The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(64)

“I can see that. I remember her, of course, but only knew her as a student. But her being a bully doesn’t make it okay that James killed her, does it? I mean, she was just a teenager.”

“You think that people change that much from when they’re teenagers?”

“God, I hope so,” I said. “I was a pretentious shit when I was a teenager. I’m sure there were some people who wanted to kill me.”

“Being pretentious is different than being a bad person,” Richard said.

“I guess so.” I was beginning to wish I’d recorded this conversation. It felt like a confession even though Richard hadn’t actually confessed to anything yet. My phone was on my desk and all I would have had to do was press the record button on the audio app. Instead, I’d been focused on getting my gun from the locked file cabinet, a move that, I had to admit, was bringing me some comfort. Even though there was no evident weapon on Richard, if he went to open his backpack or reached toward his waistband under the large hoodie, I was ready to pull my gun.

“Anyway, all I really came to tell you was that Duane Wozniak probably deserved to die that night in Maine. I didn’t have anything to do with it, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t a little bit happy.”

“It’s okay to be happy about something like that. It’s not a crime to have a feeling.”

“Right, it was just a feeling. I had nothing to do with it.”

“But Joan Grieve might have had something to do with it?”

Richard was picking at what looked like a scab on the back of his hand. “I honestly have no idea. But if she did, she had a good reason. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Right. Just like James Pursall had a good reason for killing Madison Brown.”

Richard’s eyes shifted a little, and I worried I’d taken it too far. It was clear he’d come to me in order to offer up some sort of justification. I was torn between letting him walk out of the office before something bad happened or pushing him to learn more.

“Richard,” I said, before he had a chance to respond. “Thank you for coming in and talking with me. I appreciate it. I’ll be talking with Joan soon. Should I say hi for you?”

“That would be nice,” he said, and I was surprised, expecting him to deny that he knew her, like he’d done before. “I should actually get going. I have a shift today.”

“At the hardware store,” I said.

“Yes.” He stood up, his head almost coming as high as the ceiling fan in my office that I used during the summer months.

“So if I need to ask you some follow-up questions,” I said, “and I doubt that I will, but you never know . . . Should I come to the store again, or call you, or maybe come to where you live?”

“I don’t care,” he said. “Or come to the store, I guess. I’m running late . . .”

He turned and walked toward the office door, stopping briefly to look at my Grantchester Meadows watercolor. “Pretty,” he said, and then I watched him exit. There was something strange about the way he was moving, and it took a moment before I realized that he was moving like an amateur actor in a stage play. He looked as though he’d forgotten how to make an everyday occurrence look natural.

I stood up and saw the backpack still on the floor by the chair Richard had just vacated.

Time slowed down, and as I moved quickly around the desk and took hold of it by the looped strap near the top, the phrase I was there ran through my mind, and for some reason I saw Lily’s face moving away from me. The bag was heavy to lift, and my heart began to thump. For one second I thought about racing to the window and hurling it out onto the street, but something stopped me. Embarrassment, maybe, that I’d be overreacting to something innocent.

Richard had just left the room so I took two long strides to the door, swung it open and saw him at the top of the stairs. His hood was up, but even so I could see how pale his face was. Had it been that pale in my office?

He had something in his hand, a small device that looked like a car remote. I realized his thumb was pressing down on it, and he was looking at the bag in my hand with fear. He backed away, his thumb drumming down on the device, his face twisted into something I didn’t recognize, and I hurled the bag at him.

I stepped back into my office, pulling the door closed behind me. I was moving fast but the door was moving as well, ripping from its hinges, lifting me up. Then came a deafening sound accompanied by a whiteness, and I was in the air, flying, the whiteness turning to black.





Part 3

Dirty Work





Chapter 29





Lily


It was my mother, who never misses the six o’clock news, who told me about the explosion. She says she only watches the news for the weather, and it is true she reports the seven-day forecast to me on a nightly basis whether I am interested or not. But five days after Henry Kimball had come to visit, my mother said, “It wasn’t our friend, was it, who was in that explosion I told you about?”

“What explosion?”

“Last night, darling. I was telling you about that house that blew up in Cambridge, how they thought it might have been a gas-line explosion and then it turned out it was some sort of device. It was the office of your friend . . . they just said his name.”