It was a story where the big dramatic ending evaporated into nothing.

I pushed myself away from the computer, staring at a blinking no further entries found to my final electronic request.

That wasn’t right, I thought. Someone had brutally killed Murphy. And it had to connect to Ashley.

Somehow. Some way.

I just couldn’t see it.

25

The office secretary knocked on Sally’s open door, an overnight envelope in her hand. “This just came for you. I’m not sure who it’s from. Do you want me to handle it?”

“No. I’ll take it. I know what it is.” Sally thanked her assistant, grasped the envelope, and closed the door. She smiled. Murphy was an overly cautious man. She guessed that he kept a number of post office boxes handy for mail of a more sensitive nature. Prominent letterheads and return addresses were often inconvenient for people in his line of work.

He had called her from the road, coming back from Boston several nights earlier. “I think your problem will pretty much disappear from now on, Ms. Freeman-Richards.”

She had been at her home, sitting across from Hope. Both of them had been reading, Hope immersed in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, while she had been glancing through leftover sections of the Sunday New York Times.

“That’s good news, Mr. Murphy. I’m delighted to hear that. But tell me, how precisely did you reach that conclusion?” She easily slipped into her practiced, reasonable attorney tones.

“Well, I don’t know how precise you want me to be. But our mutual friend ”-he laughed at the use of the word-“well, he and I had a talk. A good talk. A lengthy discussion of the pros and cons of his, shall we say, behavior. And after this conversation completed its predictable course, Mr. O’Connell allowed as to how it might indeed be a significant problem to continue pursuing Ashley. He was helped to see the light of reason and stated unequivocally that he would remove himself from her life from that point further.”

“You believed him?”

“I had every reason to believe him, Ms. Freeman-Richards. His sincerity was evident.”

Sally had paused, trying to read between Murphy’s words. “No one was hurt?”

“Not permanently. Unless, perhaps, Mr. O’Connell now has a broken heart, but I kinda doubt that. He was, however, deeply impressed with the recklessness of continuing his course of action, and he reached an enlightened conclusion, after I explained certain realities to him. Forcefully. I’m not sure that you really want much more detail, Ms. Freeman-Richards. It might make you uncomfortable.”

Sally thought their conversation had an odd gentility, as if she were somehow incapable of hearing certain things. It had a Victorian sensibility, as if she might get pale and faint with a case of the vapors.

“I wouldn’t want that.”

“I didn’t think so. I will send you a disposition report in the next day or so. And should you have any reason to suspect anything or see something suspicious, please call, night or day, and I will see it taken care of. I mean, there’s always the slim chance that Mr. O’Connell might have a change of heart once again. But I doubt that. He seems like a weak person, Ms. Freeman-Richards. A very small man, and I don’t mean how tall he is. But I believe he’s now out of your lives one hundred percent. And, so, if you have any investigatory needs in the future, I hope you will keep me in mind.”

Sally was a little surprised at Murphy’s description of O’Connell. It didn’t exactly jibe with her conclusions to that point. But it was reassuring to hear, and so she shunted away any contradictions she might have felt.

“Of course, Mr. Murphy. It seems like you took care of things exactly as I’d hoped. And I can’t tell you how pleased I am to hear this.”

“It was my pleasure, ma’am.”

She hung up the phone, then turned to Hope. “Well, that’s that.”

“What’s what?”

“I sent a private detective I know over to explain the facts of life to the creep. Like you’d think, when confronted by someone substantially stronger and significantly tougher and more experienced, he folded up like a cheap card table. Guys like him, they’re cowards from the get-go. Just let them know that you can’t be bullied, and they tuck their tails between their legs and disappear.”

“You think so?” Hope replied. “I don’t know. My impression is that the creep is a little more determined than that, although I sure as hell don’t know why. And a little more capable than you’re giving him credit for. Look what a mess he made for all of us with a little computer access.”

“Look, Hope, we tried to negotiate fairly with him. We tried to give him a chance to walk away, didn’t we? We even paid him a substantial sum of money. How could we have been more fair? How could we have been more direct?”

“I’m not sure.”

“We were totally straightforward, right?”

“I suppose so.”

“And he didn’t get it, did he? He didn’t want to make things easy for everyone, did he? So now he’s gotten a little lesson in how tough we can be. And just like that, it’s all over.”

Hope didn’t shake her head outwardly. But she had her doubts. Sally had seen this in her eyes, had opened her mouth to say something, then stopped and allowed the two of them to return to silence.

“Well, that’s that,” she had said with a touch of finality, a little irritated with Hope for not being more supportive.

Sally took the envelope from Murphy and sat down at her desk, replaying the conversation with Hope. She had the curious thought that things were oddly reversed: it should have been Hope, who was younger and often more headstrong, who should have been satisfied, and not Sally.

Sally tore open the flap and dropped the contents onto her desktop.

There was a cover letter, a sheaf of papers stapled together, several photographs, and a set of computer discs.

The pictures were of Michael O’Connell, taken outside his apartment. The sheaf of papers contained his modest police record and what work and school history Murphy had unearthed, along with some family information, including the names and address of his mother and father. A notation said the mother was deceased. A yellow note pasted to the computer discs said, These have been encrypted. An expert can probably unravel them, no problem. They probably contain info about your daughter. Maybe pictures. I took them from OC’s apartment, but I’d guess he has copies hidden somewhere. I did not know if you wanted to spend extra $ to have them professionally examined. The computer that he was using was accidentally destroyed during our session, so any info on the hard drive is likely ruined.

Murphy’s cover letter briefly described meeting O’Connell outside his apartment, but gave no real details about their “conversation.” At the bottom was a bill for services, which included a courtesy discount.

Sally immediately grabbed a checkbook and wrote out a draft to Murphy. She sealed this in a plain envelope, along with a note that said merely, Thank you for your help. We will call you if there is any follow-up necessary.

She pushed all the material, including the computer discs, into a manila envelope, wrote Ashley’s Creep in large letters on it, and with a sense of relief walked over to her large file cabinet and slid it into the back of the bottom drawer, where she thought it would happily remain untouched for years to come.

There is a clarity to late-afternoon light at the edge of the Green Mountains, as if things become sharper, more defined, as the day fades into night in the last weeks before winter. Catherine was poised by the window above her kitchen sink, looking westward, her eyes on Ashley. The younger woman was out back, bundled up in a bright yellow fleece, seated at the edge of a flagstone patio. Beyond her was a grassy field, which led up to the edge of the forest. They had gone into Brattleboro the day before and purchased sheets of paper, an easel, and brushes and watercolors, and Ashley was now immersed in a painting of her own, trying to capture the last streaks of day as they moved across the ridges and lingered in the pine branches. Catherine tried to read Ashley’s body language; it seemed to contain both frustration and excitement simultaneously. She was relaxed, enjoying her moment with the brush in her hand and the colors unfolding in front of her. Catherine was struck by the thought that the young woman and the painting were much the same; in the process of design.