Then
Killing Bill had been easy.
Jake Richter, going by John Richards now, had asked him where he’d been walking recently, and Bill, ever the explainer, told him how most days he walked down to Kennewick Beach then followed the cliff path along to Kennewick Harbor, then back home.
“You see the same people every day?”
“No, I hardly see anyone. Except in July and August, but then I usually do a different walk.”
A few days later, on a Wednesday, Bill asked Jake if he minded staying a little longer and doing the closing up. He was going to try to get a walk in before it got too dark. Jake had told him it wasn’t a problem, then followed Bill outside into the cool evening and watched as he made his way down toward Kennewick Beach. Jake locked the front door and left out the back—in case anyone was looking, even though it was highly doubtful—and took Captain Martin Lane down toward Kennewick Harbor. He walked casually—just out for some fresh air, he kept telling himself—then passed by the Kennewick Inn, its east wing covered by scaffolding while it got a fresh coat of paint before tourist season began.
He found the southern starting point of the cliff walk, realized he was breathing heavily, and slowed his pace. If he timed this right, he’d meet Bill coming from the opposite direction. While walking he fiddled with the homemade cosh in the pocket of his suit pants. He had made it a few days ago by putting a handful of quarters into one of his nylon socks. He hadn’t learned much from his father, but he’d learned how to make a cosh, something his father insisted on carrying in his jacket pocket at all times. His father’s had been filled with ball bearings, but quarters worked almost as well.
The path ascended, views opening up, so that all of York Harbor and even some of Buxton Point to the north were visible in the grey, dusky light. He stumbled slightly on a slick rock and looked down, noticing that the laces were loose on one of his walking shoes. He was about to bend down (never an easy thing to do these days) and rectify the situation when he realized that he could use the untied laces to his benefit.
He walked another quarter mile—the path had reached its highest point, and decided to wait for Bill to arrive.
He’d killed before, of course.
Edith Moss died so he could be with Alice. That moment marked the beginning of the best period of Jake Richter’s life, but it was also the beginning of the end. He realized that later. Watching her mother die had obviously awakened something in Alice, because only a few years later she let her friend Gina die in the ocean, then got away with telling the police that she’d had nothing to do with it. Jake had known the truth, though, and he’d revealed that to Alice, thinking it would make them closer. It hadn’t.
Over the following few months after Gina died, Alice had grown distant and cold. She’d moved back into her old bedroom and started work as an office manager at a real estate company. Then, one day, she informed Jake that she had signed a lease on her own apartment.
“You can always move back here if you need to,” Jake said.
“I won’t need to,” she said, then added: “But thanks for letting me stay as long as I did.”
Jake lived for a few years alone in the condo, occasionally allowing himself a fantasy in which Alice, tired of living by herself, asked to return. But he knew, down deep, that their relationship was over, had been over before she ever moved out. Nearing sixty, he decided to retire early from the bank. His mortgage was paid off, and he bought a used, forty-six-foot cabin cruiser. He sublet his condo and took the boat down to Florida, where he decided that he didn’t like boating as much as he thought he would. He docked the boat in the Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale, and got a job renting beach chairs and umbrellas at the Atlantic Club. His hair had been thinning for a few years, and he’d been keeping it long to conceal the loss, but down in Florida he got a buzz cut and grew a mustache. It transformed him, and he told himself he was a new person, a retiree who deserved some enjoyment in the remainder of his life. From his concrete bunker where the chairs and umbrellas were kept, he could see out onto a strip of packed beach. There was the occasional teenage girl, but most of the clients of the Atlantic Club were middle-aged or older, and none of them, not even the occasional enthusiastic widow, could begin to erase the memory of Alice Moss.
He’d been in Florida three years when the Atlantic Club let him go. They told him that they thought he should enjoy more leisure time in his retirement years, but he pressed them for the real reason, and was told that one of the guests had complained that he’d been staring at her thirteen-year-old daughter. He left without a fuss, finally sold the cruiser, and rented a cheap one-bedroom apartment in North Lauderdale. He bought a personal computer and, through various message boards, made contact with a slew of other men all interested in younger women, teenage girls mostly. He even messaged with some older women who were interested in younger boys. At least he thought he was chatting to women. You never really knew on the Internet. He spent an enormous amount of time on the computer, but in the end it turned out to be an empty enterprise. He’d been looking for someone more like him, someone who felt that being with someone younger, teaching them all you knew, was the way to a better, larger life. It wasn’t all about sex, it was about generosity, about the sharing of one’s life force. No one really understood him. The other men just wanted to share pictures, and talk about the beauty of teen girls. No one understood what Jake understood—that what he’d briefly found with Alice was akin to the fountain of youth, and that you could pass it along. Emma Codd had gifted it to him, and he had gifted it to Alice.
He still had the pictures of Alice. They were his prized possession, and he’d handled them so many times throughout the years that they’d gone thin and ragged on the edges. He kept them flat and protected in the pages of a hardcover copy of Moby-Dick on his bedside table. Sometimes he wondered if the pictures were a way back into Alice’s life. She’d probably forgotten all about them. Maybe he could get in touch, remind her of their existence, maybe ask if she’d like to come down and visit him sometime in Florida. It would be blackmail, he realized, but it would be worth losing the pictures if he could just spend a little more time with her. He thought about it a lot, but it was only a fantasy. When he did finally get in touch with her, via her work e-mail, he just asked her questions about her life. She was getting married, she told him. Another older man, and one with a young son. She still lived in Kennewick. They e-mailed back and forth, Alice’s responses so rote and formal, it was as though they had never meant anything to each other.
Years passed, and Jake began to feel old. He became sexually involved with a teenage girl, a runaway from Miami named Valeria who spent a week with him in his apartment until one day a man showed up at the door, claiming to be the girl’s brother (they looked nothing alike) and demanding a thousand dollars or he’d go to the police. He claimed Valeria was fifteen years old, even though she’d told Jake she was seventeen. He’d paid up, reluctantly and shamefully. The incident haunted him for several months—Jake deciding to leave Florida altogether—until he spotted the “brother” entering a nearby apartment complex. Jake began to watch him regularly, discovered his name was Edgar Leon, and determined that he lived alone. One night, after staking out the Jacaranda Estates for several hours, Jake followed Edgar up to his second-floor apartment, knocking on the door one minute after Edgar entered. It was two in the morning. He worried that Edgar, because of the time of night, would be armed when he came to the door, but he wasn’t. He was shirtless and yawning and opened the door wide. Jake’s first strike with his cosh put Edgar on the floor. Jake straddled him and repeatedly hit Edgar in the head until it was clear he was dead.
Jake felt better about himself after killing that cut-rate pimp. And he felt better about staying in Florida. He heard from his real estate agent in Maine that a long-term renter had just moved out of the Kennewick Beach condo he still owned, and Jake decided to sell. He was about to let the agent know when he got an e-mail from Alice, now going by Alice Ackerson, and with a new e-mail address.
The e-mail was short, just two perfect sentences: Jake, you ever think about returning to Kennewick? It would be nice to have an old friend here. Alice
The e-mail was a thrilling surprise; he’d assumed that he never would hear from her again. So he’d returned to Maine—an easy decision to make—and moved back into his old condo. He was shocked to discover that the carpeting was dirty, two windowpanes were cracked, and the wood of the balcony had rotted. Still, he was near Alice again. They met in a diner the day after he’d arrived. She was older, a little softer, but otherwise unchanged. He couldn’t help seeing himself through her eyes, though. The completely bald head, the skin damage, the white mustache. He didn’t mind so much; he knew that he hadn’t been summoned by Alice to resume their love affair. It was enough that, for whatever reason, he was needed.
“I was wondering if you could do me a favor, Jake,” Alice asked, as soon as they were settled in a booth.
“Of course, anything.”
She asked him if he’d volunteer to help out in her husband’s used bookstore. She said it was because he needed help—he worked nonstop—but the more they talked the more it became clear to Jake that Alice wanted someone to keep an eye on her husband.
“He’s found someone younger, in New York,” she said, her voice flat.
“How do you know?”
“I saw the messages on his phone, and then suddenly they stopped appearing. He must have another way of getting in touch with her now, probably something in the store. You could help me find out if it’s still going on.”
“Okay,” Jake had said. “But are we pretending we don’t know each other?”
“That would be for the best. Give him a different name, he’ll never know.”
“What if people around here recognize me?”
“They won’t, Jake. You look totally different.”
She’d been right. He hadn’t been recognized by anyone, nor had he seen anyone he recognized. The bank had been two towns over, and the patrons from there didn’t seem to frequent Ackerson’s Rare Books. He went by John Richards now, and he liked the new identity. He liked Bill, too, for what it was worth, even though he did eventually find proof that he was involved with someone in New York. It turned out they’d been sending private messages through the store’s rarely used Twitter account.
Jake had stumbled upon it by accident after going onto the store’s computer to look up a health condition. He’d been experiencing a strange twitching in his left arm recently, and he’d put in the letters T and W when Twitter popped up, landing him on the bookstore’s page. He’d never seen much of Twitter—Bill was the one who maintained it—and he noticed that there was a message icon on the top menu bar. He clicked on it, and there it was, several back-and-forth messages between Bill and a Grace McGowan in New York. They weren’t overtly sexual, but they were intimate. Most messages ended with miss you from Bill, and xoxo from Grace. There was very little information on Grace McGowan’s actual Twitter page—it seemed that maybe it existed only so that she could private-message with Bill—but there was one picture of her, and she was very young. Early twenties, maybe.
Around this time, Annie Callahan came to work at the store, a temporary arrangement because of a huge lot of books that Bill had recently bought. She was a local girl, somewhere in her thirties, and married to an out-of-work cod fisherman. She wasn’t much to look at, Annie, one of those girls who had probably been pretty for about one year of her life, back when she was seventeen. But the years of marriage to a perpetually unemployed alcoholic had taken their toll. Her face was pinched, her hair colorless and dull. She wore a carpal tunnel brace on her left arm—“years of data entry,” she said—but even with that bad wrist, she’d been an incredibly hard worker, managing to bring a semblance of order to the store that it had never had before, at least since Jake had started working there. Jake noticed that every time Bill thanked her for her work, or looked directly at her, she’d turn bright red, all the way from the dark roots of her hair down to her scrawny neck. She was in love with Bill. That much was obvious.
Jake also noticed how gingerly she’d move around the store, especially after weekends, and Jake assumed that whatever damage her husband did to her was visible under her long sleeves and high-necked sweaters. Bill, with his Gregory Peck good looks and calming voice, was clearly her idea of a knight in shining armor. He barely noticed her, of course.
Jake reported all his findings to Alice during one of her visits to the store when Jake was all alone. He told her about the full-fledged affair in New York, plus the smitten employee. Alice’s face remained blank as she took in the information. She wanted to see the picture of Grace, so Jake found the one on Twitter and showed that to her. “What do you think?” he finally asked.
“I’m done with him,” Alice said.
“Are you going to ask for a divorce?”
Her brow furrowed, and she said, “I would never get divorced, but I’m done with him.”
That night Jake lay in bed and thought of the different ways he could kill Bill, how easy it would be to make it look like an accident, especially if he could kill Bill during one of his walks along the cliff. He even thought that if the death looked suspicious, it would be incredibly easy to suggest to the police that Lou Callahan, Annie’s violent husband, might have been involved. But mostly what Jake thought about was that he would be doing this for Alice. He didn’t think he’d be back in her life any more than he was now, but it would be one last thing he could do for her. It would give him purpose.
Annie stopped working at the store; one morning she just didn’t show up and didn’t answer her phone. She came by in the afternoon with Lou, her husband, and said that she could no longer work there because Lou had picked up some work. She did all the talking while Lou, a goateed cretin, watched silently, glowering at Bill, who was oblivious. Jake put the bizarre scene in his back pocket. If Bill was gone, then Jake could twist the encounter to fit any narrative. It was something to consider.
In the next few months, Jake slept less and less. He found he could survive on as little as four hours, but he still spent about ten hours each night in bed, thinking about Bill, wondering whether he should tell Alice his plans (he finally decided not to), and building up a case against his boss. Bill was one of those careless men who was perceived as sensitive because he was bookish and reticent. But he had been hugely fortunate to marry Alice, and now he had replaced her with a much younger woman. He deserved what was coming to him.
Waiting for Bill, cosh hidden in his hand, was the longest minute of Jake’s life. He heard him before he saw him, his boots scraping along the rocky path. Jake began to walk as well, and rounded a twist, nearly bumping into Bill, who smiled and laughed.
“John? What are you doing here?”
“Thought I’d take a walk myself, and was hoping to run into you.”
“Everything okay? You look pale.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine. Look, this is embarrassing but my shoelace is untied, and I could get it myself, but . . .”
Bill looked down, then bent at the knee, saying, “Not a problem at all. I got it.”
As he was knotting the laces, Jake quickly looked back down along the path to make sure they were alone, then lifted the cosh and brought it down with all his strength on the crown of Bill’s head. It made a thunking sound, and Bill, groaning, fell to his side. Jake went down on one knee himself, and hit him two more times. He heard the skull crack.
Jake stood up. There was no sound except for wind coming in off the ocean. Bill lay right on the edge of a steep drop to the rocky shore below. Jake tried to push him off with his foot but couldn’t quite manage it. He bent and, gripping Bill by his windbreaker, rolled him off the edge with both hands.
His heart was pumping as if he’d just run a mile, but Jake’s mind was clear. He decided to keep walking north along the path, and exit along Micmac Road. There was less chance that someone would see him. If they did, they did. He’d say he’d been looking for his friend to go on a walk but hadn’t spotted him. They could never prove otherwise.
But luck was on his side that day. There was no one else on the path, and Jake was back in the store before it had even gotten dark.