The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(44)

Richard had met Joan a second time in the library late on the following Tuesday night. She had explained to him exactly what she wanted him to do. She knew the house that her husband and his girlfriend went to on Fridays during lunch. She had scouted the location and knew he could park his car on the parallel street in the small parking lot of a neighborhood playground. There were hiking trails nearby, so it made sense that he should dress as though he was a hiker, and then he could make his way through the woods to the back side of the deck house that was for sale. According to Joan, the door that led to the back porch could be opened with a credit card, and the door that led from the porch into the interior of the house was never locked. He should get there before they did, and make it look as though Richard shot Pam then himself.

“That’s not easy to do,” Richard said.

“Shooting them, or making it look like my husband shot himself?”

“Shooting them won’t be hard. The other thing will.”

“I know. But if you can pull it off, then we’ll have committed a perfect crime. It will be amazing. And if you can’t pull it off, if the police suspect that someone else was in the house, they will never in a million years suspect it was you. They’ll probably suspect it was me, but I’ll be having coffee with one of my clients, so I’ll have an alibi. And there is nothing in this world that connects us. Only our own memories. Trust me, it will be perfect, even if the killing doesn’t go exactly as planned.”

“Okay,” Richard said, relieved to know she didn’t expect him to be perfect. It wasn’t a surprise; it was the way she’d always acted. When she’d helped him to kill his cousin Duane she’d known that things might go wrong. And when Richard had gotten James Pursall to kill Madison Brown for Joan during their senior year of high school there was no guarantee that it would have worked. But the important thing, the only thing, was that Joan and Richard were strangers to one another, that no one knew how close they were, and that would always protect them. It was their superpower.

They’d agreed to meet again in another week. Joan was going to go to Henry Kimball, the ex-cop who used to teach at Dartford, and have him follow Richard and Pam.

“What if he sees me?” Richard said.

“He won’t. Just so long as you kill Richard and Pam right after they get in the house, then leave right away through the back. He won’t see you, I promise. And just to be safe you should wear some kind of disguise or mask when you’re in the house, so even if he sees you, he won’t be able to identify you.”

“Okay,” Richard said.

And then he had to wait another week to see Joan again, to make the final plan. The excitement had been almost unbearable, his days at the store starting to crawl, and his nights at home not a whole lot better. He studied satellite maps of the deck house, and the lot lines around it, planning where he’d park, and where he’d make his way to the house. He wanted to go scout the area but didn’t want to take an unnecessary risk. If someone saw him there more than once they might remember him.

Even though the waiting was unbearable, it was only because he was so excited to have Joan back in his life. And to have purpose. No, it wasn’t all about purpose, because his life did have purpose, even without Joan in it. He’d spent the past two years drawing up an elaborate plan where he’d use four carefully placed fertilizer bombs to drop all three stories of the Winslow Oaks Convention Center onto their largest hall during a packed event. He’d been considering the best time to enact this plan, at one point flirting with the idea of doing it during the annual New England Concrete Professionals Convention, the one his stepfather used to attend every year until he’d retired and moved down to Florida. That would be very satisfying, except for the fact that Don Seddon himself wouldn’t wind up crushed to death under a ton of his own product when Richard brought down the building. No, the real problem with killing a bunch of smug, witless concrete experts was that who the fuck would even care. Richard had a better plan. The Winslow Oaks Convention Center hosted at least two huge proms every spring, one for a regional tech high school, and the other for Chilton High School, one of the ritzier schools west of Route 495. The type of kids who went there were probably a lot like the type of kids who went to Dartford-Middleham, and Richard could only imagine the news headlines if he killed every single graduating senior in that particular town. All those kids in their bad tuxedos and all the girls in their glitzy dresses, acting like they’d accomplished something by graduating from high school and finding someone to have sex with.

If Richard could pull it off, and he really believed he could, his name would be remembered forever.

But for right now, now that Joan was back, he’d put the prom night planning on the back burner. Joan had work for him to do, and she would always come first. She was the one, after all, who had shown him his true world, back when they’d been fifteen years old in Kennewick, Maine. She’d shown him that you didn’t need to accept your reality, that you could change it. She’d shown him colors he’d never known existed.

On their third meeting at the Fairview Library Joan confirmed that she’d hired Henry Kimball, the teacher she knew who was now a private investigator, and he would be following either her husband or her husband’s girlfriend all week. Richard wasn’t too nuts about bringing in the private detective. It seemed unnecessarily complex, but Joan really believed that having a witness, someone who confirmed that an affair was taking place, and someone who would likely find the bodies, added an element of believability. Richard suspected she just wanted to bring in this man from her past, this man who was in the room when all their work paid off and Madison Brown got what she deserved. There was a theatrical element to Joan. Maybe it came from being a gymnast. She wanted things to be beautiful, and she wanted them to be perfect.