reconsidered her overreaction.
She glanced back at the Prius. Rafe remained paralyzed. He probably wanted to move. He probably was willing his muscles to move. But they weren’t responding. Esme assumed he was thinking about Sophie, about his father, inside the house, possibly in danger, about her perhaps even, unarmed, her hand now on the doorknob. But still, his hands remained on the steering wheel and his legs didn’t budge an inch. No, she wasn’t upset with him. She pitied him. The cold air misted the breath in front of her lips, and through the dissipating mist, she turned the unlocked doorknob and opened the front door.
There was a stranger in the den. He had a glass of wine in his hand. His head looked like a penis. It was bald, ruddy, oblong, and protruded from a brown turtleneck sweater that looked scratchy and lint-infested. He was a large man, easily six-four, and had the gut of a beer keg.
“Grover Kirk,” said the stranger, by way of introduction. He reached out a sweaty-looking hand. “I’ve left you several messages.”
Grover Kirk?
“I’m writing that book about the Galileo murders. I’ve been trying to get an interview with you and your family.”
Ah, yes. Grover Kirk. Esme glanced again above his shoulders. Definitely a dickhead.
“Mr. Kirk, who invited you into my house?”
“Your father-in-law. Lovely fellow. Relayed to me some terrific anecdotes. He’s in the bathroom at the moment. I’m afraid he might have had a bit too much red wine. I brought up a bottle from my vineyard in central Florida. Would you like some?”
He reached for a half-empty bottle on the coffee table. The bottle had stained a purple ring on the cover of one of Esme’s Sudoku books.
She knew forty-four ways of rendering him unconscious in five seconds.
“Mr. Kirk,” she said, “if you’ll recall, I did respond to your first phone message. I told you that I wasn’t interested in participating. I told you that my family wasn’t interested in participating.”
“Your father-in-law seemed very interested.” He offered her the bottle. “How was marriage counseling?”
The front door opened. It was Rafe. Finally.
“I… Who’s this?”
Grover again reached out with his hand and introduced himself.
“He’s the one who’s writing that book about Henry Booth.”
“And all associated with what he did,” added Grover. “My book would be incomplete without long passages about you and your wife. Just to be here, in this house, where it all went down, is an honor.”
Esme gritted her teeth. “He wasn’t Elvis Presley, Mr. Kirk. He was a psychopath and this family is trying to put all of that behind us.”
“You can’t escape the past, Mrs. Stuart. Surely you of all people know that.”
She wanted to ask him what he meant, but she really, really wanted to clock him upside the head, and had taken a step forward when they all heard the downstairs toilet flush. There was nothing like that sound to eliminate the tension in a room.
“Leave,” muttered Rafe. “Now.”
Grover looked to him, then back to Esme, then finally to his bottle.
“All right,” he said. “I know when to call it a night. My card’s on the table. I’ll be staying at the Days Inn over in Hicksville. Give my regards to your father-in-law. Lovely fellow.”
He waited for them to move out of his way.
They moved out of the way.
“Be seeing you,” he said, and winked, and left.
Rafe locked the door.
“What an ass,” he said.
“I liked him,” replied Lester, shuffling into the room. “Wait…where’s the bottle of wine he brought?”
“He took it with him.”
Lester frowned. “Took it with him? What an ass.”
His reason for socializing gone, the old man continued on his way to his room. Esme counted the seconds until she heard his door slam shut.
Then she turned to her husband. He hadn’t moved far from the door.
“Are you okay?” she asked him.
“I…”
She reached out to him.
But once again: an interruption. This time it was Rafe’s cell phone, vibrating in his pants pocket.
“If it’s a Florida area code,” said Esme, “don’t answer it.”
Rafe examined the screen. “Five-one-eight.”
“Upstate?” asked Esme.
Rafe nodded and pressed Talk. “Hello?”
Esme watched him as he listened. His parents, Lester and Eunice, had raised him in upstate New York. It was only luck that Rafe chose a graduate school in Washington, D.C. Otherwise, they would never have met.
Eight years.
“Who is it?” Esme whispered.
Rafe put up a hand to silence her. His face had gone pale. Whatever he was hearing was not good news.
She had accompanied him a few times to his old house. His childhood in upper-middle-class suburbia had been very different from hers on the streets of Boston. But opposites attracted, right?
Rafe spoke a bit to the person on the other line, thanked them and then hung up the phone. He looked even more rattled than he had in the car.
“Rafe, what is it?”
“Do you…remember that girl you met at my reunion…the one I took to the prom?”
Esme vaguely recalled the woman in question. She was a sales rep for a vacuum cleaner company. A bit heavy-set. Very pretty blue eyes.
“Lynette something, right?”
“Yes. Lynette Robinson. She… Anyway, that was my cousin Randy…on the phone. The police…they just identified the…remains of…Lynette’s body…in the basement of a torched house.”
3
The funeral was done in black and white.
The black, of course, was provided by the mourners. More than a hundred people came out to pay their respects. Half of them didn’t even know the deceased, but had read about the tragedy in the Sullivan County Democrat. The national press was there, too, at the outskirts of the cemetery, and even they had the good sense to
