Chapter 8
DENNY HAD LEARNED all kinds of new terms since his wife’s death, terms that filled up his brain when he should have been doing things like going through her personal effects or thinking about flowers or greeting the people who showed up at the house to pay their respects.
He learned about responding officers and the right to know, about evidence technicians and public information officers, about the safeguarding of evidence, trace evidence, evidence control, fibers, notification of next of kin.
Back in the old version of his life—the Anna version of his life, as he now came to see it—he had spent Friday nights watching Dateline with his wife.
Keith Morrison’s voice, smooth as Scotch, oozed over murder.
But was he a suspect? Morrison loved to ask.
If Denny had been in an episode of Dateline, a narrator might have asked the same question.
Was the Hamilton Police Department focused on him?
He couldn’t quite tell. In the first frenetic days and weeks after Anna’s death, Denny had been preoccupied with the physical details—how to operate his home, his life, the lives of his children.
That the police kept showing up every once in a while felt both important and unimportant.
Denny desperately wanted to know what they knew, but he also felt unmoored from the burden of his new responsibility.
Back from the interrogation, he felt breathless but also determined.
As Denny was walking out of the station, Sticks had softened, if only slightly.
Maybe the whole “bad cop” routine was just an act.
Maybe he hadn’t really been a suspect at all.
Sticks promised to keep Denny updated with anything related to the case, though it had been Denny who had checked in with the station every couple of days, asking about potential leads.
Had anyone come forward as a witness? (Not a single one.) Had the couple who found Anna seen anything else at the haul-out that day?
(No.) Had any fibers or other evidence been retrieved from her body, like material under her fingernails or hairs or DNA on her body?
(Negative biological evidence.) Had there been blood or fingerprints detected in her car?
(The vehicle was swabbed and found clean.)
In return for his many inquiries, Denny faced a series of his own.
Had he found anyone to corroborate his Ski Bradford timeline?
(One instructor remembered seeing him picking up the kids.) Would he be willing to submit DNA for a sample for the police?
(Gladly.) Did he recall what he had been wearing the night of the murder, and would he be willing to deliver his clothing to the police department for analysis?
(He did not honestly recall what he had been wearing that night, no.) Sticks had gotten into the habit of texting Denny with follow-up questions, which Denny didn’t mind.
It gave him the opportunity to ask questions of his own.
He asked about leads on suspects, but Sticks said the police couldn’t tell him anything about the current status of the case.
It was natural, Denny supposed, to feel singled out in a murder investigation, and maybe also natural to feel like the police department wasn’t taking seriously his own sense of urgency.
He had read, of course, that most progress in homicide cases happens within the first few weeks, and he was beginning to feel that Anna’s case was losing steam.
Maybe that wasn’t fair. Or maybe Sticks and the team at the Hamilton Police Department were taking every piece of information he passed their way with a grain of salt because they believed him to be involved.
Twice now, Denny had noticed cars passing him on the road near his house—slowly, in the kind of way that a car passes when they’ve been driving with no particular place to go.
They weren’t cruisers but large domestic cars, the kind that Denny had always associated with municipalities.
Almost certainly unmarked vehicles, he had thought to himself, which gave him even more reason to believe that the police were watching him to see if he was up to anything suspicious.
He did have a gnawing feeling, too—something he shoved aside, because to think it was to sink into the despairing realization that he couldn’t trust anyone, not even the police—that maybe the surveillance was less about him and more about his being a nuisance, a simple attempt to get him to stop doing what he had been doing, which was sending nonstop inquiries to the police department.
In any case, it hadn’t worked. It wasn’t working.
You said ligature marks, he texted Sticks the first week of February. Can you tell what it was from?
Three dots. Pensive. Then a reply. Sticks did this a lot, like he was considering the nature of his response.
Belt of some sort, the reply said, when it came.
Is there a way to find out what kind of belt? Maybe something about the belt marks? I’m no expert but don’t different belts leave different marks?
You’re no expert, Sticks responded. So leave the work to the experts.
Denny wanted to help, and he wanted answers.
He had left the station bruised, of course, and had even made a call to his mother-in-law, herself a law school graduate who had never practiced (and who sometimes proffered free advice based purely on academics).
She was a decent woman who trusted Denny, and she told him to tread lightly with the police but to try to get information from them when he could.
“Stay in their orbit,” she said. “You have a right to know what’s going on with the investigation, too.
” There was, she let him know, something called the Victim Bill of Rights in Massachusetts, meaning that he was entitled to know how any criminal case was progressing through the system, if it made it that far.
He also had the right to know any details about a case involving him, including significant developments.
Just knowing this made Denny feel better, even though it infuriated him that Sticks blew off any of Denny’s attempts at crime-solving but felt no remorse about tearing up his life piece by piece.
Neighbors had left him messages, expressing discomfort over what they called the new “surveillance state” in the neighborhood.
Things around town didn’t help, either. The whisperings were like a river.
Denny had grown up in the Rust Belt, where people preferred Springsteen to pretty much any other songwriter.
He was the raconteur of the blue-collar worker, penning ballads for those who could never seem to get out of their own way.
Trenton, Pittsburgh, Scranton, little cities and towns that ran down through the Tri-State Area and west through Pennsylvania and into Ohio—these were a dime a dozen to the people up in New England.
Ask Anna and she couldn’t even tell you where New Jersey ended and Delaware started, but every kid who grew up trying to figure out how to turn a quarter into a dollar down through the forgotten states that fell somewhere between the Northeast and the Midwest could sum it all up in a Springsteen song.
“The River” was one of those songs, and even though it came out when Denny was just a toddler, he sometimes felt like it was a song that was meant to express his entire small-town life growing up: people who got stuck in a place for too long, who made one stupid choice and never really recovered.
Now Anna was dead, found in a river, and the gossip flowed from that river, tributaries of sound all around him.
Every time he stopped to get gas at the Citgo station and every time he went in for a cup of coffee at Honeycomb and every time he bought groceries at Market Basket over in Rowley.
He brought the kids to Market Basket, in fact, on a Saturday afternoon in February.
There was snow coming, the forecast said; otherwise, Denny would have waited to shop during the week, like always.
Less potential for running into people he knew that way.
The parking lot was mostly full when they got there.
He had already resolved to let the kids get whatever they wanted.
Doritos. High-octane Coke. Ice cream. All of the off-limits junk that Anna had objected to.
What were they waiting for, anyway? It was, he now realized, the first real storm since she had disappeared, the first time that they would all be stuck in the house as a family of three.
They would learn to survive without her.
Actually, that wasn’t quite right. They would never really learn to survive without Anna.
They would accept it. Denny himself had been accepting her absence in the same way that a patient, newly emerged from surgery, accepts the information about the loss of an important body part.
His phantom limb haunted him, day and night.
It pained him. It was visceral. Sometimes he found himself doubled over in the kitchen, heaving with it.
He worried he might vomit in front of the children, and he steadied himself from memories that came on so urgently and thick that he wasn’t sure where they had been hiding.
A pulse of lilac—but from where, in the middle of winter?
—triggered a memory of walking with Anna in late spring to watch the sunset at the Montauket, with too much time on their hands, nowhere to go, no one to care about but themselves.
One night, the smell of mushrooms on pizza catapulted his grief back toward a tavern in New Haven where they had stopped on the way home from a long drive, where coal-fired pies had greased their fingertips and burned the roofs of their mouths.