Chapter One: Life and Death ONE LIFE AND DEATH "He wanted to be seen. This was a performance." 1 The morning of Friday, June 3, 2022, dawned cloudy and unseasonably cool. I watched from my bedroom window as wisps of ground fog--a legion of restless ghosts haunting the predawn--drifted slowly across the dark surface of the pond before dissipating in the woods beyond. Even though I was lying snug beneath a blanket, the sight raised gooseflesh on my arms and sent a chill scampering across the back of my neck. Later, when the memory returned to me in the midst of a nightmare, I realized it had been an omen of what was yet to come. 2 The house I lived in with my wife, Kara, and my sons, Billy and Noah, was actually two houses in one. The original home--built in 1796 by Thomas Moore, a prominent miller and tanner, and soon after christened Mooresland Manor--was constructed of rough blocks of stone taken from a local quarry.
A second, much larger section was added by Moore''s eldest son, Eli, in 1841. As a result, the house had two foyers, two sets of stairs leading to the upper floors, and two front-facing living rooms. This was how 701 Southampton Road, Bel Air, Maryland (a mere fifteen-minute drive from Edgewood), became known as the House with Two Front Doors. The surrounding seven-acre property boasted a spring-fed pond, a meandering creek, an orchard, open fields, and woods. Geese, deer, foxes, and raccoons were regular visitors. A U-shaped driveway and low stone wall fronted the house, with nearly 150 yards of head-high wooden fencing running along the eastern border of the property, shielding the pond and side meadow from passing cars and pedestrians. A narrow strip of grass and a gravel shoulder separated the fence line from Southampton Road. It was there, leaning against a fire hydrant, that JJ--Billy''s nine-month-old Bernese mountain dog--discovered the garbage bag.
3 A lot had changed in my world since the August 2021 publication of Chasing the Boogeyman . Most of it good, but not all of it. My oldest son, Billy, had recently graduated from Colby College in Maine and was once again living in his third-story attic bedroom, spending his days writing and editing fiction and working on various film projects. He''d listened dutifully to all the well-meaning warnings and lectures regarding how difficult it would be to follow in his old man''s footsteps, but in the end, he''d ignored each and every one of them and forged ahead anyway. I was proud of him. He was working hard and had already earned considerably more success than his father had managed at that age. Billy''s younger brother, Noah, had just completed his freshman year at the University of Virginia. He was spending the summer mowing grass at a golf course in Charlottesville and taking a four-credit statistics class.
He''d recently moved into an apartment with three of his lacrosse teammates and together they were learning the finer points of cooking, cleaning, and figuring out how to find and hold on to a girlfriend. Kara and I FaceTimed and spoke on the telephone with Noah several times a week, but it wasn''t the same as having him home. We missed him terribly. It didn''t help matters that I was feeling homesick myself. The runaway success of Chasing the Boogeyman had led to a seemingly endless string of promotional appearances. Due to COVID restrictions, I''d spent most of the late summer and fall of 2021 participating in dozens of virtual book clubs. That hadn''t been so bad. Wash my face, throw on a clean shirt, click a Zoom link, and spend an hour or two hawking books from the comfort of my own home.
Easy enough. But then the holiday season arrived--just as COVID constraints were lifted--and the publicity machine shifted into high gear. Instead of lounging in my home office, talking to a computer screen, I was suddenly crisscrossing the country with a revolving cast of barely-old-enough-to-drink publicists assigned by my publicity director. In-person bookstore signings, radio and television interviews, early morning talk shows, bookfairs (never in my life had I ever imagined there were so many blasted bookfairs)--you name it, I did it. And to the publicists'' credit, the hustle seemed to work. Chasing the Boogeyman stuck around on the hardcover bestseller lists for seventeen consecutive weeks--a rare occurrence these days unless your last name happens to be Grisham, King, or Patterson--and when it finally dropped off in mid-January, it didn''t go very far. Retail sales remained surprisingly strong throughout the early quarter of 2022. The book surged into a fifth and sixth printing.
Eventually, I ran out of bookfairs to attend and got to stay home for a couple of months, long enough to welcome a new puppy to the family and put the finishing touches on a manuscript I had started the previous summer. I even managed to regain a few pounds from Kara''s home cooking. And then it felt like I blinked one morning, and the movie version of Chasing the Boogeyman hit U.S. theaters and pay-per-view channels--and off I went again. More red-eye flights and hotel rooms, more signings and interviews, and you guessed it, more bookfairs. In the past six weeks, I''d only been home long enough to sleep a handful of nights in my own bed--and it didn''t look like that was going to change any time soon. With the movie scheduled for overseas release in mid-July, I was already preparing for a whirlwind promotional tour spanning much of Europe.
Kara, who had recently purchased a brand-new set of luggage for the trip, was over-the-moon excited and counting down the days until we boarded the plane. I was not. I was dog-tired and moody as hell. Most days, shuffling around the house or my hotel room enveloped within a hazy, dark cloud of unshakable melancholy. Or as my dear departed father would have said: "walking around in a serious funk." Most likely, I was burned-out. I''d always been a loner by nature, and socializing with friends and strangers alike--even the wonderfully supportive group of readers I''d been blessed with--took a lot out of me. Being a writer had normally been such a solitary activity in my life.
I sat by myself in an office with no windows and tapped away on my laptop. That was it; that was the job. But the landscape was different now, the stakes higher, and I was the first to admit that all the travel and publicity had worn me down--not only physically, but also mentally. Or maybe what I was feeling was just part of life, part of growing older and learning how to embrace the future and let go of the past--something I struggled with, even on my best days. All I knew was that despite my recent successes, the world felt somehow heavier. And with the exception of the ongoing horrors of the pandemic, I could honestly think of only one good reason for that. The previous fall, one of my best friends in the world, Carly Albright, had lost her husband to cancer. On the October morning he''d been diagnosed, Walter Scroggins was in perhaps the best shape of his life.
He cycled and jogged several times a week and played eighteen holes of golf (he was a walker, too--no electric carts for Walter) and mixed doubles tennis on the weekends; he and Carly were even learning how to play pickleball and had recently joined a league at their gym. Six weeks later, he was gone. At the time, it''d felt as if a tornado had touched down out of nowhere and ravaged the lives of an amazing woman and her three beautiful daughters, and then up and blown away without a trace into the treetops. The rest of us had been left standing there dazed and confused, staring up at tranquil, baby blue skies, and wondering: Did that really just happen? And when it was over--after all the tears and hugs and Saran-wrapped casseroles; after the final black-clad mourner had shuffled out of the memorial service and into the parking lot and the heavy doors had closed and the lights dimmed, and the world went suddenly still and silent--what then could you possibly say to a woman who meant so much to you, to a woman who had just buried the beating heart of her entire universe? "I''m so sorry for your loss. I love you dearly and I''m here for you always." As it turned out, those were the exact same words pretty much every one else had said to Carly Albright on that dark and dreary day--and during all the days that followed. So tell me then, how in God''s name could they have been the right words, the best words, I could muster? When it mattered most, how could they have even made the slightest bit of difference? No wonder it''d felt as if she were so disappointed in me. When everything was said and done, as autumn passed into winter and winter gave way to the promise of a new year, it felt as though I''d lost the both of them.
Kara and I hadn''t seen Carly since before the holidays, at a gift exchange dinner at a crowded Baltimore restaurant that had felt forced and hollow from the onset. Carly and I still spoke on the telephone, but only occasionally and rarely at length anymore. She was different now. Harder-edged. Always busy. Always trying to distract or forget. She often used the girls as an excuse for not having any free time, but how could I take issue with that? How could I blame her? The landscape of our relationship had shifted beneath our feet and we had become like strangers to each other. I knew this sort of thing happened all the time, but it made me sad to think about, so most days I tried not to.
Most days, I tried not to think of her at all.