The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(43)

“Title of his biography,” I said.

“Ha,” Lily said, then was quiet, her eyes unfocused, her tea mug in her hand. “Are you ready to tell me about what happened? I looked it up on my phone while we were getting dinner ready. It’s being declared a murder-slash-suicide.”

“Whoever did it did a good job,” I said. “I was first on the scene. It looked like Richard Whalen and Pam O’Neil sat across from one another, like we are right now. He shot her twice, then shot himself with the same gun.”

“So why do you think that isn’t what happened?”

I took a breath and said, “The night before the murder I slept with Pam O’Neil. I’d gotten to know her because I was following her. She was very sweet. I should never have slept with her, obviously. Now I can’t stop thinking that because of that she tried to end her relationship with Richard, which led him to shoot her and then himself.”

Lily paused, thinking, then said, “So the reason you think they were murdered by someone else is because if they weren’t then you are to blame.”

“Yes, that’s one reason. I already don’t particularly like myself, and if I caused Pam’s death I’m going to like myself a whole lot less.”

I thought Lily might say something to try and comfort me, and I was glad when she kept silent.

“But,” I said. “I do have a deep suspicion, or maybe just a gut feeling, that Richard didn’t do it. I didn’t know him at all, but I watched him and followed him. He was a cheating suburbanite with a good job, but he doesn’t make sense as a murderer.”

“You can’t really know that,” Lily said.

“I know,” I said. “Here’s the truth. Nothing that I saw over the past week makes me think I was somehow set up. Except for maybe this weird remark that Pam made about being in a threesome, but I’ll get to that. The reason I think I’ve been set up is because of what happened fifteen years ago in my classroom with Joan Grieve. That’s what I keep thinking about.”

“What happened there?”

“You don’t know about it?”

“I know a little. I know that you were an English teacher at Dartford-Middleham High School and that a student in one of your classes shot a girl and then himself.”

“He held us hostage for a while before he did it.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that.”

“And Joan was in my class, as well. The girl who was killed was one of her friends.”

“Joan who hired you Joan?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And what about the boy with the gun? Who was he?”

“Kind of a loner. Like if you were making a movie and wanted your school shooter to be a total cliché you would cast him. Not many friends, crappy home life, into violent video games and comic books.”

“But not friends with Joan Grieve?”

“Joan Grieve was a star gymnast and super popular. She didn’t hang out with kids like James Pursall. But she was there in the room when it happened, and I think she might have had something to do with it. And then, fifteen years later . . .”

“She comes back to you and the same thing happens again.”

“Exactly. And there’s one other thing, but I’m almost embarrassed to tell you about it.”

Lily shrugged, and I said, “It’s actually in my car, in my overnight bag that I packed out of pure hope you’d ask me to spend the night.”

“Go get it,” she said.

I walked across the driveway to my car to get my bag. The night sky was inky black and dense with stars. The only sign of nearby human habitation was a brand-new house on the far edge of an adjacent meadow, its enormous front door lit by overhead lighting. Before going back into Monk’s House I stood for a moment on the front stoop, watching my breath condense and trying to figure out why I was so happy to be here.

Back inside I showed Lily the three pages I’d brought with me, the responses from Madison Brown, James Pursall, and Joan Grieve to the question of what they’d be doing in ten years’ time. Lily read all three, then looked at me. She had pale red eyebrows, almost undetectable against her milky skin, but I saw that she had raised them slightly.





Chapter 19





Richard


For as long as he could remember Richard had narrated his own life. Sometimes it was simply that he recounted his day-to-day existence in a series of interior monologues. Sometimes he imagined he was subject to an extensive experiment, where an alien species had selected him from all the other humans on the planet as a subject to analyze, and he was being watched every moment of his life. He often had these fantasies—the alien ones—when his life was at the most tedious, when a day was defined by nothing more than one elitist comment from a customer at the store, or by an entire evening and night playing Assassin’s Creed until his eyes stung. When his life was interesting—and his life was seldom interesting—then the narrative would take the form of a future bestselling book, written about him after he had wreaked havoc on the world then left it all behind.

In the weeks after Joan had walked into the store and met him at the library to ask him to murder her husband, he found himself imagining the book version of his life. The author would have to theorize about the facts, of course, and fill in the details. We’ll never know for sure, but it is clear that at some point in time Richard Seddon and Joan Grieve, now known as Joan Whalen, met again. Maybe it was an accident, and maybe it was arranged, but either way, the moment they met a death sentence for Joan’s husband was now firmly in place.