The Fall Guy

eleven

At around five the following afternoon, he went out from the kitchen, where he’d been making focaccia dough, and walked over to the pool. Chloe was lying on a sunbed, wearing earbuds and laughing at something on her phone. She liked listening to comedy podcasts and on those occasions there would be the minor delight of seeing her break into helpless laughter without visible cause.

It was a beautiful afternoon, the light so clear he could see small insects at the far end of the pool, glinting in the air above the water.

“Coming for a swim?” Chloe asked, tapping her phone. She was wearing one of her thin cotton shirts over her swimsuit. Her hair was loosely gathered in a leather clasp, falling in dark strands.

“Thinking of it,” Matthew said. “I was actually wondering if it was warm enough.”

“I know. It’s getting cooler. I think the monarchs may have started leaving.” She gestured over to the butterfly garden, where a few desultory specimens were still wandering through the air.

“Where do they go?”

“Mexico.”

“Lucky them!”

She smiled.

“Want to hear something hilarious?”

She held out one of her earbuds, leaving the other in her ear.

“Sure.”

He went over and perched on the end of her sunbed.

“Come closer,” she said. “It won’t reach.”

He slid closer to her and put in the earbud. Chloe said a name that didn’t mean anything to him.

“He’s an actor but he also does stand-up. This… this person I know who goes to a lot of comedy clubs put me on to him.”

She tapped the phone and the comedian’s voice came into Matthew’s ear. He laughed along with Chloe, but he wasn’t listening. To be sitting there, joined to her through the looping white scribble of the earbuds, close enough to feel the warmth of her body, was a novel experience, strangely intimate, and he found himself wanting to take note of every detail of it: her arm in its weightless shirt brushing against him as she laughed; the sunlight on her fine small teeth; her perfume, which was like the scent of something grown in paradise; above all the private atmosphere of happiness she dwelled in, that at this proximity was something you could almost touch and taste and see. The intense love he felt for her seemed to dilate and sparkle inside him. He sat motionless, drinking in the unexpected blissfulness of the moment.

It was Charlie who brought it to an end, appearing at the gate in his swimming trunks. He was looking at his iPad.

“Hey, Chlo, didn’t we meet Wade Grollier? The director?”

Chloe took out her earbud.

“What?”

Charlie walked in through the gate, still looking at his screen.

“Didn’t we meet Wade Grollier?”

Very coolly Chloe said:

“Who?”

“Wade D. Grollier. Movie guy.”

“I don’t know.”

“I think we met him at some fund-raiser. Big guy with a beard.”

She shrugged.

“Maybe. Why?”

“He was renting a house up here this summer.”

Matthew braced himself.

“Oh,” Chloe said with perfect nonchalance.

“Yeah. He was just killed.”

No sound came from Chloe for a second or two.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“He was found dead in his rental house.”

“What?”

“Stabbed. They found him today.”

“What… where?”

Charlie looked down at his screen. “Veery Road-that’s the one that goes by the creek, isn’t it?”

Chloe didn’t answer. She had stood up, putting on her sunglasses, and was walking over to Charlie.

“I’m pretty sure we did meet him,” Charlie said as she looked at the screen over his shoulder. “At that thing in Aspen, where they had the hot-air balloons…”

Chloe had turned pale and Matthew could see that her hands were clenched tight.

“Don’t you remember? Must have been two, three years ago.”

“Maybe. What else does it say?”

Charlie flicked the screen.

“That’s all. It’s just a statement from the sheriff’s department. Found stabbed earlier today… Treating it as murder… That’s his picture.”

“Oh, god.”

“Unbelievable, right?”

Chloe moistened her lips, but said nothing.

She detached herself from Charlie and walked to the gate, cradling her elbows. Matthew could feel, almost on his own nerves, the horror surging through her.

“Where are you off to?” Charlie called after her.

“Lily.”

She moved quickly toward the house. After she’d gone, Charlie gave a quiet laugh:

“Psycho on the loose, she’s thinking.”

Matthew gave a vague nod. He’d known his reactions were going to have to be very carefully calibrated once the discovery was made, but he could tell already that this was going to be more complicated than he’d imagined. Aside from the need to hide any awareness of how Chloe would surely be feeling under her own, equally necessary, masquerade, it was also going to be crucial not to seem out of step with the casual attitude that Charlie, who had no reason to feel personally affected, would naturally assume.

Charlie continued:

“I doubt that’s what it is, though. Probably just some meth-head burglar who wasn’t expecting to find anyone home.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, or one of those Rainbow people.”

He plunged into the pool and began swimming laps. Matthew went inside. The TV was on in the upstairs bedroom. He could hear its muffled noise through the kitchen ceiling, under the squeak of Lily’s clarinet from along the corridor. There was a radio in the kitchen, but he couldn’t find any news on it. He fetched his netbook from the living room and found a couple of breaking news stories that had the same information Charlie had read from his iPad.

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.

Lily had been invited to a birthday party that afternoon, for a girl she’d met at camp. To Matthew’s surprise, Chloe invited him along for the ride.

“They sound interesting, the parents. You should come.”

“Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to gate-crash…”

“No. It’s just one of those things where they invite the adults to stick around if they want to. I’d drop Lily off but it’s all the way over in Klostville. Come, Matt!”

They set off in the Lexus. Chloe hummed quietly as she drove. She seemed dazed, absent, and Matthew wondered if she’d taken a tranquilizer. Lily sat in the back, listening to music on her headphones. Veery Road was cordoned off, the words SHERIFF’S LINE DO NOT CROSS running in black letters along the yellow tape. News vans and police vehicles were parked on the county road verge. Chloe glanced down toward the A-frame as they passed. She didn’t say anything but it wasn’t hard to imagine what she was feeling. An urge to make some comforting gesture gripped Matthew. He almost felt he could touch her shoulder in silent sympathy without danger, as if there were some point of contact between them that existed outside the practical exigencies of the situation. He restrained himself, however, aware of the danger of giving even the remotest hint of what he knew.

Glancing in the mirror, Chloe said quietly:

“Did you ever see any of his movies?”

For form’s sake Matthew thought he should ask whose.

“Wade Grollier’s. That was Veery Road back there. Where he was killed.”

“Ah, right. No, I don’t think I have. Have you?”

“I’ve seen every one of them.”

He looked for a tone of ordinary surprise.

“What are they like?”

“I think you’d enjoy them. They’re very funny and warm and… human. Even though they’re full of robots and talking animals!”

He gave a polite laugh. Was this why she’d invited him along? To talk about Grollier? If so, he felt he should do what he could to rise to the occasion.

“You said he was nice, that one time you met him…”

She was silent a long moment, and it seemed to him he could feel her struggling with an intense desire to talk, perhaps even to blab out the whole story of her affair.

“We barely spoke,” she said, clearing her throat. “But he must have made an impression on me. I went out and got hold of all his films.”

“I’d like to see them. Maybe we could watch one tonight…”

“Maybe.”

She rummaged in her purse, bringing out a pair of sunglasses that hid half her face. Matthew turned away, doing his best to conceal any awareness of her emotion. In the mirror, he saw Lily take a pair of checker-framed shades from her backpack and put them on, gazing up at her mother’s reflection. Chloe stared at her a moment before smiling. Again there was that slight impression of strain in her relationship with the girl. She started humming again; a light, tuneless sound that seemed designed to keep the world at arm’s length. By uncertain processes of thought Matthew found himself remembering Charlie’s comment about his first wife’s reluctance to have a child-how he’d been afraid it meant she wanted to go on “fooling around with other guys”-and with a little jolt he realized he might have just stumbled on something interesting. Chloe had become pregnant with Lily almost immediately after she and Charlie were married. Charlie had told Matthew the news over the phone, and Matthew had congratulated Chloe the next time he saw her in Cobble Hill. She’d thanked him, but he’d been struck by a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the prospect of impending motherhood. “It’s not exactly what I had planned for this moment in my life,” she’d said. “But I guess that’s the way it goes.” He’d assumed the pregnancy must have been an accident, and that she’d simply decided to make the best of it. (His later discovery that she was a practicing Catholic had seemed to confirm this.) But now, as he considered it in the light of Charlie’s comment about Nikki, it seemed to him things might have been more complicated. Had Charlie somehow pressured his new wife into having a child before she was ready? Got her pregnant so as to lock her into the marriage tightly enough to ward off his own jealousies? Not that he’d have forced anything: his benign image of himself wouldn’t have allowed that. But he was a good manipulator, Charlie; very proficient at getting what he wanted without seeming to twist your arm. You could say it was a specialty of his, in fact, Matthew thought. If nothing else, he was quite capable of being deliberately careless in bed. And of course he’d have been able to pretend to argue for terminating the pregnancy (Matthew could hear him doing it; all scrupulous devil’s advocacy against himself), knowing full well that Chloe wouldn’t consider it…

Was that it? he wondered, turning back to her. Was that what had pushed her into Grollier’s arms, or at least enabled her to act on her attraction to him? There was nothing vengeful or calculating about her-he was certain of that-but the delicate mechanism of her psyche was such that even if she’d had no idea of having been manipulated, let alone of punishing Charlie for it, the sheer drastic fact of it, lodged in the living tissue of her marriage, was bound to have summoned into existence some equally drastic countermeasure somewhere along the line. In which case poor old Charlie had had it coming…

A few miles beyond Klostville, the GPS took them up a steep mountain road and onto a driveway that skirted a grassy meadow. At the end was a wooden house with a stone terrace where several adults and young girls were gathered. Solar panels gleamed on the roof, and an open-sided shed of rough timbers filled with neatly stacked logs stood to one side. There was a fenced chicken coop, and a paddock with a donkey in it and some small goats. A pleasant farmyard smell scented the air, sweetish and mealy.

A tall man in his thirties greeted them on the terrace, introducing himself as Philippe. He spoke with a French accent but his wife, Caitlin, who came over a moment later, seemed thoroughly American: gangly and blonde, with a generous laugh.

“So great to meet you,” she said, shaking their hands and looking from one to the other. “Natalie is very smitten with your daughter.”

She seemed to assume that Matthew was Lily’s father, and Chloe made no attempt to correct her. They were introduced to the other adults.

“Do you guys live around here?” a bearded man in a T-shirt asked.

“Aurelia,” Chloe answered. She’d taken off her sunglasses and seemed to be making a determined effort to appear relaxed and cheerful.

“Aurelia!” another guest exclaimed. “Isn’t that where that movie director was just killed?”

“That’s right,” Matthew said, answering for Chloe.

The guest, a woman with long silver hair, shook her head:

“Awful! Do the police have any idea who it was?”

“Not as far as we know.”

“Truly awful,” the woman repeated.

Caitlin brought out dips and carrot sticks from the kitchen, while Philippe led the girls off on a treasure hunt, piling them into a wagon attached to a small tractor. The dozen-odd adults chatted on the terrace, sampling the dips and drinking craft beers from the cooler. They were a mixture of locals and weekenders. The silver-haired woman was a sculptor. The bearded man worked as a fishing and wilderness guide. There was a chiropractor and a couple who ran a shoe store. It seemed to Matthew that they were all under the impression he was Chloe’s partner, and he found himself slipping mentally into the role; sitting close to her, opening her beer, letting his arm brush carelessly against hers. He was oddly relaxed. The individual who had spent the last few weeks in a state of neurotic, spiraling obsession seemed utterly unconnected to him. He felt affable, even charming. It was as if, playing the part of Chloe’s lover, he was able to draw on qualities he couldn’t access as himself, most notably the sort of easy-going, half-serious curiosity that had always seemed to him the elusive key to getting along with strangers. He found himself in conversation with Caitlin about the enormous flagstones on her terrace. She described how she and Philippe had transported them from a disused quarry on the ridge above their house, using the old quarrymen’s technique of building an ice road in winter and sliding the pieces down. Genuinely interested, he questioned her about the house, the animals, their lives here in general. They’d moved from the city three years ago, she told him, where they’d bought and sold houses that had gone into foreclosure. Philippe, a graduate of Wharton as well as some eminent-sounding French institute, still did some real estate, but their aim was to live entirely off the land. “Homesteading,” Caitlin called it, though from the plans she described-building cellars into the hillside for goat cheese, and raising pigs for charcuterie in mobile foraging pens through the woods behind the house-it sounded more ambitious than that. She herself had grown up in Manhattan, but her grandparents on both sides were Wisconsin farmers, and as she described her and Philippe’s new life, she seemed to radiate a more than purely personal happiness, as though some large and significant destiny were being fulfilled.

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.