The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(63)

When I got back to my office the following morning at just past nine Richard Seddon’s car had still not moved. I split the screen on my computer between the map of Fairview and an internet browser, then I read about what was happening in the baseball playoffs, googled Richard Seddon again to see if I’d missed anything, then read the Wikipedia entry on Margaret Cogswell. It didn’t mention her affair with David Kintner, who was probably the least famous of her many famous lovers. She had died just two years earlier, three months after winning the Booker Prize for her final novel, A Room by the Sea. I remember that the common joke at the time was that she’d been holding off death until she finally made it off the Booker short list (she’d been there seven times) and into the winner’s circle.

I was doing image searches of her when the dot on my map started to move, and I enlarged the tracking window to full screen. Richard had pulled out of the driveway of his house and was heading toward Fairview center, probably going to work. But when he hit the first major intersection he turned south instead, eventually getting onto Route 2 and heading west. He passed the exits for Littleton and Acton, then Dartford and Concord and Lincoln, getting closer to the city. It wasn’t until he got off Route 2 and onto the Alewife Brook Parkway that it even occurred to me that he might be coming to see me. I was sitting rigid in my chair, watching as the dot passed through the two rotaries near Fresh Pond then got onto Concord Avenue, taking it all the way down to Chauncy Street. I felt like a man on a beach watching the water recede and amass itself into a tsunami, unable to move. From Chauncy Street he pulled onto Oxford, the car stopping about two blocks from my office.

He was definitely coming to see me.

I unlocked my file cabinet, removing the case where I kept my snub-nosed Colt Cobra, checking to make sure it was loaded, then placed the gun in the front drawer of my desk. I was nervous, but also a little excited. It was possible he had come to hurt me, but it was more likely he’d come to tell me something. My intercom buzzed, and I walked across my office to answer it.

“It’s Richard Seddon,” he said, and I could detect no particular emotion in the voice that hummed through the tinny speakers.

I cracked my door then went back to my chair behind the desk. The sound of his footsteps told me he was climbing the stairs quickly, and I removed the gun from the front drawer, took the safety off, and dropped my hand, with the gun in it, straight down and out of sight behind the desk.

But when Richard Seddon stepped into my office, he looked more like a befuddled college student than a killer. He wore jeans and a dark green hooded sweatshirt, and was wearing a backpack, its straps on both his shoulders. He came in tentatively, looking around my office. There was nothing in his hands.

“Hi, Richard,” I said, and slid the gun into my jacket pocket.

“Hi, Mr. Kimball,” he said, the address bringing me back not just to my teaching days, but to the time that Joan had called me the same thing in this very office, just a little over two weeks ago.

I stood up and gestured to the chair facing my desk. “Have a seat.”

He perched on the padded wooden chair, sliding his backpack off and putting it on the floor. “I thought about calling but I guess I didn’t want there to be a record for what I’m about to tell you,” he said. “Not that there’d have been a record of what I’m going to say, but just that I called you in the first place. Do you understand?”

“Sure,” I said.

Neither of us spoke for a moment and I tried to read his body language. He seemed resigned, his body limp in the chair. “I guess you know why I came here?” he said at last.

“I have no idea, but I suppose it has something to do with what we talked about yesterday.”

“Yeah. It’s about my cousin Duane. I feel like I should have told you that even though he was my cousin I thought at the time that he deserved to die.”

“Okay,” I said.

“He was a horrible guy, and I think that he was probably a rapist, or would be a rapist if he was given a chance.”

“Do you think that’s why he died that night? Do you think he’d tried to do something to Joan Grieve out on that jetty and she pushed him in the water?”

“I don’t really know,” Richard said quickly, “but it wouldn’t surprise me.”

“That’s helpful to know,” I said.

Richard looked around my office, as though he’d just been transported into it. “You work here all alone?”

“I do, for now. It’s a new business so it’s just me. I hope to hire help at some point.”

He nodded, still looking around the room. “You were a teacher at DM, right? You were the teacher in the room when James killed that girl and then himself?”

“I was, actually. I was going to bring that up the other day, but it’s not like it’s relevant to the case of your cousin.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Richard said.

“You were friends with James,” I said.

“I was, I guess. We weren’t best friends or anything, but we knew each other. The thing about him . . . about what he did . . . was that the girl he killed, Madison Brown . . . she wasn’t a good person, either. She was a bully, like a lot of people are, but she was smart, too, which made it worse, in a way, like she didn’t have an excuse, really.”