“You settle down, buckeroo,” Thomas said, his smile obvious from the sound of his voice, “and we’ll talk about it tomorrow.” He pulled Jane to his side tightly and kissed the top of her head, acknowledgment that all was right with their world—their love had been consummated, their house was intact, their son was safe.

Six

As One Door Closes . . .

1.

“What’s in the bag, Mr. Sullivan?”

Desmond stopped on the mahogany staircase. The pocket doors to the second-floor parlor were partially open, and Loretta, his landlady, and Henry, the putative superintendent of the building, were seated in reclining loungers, watching television. He’d been in Boston two weeks, and thus far he hadn’t walked up or down the staircase more than a half dozen times without hearing Loretta’s mellifluous voice asking him “What’s in the bag?” or “What have you got there?” even when he was empty-handed. He clutched the crinkly plastic sack closer to his side. “Just some trash,” he said, enunciating each word carefully. Surely there was no need to tell her the specifics: an empty wine bottle and two well-read tabloids.

“Just some what?” she asked.

“Trash,” he said and made a waggling motion with his hand, as if warding off an unpleasant odor.

“Be sure to close the lid on the barrels.”

“I will indeed.”

“In what?”

“Indeed.”

Henry gave one of his unnerving outbursts of laughter and said, “We can hear you in here. Turn down the volume.”

What the housing office at Deerforth College had billed as a grand studio apartment turned out to be a modest room on the top floor of a Back Bay town house. The charming New England kitchen was a sink and a microwave tucked into one dark corner, and the antique furnishings were a small armoire, a rutted library table, and a sagging bed. It was true he had a private bathroom as promised, but no one had mentioned it was down the hall. Still, he couldn’t complain about the location or the views; his two round windows looked out to the sailboat traffic in the Charles River Basin in one direction and Charlestown in the other. At night he could see the lights of Cambridge, and the mist on the river and somewhere in the hazy distance, Bunker Hill Monument, an obelisk which, like almost every lamppost in Boston, had enormous historical significance, although no one seemed to know or care exactly what the significance was.