The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(67)

I made my way through the small apartment, the bedroom only large enough to contain a bed and a bureau. The largest room was the living area, and it was the only room that seemed decorated in the place. One wall was lined with bookshelves, and above a dark green sofa was a framed poster for the film Withnail and I. Henry’s desk was in the living room, covered with paperwork that looked mostly like bills, plus a few stacks of books. There was no laptop, and I assumed that he had brought it with him to his office, and that it had been blown up in the explosion. I sat down at the desk and pulled out the top drawer. His passport was inside, along with a checkbook, about a hundred scattered paperclips, and two blank notebooks. I pulled them both out. One was completely filled, mostly with the starts of poems, and an occasional drawing or diary entry. There were a few dates, and the filled notebook seemed to have been completed more than a year ago. The other notebook was only partly filled so I started at the last completed pages and read backward. Most of it was poetry, some were fragments of original lines, and some were other people’s poems that Henry had transcribed out, including a rather long poem by Anthony Hecht called “The Ghost in the Martini.” The only completed poems that had been written by Henry were limericks. The last one he’d written told me everything I needed to know.

There once was a Joan and a Rick

Who had mastered just one magic trick.

Their friendship anonymous,

Their victims were numerous,

They murdered, and no one knew dick.





Chapter 30





Joan


Whenever she became angry, and boredom always angered her, Joan remembered the trick she’d learned when she’d been a young girl, probably no more than eight or nine. She’d had a psychiatrist then, named Brenda, and what she remembered most about those trips to Brenda’s office, with its thick carpet and kiddie art on the walls, was that after the session was over Joan would be allowed to take a whole roll of Spree candies home with her. She always picked Spree because it was her sister Lizzie’s favorite candy and she liked to eat them in front of her.

Brenda had been the one to suggest the anger box. She’d told Joan that feeling angry was perfectly okay, but that acting out that anger was not the best solution. She said that sometimes it was fine to simply pretend to be a different sort of child, a child that did not become angry, that wanted to please people, that wanted to be good. And the easiest way to do that was to find a place to put the bad feelings. After agreeing to try this, Brenda gave Joan a cardboard box, designed to look like a treasure chest, and told Joan that she could use this box if she wanted to. Back in her room, Joan had pushed the box under her bed, but she decided to follow Brenda’s advice. From now on, she would pretend to be a good girl, not talking back to her parents, not being mean to her sister. It didn’t matter what she felt; it mattered how she acted.

She liked to remember that time that her parents had lost her for a whole night, while she slept in the closet listening to Lizzie’s Discman. She had felt so seen, and incredibly powerful the next day. All she’d had to do was look like she’d been in danger. It was then that she decided that fighting the world would not get her anywhere, but that she could always change the world in ways that no one would ever know. Not only was it better, it was easier.

She still felt anger, though. And on the day that Joan heard about the death of Richard Seddon she’d been in one of those bored, angry moods. It was a Tuesday and she’d woken late, climbing out of a succession of disturbing dreams, then found herself sitting at her kitchen island, drinking a cup of coffee, and wondering what she was going to do with the next few hours. Her sister, who she rarely saw, and her mother, who she saw way too often, were coming over later in the morning to check in. “I’ll bring lunch,” her mother said. “I don’t want you to have to worry about anything.” She’d go for a run, of course, but what she really wanted to do was to share some of the satisfaction she’d gotten from the fact that she’d arranged to have her husband and his stupid girlfriend murdered and no one seemed to suspect a thing.

Idly, not expecting anything, she’d put Richard’s name into Google, knowing it was a slightly reckless thing to do but feeling safe about it. He was on her mind. They’d had no contact since immediately before the day of the murder, and she wondered how he was holding up. The first thing that came up was a news story about an explosion in Cambridge at the offices of Private Investigator Henry Kimball. The body of Richard Seddon had been found on the premises.

She forced herself to take two deep breaths, then sped through the news reports, quickly constructing a narrative of what she thought had happened.

Somehow Henry Kimball had actually figured something out and approached Richard with it. It was the only thing that made sense. Why didn’t Richard get in touch with her? Frustration flared in her, and she could feel her face getting red. If he’d come to her, they could have figured it out together, as they always had. Instead, he’d decided to take matters into his own hands, and he’d gotten himself killed.

And he’d left Kimball alive.

Joan got up and paced through her house. She found herself continually drawn to the big window in the living room that looked out over her driveway. The police would be stopping by to visit, wouldn’t they? Henry must have figured out that Richard was somehow involved in the death of her husband, and from there it was pretty easy to figure out that Richard and Joan had been in the same class at the same schools growing up. Still, was that enough? They’d been so careful over the years to never let anyone know they knew one another. At least she had. And she had always trusted in Richard, believing that he had been as careful as she was.