I told the kids to check on him, but we were almost at the end of the movie, so they wanted to wait. By the time we were done, he was quiet again. I mean, it couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes that he was barking.”
“Have you seen or talked to Mr. Webster since Tuesday night?”
Dale shook his head. “No. He’s a lawyer, and his clients aren’t exactly the cream of the crop, you know? So he keeps odd hours.”
“When did you last see either Gavin or Chelsey?”
“It’s been two or three weeks, I guess,” Dale replied.
“Do you know the Websters well?” Serena asked.
“I wouldn’t say well, but we’ve had meals together maybe three or four times since we moved in,” Krystal told her. “Like I said, they were more welcoming than the others around here. I know Chelsey better than Gavin. We occasionally have wine together in the evening.”
“What were your impressions of the two of them?”
Dale shrugged. “Gavin’s an odd duck.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know, he never talks about anything other than work. He seems to enjoy bailing lowlifes out of jail at two in the morning. It’s weird. Otherwise, I don’t know anything about him. He never says a word about politics, family, whatever. He doesn’t even seem to like talking about the Twins or the Vikings.”
“But he’s very good-looking,” Krystal added. “Those eyes of his... wow, they’re so mesmerizing.”
Dale shrugged. “I guess women go for that sort of thing. Me, I don’t really like it. When he looks at you, you have no idea what he’s thinking. Usually with men, you know where they stand, but not Gavin. He’s a closed book.”
“And Chelsey?” Serena asked. “What can you tell me about her?”
“Well, I imagine she was a Minnesota hot dish once upon a time,” Dale commented. “But that was — Krys, do you remember how long Gavin said they’d been together? — fourteen, fifteen years?”
“Meaning what?” Serena asked.
“Meaning a man who found himself with three million dollars might start thinking about a trade-in to a younger model.”
Serena struggled to keep her reaction off her face. Krystal rolled her eyes and shot her a look that said: Yeah, I know he’s a pig.
“So you’d heard about the inheritance,” Serena said.
Krystal nodded. “Chelsey told us.”
“Fucking amazing luck,” Dale added.
“Don’t say things like that,” Krystal interjected sharply, running out of patience with her husband this time. “His sister died of cancer. That’s not luck, that’s awful. I’m sure if he had the choice, he’d give up all of the money in order to get her back.”
“And if you believe that, honeybun, you’re naïve,” Dale retorted.
Serena swallowed down her dislike for this man. “Mr. Sacks, did Gavin say anything to you that would make you think he wasn’t happy with his marriage? Or was considering divorce?”
Dale shrugged. “Nothing specific. It’s just a guess. But based on what Chelsey told Krystal, we wouldn’t have been surprised to see them split up.”
“Mrs. Sacks?” Serena asked. “What did Chelsey tell you?”
Krystal looked uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation. “This was just girl talk. It wasn’t serious. We were gossiping over wine a couple of weeks ago, that’s all. I’m not sure it’s appropriate to be sharing it with the police.”
“Chelsey is missing,” Serena reminded her.
“I know, but I can’t believe Gavin had anything to do with that.”
“What did she tell you?” Serena asked again.
Krystal sighed. “Chelsey wasn’t particularly happy with things. I mean, even before the inheritance, she’d talked to me about how Gavin worked all the time. She wondered if he was cheating on her. You know, he represents a lot of — well, a lot of interesting clients. Prostitutes, people like that. Chelsey didn’t like it. And after they got the money, I don’t know. You’d think she would have been happy about it, but Chelsey said Gavin was acting different.”
“Different how?”
“She was vague,” Krystal replied. “Chelsey said his behavior was making her a little uncomfortable. Like she’d catch him watching her when she wasn’t paying attention, just staring at her with those eyes of his. She even made — I mean, it sounds bad now — but she made a joke about it.”
Serena’s face darkened. “What kind of joke?”
Krystal hesitated. “Chelsey said she wondered if she should have somebody tasting her food.”
Outside, when she was back in the rain, Serena struggled to understand what she did next.
Before she left the house, she reminded Dale and Krystal Sacks about their dog. She told them that they couldn’t leave the dog outside like that and that they needed to take better care of him. She said they had to bring him inside the house right now, and if they didn’t, she’d refer them to animal control.
After they’d closed the door, she went over to the Border collie again. He was still whimpering, still soaking wet, but he greeted her arrival as if she were his greatest friend on earth. She sat with him on the wet concrete, and the dog flopped over in her lap so she could rub his white belly. Fifteen minutes passed that way. No one from inside the house came to take the dog out of the rain.
She waited another fifteen minutes after that. The Sacks kids were up now. She could hear them shouting and running around inside the house. But the dog had been forgotten.
Serena didn’t ring the bell. She didn’t call animal control.
She was done with these people.
She unhooked the dog’s leash from the post, and she took the Border collie to her Mustang and put him inside.
5
For almost a year after he was shot, Stride didn’t miss his job.
The shooting had happened in late July, when a bullet tore open one chamber of his heart. The surgeons had performed an emergency thoracotomy to save him, which meant cutting open his entire chest cavity. The odds of his surviving the surgery at all had been no better than one in four. He’d actually died on the operating table during the procedure, and they’d had to shock his heart back to life.
The doctors had warned him that it wouldn’t be an easy or fast recovery, and it wasn’t. It was well into the fall months before he felt strong enough to take daily walks on the beach again. Even then, a few minutes of effort would wipe him out for hours. The slow pace of his rehabilitation left him depressed, and the doctors had warned him about that, too.
The scars of trauma are emotional, not just physical.
You’ll need to accept the reality that your life will never be exactly the same as it was before.
They were right.
Sometimes he would sit by the lake and question how the events of his life had led him to that moment. He dwelled on the mistakes he’d made, the people he’d lost. He felt like a stranger to himself, as if he were inhabiting someone else’s body. He hadn’t died, but he hadn’t started living again, either.
So as fall bled into the frigid winter, he finally embraced his new normal. He went to physical therapy twice a week, and he bought a treadmill, and when the temperatures climbed above zero outside, he went and jogged up and down the Point, which was the narrow spit of land between the lake and the harbor, where he and Serena lived. By the time spring arrived in Duluth (late, as usual), he was feeling physically more like the man he’d been before the shooting. Older, still in pain, but in some ways stronger than he’d been in years.
But he still found himself reluctant to go back to the police.