The local hardware store bore a sign that said EST 1911, though it looked as if it had been in Shorehaven since the town’s founding in 1643. In contrast to the hardness of the fluorescent-lit big-box stores, this place had a reassuring, can-do atmosphere that was welcoming—causing suburbanites to pull back their shoulders and stand taller as they came through the door. Even if they’d bought their split-level only five months earlier, they moved confidently toward a wall near the entrance, covered with a timeless collection of bolts, nails, and screws: Gotta get my materials. It gave them the sensation of knowing their houses deeply, and of having roots in Shorehaven’s equivalent of a trading post: Just pickin’ up some round-head nails.
The locals could still buy modern items like ceramic outdoor cookers and gizmos that turned toilets into multitaskers. But the homey cedar barrels filled with flashlights that got wheeled out during hurricane season and the tiered pine bins of power-tool accessories warmed up any coldness of clamshell packaging. Rough wood, a much-used bristle broom leaning informally against a display of rakes, Doris smiling behind the counter adding up purchases—these charms turned customers into the kind of neighbors who, in an earlier era, would call out on leaving: See ya at Fred’s barn raising.
I was studying sandpaper when I heard: “Hi, Corie.” It was John Grillo, landscape drainage expert and, today, my answered prayer. John was not only a member of the Wednesday lunch group; he was also the guy who brought Pete Delaney into the mix.
“How are you, John?” I asked. His full head of dark hair, contrasting with white, brushed-back sideburns and his outdoorsy bronzed skin, could have made him swoonworthy, the type of whom women would confess: OMG, isn’t he hot for a guy his age? Except his equal opportunity directness—no dancing eyebrow, no glance up and down a woman’s body—diminished the crooner sizzle my mom would have adored.
“I’m good, except I ran out of extra-fine sandpaper.” It was chore day, Saturday morning just moments before nine.
“Painting something?” I asked. Being the only child of a DIY dad had at least given me experience and vocabulary, if not skill.
“The damn dog finally got old enough to stop chewing the legs on the dining room chairs,” he said. “So I’m in the ninety-ninth step of sanding and varnishing. You?”
“Talk about sanding … I’m thinking of getting my dad a random orbital sander for Father’s Day.”
“Good gift,” he said, nodding a little like a bobble head.
“Oh, while you’re here, I’ve been meaning to ask you forever. It was you and Iris who got the lunch group going, right?”
“Right. Well, it was really Iris’s idea.”
“And she brought in Phoebe?”
“She did,” he nodded, recognizing a fond but hazy detail from a decade earlier. “I just rounded up …” If John’s consciousness were visible, I could have seen Pete Delaney teetering on its edge. But I gave him a minute to see if he could retrieve it himself. “Pete Delaney,” he said finally. “That big Mad Men ad agency he was working at? Gave him the ax. Relatively small severance package, from what he said.”
“He must have been devastated,” I said.
“I guess,” John said. The tip of the collar of his three-button sport shirt turned up and he smoothed it down. The shirt was rich people’s dark green, like racing cars and walls hung with paintings of game birds. Instead of a polo pony insignia above the left pec, there was an arc, like a small hill, with LANDSCAPE & DRAINAGE above and J. GRILLO, BLA, MLA below. “With Pete, kind of hard to tell what he’s feeling.” I nodded, not too vehemently. “He isn’t a big talker. You know, midwesterner.”
“Well, I’ve met midwesterners who won’t shut up. It could be more personality than geography.”
“He’s not your typical guy,” John replied.
“Why do you say that?” I picked up a small sand block and checked it out, just so I wouldn’t appear to be hanging on his answer.
“Because. Because it’s not like he’s antisocial.” But he seemed to hesitate after that point. I nodded again: Keep talking. “Actually, he does stuff that people do when they’re trying to come out of their shells. Coaches softball, volunteers at the soup kitchen over at the Lutheran church.”
Being religious didn’t mean you weren’t a criminal, I knew. People killed in God’s name; clergy abused children. The greatest traitor in FBI history, Special Agent Robert Hanssen of Counterintelligence, was famed for his devout Catholicism. But I asked anyway: “He goes to the Lutheran church?”
“I don’t think he’s a member. We went out for dinner a couple of times. Our wives do volunteer work together. He was saying he likes helping out at the soup kitchen there, but he OD’d on religion growing up.”
“A rough childhood?” I asked.
“No clue. Guys like him don’t talk about themselves.”
“Right,” I agreed. “You know, the thing you said before, about Pete trying to come out of his shell. That’s a really good insight.” During my time at the bureau, I found that when I was interviewing people, telling them they had good insight made them want to keep on showing how perceptive they were.
John did just that, mentioning that Pete didn’t seem to have any real friends in town, but his life seemed to revolve around his wife’s large family. “I guess that’s enough for him.” He hesitated again. I waited, sensing in his total lack of movement that he had more to say. “This one time, we went out to dinner—the two couples. His wife was joking and laughing about how much he was out of town. And he said—quietly, but ice cold—‘That’s enough, Jen.’ My wife told me later that his wife went white as a sheet. And I’ve got to admit, his wife was quiet for the rest of the dinner. It was just weird, you know?” He bit the side of his lip, as if worrying that he’d said too much. “Anyway, he’s good at doing you a favor, like I said I needed a really hard drill bit and he lent me one. Cobalt. But that doesn’t mean he wants to play poker with you. And come to think of it, I wouldn’t want to play with him.”
Now I needed to get John Grillo’s mind off Pete. On the off chance that he ran into him in the next day or two, I didn’t want John saying: Just was talking about you with Corie Geller. So I got John to walk me over to the orbital sanders where he got emotional about their workings. “Don’t even think of getting one without a dust bag.” he warned. After I vowed I would never do such a thing, I kept him busy recounting the activities and college choices of his three kids. At last, as John finished recounting how his daughter switched from psychology to mechanical engineering at the University of Vermont, I sensed Pete Delaney had been erased from his consciousness.
“Sounds as if she made a really thoughtful choice,” I said.
“That’s the perfect word for her, ‘thoughtful,’” he replied.
I pondered what he’d said: It was understandable that like many people Pete could be shy, try to be part of the community, but still focus mostly on family. Perfectly ordinary, totally normal. But it also made sense that a person engaged in a criminal enterprise would want a tranquil, even mind-numbing life. Middle-class felons want the security of being conventional. Pete could be dealing drugs, counterfeiting, engaging in human trafficking: all those required a distribution network, but theoretically he could remain hidden behind his facade of normality, enjoying a restful life when not doing his thing, whatever his thing was.
Back when I’d been working with Sami and the group, we hadn’t dealt exclusively with Islamic terrorists in the Tri-Border Area. We ran into middle-class and high-net-worth Americans as well. A dermatologist owned a lab in Rockland County, New York, that tested for skin and toenail fungus. You could not get more blech or more boring. And that was the perfect prescription for a cover-up for what he was doing—purifying inositol in his lab. He used it to cut cocaine, which he also did very efficiently.
Just as I got home with a gift-wrapped orbital sander, I got a text from Josh: In study on phone. Lunch at 1? LY—the last standing for “love you,” what we wrote at the end of notes. He started that when we first got married and I asked Josh how come it wasn’t ILY, considering I was a single stroke and he didn’t exactly have carpal tunnel syndrome from banging his gavel. “I don’t know,” he’d said. “It’s kind of relaxed, familiar. Don’t you like it?” I smiled and told him it was fine, which is what you do in the first year of your marriage. Or at least it was what I did.
I trotted into Josh’s study. He was in his leather chair reading a gray-covered document and saying, “No” and “Ax that” into his phone. Then he listened with lips pursed, as if he had yet to be persuaded by an argument but at least was contemplating it. I wondered why he didn’t go out and sit under a sycamore; it was gorgeous outside.
A minute later he ended the call and stood to kiss me, more a prelude to lunch than passion. I announced: “I want an herb garden with lots of pots.”
He nodded, then realized more was required. “Sounds great,” he said. While he didn’t become breathlessly animated, he wasn’t dismissive.
“One of the women in my lunch group has a business with flowerpots. Really nice stuff. I have no idea what it costs. Maybe a bundle, maybe not. I texted her and she said it was fine for me to come over.”
“Good. I mean great—your wanting to do something around the house. Other than your redoing the bedroom. But I can’t recall you doing anything else.” He said this with some reservation, just in case I’d added a wing to the house and he hadn’t noticed it.
“The bedroom was pretty much it. Hey, I’m a cheap date.”
“Cheap date but a class act,” my husband said. I did love it when he was gallant.
“Thanks.”
“Do what you want, Corie. Hire Wynne if you want.”
“The reason I brought it up is we agreed that if either of us wants to change anything, we had to discuss it first. Remember?”
“Right.” He didn’t remember. “I suppose I was thinking a major project, ripping out a kitchen, replacing it with a sauna. But this is fine.” He swallowed, took a breath, manned up, and asked: “Would you like me to go with you?”
If I’d said yes, he probably would have done it without complaint. But I caught the slightest lowering of Josh’s shoulders as he expelled a breath of relief when I said, “No, I’m fine. Eliza’s over at Chloë’s doing some secret Father’s Day project. So I’ll see you at one or thereabouts. I’ll pick up a tomato or two. Can you do tuna or egg salad?”
“Deal,” he said smiling, then lowered his head to become a person of substance again.
Iris Kubel’s house was not grand, but to me it was pretty near perfect, a family-size cottage made of chubby, roundish stones, with wood trim. At some point it must have been the caretaker’s house on one of those grand Long Island estates. Wide-spreading trees with the still-mellow green leaves of late spring shaded the front. We strolled around to the sunny backyard, though the light seemed softer there than in the rest of Shorehaven, as if it were filtered to shine on the fairies and sprites whose spirits animated the cottage. It was the house I would have chosen for myself.
Both Dawn and Josh had some deep-rooted belief in the necessity of “entertainment space,” as if they held weekly balls instead of the annual Thanksgiving dinner and seder. Our conservatory, the glassed-in room where we served drinks and hors d’oeuvres, was more suitably sized for the court of King George IV than for three Long Island Jews. Though I loved Josh, our need for space didn’t jibe. He was not a stone cottage kind of guy.
Iris guided me around her garden filled with receptacles, from clay urns with cherubs on the handles to stone saucers to reclaimed wood boxes that I nixed since they reminded me of coffins without lids. I showed her some shots of the back of the house and she suggested old, mossy terra-cotta pots flanking the kitchen door.
“If you have to walk sixty feet to get a few sprigs of thyme when you’re making beef stew, trust me, it’s not going to have thyme. Or you’ll use some dried stuff that’s been in a drawer since 2009. Ick.” Instead of the usual giant clip Iris used to keep her light brown hair in place, she had three large, randomly placed barrettes. Since she was wearing short gardening gloves, she scratched the top of her head with her wrist bone. “You’re sure there’s all-day sun there?” she asked. I said yes, and she dictated a list of the herbs I wanted into her phone, then suggested several different colors of basil, hyssop, and lavender. And definitely edible flowers. “During World War II, when the French couldn’t get pepper, you know what they did? Used nasturtiums!”
We went into Iris’s office, which doubled as a dining room. Her desk looked out on her garden through French doors—not the white formal kind, but the kind with glass set in old wood frames. It didn’t surprise me to find that Iris’s desk was beyond neat, with just a keyboard and a huge flat-screen monitor; any other tech equipment was hidden. All the papers and catalogs were stacked in alignment in a single rectangular basket according to size, the largest catalog on the bottom, a blue packet of forget-me-not seeds on top.
She punched some figures into her calculator app, humming as if to animate the numbers with music, and gave me two nonshocking estimates for the project—one using a version of terra-cotta made from recycled plastic that she said looked “reasonably decent” and the real thing, vintage and mossy and chipped here and there. I chose the real thing, which pleased her. We spent nearly an hour planning my herb garden, though Iris said she’d have to come and take precise measurements before it was finalized.
“No wonder they put you in charge of keeping attendance and dealing with La Cuisine Délicieuse,” I told her. “You’re so thorough.”
“My husband calls it OCD,” she said, smiling. “But actually, he likes it. He knows that if left to his own devices, he’d be living on top of a garbage dump and eating banana peels for breakfast. And the funny thing is both his parents are originally Swiss. They’re supposed to be a neat people. Who knows? Maybe that’s why they left.”
“I really admire order,” I said. “I wish I were better at it. By the way, do you keep some kind of calendar for your gardening?”
“I keep one for every client that pops up as a link, plus my own. I grow a lot from seed, so it’s not just when to plant things on the ground or in their final pots.” Iris smiled a lot, and with her entire face, eyes crinkling, happy mouth pushing up full cheeks. Even her wide, freckled nose scrunched upward. “Even though I’m outdoors so much, I have the soul of an accountant. I love calendars, spreadsheets, all sorts of organization.”
“No kidding. I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“A good spreadsheet gives me so much comfort.”
“Do you keep any records for the lunch group?” I asked casually.
“Oh sure. Who’s there, who’s not there, whose turn it is for show-and-tell. I mean, not that they really need me to do it, but that way I can remind people whose turn it is the following week. Or like, if they forgot their wallet or something and someone else puts their lunch on their own credit card, I can say, ‘Phoebe, you owe Darby seventeen seventy-five.”
“That’s great! Do you make any other notes?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, it’s not as if my left brain is at war with my right brain. They get on fine. So even though part of me is a CPA, the other part is sentimental. Like even though they are a cliché, I love using bleeding hearts or weeping lantana. And I love my spreadsheets because they’re also a diary.”
“A diary?” I asked, wanting to hug her or at least pinch her plump cheek.
“For instance, if Phoebe has some big item on eBay I’ll put it down. Remember she had that vintage bicycle with the giant front wheel? She got over two thousand dollars for it! Sometimes, when I’m scrolling through, it brings back stuff I’ve forgotten.”
Iris went into her kitchen to make me a cup of mint tea and came back with flowered cups and saucers that looked very much at home in the cottage. I took my tea from a small china tray and asked: “Would it be possible for you to lend me your records for the group? Or email them? I’m trying to learn how to use a spreadsheet. A couple of the literary agencies I work with are pressuring me to use one to keep track of the books I’m reading for them, and I’m sure the others will be following soon. It’s a little confusing for me, even though the purpose is clarity. Maybe if I could look at a sample of something that’s not all numbers, with names I’m familiar with, it could help.”
“Which spreadsheet do they use?” Iris asked. I gave what I hoped was a look of: Help me out here, and she said, “I use Excel.”
“I think that’s it! Would you mind?”
“Of course, it isn’t top secret,” she said in her smiley way. “Sure. I’ll email it to you as an attachment.”
Which she did. By the time I got home with two tomatoes and ciabatta bread, it was in my inbox. Iris really did love those details. What I especially admired was her noting all the cities Pete Delaney told the group he was visiting.