Everybody’s Fool, a novel by Richard Russo, is set in the fictional town of North Bath in upstate New York. There, over the course of one weekend, a crew of local eccentrics juggle long-standing grudges, acute crises, and surreal weather events to the best of their limited abilities. Along the way, readers learn about their troubled pasts.
At Hilldale Cemetery, Douglas Raymer, chief of police, arrives late for the interment of a local judge. The service is long, and between the heat and his emotional distress, Raymer’s feeling poorly. The setting is stirring up feelings about his late wife, Becka, who died in a freak accident the previous year. Raymer carries an object in his pocket: a garage-door opener that was found in Becka’s car. He thinks he can use it to track down the mystery man Becka had been seeing behind his back before she died. Suddenly, the ground quakes. The mayor, Gus Moynihan, urges Raymer to investigate the cause. As Raymer sets off, he faints and falls into the judge’s open grave before the casket is lowered.
Meanwhile, a handful of locals gather at Hattie’s, a diner run by a woman named Ruth. Carl Roebuck, a disreputable businessman who’s having a problem with one of his developments, the Old Mill Lofts, is chatting with Donald “Sully” Sullivan, his friend and landlord of the house where Carl lives. Sully’s preoccupied with thoughts of his own impending death. He has a bum heart and doctors recently told him he has only a year or two to live unless he gets an internal defibrillator. He doesn’t intend to get the surgery.
The mood at Hattie’s takes a turn for the worse upon the arrival of the proprietor’s former son-in-law, Roy Purdy, who was recently released from prison. On some level, Ruth hates Roy because he beat her daughter Janey, but she seems to have a soft spot for him anyway. Sully, Ruth’s former lover who also happens to hate Roy, idly contemplates his murder. Soon after Roy leaves, they hear a loud noise and the room shakes. They go outside where they can see that something bad has happened at Old Mill Lofts. They’ll later learn a wall collapsed on someone’s car.
Raymer is at the hospital recovering from his fainting spell when he learns about the collapse. Since his car is at the cemetery, his employee, Charice Bond, sends her brother Jerome, a cop in a neighboring town, to collect him. As Jerome drives, Raymer realizes he’s lost the garage-door opener. He and Jerome rush to the cemetery, but it’s too late. The judge’s grave has been filled. Presumably, the opener is now six feet under.
Arriving home from Hattie’s, Ruth gets a call from Roy, who asks for a ride home from the hospital. The car that the wall collapsed on was his, and he was inside it at the time. In the car, Ruth offers to pay Roy if he’ll leave town and never come back. He declines.
After a brief stop at the Lofts, Jerome and Raymer head to the Morrison Arms, the seedy apartment building where Raymer lives. They go to Gert’s, a bar across the street. Over the radio, Charice informs Raymer that there’s a cobra loose in the Arms. The snake is the property of William Smith, an exotic reptile dealer who’s running his illegal operation from one of the units. Among the residents who had fled outside, Raymer spots Roy, who has been staying at the Arms with a woman named Cora.
As Raymer prepares to search the building with someone from animal control, he hears a scream. Assuming that someone has found the snake, he runs towards the noise. Its source is Jerome who’s acting very strange. Someone has vandalized his beloved 1964 Mustang. He’s wrongly convinced that Raymer is the culprit.
With the snake still at large, the Arms is deemed off-limits to residents for the evening. Raymer decides to sleep in his office. When Charice finds him there, she takes pity and invites him to dinner; he’s tired, hungry, battered, and bruised. Meanwhile, Sully and his best friend, Rub Squeers, head to a bar for some drinks. There, they run into a local known as Spinmatics Joe, who leaves the bar after Sully teases him for not being able to pronounce “Hispanics,” which is why he’s known as Spinmatics Joe. Outside, unbeknownst to anyone, the snake dealer, who’s fleeing the Arms in his van, hits Joe. Smith drags Joe into the woods and leaves him there to die.
With a start, Raymer wakes up from a dream about his dead wife. He’s on Charice’s porch where he fell asleep after a big dinner. She’s nowhere to be found and he can’t get inside because the door is locked. Worse, an electrical storm is imminent. Though he realizes it’s a terrible idea, Raymer decides to shimmy down one of the columns that’s holding up the porch. Too late, he realizes the column isn’t stable. Somehow he avoids falling to his death.
Raymer begins walking. His car is still at the cemetery. He’s soon picked up by Officer Miller, who has a crush on Charice and happens to be in the area stalking her. Miller reveals that Charice isn’t home, which Raymer didn’t realize; he thought she was mad at him for having fallen asleep. As the two policemen drive past Charice’s house, they see that her porch has been struck by lightning. Suddenly, Raymer’s convinced that he wasn’t just dreaming about Becka; her ghost had visited him there on the porch. He asks Miller to take him to the cemetery. Raymer wants to visit Becka’s grave to “talk” to her ghost.
Another storm is brewing. As Raymer reaches his late wife’s headstone, the sky opens up. He sees that someone left her flowers and assumes it must have been her secret lover. When he bends down to check the card for a name, he’s struck by lightning. Afterwards, he notices a new, yet familiar “presence” or second self in his consciousness, which he christens Dougie. The lightning also injured his hand. For the next day, Raymer will pick at the wound, ultimately causing severe damage. For now, Dougie urges Raymer to look at the card, which he’s still clutching in his hand. Unfortunately, there is no name.
After a night at the bar, Sully returns home where he finds Raymer, his lifelong nemesis, asleep on his toilet. Raymer is there to ask a favor. He wants Sully to help him dig up the judge’s grave so he can retrieve the garage-door opener. Sully’s up for it; he’s in the mood to do something stupid. He recruits Carl as a third set of hands and they set off. The opener is not in the grave, however. The three men part ways.
The following morning, Gus Moynihan is searching for his mentally unstable wife, Alice, who’s gone missing. Eventually he finds her near Raymer’s old home. At Hattie’s, Ruth finds Roy in her daughter’s apartment, which is adjacent to the restaurant. When Ruth tells Roy to leave, he viciously attacks her. Sully sneaks up from behind and hits him on the head with a skillet. Roy, who’s badly injured, flees the scene with Cora. They drive to a nearby lake.
Charice radios Raymer, who’s back at the Morrison Arms. She explains that she left the night before because Jerome had a panic attack. As they’re talking, Raymer realizes that Roy was the person who trashed Jerome’s car. Later, at the station, Charice tells Raymer that Spinmatics Joe is missing. Raymer and Miller find Joe in the woods, where he’s been lying since the hit-and-run accident.
At the hospital, Ruth’s extensive injuries are treated. It’s touch and go at first but eventually her family learns that she’ll live. Sully leaves the hospital with two items on his agenda. First, he stops by Ruth’s house to tell her husband, Zack, what happened. Then he hunts Roy whom he intends to murder. He looks several places with no success.
Raymer, who’s on a hunt of his own, has uncovered a lead on a damaged vehicle that may have been involved in the hit-and-run. Soon he finds the vehicle, a white van that someone sold to a mechanic. Raymer deduces that his suspect is likely on a bus heading north. Stopping a bus as it leaves the station, he boards. He confronts William Smith, who threatens him by opening a box that contains a deadly snake. “Dougie” tricks Smith by saying the box is empty. When Smith bends down to investigate, the snake administers a fatal bite. Raymer returns it to the box.
Raymer heads back to the cemetery to have another chat with Becka’s ghost. Rub, who’s a gravedigger there, gives Raymer the lost garage-door opener, which he found the day before. Raymer calls Jerome to let him know that Roy vandalized his car. Jerome still thinks it was Raymer. Raymer goes to Jerome’s house and finds an extremely agitated Jerome in the garage. Charice arrives hoping to forestall conflict, but Jerome has already pulled a gun. Jerome confesses that he was Becka’s secret lover. He thinks that Raymer has known all this time. For his part, Raymer is distracted by the realization that he has feelings for Charice and by the pain in his injured hand, which has gotten much worse.
Roy, having knocked Cora unconscious with a rock, takes off in her car. Though he’s certain he’s on his way back to prison, he wants to dispatch Sully in retaliation for the skillet incident before he’s caught. Sully’s one step behind him, checking out the lake area that Roy just left. Later, near his own home, Sully spots Cora’s car. He knows Roy must be near, but he can’t find him. As Sully searches, the chest pain and shortness of breath that have been plaguing him all day intensify. He blacks out in his driveway. Courtesy of Officer Miller, who happened to see him collapse, Sully wakes up in the hospital. He’s had surgery and he feels much better. He’s looking forward to the rest of his life.
Raymer, who survived Jerome’s assault, is also in the hospital receiving treatment for his hand. As he leaves, he spots a fire. It’s Sully’s trailer, and Roy’s corpse is inside. As it turns out, Zack had stopped by Sully’s trailer to tell him that Ruth’s condition had improved. He killed Roy, who was in the trailer waiting for Sully, then burned down the trailer.
At the station, Raymer runs into Charice, who explains that she’s known about Jerome and Becka for some time. She also says that Jerome has struggled mightily with obsessive-compulsive disorder. They kiss, and Raymer says he thinks he’s in love with her. She seems to return his feelings. They agree to put the past behind them.