Chapter 27
THAT NIGHT, AFTER the kids were asleep, Denny collected all of it: the notebooks, the stray papers, the photos that had amassed on the floor of her office.
Packaged it into boxes. Took it out to the shed, where he had long ago installed a paper shredder.
Would he regret destroying any of this, the information that could prove guilt?
Possibly. But the alternative, he reasoned, was that someone else could end up with it, that Sticks might end up with it, and Denny could not bear the thought of more of his wife’s belongings falling into the hands of the incompetent—and, for all he knew, criminal—officer.
He didn’t have much time, he knew, but Denny snapped quick photos of some of the journal pages, most of which were written in Mary’s now-familiar cursive.
He also took a photo of one of the pieces of card stock bearing his wife’s image: ANNA PLUMMER FOR PRESIDENT.
Then, one by one, he turned years of her life into compost—long woven ropes of paper that the shredder spit out in indignation.
“I don’t like it, either,” he said to the shredder, the third time it jammed, as if it had been a sign to keep the pages intact. He remained unpersuaded. It had to go. All of it.
Sticks would be back soon. Denny knew that for sure.
When he was finished with the shredding, he mixed the papers with sawdust from an ongoing project and shoveled it all into a green wheelbarrow that he kept outside the shed.
Spring would have been a better time, he realized, to try to hide something as conspicuous as a mountain of papers and sawdust, but what choice did he have?
The summer before, he had started to clear a space for a fire pit before the Conservation Commission had stopped by to tell him that he was not allowed to remove any trees—dead or alive—without a proper permit.
Still, the space where the dead birches had once lain remained, an area that was now covered with snow, leaf debris, and mud.
It was an okay hiding space if he could make quick work of it, a task that would be doubly difficult in the cold and the dark.
Denny was halfway through digging a hole in the back and filling it with the combination of dust and shredded paper when a cruiser pulled up, now for the second time in one day.
Denny pulled out his phone to look at the time.
He had been working in the dark with a headlamp, trying to attract the least amount of attention possible from the neighbors, who tended to call Conservation at the drop of a hat, though Denny suspected that the cruiser had nothing to do with the neighbors and everything to do with whatever other mess he had stepped in.
The car pulled all the way to the end of the driveway, right near where Denny’s shed stood.
Headlights on, glaring angrily at the shed itself.
A dark figure got out, but the car engine remained on, with steam billowing up; it was that cold out.
Denny, standing back in the woods, found himself shivering, from the cold, yes, but also in anticipation of whatever lay ahead.
A reckoning, he figured. Two men in the night.
He heard boots crunching through the snow, even though he could not see the face of the shadow that approached. But he already knew it was Sticks. And then a voice called out in recognition. “Plummer, you there?”
Denny stopped. Nothing much he could do now besides admit that he was out in the woods, shoveling dirt into a hole in the middle of the night.
Certainly nothing suspicious about that, unless you were a cop investigating exactly the kind of thing that might look suspicious, like a person shoveling dirt into the woods in the middle of the night, in January, in Massachusetts.
“Yep, back here,” Denny said. No use lying about it now. Sticks could see the headlamp anyway. It wasn’t exactly inconspicuous.
“Whatcha got back there? Evidence?” Sticks came closer and shielded his eyes from the headlamp.
“I wouldn’t say so, no,” Denny said, putting the shovel back into the wheelbarrow. “Honestly, I just do clearing by night so Conservation won’t get on my case. You know how it is.”
“Actually,” Sticks said, “I do.” The Hamilton and Boxford Conservation Commissions were notorious for busting homeowners for clearing their own land without permission.
Remove a dead tree from protected land and you were looking at a hefty fine, and it wasn’t unusual for homeowners to do yardwork by cover of night to avoid nosy neighbors and the watchful eye of the town.
Denny stepped back, admiring the wheelbarrow as if it were a piece of art.
He took some satisfaction in the clear irritation it brought to Sticks, this back-and-forth, even if they did agree on the Conservation Commission.
Ordinarily, Denny wouldn’t be so smug with a cop, but here the man was, on his property, snooping around in the middle of the night. Eat or be eaten was how he saw it.
“You know, Conservation aside, you’ve got a wheelbarrow of dirt out here in the woods in the middle of a January night,” Sticks said, taking a step closer. “A normal person might find that a little . . . odd.” He made a sniffing noise, as if he was trying to detect something in the air.
“I might ask you what would make an officer take a casual drive over to a civilian’s house in the middle of a January night,” Denny spat back.
He took a step closer. The headlamp, he knew, was making it difficult for Sticks to see, and the more difficult it was for Sticks to see, the less likely he was to stumble onto the mix of sawdust and shredded paper that Denny was not-so-artfully hiding in the wheelbarrow.
“I’m sure you’re not accusing me of anything untoward, Mr. Plummer,” Sticks said, shielding his eyes again. “After all, you did scare off one of my junior officers today. Or maybe you’ve already forgotten?”
“You mean the kid you sent over here to browbeat me into giving up my wife’s personal belongings, when I still haven’t gotten back the last load of stuff I handed over to the Hamilton Police Department?
” It could go on like this for hours, Denny was relatively certain.
He wanted to be delicate with Sticks, but he also wasn’t about to be walked over, not on his own property.
This had gone too far, and the surprise visit—two surprise visits, if you counted the earlier one—had just about pushed him to the limit.
Sticks put his arms down by his side. In the dark, Denny couldn’t be sure, but it almost looked like the officer was reaching for his firearm.
“I’d be careful, Mr. Plummer, about what you’re insinuating.” It was now the second time Sticks had used words just like these, the first having been over at the Agawam, many months earlier.
Denny thought about asking about the gun but thought better of it. Best to let a sleeping firearm lie, he thought to himself. Instead, he took up a different line of inquiry, one that he knew would also rile the officer. But at least it stayed far away from guns.
“Seems like a lot of people around here need to be careful. Isn’t that right, Officer Malkin?
My wife needed to be careful. What were those words you used?
Ligature marks, right? A lot of coincidences, though.
Her running for the president of the PTO and all.
If I were a more suspicious person, I might start thinking that there were some people in this town who didn’t much like the things that my wife was getting into. ”
Sticks took a step forward. Maybe Denny had overstepped after all. “I was driving by here, you know, on duty, and I saw a strange light coming from the woods. I stopped to investigate.”
“Are you explaining it to me, or to the people who will come investigating later on?” Denny said.
His voice was steady, but he was worried now.
He was staring into the dark eyes of power, the kind of person who could find a woman dead in a river and hide the truth because the truth betrayed secrets that he didn’t want revealed, secrets that he knew too much about.
Inside, Louisa and Ben were sleeping. Push too far and Denny might find himself frozen in the haul-out, poor Ophelia’s forever soulmate, just another senseless tragedy, a man claimed by nature.
It was clear to Denny now: There were no accidents, no coincidences, not in Hamilton.
Ellen Wilson’s brother, Sticks, this small-town cop, had staged this poor performance from the start.
A prime suspect to divert attention from a murder had given plenty of time for the trail to grow cold.
Now Denny was a nuisance. An interference.
A man who needed to be handled. And Sticks was ready to do the handling.
“Plummer, don’t make things difficult,” he said.
He had dropped the honorific, a sign of his growing irritation.
“I’m just telling you how these sorts of things sometimes play out.
” His voice was gravelly, gruff. He sounded like a television cop, Denny thought, full of bluster, like he had memorized lines from crime shows.
“I’m sorry to have wasted your time, Officer,” Denny said. “You’ll find nothing amiss here. I’m happy to call dispatch and let them know if you’d like.” He stuck out a hand, a temporary peacemaker. If he could hold Sticks off until morning, maybe there was a chance for both of them.