The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(65)

“Henry.”

“Yes, him.”

I went online. It had been a relatively unimportant story when it had been deemed an accident, but now that it looked like it was an intentional act, the story was getting a lot more attention. The explosion had taken place on the second floor of a commercial property on Oxford Street, outside of Henry Kimball’s office where he conducted his private investigations business. Henry Kimball was in critical condition at Boston Memorial Hospital, while Richard Seddon, a hardware store employee, and resident of Fairview, Massachusetts, had been declared dead at the scene. The only connection that linked the two had been Dartford-Middleham High School, where Henry Kimball had been an English teacher, present in the room when James Pursall killed a fellow student then himself. Richard Seddon had been a senior at the time of the incident but had not been in any of Henry Kimball’s classes. Once that detail had emerged, however, the story had become even larger, the speculation being that the two incidents were somehow connected.

On Sunday the Boston Globe published a lengthy article about Richard Seddon entitled “An Unseen Life: What We Don’t Know About the Oxford Street Bomber.” It was now established that Seddon, who had been living in the basement of his empty childhood home, had created the bomb that he brought to the office building in Cambridge. He had a stepfather in Florida who had refused to answer any questions from reporters, but other than that, Richard had no living relatives. His boss and coworkers from the hardware store he worked at provided very little information, all of them saying that Seddon had kept to himself but had always been friendly and a hard worker.

I was a little surprised to see that, so far, no journalist had made any connection between Joan Grieve and Richard Seddon. Her name would have come up, of course, since Henry had so recently been involved in the deaths of her husband and his lover. And Joan Grieve had gone to Dartford-Middleham, as well. I imagined that some eager journalist, and possibly a detective, was trying to discover a relationship between the two, but they’d clearly had no luck.

I knew, though.

I knew that Richard Seddon had been the third person that Henry and I had discussed when he’d come to visit. Seddon and Joan Grieve had both been involved in the high school shooting, and Seddon had definitely been involved in the deaths of Richard Whalen and Pam O’Neil. Richard was Joan’s partner in crime. Or had been, until recently. Henry had figured it out, and he’d paid the price.

On Sundays my father likes to have a roast dinner. That day, the day the Globe had published their profile of Richard Seddon, I was cooking a pork loin with crispy potatoes and two vegetables. My father was drinking beer instead of his usual whiskey and water, and my mother had made a salad with the last of the kale from the garden, a development that had enraged my father to no end.

“You don’t eat salad with a Sunday roast,” he’d repeated several times.

“I do,” Sharon had said.

It was during dessert that I told them both I needed to be away for a couple of days. My mother merely looked confused, maybe wondering how there’d be any possible reason for me to go anywhere, but my father looked genuinely scared, as though I’d told him I had a week to live.

“Where are you going, Lil?” he said, after we’d moved to the living room, and he’d returned to drinking whiskey.

“Just to Cambridge for a few days. I’ll stay at a hotel and I’m actually going to meet someone who you’ll be interested in. There’s a Margaret Cogswell scholar who’s spending a sabbatical at Harvard, and I’m going to talk with her about some of your archived materials.”

My mother was not in the room at this point, having gone to her studio. I’d already told her, while we were doing dishes, that I was going to Cambridge to visit my old friend Sally Kull from Mather College. There was no way my mother and father would ever compare stories. I’d actually been telling them separate lies for as long as I could remember, even when they’d still been married.

“She’s not from that school,” my father said about the imaginary Cogswell scholar, “the one you told me about with all of Margaret’s stuff, that wants mine now, too?”

“No, but I still want you to think about that offer. It was a good one.”

I’d been spending the summer and the early fall going through all of my father’s papers, and talking with various universities, and some private collectors, about where they might wind up after he died. The best offer so far had come from a private college in Arizona that owned the complete archives of the British novelist Margaret Cogswell, quite a bit more famous than my father, and a woman with whom he’d been involved during the 1970s. I knew that the college only really wanted to buy my father’s papers because of his connection with Cogswell, and my father suspected it too. “We should take the offer,” he’d said on numerous occasions, “then burn all my letters from Maggie, and then see how they like it.”

“I think they’re probably more interested in The Broomfield Tomb,” I said, referencing my father’s unpublished novella, one that had been written while he was still involved with a young Margaret Cogswell, and a book that was far more flattering to her than his novel July and August.

“We’ll burn that too,” my father said. “In fact, let’s burn it anyway.”

“I actually love The Broomfield Tomb,” I said. “It’s very romantic.”