Брайан Фриман: Funeral for a Friend

It made for a lonely summer. She didn’t have a lot of friends.

Cat turned on her nightstand lamp. She got out of bed and went to the window, where she stared at the rain. The air was sticky on her bare arms and legs. She tried to decide whether to sneak out to her car and head to a downtown club, but she didn’t want to go out. Not tonight, not alone. But she was also wide awake.

She went back to her nightstand, opened the top drawer, and removed a stack of letters inside that were bound together with a rubber band. She’d told Stride that she wasn’t receiving much fan mail anymore, but that wasn’t true. Most days, she tried to get to the mailbox ahead of Stride or Serena, so they didn’t see the dozens of letters addressed to her from people all over the world. Total strangers. They all treated her like a best friend. They all knew where she lived.

It was creepy.

Today’s batch included almost twenty letters, plus a large manila envelope. She peeled off the rubber band and began opening the notes one by one. Most were harmless. People sent her the oddest things: photos of their pets, poems, cardinal feathers, loose change, pictures of Jesus. She put aside a few to send replies, because she felt bad for girls who wrote to her because they’d been raped, or abused, or assaulted. She’d been there herself, and she didn’t want those girls to feel alone. Some of the notes she put directly in a shredder. Those were hate mail from Dean Casperson fans who accused her of trapping him and going after his money.

There were disgusting ones, too. It was unbelievable what people did. She’d told Stride about her Estonian pen pal who sent close-ups of his erections, complete with graying pubic hair, but she got others like that all the time. In today’s stack, there was a soiled copy of her People magazine cover that a man in Kentucky had obviously used to masturbate. He sent her the results.

“Yuck yuck yuck yuck,” Cat said aloud.

It wasn’t the first time she’d gotten something like that. Holding it by the corner, she threw it away.

Then she got to the last item in the stack, which was the large manila envelope, hand-addressed to her in lime-green marker. She noted that the postmark was local. It had been sent to her by someone in Duluth.

When she opened the envelope, she immediately felt a shiver of alarm. Inside, she found an eight-by-ten photograph of her . It was a recent picture, taken at the house of Drew and Krista Olson, who’d adopted Cat’s baby. The photo showed Cat in their backyard, her long hair flying, a big smile on her face as she played with her two-year-old son, Michael.

Whoever sent this had been watching her. Spying on her. But that wasn’t even the worst part.

The photograph was covered in green marker, like the address on the outside of the envelope. One sentence was scribbled on the front and back of the picture over and over.

I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you .

Cat had received personal messages before. Invitations to prom. Invitations to sex. Even marriage proposals and engagement rings. But this one was different. Something about it felt threatening, not just that the postmark was local, not just that it was a picture of her, not just that someone was watching her.

There was something else about it.

What?

And then her gaze drifted to the top of her dresser, and she knew. There it was, sitting upright next to her Bluetooth speakers, in plain sight. She hadn’t noticed it before, but she knew she hadn’t left it there herself.

A green marker.

He’d left behind the marker.

He’d written the message on the photograph right here in her bedroom.

Steve’s yard was small and crowded with trees. There were only so many places to hide a body, and Stride knew where to tell the forensics team to dig.

He remembered the day seven years ago when Steve had added a picket fence and a small garden near the street. That was an unusual project for him, because Steve didn’t exactly have a green thumb. He’d planted herbs like rosemary, parsley, and basil, because he said he was taking a cooking class and wanted to use fresh ingredients. The garden had lasted for all of one season, and since then, the rectangular plot had been nothing but a nest of weeds.

The ground in the yard was soft, thanks to the rain, and their officers had erected a tent over the garden. Under the tarp, men with shovels carefully scraped away the mud layer by layer. Stride sat with Maggie in her Avalanche as the team worked. He drank coffee; she ate McDonald’s fries. Neither of them said a word, but he could feel her eyeing him across the truck. She was waiting for him to give her some kind of explanation for the search, but he couldn’t do that.

Not yet.

Not until they found Ned Baer’s body.

He’d recited Steve’s dying words for Maggie exactly as he remembered them, leaving nothing out. He hadn’t tried to protect himself. She’d taken his statement with an expressionless face and not asked any follow-up questions. Instead, she’d written up the warrant application based on Steve’s confession and hand-delivered it to a friendly judge at the county courthouse. Now the search was underway. There was nothing to do but wait and see what the team found.

They weren’t alone on the Point. Neighbors had already begun to gather near the house to observe the police activity. They all knew Steve and knew he had died the previous day. It hadn’t taken long in the tight-knit Point community for word to spread that something unusual was happening. Sooner rather than later, the local media would also pick up the story and descend on the area.

The story of Ned Baer was going to be back in the news. This time, unlike seven years ago, Stride knew the truth was going to come out.

No more sins of omission. No more lies.

He needed to call Andrea and warn her.

Stride checked his watch. The forensics team had been digging for less than an hour, but if the body really was here, they’d get to it soon. He was impatient to know if he was right, so he got out of the Avalanche and stepped into the pouring rain. He wore a vinyl slicker and pulled up the hood. There was no wind, and the summer rain was warm, but he still shivered. This was one of those moments when he missed smoking. A cigarette in his hand would have gone a long way toward calming his nerves.

Maggie emptied the last few french fries into her mouth and joined him. She stood unprotected in the rain. He felt the weight of the silence between them, heavy and uncomfortable. He didn’t like feeling that way with her. They’d been partners and friends for two decades; they’d even been lovers for a brief, uncomfortable stretch of months. He trusted Maggie more than anyone else in his life except Serena, but Maggie was also a cop, and Stride was acting like a witness with things to hide.

Under the tent on Steve’s front lawn, Sergeant Max Guppo used two fingers to let out a loud whistle.

This was it. They’d found something.

Stride marched that way, head down, his hands in his pockets. He heard Maggie clear her throat behind him, and he knew she wanted him to stay back and let her talk to the forensics team alone. She was right. She was in charge here. He needed to keep this case at arm’s length, but right now, he didn’t care about protocol. He wanted to see what Steve had hidden in the ground.

His long legs carried him across the wet grass. Maggie hurried to catch up with him. The rain poured over the edges of the tent, and he crossed through a waterfall to the other side. Guppo was waiting beside a hole that went about two feet down into the wet soil. The other members of the team leaned on dirty shovels, and their faces were wet with sweat and rain.