Snake Eater by William G. Tapply

“was his little sanctuary. It’s where he came when he was writing his book.”
    “He never showed it to you, huh?”
    “He was very secretive about that book. He worked on it for, I don’t know, three or four years. He’d sneak down here and wouldn’t tell me why for the longest time. I’d tell him, I’d say, “You meeting some girl or something?’ And he’d give me that old smile and say, ‘Nay, lass. No girl.’ But he wouldn’t say what it was. Daniel was a secretive man anyway, but I kept bugging him, and finally he admitted he was trying to write a book. I asked him what it was about. He told me not to ask. He made it clear. It was none of my business. So I didn’t ask. I just knew that it was important to him and he didn’t want anybody to know about it. I think it would be neat if Daniel’s book got published.”
    I nodded. I realized that Daniel’s murder had driven thoughts of his book from my mind. “I’ll check with Al Coleman again, see what the holdup is. He said he was sending it right back, and that was over a month ago. There are plenty of other agents. But meanwhile, there’s got to be insurance records, a will, deeds, things like that that I’ll need. None of that stuff’s here.”
    Cammie snapped her fingers. “He kept a strongbox in his bedroom closet. That’s probably what you want.”
    We locked up the shop and went back to the house. A couple of minutes later Cammie placed a cheap metal box on the kitchen table. It wasn’t locked. Inside I found several manila envelopes. Daniel had carefully labeled each of them with a black felt-tip pen. “Deed.” “Will.” “Automobile.” “Medical.” “Business.” “Tax.” “Insurance.”
    None, I noticed, was labeled “Book.”
    I decided to take the whole box with me. I could look through all of it later.
    Then Cammie switched on the floodlights that lit up the yard, and Terri and I helped her fill plastic trash bags with beer cans and plastic glasses. There were hundreds of them—in the house, on the deck, in the gardens, all over the lawn, under the shrubbery. I told Terri that Daniel’s yard after the party was our world in microcosm. She told me I was unnecessarily cynical. I said I didn’t think so.
    Cammie insisted that Terri and I stay for supper. We made ham-and-Swiss-cheese-and-tomato sandwiches on whole wheat and washed them down with more beer. We had coffee on the deck.
    “What are you going to do?” Terri said to Cammie as we studied the night sky.
    “I don’t know. Nothing for a while. Paint.”
    “Going to stay here?”
    “For now.” She shrugged.
    “Will you be okay?”
    She smiled. “I’ve got my friends,” she said.
    Terri asked me to spend the night with her in Acton. I accepted. She slept pressed tight against my back with her arm draped over my hip, and I lay awake for a long time with her soft breath on the back of my neck, and I knew that just then neither of us was feeling any need for space.
    I also knew that that would change. It always did.
    Sunday evening I emptied the manila envelopes from Daniel’s strongbox onto my kitchen table and began to sort through their contents. He had everything well organized. It would be easy.
    He had bequeathed the house and the studio to Cammie. The shop and its contents went jointly to Brian Sweeney, Roscoe Pollard, and Vinnie Colletti.
    The last envelope I opened was the one labeled “Insurance.” It contained policies on his car and his buildings, plus a modest army policy on his life. The beneficiary was Cammie.
    Inside the big insurance envelope was a smaller envelope. I opened it and spilled its contents onto the table.
    Photographs. Six of them. Plus two index cards.
    The photos were five-by-seven black-and-white head-and-shoulder shots. Six men. On the back of each was printed a name and address. The printing did not match Daniel’s.
    Each of the two index cards had a name and address printed on it in Daniel’s hand.
    I looked at the