“It’s for a part,” he said. “Other people lose eighty pounds or grow a beard; I can wear a Sox hat.”
She eyed him warily. “Okay. John No Last Name can wear a Sox hat. He probably stole it.” Just then, Laurie’s phone pinged and she looked down to see a message from Matt.
Just wondering if you’ve had a chance to grab those letters. Still would love to take a look.
She groaned. “This guy.”
“What?”
“Well, like I told you, I got him to come over to the house by telling him this story about finding these letters to Dot. I didn’t really think about it beyond that. But now he’s, like, obsessed with them, and he wants to see them, and I think I might have done a little bit too good of a job convincing him that I wanted his help and that he could definitely, absolutely rob me again. And he’s very excited about it.”
“So you’re assuming he has not seen the Melissa McCarthy movie with the forged letters.”
“I’m hoping he hasn’t. I’m not sure he watches a lot of great women directors, plus I doubt he can fit it into his busy schedule of rewatching the special features on his Joker Blu-ray.”
“As long as we’re talking about fakes,” he said, “what do you think our odds are here, assuming we get this back? Do you think Dot would have had some expensive thing in her house and she wouldn’t have told us? She wouldn’t have mentioned it in her will, or told anybody where or what it was? I’m not sure why she would do that. And I guess I don’t want you to be upset if…if it turns out it’s just a thing she had.” He looked down into his coffee cup.
“I don’t know,” Laurie said. “But there’s a story about this thing. I think she knew this guy, Kittery. Ginger said something the other day, and I just—I just think she knew him, maybe.”
“And what if she did?”
“Well, what if this was a present from him? What if she really cared about him and this was what he gave her? I don’t even care whether it’s worth money, but if this was important to her, I want us to know the story.”
Ryan thought about things in a very particular way. It was why he was a good actor. He could see in a lot of directions, Lisa always said. She said if he saw two people bump into each other going through the door of a coffee shop, he could understand how it felt for both of them. “Maybe she didn’t want us to know,” he said. “Or she would have told us.”
Laurie felt the breeze getting a little warmer on her cheek. “Look, you put on a Sox hat and you want to be Bob Wanamaker. I try to figure out what happened,” she said. “It’s what I do, you know? I want to know why this bird doesn’t live by this pond anymore, or why these wolves stopped coming back to this park, or why this flower died off. I don’t want people to think she just took pictures of things. I don’t want them to think she just stood outside of everything and watched and clicked her camera. I want to know what happened.”
He nodded. “Okay. Fair enough.” She was struck by the ease in him. He’d been skinny, really skinny, when he was younger. She used to say he had the A body and she had the B body in the family, and everybody else was somewhere in between. He’d had elbows with sharp corners like he was made out of Popsicle sticks. Now he was different. He went to the gym, which he said was a work requirement—which he wrote off on his taxes. He always had pro-level haircuts, and Lisa kept him in sharp ensembles, sometimes tweaking and tailoring for him. He was a good-looking kid, that was what people would say about him. He was a good-looking kid. He smiled at her. “If you say it’s important, then we’re going to get it back in your hands. I’m on board.”
“Thank you.”
“Can I ask you one other thing?” He paused for only a second. “I hear everything you’re saying. But do you also want to get this thing back because you want to stick it to the asshole who took it away from you? Because if that’s what this is about,” he said as he put on his sunglasses against the morning glare, “then I’m really, really on board.”
He had never gotten over the feeling of that shiny gold suit.
Chapter Eighteen
Rocky’s last name was Sapwell.
This had not been hard to learn; would that everyone a reporter ever needed to track down was named Rocky and lived in a small town known for hooked rugs and its toy museum. Nick found him in about five minutes, smiling out from a Facebook profile that listed him as a “collectibles dealer” who lived in Waldoboro. When he sent the page to June and Daisy, both of whom had seen the guy while Nick and Laurie were breathing on each other in the closet, they said yes, that was him.