Chapter 27 #4
As the kids continued to fight over the lion’s mane and the Portuguese man-of-war, Denny thought about the Windsor chair left in the shed, and how after the bus came he would load it into the back of the Jeep and drive it over to Di’s.
He knew, in a deep and hot kind of way, that Di had been involved somehow with Anna’s death.
She had known. She had been involved. She had been there.
She had helped cover it up. Di, who had curled up against his wife in the years when she was still in the process of becoming a person.
He knew it as surely as he knew anything, even without proof, even without words.
He needed to see her, the cold and calculating look in her eyes, the loop her mind took when he said Anna Plummer.
If she asked for an explanation about the chair, he would just look at her the way she had looked at him the day before, with a mixture of want and need.
It was a chair that needed a place to live, and he was a person who was in the business of delivering to people the things that they weren’t quite sure they wanted.
Denny didn’t see Di’s car in the driveway when he pulled in, but the lights on the first floor were on and a cotton ball of smoke was rising from the chimney.
One of Anna’s favorite parts of Di’s so-called estate was the floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace in the home’s family room.
She said she wasn’t jealous of the things Di had, but he could tell that the fireplace was the one thing that his wife envied.
“I don’t want a house like that, but I want a fireplace like that,” she often said, knowing that they could never have either.
He was careful to open the back of the Jeep in such a way that the chair didn’t slide.
He didn’t want to scratch it, nor did he want to risk it slipping out, since the driveway was graded.
He was parked slightly uphill, and the chair tipped toward his stomach, and he caught it at an awkward angle, assuming the wood’s full weight.
A chair like that was heavy, substantial.
It could last a lifetime if you treated it well.
Di must have heard him in the driveway, because she opened the door and called to him from the granite steps.
“What’s going on here?” she called. She wore a matching gray sweatsuit that, though generic, somehow looked intentional on her.
A delicate string of pearls lay close to her neckline, and her blond hair was pulled back from her face with a wide cloth headband, also gray.
“I wasn’t expecting company,” she said, gesturing to her outfit by way of apology.
“I didn’t mean to come by unannounced,” he said, repositioning the chair and hoisting it up from the bottom so that he could carry it and still walk straight ahead while talking. “I wanted to bring you this.”
Di took a step back into the entrance of her house. She appraised the chair, looking surprised. “A Windsor?” she said. “Well, it’s beautiful. What should I do with it?”
“Anything you want.” Denny was stopped at the front step. “May I?” he said. Di had blocked passage any farther and was looking the chair up and down.
“Oh, yes, yes. I’m sorry.” She stepped back, letting him in.
The chair was elegantly turned with a deep stain. She could bring it into the first-floor study, but instead she stood staring at it. Denny could smell the fire blazing.
“Did you want me to bring this anywhere for you?” he asked.
“Maybe just leave it for right now,” she said. “I was actually . . .” She trailed off. Denny’s tactic of offering a gift did not seem to have softened the visit. Di was in a hurry to get him out. The fire. The notebook. He wondered if the two were related.
“I see. Well, I guess I’ll be going then.”
“Denny,” she said. She reached out for his arm.
For a moment, he thought she was going to say something tender.
He looked at her, at her deep green eyes.
Something electric flashed in them. She paused and held his arm for a second and then dug her hand into his arm.
“After this, it’s over,” she said. “You don’t come back here.
” He moved to extract his arm, but she held on tight, her nails digging in.
“Walk away from this and everything goes back to the way it used to be. Do you understand me?”
He didn’t want to hurt her, so he spun around to release her grip, and noticed, as he did, a small table near the door. On it, there was a crystal bowl. A familiar glint of gold caught his eye—what looked like a button. As soon as he saw it, Di’s eyes followed his.
“What is this?” he asked. He reached out and grabbed it. The button was the same as the one Mary had held up in the light of the sunroom. Tiny and gold. The button from a cashmere sweater. There were no coincidences, is what Anna would have said.
Di opened her palm, and Denny handed her the button.
How did she know that he would give it back?
Like Anna, she, too, was a witch. Her power was intoxicating.
“Call it a memento,” Di said. “Let’s just say that a few of us have them.
To remember what binds us to one another.
” She rolled the button in her fingers and made a fist, as if to say, All gone.
“What now?” Denny asked.
“Now you go home,” Di said. “Live your life. Move on. This never happened.”
“And what if I don’t agree to that?”
“Things will probably be better if you do,” she said.
“But it did happen. You took something from me,” Denny said. “I want to know why.”
“You’re too trusting,” Di said. “You open your heart so easily. I like that about you, actually. Anna did, too.”
“If you thought I was onto you, why didn’t you try to stop me?” Denny asked.
“Oh, I did,” Di said. “We all did. How quickly you’ve forgotten about your brakes.”
Denny nodded. In retrospect, that made perfect sense. Di, who knew him best, could have gotten into the garage herself. How silly of him not to have seen it.
“It wasn’t that I didn’t love Anna, by the way,” Di said, offhandedly. “That was complicated.”
“There are just some things that you love more, though, right? Like making sure your kids get into Harvard.”
Di looked at him with a cold and clinical glare. She clearly hadn’t expected him to know so much about her—or about the PTO. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“It’s funny,” he said. “You don’t have much sentimentality when it comes to protecting what you did.
But you’ll go to such lengths to protect the PTO.
” For a moment, he considered mentioning the secret society but thought twice.
There was danger everywhere; powerful people surrounded Di.
He could get hurt the way Anna had, and he knew exactly how close he was to finding himself at the haul-out.
“Denny, I’m going to give you some advice that’s for your own good,” Di said.
“Forget that we ever had this conversation.” She took a step forward.
She was not strong enough to hurt him, but he saw something in her just then—something unrecognizable.
There were consequences to knowing the truth, she was saying.
Whatever answers lay on the other side, he didn’t want them, did he?
“Stay away from my family, Di. That’s not a request.” He turned his back and walked out.
“You have a good day, Denny Plummer. I do hope to see you around.”
The heavy door closed behind him with a whisper.
Denny went for a long, restorative drive out toward the Artichoke, where Anna used to run.
It was far, so far from Hamilton. He had always marveled at the fact that she had gone all the way to Newburyport just to get out of the car to stretch her legs.
But people love what they know, and she knew that, every crest and turn of the road, where the flowers sprang up and where the road dipped down and even where the tar needed replacing.
No one could have loved a place more than Anna loved that spit of road, and now it would never again know her sweat or her laughter, the way her own unique gait sounded coming around a bend at magic hour. They had taken that from the world.
He drove the loop twice, caught a shy doe hesitating and then bounding out in front of a snowy beat of bushes, before making the winding loop back.
It was late in the day. Denny had gotten nearly nothing done, besides delivering one single Windsor chair, confirming his own worst instincts, and battled with himself about what to do next. Conclusion: He had no idea.
Pulling up to the house, he noticed something strange.
There was something wrong with the front door.
Normally, Denny went in through the garage, but this time he parked on the side of the house and walked up the path that flanked it.
The door had been forced open, allowing in the dusty late-day light.
He barely touched it and it swung open, almost as if it had been expecting him, as if the house knew he would be coming.
The house, of course, had been expecting him. Or someone had been. Because there, in the hallway, Denny saw the final warning. Hank lay motionless, eyes shut, a dried pool of blood beneath him. It was too late. It was always too late.