The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(23)

“Thanks, Henry,” she said, and then, reading my thoughts, added, “although what I really want to say is ‘Thanks, Mr. Kimball.’”

“Please don’t.”

After ending the call I sat on the bench for a while longer. A bank of clouds had passed by and now there was sun again, lighting up the remaining leaves on all the trees. An older couple, both of them mildly stooped over, went slowly past me and toward the Concord River Inn. If it was lunchtime for them then it might as well be lunchtime for me. I held the door for them then entered myself, following a narrow, wallpapered hallway that led to the tavern area at the back of the inn.



After lunch I swung back through Sudbury to see if Richard’s car was still parked at the house he’d gone to earlier. It wasn’t, so I returned to the Dartford offices, parking on a residential street that ran parallel to Colonial Road, then walked past the offices, seeing the BMW in the back parking lot. I looked for Pam’s Toyota, too, but didn’t spot it either in the lot or on the street. It was possible she was working at the other offices today.

I returned to the coffee shop, the woman behind the counter recognizing me when I came in. “Large latte?” she said, and I nodded.

I took up my usual seat close to the window. I’d brought a novel with me this time. The Riverside Villas Murder by Kingsley Amis. I read my book but positioned it in such a way I’d be able to detect any cars exiting from the alleyway between the Blackburn Properties building and the florist next door. I drank my coffee as slowly as possible, and picked at a lemon-ginger scone, and sometime around four in the afternoon, wrote a limerick on the inside back cover of the Amis novel:

There once was a bored private eye.

Day in and day out he would spy

On people in bars,

Or out driving cars,

Like a voyeur, but not the good kind.





Just before five o’clock Richard’s BMW nosed its way from the alley back onto the road. I was able to catch up with him about a quarter of a mile down the road, heading toward his house. He veered off at one point but it was just to pull into the large parking lot of a discount liquor store. He emerged holding a paper bag close to his torso and returned to his car. I was parked one row over, and angled so that I had a view through the driver’s side window. He put the bag down on the passenger side seat then pulled something from it. I wasn’t sure what it was until he raised it to his lips, and I saw him drinking from a nip bottle, tipping it back and downing it all at once. Then he reached into the bag again and pulled out another of the same. This one he sipped at slowly while staring through his windshield out toward the darkening sky. He must have turned on his car’s engine because he powered his window halfway down and I could hear music coming from inside. I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure, but it sounded like “Lyin’ Eyes” by the Eagles, which was way too on the nose, I thought.

When he finished his second small bottle, he got out of his car, and walked with a stiff, awkward gait back to the front of the store, where he deposited the two empty nips into a trash container.

Then he got back into his car and drove home, me following at a slight distance. After he pulled into the driveway of his green Colonial I kept driving, all the way back to Cambridge. At a long red light, I got on my smartphone and cued up “Lyin’ Eyes.”





Chapter 10





Joan


She left the Windward at just past ten, walking across the empty front lawn, then crossing Micmac Road to get to the beach. It was a dark night, no stars in the sky. Stepping onto the beach she had a brief moment of complete displacement, the water and the sand and the sky all equally black, and making Joan feel as though she were a tiny creature marooned in the middle of a vast nothingness.

She saw a yellow flicker toward the jetty side of the beach and made her way in that direction, walking slowly, ready to turn back if it was only Duane by the fire. But soon she could hear multiple voices, and a loud whooping noise. There were about six bodies grouped around the flames. It wasn’t until Joan was close enough to hear their words and see their faces that they even saw her approaching. Duane stood up. “Hey, you made it,” he said, and all the other firelit faces turned toward her.

He introduced her around, ignoring the fact she’d already met Derek. Besides him, there were three other guys, two of them who seemed like they might be in their twenties, one of them smoking a cigarette. And there were two girls, wearing shorts and sweaters, hunched over near the fire like they were freezing. Their names were Emily and Anne and they said they were sisters, even though one had very blond hair and the other one was a full-on redhead, her face covered with dark freckles. Duane grabbed Joan a can of beer from a plastic cooler, and she popped it open and tasted it. It was both bitter and overly sweet at the same time, and she shuddered a little after taking a sip.

“You like beer?” Duane said.

“Not really. I prefer martinis.”

Everyone had been listening, and the boys laughed, one of them saying, “Oh my God,” in a loud, slurry voice.

There were two coolers around the fire, and Joan was offered one to sit on. Duane was nearest to her, and he began to tell her about how there was this liquor store a few towns away in Biddeford, and it was run by this guy whose brother was a cop, so pretty much anyone could buy beer there, no matter how old they were. “All you gotta do,” said Derek, “is show them any kind of ID when they ask. Like just present your library card or something, and the guy who owns the place looks at it, then rings you up.”