Grace's Story

Grace Pellitier had moved to North Haven a month ago. She had bought the small cottage at 100 Cross Street. She was at the kitchen table with her ten-week-old golden retriever, Bella, asleep under her chair. She was fifty pages into a thriller that wasn't quite working.

Her Detective Cole Renner had just arrived at a crime scene. There was a body, no witnesses, and a mayor who wanted neither fact on the record. Plotting came naturally to her; character came harder. She kept putting people in rooms without knowing what to do with them.

In the park at the edge of town, under the low branches of an overgrown lilac bush, someone had left a woman face down in the dirt. Renner crouched and saw the bruising at her throat before he saw anything else. Strangled. Moved here after. Whoever had done it knew the park well enough to know that particular bush, that particular blind corner where the trail bent away from the sight line.

At exactly one o'clock, Bella went to the back door, her tail going in circles. Grace saved the file, clipped Bella's leash to her collar, and they stepped outside.

The trail behind Cross Street ran along the tree line before opening onto a wider path that circled back toward the neighborhood. Bella was still learning the leash — pulling toward every smell, sitting down without warning, pulling again. Grace let her work. She was still getting used to it — the light off the water in the afternoon, the smell of the cedars and pines after a rain.

Halfway along the trail, Bella stopped and went rigid.

She was locked onto the large lilac bush where the path bent away from the tree line. Old growth, thick at the base, with branches hanging low to the ground. Bella's nose dropped, and her whole body pulled against the leash. Grace let her pull.

Under the low branches, half-hidden in the grass, lay a white-tailed deer. A doe, full-grown, on her side. The flies had already found her. Bella pushed her nose toward it and Grace pulled her back.

"That's been there since yesterday morning."

Grace turned. An old woman stood on the path behind her — around seventy, lean, white-haired, carrying a canvas bag. She looked at the deer and said nothing for a moment.

"Edna Marsh. I'm on Miller Street." She nodded back up the trail. "I called it in. They'll come for it today or tomorrow." She looked at Grace. "You must be the one who bought the cottage on the corner of Cross and Arbor Court."

"Grace Pellitier."

Edna looked at Bella, who had given up on the deer and was now sitting on Grace's foot. "Young dog."

"Ten weeks."

Edna shifted her bag. "Bluff trail floods in a hard easterly. Take the upper path when the wind shifts. Left board on the footbridge is loose — has been since last fall." She moved on without waiting for a response.

Grace wrote through Tuesday and into Wednesday. Wednesday afternoon, she worked on a scene: Renner on Fielder Avenue at dusk, stopped in front of a dark house.

The lights were out at 154 Fielder, she wrote. Renner stood on the walk and understood that the woman inside had found something she hadn't been meant to find — a letter, left where it would be discovered, and the finding had revealed something important about the case.

She saved it and went to bed.

Thursday morning, her phone showed a message from an unknown number: This is Linda Asher, 154 Fielder. I found your name in the town directory. That kind of thing is kept very current in a small village like ours. There's a misdelivered envelope in my mailbox addressed to you at 100 Cross. I can leave it out or drop it off, whichever's easier.

Grace listened to the message twice, standing in the kitchen in her socks. That afternoon, she rode her bicycle to Fielder Avenue. The house was a gray Cape Cod with a window box, tulips just coming up. A woman was working on the hydrangeas in the front yard. She looked up when Grace came through the gate.

"Grace Pellitier?"

"Linda Asher?"

Linda handed her the envelope. Dianne's handwriting across the front. Inside was a card — her aunt sent cards when a phone call didn't feel like enough — and inside the card: I know you're managing. I know you're fine. I just wanted you to have this in your hand. A twenty-dollar bill fell into Grace's lap. Her eyes stung and she looked away.

Linda had already turned back to the hydrangeas. "Come in for tea, if you have time."

Grace had time.

She didn't tell Linda what she'd written. Linda would’ve thought she was daffy. The deer under the lilac bush and the dark house on Fielder. She had written both. They didn’t happen exactly the way she’d written them, but they still happened.

Two nights later, she was up past midnight. Detective Renner was moving through a house on the north end of the island.

At half past two in the morning, the electricity failed. In the sudden dark, Renner heard someone fall — not the fall of a movie, but the small, bad sound of a person going down hard and not immediately getting up.

She saved it and, leaving the cold coffee beside the keyboard, she went to bed.

At two forty-three, the power went out. It came back in twenty minutes. She lay in the dark and listened to the wind until she drifted back off to sleep.

The next afternoon, while Grace and Bella were on their walk, they ran into Edna. With her arms crossed, she told Grace about Mort Alcott, who lives at 125 Miller Street. When the power went out, he had gone to his porch to reach his fuse box — mounted on the exterior wall — and gone down the front steps, headfirst. He broke two fingers. He keeps telling people the steps are uneven. "They're not uneven," Edna said. "And he's lived in that house his entire life."

When Grace and Bella got home, she went straight to the laptop and read the paragraph again. She went back through the manuscript from the first page. A stakeout in the rain. A phone ringing in an empty office. A car breaking down on a county road. She read each one.

Then page fifty-nine.

To give Renner some backstory, she'd written it fast.

Renner had never met his father. The old man had gone out one morning when Renner was four and not come back — no fight, no drama, just gone. His mother had followed two years later, a car accident on a February road, and after that, it had been an aunt who raised him, a woman who loved him and didn't talk about it much.

She left Bella with water and her rope toy, took the bicycle from the back gate, and rode to the library.

Clara Gordon was behind the circulation desk. She had short gray hair and didn't look up until Grace was at the counter.

"Cross Street. Grace Pellitier."

"Yes." Grace put her returns on the counter.

"You're the writer."

"Thrillers."

Clara looked at her over her reading glasses. "Then you're after what's underneath. Not what happened — but why it happened."

"Yes," she said. "That's it."

She rode home along the main road. When she got home, Bella was at the back gate waiting. She put her bicycle away, and with Bella following close behind, they went inside. She sat at the kitchen table, and Bella settled across her feet. She opened the manuscript to the last page and started typing.

Renner pulled over and sat looking at the water. He picked up his phone and called the one person who had always picked up. He told her where he was and what had happened and that he didn't know what came next. She said she'd be there by morning. He believed her.

She picked up her phone and called Dianne.

Her aunt answered on the second ring.

"I need you to come," Grace said. "I can't explain it well. I just need someone who knows me here."

Dianne admitted, "I looked at the ferry schedule two weeks ago," she said. "I didn't want to push."

"You're not pushing."

"Saturday, then."

"Saturday," Grace said.

She set the phone down. Bella was at her bowl eating her supper. Grace got up, went to the cupboard, and started on her own.