Epilogue
DENNY DROVE ALL the way down to Hopkinton while the kids were at school, because he wanted to surprise them.
The dog was named General. He was black, with a tuft of white fur at the jawline and liquid eyes.
“A litter drop from Tennessee,” the program coordinator had told him over the phone.
General. But that name, he thought, felt a little too militant.
He’d have to ask the kids to weigh in. Maybe something a little softer, like Rover or River.
He slipped a leash onto the dog and walked him down the narrow halls of the shelter.
The animal was shy at first, and held back on the lead, but once Denny took him outside into an area that had clearly been designed for potential pet owners—a chain-link fence was obscured by tall plantings—the dog jumped up and down and licked him on the face.
Denny found a tennis ball on the ground and tossed it in the air, and he jumped up on his hind legs and retrieved it, as if he had always been waiting for this opportunity to prove his mettle.
“Well, I guess that settles it,” he said. “You’re coming home with me.”
He had long ago donated Hank’s old belongings, but he stopped by a PetSmart off the highway on the way home for a new bed and some toys and a bag of food, plus a new food and water bowl set for him.
“Daddy, he’s so cute,” Louisa cooed, as she stepped off the bus. And he was, this dog, this symbol of renewal, this symbol of the new life the three of them were carving out for themselves. They weren’t forgetting, but they were learning to move on.
This life, he thought to himself. You earn it. You have to learn to keep it.
Every once in a while, Denny would get an order for a delivery near Nancy’s Corner, or he would pass over near Honeycomb and drop in for a coffee and there would be Mimi or Di or Ellen Wilson.
They’d look at one another with the faraway gaze of people who used to be acquaintances, who had been involved in their fucked-up lives and had somehow managed to get out of them.
Only once had he spotted Mary Langley at the gas station in South Hamilton, and she had pretended not to know who he was.
Hamilton had gone back to being the uninterrupted town that it was before Anna Plummer moved there.
It had been sanitized, freed of her spirit.
Denny knew what lay beneath the surface, but to survive was to ignore it.
To survive was to tread lightly upon the crust.
He briefly considered going back to New York, but what was there for him, anyway?
He had built a business in Hamilton, and his kids were happy in Hamilton, and it now housed his life, the shell of it.
He could soldier on here, a general himself.
He could—he would—make Hamilton home, in the way that Anna would have expected and wanted.
Stay quiet, stay the course. He was of the belief—foolish or otherwise—that if you left dangerous things alone, they would leave you alone, too.
Wash your hands of them. Hornets wouldn’t come for you if you weren’t interrupting the nest.
Only once had he been jolted awake out of this dreamlike state, when an article appeared below the fold on the front page of the Boston Globe announcing that the body of a Winchester woman had been found washed up off the Aberjona River.
But these things happen in towns like that sometimes.
Bad luck, Denny thought. You do hate to see it.
One afternoon, in the mail, Denny received a package from the Hamilton Police Department. Wrapped in bubble wrap was Anna’s laptop. It had been completely scrubbed of anything important, but it was there, just the same, an artifact of his previous life.
I thought you might want this back. Sorry we couldn’t find anything of use on it. We’ve decided to close your wife’s case. In the end, her death has been ruled “inconclusive.”
—Officer Malkin
This was over, then. What the Ipswich River had claimed he could never have back, but they would all move on, rebuild, erect a new life precariously on the delicate topsoil here in Hamilton.
Rewind. Start over from the beginning. Suck the marrow out of life.
All of that Thoreau bullshit. If there was a lesson in all of this—Denny did believe in lessons, at the end of the day, or had come to believe in them, at least—it had less to do with redemption and more to do with a stab at happiness.
Oh, maybe the secrets kept people sick, or maybe it was the secrets that were necessary for survival.
The secrets—it was the secrets that kept small towns alive.
Even Anna Plummer had known that much.