All the Beautiful Lies

by Peter Swanson

  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.”

  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. Jak
e 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.

  Jake wasn’t sure he’d be able to go to Bill’s funeral, but knew it would look strange if he didn’t. He went but avoided talking with Alice, who surely knew that he had done her bidding, and was shocked to see Grace McGowan—it had to be her—sitting quietly by herself at the back of the church. The sight of her scared him, somehow, as though she knew what had happened. But that wasn’t possible, was it? She was here because she’d loved Bill, and she was hiding in the back of the church, not wanting to be seen.

  But then she’d actually come into the store. Jake watched from the back room as she talked with Harry, and then they exchanged numbers. After she left, Harry told him that she was looking for a job. He was alarmed, wondering if she knew anything, even though he thought that was impossible. But it gnawed at him.

  On the Wednesday evening after the funeral, Jake closed up shop and went and sat on the bench across from the Village Inn to read that day’s paper. It was something he sometimes did when the weather was decent. No one noticed an old man on a bench. But that night, he’d done it hoping to see Grace, maybe find out where she was living. Many cars drove by, plus a few pedestrians. He was about to give up when a couple came out of the Village Inn; he recognized Harry right away, and then he recognized Grace. Had she gotten a room at the Village Inn, and had Harry been in there with her? It was a definite possibility, but maybe they’d just had a drink at the bar. They turned left, up the hill, and Jake followed them at a distance, up to Barb Whitcomb’s place, where they stopped and talked some more. Jake, not willing to risk being seen, turned back.

  That next afternoon Jake talked with Barb, sidling up next to her as she was coming back from the Cumberland Farms with her Megabucks ticket. He found out that she’d been advertising one of her spare rooms on the Internet, and that the girl, Grace McGowan, had come up from New York City the previous Friday. “She cries in her room, that much I can tell you. I don’t ask what’s going on because it’s none of my business.”

  “You think she’s here because she knew Bill?”

  “You’d know more than me,” Barb said. She told him that she was leaving the next day to visit her adult daughter, who lived on the Cape. “She’s back in rehab, telling me she’s cured, of course, and don’t I want to come down and see it for myself.”

  “Maybe it will take this time.”

  “That’s what she says, John. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  That night he didn’t sleep at all; he kept thinking of Grace, wondering why she was still in town, why she was clearly after Harry. He wanted to call Alice, but knew that would be a mistake. They talked frequently, but always at the store when no one else was around. She didn’t want anyone to know about their connection. He paced the condo, then at dawn he got dressed and made a new cosh using a sock and quarters from his change bowl. He showered, then dressed for the day, pushing the coin-filled sock down deep into his suit pants pocket.

  That night, after the sun had set, Jake went up the hill to Barb’s house. There was no good place to sit and watch, so he stood quietly in the stand of birches across the street, his eyes on the bowed-out second-floor windows. He thought he caught movement a few times, maybe a shadow passing across a curtain, but he couldn’t be sure. But if he stayed here long enough, he knew he’d eventually see Grace either arrive or depart. Either way, he could get to her. He shifted from leg to leg and shook his arms to keep his circulation going. He’d slept a little bit in the back office of the store that day, nodding off in the wooden swivel chair. He dreamt he heard Bill’s voice, slicing through the wind, telling him to wake up, but his eyes were glued shut, and he couldn’t open them. He was worried he was going to fall off the cliff and into the cold water below, but he couldn’t open his eyes, and he couldn’t stop walking forward, feeling for branches that would keep him on the path. Bill’s voice got closer, then farther away, and Jake jerked awake only when his elbow slipped off the arm of the chair.

  He’d been standing and watching Barb’s house for less than an hour when the front door opened. He stood as still as possible. The slender figure, too tall for Grace, he thought, walked from the dark house into the light of a streetlamp on the sidewalk. It was Harry, which wasn’t surprising. How long had he been inside? Had they been fucking, or had she been telling him about his father? Probably both. Jake waited a few minutes, then crossed the road to the house. He tried the door but it was locked. Lookin
g back over his shoulder, he pressed the doorbell; two chiming notes sounded from within the house. He pulled the sock from his pocket, and waited, hoping she’d swing the door open freely, expecting to see Harry again.

  Instead, she cracked the door open three inches and peered out. Jake pushed against the door with all his strength, catching her unaware, and she stumbled back.

  “Hey,” she said, right before he hit her in the jaw with the cosh, dislocating it. She crumpled instantly to the floor like a knocked-out boxer in the ring. Jake stayed standing, his heart tripping in his chest, wondering if the blow had killed her, but her chest was still lifting and falling under her striped shirt.

  The door was open behind him, and Jake pushed it almost all the way closed with his foot, then he crouched over Grace McGowan and hit her several times on the side of her head.

  Chapter 30

  Now

  Harry had no memory of being at Caitlin’s motel room, but he did remember the ambulance ride, and he knew that he’d tripped and fallen, even though it was a fuzzy memory.

  There was a persistent, low-frequency ringing in his ears, and the inside of his head felt swollen, almost like a balloon had been blown up inside his skull. Earlier, one of several doctors who’d come in to question him had asked him what town he was in, and he was totally surprised that he hadn’t immediately known. She’d moved on to other questions, but before she left, he’d said, “Kennewick. I’m in Kennewick, Maine.”