Eight Perfect Murders(25)
Emily grinned again, then said, “Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m fine. Why?”
“Oh, nothing. You seem distracted, that’s all. I didn’t know if there was anything going on.”
It was so out of character for her to express this much interest in me that I realized that I must be acting noticeably different. I think of myself as stoic, as someone who never reveals too much of themselves, and it worried me that that might not be the case.
“Would it be okay if I go for a walk?” I said. “You can cover the store?”
“Sure.”
“It’ll be a quick walk,” I said.
Outside it was still bitterly cold, but the sun was out, the sky a hard, unforgiving blue. The sidewalks had been cleared and I walked toward Charles Street, thinking I’d cut up to the Public Garden. I kept thinking about the conversation with Gwen about Strangers on a Train, a book that I’d worked hard at not thinking about for many years.
There were more people in the park than I thought there would be, considering the temperature. A father was wiping snow off one of the Make Way for Ducklings bronze figures so that he could put his toddler on top of it and take a picture. I must have walked past those ducklings a thousand times and there was always a parent, or a set of parents, posing their child for a photograph. In summertime there was often a line. And I always wondered what the parents got out of it, their insistence to document a particular moment. Not being a parent, I don’t really know. It was actually something that Claire and I had never talked about, having children. I had told myself it was up to her, but maybe she’d been waiting for me to broach the subject.
I walked around the frozen pond, the wind now spinning dead leaves, and started to make my way back to the store. I was not innocent, even though sometimes I allowed myself the luxury of thinking that I was. And if Gwen Mulvey discovered the truth, then I would have to accept it.
Chapter 11
I knew that I was going to kill Eric Atwell the moment I’d finished reading Claire’s diary. But it took me many more months to work up the courage to admit that to myself.
I also knew that when Atwell was dead, I was going to be an immediate suspect. My wife had been coming from his home on the night she died in a car accident. Atwell had even confessed to providing the drugs that were found in her system, and the police, no doubt, had also determined that Claire Kershaw née Mallory had been having an affair with the wealthy owner of Black Barn Enterprises.
I thought of hiring someone to kill Atwell, then making sure that I was far away (out of the country?) when it happened. But there were so many reasons this wouldn’t work. For one, I doubted I had the kind of money it would take to hire a professional hit man, and even if I could scrape it together somehow, it would be obvious to anyone looking at my suddenly depleted bank account. I also had no idea how to go about hiring a killer. Nor did I even want to support such a profession. Anyone who killed people for money was not someone I wanted to be involved with; besides, it would be giving someone far too much power over my own life.
So I decided that I couldn’t hire a killer. But I did like the idea of being far away when Eric Atwell was killed.
A year earlier, sometime in 2009, a young woman had come into Old Devils with a stack of incredibly valuable first editions. They weren’t primarily mystery novels, although there had been an 1892 Harper & Brothers edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes that had made me ache with longing. There were about ten books in all—including two Mark Twain firsts that must have been worth thousands—and the woman, who had stringy hair and scabbed lips, had been carrying the books in a grocery bag. I asked her where she got them.
“Don’t you want them?” she said.
“Not if you can’t tell me where you got them from.”
She’d left the store, as quickly as she’d come in. In retrospect I began to wish I’d simply bought them from her with whatever money was in the register. And then I’d have been able to find the owner—she must have robbed someone’s home—and returned the books. As it was, I did call the police to report the incident, and they told me they’d keep an eye and an ear out for reports of stolen books. I never heard anything back from them, and I never saw the young woman again. At that time, Old Devils had an employee named Rick Murphy, who worked weekend shifts. Rick was a collector, primarily interested in anything horror related.
I told Rick about the woman who’d come in with the rare first editions.
“She might try and sell them online,” Rick had said.
“She didn’t look like the type who goes online.”
“Worth checking, though,” he said. “There’s this pretty tasty little site, more of a dark web place, where people sell collectibles under the table.”
Rick, who worked in IT at an insurance company during the week, showed me a site called Duckburg. To me it looked nearly incomprehensible, like message boards from the early internet days, but Rick pulled up a section where rare collectibles were offered for sale. It was all anonymous. We did searches for some of the books that had been brought into the store, but nothing popped up.
“What else is on here?” I said.
“Ah, the gentleman is intrigued. A lot of it is just a place to chat anonymously. To tell the truth, this isn’t the true dark web, but it’s darkish enough.”