The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(52)

I knew I hadn’t had him in one of my classes, so I was trying to remember how I knew him, when it came to me. He’d been friends with James Pursall, the shooter who had killed Madison Brown and then himself in my classroom. In fact I remembered that Richard Seddon was pretty much James Pursall’s only friend.

I stared at Richard Seddon’s picture, tapping my finger on the glossy yearbook page, wondering where he was now, and how I could find him.





Chapter 23





Richard


Richard loved to think about that summer in the year 2000 when he’d first met Joan, and when they’d lured Duane to the end of the jetty. Every detail of that week was accessible to him. But for some reason he rarely thought about senior year of high school, the year he’d talked James Pursall into shooting Madison Brown at school and then killing himself. When he thought about it now the memories were filled with blank spaces, in the same way that his childhood was now largely composed of just a few vivid, unforgettable moments unmoored by any context.

The best memories of senior year had been his meetings with Joan in the Middleham town library. They’d met seven times, always an hour before closing time, and together they’d talk about what Joan sometimes called the Madison Brown problem, and how James Pursall was the perfect person to solve it. She was the one who first thought that Richard could talk James into shooting Madison. This was after Richard had told Joan that James had two semiautomatic weapons that he’d purchased at a gun show with a false ID, and that James talked a lot about going on a shooting spree and then killing himself. It was a persistent fantasy, and Richard had told him that it was his fantasy, too. Not that it was, but Richard couldn’t tell him that he’d already killed someone, his own cousin, and how that had felt.

“Could you get him to kill Madison Brown and then himself?”

“I don’t know,” Richard had said. And at the time, although he’d mostly forgotten this, there was a part of him that thought: Am I a murderer? Pushing Duane into the ocean was one thing, but Joan was talking about guns. And then he let it go, because if it was okay with Joan it was okay with him, as well.

“You could make a pact with him. He has two guns. You could form a plan, that the two of you would use them at the same time in different rooms at school. You wouldn’t kill anyone, but he wouldn’t know that.”

“So you think I should just say to him that I have a plan. He needs to kill Madison and then himself, at the same time as . . .”

“No, no, no, no. This is what you say. You say you had this really cool thought. That you’d sneak guns into the school. That you’d both go on a hunt. He’d pick a target for you and you’d pick a target for him, and that you’d need to shoot and kill this person at the exact same time, and then kill yourselves. Don’t talk about it like it’s a real plan, just talk about how cool it would be in theory. Two targeted school shootings with no survivors left. Don’t ever suggest doing it for real. Let him do that.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“Then we’ll find another way to fix the Madison Brown problem.”

Richard had done exactly as Joan had suggested. James was over at Richard’s house. They were both in the basement playing Violence, but mostly just listening to their current favorite band, As I Lay Dying. Richard had made the suggestion, not surprised when James reacted exactly as Joan had said he would. He’d loved the idea, excited to pick the person who Richard would need to kill. He kept changing his mind, finally narrowing it down to between another senior, Danny Eaton, and a particularly horrible science teacher named Mr. Barber. “Who would you want me to shoot?” James had asked.

“I’ve thought about this a lot. I’d definitely want you to shoot Madison Brown.”

“Oh, wow,” James had said. “Oh, yeah. She’s a fucking bitch. You know I’m in a class with her. Honors English. It would be easy.” James had pointed his finger and cocked his thumb, making imaginary shooting gestures.

Meeting with Joan in the library on a cold night in January, at the beginning of their final half year in high school, Richard had said, “There’s just so many ways it could go wrong. It’s not like what we did with Duane.”

“I know,” Joan said. They were in the alcove where they always had their conversations, up on the balcony level. Only once in their meetings had someone else come upstairs, a wheezing old man, and by the time he had walked past their spot, Joan had ducked down another aisle. Besides, the man had never even looked at Richard sitting in his chair. It was possible, of course, that a librarian might have noticed the same two high school students had been in the library at the same late hour on more than one occasion. But Richard doubted it.

“So let’s just list the ways it can go wrong,” Joan said.

“He could chicken out. He could tell someone about our plan. He could kill Madison but not himself, then tell everyone I told him to do it.”

“Okay,” Joan said. “Those are all bad, but they aren’t the end of the world. It would be your word against his. All you’d have to say was that you used to talk to him about fantasies, but you never in a million years thought he was serious.”

“But I’d have a gun on me,” Richard said.

“No, you wouldn’t. You’re not going to shoot anyone, so don’t bring a gun into school. In fact, take the gun you have and hide it somewhere it won’t be found. And then you not having a gun will back up your story about not taking it seriously. I mean, they might not believe you, but they couldn’t prove anything, right?”