No Stranger to Grief
“I’m so sorry,” Dane said. “I think I got stuck behind every goddamn horse trailer in the county.”
“I’m…” Disoriented, Liko promptly forgot what he was saying.
“I feel like an ass. Hi. How are you.” Dane walked over, holding out a hand. They shook. “I’m sorry you had to wait.”
“No, it’s all right,” Liko said, putting his feet on the floor. “I fell asleep.”
“Good. That means the house likes you.”
“Where’s Diane?”
“She had to go do a thing. When she comes home, she’ll yell at me some more.”
“It’s all right. This place is…comfortable.”
“Are you hungry? I know you brought doughnuts but I need lunch. Come in the kitchen.”
Liko followed, saying, “I don’t want to take up your time. I just need to ask you a question.”
“You’re not taking my time. I wasted yours. Sit down. Ask away.”
Liko slid onto a chair at the long table and reached in his back pocket for the letter. “By any chance, do you work for Jonathan Henshe Games?”
“No.”
“But you know the company?”
“Sure.”
Liko smoothed the paper open. “Do you know who might have sent this to me? And why it tells me, in so many words, to come to your farm?”
Dane looked around and located a pair of reading glasses on the windowsill. He turned his cap backward, put on the glasses and read the letter where it lay, then picked it up and read it again. He slid the readers down and looked at Liko over the rims.
“Your son died?”
“Yes.”
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry. What happened?”
“Brain aneurysm.”
“Oh. God, I’m sorry…”
“Thank you. He loved the Three Hares game. He was really invested in the mystery at the end. You know about it?”
Dane nodded, teeth closed on a corner of his lower lip.
“He was playing the night he died. He figured something new out. A piece of the chamber puzzle nobody else had solved. He was going to post about it the next day. But…”
“There was no next day.”
“No. And I kind of picked up the flag. Or the sword. The mantle?”
“You’re finishing what he started.”
“Yeah. And they…” Liko indicated the letter. “They sent me here.”
Dane skimmed the paper again, faintly shaking his head. “Not even,” he said. “They just sent you to the town. Look for yourself along the roadside. What, did you just walk all over until you found this place?”
“Pretty much.”
“Shut up. How long did it take?”
“A week.”
“Jesus.”
“So why am I here?” Liko asked.
Dane folded the paper and handed it back. He tucked the reading glasses into the collar of his fleece, then started opening the bag of bread and the cold cuts. “You want turkey? Ham?”
“Whatever you’re having.”
“There’s beer in the fridge.”
Liko opened two bottles, curbing his impatience, sensing if he pushed hard on this guy, he wasn’t going to get anywhere.
He sat again, drank his beer and studied his host. As a writer, he treated people-watching as a professional exercise, trying to describe hair, noses and faces in an interesting way.
No adjectives wanted to stick to Dane. Liko couldn’t get a bead on the guy’s age—one minute he looked early forties, the next early thirties.
Sometimes he turned his head or looked up or over, and he appeared almost adolescent.
Mature laugh lines radiated from the corners of his eyes, but his face was smooth like a boy’s.
Something about his body was strong, but slight.
He was undeniably handsome, yet in a way he was kind of… pretty.
Dude, quit staring.
“Diane gave me the tour,” Liko said. “This place is really something. And I’m only seeing it in late winter. It must be incredible at the height of the season.”
“It’s carefully controlled insanity.”
“How many people work here?”
“I have two workers in the greenhouses right now, starting crops. More will come for land prep and direct sowing. The three artist cottages are booked years in advance. The occupants will show up Memorial Day but they’re barely any work.
They mostly want to be left alone. I’m called in to change a lightbulb or plunge a toilet.
” Dane set a sandwich in front of Liko, then turned to rummage in a cabinet and brought out a bag of chips.
When he dumped some on their plates, Liko noticed his right hand wore a number of rings and was tattooed with stars that disappeared up the cuff of his fleece.
His left hand was bare of both ink and jewelry.
“Diane said you married into the Schoenfelds?”
“She robbed me of all my small talk.”
“Is your wife home?”
“No.” Dane’s tone was curt and Liko, ever mindful of people’s secret battles, let the topic drop.
Hey, if he’s single, this little lunch might get interesting.
He was staring again, mentally pulling Dane’s clothes off. Attraction like an avalanche from his chest into his lap, making his periphery blur a little. Desire purred through his body, warm and lush and electric.
And weirdly familiar.
This has happened before.
“So I noticed the Green Man everywhere,” he said. “The hares and rabbits. The wisteria.”
“Subtle as a kick in the head.”
“So why am I here?”
“Why indeed.” Dane sat down. “Look, here’s the deal. I don’t know who wrote you that letter, but I know everything else.”
“Everything else about what?”
“The Three Hares mystery. I know how to solve it. If you want, I’ll get my laptop, fire up the game and walk you through it. I’ll be done before you finish your sandwich. You can post the solution tonight. Case closed. Quest finished.”
“Oh,” Liko managed to say.
“You’ll be famous.”
“I will, won’t I?”
“Then what will you do with yourself?”
Liko could only stare back.
“Here’s what I mean,” Dane said. “Are you doing this for the journey or the destination? Do you want me to hand you the answers on a plate? Or do you want me to guide you a little here, a little there. Let you nibble your way to it.” He took a pull on his beer.
“Look, I’m no stranger to grief. I know how much time you spend figuring out ways to kill time. ”
Liko gave a weak laugh. “I feel seen.”
“So I’m asking, how much time do you want to kill? Do you want to solve this mystery like buying a finished piece of artwork, or do you want it like a paint-by-number kit?”
“I see your point.”
“I’ll give you the answers, but I’d feel better about it if I knew you had the next thing lined up to fill the void. Do you?”
“Not really.”
“What do you do?”
Liko gave his occupation for the second time that day.
“Have you written any books of your own?”
“No.”
“Only ghostwritten for other people?”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“Can’t think of stories to tell. I don’t have that kind of imagination.”
“Oh come on, how can you be any kind of writer and not have imagination?”
“I have creativity, not imagination.”
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
“I don’t think so. People with imagination have ideas. People with creativity execute ideas.”
“So it’s either-or?”
“God, no. Some people have both imagination and creativity, and we call them geniuses.”
“I like this theory.” Dane ran a finger around the plate to catch little blobs of mayo and mustard, then licked them off. Or rather, sucked them off. Not looking at Liko, but moving in a way that conveyed he liked to take his time with such things.
It’s so on, Liko thought, trying not to stare as Dane rubbed his clean fingertip against his thumb.
“What genre do you write?”
“Mostly thrillers,” Liko said. “I can’t think of a conspiracy plot to save my life.
My brain doesn’t think that way. I have a theory I’m not enough of an asshole…
But I digress. The point is, if you bring me your complicated plot and spell out the twists, the spoilers, who did what and when and how, I’ll make it a masterpiece. ”
“Good to know,” Dane said.
“Do you have an idea for hire?”
Dane wiped his mouth, crumpled the napkin and tossed it on the empty plate. “The mystery in the Three Hares game is a love letter. Everything in that chamber is significant to only three people, two of whom are gone.”
Liko’s eyebrows pulled down at gone and Dane held up a palm.
“I said I’m no stranger to grief. I’ll get to that.
My point is, without the context, I don’t think the solution to the chamber is going to be very satisfying.
Or even interesting. I mean, once you click on everything just right and rearrange the letters and make this do that, and that do this…
What happens then is beautiful, but it’s beautiful to me.
Because it’s my life. It’s my love letter.
It makes sense to me. It’s important to me.
But everyone else will probably think, What the fuck?
This is what we’ve been wondering about for years?
This is stupid. It makes no sense. It was more fun not knowing. ”
“Okay,” Liko said, nodding slowly. “Fair.”
Dane started peeling the label off his beer bottle. “But if I tell you the story and give you the context… Who knows, maybe you’ll find it just as anti-climactic, or maybe not. Maybe it’ll mean more to you if you know about me. Truth be told…”
He looked up and Liko noticed one of his brown eyes was slightly darker than the other.
“Lately I’m thinking I want to tell someone my story,” Dane went on. “Maybe you could assess it professionally. If it’s solid, you take it and run. You walk out of here with both the solution to the Green Man Chamber, and an idea for a book.”
“That’s unbelievably generous. What’s in it for you?”
“A way to move on to the next thing.”
“Your own way to kill time.”
“Well, I didn’t want to be rude about it. Where do you live?”
“Connecticut.”
“What’s there?”
“My house.”
“What else?”
“A lot of memories,” Liko said. “A lot of haunted places and associations, a lot of pain. My son’s empty bedroom I keep like a shrine. An ex-wife I sleep with too much. A job that isn’t dependent on geography.”
Dane smiled. “So come here. Bring your job and your grief. Leave your ex-wife.”
“Here in general or here?” Liko tapped the table for emphasis.
“Either.”
“What about your sister?”
“Diane? She comes and goes. She’s not my keeper.”
“What does she do?”
“In general, she’s like a life coach. In particular, she helps me do brave things.”
“I see.”
“It’s basically just me and the dog. The house is too big for us but a lot more people used to live here.”
“Who?”
Dane didn’t answer. Considering Liko, he licked his lips over the top of the beer bottle and he became, all at once, a thrillingly sexy man.
“Who else used to live here?” Liko pressed.
“Jonathan Henshe.”
“When did he leave?”
“Couple years ago.”
“Why?”
“Go ask the Green Man.” Dane shrugged. “It’s what we say around here when we don’t have answers.”
Their eyes held, poised above complicit smiles. Liko didn’t know what they were talking about anymore, only that he was exhilarated in a way he hadn’t felt in a really fucking long time.
This is good stuff, something in him said. Don’t rush it.
Dane was right. Why have it handed to him on a plate when he could nibble a little here, a little there. Kill a whole boatload of time by taking his time.
“Is there a lake around here?” he asked.
“Not since the Pleistocene era.”
“Then why is Birch Island called Birch Island?”
“The region was an effluvial plain. Before settlers irrigated it, they’d see massive flooding during storms. Everyone would flee to the highest points in the area, and those points became known as islands in local speak.
Birch Island was one of the flood refuges.
Pine Island is another. There’s a bunch of them. ”
“I see.”
“You’ve come to a refuge, Liko Greenman. With a little poetic license, you could say you were evacuated here after a disaster.”
“Mm.”
“So why not stay?”