Page 89 of All These Beautiful Strangers

“I, um, have to be getting back to the city,” I said, reaching to scratch the back of my neck to free my hand from hers.

“Do you have to go right now?” Grace asked. She sounded disappointed. “Can you spare half an hour? There’s something I would really like to show you.”

I looked back at her. She seemed insistent.

“Okay,” I said.

Grace broke into a smile. “Okay,” she said back to me.

In my car, Grace sat in the front passenger seat and gave me directions. A few minutes outside of town, she instructed me to pull over near a thick stand of trees. We parked in the grass near a split elm that lightning had cut nearly clean down the middle. Grace took my hand and led me into the woods. Through a break in the trees, I saw the lake.

“Langely Lake,” Grace told me.

She gestured at a thick oak near the water’s edge. There were several long boards lying flat in the arc of the tree where the trunk had split. Smaller boards had been nailed to the face of the trunk as a makeshift ladder.

“We built that, Jake and me, when we were kids,” Grace said. “It was our special place. No one else knew about it. I know it doesn’t look like much now, but it was something to us.”

Grace climbed the makeshift ladder into the tree house and I followed her. We sat on the boards with our legs dangling below us, over the water.

“The first time I ever saw you was in this tree house,” Grace said. “Jake laid his yearbook out right here on these boards that first summer he was home. He pointed to your photo and told me your name. You looked like such a snotty little asshole in your school blazer I couldn’t believe it when Jake told me you were friends.”

I laughed. “It’s not my fault,” I said. “Everybody had to wear those blazers. We all looked liked pretentious dicks.”

“Trust me, it wasn’t the blazer,” Grace said. “It was you. You had this look like you just knew you were better than everyone.”

“Well, I’ve always made an excellent first impression,” I said. “Funny enough, the first time I saw you was in a photograph, too. I think I mentioned it when we first met—there was this picture of you with an ice cream cone that Jake kept on his desk.”

“Ah, yes,” Grace said. “The one where I have ice cream smeared across my face? See, I make a great first impression, too.” She bumped her shoulder against mine and looked out at the lake. “I thought you were a pretentious jerk and you thought I was some heathen who hadn’t mastered the art of eating.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t think that at all.”

“Oh yeah?” Grace said. “Then what did you think?”

“I thought—I thought, you looked like happiness,” I said. I didn’t know how to put into words the way I’d felt when I saw her picture—the way something inside of me had shifted. “Not that you looked happy, though you did, but that you were happiness personified. I thought, I have to meet that girl.”

There was a painfully long moment before Grace turned her gaze away from the lake and looked at me. There were so many things I felt that I should tell her. Instead, I took her into my arms and kissed her. She didn’t pull away. Instead, she kissed me back.

She tugged on the collar of my shirt, pulling me down with her onto the boards of the makeshift tree house, and my hands were in her hair, unbuttoning her blouse, skimming the hem of her skirt.

Afterward, I took her hand in mine, and Grace leaned her head against my shoulder and together we stared out over the lake and watched the sun disappear into the trees on the other side, like the flame of a candle flickering out.

Part Three

Twenty-Three

Charlie Calloway

2017

He wasn’t just a nameless man in a photograph anymore. I knew his name, his occupation, his whereabouts. Peter Hindsberg. He was a private investigator, one half of Hindsberg & Thornton Investigations, which he ran with his partner, Ron Thornton. Their website listed an address for their office near the outlet mall across town. In their short bios, I read that Peter Hindsberg had served as an insurance fraud investigator for Hartco Insurance for several years before starting his own investigation firm with his longtime friend Ron Thornton, a former police officer in Stamford. A quick Google search didn’t reveal much further information, aside from an engagement announcement in the Hillsborough Chronicle from 2004 between Peter and a Miss Lucy Hale, a pretty brunette who taught kindergarten at a local elementary school.

“Do you think your mom thought your dad was cheating or something?” Greyson asked, leaning over my shoulder to get a better view of his computer screen as I scrolled.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

Greyson pointed to a spot on the screen. “Just looking at the list of services here.”

I scanned it. Under surveillance, background checks, missing persons, civil and criminal research, pre-litigation, legal preparation, and subpoena service, there were listed: cheating spouses, alimony, and child custody.