I know, right? Grace’s voice, so real in Caitlin’s head that a feeling of utter desolation swept through her that she’d never hear that voice out loud again.

Caitlin, throat aching, focused on the mental list again. She repeated the items from her earlier list, adding Get something to eat at the terrible-looking diner across the street.

Then she added one more item: Find and talk to Harry Ackerson.

Chapter 23

Then

Jake Richter, born and raised in Menasset, Massachusetts, was the son of a German immigrant named Peter Richter, a truck driver who made deliveries for a fishing company in nearby New Bedford; his mother, Jocelyn, half Portuguese and half Quebecois, had cleaned fish at the same New Bedford company. They went on three dates before getting engaged on their fourth. A year later they were married and expecting their first child. After Jacob’s birth, a labor so traumatic that she made sure to never get pregnant again, Jocelyn quit her job, occasionally picking up housecleaning work for the summer residents who owned five-bedroom cottages down at the beach.

During his interminable childhood, Jake and his parents spent every evening together in the cramped middle apartment of a brown triple-decker in Menasset’s town center. They didn’t own a television but listened to the radio every night, Peter steadily drinking brandy from a water glass while Jocelyn would eat Nabisco waffle creams and work on her needlepoint, sometimes talking back to the radio but seldom, if ever, speaking to her husband or her son. Peter Richter rarely spoke, either, and when Jacob started kindergarten he was so stunned by the sheer amount of chatter, not just from the other kids but from nervous Ms. Soares, a first-year teacher, that he refused to speak. Suspected of retardation, he was held back a year.

But by the time he reached middle school, Jacob—now known as Jake—was regularly getting high marks and had learned to insinuate himself into conversations with the other kids in his class. Boys talked about baseball and comic books and liked to make up stories about getting into fights, while girls just liked it when you paid attention to them, mainly through teasing. Both boys and girls talked about television—for a while it was Howdy Doody—but by the time Jake was getting ready to leave Menasset Middle School for the regional high school, it was all Candid Camera or a new show being aired in the afternoons called American Bandstand. Jake asked his parents only once if they would consider buying a television. His mother said that she didn’t think she’d be able to keep doing her needlepoint and watch television at the same time, and his father said that television was a waste of money. So Jake learned to secretly listen in when kids talked about the shows they watched. He memorized what they said, and that way he could pretend he watched TV as well.