“‘Fall hair don’t care,’” he muttered. “Jesus fucking Christ.” It was gratifying in a petty sort of way to see that the commenters on the picture largely agreed with him: Adrienne Richards was an asshole. The ridiculous hair, the latte, the idiotic hashtags; if she was trying to make people hate her, she was doing a good job. He scrolled down, past pictures of glossy manicures, expensive shoes, Adrienne in an evening gown at a fundraiser for a politician who was now on the verge of going to prison for fraud. Adrienne’s face was everywhere, too, right up close, her big blue eyes framed by a row of impossibly thick lashes, probably fake. It all looked familiar in a generic girly sort of way, but eventually, he came to a view he recognized for certain: the lake, seen from the deck of Lizzie Ouellette’s cabin, with Adrienne’s pink polished toenails in the foreground. #Latergram from Xanadu, the caption read. It took Bird a minute, but then it clicked: with no cell service at Copperbrook Lake, Adrienne Richards could only document her vacation after the fact. Like a normal person. Which probably drove her crazy, he thought, chuckling.
It wasn’t until he reached the next photo that the realization clicked. It was a shot of Adrienne with her back to the camera, hair tumbling over her shoulders, silhouetted against a peachy sunset. The light was low, the focus was soft; unless you knew to look for it, you wouldn’t even recognize that one of her hands was resting on a long wooden railing, the one that wrapped around the deck of a house he’d been at just that morning. But the picture itself was one he’d seen before—gathered by Lizzie Ouellette into a photo album titled, Dreams.
As he scrolled farther back, he found others like it. Adrienne’s outstretched hand with the fingernails painted cherry red. Adrienne’s feet in a pair of expensive leather boots. Adrienne’s martini, a sweating crystal glass on a dark wood bar. This was what passed for an ambitious fantasy in Lizzie Ouellette’s world: a picture of another woman standing on the deck of the house that she owned.
And all that time Lizzie was idolizing Adrienne, wistfully saving pictures of her fingernails like they represented a life she could never have, Adrienne had been sneaking behind her back to suck her husband’s dick.
He was wrong. Lizzie’s dreams weren’t banal. They were goddamn tragic. They were the saddest thing Bird had ever seen.
His thoughts were interrupted by the buzzing of the phone in his hand. He lifted it to his ear, tapping the screen to answer it.
“This is Bird,” he said.
Brady didn’t bother with formalities. “Boston PD says the lady is at home, evidently alone, drinking a glass of wine, and showing no signs of distress,” he said.
A glass of wine, Bird thought bitterly. After what he’d just seen, the idea of Adrienne Richards blithely sitting around with a beverage, while Lizzie Ouellette was about to be dissected, was practically obscene.
“They know all that without knocking?” he asked.
“Apparently, there’s a big glass window on the street side, second floor, with a good view in. She’s sitting right up in it.” Brady paused. “You know, I had a cat once who liked to do that.”
“Great,” Bird said.
“They’ve got one guy keeping an eye on the place until you show up. If Cleaves gets there first, they’re prepared. I told them armed and dangerous, but it’s only the shotgun that was missing, correct? No other weapons?”
“Not that we know of.”
“All right. Good. A gun that big will be easy to spot, if he’s dumb enough to walk around with it. And the other thing, your guy Cutter? You were right, he’s a known entity. Heroin dealer.”
“Huh,” Bird said.
“You can’t be surprised,” Brady replied. He was right: heroin was having a boom in small-town New England, tearing its way through communities from Cape Cod to Bar Harbor and beyond. A frantic play by the cartels, who had flooded the region with cheap product in an attempt to recoup their losses from the slow state-by-state creep of legalized cannabis. Bird wondered if that was why the people he’d talked to today hadn’t been more floored by Lizzie Ouellette’s tragic death at the age of twenty-eight. The violence aside, dying young in Copper Falls just wasn’t that unusual.
“Not surprised. It just hasn’t come up,” Bird said, and then instantly thought, But that’s not true. There had been Deborah Cleaves’s furious denial, My son doesn’t do drugs, and then the follow-up question; it had seemed like nothing more than an angry retort at the time, but now . . .