The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(48)

I put my computer away, packing it in the backpack I’d brought with me. It was seven in the morning and I couldn’t sleep anymore, despite staying up late the night before telling Lily Kintner about recent and past events.

I was in a small bedroom with a slanted ceiling on one side, and a view across a misty field that ended in a line of trees. The walls were painted a ghoulish yellow color, and one of the windowpanes was cracked. I’d slept on a thin mattress on a wooden cot and was now sitting at a child-sized desk trying to figure out if it was too early to go downstairs and see if anyone had made coffee. I could hear a scratching sound at the door and opened it up, letting in a slate-gray cat who stopped to look at me like I was the ghost of a man who’d drowned her kittens. We stared at one another until she decided I was a mere mortal, then she circled the room, eventually coming over and rubbing against my ankle. I thought of Pyewacket, who hated to be left alone overnight at home, and I suddenly longed to be back in Cambridge. In the light of day it seemed strange I’d come here in the first place. Maybe Richard Whalen had really fallen in love with Pam O’Neil, so much so that when he knew she was going to break up with him, he did the only logical thing he could think of. He shot her and then himself, ensuring that neither of them would ever be free to love anyone else ever again. It was certainly the way that it looked. Why was I so suspicious of Joan Grieve Whalen? Was it because if she wasn’t involved, then I was, in some part? By sleeping with a woman I shouldn’t have slept with, had I brought about her violent death? I pushed the thought out of my head.

The collarless cat leapt onto the small blond-wood desk, and I jumped a little. I scratched her under the chin, then got my backpack and went down the backstairs toward the first floor of Monk’s House.

In the kitchen I found Lily’s mother, Sharon, wearing a loose lavender dress and frying bacon at the stove, while Lily was putting last night’s dishes away. Both turned to look at me, and Lily said, “Coffee’s next to the fridge. Help yourself.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I won’t stay long, but I will drink a cup of coffee.”

“You won’t stay for breakfast?”

“Of course, he will,” Sharon said. “I’ve made double.”

After agreeing to stay I sat down at the wooden kitchen table. “I met your cat,” I said into the room.

“I don’t think so,” Sharon said loudly, as Lily nodded only at me, then said, “That’s April. She’s not really our cat, but she likes to come into our house.”

“I’m very allergic, you know,” Sharon said. “Lily knows that better than anyone, so I really doubt we have a cat.”

Lily said, “She likes the room you stayed in last night, and we think she gets in through the greenhouse at the back, but we haven’t figured out how she does it. I’ve always had a cat here. They just arrive somehow.”

Sharon kept putting platters on the table, one of bacon, one of scrambled eggs, one of fruit. David Kintner came down, wearing the same clothes he’d had on the night before, but he’d added a tie, tucked into his buttoned-up cardigan. He sat next to me without saying anything and Lily put a boiled egg in a cup in front of him, plus coffee in a bowl. He proceeded to tap on his egg with the edge of a spoon.

After eating, David said his first words of the day, which were to me. “How long are you here? Do you propose to spend your time rambling the countryside, or drinking, or a little bit of both?” It sounded a little rehearsed.

“I’m leaving, unfortunately, right after breakfast.”

“He’ll be back, Dad,” Lily said. “He promised me.”

“Ah, good,” David said, rubbing at a stain on his tie.

Lily showed me her garden before I got back into my car. It was dying, of course, but there was still color in places, bronze mums in pots, withering sunflowers, a shrub with tiny leaves that had turned various shades of purple. April, the cat, appeared, skirting quietly along an old stone wall, and looking back at me, trying to figure out if I was the same ghost that had been up in her room.

“I did some research on Joan this morning, just googling her and looking at her social media,” I said.

“And?”

“And I began to feel stupid. Maybe her husband just snapped. Maybe she’s just one of those unlucky people who find themselves near violent death at different times in their life.”

“It’s a possibility.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I don’t know what to think until I learn more, but my feeling is that your feeling is correct. She’s smart and she makes things happen.”

I nodded. It was turning into a pretty day, dark clouds being pushed east, and the early morning sun now warming everything up. “We’ll both see what we can find out, then?”

“Let’s stick to the plan. If there’s nothing, then it was nice to have you come down to visit. It cheers my father up.”

“You don’t have a lot of visitors?”

“Not ones that he likes. My mother’s friends, mostly. Dad’s friends seem to be either dead or done with traveling.”

“Or both,” I said, hoping to make Lily smile.

“Or both,” she said.

“Are you going to stay here with them?”