JOAN

  She left the Windward at just past ten, walking across the empty front lawn, then crossing Micmac Road to get to the beach. It was a dark night, no stars in the sky. Stepping onto the beach she had a brief moment of complete displacement, the water and the sand and the sky all equally black, and making Joan feel as though she were a tiny creature marooned in the middle of a vast nothingness.

  She saw a yellow flicker toward the jetty side of the beach and made her way in that direction, walking slowly, ready to turn back if it was only Duane by the fire. But soon she could hear multiple voices, and a loud whooping noise. There were about six bodies grouped around the flames. It wasn’t until Joan was close enough to hear their words and see their faces that they even saw her approaching. Duane stood up. “Hey, you made it,” he said, and all the other firelit faces turned toward her.

  He introduced her around, ignoring the fact she’d already met Derek. Besides him, there were three other guys, two of them who seemed like they might be in their twenties, one of them smoking a cigarette. And there were two girls, wearing shorts and sweaters, hunched over near the fire like they were freezing. Their names were Emily and Anne and they said they were sisters, even though one had very blond hair and the other one was a full-on redhead, her face covered with dark freckles. Duane grabbed Joan a can of beer from a plastic cooler, and she popped it open and tasted it. It was both bitter and overly sweet at the same time, and she shuddered a little after taking a sip.

  “You like beer?” Duane said.

  “Not really. I prefer martinis.”

  Everyone had been listening, and the boys laughed, one of them saying, “Oh my God,” in a loud, slurry voice.

  There were two coolers around the fire, and Joan was offered one to sit on. Duane was nearest to her, and he began to tell her about how there was this liquor store a few towns away in Biddeford, and it was run by this guy whose brother was a cop, so pretty much anyone could buy beer there, no matter how old they were. “All you gotta do,” said Derek, “is show them any kind of ID when they ask. Like just present your library card or something, and the guy who owns the place looks at it, then rings you up.”

  “What kind of beer is this?” Joan said, just to have something to say.

  “It’s Coors Light. You like it? We have other stuff too. We got Jäger.”

  “The beer is fine,” Joan said, and one of the sisters said she’d do a Jäger shot, and then the bottle was being passed around. When it got to Joan she said she’d do one shot, and she tipped the bottle to her lips, but only sipped a tiny bit.

  “It’s no martini,” one of the older boys said.

  “No, it’s not,” Joan said, and looked at him until he looked away. Then she twisted her beer can into the sand so it wouldn’t tip over, and said, “I’m going to take off soon, it’s kind of cold out here.”

  “You’re wearing jeans and a sweatshirt,” Duane said. “Look at me.” He stood up to demonstrate he was only wearing cargo shorts and a T-shirt.

  “We’re pretty cold, too,” said one of the other girls, and then one of the older guys said that his place wasn’t too far away from here, and they could all go there and smoke some pot.

  Joan stood up and said she really did need to get back to the hotel, that her parents would probably be checking on her soon, and if she wasn’t in her room they’d have a fit.

  “You aren’t going to show off your gymnast’s moves first?” Duane said.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. You’re a gymnast, aren’t you? Let’s see something.”

  “Yeah, let’s see a split,” one of the older guys said, lighting a new cigarette.

  The sand was packed hard where they were all sitting so Joan did a quick handstand, holding it for a few seconds. Everyone clapped. “I’m heading back,” she said.

  “I’ll walk you,” Duane said, and Joan shrugged. “I’ll be back,” he said, as the two of them headed in the direction of the hotel.

  “Yeah, right,” one of the boys shouted, and Joan looked back. The two sisters had stood up, as well, and she could hear the guys begging them to stay a little longer.

  “I don’t really need to be walked back,” Joan said.

  “I don’t mind taking a break from those guys. Besides, it’s pretty dark out.” He was acting as though they hadn’t been on this beach before, her trying to get away from him, him squeezing her arm and calling her a tease. Maybe he actually had forgotten?

  They crossed the road, an oncoming car casting them briefly in yellow light. When they got to the lawn, he pressed his hand against her lower back, and said, “Slow down, will ya?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to keep hanging out with you. Seriously, you’re like the only cool person in this place. Why don’t you show me another one of your gymnastics moves?”

  “I probably shouldn’t, not without stretching. I might hurt myself. Besides, I don’t want to be a tease.”

  “Hey, look, I’m sorry about that. I was just plastered, that’s all. I’m not like that, though. I just want to hang out.” Joan could feel that he’d grabbed a bunch of her sweatshirt and was tugging her toward him. Looking at his face in the moonlight she saw the same thing in his eyes that she’d seen a few nights before, a wolfish look, like hunger. If they were still on the beach she thought she’d be in trouble. Even here on the lawn she considered running, then made a quick decision and gave him a hug, saying “Let’s hang out again this week, okay? Just the two of us.”

  He hugged back, then let her go. “Sure, anytime.” His voice was hoarse and just as she was turning to leave she saw him adjust the material around his crotch.

  She walked the rest of the way to the front of the hotel herself. There was cigar smoke in the air, and as she went up the wooden steps to the wide front porch, an older man on one of the rockers said, “It’s nice being young, eh?”

  Joan pretended she didn’t hear him and entered the lobby.

  *

  The following day, because she didn’t want to have to deal with Duane, she agreed to drive with her parents to Ogunquit. They had lunch at a pretty good restaurant, even though her father kept saying how they were basically paying double for lunch because they could be eating at the Windward. Then they walked on a path that wound along the rocky coast and got ice cream in a place called Perkins Cove, sitting at a picnic table and watching boats come and go on the water.

  “You having fun on this trip?” her mother asked. They were sitting on a bench near a cluster of shops while her father browsed in a used bookstore.

  “Yeah,” Joan said, as brightly as possible, not wanting to have a conversation about her feelings with her mom.

  “Oh, okay. Just checking. Sometimes I can’t read you at all, not like Lizzie.”

  “Lizzie is having fun on this trip,” Joan said.

  “Yes, she certainly is.”

  “Do you think that girl Denise is her girlfriend?”

  “I think your sister is in an experimental phase, if that’s what you mean. I’m not sure she knows exactly who she is right now.”

  Joan, not really caring one way or another about her sister, talked about it with her mother for a while, only to avoid having to answer questions about herself.

  “Here’s your father, with a stack of books he won’t read,” her mother said, and they each watched her father step out of the store and squint into the sunlight, trying to find his family. “Let’s stop talking about Lizzie for now. I’m not sure your father’s handling this new version of her.”

  That night at dinner, they all ate as a family in the dining room, Lizzie noticeably quiet. Denise was nowhere to be seen. Duane, wearing a baseball cap and a T-shirt with cut-off sleeves, said hi to Joan in the buffet line, asking her why she hadn’t been to the beach that day.

  “I went with my parents to Ogunquit,” she said.

  “Oh, cool,” Duane said. “Wanna meet up tonight? We could do another fire on the beach, just the two of us.”

  “I can’t tonight,” Joan said. “Tomorrow, maybe?” She remembered what Richard had said about baiting the hook.

  “Cool,” Duane said.

  She hadn’t seen Richard in the dining room, but when she went to the library around nine o’clock he was there, sitting in his usual chair, reading a paperback called The Forever War that looked like science fiction. He immediately closed the book when he saw her.

  “I didn’t see you at dinner,” she said.

  “I walked into town and got a pizza,” he said. “I don’t think I can take another night with my aunt and uncle and with Duane.”

  “Duane and I are like this now,” Joan said, holding up two fingers, pressed together, and smiling.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. He walked me back to the hotel after I’d hung out at the beach.”

  “Yeah, I know all about it. I was watching you.”

  “You serious?”

  “I was sitting over on that bench swing. I watched you guys walk across the lawn.”

  “Did you see us hug?”

  “Yeah,” Richard said, and Joan thought back to what her mother had said earlier about not being able to read her. She couldn’t read Richard, she realized. Not his emotions, anyway. Was he jealous? Or was he simply scheming? “This morning Duane was telling me all the things he was going to do to you.”

  Joan, even though she wasn’t surprised, felt blood rush into her face. “Ugh,” she said. “That is so gross.”

  “He’s gross, I told you.”

  “What did you say when he told you that?”

  “I don’t say anything, really. I just listen.”

  “You don’t defend my honor, Richard,” she said in what she hoped sounded very dramatic and sarcastic, but as soon as she’d said it, she realized she sounded like her mother in one of her moods.

  “I want to kill him,” Richard said. “That’s pretty much defending your honor, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. What else did he say?”

  “He said you made out with him, and that he could tell you were super horny.”

  “He really said that? I totally didn’t make out with him. In fact—you saw it—I had to hug him to keep him from trying to kiss me.”

  Richard was laughing.

  “He’s such a liar,” Joan said.

  “Yeah, he is. So what are we going to do about it?”

  Joan, who had been thinking a lot about Duane the past few days, said, “Are you serious when you say you want to kill him?”

  Richard thought for a moment, then said, “Sometimes I am and sometimes I’m not. But I am one hundred percent serious that I wouldn’t feel bad for a moment if Duane died, whether I had anything to do with it or not. Why? Are you serious about it?”

  “I think so,” Joan said. “Let’s teach him a lesson.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s push him in the ocean.”

  Richard was very still, but Joan could tell from his eyes that his thoughts were moving fast. “I’m not kidding,” she said. “Let’s do this. It’ll be fun.”

  “You’d have to be the one to get him to the end of the jetty at night.”

  “That’s not going to be a problem,” Joan said.

  “But I can push him into the water.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re going to have to lie to some people after it happens. You’re going to have to act a part.”

  Joan didn’t need to think. She said, “That’s not going to a problem, either.”

  CHAPTER 11

  KIMBALL

  I was sitting in my car, torrential rain drumming on the metal roof, keeping an eye on the Blackburn Properties in Concord. Something seemed to be happening in the real estate world, because Richard Whalen had driven to the Dartford office in the morning, stayed there an hour, then driven over to Concord. After having lunch at a Thai restaurant with two women whom I recognized from the website as real estate agents, he’d returned briefly to the Dartford office and now he was back in Concord. The rain that had been threatening all day began just as Richard parked in the lot of the smaller office, part of a strip mall halfway between West Concord and Concord center. Richard pulled his suit jacket up over his head and ran from his BMW to the front door just as the sky split open, dumping the remnants of a hurricane that had been slowly climbing the coast for the past week.

  The Concord office was harder to watch than the Dartford one. The only vantage point was its rather small front parking lot; there were no coffee shops or bars nearby, no places to park your car and be hidden. It helped, of course, that anyone looking outside from the office at this particular moment would be looking at the rising floodwaters, and not my car. I wasn’t particularly worried about Richard, partly because Joan had told me he had his head in the clouds, but I was worried about running into Pam again, since we’d already met. But so far, I’d seen very little of her. She parked on the street in front of the Dartford office, and her car stayed there all day. I’d never seen her in the presence of Richard.

  Ever since being in Concord the day before I’d been thinking not just about Lily Kintner and my time as a Boston police detective, but about my life in general, and everything that had led me here. I was close to forty and felt as though I’d failed at just about everything that had meant something to me. I had failed as a police officer when I let my obsession with a suspect get the better of me. I’d failed as a poet, not just because I was largely unpublished, but because I hadn’t been able to write anything but dirty limericks for what seemed like forever. And I had failed as an English teacher all those years ago, lasting one year in the classroom and then never returning.

  I rolled down my window to get some air, and to hopefully clear the condensation that had built up on the inside of my car’s windows. I told myself to stop feeling bad for myself. I had been through two bad experiences and I had survived them. I still had a pretty good hairline, a cat who liked me, and my health. And I wasn’t forty quite yet.

  The rain turned off as fast as it had turned on, and the skies were briefly blue. Richard, folders tucked under an arm, emerged from the office and got back into his car. I followed him, thinking he was heading back to the Dartford office, but he pulled into the driveway of a Ninety Nine Restaurant at a busy intersection. It was almost four o’clock in the afternoon and there were quite a few cars in the parking lot. I watched as Richard, still holding the folders, entered the restaurant. I scanned the other cars in the lot, looking to see if I could spot Pam’s Toyota, but I didn’t see it. I let twenty minutes pass by.

  I was pretty sure I hadn’t been seen by Richard since I started tailing him, so I decided to enter the restaurant, maybe grab a quick drink at the bar, see if Richard was meeting a woman there. Just because Pam’s car was nowhere to be seen didn’t mean he was alone inside. I was wearing my baseball cap and a flannel shirt, not my usual outfit. I decided to keep the cap on, and I entered the restaurant, a wide-open space with a U-shaped bar at its center. Richard was at the bar, his back to the front door, papers spread out in front of him, and his cell phone pressed to an ear.

  A hostess appeared, and I told her I was there just for a drink. She waved me in and I sat at one of the high-top tables that ringed the bar, about two car lengths from Richard. I could hear his voice talking into his phone but couldn’t make out the words. He had a pint glass with something clear in it, on ice, with two lime wedges. When my waitress appeared, I ordered a ginger ale with lime and asked for it in a lowball glass. I’d skipped lunch, so I also asked what the quickest appetizer from the kitchen would be, and she said the boneless wings were fast, so I ordered those too.

  I sipped my drink, and watched Richard finish his, then nod toward the bartender for another. It was a Tito’s and either soda water or tonic. The bartender, who had shiny black hair pulled tightly back in a bun, and overly tanned skin, added two limes and put it in front of him. I hadn’t found out too much about Richard’s love life, but I had found out that his drink of choice was vodka. He made another call, and this time I could hear him saying something about title insurance, his voice loud and agitated.

  A pile of chicken wings arrived at my table, and I ordered another ginger ale. Richard was now looking at his phone, scrolling through what looked like texts. I ate quickly, not knowing when Richard might get up and leave. He was only halfway through his second drink, but he’d signaled the bartender for the check and paid it quickly in cash. I was nearly done with my food when I heard a woman’s voice shout “Richard,” and he turned from the bar as two women, one trailing a happy birthday balloon, descended upon him. I heard their muffled conversation as all three moved to a large table farther from the bar but closer to me.

  “I just got here,” I heard him saying, then he offered to buy a round. As the two women—one of them, tall and angular, was familiar as an employee at Blackburn—shucked their jackets and picked seats, Richard brought over two glasses of white wine then returned to the bar to get a bottle of beer for himself. The door swung inward again, and a group of three men entered, all talking loudly. They quickly spotted the table where the two women were sitting and made their way there.

  I had asked for a bill with my food, and I put down enough cash to cover it. If this was a work party, as it seemed, then Pam was bound to show up soon, and it made sense for me to leave. I could either head home or stay in the area for a while, maybe come back here in an hour and see if Richard left with any female company. I exited the restaurant and crossed the parking lot to my car. With my hand on the door handle, I heard steps behind me, then a voice. “Hey, you.”

  I turned to see Pam, dressed in a thigh-length beige coat, and with a knotted scarf at her neck. “Henry, right? It’s Pam, from the restaurant the other night.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “If you didn’t look so surprised right now,” she said, smiling without showing any teeth, “I would ask you if you’re following me.”