“I tried to get ahold of you, but you left the radio.”
“Tell me.”
“They found his body.”
“Who?”
“Tom.”
BobDan sucked in a sharp breath.
Shirlene explained how a large industrial fishing boat from Boston hauled it in on their trawling net a few days earlier. Took some time to get to the right authorities and then run the proper identification tests.
“Does Piper know?” Anders interrupted her.
Shirlene nodded. “She was here when the call came through. Took off before I could do anything. Pearl went to check on her, but she wouldn’t open the door.”
Shirlene kept talking, but Anders didn’t stick around to hear any more. He ran. Past the huddled watermen, past the bench. Down the deserted main street, past the general store and the church. And though his heart was pounding in his ears and his lungs were screaming at the cold air being forced into them, he kept running all the way to the bed-and-breakfast. He sprinted down the alley to Piper’s carriage house, took the steps two at a time, and didn’t even bother knocking. He threw open the front door and burst in, nearly tripping on Piper, who lay crumpled like a pile of discarded clothing on the floor, her entire body convulsing with sobs, as if she’d taken one step into the house and then hadn’t had the strength to go any farther.
Anders immediately scooped his arms beneath her and she collapsed against him, limp with grief. He carried her to the couch, where he just held her while she blindly cried into his chest. He wasn’t even sure if she knew it was him—or if she’d be angry when she realized it, considering the last time they saw each other she had told him in no uncertain terms to leave. He only knew that he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, leave her alone like this.
Finally, the fresh waves of crying seemed to slow, with longer lulls in between, and she lifted her head to look at him. His breathing shallowed, bracing himself for her ire. “I know it’s stupid,” she said, her voice small and hoarse. “But I think I was holding out hope this whole time. I thought maybe he could somehow . . .” She hiccuped. “Still be alive.”
Anders smoothed her hair. “That’s not stupid.”
She pressed her cheek back against his chest and began crying anew, albeit calmer this time, and Anders let her, methodically stroking her curls. It was peaceful, sitting here, and Anders imagined he could stay exactly in this position for days, if not weeks, and not find himself wanting for anything.
And then the door burst open once again, startling him. He looked over to see Mrs. Olecki filling the door frame, holding a metal whisk in one hand—which may not have been so strange, if the expression on her face didn’t look so angrily purposeful, as though she were intent on using it for something other than to mix cake batter.
“How dare you,” she said, coming straight for Anders. Piper sat up, confused. Pearl kept her blazing eyes glued on Anders and didn’t stop moving until her whisk was inches from Anders’s face.
Anders pressed himself into the back of the couch as far as he could, his palms facing forward in a don’t shoot motion. He eyed the whisk. Don’t swat.
“Mrs. Olecki?” Piper said, bewildered, but Pearl didn’t even glance her way.
“Good Morning America called!” she said, and Anders sat stunned for a beat that they hadn’t waited like he’d asked them to. And then flooded with relief. That was what this was all about? Granted, it wasn’t the ideal way to introduce the information to Piper, but he was coming to tell her anyway, and now he could explain. “It’s about you, Piper,” Pearl spat out, as if the words tasted bad in her mouth. “His little podcast has nothing to do with global warming—and everything to do with you and Tom.”
Piper turned her head slowly until she was looking fully at Anders, her eyes wide, cheeks still wet with tears. “Is that true?”
“Yes, but—”
The parallel lines in Piper’s forehead deepened, her brow furrowed. “You lied to me? You’ve been lying to me this entire time?”
“Well, technically yes, but—”
“And Good Morning America . . .” He could nearly see the wheels in her head turning, as she made sense of it all. “I thought you said you only had, like, four listeners.”
“Well, it’s increased slightly—I told you it was doing better.”
“How much better is better?”
Anders mumbled the number quietly.
“I can’t hear you.”
“A little more than one million.”
“ONE MILLION PEOPLE!”
“Give or take.”
“You’ve been blabbing all the details of my personal life to one million people without telling me, without my permission, so that, what . . . you could be some famous podcaster?”
When she put it like that, Anders’s confidence faltered and shame started to flood his veins. His mind raced, trying to figure out how to explain so that it sounded less horrible, but he couldn’t—because that was exactly what he’d done. Piper straightened her spine, her entire body going as stiff as it had been limp just minutes before. She pointed to the door. “Get. Out.”
“Piper, please,” he said, the positive aspects of this horrible thing he’d done slowly coming back to him. “I was coming here to tell you. This could actually be a good thing—”
“GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!” Piper screamed so loud, the silence afterward hung in the air like a presence. Her eyes were on fire, her entire body vibrating with anger.
And Anders had no choice but to leave, Mrs. Olecki following a step behind him, with her whisk poised and at the ready.
* * *
—
“I knew it! I knew that boy was up to no good,” Pearl fumed later that evening to Harold, over their dinner of cod stew and corn bread. She’d been repeating some variation of that sentence, sometimes muttering it, sometimes shouting it to the air, all afternoon. “What a slimy, good-for-nothing, dishonest . . . journalist. And to think we let him stay under our roof! Fed him, even. We housed the enemy, that’s what we did, Harold.” Harold wasn’t sure that was an accurate assessment, but he knew better than to contradict his wife when she was on a tirade.
Instead he took a thoughtful bite of his corn bread, swallowed, and then said: “Business sure does seem to be picking up. Maybe next summer we’ll finally be able to put a new roof on the house, huh?”
Pearl narrowed her eyes at him. “I know exactly what you’re doing. You think just because some little bit of good came out of his lying, backstabbing betrayal, I should just forgive and forget. Well, I will not do it. The way he lied to us all right to our faces and hurt Piper! As if that girl hasn’t been through enough. I should just cancel all those reservations! That’s what I should do. It’s blood money! That’s what it is.”