“What does that mean? It could mean many things. He could have argued with someone along the path. It could have been an attempted mugging, although your father was found with his wallet on him. It’s possible that some kid threw the rock that hit your father and it was a complete accident. We just don’t know. That’s why I’m here, just to ask you some questions.”
“Okay,” Harry said, then added, “Should I text my stepmother? Should she be here?”
“I’d like to hear from you right now.”
“Sure,” Harry said. He watched as the detective pulled a spiral-bound notebook and a pen from the inside of his jacket. Harry thought that he couldn’t have been more than forty years old, although he had a receding hairline, noticeable even though his hair was cut very close to his scalp. He had a long nose and thin lips, and his dark eyes were set deep in their sockets.
“Can I ask you some questions about your father?” he said.
Harry nodded.
“Had anything changed in his life recently? How was his marriage?”
“Honestly, I don’t know that much about my father’s marriage.”
“How long had they—”
“Since I went to college, so about four years.”
“Can you think of anyone who might have had a reason to harm your father?”
“No.”
“Disgruntled customers from the store? Old girlfriends?”
Harry shook his head.
“Do you know anything about your father’s financial situation?”
“You mean, did he have money?”
“That. Or did he have money problems? How was the store doing?”
“Fine, I think. My father did okay in his business, well enough to send me to college. He had some family money, as well, I think. And my mom had some money from her parents. My biological mother.”
“Your mother is . . . ?”
“She died. About seven years ago.”
The detective jotted that fact down in his notebook, as though it was the first thing he learned that he hadn’t known already. “How did she die?” he asked.
“Of lung cancer.”
“Did your father have close friends here in Kennewick that you knew of?”
“He was friends with John Richards, who works for him.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Not much. He’s a retiree who started out by volunteering to help out at the store, but now he pretty much co-manages it with my father.” Harry stumbled over the words, aware he was using the present tense.
“And they were friends?”
“Oh, yeah. I don’t know if they were social with each other, if they did things outside of the store, but my father relied on him.”
“What about other employees?”
“I know that he sometimes got someone to help out during the summer, when there was the most foot traffic in the store, but they were usually teenagers or college students.”
“You never came up and helped out during a summer?”
“No,” Harry said.
“Okay. What about other friends? Did your father and his wife socialize with other couples at all?”
“I don’t really know, but I don’t think so. Alice has a friend named Chrissie Herrick—that’s where she is right now—and she’s married but I don’t know if they did ‘couple’ things together.”
The detective pulled a vibrating phone from his pants pocket. He checked the screen, then put the phone into his suit jacket pocket. “Sorry,” he said, then slid forward fractionally on the sofa. “Anyone else you can think of that your father had regular contact with? Anyone he kept in touch with in New York?”
“His old business partner, Ron Krakowski, was there, and they were still close, but he never even leaves the city.”
He jotted the name down on his pad, then put it back in his suit jacket. It was clear that he was getting ready to go. “You’ve been very helpful, Harry,” he said as he stood.
Harry stood, as well, and accepted the card that the detective was holding out to him. “If you think of anything else, even if it seems insignificant, give me a call. That’s my cell number on the card,” the detective added.
At the door, Detective Dixon asked Harry if he was planning on staying in Kennewick awhile.
“I have no other plans,” Harry said. “I’ll probably help out at the store.”
As soon as the detective turned to go, Harry watched as he pulled his cell phone out, thumbed the screen, then lifted it to his ear. He was talking as he got into the maroon Impala and shut the door behind him. The car’s glass was tinted.
Harry turned back into the house and thought of calling Alice but quickly decided against it. Instead he wandered back into the living room and looked out at the rainy day, trying to wrap his head around the new information. He felt as though his body was reacting to the news faster than his mind was; his chest hurt, and his limbs felt electrified, like he needed to do something physical. He realized the feeling was anger. His father might have been killed. Harry’s mind flashed on the young brunette woman that he’d seen outside of the house and at the funeral. He remembered that he was going to ask Alice about her today. He stared at the window. It was still raining, but a streak of blue sky had appeared over the tree line to the west. Harry suddenly needed to get out of the house. He grabbed one of his father’s raincoats from the row of pegs in the front hall, and stepped through the door onto the front steps. He felt instantly better, breathing in the damp air. He walked to the end of the driveway, then arbitrarily turned right and began to walk, head down, the diminishing rain pattering on the hood of his father’s coat.
Chapter 9
Then
Edith Moss’s funeral was held at a church in Biddeford, and she was buried in a family plot. Alice wondered if that was what she would have wanted, considering the way she talked about her family, but Alice also knew it didn’t matter. Her mother was dead and would never know the difference.
Edith’s two brothers were there, and some of their kids from assorted girlfriends and ex-wives. Alice hadn’t seen any of them since they’d moved out of Biddeford to Kennewick. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Edith had said. Alice actually liked her uncle Claude, even though he was supposedly the worse of the two Moss brothers; he rarely worked, and drank all day. But he was always in a good mood, and when Alice was a little kid, he’d give her packs of fruit-flavored chewing gum. Her uncle Theo, who never gave her anything, was a construction foreman with a bad back who was now on disability. In the receiving line, he said to Alice, “Guess you get all that Saltonstall money, now, eh?”
“I guess,” Alice said, resolving to never see any of her Biddeford relatives again.
A few of Jake’s friends from the bank came but no family. Gina came, of course, and so did Justin, and a few other kids from high school that Alice barely knew. Justin couldn’t take his eyes off Alice during the brief, terrible reception in the church’s basement. She wondered if he was trying to figure out if her “boyfriend” was there. Would he know she’d been lying? She didn’t particularly care one way or another. She hadn’t thought she’d ever see him again after the party at his house, and she was pretty sure that now she’d never see him again after her mother’s funeral.
Everyone kept asking Alice what her plans were. Was she going away to college? Would she come back to Biddeford? She told them she didn’t know yet, but she did know. She wanted to keep living with Jake. She’d take classes at MCC, just for something to do, but now she had Jake all to herself. She pictured them trying new restaurants up and down the coast, maybe even traveling together.
After the reception, Jake drove Alice back along Route 1 from Biddeford and through Kennebunkport. “I don’t want to go back home quite yet,” he said.