All the Beautiful Lies(21)

He left Alice alone at the table while he went to the front desk to book the rooms. She wanted to tell him that he could get just one room, but her voice had stopped working. He came back with two keys. The front desk had also sold him two toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste.

Both of the rooms were nice, but one of them—the one that Jake insisted that Alice take—faced the ocean and had an outside deck. Jake had bought a second bottle of wine from the restaurant to take upstairs, and together they sat on the deck, the night getting cooler, and drank it. Alice took small sips, not wanting to get drunk, not wanting to be like Edith had been, but the wine tasted good, and was making all her muscles tingle and relax.

“You were brave today,” Jake said.

“Was I? I didn’t do anything.”

“No, but you were there. You came. How are you feeling?”

She thought for a moment about what to say, then decided not to lie. “I feel nothing. I feel cold.”

“Cold isn’t nothing.”

“No, I feel cold right now. It’s cold out here.” She laughed, and so did Jake.

Inside the room, he pulled her into his arms, and hugged her. His skin smelled of cologne, and he was tall enough that his chin rested above her head. She tilted her head and kissed his neck, and he brought his hand up to her chin, tilting it so that he could kiss her. He brought her to the bed, his hands sliding up her thighs to the elastic top of her stockings. She lifted her hips as he pulled them off.

Afterward, in the black darkness of the room, he said, “No one, absolutely no one, can know about this.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Alice said. “I don’t even want to know anyone else. I just want to know you.”

“I feel the same way,” he said.

Alice woke at dawn to the sound of gulls. She was shivering. They’d left the door to the balcony cracked. She got up to close it, just as the door to the hallway opened up and Jake was coming back into the room. She startled, not aware that he had left. “Where’d you go?” she asked.

“The other room. I made it look like someone had slept there. Just in case. I didn’t want it to look . . .”

“No, I understand.”

He was staring at her, and Alice realized she was naked. She stood, letting him look, and then he came to her.

They returned to the condo that afternoon. They walked the exterior stairs up to the front door. Alice used her key, but before she could step inside, Jake said, “Wait.” Then he lifted her into his arms and carried her, like a bride, over the threshold.





Chapter 10





Now



Harry got back to Grey Lady at just past three. He had walked for miles, eventually winding up at York Hill State Park, where he’d climbed a muddy trail to reach the top of York Hill, less than seven hundred feet of elevation but enough to see the White Mountains to the west and the Atlantic to the east. The rain had stopped completely by the time he got to the summit; the sky was half clear, half darkened by clouds. He was alone, his shoes soaked through, and he felt like screaming at the top of his lungs. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it; a voice at the back of his head was laughing at how clichéd it would be. Instead he sat on a boulder, wondering what would happen if he simply lay back and didn’t move. Would he freeze to death in the middle of the night? He tried it, his shoulder landing in a shallow puddle of rainwater, then immediately sat up again. He couldn’t even fall apart properly, and he decided that he would go back to the house to hear what Alice had to say about the latest developments.

He was surprised to find her in the kitchen, ingredients spread out on the butcher-block island. “Oh, good,” she said when she saw Harry. “I’m starting to prepare dinner. You’ll be eating here, I hope?”

“Sure,” Harry said, then added, “Did you talk to a detective today?”

“I did. Did you?”

“They think it might not be an accident.”

“Well, that’s what they say. I don’t know what to think except that either way, he’s still gone, Harry.”

“I know. But if someone had something to do with it—”

“Maybe someone was just trying to mug him, and your father fought back. Maybe it was still an accident.”

“If someone was trying to mug him then it wasn’t an accident.”

“No, I know,” Alice said, beginning to slice an onion. “The police will figure it out.”

“Where did they talk with you?” Harry asked.

“Who? The police? They found me at Chrissie’s house. I think you must have told them I was there. Chrissie wasn’t surprised, either. We both thought that someone else might have been responsible.”

“But who?” Harry asked, trying to keep his rising irritation at Alice’s lackadaisical attitude from showing. “Did they ask you if you had any idea who might have been involved?”

She stopped slicing and looked directly at Harry. “They did ask me. I told them I had no idea.” Her eyes held his, almost challenging him to call her a liar. He felt she was holding something back, but he didn’t say anything. “It doesn’t matter, though, Harry, does it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your father’s dead. He’s not coming back.”