All the Beautiful Lies(71)

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.





Chapter 29





Then



Sleep had never been easy for Jake, not even when he’d been young. It came reluctantly, if at all, and departed easily, scared away by the first appearance of dawn light through the cracks in the curtains. For a long while, he found he could drink himself into a good night’s sleep, but in his fifties, he’d developed acid reflux, at its worst after a night of drinking. He’d prop himself on pillows, and after several hours of a revved-up mind and the rising taste of bile at the back of his throat, he would sometimes manage a few predawn hours. He quit drinking and found that Ambien helped for a period of time, till something in him began to resist the drug, and he’d lie in bed half awake and half spooked by visual hallucinations. He returned to moderate drinking and over-the-counter acid-reducing pills that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.

But after what he’d done to Bill on the cliff path, Jake wasn’t sure he’d slept at all. He must have, a little bit, if you wanted to call those thin excursions into semiconscious states a form of sleep.

The worst part of his recent nights was picturing Bill, who’d offered him both a job and some semblance of friendship, groaning at his feet. And he kept hearing the sound the cosh made when he brought it down on Bill’s skull, like an icy puddle cracking.

Jake reminded himself that Bill had been a selfish man, so caught up in his books that he barely paid attention to the people around him. Besides, he’d done this all for Alice. He’d done what she wanted. And now Harry was back, and Jake wondered if Harry had factored into all of this, if Alice wanted to start a new life with Harry. Lying awake, he’d try to remember that time with Alice immediately after Edith had died. It was comforting, but Jake found his mind wandering further back, thinking of Mrs. Codd, his neighbor, all those years ago. She’d been dead now for over fifty years, and Jake often wondered if anyone else ever thought of her. Her sons, maybe, if they were still alive.

Sometimes he thought of his parents, both long dead as well, his father from drinking at the age of fifty-five, and his mother from congestive heart failure ten years later. He’d kept to his promise and never gone to see either of them after that first year of college, although he’d sent his mother updates whenever he moved addresses, and she’d sometimes write back. She’d written him when his father died, describing the circumstances, but never mentioning that she’d like for him to visit. He wouldn’t have, even if she’d asked. After she died, he’d received a letter from a lawyer, saying that there was some furniture and other possessions that he might like to have. Jake never responded. A second letter arrived, but that was it. He’d felt nothing at the time, but as he’d gotten older, his anger at his parents had increased. Why had they brought him into the world if they had no interest in loving him? It had made him what he was, of course: successful, able to find his own love and happiness, unburdened by guilt. But why had they done it? If he could go back in time, he would ask his mother that question, just to see her squirm.