“Why is that?”
“I did try,” she said. “I have to be very careful about what I say.” She leaned over and picked up the button. “Do you ever feel like people are watching you, Denny?”
He thought about Mary’s words. Watching. The scrawled wordKillerthat had appeared on his door. Di showing up unannounced. Sticks always being just a step ahead. Denny didn’t answer.
“I can tell from that look that you do,” Mary said.
“I’ve never really thought about it quite like that,” he said.
“Hamilton,” she said. “Always someone sticking their nose in your business, right? Even when I met Anna, that was something that irritated her about this place. She was always talking about how when she was growing up, people knew plenty about each other but still kept to themselves.”
“That was something that definitely bothered her, yes,” Denny said. “She never told me about you. I don’t even know how youmet. That’s been gnawing at me, actually. That there were things about my wife that I didn’t know. That I still don’t know.”
“Veterans Pool. I’m from here originally. I think she needed an ally.”
“She always had Di.”
Mary went quiet for a moment, ran a hand through her hair. Denny now noticed that she was younger than he had originally thought, maybe even a decade younger than he and Anna. “Some people put all their cards on the table. Anna was like that. I loved her for it.”
“And you?” He wanted to know how she viewed herself, this mysterious friend of Anna’s whom he had never met, the woman holding her button.
“I’m like her. See something, say something. I’d say that’s why we got on so well. Until we didn’t.”
“Something happened with the two of you?” Denny asked.
“Right at the end. A few weeks before she died.” She leaned over, holding the button between her index finger and thumb. “I had this feeling. Anna was running for the president of the PTO. I assume you know that.”
“A recent discovery,” he said. “But I’m learning. I think Anna was afraid I wouldn’t approve, but the funny thing is that I would have supported anything she did.”
“She was going to win.”
“There are a lot of people who wouldn’t have liked that,” Denny said.
Mary thought about that for a second. “Yes. But she knew that.Weknew that. And we knew that Mimi knew it. Every week, we met at Honeycomb, and it’s not as if Mimi didn’t know about the whole strategy.”
Denny sat silent a minute. He had no reason to trust this woman—this friend of his wife’s whom he had just met—but hewas out of reasonable choices. “I found a notebook of hers,” he said. “There was something else.”
Mary said nothing, just looked straight ahead, hands folded neatly in her lap.
He cleared his throat. “She wrote that the PTO was a cover operation. There were a few notes. Cover operation. Secret society. Things like that,” Denny said.
Those words were met with more silence. Mary did not move, but there was a nearly imperceptible twitch. Denny saw it. Something had caught her off guard. “Well, I don’t know anything about that,” she said.
“Why would she have written it? It seems like a strange thing to write. And only days before . . .”
“I really don’t know,” Mary said abruptly. “Who knows why people do the things they do?”
Now Denny was interested. He tried to prop himself up on the sinking chair. Mary was still holding the button up in the air like a magical charm. “When you met with my wife,” he said, “what was it you had the feeling about? You didn’t say.”
“It was Di,” Mary said. “All along. It was always Di.”
Chapter 24
THE PTO ELECTIONwas two weeks away. Anna had put out of her mind the dinner with Mary. In fact, she hadn’t spoken with her since. Instead, she had relied on Di for information about the ebbs and flows of the polling. On Wednesday, the day designated for their regularly scheduled tête-à-tête at Honeycomb, Mary sent a group chat saying she was sick. It was for the best, Anna thought. She didn’t want to sit in uncomfortable silence, nor did she want to explain to Di what their third-wheel friend had said. At some point, they would have to face the uncomfortable reality of it: a jealous friend who would never fit the same way that Di and Anna had. That’s what she was telling herself, at least—that all of this was because of jealousy, that Mary had felt the twinge of a thirty-year friendship brushing against her nascent one. The other feelings that had risen up Anna pushed to the back of her mind.
On Saturday, Anna told Denny to sleep in and she and the kids drove to meet Di and her kids all the way out to Salisbury Beach, even though it was winter.
“Mom said I could do as much Skee-Ball as I want this time,”Louisa told Ben in the car. That wasn’t true, of course. There was a limit. Forty dollars. But that could buy a lot of Skee-Ball, even accounting for inflation.
