“And realistically,” Di continued, “do you think there are that many people out there who have your phone number and a big Rolodex of people who they can give it to?”
It was that last part that stuck with Anna. The access. The assault. The PTO, they had strength in numbers. But then, the kids in Hamilton, they had Internet-savvy, too. They could just as easily rile up a crowd. She wasn’t sold. “I’m not convinced that Mimi Mar is smart enough to be able to execute this kind of thing,” Anna said.
“Maybe you’re underestimating her,” Di said. “I don’t really know. I don’t know her that well. But she’s on, what? Her third term as president of the PTO? Six years? She’s been in the PTO for practically her entire time as a mom. That sounds pretty powerful to me.”
“I’m not sure how much power I want to give to a parent-teacher organization, to be honest,” Anna said. “It gives me the creeps.”
“Fair enough,” Di said. “All I’m saying: Maybe give the blonde the benefit of the doubt.” She shook her own shorn blond hair like a little wet dog. Anna giggled. Di was anything but a prototypical blonde.
Maybe warnings were everywhere. A scrim of ice, creeping across the windshield, formed a bony finger. “Would you look at that,” Anna said.
“It’s pointing right at us,” Di said, and it was true; it really was.
Di had always been a gifted partner in crime. She was born to do it, as the youngest child. Diane Foley, before she was Diane Maguire, forgotten child, tomboy in childhood who had somehow outgrown ugly duckling status far earlier than the rest of their motley crew. She had been the first to be noticed by boys, but she never let it stop her, never let the attention divert her from hijinks and adventures. Maybe it even made her a bigger prankster than the other two: Anna and Kaitlin Connors, who had died of a heroin overdose back in the early 2000s, when the stuff was consuming all of the northern New England towns, back in a bleak winter that was not unlike this one. Stuff like that, stories like that, were what bonded Anna and Di together after all these years, Anna sometimes thought. It was why they were here, at the Hamilton Police Department, on a Saturday morning—okay, fine, call it early afternoon by now—rubbing hands together in the cold, looking at each other for confirmation.Are we going to do this? Okay, fine. Let’s do it.
Inside, they asked to speak with an officer and were directed to have a seat: two filthy and nubby orange chairs that looked like they had never been reupholstered, like they had been there at least since the 1970s. In time, a short, meaty officer with a crooked name tag that readMalkincame out and shoved a paw at them.
“Ladies,” he said. “Right this way.”
Perhaps predicting what she was thinking, Di jabbed an elbow into Anna’s rib cage, like they were thirteen all over again. A mistrust for authority, that’s what she had always been accused of possessing, right or wrong. There was the oldWayne’s Worldjoke: smells like bacon. Cops. Pigs. Anna thought of it now. Wrong time to piss an officer off, of course. She knew that, though she couldn’t help but think of the cops as the enemy.
“Thanks for taking the time,” Di said, putting on her best Hamilton Mom performance.
“Ever been in the station before?” Malkin asked, making a joke about upper-middle-class mothers from Hamilton and the station, and this time Di elbowed Anna hard. Hampton Beach, 1998. Weed wasn’t legal yet. A joint. Officers’ flashlights right in their fuckingeyes.Locked up and cuffed to a metal bench for two hours until they paid bail. Plus, the assholes grabbed their fake IDs and threatened them with possession of false identity, a felony.
“Now what would two fine upstanding women like us be doing in a police station, officer?” Di smiled her best mom smile, flashed her perfect white teeth, which she now got bleached regularly by a very expensive North Shore dentist. Her husband was a corporate lawyer, and she could afford to do that, even if she didn’t wear Moncler every single day. She was no Mimi Mar, but she could perform with the best of them.
“You’d be surprised,” Malkin said. “You sure would be surprised.” He laughed a tinny little laugh, ineffectual for a man of his heft. It made Anna want to laugh, too, but she didn’t. She stared straight ahead at the narrow little hallways with their yellow-white light. Malkin took the lead and opened a conference room for them. “Right in here,” he motioned.
Inside, at a table meant to look like wood that was actually plastic, Anna filled out five pages, signed her scrawled cursive signature.Anna Plummer, February 12, 2022,beside a long and detailed accounting of every message and threat sent to her.
“We’ll handle it from here,” Malkin said. “I’m sure you’ll have no more trouble, Mrs. Plummer.”
“You can call me Anna,” she said.
Chapter 10
OUTSIDE, THE FIRSTflurries from the storm scurried like they were fake, like they were part of some movie set. No sign of the police today, trailing him home or parked anywhere near the house. Sticks had sent an obligatory text earlier in the day to report only that Denny’s DNA swab had come back negative. No surprise there, Denny thought. He himself trusted his own innocence, even if the cops and the town did not.
Denny had received a text about an Amazon delivery at the front door. Louisa and Ben were readingDog Man: Fetch-22in the playroom, offering up a rare moment of silence. All of the things that Anna had once spent hours shopping for, Denny now bought last-minute: toothpaste, detergent, dog food, socks. Prime next-day delivery had been saving his life, another marker of his wife’s absence, of the hollowed-out space where she had been. He could only show up. He could not be her. Ordering things online was no true replacement for a parent, and he mourned what his kids were losing in the kind of mom who went out to actual stores and hand-picked the things she knew they loved. But he felt like a hard-tappedspring maple, too tired to produce even one more ounce of usable sap. Of what use was he now? He could make his tables and chairs, feed his kids, and hold their hands at the bus stop, but he could not be Anna Plummer. He could not be that.
And so, Denny ordered the toothpaste, detergent, and dog food, and they arrived in large cardboard boxes. His wife would have been horrified. Retrieving the boxes, Denny noticed that the door looked different. Scratched across the hunter green paint, as if marked in blood—but no, it was just paint, Denny thought, holding his breath for a minute—was a scrawled word.KILLER,it read, right there, across the door to his house. The indecency of it. The gall. That someone would come right up to the front steps, as he stood not feet away, talking on the phone, in his house, where he made breakfast every morning for his kids—Ben’sfrupples,the word he still used instead ofwaffles, even though the kid had long ago learned to pronounce it correctly—it was a desecration, an invasion.
The Amazon delivery person had just been there. Could it have been? But no. Denny checked his phone. He had received a notification for the boxes, and, what’s more, an email with a picture: boxes propped against the front door. That was a coincidence, yes, but the door in the grainy photograph was the same door that he had left behind, and anyway, what delivery person would jeopardize a job that could so easily get them fired?
No, there was obviously another explanation, a more insidious one. Whoever had done this thing had been there just seconds before, had missed Denny by a hair, which made the skin on his arms grow prickly. How had Denny missed the culprit? How had this person had time to violate his home and slip so quickly and so quietly into oblivion? The house was set on a hill. Any car would have had to have been parked on the busy road below. In the settling dusk, Denny saw scuffed boot marks, large, leading down the steps toward the driveway, where they evaporated into thin air, asif they came from a ghost. He could not understand it. The timing, the footprints, the cat scratch on the door: It made no sense, but it had clearly been done to provoke in him a sense of fear, in this snow-lit witching hour, his wife’s spirit haunting the walk, surely telling him something that he could not quite understand. Men’s boots, they had to be, he thought, but no man could simply cease to exist, no man could be there at the door one minute and then gone the next. An impossible feat. A violation of time and space and physics.
Something deeper had started to sink into Denny’s consciousness, a vague feeling that maybe—and perhaps it was paranoia, he couldn’t be sure—he was being set up. To stage such an act of vandalism took real skill. Professional skill, Denny thought. A cop might be good at replicating a phantom. A cop might be able to get up to a home without anyone noticing. A cop might be the perfect person to wipe evidence clean and make sure none was ever found after the fact. That his wife’s murder investigation was unsolved had opened in him not only a chasm of grief but also a deep mistrust for everyone. He couldn’t be sure that Sticks was doing his job, that he could trust anyone in this small town, that scraping away the patina of Hamilton left behind anything but rotten framing. And that was what scared Denny Plummer the most: that somewhere, buried in the architecture of power, lay things he did not want to know, did not need to know, and was in danger of finding out about. Of course, thinking this—any of this—was ridiculous, and Denny knew it.
He stood looking at the door and the boot marks and the snow, which had started to fall a little faster now, catching the day-end light. Under different circumstances, it would look pretty, he thought, the kind of magical snow that always arrived at this time of February, when everyone was just about fed up with winter. Six more weeks of it? You could barely stand it, could barely hang on in the cold, and then there you were, struck speechless by thediamond glisten of that stupid snowfall. It was coming down now, harder than ever. For once, the weathermen hadn’t been exaggerating. The promised snowstorm had finally arrived.
The children were asleep. Sticks had come by to take an official report about the door but had seemed untroubled. The officer was worried about the things that seemed to matter least and was unconcerned about the ones that seemed to matter most. Someone had been here, on this property, while Denny was in the other room with his own kids, but Sticks had shaken it off as if it had been just a childhood prank. NotKillerwith a capitalK,no, justkiller,like the adjective, because words, he assumed, could have so many different meanings. It was a punch in the fucking gut, was what it was. He could see, from the officer’s eyes, that he was not being taken seriously. That he was asuspect,not avictim,and it made himangry,even though he struggled labeling his own emotions (he was getting better at it, he had to admit, since Anna was no longer around to pull it out of him, almost as if he had absorbed this part of his wife in her absence, this ability to see his own deficiencies and proactively work on them).
Since his wife’s death, Denny had avoided her glossy blue office, and he had made it a point to walk through different parts of the house. That space, where she so often stared out from her desk at a square of lawn and the staggeringly tall pine trees, had been a place for her own contemplations. It was where she went, he guessed, to think about the work she could have done if she had been a little braver. Next to her desk was a collapsed portable easel that she had given up on years before. He couldn’t remember the last time she had rescued her paints from the abyss.
Tonight, he turned on the overhead light in her office. Denny had forgotten about his wife’s backup computer, the one he had urged her to buy just in case the first one crashed. She was, afterall, a copywriter. She needed a backup plan. And there it was, right where she had left it, top left drawer, a gold MacBook, lifeless in its case. He propped it up on the ergonomically correct stand that he had gotten her two years earlier. The stand was on top of her midcentury desk, along with the other ephemera of her life. A faded photograph of her parents on their wedding day, cutting a very tall cake. A black porcelain Crate & Barrel crock overstuffed with pens and pencils, many of them broken. A letter organizer with all manner of papers inside: self-adhesive postage stamps, tax information, unread magazines, pieces of artwork created by their children that had no other real home.
He turned the laptop on and entered his wife’s password.Glazed. So stupid, this inside joke, that she would even dedicate the password to a donut. But look at him now, in this moment of silence, thinking of her and her donuts. Glazed. She had had the last word, all right.
