All the Beautiful Lies

by Peter Swanson

  Harry sat down on the chair, painted the same color as the desk. He carefully slid the drawer all the way out. Most of what he found was paid bills, bank statements, an insurance policy for the station wagon. There were no letters from a private investigator. He did find an expired passport that had been issued when Alice was just nineteen years old. He’d never seen a picture of his stepmother when she’d been young. She was makeup-free, her skin as pale as it was now, but her eyes seemed even larger in her face, her face a little bit rounder. She was beautiful, and Harry wondered what she’d been like as a teenager. It was somehow impossible to imagine her any different than she was now. He stared at the picture for a long time, and she seemed to stare back, telling him nothing.

  He flipped through the passport to see where she’d been, and a photograph fell out. It was a picture of a young Alice standing with a man Harry didn’t recognize on a cobblestone street, a stone building behind them with the word Funiculaire in metal letters on its side. Both Alice and the man were wearing long, heavy coats. The photographer had focused more on the building behind them, the rail tracks leading up a steep slope, and less on Alice and the man, both a little blurry. Even so, it was clear that the man was quite a bit older than Alice. His arm was draped possessively over Alice’s slim shoulders. Her father, probably. Harry tried to remember if he knew anything about Alice’s family, but all he could recall was his own father telling him that Alice’s parents were dead, and that she wasn’t close to anyone in her extended family.

  Bill hadn’t talked too much about Alice, except for the time he said she reminded him of Maine. For some reason, that description had stuck. Harry heard a noise coming from the front of the house. He quickly returned the passport to where he’d found it, shoved the drawer shut, and went to look. The mailman had pushed the mail through the front door’s slot. Harry picked up an envelope from a bank and a Nordstrom catalogue, and brought them to the kitchen counter. He considered a second cup of coffee but decided he was already jumpy enough. He drank a glass of orange juice instead, flipping through the catalogue, barely seeing the pictures. Then he checked his phone. Nothing from Grace, not that he was expecting something.

  He didn’t go back to Alice’s office, going instead to his father’s, and sitting at the desk on the leather chair. He stared at the framed print on the wall, an original signed illustration by Robert E. McGinnis of a girl in a short white dress sitting on top of a roulette table. It had been done for a book cover, Harry knew, but he couldn’t remember which one. Something from the 1960s. Harry swiveled in the chair, looking at all his father’s books, wondering what would become of them now. He began to think about all the words his father had read, all the plots he’d absorbed, and how they were all gone, but then he stopped himself. Instead, he picked through a stack of books on the desk. At the top was one of his father’s moleskin notebooks. He’d always had one going, filling at least two notebooks a year. In a sense, they were his diaries, but instead of filling them with activities and day-to-day recollections, they were filled with lists of books he was trying to acquire, and lists of books he already had. There was also page after page of favorite quotes, plus his current ever-changing lists of top tens. Ten best Signet paperback covers. Ten best standalone Christies. Ten best crime novels published before 1945. Harry had flipped through his father’s notebooks before. There was never anything personal, not even a shopping list. But, in a way, it was as personal as a diary. It mapped his interior world.

  Harry flipped to the last entry, which came midway through the notebook. It was a quote, centered on the page:

  “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

  As was sometimes the case with quotes his father wrote down, it wasn’t attributed to anyone, probably because his father knew who said it, and these books were only for his father. Harry read the words several times, haunted by them. Maybe it was just some line from a song that his father liked, but it also sounded like a premonition of death.

  Harry punched the line into his smartphone, and got an instant hit. It was from a song by Bob Dylan called “Not Dark Yet.” He wasn’t surprised. Dylan was his father’s favorite musician—there wasn’t even a distant second, except maybe Frank Sinatra. Bill had spent as much time obsessing over Dylan’s lyrics as he did actually listening to his music. His notebooks were filled with Dylan quotes, and sometimes he’d transcribe entire songs.

  Still, Harry stared at this particular line from Dylan for another minute. It was the last thing his father had ever written. Then Harry flipped back a page. There was another quote, this one with an attribution:

  “That’s the worst thing about democracy: there have to be two opinions about every issue.”

  —Ross Macdonald, Black Money

  And before that quote was one of his father’s lists. This one was titled: A REVISED list of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels, ranked in order of preference.

  He didn’t hear the front door open, but Alice’s voice was suddenly in the house. “Anybody home?”

  Harry startled, then stood up, putting the notebook down, and stepping out into the hallway. Alice was there, between Detective Dixon, wearing what looked like the same tan suit he’d had on the first time Harry had met him, and another man, much shorter, in a dark suit. Strange scenarios were passing through Harry’s mind. Was Alice being arrested? Was there more bad news?

  But then Detective Dixon, in a calm voice, said, “Hello, Harry. Alice came by the station this morning, and I thought I’d bring her home. She’s a little upset.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  Alice turned and entered the living room. Detective Dixon stepped forward. “Harry, this is my colleague, Detective Vogel.”

  Harry nodded in the other detective’s direction. He had a wide face and thick, dark eyebrows that almost touched above the bridge of a squat nose. “What’s going on?” Harry asked.

  “Sam, why don’t you sit with Mrs. Ackerson a moment while I talk with Harry.”

  Detective Vogel nodded and followed Alice into the living room while Dixon grasped Harry’s shoulder in one of his big hands and said in a lowered voice: “Alice came to the station today with some new information. She said your father was involved with a young woman here in town. Do you know anything about that?”

  “What do you mean, ‘involved’?” Harry asked.

  “Does the name Annie Callahan mean anything to you?”

  Harry, completely expecting the detective to say Grace’s name, said nothing for a moment. “You knew her?” the detective asked.

  “No, sorry, I didn’t. I don’t. Who is she?”

  “Are you sure? She worked briefly at your father’s bookstore?”

  “Up here? In Maine?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No, I didn’t know her.”

  “What about the name Lou Callahan? Ever heard that name?”

  Harry shook his head.

  “Okay, thanks. That’s all I needed to know. Your stepmother told us today that your father had been involved, romantically, with an employee at the store. That’s Annie Callahan. She thinks either she or her husband might have had something to do with your father’s death.”

  “Why is she just telling you this now?”

  “Partly because of you, Harry. That’s what she said, that she wanted to protect you from finding out that information. She’s pretty upset.” Just as Detective Dixon was saying those words, the other detective—Harry had already forgotten his name—reappeared in the doorway to the living room, and said, “She’s asking to see Harry. You all set here?”

  “We’re all set,” the detective said, placing his hand on Harry’s shoulder and leading him toward Alice.

  Chapter 17

  Now

  In the living room, Alice was on the couch, her knees up tight to her chest. Her head was angled down, her eyes squeezed shut, and she was emitting low, eerie groans. Her wet cheeks made it clear that she’d been crying. Harry was paralyzed with ina
ction for one brief moment, then slid next to her and placed an arm over her shoulders. She instantly adjusted herself, moving closer to him, pressing her damp face against his shirt. He could hear and feel the ragged breath entering and exiting her body. Both detectives stayed standing, but Detective Dixon said, “Alice, I’m going to go talk with this Annie Callahan, okay? And then maybe with her husband.”

  Harry didn’t think she was going to react, but then she shifted her body, turning to face the detective, wiping at her face. There was a damp spot on Harry’s shirt where her face had been. The detective pulled at his suit pants above the knees and crouched. “You going to be okay here with Harry?” he asked.

  Alice slid her legs off the couch and put her feet back on the floor. She nodded her head, while drawing a wet breath in through her nostrils. Harry kept one hand on her back, nervous about moving it. She was wearing a wraparound dress, and the front had slid open a little so that Harry had a brief view of one of her breasts barely covered by the white cup of a bra. She shifted again, fixing the dress, and Harry moved his hand.

  “I don’t know if . . .”

  “You don’t know if what, Mrs. Ackerson?”

  “I don’t know for a fact if Annie . . . or if her husband . . . had anything to do with what happened to my husband.”

  “No, of course not. But it’s information we should have. We’ll check it out.” He stood and nodded toward his partner. Harry took the opportunity to get off the sofa and walk them to the door. “We’ll let you know if we find anything out. In the meantime, if Alice mentions anything that she didn’t mention to us, then . . . you have my card?”

  “I do,” Harry said.

  After they’d left, Harry returned to Alice, who was now standing, smoothing out her dress in the middle of the living room. Her face was dry.

  “You okay?” Harry said.

  Alice didn’t answer the question, but said, “It’s this woman’s husband, I know it is.”

  “Who? This Annie Callahan?”

  “I was hoping you’d never have to hear that name, Harry. I’m sorry. It wasn’t your father’s fault. It was all her. She went after him. She saw his store, and she saw this house, and—”

  “Tell me what happened between them,” Harry interrupted.

  She hitched her shoulders back. “Is it too early for a drink, you think?”

  Alice went to the sunroom while Harry made drinks: a glass of rosé for Alice and a beer for him. He was really only drinking the beer so Alice didn’t have to be alone, but was also happy to be drinking it. He was rattled by the new information.

  Once they were settled—Alice on the love seat, and Harry in one of the rocking chairs—Alice said, “We hired Annie as a huge favor. Her husband, Lou, was a fisherman, is a fisherman, and, you know, with the cod restrictions, he’d been out of work for six months. Your father heard about it, and offered Annie a job. It was last fall, when there’d been extra work.”

  “I didn’t know about that.”

  “Your father was back from a scouting trip with too many books, of course, so he offered Annie a job. Just to help out with cataloguing, but at twenty dollars an hour.” She shook her head, more of a tremor, at the memory. “And then, before you knew it, she’s coming around here to help Bill with the books in his office. I knew. I knew something . . .”

  “How old is she?” Harry asked.

  “Annie? She looks a lot older than she is. I don’t know, somewhere in her thirties.”

  “And they were definitely involved?”

  She tipped her glass back and almost finished her wine. Harry watched her throat muscles swallowing.

  “Oh, they were, for sure, Harry. I’m sorry you have to hear this. I was hoping you wouldn’t, because I know how you felt about your father, how much you admired him, but it was very clear that something was going on. And I had to force him to get rid of her. And then when the detective told me that your father’s death was not an accident, I just knew. I didn’t say anything right away, because of you, Harry, but then I decided I had to tell them.”

  Harry wanted to ask Alice for more specifics. Had she caught them together? Did his father confess to her that they were involved? He didn’t know why he was skeptical—especially considering the possibility that his father had also been having an affair down in New York City—but he did wonder if Alice was overreacting.

  “So she was fired?”

  “She was let go, let’s just say that, and that’s when her husband finally figured it out. John told me that he came to the store, threatened Bill, told him that if he ever came near Annie again he’d kill him with his bare hands. Something like that.”

  “John told you this, or my father did?”

  “John was the one who told me, because he was worried. I asked Bill about it, and he said it was no big deal, just a frustrated man blowing off steam. Your father could be . . . he could be too charitable at times.”

  “So you think that Lou . . . ?”

  “I didn’t think your father had anything more to do with Annie, but who knows? He was always gone lately, and maybe he was meeting her somewhere else. I don’t know. Stupid man.” She looked at her glass, rolling the tiny amount of wine that was left up one of the sides.

  “Can I get you some more?”

  “Okay,” she said, holding out the glass for Harry to take. When he returned with the wine, Alice had curled up in the fetal position on the love seat. Harry gingerly placed her glass on the glass-topped coffee table, as she said, in a fuzzy voice, “Thank you, Harry. I might just take a little nap.”

  “You should.”

  “Don’t leave me, okay?”

  “Okay,” Harry said, not knowing exactly what she meant, “I’ll be here if you need me.” He quietly left the living room, went up to his bedroom, opened up his laptop, and did a search for Annie Callahan or Lou Callahan, but couldn’t find anything. Then he texted Grace, asking if they could meet and talk sometime soon. He needed to get the whole story from her, why she had come to Maine. It was clear that she’d had some sort of significant relationship with his father, and the police would need to know about that, as well.

  Waiting for a response, Harry paced his small bedroom. He stopped and looked at the packed bookcase, all filled with his father’s detective stories. Bill Ackerson would never know that he wound up as a corpse in his own mystery story. Harry almost smiled at the thought. He thought back to the previous Christmas, his father giving him, as he always did, a check, plus one single book, usually his father’s favorite book of that past year. This year it had been A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin. “I missed this, somehow, on the first go-round. It’s brilliant.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Harry had said.

  Later that same night, Alice in bed, Harry had started the book while his father finished reading the latest Ruth Rendell.

  “Why do you think you like mysteries so much?” Harry asked.

  “I’m deeply skeptical of any book that doesn’t begin with a corpse.”

  Harry had heard his father say these exact words, or something close to them, many times. “No, really. Why?”

  His father frowned, thinking. “It’s my religion, I guess, since I don’t have a real religion. The world is chaos, and then a detective comes along and restores order. Or he doesn’t, and that’s really my favorite kind of mystery story.”

  Harry had finished A Kiss Before Dying by the time he returned to school that year. It turned out to be one of those books in which order is restored, but not before a lot of damage had been done. Harry liked the book, but it had left him feeling empty and sad. Instead of bringing it back with him to Mather, he’d left it in the bookshelf in his room. He pulled it out now, looked at his father’s inscription: To Harry with love from Dad. He quickly closed the book and put it back on the shelf. A few months earlier, Harry thought he knew his father, inside and out. Now, he realized he didn’t know him at all.

  His phone buzzed, a text coming through.

 
Come by tonight any time. Just ring the front doorbell and I’ll come let you in.

  Harry wrote back—okay—then went back downstairs to check on Alice.

  She was still in the sunroom, still tucked up asleep on the short sofa in the same position. She looked deeply asleep.

  While Alice slept through the afternoon, Harry tidied up around the kitchen, finding a frozen pizza in the freezer, and cooking it for dinner, even though he wasn’t hungry, and doubted that Alice was, either. When she finally awoke, she wandered into the kitchen, empty glass in her hand, and asked Harry what time it was.

  “Dinnertime,” he said. “You really slept.”

  “I dreamt I woke up and you were gone, and I started to look for you, asking everyone I knew, but everyone told me you’d never existed. And then I was asking about your father, and it turned out he never existed, either.”

  “Scary,” Harry said. “Are you hungry?”

  “Maybe in a minute. I’m going to go see what’s on the TV.”

  Alice turned on the television to the only channel she really watched—HGTV. A couple—a striking blonde and her dark-haired husband—were putting an offer on a California ranch house they wanted to renovate and flip. Harry brought Alice a plate with a slice of the pizza on it. “Thank you, Harry. Who knew you were so handy in the kitchen?”

  “It was frozen.”

  “It’s what your father used to make for dinner when I wasn’t around.”

  “Oh,” Harry said, wanting to apologize. Instead, he said, “So you really think it was Annie Callahan’s husband?”