That was the way it was, always too much synchronicity, like someone behind the scenes somewhere was mapping it all out for them, interwoven strands producing a pattern that was always just out of sight. The truth was though that there was no pattern, the connections were randomly generated, meaning nothing, possessed of no more significance than people chose to attach to them.
The connection he was heading into felt ominously significant, like he’d been heading toward it blindly for almost two years, but that too was a trick of his own mind, nothing more. It was only in his own mind that he was more than just a traveler, that they were more than a family that had suffered a loss, that their inn was more than a place for meeting a contact, it mattered only to him, the curse of carrying too much truth, too much knowledge.
But that didn’t make it any easier, the thought that he’d be staying in their guesthouse, within breathing distance of their daily routines and of any hidden sadness. He’d have to meet that woman and speak to her, knowing what he knew, all the while playing the casual tourist. He’d probably see Bostridge’s children too, the baggage of their loss perhaps even more easily visible.
Possibly Holden had chosen the Copley Inn for purely practical reasons, perhaps simply as somewhere Tom would know from his strange little riddle, a place with nowhere to swim. JJ couldn’t help but think though that there must have been some satisfaction, whether Holden was in the business or not, in forcing him to go there, to face the people from whom he’d taken, knowing what they could never know.
If that had been Holden’s intention it had worked well enough; the thought of it played on JJ’s mind as he drove the final leg in darkness, a fine rain falling like a steady mist sprayed onto the windshield, the last half hour on back roads. His thoughts blanked again only when he saw the turning, clearly marked, on the near side of the small town where the inn was situated, the signboard knocking him into automatic.
Numbly, he climbed the couple of hundred yards up to the house, gravel crackling under the tires, trees mossy damp, and then the white clapboard expanse of the building, the porch lit, a few other cars parked around to the side. The rain was still falling, almost invisible but cool in his face as he walked from the car, bracing himself.
The main door was locked, the glass window in it looking onto an entrance hall with a large staircase. When he rang the bell a woman appeared, mousy hair, slim and attractive, casually dressed but stylish, expensive clothes. She looked in her mid-forties perhaps, old enough to be Susan Bostridge. As she saw him through the glass she smiled, opening the door then and saying, “You must be Mr. Hoffman.” It wasn’t the woman he’d spoken to on the phone; this voice was softer, younger.
“William Hoffman, yes.”
“I’m Susan Bostridge.” She reached out her hand and shook his. JJ was suddenly speechless, his mind tailspun by the mention of her name, the eye contact, the physical presence, this attractive pleasant woman whose husband he’d killed. But she distracted him then by looking at his sweater. “Oh, it’s raining,” she said and lightly brushed the fine droplets of water from his shoulders, an immediate comfortable domesticity that brought him around, putting him at ease. It wasn’t what he’d expected, bringing him back to the moment.
“Idiots’ rain,” he answered her, smiling. “It’s what the Turks call it.”
“Idiots’ rain,” she repeated, the words hanging there for a second. “Have you driven up from Boston?”
“No, I came up from New York on the Vermonter, hired a car at the station.”
“Oh, well that’s a nice journey. But you must be tired! Would you like something to eat?”
He was already forgetting who she was now, the connection almost disappearing. “No, thanks, I am tired. I think I’ll make it an early night.”
“Then I’ll show you to your room,” she said, smiling, as much with her eyes as anything, a smile that looked for an old friend, like the loaded smile Jools had given him the night before.
He almost felt like he knew her too, and not for the obvious reason; her soft patrician voice and easy warmth disarmed him, making it all but impossible to associate her in his thoughts now with the pathetic figure of Bostridge and his child prostitute.
But being in her company even briefly was enough to make him think that memory might be unfair too. This was the man’s wife, his home, a man who had to have had volumes more to him than the few tawdry Technicolor snapshots JJ had stored away. What did he know anyway of a man he’d seen only in a final moment of weakness and exposure? What did he know about any of them?