All the Beautiful Lies(70)

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.”