In good health.
—Your Faithful Mouse
After that, Anna wrote back twice more, but it was into the void; no more emails arrived. Denny had never needed a sounding board so badly, had never wished for a partner so fervently. He had always been solitary in his work, the kind of artist who thrived on time spentalone in a shed, but this kind of problem was bigger than him, bigger than Anna. It was a problem that bubbled beneath the crust of a respectable-looking town. There was a reason that Anna couldn’t tackle it herself, even though she was strong-willed and bold. Unstoppable force, immovable object. Which was stronger in the end? It was the force: The force would win. Anna was just another object in the way, and they had numbers, so many of them, pushing her out of the way, making her yield: She had no choice but to yield.
Denny now realized that his wife had stumbled onto genuinely grave danger, the kind of danger that could get a person killed. A secret society might be hard to believe, but there wasn’t much about any of this that was easy to believe, and if his revelation about Life Time and the pool incident with Louisa had taught him anything, it was that Mimi Mar was cold and unyielding, like New Hampshire granite. Whatever mess had started with the Ziti with Your Sweetie Dance and had escalated with the PTO elections may have been only that: a mess. But the minute that Anna discovered a wide and flowing river of deceit, that just may well have sealed her fate.
The Gerhard Richter painting that had followed Anna around for so many years, Denny knew, was calledCandle,orKerzein German. In 2011, it was sold to a private collector for over eleven million pounds. Sometimes when Anna was feeling bad about having abandoned some of her creative pursuits, she looked the painting up on the Internet and stared at it. Denny had caught her doing this before. She would close the browser just as he was walking into the room, but he knew. This was one of the things he knew about his wife: that she had some regrets, and that these regrets lingered. They had a long half-life.
And maybe that candle, with its tormenting glow, kept her thinking of other things. She wasn’t painting, but she was planning. Planning to make Hamilton better. Planning on ushering in a better generation of kids. Always planning. Denny could see the candle himself now, the flame slightly blurred.
“When the time is right, I’ll be here to help you,” the voice said. It was Anna’s voice, or it was his voice, or it was just a whisper in the emerging light. But Denny knew that he would put the pieces together. Anna had left a trail for him to find, breadcrumbs leading him to a destination.
“Thank you,” he said to the ghosts he didn’t believe in. “Thank you.”
One year. At the bottom of the stairs, Denny looked at the markings on the wall where he had notched the growth of his children, now a year without their mother. Louisa had grown in leaps and bounds. Anna had never been tall—diminutive in stature but never in substance, she liked to say. But Louisa was proving to be a counterpoint, sprouting faster than her father could account for. Ben was a smaller, softer version of his parents. Was it Denny’s imagination, or was his son a little quieter and more reserved now? He was sensitive to the world around him, and he could recite obscure facts and figures about it.
“The lion’s mane is the longest jellyfish in the world,” Ben said over breakfast. The house felt more empty than usual, like a hole had opened up that morning, just for them.
“No, it’s the Portuguese man-of-war,” Louisa said.
“It’s the lion’s mane!” Ben said. He knew about these things. His best friend from school, Liam, was as studious and knowledgeable as he was when it came to sea animals and their accompanying factoids. “It can grow to be almost as big as a person.”
“Disgusting,” Louisa said.
Denny didn’t find it disgusting, though. He was fascinated by what lurked below in nature, by how other species survived. The ocean, so calm and serene on its surface, hid so many secrets beneath. You never knew what you might find if you dipped a toe below. A black-tipped shark, hunting for prey. A school of angelfish, dancing in the afternoon light. Or a lion’s mane jellyfish, tentacles searching for something to hold on to.We are all just full of secrets,Denny thought.Every last one of us.Anna had been full of secrets, and he had his secrets, too, even now, a year later.
He was still reeling from the ghost. Was she real? Was he? Now it was time, Denny knew, to put the last pieces together, to make right what had been made wrong a whole year ago. The center of his world had been set askew, corrupted. It was up to him to correct course.
All those sea creatures were more dangerous than they looked. Anna would have used the wordinsidious. The danger was the kind you couldn’t see immediately. Maybe a bear looked ferocious, its fangs glistening, threatening to draw blood. But it was the jellyfish that could get you. Wasn’t it the box jelly, after all, that could kill a person with just a single point of contact? Wasn’t the box jelly the creature that had defeated the indefatigable Diana Nyad, who had doggedly pursued the swim between Cuba and Florida multiple times before finally achieving her goal?
Box jellyfish crept up in the middle of the night, caught unlucky swimmers by surprise, injected them with venom so poisonous and toxic that they could not go on. The venom was a paralytic, entering the bloodstream swiftly and effectively. Anna had found herself, too, amid a community of box jellies, women so swift and poisonous that extrication was impossible. You could scream, but who was there to listen, after all? It was a sea full of them, box jellies, pulsing in the night.
Sticks, of course, was a lost cause, and he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Mimi. But Denny wondered if he might still have some luck with Di. Her husband, Mark, worked long days in Boston as a corporate lawyer. He wouldn’t be home until evening. Denny considered a peace offering, something that would feel organic and natural. He never stopped by Di’s house, not even when she and Anna were at the peak of their friendship, andit would stretch the limits of credulity to think that he would be doing so now, unless he needed something from her.
Denny was good at making people need him, though. That was the art of being a furniture maker: He produced beautiful things that people didn’t know they needed that they suddenly made space for in their lives, that they suddenly had to have. He could make people fall in love with items, like the Windsor chair that he had recently made with no distinct owner in mind. It was just sitting in the work shed, waiting for someone to find a home for it.
As the kids continued to fight over the lion’s mane and the Portuguese man-of-war, Denny thought about the Windsor chair left in the shed, and how after the bus came he would load it into the back of the Jeep and drive it over to Di’s. He knew, in a deep and hot kind of way, that Di had been involved somehow with Anna’s death. She had known. She had been involved. She had been there. She had helped cover it up. Di, who had curled up against his wife in the years when she was still in the process of becoming a person. He knew it as surely as he knew anything, even without proof, even without words.
He needed to see her, the cold and calculating look in her eyes, the loop her mind took when he saidAnna Plummer.If she asked for an explanation about the chair, he would just look at her the way she had looked at him the day before, with a mixture of want and need. It was a chair that needed a place to live, and he was a person who was in the business of delivering to people the things that they weren’t quite sure they wanted.
Denny didn’t see Di’s car in the driveway when he pulled in, but the lights on the first floor were on and a cotton ball of smoke was rising from the chimney. One of Anna’s favorite parts of Di’s so-called estate was the floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace in the home’sfamily room. She said she wasn’t jealous of the things Di had, but he could tell that the fireplace was the one thing that his wife envied.
“I don’t want a house like that, but I want a fireplace like that,” she often said, knowing that they could never have either.
He was careful to open the back of the Jeep in such a way that the chair didn’t slide. He didn’t want to scratch it, nor did he want to risk it slipping out, since the driveway was graded. He was parked slightly uphill, and the chair tipped toward his stomach, and he caught it at an awkward angle, assuming the wood’s full weight. A chair like that was heavy, substantial. It could last a lifetime if you treated it well.
Di must have heard him in the driveway, because she opened the door and called to him from the granite steps. “What’s going on here?” she called. She wore a matching gray sweatsuit that, though generic, somehow looked intentional on her. A delicate string of pearls lay close to her neckline, and her blond hair was pulled back from her face with a wide cloth headband, also gray. “I wasn’t expecting company,” she said, gesturing to her outfit by way of apology.
“I didn’t mean to come by unannounced,” he said, repositioning the chair and hoisting it up from the bottom so that he could carry it and still walk straight ahead while talking. “I wanted to bring you this.”
Di took a step back into the entrance of her house. She appraised the chair, looking surprised. “A Windsor?” she said. “Well, it’s beautiful. What should I do with it?”
“Anything you want.” Denny was stopped at the front step. “May I?” he said. Di had blocked passage any farther and was looking the chair up and down.
“Oh, yes, yes. I’m sorry.” She stepped back, letting him in.
The chair was elegantly turned with a deep stain. She could bring it into the first-floor study, but instead she stood staring at it. Denny could smell the fire blazing.
