Chapter 4 - The Scent of Pine
Finding Grace was not a matter of private investigators or surveillance logs.
I had known Grace Bennett since we were twenty-two years old, when we met in the reference room of the Avery Architectural Library at Columbia. While the other girls in her graduate cohort talked about landing partnerships at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill or designing glass towers in Dubai, Grace talked about vernacular timber construction in northern New England. She talked about the way white pine smelled when it was dried in a stone kiln, and how a house should feel like an extension of the granite ledge beneath its foundation.
She hadn't gone to her sister’s home in Vermont; Eleanor’s lawyers would have anticipated that within thirty minutes.
She hadn't gone to her father’s cottage in Sharon; that was listed on our marital asset disclosures.
She had gone to the place she had never brought me.
At 2:00 p.m., I rented an ordinary dark gray Ford Explorer from a lot near LaGuardia, left my corporate smartphone in the glove compartment, and took an untraceable prepaid burner phone from a convenience store on the Grand Central Parkway.
I drove north on Interstate 95 through Connecticut, through the rocky coastal cuts of Rhode Island, past Boston, and up into the winding, two-lane state routes of coastal Maine.
By 8:30 p.m., the city lights had vanished entirely, replaced by the towering, pitch-black silhouettes of white spruce and balsam fir flanking Route 1. The rain had turned into a wet, heavy coastal sleet that slapped against the windshield in rhythmic, icy pulses. The air coming through the dashboard vents smelled of woodsmoke, tidal mud, and freezing salt water.
Pemaquid Point.
Her maternal grandfather had been a boatbuilder in Bristol, crafting wooden lobster hulls in an unheated shed overlooking the Damariscotta River. When he passed away in 2014, he had left Grace a two-acre parcel of rocky headland with a three-room cedar-shingle cottage that had no central heating—only an antique cast-iron woodstove and a gravity-fed water cistern.
I turned down a narrow, unpaved gravel lane rutted with deep puddles of frozen mud. The headlights swept across ancient stone walls draped in wet moss, finally catching the low, weathered roofline of the cottage.
Parked beside the shed was an old, faded blue Volvo wagon that had belonged to her sister.
And through the small, multi-paned front window, a warm, amber light cut through the freezing darkness.
I cut the engine.
The silence that rushed into the cabin was absolute, broken only by the ticking of the cooling manifold and the distant, rhythmic boom of Atlantic swells breaking against the granite ledges three hundred yards away.
My heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
I looked at myself in the rearview mirror: the dark circles beneath my eyes, the hollows in my cheeks, the damp wool coat smelling of exhaust and cold rain. I had spent eight years believing that my power in the world came from the balance sheets I managed, the boardrooms I controlled, and the name engraved on the brass directory in Midtown Manhattan.
Now, sitting in a rented car in the mud of coastal Maine, I knew that I was nothing more than a beggar standing outside the gates of a temple I had desecrated with my own hands.
I stepped out into the freezing slush.
The wind off the bay bit through my trousers, but I barely felt it. I walked up the three flagstone steps to the low wooden porch.
Through the glass of the front door, I saw her.
Grace was sitting in an old rocking chair beside a roaring Jotul woodstove, wearing an oversized gray wool sweater with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, her hair pulled back into a messy, practical knot. On her lap, wrapped in a faded yellow fleece blanket, lay Noah.
She was singing to him.
I couldn't hear the melody through the heavy storm door, but I recognized the gentle, rhythmic swaying of her shoulders—the same movement she had performed every evening at seven-thirty in our Tribeca bedroom while I sat three feet away on the leather sofa, checking the closing prices on the Nikkei index and answering encrypted messages from Vanessa.
Noah’s tiny hand was curled around the collar of her sweater, his eyes half-closed, his cheeks flushed pink from the heat of the fire.
Beside the rocking chair, resting on the raw pine floorboards, was the hand-carved wooden mobile of wooden puffins and gulls that Grace’s father had made with a pocketknife before he died.
She hadn't left it behind. She had wrapped it in bubble wrap, packed it into the white freight van, and carried it four hundred miles north through the dark so that when our son opened his eyes in the morning, the things that loved him would still be hanging above his head.
I raised my knuckles to the wood.
My hand hovered three inches from the door.
Do not let your family call me unstable this time. I am no longer alone with my word.
If I knocked on that door tonight, accompanied by the wind and the dark, what would she see?
She would not see a husband coming home to repent. She would see Eleanor Whitmore’s vanguard. She would see a predator who had hunted her through the night to strip her of the only thing she had left in the world.
My hand dropped back to my side.
I took two steps backward off the porch, my boots sinking into the wet gravel. I walked back to the rented Ford, climbed into the front seat, started the engine, and pulled thirty yards down the lane into the shadows of the spruce trees where the cabin’s windows were still visible through the branches.
May you like
I turned off the lights. I turned off the heat.
I pulled my wet wool overcoat tight around my shoulders, rested my forehead against the cold steering wheel, and prepared to spend the night standing guard over the woman I had betrayed.
