Charlie came in from his swim and joined Chloe upstairs. An hour later the two of them came down for dinner.
“Like I told you, Matt,” Charlie said, “burglary gone wrong. They had the sheriff on the local news. So we’re off the hook for anything creepier. Right, Chlo?”
“Right.” Chloe poured herself a drink.
“What did they say?” Matthew asked, trying to strike a tone of neutral interest.
“Basically just that. Someone broke in thinking he was out, got surprised and stuck a knife in him. The owner of the house found the body this morning but it happened a while ago.”
“They can’t tell exactly?”
“I guess that takes some time to determine. Anyhow, according to the owner he was due to fly out to Malaysia the day before yesterday, so-”
“Indonesia,” Chloe corrected him.
“No, I think she said Malaysia.”
She seemed about to insist, but swallowed down her drink instead.
“I’m guessing it happened the night of the fireworks,” Charlie said. “Everyone in town goes, so it’s an obvious time for a break-in.”
“Right.”
“It’ll put a damper on the summer rental market, that’s for sure.”
Chloe went over to the drinks cabinet. Matthew heard the bottle clinking against her glass but managed to stop himself from looking.
“Sorry, that was a callous thing to say,” Charlie said. “I guess I’m spooked by the fact that we met the guy. Chloe does remember, by the way, Matt.”
“Oh, yes?”
Matthew looked at Chloe. She nodded.
“What was he like?”
Her eyes met his, and he made himself hold their glance. Her poise impressed him. Aside from the shaky hands and the fact that she was drinking at three times her usual rate there was little outward indication of what she must have been feeling. Certainly Charlie didn’t seem to have any inkling of it.
“Oh, you know… It was at one of those events where you chat to hundreds of people. He seemed nice enough…”
“Was he… did he have a family?”
“I have no idea.”
“He lived with some actress in SoHo,” Charlie said. “She’s off filming in the desert. Apparently he was up here to rewrite the script of his new movie.”
“What actress?” Matthew asked, trying to second-guess what a guiltless version of himself would be saying.
“I forget. Who was it, Chloe?”
“I have no idea,” Chloe said with a brusqueness that made Matthew nervous. He was well aware that his safety depended as much on Chloe’s ability to put on a convincing performance as it did on his own.
“But listen,” she said. “Let’s not talk about this right now, shall we? Lily doesn’t know and I don’t want to scare her.”
“Agreed,” Charlie answered.
The topic wasn’t mentioned at dinner, and Chloe went off upstairs immediately after. Matthew cleared up while Charlie and Lily embarked on a game of Scrabble in the living room. When he was finished he looked online for more news. There were tributes from fans and colleagues, but nothing new about the investigation. He went to bed without any serious expectation of being able to sleep, which turned out to be the case, though he drifted off for a couple of hours just as day was breaking and the birds were beginning to sing.
Breakfasting alone, he found a report on the murder in the New York Times online, along with a short obituary. Neither contained anything he didn’t already know. Later that morning Charlie came home from tennis with the Aurelia Gazette and the East Deerfield Citizen.
“He’s all over the Citizen,” he said, sprawling down on the sofa.
“Who is?” Chloe asked. She’d been upstairs most of the morning, but had gone outside a little while ago, and had just come back in with some wildflowers, which she was arranging in a vase. She was wearing more eye makeup than usual, Matthew noticed. Other than that, it was hard to tell whether there was any objective basis for the aura of precarious frailty he detected around her, or if he was only noticing it because of what he knew. Lily was up in her room, her voice rising uninhibitedly over the tinny accompaniment of a karaoke machine.
“Wade D. Grollier,” Charlie answered his wife. “Want to hear what they say?”
Chloe cleared her throat before answering.
“Sure.”
“Not interrupting you, Matt?”
Matthew had found a Sudoku book in the bathroom and spent the last couple of hours doing puzzles. Plunging his mind into the realm of pure numbers seemed to give him some relief from his own thoughts, which had begun circling around the variables of what might or might not happen now that the body had been found, and how best to react to each eventuality. This ceaseless but largely pointless activity was what had kept him awake for most of the previous night.
“Of course not,” he said.
“I’ll give you the highlights. Let’s see. Police unable to pinpoint exact time of death but believe it occurred sometime during the Aurelia Volunteers Day fireworks. So I was right about that… Director survived by a sister, who issued a statement calling him one of the kindest, funniest, most creative blah blah blah… Staying in Aurelia to work on a screenplay… Not married but living in New York with girlfriend, actress Rachel Turpin. Right, of course. Spokesperson for Turpin said the actress, who is currently on location in Arizona, was devastated and blah blah… Officers from the sheriff’s department canvassing neighbors on Veery Road and throughout Aurelia for possible leads… Case being handled by detectives from Homicide and Burglary Divisions… Murder weapon believed to be a kitchen knife missing from the house… Any information from members of the public blah blah blah…”
He tossed the paper aside.
“East Deerfield Burglary Division. Now, there’s a phrase to strike fear into the most hardened criminal’s heart! Maybe the guy’ll just turn himself in out of sheer terror.” He laughed. It was a quirk of Charlie’s to be contemptuous, on principle, toward the police and uniformed officials in general.
“Why are they so sure it was a burglary?” Chloe asked.
“As opposed to what? An assassination? Some rival director jealous of his awards?”
Chloe shrugged.
“I mean, was anything actually stolen?”
“Well… presumably.”
After a moment, Chloe said:
“Does it say what?”
Charlie picked up the paper and scanned the piece again.
“No. But-would it, necessarily?”
“I guess not.”
She adjusted some flowers in her vase, and picked up a photography book. Matthew glanced over, trying to guess what was going through her head. It occurred to him that she might have been thinking about Grollier’s disposable Tracfone; hoping it had been stolen, perhaps, so that the police wouldn’t find her number on it. It was too bad he couldn’t tell her he had it safely in his own possession.
Charlie looked at his watch.
“I should get going. Big meeting this afternoon.”
He went up to take a shower. Before long Chloe put aside her book and casually reached for the newspaper. Grollier’s face filled most of the front page, broad and smiling. Matthew watched out of the corner of his eye as she looked at the picture, her own face expressionless. After a while she stood up and, without a word, went out through the glass doors. Halfway across the lawn she stumbled on something, almost tripping over, though she moved on as though she hadn’t noticed. Passing Charlie’s meditation garden, she wandered into the woods at the edge of the property, disappearing behind the gray trunks. She was gone for the rest of the morning.