“Right,” said Bob. “But any of the guys you worked with at the ironworks? Anyone who could give me an idea of what a good guy you are? Maybe an old girlfriend or two?”
Matt looked up and gave a small smile. “Sure.” He looked around the room and then finally said, “Fred LaRue. Also, Johnny Tibbetts.” And then, after a long moment, he said, “I didn’t really have any girlfriends. But I sort of went out with a couple of women years ago. My mother liked them for a while, but then she didn’t.”
“Why didn’t she like them?”
“Who knows.” Matt sat with his shoulders slumped and then he yawned. “I think they both moved away, though.” His eyes watered from the yawn, and he removed his glasses again and rubbed his eyes.
“What were their names?” Bob asked, and Matt told him, and Bob typed the names into his laptop. Then, as he stood up to go, he said, “Matt, do you have a gun in the house?”
Matt looked surprised but said immediately, “Yeah, I have a rifle.”
Bob sat back down. “Okay, I need to know. When was the last time you shot the gun?”
Matt looked blank for a moment and said, “A few weeks before my mother disappeared. Actually, my sister shot it. She was up from Connecticut, and she shot it because my mother saw a raccoon outside her window and she always hated raccoons and she kept mentioning it, getting more agitated, and my sister said to me, ‘Matt, would you take your gun and fucking kill that raccoon?’ But I didn’t want to, so Diana did. She opened the window and shot it, and then I went outside and shot it again to make sure it was dead. God, the poor thing.”
“Where do you keep the rifle?” Bob asked.
Matt said, “In the closet in my bedroom.” After a moment he said, “You want to see it?”
Bob nodded. He went into Matt’s bedroom and saw, in the closet, the rifle lying across the top of a shelf high up.
“And your sister knows it’s there? Is that where she got it to kill the raccoon?”
“Yeah. That’s where she took it from.”
“Is it loaded right now?”
“Yeah,” Matt said again. “Is that a bad thing?”
“You have no plans on using it, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, I’d unload it,” Bob said, and Matt said with a small shrug, “Okay,” and they walked out of the room together. “So that was the last time your sister saw your mother? A few weeks before she disappeared?” Bob turned to ask this.
“Yeah,” Matt said, looking down. He shook his head slowly, and when he looked up at Bob his eyes were wet. “You know what hurts me the most? God, this just hurts me.” And he sank down into a chair back in the dining room. “That my mother must have been so scared when she was taken.” Matt drew a hand across his nose and his eyes. “She would have been so frightened, and that’s what hurts me so much. To think of her so small, and so scared, being driven away.”
Bob waited, sitting back down in a chair himself.
Matt finally said, “I used to sort of wish Diana wouldn’t come. She didn’t come much. But she made things worse every time just because they hated each other so much.”
“Why did they hate each other so much?”
Matt looked away and said nothing for many moments. He kept running his hand through his hair; he was no longer crying. He put his glasses back on and said, “Well, my father always liked Diana, and my mother hated that he liked her more than he liked my mother. Diana was always pretty, you know. I think my mother resented that.” He still did not look at Bob. He raised his shoulders and said, “They just hated each other.”
—
As they walked toward the side door of the house, Matt said, “Ah, listen. You should probably know.” He pointed upstairs to where the studio was. “One of those models was Ashley Munroe.”
3
At the very same time that Bob had gone to see Matt Beach, Olive Kitteridge was sitting in her wingback chair waiting for Lucy Barton to show up. Of all things, Lucy had called Olive and said, “Olive, now I have a story to tell you!” And Olive had said to come over anytime, and so today was the day Lucy was going to tell her own story to Olive.
There was a rap on the door a little before ten o’clock and Olive yelled, “Come in!” and in came Lucy; these days she wore a puffy black winter coat, which she took off right away. She was wearing a thick black sweater and sat down on the small uncomfortable couch. “Hello, Olive,” she said, with a smile that made Olive feel warmly toward her.
“Hello, hello,” said Olive. “Now. Tell me your story.”
Lucy nodded. “Okay,” she said. She unzipped the big zippered boots and took them off and said, “Sorry, I should have taken these off earlier,” because there were small drops of brown water on the floor, but Olive waved a hand and said “Forget it,” and so the boots stayed on the floor next to Lucy’s feet; she was wearing one red sock and one blue, Olive noticed.
“Now.” Lucy looked over at Olive, her legs were crossed, and she said, “Okay, so I had to go to Washington, D.C., for a gig last week.”
“A what?” Olive asked, leaning toward her.
“A gig. An event. I had to do an event in D.C.”
“What was the event?” Olive asked, and Lucy sighed and said, “Oh, it was just the stupidest thing. I sat in a huge auditorium and only five people were there. Oh Olive, it was so stupid.” She waved a hand as though to dismiss it.
“Five people in a huge auditorium?”
“Yeah. I mean, it was also Zoomed to people, oh, who knows. That’s not the story. The story is this.”
Olive sat back in her chair.
“I took a train from New York to Washington, and I met this man on the train.” Lucy looked straight at Olive.
Olive had a reaction to this.
Olive thought: Lucy, honestly, you are too old to be boy-crazy. Lucy already had Bob Burgess—remember we have mentioned before that Olive believed those two to be in love—and Lucy also had her ex-husband, William. And she was still walking around looking for men? And only five people showed up to see her? Some small rearrangement was going on in Olive’s mind about this woman.
