His heart was pumping as if he’d just run a mile, but Jake’s mind was clear. He decided to keep walking north along the path, and exit along Micmac Road. There was less chance that someone would see him. If they did, they did. He’d say he’d been looking for his friend to go on a walk but hadn’t spotted him. They could never prove otherwise.

But luck was on his side that day. There was no one else on the path, and Jake was back in the store before it had even gotten dark.

Chapter 29

Then

Sleep had never been easy for Jake, not even when he’d been young. It came reluctantly, if at all, and departed easily, scared away by the first appearance of dawn light through the cracks in the curtains. For a long while, he found he could drink himself into a good night’s sleep, but in his fifties, he’d developed acid reflux, at its worst after a night of drinking. He’d prop himself on pillows, and after several hours of a revved-up mind and the rising taste of bile at the back of his throat, he would sometimes manage a few predawn hours. He quit drinking and found that Ambien helped for a period of time, till something in him began to resist the drug, and he’d lie in bed half awake and half spooked by visual hallucinations. He returned to moderate drinking and over-the-counter acid-reducing pills that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.

But after what he’d done to Bill on the cliff path, Jake wasn’t sure he’d slept at all. He must have, a little bit, if you wanted to call those thin excursions into semiconscious states a form of sleep.

The worst part of his recent nights was picturing Bill, who’d offered him both a job and some semblance of friendship, groaning at his feet. And he kept hearing the sound the cosh made when he brought it down on Bill’s skull, like an icy puddle cracking.

Jake reminded himself that Bill had been a selfish man, so caught up in his books that he barely paid attention to the people around him. Besides, he’d done this all for Alice. He’d done what she wanted. And now Harry was back, and Jake wondered if Harry had factored into all of this, if Alice wanted to start a new life with Harry. Lying awake, he’d try to remember that time with Alice immediately after Edith had died. It was comforting, but Jake found his mind wandering further back, thinking of Mrs. Codd, his neighbor, all those years ago. She’d been dead now for over fifty years, and Jake often wondered if anyone else ever thought of her. Her sons, maybe, if they were still alive.