All the Beautiful Lies(69)
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.