Chapter 10
OUTSIDE, THE FIRST flurries from the storm scurried like they were fake, like they were part of some movie set.
No sign of the police today, trailing him home or parked anywhere near the house.
Sticks had sent an obligatory text earlier in the day to report only that Denny’s DNA swab had come back negative.
No surprise there, Denny thought. He himself trusted his own innocence, even if the cops and the town did not.
And so, Denny ordered the toothpaste, detergent, and dog food, and they arrived in large cardboard boxes.
His wife would have been horrified. Retrieving the boxes, Denny noticed that the door looked different.
Scratched across the hunter green paint, as if marked in blood—but no, it was just paint, Denny thought, holding his breath for a minute—was a scrawled word.
KILLER, it read, right there, across the door to his house.
The indecency of it. The gall. That someone would come right up to the front steps, as he stood not feet away, talking on the phone, in his house, where he made breakfast every morning for his kids—Ben’s frupples, the word he still used instead of waffles, even though the kid had long ago learned to pronounce it correctly—it was a desecration, an invasion.
The delivery person had just been there.
Could it have been? But no. Denny checked his phone.
He had received a notification for the boxes, and, what’s more, an email with a picture: boxes propped against the front door.
That was a coincidence, yes, but the door in the grainy photograph was the same door that he had left behind, and anyway, what delivery person would jeopardize a job that could so easily get them fired?
No, there was obviously another explanation, a more insidious one.
Whoever had done this thing had been there just seconds before, had missed Denny by a hair, which made the skin on his arms grow prickly.
How had Denny missed the culprit? How had this person had time to violate his home and slip so quickly and so quietly into oblivion?
The house was set on a hill. Any car would have had to have been parked on the busy road below.
In the settling dusk, Denny saw scuffed boot marks, large, leading down the steps toward the driveway, where they evaporated into thin air, as if they came from a ghost. He could not understand it.
The timing, the footprints, the cat scratch on the door: It made no sense, but it had clearly been done to provoke in him a sense of fear, in this snow-lit witching hour, his wife’s spirit haunting the walk, surely telling him something that he could not quite understand.
Men’s boots, they had to be, he thought, but no man could simply cease to exist, no man could be there at the door one minute and then gone the next.
An impossible feat. A violation of time and space and physics.
Something deeper had started to sink into Denny’s consciousness, a vague feeling that maybe—and perhaps it was paranoia, he couldn’t be sure—he was being set up.
To stage such an act of vandalism took real skill.
Professional skill, Denny thought. A cop might be good at replicating a phantom.
A cop might be able to get up to a home without anyone noticing.
A cop might be the perfect person to wipe evidence clean and make sure none was ever found after the fact.
That his wife’s murder investigation was unsolved had opened in him not only a chasm of grief but also a deep mistrust for everyone.
He couldn’t be sure that Sticks was doing his job, that he could trust anyone in this small town, that scraping away the patina of Hamilton left behind anything but rotten framing.
And that was what scared Denny Plummer the most: that somewhere, buried in the architecture of power, lay things he did not want to know, did not need to know, and was in danger of finding out about.
Of course, thinking this—any of this—was ridiculous, and Denny knew it.
He stood looking at the door and the boot marks and the snow, which had started to fall a little faster now, catching the day-end light.
Under different circumstances, it would look pretty, he thought, the kind of magical snow that always arrived at this time of February, when everyone was just about fed up with winter.
Six more weeks of it? You could barely stand it, could barely hang on in the cold, and then there you were, struck speechless by the diamond glisten of that stupid snowfall.
It was coming down now, harder than ever.
For once, the weathermen hadn’t been exaggerating.
The promised snowstorm had finally arrived.
The children were asleep. Sticks had come by to take an official report about the door but had seemed untroubled.
The officer was worried about the things that seemed to matter least and was unconcerned about the ones that seemed to matter most. Someone had been here, on this property, while Denny was in the other room with his own kids, but Sticks had shaken it off as if it had been just a childhood prank.
Not Killer with a capital K, no, just killer, like the adjective, because words, he assumed, could have so many different meanings.
It was a punch in the fucking gut, was what it was.
He could see, from the officer’s eyes, that he was not being taken seriously.
That he was a suspect, not a victim, and it made him angry, even though he struggled labeling his own emotions (he was getting better at it, he had to admit, since Anna was no longer around to pull it out of him, almost as if he had absorbed this part of his wife in her absence, this ability to see his own deficiencies and proactively work on them).
Since his wife’s death, Denny had avoided her glossy blue office, and he had made it a point to walk through different parts of the house.
That space, where she so often stared out from her desk at a square of lawn and the staggeringly tall pine trees, had been a place for her own contemplations.
It was where she went, he guessed, to think about the work she could have done if she had been a little braver.
Next to her desk was a collapsed portable easel that she had given up on years before.
He couldn’t remember the last time she had rescued her paints from the abyss.
Tonight, he turned on the overhead light in her office.
Denny had forgotten about his wife’s backup computer, the one he had urged her to buy just in case the first one crashed.
She was, after all, a copywriter. She needed a backup plan.
And there it was, right where she had left it, top left drawer, a gold MacBook, lifeless in its case.
He propped it up on the ergonomically correct stand that he had gotten her two years earlier.
The stand was on top of her midcentury desk, along with the other ephemera of her life.
A faded photograph of her parents on their wedding day, cutting a very tall cake.
A black porcelain Crate & Barrel crock overstuffed with pens and pencils, many of them broken.
A letter organizer with all manner of papers inside: self-adhesive postage stamps, tax information, unread magazines, pieces of artwork created by their children that had no other real home.
He turned the laptop on and entered his wife’s password. Glazed. So stupid, this inside joke, that she would even dedicate the password to a donut. But look at him now, in this moment of silence, thinking of her and her donuts. Glazed. She had had the last word, all right.
The desktop was meticulous. She had been an organizer, even on the digital side.
A single folder marked “documents” stared back at him on the home screen, and he clicked on it.
He had no idea what he was looking for. Should he be in here, looking through her personal effects like this?
What if he found something he didn’t want to see?
And also, would there be anything here? Sticks had her computer, didn’t he? Wasn’t this just a backup?
Email, he remembered. Her email would be saved on both computers. If she was smart—and he knew she was—she would have mirror images of most documents and programs on both, for safekeeping. That was exactly the kind of thing that Anna would have done.
Just then, Denny stopped. Her email, he realized, was where he wanted to look first, but he had been hesitating, because email was the window into everything, where everyone kept their secrets.
He and Anna had never hidden their passwords from one another, and so he knew exactly how to get into hers, but he had never been tempted, had never had any concerns, not until now, without her here to stop him.
Bottom of the page. Google Chrome. Browser open.
Gmail. It would take just one minute to open her entire private life, to sift through anything that she had kept from him in their years of marriage, and now he would have to ask himself the truth about all of this, which was this: Did he really want to know it?
The only thing worse than the worst-case scenario, of course, was not knowing at all.
Denny plugged his wife’s information into Gmail.
Password Dunkindonutsfann. Another stupid joke staring back at him from beyond the grave.
He had warned her, too, that her password was hackable because it included not a single symbol or number, a password left over from the good old days.
But she had refused to budge. But it’s true, it’s me, I like it, I can remember it!
On she went: There was no stopping her, no changing her mind.