“It was about one-thirty, and I said, ‘I get it. I’m sorry.’
“And then we drive through all this heavy traffic in what I felt was a very companionable silence, and then we got to where I needed to go, and I said, ‘Just pull over wherever it’s safe for you to stop, and I’ll get out.’ So he pulled over and I paid him and tipped him, and I said, ‘I hope you can have your lunch soon.’
“And he turned to look at me then, these enormous brown warm eyes, and he said, ‘God bless you.’ But he said it—oh how can I tell this—like he was giving me a benediction or something, and I said thank you, but then I realized that wasn’t enough, so I said, ‘God bless you, too,’ and he smiled a little behind his mask, and he said, his brown eyes so warm, ‘I will see you again.’ And I was so surprised, and I said, ‘Oh I hope so, that would be lovely.’
“And that was that. It took me about five full minutes to realize he had really made my day. I mean, you know, he was sort of touched.”
“Touched? You mean he was crazy?” Olive asked.
“No, I mean he was touched by God.”
Olive rolled her eyes. “I don’t believe in God. That’s all rubbish,”she said firmly.
“Okay, but think of this, Olive. If God is love, then this man was touched by God.”
Olive rolled her eyes again.
“And maybe you don’t believe in God—which is fine, I don’t care—but you have been loved. And you love. You love your friend Isabelle Goodrow.”
“Yes, I do, you’re right about that,” Olive said.
Lucy gave a small shrug.
And then it came to Olive; she had an understanding. She said, “Lucy, you’re a lonely little thing.”
Lucy looked up at her quickly. She said, “Who is not lonely, Olive? Show me one person.”
Olive said, “Plenty of people. All the snot-wots who live here and gather every day in the lounge for their glass of wine with each other. They’re not lonely.”
“How do you know?” Lucy bit on her lower lip, and then she said, “How do you know what those people think about in the dark when they wake up in the middle of the night?”
Olive had no answer for her.
Lucy stood up and pulled on her coat. “Those are my stories,” she said, and then bent down to put her boots back on. “But you’re right. They are stories of loneliness and love.” Lucy stepped into the tiny kitchen for a moment and returned with a paper towel and she bent down and soaked up the drops of water on the floor left from her boots. Then she picked up her bag and said, “And the small connections we make in this world if we are lucky.”
And then to Olive’s amazement, Lucy said, smiling at her with a gentleness on her face, “And I feel that way about you. A connection. Love. So thank you.” She moved toward the door.
Olive said, “Wait.” As Lucy turned, Olive said, “Well, phooey. I feel connected to you too. So there.” She stuck out her tongue.
Lucy’s face opened in a full smile. “Bye-bye for now, Olive Kitteridge.”
Olive raised a hand over her head. And the woman was gone.
Olive sat for a very long time in her chair. It was a really, really long time that she sat there.
And then she called her friend Isabelle and she said, “Have I got a story for you.”
4
It just so happened that in March a woman in the attorney general’s office had returned to practice after a maternity leave, and she was eager to get back to work. She had—before going on leave—unsuccessfully prosecuted a man who had allegedly killed a young girl and disposed of her body in a garbage bag. The woman’s name was Carol Hall and she had worked in the attorney general’s office for nine years and was known to be the best they had. The unsuccessful prosecution had rankled her, and she had decided to take the Matthew Beach case and do it well. Bob Burgess had heard this the day before, and thinking of this now, he thought: Oh Christ.
—
Shortly after Bob left Matt’s house and was back on the main road to Shirley Falls, he pulled into a gas station parking lot and made a few phone calls. First he called the attorney general’s office’s criminal division, getting Carol Hall on the phone. He told her he was taking the case of Matthew Beach. “Good,” she said. He told her that the seizure of Matt’s computer was unconstitutional and that he was going to file a motion demanding it back. “Fine,” Carol Hall said. But then she said, “As soon as they ping his cellphone and find out he was in Saco that day—and they will find that out any minute now—I am bringing him in and charging him with murder.”
“Good luck with that, he doesn’t have a cellphone,” Bob said.
He heard her receive this, and then she said, “We’ll be in touch, Bob Burgess.”
Then Bob called the state police and then the local police and then the sheriff, and he said that he was taking the case of Matthew Beach, and no one was to speak to Matt outside of Bob’s presence. All of them, he noticed, answered with their dry, almost sardonic Maine tones. “Okay then, Bob.” Bob told them all that he was going to file a motion that anything on the computer could not be used as evidence and that the computer should be immediately returned to Matt. And they said, basically, Okay, do what you need to do.
And then he called Diana Beach and told her he had seen Matt, that he was taking the case. “Oh Bob, thank you so much. I feel so much better now,” she said.
She said that she wanted to meet with Bob, and he told her to come to his office in Shirley Falls the next day.
And then, still in the gas station parking lot, Bob, searching on his cellphone, found the number for Ashley Munroe, and he called her. She picked up immediately, and he asked if he could come see her. “When?” she asked. And he said, “Now.”
—
He found her in a trailer on the other side of Shirley Falls. The sun was trying to break through the clouds, but the wind from the north had picked up; the trees near the trailer park were bare, and their thinner branches bent over in the wind. Bob parked his car and walked around the trailer park. He saw two trailers that still had Christmas wreaths on them, and then he found Ashley’s home.
Ashley came to the door holding a baby in her arms. She was a tall woman with bright red hair, so bright it had to be dyed, Bob thought, and she had glasses on that kept slipping down her nose. There was a sweetness to her, he felt, and she was thin, but the middle of her had a few folds that could be seen over the tight stretch pants she wore. “Come in,” she said, and Bob saw that one of her front teeth stuck out; they went and sat at the small table. The mobile home was very tidy. There were fake flowers hanging above the kitchen sink, and a certain quiet festiveness to the place. It was one of the wider homes in the park.
Ashley sat across from him, jiggling the baby on her knee. Her nails were painted turquoise. “What do you want to know? I had nothing to do with this, not one thing, I told the cops that already.” She looked straight at Bob as she spoke; her eyes were hazel behind her glasses, and her lips were cracked from dryness. “I was in labor when that car was rented, and my driver’s license and credit card had been stolen, like, I don’t know, maybe a few days before. It was a new credit card, my mother had just given it to me to help out with things for the baby, even though my boyfriend works as an electrician. I keep my things in a tiny zipped bag, and I didn’t know until after I gave birth that they had been stolen, because I hadn’t used the card for a few days, and when I reported it stolen they said the last thing charged on it had been that car.” She glanced around. “My boyfriend lives here now. What else do you want to know? You want to know about Matt?” She bent and kissed the baby’s head.
“Yes, tell me about Matt.” He liked the frankness of this woman. He found her to be believable, and the baby kept smiling at him. The baby had one curl on the top of her head, and the curl was held by a bright pink ribbon.
Ashley pushed her red hair back, and Bob saw a tattoo on her neck, a small rose. She said, “I modeled for him all during my pregnancy. Some guy my boyfriend knows had heard that Matt liked to paint pregnant women and paid twenty-five dollars an hour, so I went once a week for two hours at a time. Sometimes it wasn’t that long, but he’d always pay me for two hours.”
