“Did you know Eric Atwell?” she asked, after she’d taken a seat on the edge of the sofa.
“I didn’t, but my wife knew him. Unfortunately.”
“Why unfortunately?”
“I’m sure you know this already, because it’s why you’re here. My wife produced a video for Eric Atwell, and after that they became friends. She . . . Claire . . . my wife died in a car accident coming home from his house in Southwell.”
“And did you blame Eric Atwell for this accident?”
“I did, partly, at least. I know that my wife started doing drugs again after she met him.”
The detective nodded slowly. “Did he provide those drugs?”
“He did. Look, I know where this is going. I hate . . . hated . . . Eric Atwell. But I didn’t have anything to do with his death. The truth is, my wife had on-again, off-again problems with drugs and alcohol. He didn’t force her to start taking drugs. He didn’t introduce her to them. Ultimately, it was my wife’s decision. I forgave him. It took a lot, but after what happened, I did finally make a decision to forgive him.”
“So how do you feel now that you know he’s been murdered?”
I stared at the ceiling, as though I were thinking. “Honestly, I don’t really know. I’m telling the truth when I say that I forgave him, but that doesn’t mean that I liked him. I’m not sad, and I’m not exactly happy. It is what it is. If I’m honest about it, I think he probably got what was coming to him.”
“So you think he was murdered by someone from a sense of . . . out of revenge, maybe?”
“You mean do I think he was intentionally murdered . . . as opposed to just being mugged?”
“Right, that’s what I mean.” The detective was very still, barely moving in the sofa.
“It occurred to me. Sure. I can’t imagine that my wife is the only one he gave drugs to. And she probably wasn’t the only one he started charging after she became addicted. He must have done that to other people.” As soon as I spoke the words, I realized it was more than I had wanted to tell the detective. There was something about her calm presence that was making me want to talk.
She was nodding again, and when she realized that I had stopped speaking, she said, “Did your wife end up giving a lot of money to Atwell? Money you didn’t have?”
“My wife and I had separate accounts so I wasn’t aware of it at the time. But, yes, she started giving money to Atwell for drugs.”
“I’m sorry to have to ask you this, Mr. Kershaw, but as far as you knew, was there any sexual relationship between your wife and Atwell?”
I hesitated. Part of me just wanted to tell this detective everything I had learned from Claire’s diary, but I also knew that the more I spoke, the more it became obvious that I had a very serious motive for Atwell’s death. I said, “I don’t know, to tell the truth. I suspect they might have.” Saying the words made my throat start to close a little, as though I were about to cry, and I pressed the heel of my hand against an eye.
“Okay,” the detective said.
“She wasn’t herself,” I said, unable to stop myself. “I mean, because of the drugs.” I wiped a tear from my cheek.
“I understand. I’m sorry to come out here and make you go through all this again, Mr. Kershaw. I hate to have to do this, but investigations of this kind are often all about the elimination of possible suspects. Do you remember where you were on the afternoon of February eighth?”
“I was in Florida, actually. At a conference.”
“Oh,” Detective James said, almost looking pleased. “What kind of conference was that?”
“Antiquarian booksellers. I run a used bookstore here in Boston.”
“Old Devils, right. I’ve been there.”
“Really? Are you a mystery fan?”
“Sometimes,” the detective said and fully smiled for the first time since she’d stepped inside of my apartment. “I went to see Sara Paretsky read. About a year ago?”
“That sounds right,” I said. “She was good, I thought.”
“She was. Were you the one who introduced her?”
“I was. You’ll be forgiven if you don’t remember me. Public speaking is not my forte.”
“I think I remember you being fine,” she said.
“Thank you for that,” I said.
Detective James put her hands on her knees, and said, “Unless you have anything to add, I think we’re probably done here.”
“I don’t,” I said, and we stood up at the same time. She was almost exactly my height.
“I will need some corroboration about the conference in Florida,” she said.
I promised to send her flight details, and I also gave her Shelly Bingham’s name and address.
The detective left a card. Her first name was Roberta.
Chapter 12
The sign that welcomed me to Tickhill, New Hampshire, also informed me that the total population was 730 inhabitants.
It was March 14, 2011, a Monday. I had left Boston at just after five in the morning and it was now eight thirty. The village of Tickhill was just north of the White Mountains. I’d done some research on the town, and some on Norman Chaney, the man I was there to kill, but not too much. And what research I’d been able to do I did at a library computer, jumping onto one of the desktops after a patron had left without logging off. I’d had my notebook with me and was able to take notes. What I learned about Tickhill was that it had one diner, and two bed-and-breakfasts, both popular because of their proximity to several ski areas. I pulled up a map and got an exact location for Norman Chaney on Community Road. The house, at least according to the map, looked fairly isolated. After sketching the location in my notebook, I began to research Norman Chaney, who had purchased the Tickhill house three years earlier for $225 thousand. The only other possible hit I got on Norman Chaney was an obituary from 2007 for Margaret Chaney, a schoolteacher from Holyoke, in western Massachusetts, who had died in a house fire. Margaret Chaney, forty-seven years old when she died, had left behind two children, twenty-two-year-old Finn and nineteen-year-old Darcy, and her husband of twenty-three years, Norman Chaney. It wasn’t much, but it made me wonder. Could Norman Chaney have been responsible for the death of his own wife, and, if so, was that why he’d been marked for death? And was that why he’d left Holyoke to live in a town of less than a thousand residents?
It had occurred to me that I didn’t really need to kill Norman Chaney. If Duckburg, the site where I’d arranged the murder swap, was as anonymous as it promised, then there was no way that the stranger I’d communicated with would ever find out who I was. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Even if this stranger—this shadow version of myself—knew nothing about me, he did know one thing. He knew that I wanted Eric Atwell to die. That might put me on a long list, but it also might not. I had decided to go through with my half of the bargain; it seemed the safest thing to do, but also maybe the right thing to do, in a twisted way.
Before shutting down the library computer, I quickly looked up both Finn Chaney and Darcy Chaney. Unlike their father, they each had online presences. If I’d found the right people, then Finn Chaney was currently working at a small bank in Pittsfield, where he was also a trivia host at a local pub. Darcy Chaney now lived outside of Boston, attending graduate school at Lesley University in Cambridge. There were pictures of them both, and they were undoubtedly brother and sister. Jet-black hair, heavy eyebrows, blue eyes, small mouths. Neither of them seemed to live with their father, and that was the most important piece of information that I got. If Norman Chaney lived alone, then my job became substantially easier.
It had just begun to snow as I entered Tickhill, light flakes that filled the air without seeming to land. I found Community Road, a sparsely populated and poorly paved road that wound up a hill. I slowed down as I approached number 42; the mailbox, painted black with white letters, was the only indication that a property even existed. Driving slowly by, I peered down the dirt driveway but couldn’t make
out the house in the woods. At the end of Community Road, I U-turned, then made a decision. This time I turned down the driveway. It twisted to the left and then I could see the house. It was an A-frame construction, more windows than wood, made to look like a miniature ski chalet. I was very happy to see that there was no garage and that only one vehicle—some kind of SUV—was parked out front. The chances that Norman Chaney was alone just went up significantly.
Wearing gloves, and with a balaclava on my head but not pulled all the way down over my face, I stepped out of the car, holding a crowbar down near my leg. I approached the house, stepping up the two steps to the front door. It was solid wood, but there was a strip of beveled glass on either side. After ringing the doorbell, I peered into the dark interior of the house, made wonky by the ripple effect of the glass. I’d decided that if anyone other than a middle-aged man came toward the door, I would pull down my balaclava and make my way back to the car. I’d already smeared enough mud on the license plate so that both the number and the state were obscured.
No one answered the door. I rang the bell again—a four-note chime—then saw a large, heavyset man lumbering slowly down the stairs. Even through the glass I could see he was wearing gray sweatpants and a flannel shirt. His face was ruddy, and his thick dark hair was sticking up in tufts, as though it was unwashed.
The man pulled the door open. There was no fear in his expression, not even any hesitation. “Uh-huh,” he said.
“Are you Norman Chaney?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” he said again. He was over six feet tall, even though he stooped slightly, one shoulder noticeably higher than the other.
I swung the crowbar, aiming for the side of his head, but Chaney reared back, and the tip of the bar connected with the bridge of his nose. There was a splintery crack as he staggered back, blood falling in a sheet down over his chin. He raised his hands to his face and wetly said, “The fuck.”
Stepping into the house I swung the crowbar again, but Chaney easily blocked it with his meaty left arm, then swung at me with his right, batting me in the shoulder with a fist. It didn’t hurt but it knocked me off balance for a moment, and Chaney charged, grabbing me by my tracksuit in both fists, shoving me up against a wall. Something, probably a coat hook, jabbed me high up in my back. Warm blood was spraying from Chaney’s nose, hitting me in the face. Some memory, probably from an Ian Fleming novel, went through my panicked mind, and I raised my right foot, bringing my heavy boot down hard on Chaney’s instep. Chaney grunted and loosened his grip, and I pushed forward as he stumbled backward, both of us falling after a few steps, me landing on top of him, hard, hearing something snap. Chaney’s face contorted, and his mouth opened and closed like a fish pulled from the water. I pushed myself off his body, then put a knee on his chest and leaned on top of him again. He struggled to breathe, and I put my gloved hands around his thick neck, and squeezed, pressing as hard as I could with my thumbs. He tried to pull my hands loose, but he was already weakening. I closed my eyes and kept squeezing. After about a minute, or it might have been longer, I stopped and rolled off to the side, breathing heavily and aware that my mouth was salty and thick with blood. I ran my tongue around my teeth, but it was the tip of my tongue that was ragged and painful. I must have bit it during the fight. Blood was filling my mouth, and I swallowed it. It seemed a bad idea to spit a mouthful of my own blood onto the scene of a crime, even though I knew I’d probably left all sorts of DNA traces already.
Crouching in front of Chaney, and without directly looking at him, I felt for a pulse in both his neck and his wrist. There was none.
I stood, the world wobbling around me for a moment, then bent to pick up the crowbar. I had decided earlier that I would need to go through the house, take a few valuables, after Chaney was dead, but I didn’t know if I had it in me. I just wanted to be back in the car, heading as far away from what had just happened as possible.
I was about to turn when movement from the corner of my eye made me look across the foyer toward the open-plan living room with floor-to-ceiling windows. A ginger cat was making its way slowly toward me, its unclipped nails clicking on the hardwood floor. The cat stopped and sniffed at Chaney’s body, then looked again at me and meowed loudly, taking two steps closer, then flopping onto its side and stretching out to show its white tufted stomach. A wave of almost paralyzing cold swept through my body, a premonition that for the rest of my life this one image, this cat asking for love while its owner lay murdered on the floor, would haunt me forever. Without thinking, I bent down and scooped up the cat, bringing it with me out to my car, and driving away.
The snow had picked up and had now begun to stick to the roads. I drove slowly, reversing my route back through Tickhill’s town center then picking up the highway that would lead me through the White Mountains and south to Massachusetts. My movements in the car felt slow and deliberate, and even the car itself felt like it was moving through air that had turned into something close to solid. Time had slowed down, and everything was suffused with a sense of unreality. I looked down at the passenger seat where I’d put the docile cat. Some part of my brain was yelling that you never take anything from the scene of a crime, telling me I’d just signed my death warrant, but I kept driving. The cat was now looking up toward the window, at the snowflakes flying by the car. There was no collar. I reached a hand out and rubbed the cat along its spine; it was thinner than I thought, most of its bulk coming from its thick orange fur. I thought I could detect a tiny purr vibrating through my fingertips.
Once I was through the mountains, and my mind had started to clear a little, I made the decision that I would pull over into some random town, look for a store, or an inn, someplace with an unlocked door, and slide the cat inside. He or she would be found and taken to a shelter. There was a risk, a huge risk, that someone would see me, but I had to try. I should never have taken the cat, and I couldn’t even remember now why I had done it. But now that the cat was in the car, I couldn’t bring myself to simply push it out onto the side of the road. That would be the prudent thing to do, but the cat’s chances of survival would be so slim.
I kept driving, and somewhere in southern New Hampshire the cat put its head down and went to sleep. I hadn’t pulled over in any random town, and I suddenly knew that I wasn’t going to. When I arrived back in Beacon Hill and found a parking spot right in front of my building, the cat was still with me. I scooped it up and took it upstairs. It was ten thirty in the morning.
While the cat padded around my small apartment, sniffing and rubbing its cheek along every piece of furniture, I stripped off all my clothes and put them, along with the crowbar, into a heavy-duty garbage bag. Then I showered, soaping up and rinsing off at least three times, until the hot water began to run out.
In my original plan for the day, I was going to leave Chaney’s house, then drive slightly north to a used bookstore I knew that was in an old refurbished barn. I’d been there multiple times, and in the past had had luck finding rare editions of crime novels. If for some reason I wound up being a suspect in Chaney’s death, if my car had been spotted by someone, then at least I’d have had some reason for being in New Hampshire on that particular Monday. It was a very thin alibi, but it was better than nothing. I supposed that now I could say that I was planning on driving to a favorite bookstore but turned back because of the snow.
Of course, none of that would explain the presence of a murdered man’s cat in my apartment, a cat that was now rubbing its chin up against my ankle. I found a can of tuna, tipped it into a bowl, then filled a second bowl with water. I also found the lid from a cardboard box, and scattered some dirt from one of my spider plants into it, hoping it would work as a litter box. While the cat ate, I went onto my computer and did a Google search to find out how to know if a cat was male or female. After some poking around, I decided that the cat was male. I spent the day inside with him, at one point both of us sleeping together on the sofa, the cat down by my feet. Toward nightfall, he�
�d found his way onto the bed, and he curled up on my current book, a paperback copy of Rex Stout’s Too Many Cooks. I named the cat Nero.
One month later—one month after I had left Norman Chaney’s corpse in Tickhill, New Hampshire—two things were clear. One, the police weren’t coming for me. Even though I hadn’t gone online to look up anything about the Chaney murder case, I felt, deep in my bones, that I’d gotten away with it. The second realization was that Nero, who’d taken to his new home pretty happily, needed more people around him. I was often gone for twelve hours at a time, and when I returned home, Nero was right at the door desperate for affection. Mary Anne, my downstairs neighbor, told me she could hear him crying during the day.
I was beginning to think that Nero would make an excellent store cat at Old Devils.
Chapter 13
Being an avid mystery reader as an adolescent does not prepare you for real life. I truly imagined that my adult existence would be far more booklike than it turned out to be. I thought, for example, that there would be several moments in which I got into a cab to follow someone. I thought I’d attend far more readings of someone’s will, and that I’d need to know how to pick a lock, and that any time I went on vacation (especially to old creaky inns or rented lake houses) something mysterious would happen. I thought train rides would inevitably involve a murder, that sinister occurrences would plague wedding weekends, and that old friends would constantly be getting in touch to ask for help, to tell me that their lives were in danger. I even thought quicksand would be an issue.
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