“I didn’t think your father had anything more to do with Annie, but who knows? He was always gone lately, and maybe he was meeting her somewhere else. I don’t know. Stupid man.” She looked at her glass, rolling the tiny amount of wine that was left up one of the sides.

“Can I get you some more?”

“Okay,” she said, holding out the glass for Harry to take. When he returned with the wine, Alice had curled up in the fetal position on the love seat. Harry gingerly placed her glass on the glass-topped coffee table, as she said, in a fuzzy voice, “Thank you, Harry. I might just take a little nap.”

“You should.”

“Don’t leave me, okay?”

“Okay,” Harry said, not knowing exactly what she meant, “I’ll be here if you need me.” He quietly left the living room, went up to his bedroom, opened up his laptop, and did a search for Annie Callahan or Lou Callahan, but couldn’t find anything. Then he texted Grace, asking if they could meet and talk sometime soon. He needed to get the whole story from her, why she had come to Maine. It was clear that she’d had some sort of significant relationship with his father, and the police would need to know about that, as well.

Waiting for a response, Harry paced his small bedroom. He stopped and looked at the packed bookcase, all filled with his father’s detective stories. Bill Ackerson would never know that he wound up as a corpse in his own mystery story. Harry almost smiled at the thought. He thought back to the previous Christmas, his father giving him, as he always did, a check, plus one single book, usually his father’s favorite book of that past year. This year it had been A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin. “I missed this, somehow, on the first go-round. It’s brilliant.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Harry had said.

Later that same night, Alice in bed, Harry had started the book while his father finished reading the latest Ruth Rendell.

“Why do you think you like mysteries so much?” Harry asked.

“I’m deeply skeptical of any book that doesn’t begin with a corpse.”

Harry had heard his father say these exact words, or something close to them, many times. “No, really. Why?”

His father frowned, thinking. “It’s my religion, I guess, since I don’t have a real religion. The world is chaos, and then a detective comes along and restores order. Or he doesn’t, and that’s really my favorite kind of mystery story.”