He pictures her rolling over to face her executioner; sees those big brown eyes of hers widening in dread just before the gunshot.
But of course, it hadn’t happened that way. She’d been double-tapped in the back of the head while sleeping on her stomach.
On this sun-dappled late summer morning, he rounds the corner and sees a familiar SUV with an oval LBI sticker on the rear window—Long Beach Island, down the Jersey Shore.
The vehicle belongs to the couple who live diagonally across the street from 104 Glover. Luggage is heaped in the back. The owner, dressed in shorts and a Rip Curl T-shirt, stands on the running board, securing surfboards to the top. His wife has just joined him, in a broad-brimmed straw hat and sunglasses with a beach bag over her shoulder. Their voices carry.
“All locked up and ready to go?” he asks.
“Yes. Did you put my wine in the cooler?”
“Crap. I knew I forgot something.”
“Blake! Go back and get it. I need it!”
“There’s wine down the shore.”
“Not the kind I like,” she whines.
Some people these days are so entitled, Jacob thinks, moving on past the bickering couple. When he was their age, he wouldn’t have—
Stopping short, he gapes at 104 Glover.
No one has lived there since the murders.
Now the front door is propped wide open and a moving van sits at the curb.
Nora
The morning passed in a flurry of cleaning and unpacking, transforming the stagnant, shuttered house into a home filled with sunlight and voices. Now the scents of furniture polish and take-out pizza mingle with the pineapple sage in the front hall.
Passing the vase on her way up the stairs after lunch, Nora again thinks of healing. Of Teddy.
Time to sneak away and make a furtive phone call.
Keith is in the living room with his laptop, working from home to get a head start on the new job. The girls retreated to their rooms, Stacey’s in the middle of the hall across from the bathroom, Piper’s at the far end. Their doors are closed, and all is silent beyond.
Back home, they have their own suites, with walk-in closets and bathrooms. Here, their rooms are smaller than their closets. There’s one full bath for four people, unless you count the rust-stained shower stall in the basement, a 1960s rec room remnant.
But this is New York, and it’s only for a year.
In the sunlit master bedroom at the top of the stairs, Nora changes out of the jeans and white T-shirt she’d donned yesterday morning on the opposite coast. Yesterday, yesterday’s life, might as well have been lived by a stranger.
She puts on another pair of jeans, darker and more fitted, and another T-shirt, this one black. She releases her long blond hair from its tight ponytail and with it, the last of a tension headache she didn’t even realize she had.
Better. So much better, she assures the woman in the mirror.
Everything will be better from now on. You can do this. You’re doing it. You did it. You’re here.
The woman starts to smile, but her blue eyes widen as a faint snatch of music box melody tinkles into the room, and the summer breeze chills.
Nora stands poised, head tilted, not sure whether she really heard it. Was it a ghost? Her imagination?
She steps closer to the billowing curtains and leans toward the open screen, peering down at parallel lines of redbrick row houses and parked cars. She hears only street noise—distant sirens, traffic, a radio, men shouting, kids playing, and then . . .
There it is again. She’s relieved to see an old-time ice cream truck trundle into view like an aging crooner taking the stage, timeworn and playing a nostalgic tune. Not a ghost, not her imagination, no reason to be uneasy. But there’s something . . .
“I told you so, Nora,” Teddy’s voice whispers. “I told you this move wouldn’t make anything better. I told you it was dangerous.”
“No,” she says aloud. “You’re wrong, Teddy.”
She shoves her feet into sneakers, grabs her phone, and descends the stairs beneath the Victorian family portrait.
A rigidly posed young mother in a high-collared dress and father in a three-piece suit rest their hands on their seated teenage daughter’s shoulders. Her eyes are fixed on something behind the photographer and she’s clutching a nosegay of delicate flowers Nora’s pretty sure are forget-me-nots, even without the evocative blue.
These people are a part of 104 Glover’s history, like the Howells, and all who came between.
Nora peeks through the archway into the living room. The ornate carved mantel in the photo’s background remains intact above the marble fireplace.
Keith is in a cushy leather recliner, phone in hand, laptop open, head thrown back, snoring. Yeah, so much for that head start, but Nora is relieved. He won’t ask any questions until she’s back; might not even realize she’s gone.
She grabs the leash draped over the newel post and crosses the wide archway into the dining room. It’s formal, with built-in corner cabinetry, another fireplace, and a polished oval table. Beyond tall windows, the brick patio is lush with green foliage and abundant summer blooms. Flowering vines crawl along trellises and arbors, and a thick, thorny border of roses and berries provides a living privacy screen.
Nora’s eye lingers on faded blossoms that need deadheading and unruly brambles that need pruning. But first things first.
In the kitchen, she finds Kato snoozing in a sunny patch on the back doormat.
Her voice echoes off the subway-tiled walls, polished stone countertops, and slate floor as she asks, “Hey, want to go for a walk?”
The pug opens one eye and closes it again.
Nora fastens the leash to his collar and gives it a little tug. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. Just you and me.”
He gets to his feet with an agreeable wag of his tail, though he’d have been content to doze the afternoon away like Keith. Kato’s on the lazy side even for a pug, and this morning’s walk with Stacey filled his daily quota, and then some. But if Keith asks where she went, she’ll say the dog wanted to go out.
She half expects him to appear and call after her as she heads down the steps onto the sidewalk, and holds her breath until she rounds the corner onto Edgemont Boulevard.
Safe.
The ice cream truck has moved on, but the song is stuck in her head.
All around the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel . . .