Caitlin went to the motel’s window and stared out into the half-empty parking lot. A gull skimmed by, just a few feet above a parked Suburban. It reminded her she was in a seaside town. Just two days earlier, Grace had been alive here, maybe falling for another man. Bill’s son, Harry, of all people. And it had been Harry who found her body. How was he not a suspect? He must have been at least somewhat upset at Grace and her role as his father’s mistress. Mistress. The word almost made Caitlin laugh out loud. But that was what her sister had been, right? Nothing more than a mistress to a man old enough to be her father. And she’d gotten killed because of it, despite the detective’s asking questions as though there might have been some other motive for Grace’s death. The whole thing was lurid, and she hadn’t been surprised to see the news vans gathering outside of the police station earlier.
She began to have a conversation in her head with Grace, something she’d done her entire life. Can you believe it? You were murdered.
I know, right? Grace’s voice, so real in Caitlin’s head that a feeling of utter desolation swept through her that she’d never hear that voice out loud again.
Caitlin, throat aching, focused on the mental list again. She repeated the items from her earlier list, adding Get something to eat at the terrible-looking diner across the street.
Then she added one more item: Find and talk to Harry Ackerson.
Chapter 23
Then
Jake Richter, born and raised in Menasset, Massachusetts, was the son of a German immigrant named Peter Richter, a truck driver who made deliveries for a fishing company in nearby New Bedford; his mother, Jocelyn, half Portuguese and half Quebecois, had cleaned fish at the same New Bedford company. They went on three dates before getting engaged on their fourth. A year later they were married and expecting their first child. After Jacob’s birth, a labor so traumatic that she made sure to never get pregnant again, Jocelyn quit her job, occasionally picking up housecleaning work for the summer residents who owned five-bedroom cottages down at the beach.
During his interminable childhood, Jake and his parents spent every evening together in the cramped middle apartment of a brown triple-decker in Menasset’s town center. They didn’t own a television but listened to the radio every night, Peter steadily drinking brandy from a water glass while Jocelyn would eat Nabisco waffle creams and work on her needlepoint, sometimes talking back to the radio but seldom, if ever, speaking to her husband or her son. Peter Richter rarely spoke, either, and when Jacob started kindergarten he was so stunned by the sheer amount of chatter, not just from the other kids but from nervous Ms. Soares, a first-year teacher, that he refused to speak. Suspected of retardation, he was held back a year.
But by the time he reached middle school, Jacob—now known as Jake—was regularly getting high marks and had learned to insinuate himself into conversations with the other kids in his class. Boys talked about baseball and comic books and liked to make up stories about getting into fights, while girls just liked it when you paid attention to them, mainly through teasing. Both boys and girls talked about television—for a while it was Howdy Doody—but by the time Jake was getting ready to leave Menasset Middle School for the regional high school, it was all Candid Camera or a new show being aired in the afternoons called American Bandstand. Jake asked his parents only once if they would consider buying a television. His mother said that she didn’t think she’d be able to keep doing her needlepoint and watch television at the same time, and his father said that television was a waste of money. So Jake learned to secretly listen in when kids talked about the shows they watched. He memorized what they said, and that way he could pretend he watched TV as well.
When he was fifteen years old, one of the women whose houses his mother cleaned asked her if she knew anyone who could take care of the grounds in the fall. Jocelyn volunteered her son, and in October of that year, Jake began to work one day a week at Mrs. Codd’s shingled cottage, two streets from the shore and with a two-acre backyard to take care of. His job was primarily raking, getting rid of the leaves from the massive beech trees and maples that lined her property, but Mrs. Codd always had one or two small jobs for him to do around the house—taking down the storm windows, or moving the patio furniture back into the garage. She’d hover near him while he did these chores, always with a lit cigarette. Her hair, cut into a bob, was dyed a platinum shade of blond; her face was heart shaped, dominated by wide-set brown eyes made larger by heavy streaks of light blue eyeshadow. She couldn’t have been more than fifty years old—at most—but her two children were already away at college, and her husband, an insurance executive in Hartford, came out to the house only on the weekends. Like some of the kids at school, and not at all like his own parents, Emma Codd talked nonstop to Jake, even sometimes accompanying him as he raked up leaves, telling him about her two boys at college, or asking him what kids these days were like, what music did he listen to, what did he watch on television.
“We don’t have a TV,” he said to her, the first time he’d admitted that to someone.
“Well, that’s probably a very healthy thing, Jake, although I don’t know what I’d do without it in the evenings. It’s not that I watch it all the time, but it’s nice to have on just for the company, you know?”
“My parents don’t really care about my health, it’s just that my dad is too cheap.” Jake had figured out that Emma Codd, who could talk about anything, liked to talk about other people’s shortcomings most of all.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said. “I bet he’s just worried about your eyes, is all. But, really, if it has to do with money, I’d be happy to just let you have my old television set, one of those things they made just after the war, looks more like a radio with a screen in it, but I’m sure it still works. Or, you’re more than welcome to come over anytime you want in the evening and watch some television with me. I wouldn’t mind the company.”
Jake knew that his father would never accept the television, especially from Emma Codd, a woman he often referred to as “that rich bitch,” and whose husband he called “cuckold Codd,” using a word that Jake didn’t understand. But he did mention to his parents that he’d been invited to watch television at the Codd household. He knew there would be no objection. His was a cold and loveless house, but that also meant there was freedom. He could come and go as he pleased; his parents never expressed any desire to have him around, and his father even grumbled sometimes about how much the weekly food cost had increased now that Jake, who’d grown four inches in under a year, was eating so much.
Jake started going to Emma Codd’s house weeknights after suppertime, only after the dishes were cleaned, dried, and put away (his nightly chore), and only if he’d finished all his homework. In her large living room, Mrs. Codd and Jake would watch television together while she drank a Tom Collins, and talked over most of the programs. She would move around the room, freshening up her drink, or stretch out on the sofa next to Jake, sometimes brushing his legs with her bare feet.
Back at home, under his covers, he’d allow himself vague and dirty thoughts about Mrs. Codd, which would always end with him feeling repulsed by himself. Jake had limited knowledge about sex, not having learned anything from either of his parents, and having absorbed a fair amount of misinformation from kids at school. But in all that misinformation he’d never heard about a kid having any kind of relationship with an adult. It never occurred to him that Mrs. Codd would want to have sex with him. Jake knew that married couples did it, and he’d heard stories about spin-the-bottle games, and the two or three girls from Menasset who would let you get away with more than kissing, but he was still utterly surprised when Emma Codd, one night, asked Jake if he’d ever kissed a girl.
“Not really,” he said.
“Not really?” she laughed, so loud that it led to a coughing fit. She stubbed out her cigarette in the plate-sized glass ashtray on the coffee table.
“One or two, I guess,” Jake said, which was true. Margie Robinson and he had kissed on the lips in the woods behind the middle school playground. She’d claimed she wanted to see if the lipstick she was wearing would get onto his lips.
“No tongue?”
“What do you mean?”