The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(36)

I wanted to turn around and walk out of the house, wait for the police. But I forced myself to come around to the front of Richard’s body, where I very carefully put two fingers underneath his jaw and felt for a pulse that wasn’t there. I only kept my fingers there for about a second and a half, but he was obviously dead. The force of the bullet had bulged his right eye from its socket. I turned to Pam. She’d been shot in the middle of the chest, but also in the center of her forehead. Her blond hair lay feathered down her shoulders as though she’d been posed. I couldn’t bring myself to feel for a pulse.

Breathing in through my mouth and blowing out through my nose, I retraced my steps and exited the house by the front door. I walked as far as I could into the woods that skirted the property—only about fifty feet—then bent over and was sick on the fallen orange pine needles.

I heard sirens in the distance.





Part 2

The Third Person





Chapter 16





Kimball


One week after I’d walked into a staged deck house and found the corpses of Richard Whalen and Pam O’Neil, I received a check in the mail from Joan Whalen. I had never invoiced her, of course, and the amount in the check was much higher than what she owed me. She also included a short note:

Mr. Kimball, I knew you would never ask for money from me, but I want to pay you for your time. I am sorry you had to find the bodies, but at least you were able to tell the police what you saw. I never suspected Richard would be capable of such a thing, and if I had I would never have gone to you. Best regards, Joan Grieve Whalen



I tried to imagine Joan’s state of mind when she’d written that note, and signed the check, and mailed them both to me at my office in Cambridge. I couldn’t. I simply didn’t know her well enough, and I’d found myself, during the past week, picking through my memories of being a high school English teacher for one year, and having Joan in my senior honors class.

After giving my initial statement to the lead detective—a young, pale redhead named Jimmy Conroy—I had returned to the Bingham police station the following day and given that same statement again. I had tried to parse the questions that were coming at me, this time with a state detective sitting in the back of the interrogation room, her eyes either on me or on the back of her hand. There were more questions the day after about my relationship with Pam O’Neil, and I answered them truthfully. I could feel the disapproval every time I admitted we’d had a sexual relationship.

“Did she ever give you any indication that she was afraid of Richard Whalen, or that she was nervous about ending the relationship with him?” Detective Conroy said. Even with his thinning hair he didn’t look a day over twenty-five.

I told them she had never even confirmed to me the identity of the man she was involved with, and that she had never said anything about being scared of him.

“Is it your opinion that she was definitely going to tell him that she wanted to end the relationship?”

I thought for a moment, then said, “My opinion was that she wanted to end the relationship. I have no idea what happened on the Friday when she met him.”

I knew what Detective Conroy was doing, that he was trying to build a story that would account for Richard Whalen putting two bullets into Pam O’Neil and then a third bullet into his own head. And, honestly, it wasn’t a very complicated story at all. Richard knew Pam was going to stop seeing him, and she had probably even indicated to him she wanted to talk to him that Friday at lunchtime; maybe she’d already told him it was over. So he killed her, and then himself. Of course, why did he have the gun with him, unless he suspected what might happen? I also wondered why Pam had never indicated to me that Richard had become possessive or unhinged. Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she thought they were having a casual fling, while Richard believed they were Romeo and Juliet. People were like that.

“Do you think she was breaking up with Whalen because of you? Because she hoped that the two of you might continue your relationship?”

It was the same question I’d been asking myself since the day I’d discovered the bodies. “I don’t think so, only because she told me she wanted to break off the relationship before we slept together, but, who knows, maybe.” He looked at me with dead eyes, and I understood his antipathy.

“Mr. Kimball, one more thing, before you go . . .” It was the state police detective, leaning forward now. “Just to reiterate, because I know you answered these questions yesterday, but you saw no other car in the driveway of the house?”

“I saw two cars. The one that belonged to Pam O’Neil and the one that belonged to Richard Whalen. There might have been a car in the garage. I never checked.”

“Thank you. And after you heard the gunshots and approached the house, did you hear anything else? Any other noises coming from the property?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “And I was listening carefully, expecting to hear another shot, maybe, or for someone to come out of the house.”

“I’m sure you were.”

I hadn’t heard from either the Bingham Police Department or the state detective since that second interrogation. The Boston Globe had been reporting on the story daily, and it was now regularly being referred to as a murder-suicide.

After reading Joan’s note several times, I went into my office closet, the one that was filled with all the parts of my life that I no longer looked at. I pulled everything out until I found an old cardboard box from around the time that I was teaching at Dartford-Middleham. Inside I found the notebooks where I’d written out my lesson plans. At the bottom of the box I found a green folder that contained about thirty sheets of paper, each one with a handwritten paragraph and the student’s name on the top. It had been near the end of the semester, which meant it was very near to the day of the shooting, and my seniors had just about lost any interest in anything academic. I remember the windows of the classroom were open, and warm, lilac-scented air was coming in. I’d talked to them about college, and what their expectations were. They were all college-bound, this particular class, and then, just for something to do, I passed out blank sheets of paper and had them all write down where they thought they’d be in ten years. “Maybe I’ll find you in ten years and let you know how close your predictions were,” I’d said.