Later

11

I was still eating a few last French fries (cold by then, but I didn’t mind) when we turned onto a little dead-end street called Cobblestone Lane. There might have been cobblestones on it once, but now it was just smooth tar. The house at the end of it was Cobblestone Cottage. It was a big stone house with fancy carved shutters and moss on the roof. You heard me, moss. Crazy, right? There was a gate, but it was open. There were signs on the gateposts, which were the same gray stone as the house. One said DO NOT TRESPASS, WE ARE TIRED OF HIDING THE BODIES. The other showed a snarling German Shepherd and said BEWARE ATTACK DOG.

Liz stopped and looked at my mother, eyebrows raised.

“The only body Regis ever buried was his pet parakeet, Francis,” Mom said. “Named after Francis Drake, the explorer. And he never had a dog.”

“Allergies,” I said from the back seat.

Liz drove up to the house, stopped, and turned off the blippy dashboard light. “Garage doors are shut and I see no cars. Who’s here?”

“Nobody,” Mom said. “The housekeeper found him. Mrs. Quayle. Davina. She and a part-time gardener were the whole staff. Nice woman. She called me right after she called for an ambulance. Ambulance made me wonder if she was sure he was really dead, and she said she was, because she worked in a nursing home before coming to work for Regis, but he still had to go to the hospital first. I told her to go home as soon as the body was removed. She was pretty freaked out. She asked about Frank Wilcox, he’s Regis’s business manager, and I said I’d get in touch with him. In time I will, but the last time I spoke to Regis, he told me Frank and his wife were in Greece.”

“Press?” Liz asked. “He was a bestselling writer.”

“Jesus-God, I don’t know.” Mom looked around wildly, as if expecting to see reporters hiding in the bushes. “I don’t see any.”

“They may not even know yet,” Liz said. “If they do, if they heard it on a scanner, they’ll go after the cops and EMTs first. The body’s not here so the story’s not here. We’ve got some time, so calm down.”

“I’m staring bankruptcy in the face, I’ve got a brother who may live in a home for the next thirty years, and a boy who might like to go to college someday, so don’t tell me to calm down. Jamie, do you see him? You know what he looks like, right? Tell me you see him.”

“I know what he looks like, but I don’t see him,” I said.

Mom groaned and slapped the heel of her palm against her poor clumped-up bangs.

I grabbed for the door handle, and surprise surprise, there wasn’t one. I told Liz to let me out and she did. We all got out.

“Knock on the door,” Liz said. “If no one answers, we’ll go around and boost Jamie up so he can look in the windows.”

We could do that because the shutters—with fancy little ornamental doodads carved into them—were all open. My mother ran to try the door, and for the moment Liz and I were alone.

“You don’t really think you can see dead people like the kid in that movie, do you, Champ?”

I didn’t care if she believed me or not, but something about her tone—as if this was all a big joke—pissed me off. “Mom told you about Mrs. Burkett’s rings, didn’t she?”

Liz shrugged. “That might have been a lucky guess. You didn’t happen to see any dead folks on the way here, did you?”

I said no, but it can be hard to tell unless you talk to them… or they talk to you. Once when me and Mom were on the bus I saw a girl with cuts in her wrists so deep they looked like red bracelets, and I was pretty sure she was dead, although she was nowhere near as gooshy as the Central Park man. And just that day, as we drove out of the city, I spotted an old woman in a pink bathrobe standing on the corner of Eighth Avenue. When the sign turned to WALK, she just stood there, looking around like a tourist. She had those roller things in her hair. She might have been dead, but she also might have been a live person just wandering around, the way Mom said Uncle Harry used to do sometimes before she had to put him in that first care home. Mom told me that when Uncle Harry started doing that, sometimes in his pj’s, she gave up thinking he might get better.

“Fortune tellers guess lucky all the time,” Liz said. “And there’s an old saying about how even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”

“So you think my mother’s crazy and I’m helping her be crazy?”

She laughed. “That’s called enabling, Champ, and no, I don’t think that. What I think is she’s upset and grasping at straws. Do you know what that means?”

“Yeah. That she’s crazy.”

Liz shook her head again, more emphatically this time. “She’s under a lot of stress. I totally get it. But making things up won’t help her. I hope you get that.”

Mom came back. “No answer, and the door’s locked. I tried it.”

“Okay,” Liz said. “Let’s go window-peeking.”

We walked around the house. I could look in the dining room windows, because they went all the way to the ground, but I was too short for most of the other ones. Liz made a hand-step so I could look into those. I saw a big living room with a wide-screen TV and lots of fancy furniture. I saw a dining room with a table long enough to seat the starting team of the Mets, plus maybe their bullpen pitchers. Which was crazy for a guy who hated company. I saw a room that Mom called the small parlor, and around back was the kitchen. Mr. Thomas wasn’t in any of the rooms.

“Maybe he’s upstairs. I’ve never been up there, but if he died in bed… or in the bathroom… he might still be…”

“I doubt if died on the throne, like Elvis, but I suppose it’s possible.”

That made me laugh, calling the toilet the throne always made me laugh, but I stopped when I saw Mom’s face. This was serious business, and she was losing hope. There was a kitchen door, and she tried the knob, but it was locked, just like the front door.

She turned to Liz. “Maybe we could…”

“Don’t even think about it,” Liz said. “No way are we breaking in, Tee. I’ve got enough problems at the Department without setting off a recently deceased bestselling author’s security system and trying to explain what we’re doing here when the guys from Brinks or ADT show up. Or the local cops. And speaking of the cops… he died alone, right? The housekeeper found him?”

“Yes, Mrs. Quayle. She called me, I told you that—”

“The cops will want to ask her some questions. Probably doing it right now. Or maybe the medical examiner. I don’t know how they do things in Westchester County.”

“Because he’s famous? Because they think someone might have murdered him?”

“Because it’s routine. And yeah, because he’s famous, I suppose. The point is, I’d like for us to be gone when they show up.”

Mom’s shoulders slumped. “Nothing, Jamie? No sign of him?”

I shook my head.

Mom sighed and looked at Liz. “Maybe we should check the garage?”

Liz gave her a shrug that said it’s your party.

“Jamie? What do you think?”

I couldn’t imagine why Mr. Thomas would be hanging out in his garage, but I guessed it was possible. Maybe he had a favorite car. “I guess we should. As long as we’re here.”

We started for the garage, but then I stopped. There was a gravel path beyond Mr. Thomas’s swimming pool, which had been drained. The path was lined with trees, but because it was late in the season and most of the leaves were gone, I could see a little green building. I pointed to it. “What’s that?”

Mom gave her forehead another slap. I was starting to worry she might give herself a brain tumor, or something. “Oh my God, La Petite Maison dans le Bois! Why didn’t I think of it first?”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“His study! Where he writes! If he’s anywhere, it would there! Come on!”

She grabbed my hand and ran me around the shallow end of the pool, but when we got to where the gravel path started, I set my feet and stopped. Mom kept going, and if Liz hadn’t grabbed me by the shoulder, I probably would have face-planted.

“Mom? Mom!”

She turned around, looking impatient. Except that’s not the right word. She looked halfway to crazy. “Come on! I’m telling you if he’s anywhere here, it will be there!”

“You need to calm down, Tee,” Liz said. “We’ll check out his writing cabin, and then I think we should go.”

“Mom!”

My mother ignored me. She was starting to cry, which she hardly ever did. She didn’t do it even when she found out how much the IRS wanted, that day she just pounded her fists on her desk and called them a bunch of bloodsucking bastards, but she was crying now. “You go if you want, but we’re staying here until Jamie’s sure it’s a bust. This might be just a pleasure jaunt for you, humoring the crazy lady—”

“That’s unfair!”

“—but this is my life we’re talking about—”

“I know that—”

“—and Jamie’s life, and—”

“MOM!”

One of the worst things about being a kid, maybe the very worst, is how grownups ignore you when they get going on their shit. “MOM! LIZ! BOTH OF YOU! STOP!”

They stopped. They looked at me. There we stood, two women and a little boy in a New York Mets hoodie, beside a drained pool on an overcast November day.

I pointed to the gravel path leading to the little house in the woods where Mr. Thomas wrote his Roanoke books.

“He’s right there,” I said.