Today he told himself that Emma, his oldest daughter, was a lovely seventh grader who was beginning to show noticeable signs of insecurity and anxiety, just like her mother. But she was so compulsively good, such a people pleaser, that she was easy to forget about in the chaos of their daily lives. Pay attention to her, he told himself, make sure she knows that things turn out okay in the end. Alex, about to turn eight, had finally, and formally, been diagnosed as not only having ADHD, but also oppositional defiant disorder, which explained some of the behavior issues. Not all, as Nancy insisted. But, still, getting the diagnosis was the right first step, and would help the school system in crafting his educational plan. Joshua, his youngest, was fine except for the persistent sinus infections. He needed to have another conversation about alternative medicines with Nancy, who just kept wanting to throw antibiotics into him. Tonight was probably not the night, but this weekend, maybe, depending on her mood.

  He turned on to Trail Ridge Way, the long, sparsely populated road that culminated in a cul-de-sac anchored by three brand-new mansions, each in distinctly different styles. His was the Italianate one, at least it was Italianate on the outside, although distinctly Palladian, if that was the correct word, on the inside. Thinking of the house, his mind turned to Nancy. Was she better, or worse, lately? He wasn’t even sure anymore, although in the past few weeks her obsessive thoughts had been mostly about Alex, and the latest tests to determine his disorder, and less about Matthew’s “affair” with his new executive assistant. She was wrong about the affair, of course; Matthew, except for an occasional fantasy he allowed himself, usually about Ellen Matthiessen, the head of legal, had been faithful for all fifteen years of his marriage. It was true that he’d gone out for drinks with his team back in July, and had ended up walking Jada Washington back to her apartment in the South End before returning to the Back Bay to get his car, but Jada, who mostly talked that night about her obsession with The Mortal Instruments books, had reminded him more of his own daughter than any potential object of desire. His mistake had been that he told Nancy about the evening, thinking she’d be amused that his “executive assistant” had so much in common with their twelve-year-old daughter. She hadn’t been amused. She’d kept him up all that night accusing him of infidelity. He managed to convince her that nothing had happened, and spent the remainder of the summer trying to convince her that he hadn’t wanted anything to happen. But she’d been quiet about the subject for over a week now, and possibly, just possibly, it was over.

  He pulled his Lexus into the four-car garage, then sat for a moment, listening to a few more minutes of his Foo Fighters mix before heading through the vestibule into the kitchen, where Nancy, leaning against the island, was holding up a piece of paper for him to see as he entered.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “You tell me,” she said.

  He approached her tentatively, just as Alex came racing into the room, wearing the ninja outfit, complete with plastic samurai sword, that he’d already picked out for Halloween. Matthew fended off Alex’s repeated attacks, as he took the sheet of paper from Nancy. It was a list of half a dozen or so names, including his. None of the other names on the list was familiar.

  “What is this?” he asked his wife, then, turning to his son, yelled “Alex! Enough!”

  “I don’t know what it is. It came for you in the mail today, and I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to see it, and I wish I hadn’t, but now that I have, I’d like to know what it’s all about. Some sort of code.”

  “I have no idea. Alex, that’s enough. Go find Joshie, and see if he wants to play. Nance, why are you making that face? What do you mean, some sort of code?”

  “Well, I don’t understand what it is, that’s all.”

  “I don’t understand it either. It’s probably nothing, just some mistake. What was on the envelope?”

  Nancy turned and retrieved the envelope from the pile of mail on the granite countertop. Emma came into the kitchen and hugged Matthew as Alex careened off to look for his younger brother, hiding probably, since Joshua was the only six-year-old in the country who didn’t like play fighting.

  “There’s nothing on it. That’s why I was suspicious.”

  Emma took the sheet of paper from her father and began to read it.

  “Honestly, Nance, I have no idea.”

  “There’s an Abby Horne in my school but I don’t think there’s an Alison Horne,” Emma said.

  “Never mind,” Nancy said, pouring herself a glass of wine now. “It just looked suspicious. I overanalyzed.”

  “What did you think it was, Mom?” Emma asked, her voice verging on disdainful. Matthew had noticed that as Emma had gotten older she’d become more and more critical of her mother, as though she were starting to recognize some of the more erratic nuances of Nancy’s personality. It was not a comforting thought.

  Joshua entered the kitchen, crying, a pink welt raising up along his cheek. Matthew went to look for Alex. The samurai sword had been a huge mistake.

  8

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 7:00 A.M.

  Early September was the best time of year, by far. It was still summer, the normally cold Atlantic Ocean was at its warmest, and the tourists—the ones with brats, anyway—had gone for good. The stretch of sandy beach that led from the Windward Resort up to the stone jetty was practically unoccupied (one lone figure crouched near the tide pools) as Frank Hopkins took his morning walk about half an hour after sunrise. The sky was the sickly color of fish chowder, and there was mist hovering above the sand. He wore shorts and topsiders but had pulled an old cotton sweater on over his polo shirt. Unless he was mistaken, mornings had been a little bit cold lately. Or maybe his bones were getting cold. Getting old and getting cold, he rhymed to himself, then stopped for a moment to have a coughing fit.

  After he was moving again, he nearly stepped on the carcass of a seagull half covered by the shifting sand. There was part of a wing, an exposed spine, what looked like its beak, open slightly as though it were cawing. His stomach flipped a little, which probably had more to do with that glass of brandy he’d drunk in his room last night after closing time. He’d known it was a mistake but couldn’t help himself, propped up in his bed on four or five pillows, trying to remember what it was that Shelly had told him in the lounge, something about her husband wanting to move to Florida. She wasn’t happy about it, that much he knew, but the sound system in the lounge was getting louder and louder these days and he didn’t catch everything she’d said. He hoped that Shelly, who’d been tending bar at the Windward for over a decade, wouldn’t leave, but he supposed it was inevitable. Bartenders come and go. Just like wives, and just like the years. Still, losing Shelly would hurt. Spending every evening with her—even from opposite sides of a bar—was the best part of his day.

  He looked up to see how close he was to the jetty, where he would turn around and walk back. Even though the sun was hidden behind an expanse of hazy cloud cover, he found himself squinting at the brightness of the sky. He stumbled slightly. What had he just been thinking about? Shelly leaving him? Or had he been thinking about Gloria, his second wife, and how when she’d left him she’d done it by simply driving away one morning and never coming back? Lately, his memories were increasingly jumbled; events that happened in his childhood suddenly popped into his mind as though they’d happened the day before, and things that were happening now, like the stalled renovations on the veranda, seemed like they were taking place in some hazy past life that he couldn’t quite remember.

  How had he gotten so old so fast? He really needed to cut down on his drinking. Tonight he’d tell Gloria that for every drink he had—every real drink—he’d also drink a seltzer water. That would be a good thing. Then maybe he wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night, his mouth so dry that his tongue felt like an unused sponge. Yeah, tonight he’d start drinking more seltzer water. And no brandy while he lay in bed. And he’d get whatever the daily fish was instead of the cheeseburger. That would impress Gloria—no, not Gloria, Shelly!—and maybe she wouldn’t leave him after all. He liked the way she lowered her voice when she talked with him—it was very intimate, even though he didn’t always understand what it was she was saying to him.

  He was nearly at the jetty when the disk of the sun appeared in the sky, the mist starting to burn off. His eye went to the barnacled rock he always superstitiously touched before turning back. The shape of the rock made him think of a child curled into herself, her head tucked between her thighs, her hair the black seaweed that clung to the rock at the high-tide line. The rock, like the beach, had stayed virtually unchanged in Frank’s long life. What was surprising on this particular morning was the presence of a single white envelope resting at the top of the rock. The envelope was held in place by a perfectly round gray stone, ringed in white. Frank picked the envelope up, holding it at just the right length from his failing eyes so that he could read the mailing label. It had his name and address on it. A strange sense of unreality passed over him. Why was there a letter for him at the jetty? Was he dreaming? If so, it would make sense. He dreamed the same dreams over and over, and they often took place on this very beach, near this very jetty. He blinked rapidly, as though to prove that he was still in reality, then looked down to see that the damp envelope remained in his grip. With trembling hands he opened it, pulling out a single sheet of paper that he unfolded. He didn’t exactly know what he’d been expecting but it wasn’t the simple list of names he was presented with. He ran his eyes over the names, noticing his own, and not immediately recognizing the others.

  He was about to turn to see if he could spot who’d left the envelope on the rock when he felt the tight grip of someone’s hands around his ankles, then he was yanked violently, so that he pitched forward and landed facedown on the damp sand. His head had partially struck the edge of his turn-around rock, and there were sudden tears in his eyes, a sharp wet pain on his temple. Whoever had attacked him hoisted him by his belt and moved him a foot forward along the sand so that his face landed in a shallow divot filled with seawater. He tried to get up, but his arms felt weak, and he yelled out for help instead. The person on his back pushed his face violently into the pool of water. Frank’s nose stung with terrible pain, and his mouth filled with sand and water.

  “Do you know why you’re going to die?” came a voice in his ear.

  Frank coughed, and now he could taste warm salty blood mixed in with the sand clogging his mouth. “No,” he said, although part of him did know why he was dying. It had to do with the jetty, didn’t it? And the dreams he always had.

  The voice spoke again. He could feel breath moving over his skin, and the words that his murderer said made him realize that he had been right. His dreams had been right too. And for a moment he felt something resembling peace, the real world mixing in with his dream world to make just one place, the world of his existence, rapidly coming to an end. The strong hands pressed his face deep into the sand, the water licking at his ears. In the red darkness he saw concentric circles, like tide pools growing and shrinking. And he saw his mother, back in the old kitchen, wearing an apron over a dress. She was turned away from him, doing something at the stove, and he was crying, begging his case, telling her how sorry he was. I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m sorry. But she wouldn’t turn around. Even the darkness was now shrinking until there was nothing but tide pools, and his mother still not turning back, the world getting smaller, breathing water instead of air.

  EIGHT

  1

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 8:45 A.M.

  Detective Sam Hamilton stood about eight feet from the body, attempting to memorize the crime scene, take it all in. The victim was on his stomach, one leg hitched up slightly, as though he were sleeping. His face was submerged in the damp sand so that all you could see of his head was straggling gray hair and a sunburned neck.

  “Is it definitely Frank Hopkins?” Lisa Banks, one of Kennewick’s patrol officers, was standing next to Hamilton.

  “Jim thought so, and so do I. It’s his clothes, right? I mean, who needs to see the face?” Frank Hopkins owned the Windward Resort, having inherited the business from his parents, and he was a regular fixture at his own bar. All the year-round residents of Kennewick knew him.

  “Yeah, I guess I could tell it was him, as well.”

  There were about four other members of the Kennewick Police Department in the vicinity of the scene, but no one except for Jim Robichaud, first to arrive, had gotten close to the body. The Maine State Police had been alerted, and their crime scene and forensics people were on the way.

  “What’s that?” Lisa said.

  Sam looked toward where she was pointing. It was a piece of white paper, or maybe an envelope, crumpled up in Frank’s left hand.

  “I was wondering about that myself,” Sam said.

  “Should we get it?”

  “Better not. It’s not going anywhere, and it might be evidence.”

  “Evidence of what? You think there was a crime here?”

  “It does look like someone pushed his head pretty deep into the sand.”

  “You don’t think he just keeled over from a heart attack, and the tide did the rest. I know you’re not from around here, but you’ve been to the beach, right? If you stand at the edge of the water the sand sucks your feet into it.”

  “No, you’re right. It just feels like something else happened here.”

  As soon as he’d said the words, Sam wondered if he actually was imagining a crime where there was none. Frank Hopkins was not a young man. Not healthy either, judging by how much time he spent drinking at his own bar. The most likely explanation for what had happened was that he’d been on a morning walk and his heart had simply gone out. Sam knew that he was prone to see criminal activity where there was none, and maybe he was doing it again.

  Lisa shrugged, then turned back to look toward Micmac Road. She thought she heard a vehicle and she was right. Three metallic-blue SUVs were pulling up along the edge of the road. There was also a local news van arriving from the other direction. “They’re here,” she said, stretching out the vowels and Sam laughed because she was imitating that little girl from Poltergeist. He began to take long strides toward the arriving officers.

  It was much later in the day when Sam, back at the station, learned about what had been found in Frank’s hand. A torn envelope addressed to Frank. There’d also been a piece of paper, damp from the sea but still legible, and presumably originating from inside the envelope. On that piece of paper was a list of nine names, including Frank’s. The letter had been taken directly to State Police headquarters, but Sam saw a photograph and read through the names twice. None were immediately familiar to him. There was also a photograph of the front of the envelope. No stamp, no postmark, just an address label. It was bewildering, a true mystery. Not that it wouldn’t have been a mystery had the envelope not been there. The initial, unofficial coroner’s report stated that there were bruises on the back of Frank Hopkins’s neck indicating that someone had held his face down in the water until he’d drowned. Who would want to kill Frank Hopkins on his morning walk? A mugger? A jilted lover? Both seemed highly unlikely.

  Sam, who had been a police detective in Kennewick for fifteen years now, knew Frank Hopkins fairly well. He’d been one of the first citizens Sam had had contact with when he’d moved to Maine from Houma, Louisiana, back in 1999. He’d interviewed for the job on a sunny October weekend, then arrived for it five weeks later in early December, and Kennewick was already encrusted in a grungy layer of hardened snow. His new colleagues told him it was slightly early to feel like Siberia in southern Maine, that they’d just been ambushed by an early nor’easter followed by a long cold snap. There’d been lots of jokes along the lines of “Welcome to paradise,” and “I hope you brought your long johns,” but, secretly, Sam was thrilled to be greeted by the snowy beauty of New England. He’d spent his first thirty-five years either in Louisiana or Jamaica, where his family was from, and neither truly felt like home to him. He’d longed, for reasons mostly mysterious to him, for somewhere else. And the weathered houses of Kennewick, the low gray skies, had felt right.

  His first official act as Kennewick’s only police detective had been to visit the Windward Resort to follow up on a suspected theft. He’d been greeted by Frank Hopkins, a man with a Maine accent so thick that it sounded just a little bit fake to Sam’s untrained ear. The cash register at the bar of the Windward had been cleared out—no more than a couple of hundred dollars, Frank said—and he suspected a recently terminated employee named Ben Gagnon who’d been working as a busboy in the dining room. Ben, a local kid, had been let go for calling in sick one too many times.

  “I fired him yesterday,” Frank had said, “but Barbara, one of the cleaning women, told me she saw him this morning, and he told her he’d come in for his last paycheck. Anyhoo, he did no such thing because we mail out all the paychecks, and Barbara, another Barbara, the one who works the bar, said that all the paper money was gone from the register.”

  “Was the cash register locked?”

  “Well, yeah. Except that the key to unlock it is hanging off a hook right below the back of the bar, so it wouldn’t take a genius to pull off this particular crime. Look, I’m friends with Ben’s mother and to tell the truth, I’m not sure I even want to press charges. I’m just worried that if he thinks he got away with it once he might try to get away with it again. Does that make sense to you?”

  “It does,” Sam said. “Where do you think Ben is now?”

  “Probably at Cooley’s. It’s a bar down the other end of the beach. He’ll be spending my money and badmouthing me all at the same time.”

  Sam had gotten a pretty good description of Ben Gagnon, then gone down to Cooley’s and brought him back to the station for questioning, where the kid made a full and weepy confession. Frank hadn’t pressed charges, and Ben had returned the money. It had been Sam’s first case in Kennewick and that was probably the only reason he’d remembered it. But since then, Sam had regularly gone to the Windward for a scotch and soda on a Friday night. And occasionally, over the years, he went to Cooley’s for a beer, despite the fact, or maybe because of the fact, that it was the only place in his new town in which he’d experienced any kind of racism. A very drunk real estate developer from Wells, the next town over, had said to Sam, sometime during his first winter in Kennewick, “Anyone tell you you’re the wrong color for Maine?”