“I don’t know for a fact if Annie . . . or if her husband . . . had anything to do with what happened to my husband.”
“No, of course not. But it’s information we should have. We’ll check it out.” He stood and nodded toward his partner. Harry took the opportunity to get off the sofa and walk them to the door. “We’ll let you know if we find anything out. In the meantime, if Alice mentions anything that she didn’t mention to us, then . . . you have my card?”
“I do,” Harry said.
After they’d left, Harry returned to Alice, who was now standing, smoothing out her dress in the middle of the living room. Her face was dry.
“You okay?” Harry said.
Alice didn’t answer the question, but said, “It’s this woman’s husband, I know it is.”
“Who? This Annie Callahan?”
“I was hoping you’d never have to hear that name, Harry. I’m sorry. It wasn’t your father’s fault. It was all her. She went after him. She saw his store, and she saw this house, and—”
“Tell me what happened between them,” Harry interrupted.
She hitched her shoulders back. “Is it too early for a drink, you think?”
Alice went to the sunroom while Harry made drinks: a glass of rosé for Alice and a beer for him. He was really only drinking the beer so Alice didn’t have to be alone, but was also happy to be drinking it. He was rattled by the new information.
Once they were settled—Alice on the love seat, and Harry in one of the rocking chairs—Alice said, “We hired Annie as a huge favor. Her husband, Lou, was a fisherman, is a fisherman, and, you know, with the cod restrictions, he’d been out of work for six months. Your father heard about it, and offered Annie a job. It was last fall, when there’d been extra work.”
“I didn’t know about that.”
“Your father was back from a scouting trip with too many books, of course, so he offered Annie a job. Just to help out with cataloguing, but at twenty dollars an hour.” She shook her head, more of a tremor, at the memory. “And then, before you knew it, she’s coming around here to help Bill with the books in his office. I knew. I knew something . . .”
“How old is she?” Harry asked.
“Annie? She looks a lot older than she is. I don’t know, somewhere in her thirties.”
“And they were definitely involved?”
She tipped her glass back and almost finished her wine. Harry watched her throat muscles swallowing.
“Oh, they were, for sure, Harry. I’m sorry you have to hear this. I was hoping you wouldn’t, because I know how you felt about your father, how much you admired him, but it was very clear that something was going on. And I had to force him to get rid of her. And then when the detective told me that your father’s death was not an accident, I just knew. I didn’t say anything right away, because of you, Harry, but then I decided I had to tell them.”
Harry wanted to ask Alice for more specifics. Had she caught them together? Did his father confess to her that they were involved? He didn’t know why he was skeptical—especially considering the possibility that his father had also been having an affair down in New York City—but he did wonder if Alice was overreacting.
“So she was fired?”
“She was let go, let’s just say that, and that’s when her husband finally figured it out. John told me that he came to the store, threatened Bill, told him that if he ever came near Annie again he’d kill him with his bare hands. Something like that.”
“John told you this, or my father did?”
“John was the one who told me, because he was worried. I asked Bill about it, and he said it was no big deal, just a frustrated man blowing off steam. Your father could be . . . he could be too charitable at times.”
“So you think that Lou . . . ?”
“I didn’t think your father had anything more to do with Annie, but who knows? He was always gone lately, and maybe he was meeting her somewhere else. I don’t know. Stupid man.” She looked at her glass, rolling the tiny amount of wine that was left up one of the sides.
“Can I get you some more?”
“Okay,” she said, holding out the glass for Harry to take. When he returned with the wine, Alice had curled up in the fetal position on the love seat. Harry gingerly placed her glass on the glass-topped coffee table, as she said, in a fuzzy voice, “Thank you, Harry. I might just take a little nap.”
“You should.”
“Don’t leave me, okay?”
“Okay,” Harry said, not knowing exactly what she meant, “I’ll be here if you need me.” He quietly left the living room, went up to his bedroom, opened up his laptop, and did a search for Annie Callahan or Lou Callahan, but couldn’t find anything. Then he texted Grace, asking if they could meet and talk sometime soon. He needed to get the whole story from her, why she had come to Maine. It was clear that she’d had some sort of significant relationship with his father, and the police would need to know about that, as well.
Waiting for a response, Harry paced his small bedroom. He stopped and looked at the packed bookcase, all filled with his father’s detective stories. Bill Ackerson would never know that he wound up as a corpse in his own mystery story. Harry almost smiled at the thought. He thought back to the previous Christmas, his father giving him, as he always did, a check, plus one single book, usually his father’s favorite book of that past year. This year it had been A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin. “I missed this, somehow, on the first go-round. It’s brilliant.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Harry had said.
Later that same night, Alice in bed, Harry had started the book while his father finished reading the latest Ruth Rendell.
“Why do you think you like mysteries so much?” Harry asked.
“I’m deeply skeptical of any book that doesn’t begin with a corpse.”
Harry had heard his father say these exact words, or something close to them, many times. “No, really. Why?”
His father frowned, thinking. “It’s my religion, I guess, since I don’t have a real religion. The world is chaos, and then a detective comes along and restores order. Or he doesn’t, and that’s really my favorite kind of mystery story.”
Harry had finished A Kiss Before Dying by the time he returned to school that year. It turned out to be one of those books in which order is restored, but not before a lot of damage had been done. Harry liked the book, but it had left him feeling empty and sad. Instead of bringing it back with him to Mather, he’d left it in the bookshelf in his room. He pulled it out now, looked at his father’s inscription: To Harry with love from Dad. He quickly closed the book and put it back on the shelf. A few months earlier, Harry thought he knew his father, inside and out. Now, he realized he didn’t know him at all.
His phone buzzed, a text coming through.
Come by tonight any time. Just ring the front doorbell and I’ll come let you in.
Harry wrote back—okay—then went back downstairs to check on Alice.
She was still in the sunroom, still tucked up asleep on the short sofa in the same position. She looked deeply asleep.
While Alice slept through the afternoon, Harry tidied up around the kitchen, finding a frozen pizza in the freezer, and cooking it for dinner, even though he wasn’t hungry, and doubted that Alice was, either. When she finally awoke, she wandered into the kitchen, empty glass in her hand, and asked Harry what time it was.
“Dinnertime,” he said. “You really slept.”
“I dreamt I woke up and you were gone, and I started to look for you, asking everyone I knew, but everyone told me you’d never existed. And then I was asking about your father, and it turned out he never existed, either.”
“Scary,” Harry said. “Are you hungry?”
“Maybe in a minute. I’m going to go see what’s on the TV.”
Alice turned on the television to the only channel she really watched—HGTV. A couple—a striking blonde and her dark-haired husband—were putting an offer on a California ranch house they wanted to renovate and flip. Harry brought Alice a plate with a slice of the pizza on it. “Thank you, Harry. Who knew you were so handy in the kitchen?”