Denny lifted his Champagne of Beers sky-high, and there, in the dining room that was designed to look like some kind of far-flung boat in a Southeast Asian sea, they made a toast.
“To Saturdays,” he said.
“To cherries!” said Louisa.
“To Skee-Ball,” said Ben.
“To drinking piña coladas,” said Anna. “To enjoying every last minute of it.”
Chapter 25
DI IN HIS BED.Di with his children. Di, his wife’s best friend. The button held in the air was a talisman, Denny realized, a thing with magical powers that he was supposed to understand but did not.
“That button,” he said.
Mary nodded. “It was Anna’s. I found it in my mailbox. I assume it was sent as some kind of warning.”
Warnings had been everywhere, swirling around him, Denny knew, even if he had been ignoring them. The message on the door, of course—that had been the obvious one, but there had been more subtle ones, too. Di’s appearance at his home, he now knew, was not an accident. She had come to get him off the scent. All this time, he had put his trust in the wrong person, pursuing a lead and telling her everything he knew, while she no doubt went back to the very people he was chasing.
“How far does this go?” he asked.
“I don’t know very much,” Mary said. “I have suspicions, and that’s about as far as it goes. As you can see, I’ve stayed out of it. For good reason. Safety in distance.” A noise came from the otherroom and a little boy peeked his head in. “Here’s my good reason now,” she said.
The little boy waved. He was small, about Ben’s age, though a little taller, with a spray of freckles across the bridge of his nose. Mary excused herself a moment, and Denny could hear the television from another room in the house. In a minute, she was back, smoothing the settee with her hand before sitting down.
“How much did Anna know?” Denny asked.
“I honestly have no idea. I met her for dinner. I told her I had some thoughts about Di. She didn’t take it well. She pretty much stopped speaking to me. A few weeks later, after everything happened with Anna, the button appeared, and I took myself out of it. I know exactly who those women are, and I can’t . . .”
“I understand.”
“But do you?”
“I think I’m starting to.”
“I wish I could help you more,” she said. She stood up from the settee, brushed off invisible lint from her pant legs. “I hope you understand why I can’t be involved in any of this. It’s dangerous. They’re dangerous. It’s not just Di. Or Mimi. There are connections here. In this town.”
“Like Ellen, for instance,” Denny said.
Mary didn’t answer. She tipped her head back a little. Denny could see a necklace with a charm in the shape of a star—something he hadn’t noticed before—sitting squarely in the nape of her neck. “Ellen Wilson obviously comes with a side of the Hamilton Police Department, and that’s a road I don’t want to go down. I’ll leave it at that.”
“Until recently, I was under the impression that Ellen and my wife were friends,” he said. “Well, maybe I shouldn’t say friends. I knew that Anna didn’t trust her completely. But they had afriendship. That’s what Anna had always led me to believe. It’s what Ellen certainly led me to believe when I saw her not long ago.”
“Ellen wanted you to have that impression,” Mary said.
Denny chewed on his cheek. Ellen wanted him to have that impression. Ellen wanted Anna to have that impression. Sticks wanted Denny to back away from the case entirely. It had all been connected, right from the start, from the moment his wife meddled in the milquetoast dealings of the Hamilton PTO. A dance for little kids. A bid for equality. She had exposed some raw, pink underbelly in a town where no one wanted anything exposed. Still, he felt unsettled. The scribbled penmanship. His wife’s notebook. Denny had extended grace to too many people, had spread himself thin listening to the stories of Hamilton, and where had it gotten him? He had been running in circles, listening to different versions of the town, but maybe they were all a little untrue. Mary could just as easily be protecting her own version of a story. He wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe that someone had been looking out for his wife. But something about the way she had bristled at those words,secret society.He couldn’t be sure.
“How deep do you think this goes? The police?”
“That I can’t say,” Mary said.
The idea that Sticks was involved in his wife’s murder was, of course, equally unfathomable. Blue snow, blue lights, the man at the door informing him of a man’s worst nightmare. Could he have known all along? Hamilton was, though, the kind of shiny town where everything lived beneath the surface. The houses were beautiful, those huge equestrian properties, but anyone who had ever lived inside a home that was built in the 1700s or 1800s could tell you plenty about rot, about termite damage and knob-and-tube wiring and beautiful pine flooring that was so soft that it took on the shape of a high heel if you walked on it. A house that was old and beautiful on the outside was actually just full of quiet decay, and maybe that’s what Hamilton was, too, a place where faces were painted on, where everyone was quietly spoiling on the inside. You couldn’t see it. You couldn’t know it.
“I should probably get going,” Denny said. He pushed himselfup from the sunken chair. Mary was tall, much taller than his wife, and he found himself looking squarely into her eyes. She had a sadness about her, which he only now noticed. At some point she must have put the button back into the Murano crystal ashtray, but she picked it back up and handed it to him.
“You should keep this. It really belongs to you, not me,” she said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you more.”
Denny reached out. He wanted to give her a hug, but they weren’t friends. He realized he might never see her again, this stranger, this friend of his wife’s who had spent so much time with the person he had once shared a life with. He reached out, patted Mary on the shoulder, the way you would a friend, even though she was not a friend. She was just somebody that somebody used to know. “I’ll show myself out,” he said, heading out of the sunroom, past the clutter of antiques and old, aging things, toward the door, and out through the snowy walk, into the cold, clear January day.
