He felt relief that he had the house to himself for the first time since he’d arrived back. He swung the refrigerator door open; it was packed with leftover food, and Harry made himself a ham and cheese sandwich. There was some of yesterday’s coffee in the pot, not a lot, but he poured it over ice, added milk, and brought his breakfast out onto the front steps of Grey Lady. A cool, gentle rain was just beginning. There was no sound, except for the chatter of birds, and Harry could smell the ocean. That was not always the case in Kennewick Village, far enough inland that, depending on the wind, it didn’t feel any more like a seaside town than New Chester, Connecticut. But when the wind was right, the air had that unmistakable tang of salt water and tidal mud. He’d grown up in Manhattan, but Harry had spent enough summers in Maine to consider it a kind of childhood home.

He finished his coffee and his sandwich, then went back inside. He thought of going into his father’s office but decided against it. He wasn’t prepared for a room so filled with memories of his father. Instead, he wandered into the living room, a room that with its beige color scheme and watercolor seascapes seemed more Alice than Bill. The one indisputable item of Bill’s, besides the dark grey wing-backed chair, was one of his cherished barrister bookcases, each shelf with its own pull-down glass front. Harry looked at its contents, all hardcovers, including a shelf of Agatha Christies. Harry lifted the glass front and pushed it back into its slot so he could look at the books. There was a hardcover copy of After the Funeral next to a hardcover of the same book with its American title, Funerals Are Fatal. Harry, who’d inherited some of his father’s immense love of mystery novels, tended to like American crime writers more than cozy English golden-age mysteries, but he’d gone through a brief Christie phase in middle school after his father had given him Ten Little Indians. He could still hear his father’s voice from then: “Now, if you decide to read all of Agatha Christie, just keep in mind that some of her books have more than one title, so don’t read them twice.” He’d then gone on to catalogue the many different title changes in her publishing history, like another father might tell his son about the year-to-year batting champions in the 1930s and 1940s. Harry, at twelve, had been impressed, but now he wondered if his father had wasted his life in the trivial pursuit of something only he (and a smattering of other misfits) cared about. How many useless facts and complicated plots got wiped out the moment he died?