After a while she excused herself and went back inside the house. The silver-haired woman and some of the other guests were still talking about Grollier’s murder, trading theories about what had happened. Matthew turned toward them, listening in. One of the shoe store couple had heard that Grollier’s body was found naked, and was surmising some kind of sexual assignation gone wrong. The chiropractor seemed to know for a fact that the police were planning a raid on the Rainbow encampment to search for the stolen property. The wilderness guide echoed what Charlie had said: “I’ll bet it was just some drug-addled drifter who’s probably halfway across the country by now…”
He tuned out. The air was cool, but the sun itself was pleasantly warm. He tipped his face to it, closing his eyes and basking in its intimate heat. A fantasy formed in his mind: living up here in the mountains with Chloe, opening a little restaurant with food from local farmers and “homesteaders,” cultivating a group of friends like these. His visits to the A-frame felt very distant from him. The stabbing itself seemed to have receded to a point of almost imperceptible remoteness.
The little rural fantasy played on in his mind. A funny name for the restaurant occurred to him-Discomfort Food-and he chuckled softly, knowing it would amuse Chloe too. The talk around him had moved on from Grollier and he listened in again as it turned to the price of firewood, the surge in the local bear population, intrigues at the Klostville Town Board… There was something appealing about it all; an easy, expansive ordinariness he hadn’t encountered for a long time; not in the pinched conditions of his own life and not in the more luxurious spaces of Charlie’s either. Charlie’s wealth made him guarded, wary of people’s motives for befriending him, and he lived a rather solitary life as a consequence. He and Chloe had done almost no entertaining this entire summer. Even the people who were going to be ousting Matthew in a couple of days were, as it turned out, just a potential business partner and his family.
Caitlin came out of the kitchen carrying a tray of plates and glasses.
“They just had a guy from the sheriff’s department on the radio. The barman at the Millstream Inn remembers seeing Grollier in there the night he was killed. Apparently he got a call from someone and left in a hurry right after. They’re putting out an appeal for the caller to come forward.”
Matthew forced himself not to look at Chloe, but he could feel her tighten beside him. The other guests began talking.
“Can’t they just track the person down from the guy’s call records?”
“Maybe his phone was stolen.”
“They’d still be able to get the records, though, wouldn’t they, from the carrier?”
“Depends what kind of phone it was.”
Half-listening, he tried to gauge the seriousness of the development. Assuming Chloe had called Grollier on his Tracfone, and that Grollier had paid for that phone with cash, there was no reason to think the police would trace the call to Chloe. But what if she’d called him on his iPhone? Or what if the disposable phone had been paid for with a credit card and was therefore traceable? Or suppose Chloe decided, regardless, to come forward as the caller? Her good Catholic girl’s conscience was apparently flexible enough to permit an affair, but he wasn’t so sure it would allow her to obstruct the investigation of a murder.
He turned to her. She was following the conversation with a plausible air of detached curiosity, even putting in the odd comment of her own. But there was a fragility in her bearing, a constriction in her smile, and even if no one else noticed it, he could feel the immense effort of self-control she was making.
She smiled at him-he’d been staring, he realized-and he smiled back, wishing he could beam some strength at her, or at least a sense of how dangerous it would be, for both of them, if she lost her nerve.
twelve
“There are forty-five million people living in poverty in this country,” Charlie said, reaching for some smoked sturgeon he’d brought back from the city. “They can’t put up collateral for a big loan, but relatively tiny amounts of money can make a huge difference, and the thing is they pay it back! Or at least the women do. The women actually have a near-one-hundred-percent repayment rate.”
It had rained in the night; a soft drumming like fingers on a desk, and it was still coming down steadily. Charlie was in a good mood. His deal was coming together, and in his exuberance he seemed to have forgotten his earlier reluctance to discuss it in front of Matthew.
“Interesting,” Chloe said. She seemed composed, if not exactly relaxed.
“Yeah, I think we’re going to make microloan-lending to impoverished women a centerpiece of our strategy.”
“That’s excellent, Charlie.”
“It’ll take some packaging, to get it across to investors, but it stacks up. It’s kind of exciting. We’re actually feeling rather proud of ourselves!”
“You should be. Isn’t that great, Lily? Did you hear what Daddy said?”
“That’s great, Daddy.”
Matthew listened absently, smiling and nodding in the right places, though his mind was on other things. As of tomorrow he’d be gone for four days, which seemed a long time not to be able to follow developments firsthand, and this was nagging at him. Chloe’s state of mind, in particular, was something he felt he needed to monitor closely and he wasn’t going to be able to do that from the city. So far she seemed to have decided it was more important to protect her marriage than help the cops. But that could easily change, and he’d have preferred to be able to see it coming.
Lily wanted to play Scrabble after breakfast. Matthew began to clear the dishes, but Chloe insisted he come and play with them.
“We’ll clean up later.”
They went into the living room and set up the board on the coffee table. For a while they played without speaking, lulled by the steady rain into a peaceful silence. Even Matthew was able to relax a little. His mind drifted back to that first game of the summer, when Charlie had been so unamused by his joke word “siouxp.” He found himself thinking of family Scrabble games when Charlie had come to live with them in London: the way he’d been torn between wanting to be a part of the household and wanting it known that he considered the whole rigmarole to be, in some crucial way, not “cool.”
“Coolness” had been extremely important to Charlie at fourteen, Matthew remembered. He’d arrived a year late at their school, which made it difficult for him to make his mark, or at least to get the kind of immediate high-status social ranking to which he seemed to feel entitled. Being cool had evidently been something he believed he could turn into a ticket to popularity. He was already somewhat cool, intrinsically, from the other boys’ point of view, just by being American, but he took a lot of trouble to finesse it. Matthew had shared a bedroom with him for over a year, so he’d been able to observe the process close up, and it had been a revelation. The Dannecker family had never been remotely interested in fashion or pop culture, but suddenly here was this boy in their home who, to Matthew’s admiring astonishment, would spend hours in front of the mirror, gelling his hair, trying on different outfits, with and without Ray-Bans, Discman, Yankees hat, Converse sneakers. Even on schooldays he’d do things with the school suit to sharpen it up. Fancy belts, a pair of cowboy boots he ordered from Arizona… But it had been about attitude also, Matthew thought, remembering the subtle sneer fixed permanently on his cousin’s handsome face at that time, and the way he had of rolling his eyes that made you feel ashamed of whatever crime against coolness you’d just committed. He’d do it when anyone in Matthew’s family used one of the pet words they’d held on to from when Matthew and his sister were little-“polly” for porridge, “mimi” for milk… It was just their way of amusing each other, but Charlie had made the whole family self-conscious about it.