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. 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.