Chapter 14
THE HOUSE WAS cool and dark. Outside, the sky was fading rosy-pink, the same color as on the first night he sat with Anna out on the Montauk docks, looking to the future with that mystery girl, her witchcraft and her charms. Tonight, the light felt decidedly less optimistic.
The house seemed closed off, like a fortress, impermeable, cruel, and unkind.
Di had taken the kids for the afternoon, which was both a sadness and a relief.
It should have been him, he knew, planning excursions with the kids.
They were already one parent down. But he had started to feel like a stranger in his own body, curling back at the edges, a plant that had spent too much time in the sun.
Denny looked at a mussed-up bedspread that Anna never would have stood for, Anna and her perfectionism, ever a bone of contention in their marriage and now something he missed constantly.
Their messy house—his house, now—was an ever-present reminder of Anna’s absence.
While his wife was alive, Denny had been mostly unaware of his own good fortune, but his general lack of perception weighed heavily on him now.
Had he been an unfit husband, depending too fully on his wife to propel their lives forward?
They had lived well; they weren’t wealthy but they were a notch above middle class in this soft and comfortable place.
They loved each other. They loved their kids.
They had vacationed and eaten lobster dinners near the beach and taken glasses of wine outside in warm weather and done all of the pleasant things that couples in their forties do, and yet: He had missed the signs of her struggle, the throttle of perfectionism, the town closing in on them.
He had been too busy enjoying the seamlessness of upper-middle-class life in Hamilton to recognize even the slightest tinge of darkness.
Soon, Denny heard a chorus of voices coming from the kitchen.
He met his kids halfway down the stairs and they folded into him, soft bodies that seemed at once bigger and smaller than when he had last left them.
Kids were always doing that, surprising you with their overnight changes, breaking your heart with the reminders of how young and tender they still were.
“Daddy, we missed you,” Louisa said, clawing at the back pockets of his jeans like she had when she was a baby.
She was always trying to find out what he stored in his pockets, the junk that Anna complained about constantly: business cards and tissues, spare screws and quarters, the stuff of life that ended up at the bottoms of drawers or in the clattering trays of washing machines, causing them to clank and stop working for a day or two.
Somehow, though, he suspected that even his wife would find pleasure in this corporeal need of their daughter’s, a grasping for her dad’s body, to hold on to something real, to know that there was a part of them—of their unit of four—that still stood firmly before them.
Denny scooped up both kids, one in each arm, wondering how much longer he’d be able to do it, and kissed each on the top of the head.
“You smell like the sea,” he said. Like sunscreen. Like salt. Ben had sand in his hair. “Did Di take you to the beach?”
“Sandy Point!” Ben said. “Then all the way to Salisbury to Beach Pizza.”
“I couldn’t have designed a better summer day myself,” Denny said.
“I took them for a trip down memory lane,” Di said.
He hadn’t seen her come into the foyer, but there, suddenly, was Di, wearing a bathing suit beneath a nearly sheer cotton jumper, along with pink flip-flops.
She wore a sporty, expensive-looking visor on her head, which didn’t quite mask her sun-licked skin.
“All Anna’s and my favorite spots from when we were kids ourselves.
” She looked at Denny for just a second too long, touched a knuckle to her eye in what was an uncommon gesture of emotion—for Di, at least—and then looked away. “Anyway, I have to get going. Dinner.”
Denny nodded. Best not to belabor the point. “Thanks. For doing this.”
“I hope the break was helpful?”
“More than you know.”
“Don’t be a stranger,” she said. She waited a moment, as if she expected him to deliver a sermon right there. But then, thinking better, she smiled. “Well, anyway. Give a ring.” With a salute, she was out the front door, a whisper in the wind.
A few weeks had passed since he had learned about the so-called Life Time incident, and Denny had been turning it around and around in his head.
He knew he needed to talk to Sticks about all of this.
The next morning, while the kids ate waffles and fought over who had made the better sandcastle at Sandy Point, he texted the officer.
I have some stuff I wanna discuss with you, he wrote.
Sticks was inconsistent over text, at best. Sometimes the officer would write back instantly, in a flurry of interconnected blocks—never one-line texts that went on for pages, the way Anna used to write.
Other times, it took hours, or, worse, Sticks would start something, ominous dots of an iPhone messenger portending a response in the queue, and then the dots would disappear and nothing would arrive for days.
Denny could never tell if the officer was distracted or plotting, or if he was a little too cautious in what he was committing to the page.
Denny had absorbed, he knew, a heavy helping of distrust of the police from his wife, but something about Sticks didn’t sit right with him.
Still, he was the lead on the case, and Denny was careful not to destroy his only chance of resolving the mystery of his wife’s disappearance and—a word he didn’t even like to associate with her loss—murder.
Pretty soon, a message did pop up on Denny’s phone. He was surprised to see that Sticks was communicative today.
Can meet later today, Agawam in Rowley. 4 or so.
Denny would have to find someone to watch the kids, maybe his mother-in-law, who lived in Newburyport—not so far from Rowley—and the kids hadn’t gotten a full day with Gram in a while.
After Anna’s death, she had finally retired, though she was withdrawn now, suddenly a woman very much settled into her seventies.
Anna’s Hippie Dippie Mom, as his wife had always referred to her, now always seemed a little unmoored, as if the wind that carried her through life had been subdued.
She still dug her hands into the soft garden beds every April through October, but she didn’t seem to derive the same pleasure now.
She hadn’t called to ask if they needed any extra tomatoes, hadn’t asked about Ben and whether he was still craving Sungolds or warm green beans straight from the vine this year.
If Denny’s own small family had been shattered by the loss of their ebullient Anna, Corina Denton had been simply squashed flat.
Denny couldn’t make that part right, but he could deliver to his mother-in-law the shiny, bright faces of Anna’s children, tanned limbs that made him think of what Anna herself must have been like as a child, leaping into the ocean or diving down to find rings at the bottom of a pool, always in motion, always searching for something, asking questions, seeking the sun like their dog in the slice of winter light in the dining room.
Fine, good, see you there, Denny wrote back to Sticks, wondering how Sticks would consider this wild ride of an idea, that Queen Bee Mimi Mar had some vendetta against his wife, that she had—in front of other people, even—hip-checked his daughter into a pool as some kind of warning.
It was a little unbelievable, Denny had to admit.
And even he struggled to make sense of what Mimi was fighting so hard to preserve.
But Denny believed that Mimi Mar had done something terrible, something she could not come back from. And he intended to prove it.
Corina said to come over with the kids. When they got there, she was wearing a gardening apron made from some kind of thick rubber material. Her gray hair was pulled back in a nub of a ponytail and her hands were covered in gloves.
“My munchkins!” she shouted, holding her arms open as Louisa and Ben leapt from the car, and she wrapped them up in her dirt-flecked embrace, careful not to stab them with her hoe (left hand) or trowel (right).
“It has been too long! Shame on you, Denny, these kids are practically adults now.” She let go and the kids took a step back and she inspected them. “Adults!”
Corina wasn’t wrong. Denny hadn’t stopped by the house in over a month, not because he was avoiding her exactly, but because he was avoiding talking about Anna, and that was a lot of what they did when they were together.
He didn’t want to relitigate the past, to slip into memories of his wife when all he saw—in his house, in his car, in his shed—were reminders of his old life.
Here, in Anna’s childhood home, were just more reminders of a place that no longer existed, a world where Anna Plummer was alive.
“I know, Corina. I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just . . .”
She put a hand up. “Don’t,” she said. “We all have our things.”
“I’ll probably be gone two hours at the most,” he said. “We can have dinner when I’m back. All of us. If you want?”
“That would be nice.” She was staring at the kids again, at Louisa in particular, running a thumb along the side of her face, maybe trying to memorize what she looked like now or maybe remembering what another little girl had looked like at this exact same age, so many years ago, in another time, in another universe, when things had been different, when life had been different, when no one had been dead or in pain or left frozen in a river, a mystery for everyone’s taking.