The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(47)

Lily touched an earlobe and was quiet for a moment. “What I think is that Joan Grieve absolutely had someone kill her husband and her husband’s lover. Just like she absolutely had James Pursall kill Madison Brown for her. I don’t know how she did it, but she did. There’s a reason she came back to you and asked you to follow her husband. It was nostalgia, I think. She has good memories of what happened in your classroom, and she wanted to replicate the experience.”

“She did replicate the experience. At least for me. Two bodies dead by gunshot wounds. Something I never thought I’d see again.”

“So here’s the thing about Joan,” Lily said, and she moved forward on the couch in preparation for getting up and going to bed. “She doesn’t do these things on her own. Somehow, back in high school, she got James Pursall to do her dirty work. Last week, she got someone else to murder her husband. All we need to do is find that person.”

“Okay. How do we do that?”

“I can help you. We need to find out everything about Joan’s life. My guess is that some other people in her orbit might have come to bad ends. We’ll find something. I just don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we will.”

“So you’ll help me?”

Her face was below the lamp now, and I could see both her eyes, pale and green. “Of course I will,” she said, “I’ll always help you, no matter what.”



I woke up in Shepaug, confused for a moment about where I was. The house was quiet, and after walking carefully down the hall to the bathroom, I returned to the attic room, got out my computer, and continued my online search of Joan Grieve.

It was strange, but her name did not come up in any stories relating to the shooting that had taken place in my classroom. My name was mentioned, obviously, as were the names of the deceased. And a few other members of that class had been quoted by the papers. Ultimately, though, the story didn’t really have any legs, probably because James Pursall killed only one other person before taking his own life. We live in an age of mass murder, and two dead bodies, even young ones, just don’t cut it, anymore.

I stared past my computer screen for a few minutes, my mind still back in that classroom, especially since telling Lily the entire story the night before. One day in the future everyone who was there would be dead and there would be zero memory of the event. And even right now, I knew that my memories were faded and falsified by the passage of time. I opened a blank document, thinking for a moment of a poem, ideas streaming through me just out of reach. I have believed for a while that all poetry is saying the same thing—I am here—although what the poet really means is, I was there, because all poetry is just a letter to some future reader. Everything boils down to that one sentiment. I was there. I was there, and I felt things and saw things and sometimes I understood them, but most of the time I did not. I started to jot down a few lines, along this line, erased them, and wrote:

There once was a poet in permanent dread

Over the fact that we all wind up dead,

So he scribbled out verse,

Which just made it worse,

And decided to get laid more instead.





Then I erased that too and went back to thinking about what I might learn about Joan through online searches. Despite not being named as a school-shooting survivor, Joan Grieve Whalen did have an online presence because of her job as an interior decorator. She had a website, a page on LinkedIn, an Instagram account (all pictures of house interiors, either her designs, or ones she admired), a Twitter account, and a Facebook page that she didn’t seem to use anymore. I searched her friends on Facebook, looking for any names I recognized from my year as a teacher. There was one. A girl named Kristin Hunter that I remembered from that honors English class, one of the best students if you went by her essays and exams. I remember the only conversation I had with her was when she’d approached me to see if she could get out of giving her mock-valedictorian speech in front of the room, saying she had an anxiety disorder. I’d told her I’d be happy to work with her in advance to go over some strategies for public speaking. I wonder if there had been a small part of her that felt relieved she never had to give that speech because of what James Pursall did just a few days later. As someone who’d had my own fair share of public speaking phobia, I knew there were times I would have welcomed a mass shooting to get out of giving a poetry reading.

Kristin’s Facebook page was private, so I didn’t learn anything there, although I doubt there would have been anything of interest. Kristin and Joan had probably not been friends in real life and had just found each other on social media the way that old classmates did. I did find two Grieves in Joan’s list of friends. One was a Dorothy Grieve, who turned out to be Joan’s mother, a woman who posted pictures of either her cats or her Candy Crush scores. Then there was Elizabeth Grieve, clearly an older sister of Joan, and a creative writing teacher at Emerson College, plus a published poet. She had her own website, a picture of herself on it, and it was as though all of Joan’s facial features had been plucked off Joan’s face and rearranged on someone else’s in a less successful way. The same eyes but too close together, the same beautiful mouth but marooned by a square chin. Elizabeth Grieve’s black glossy hair was cut short and turning gray in places. I read the few poems that were on the website, free verse mostly, and confessional. There were several about being a childhood leukemia survivor and one about her father’s funeral, and how afterward she’d touched herself in her childhood bedroom looking at the cover of a Nancy Drew novel and dreaming of Bess. There was no mention of a sister. On a whim, I looked Elizabeth Grieve up on Amazon, found her two books—the first was called Variations on a Theme and the second Sea Oat Soup—and ordered them both to arrive the following day.