Chapter 12
IN THE AFTERNOONS, before he picked the kids up from camp, Denny drove the back roads of the North Shore: Ipswich Road through Georgetown and Boxford, or sometimes, if he was feeling particularly prone to wandering, the rolling passage through Newburyport and into West Newbury that snaked around the Artichoke Reservoir.
This was always Anna’s favorite place, particularly in summer, when a plumage of purple flowers erupted in the old farming fields.
Sometimes she would have him deposit her here in the afternoons on the way home from a beach adventure so that she could run a quick four-mile loop.
He’d take the kids for ice cream at Hodgie’s, over in Amesbury, and be back to pick her up just in time to watch the sherbet sun sink into the water, his sweaty wife bent double as if she had just conquered the world.
The Artichoke hadn’t changed in the months since Anna’s death.
Same rolling hills that traced the water.
Same group of kids with their legs kicked out over the bridge, fishing, catch-and-release only, every summer, just like always.
Same purple flowers, tall and spindly, growing mysteriously from those fields.
It had been six months and Denny still had no real answers about his wife’s death, though Sticks had mostly stopped coming around.
Last winter Denny had turned over one of Anna’s computers to the police, believing that giving Sticks this information would help solve the case of Anna’s murder.
Instead, it seemed to stall it. He hadn’t been cleared as a suspect, but the long bouts of silence he received from the police department led him to believe that no one was really looking very hard into Anna’s death these days.
She was just another woman who had gone quietly into that good night.
The case’s stalling had inspired in Denny complete and total wrath.
In the days and nights since he discovered the hateful messages on Anna’s computer, he had, he supposed, gone a little rogue.
He stayed up late, scouring the Internet.
Was he becoming a vigilante? Maybe. It felt counter to his nature, but there he was, as obsessed with his wife’s murder as his wife herself had been with Friday-night Dateline.
She always seemed to know the outcome of a case only a quarter of the way through, and Denny hoped that he, too, could reach the conclusion in time to achieve some kind of justice.
Besides his desire for justice was a kind of anger that was unfamiliar to him.
Denny Plummer was mad. He was livid. He felt robbed of time, and he was determined to figure out what had happened.
The perversion of justice—the murder of his wife—caused him acute pain, but if he could only put things back in order, maybe he could reverse the order of time.
This was a way to bring Anna back, as ridiculous as that sounded.
Of course, Denny knew a few things of his own.
Every day, on his drives, he thought of more things that might be useful.
He kept a notebook in the Jeep and pulled over, jotting down notes when the thoughts occurred to him.
By now, the notebook was nearly full of handwritten notes to himself, half-thought-through ideas that led to no significant conclusion.
Handed computer over February 2023
Anna, coffee, Mimi Mar, February 2022
What do I know about Mimi Mar
That last one stuck in his mind like an upturned tack.
Mimi Mar, Mimi Mar, Mimi Mar. She had become his foil, his heartburn, his agita.
Mimi Mar stuck in his craw. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something about Mimi was just not right.
Mimi wasn’t a local, Denny knew that. She had moved to Massachusetts for college and had met her husband, Franklin Mar, in 2003 at a bar in Boston.
By 2007, the two were married and living in a condo in Charlestown.
By 2009, Mimi had quit her job in public relations, and by 2012 they were living in Nancy’s Corner in Hamilton in a three-million-dollar house.
Two years later, she was pregnant, and her trajectory was complete.
College grad to the PTO in just a few easy steps.
What Denny didn’t know about Mimi Mar was what concerned him, and although he knew that maybe there wasn’t much rational about his dislike or distrust for her—except what he had inherited from his wife—he felt a compulsion to keep digging.
He needed to find out more about her—where she had lived before Massachusetts, and what her parents did—but she was practically invisible.
Search anyone on the Internet and you’re bound to find a trail, but Mimi wasn’t like that.
Her life began and ended in Massachusetts.
It was as if her past had been engineered to fit this adult version of her, as if she had scrubbed whatever came before, projected a new and improved part of herself onto the world.
And Denny wanted to know more about what came first.
He had heard rumblings that she was from Baltimore.
But the trail then went cold. What he needed, he realized, was someone as inquisitive and bold as he wished he could be.
He needed Anna, of course, but, in a pinch, he could use Di, the enigmatic best friend, who was fearless and bold, and never afraid to find trouble, even if trouble was happy to find her first.
“The first thing I would do, personally, is a good old-fashioned Facebook stalk,” Di said.
She arrived at the house with corn from Meadowbrook Farm, first of the season, along with blueberries and biscuits, Richardson’s vanilla ice cream, steaks, handfuls of fresh basil, a bag of tomatoes, her two boys, and her husband all in tow.
“Take this,” she said, foisting the groceries upon Denny and moving right into the house as if she owned the place, ever her signature move.
Outside, it was balmy still. The cicadas were singing.
The construction around the pool was finally complete, and the backyard had been transformed into a serene oasis, bluestone pavers leading to a cerulean pool that sparkled in the late afternoon sun.
Squinting, Denny could almost see a completely different reality, all of them sitting down for a July dinner, his wife emerging from the pool, the steaks hissing on the grill.
“Meaning what, exactly?” he asked.
“Meaning, who she is friends with can tell you plenty about who she really is. Maybe you can’t find anything about her online, but you can probably find out about them.
” Di had already made herself plenty at home, rooting around in the fridge for a bottle of rosé—old, unopened, Anna’s—and a portable insulated cup that was half of a set the two had shared.
The kids ran around outside, jumping in the pool and savoring the delights of late July.
July was Denny’s favorite month, and he usually hated to see it go, but this year time seemed to mean nothing at all.
Coming home, there was no joy in that. You could not look forward to the next steps, it turned out, when you hadn’t resolved the last ones.
They were loud and preoccupied with the pool, setting up camp at a far table.
“We’ll eat out here,” Louisa called, and Denny knew the adults would have plenty of time—and space—to themselves.
When he finished grilling, Denny came back to Di’s proposal. He hadn’t thought much about how hard Mimi had tried to erase herself.
“Di, do you think she did it on purpose?”
“Anna never trusted her,” Di said. “Especially . . .”
“Especially what?”
Di’s husband offered a look. He reached a hand out, as if to say, No, don’t, but it was too late, the conversation was too far gone.
“There was just an incident. At Life Time.” Di and her husband, Mark, exchanged looks. He had been a friend of Anna’s, too, all of them childhood friends, and sometimes Denny felt as if he had been on the outside looking in on some multisided relationship that he could never quite crack.
“When?” Denny asked. “Why am I just fucking hearing about this now? Sometimes I feel like it was a vault between you two, a vault I can’t pry open, even after Anna’s death . . .”
“I think,” Di said, “because we weren’t exactly convinced, at the time, that it was real.”
Mark—prototypical New England type, preppy, swoop of brown hair, loafers, an accent that could never disappear despite accumulated wealth, swaddling a beer—tapped the ring of condensation his drink had left on the teak.
He didn’t make eye contact. He had known about this, Denny surmised. Whatever this was.
“I still don’t really understand what we’re talking about here,” Denny said.
“There was this day at Life Time, right before Memorial Day last year,” Di said. “Anna and I were in the pool. Louisa tripped running to get back in after the guards blew the whistle.”
“I remember that,” Denny said. “She came home bandaged up.”
“That part she told you,” Di said, looking at Mark again.
“I assume there’s a part she didn’t?” Denny said.
“At the time, I didn’t really believe her. She swore she saw Mimi hip-check Louisa,” Di said.
“Into the pool?” That was a wild revelation.
Denny could feel his heart beating twice as fast as normal.
His daughter pushed into a pool by none other than Mimi Mar.
That instinct, the one that kept him up at night, hadn’t been wrong, but now it pulsed into overdrive, firing on all cylinders.
If his friends hadn’t been at the house, he would have raced upstairs and set about investigating this new information, crawling into a whole new wormhole.
He could picture his wife’s backup laptop, asleep in her lacquered office.
What secrets could he uncover with this new information?
But Denny felt something else, too, beyond his anger at his wife’s murder.
There it was again, that familiar sadness.
Here was something else that Anna had withheld from him, something else she hadn’t trusted him with.
Maybe she thought he would think she was losing her mind.
Maybe she just thought it wasn’t important after all.
Whatever it was, she hadn’t told him about it, this incident, this thing that haunted her, the pool, the moment that happened—or maybe didn’t.
He ached for Anna, and for his daughter, for the things he had missed when his family was whole.
“It seemed pretty hard to believe, to be honest,” Di said. “Even for Mimi.”
But now, in the pink light of evening, nothing seemed hard to believe, certainly not a grown woman sending a seven-year-old spinning into a pool with the nudge of a hip.
In fact, it seemed to Denny very easy to believe.
What if it had been a warning? What if Anna had misjudged the potency of the message?
What if to misunderstand the enemy was to do so at your own peril?
“Explain this. Explain why she didn’t tell me these things,” Denny said.
“You know what she loved about you?” Di asked.
“Honestly?” Denny said. “Sometimes I really do not.”
“She loved that she didn’t have to tell you all of these things. She loved that there was a whole network of complication and that you were not part of it.”
“Di, that doesn’t make me feel any fucking better.
” He stood up and drained a glass of rosé.
He wasn’t even sure it was his. He often felt that Anna had misjudged him, that she had fallen in love with him because she liked that he was some of the things that she was not: even-tempered where she was outraged, cool where she was hot.
But she misinterpreted his quiet for a lack of depth.
She misinterpreted his evenness for an incapacity to experience rage.
But he had that capacity, and she had seen it a few times, when he would turn funny or weird or sarcastic or angry.
He just did a better job of concealing it than she did.
“Maybe she just didn’t think you’d react the way she’d want you to react. I don’t know,” Di said.
“Maybe you have to give someone the chance in order for them to be proven right or wrong,” Denny said, walking into the house. “Maybe it’s easier to say all these things because she isn’t here. Maybe, maybe, maybe.”
Once Di and Mark and the kids were gone and his own kids were in bed, Denny took the opportunity to look into Mimi Mar again.
He was back on his own computer now, and in his own office, no more than a corner of his bedroom that he had converted into a workroom of sorts.
He could no longer face the Hague Blue walls or the abandoned books or the artwork that had once been hers.
Anna’s office was a place where no one went.
On the nights when he could not sleep—and there were plenty of those now—he had built himself a slip of a desk, which looked out onto the sloping lawn below, and onto the deep blue pool, backlit by the installed lighting that the pool company had talked Anna into.
In the end, despite his protestations about the cost, she had been right; it looked like moonlight dappling a lake, just spectacular from this angle, and maybe she, too, would have spent thick summer nights looking down at the project that she had most wanted to see complete, perfectly executed, fully formed, beautiful.
And yet, the pool, which was her dream, had become his inheritance.
From his office now he could watch all the plans she had made finally come to fruition, despite the fact that she hadn’t lived long enough to see any of it herself.
When he was feeling ungenerous, these small and aching twists of fate made him the angriest, not only that her dreams had outlived her, but also that he had been stuck with them, this constant, persistent reminder of her that he could never escape.
Denny logged into Facebook and looked up Mimi Mar again, a search so familiar that computer completed it for him, filled in the blanks before he even had the chance.
Following Di’s instructions, he went to her long and curated lists of friends, plenty of Hamilton faces he knew, people from school events and softball games, sharp-featured parents who were always well dressed and who drove expensive SUVs.
Mimi Mar was friends with everyone who was anyone in Hamilton, Massachusetts.