The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(79)

I passed Fruitlands, a nature preserve and the historical site of the farmhouse where Amos Bronson Alcott failed to establish a commune based on transcendentalism and the Shaker religion. It was a place I had visited often when I lived in the area and I pulled into its parking lot now. The buildings weren’t open to visitors but I wandered the woods for an hour, at one point sitting in the hollow base of a twisted apple tree, and just watching the natural world. A family of turkeys wandered by, and chipmunks rustled through the fallen leaves. On my way back I passed a hay meadow that had been recently mown, and saw a dark fox that looked as though it had found a nest of mice. He spotted me too, and we stared at one another for a while before he decided I was not a threat and continued digging in his meadow.

On the way back to my car I passed the farmhouse, remembering a tour I’d taken years ago and how everyone in our group had laughed when the tour guide said that the Shaker religion forbade procreation. A man had laughed and said, “I wonder why that religion’s not around anymore?” as though he’d been the first person to ever say that. And I remembered thinking at the time that I could get behind a religion that would eventually lead to the end of the human race, the world returned to birds and animals.

I arrived at the library exactly at two in the afternoon, after spending the intervening hours at a diner in the next town over. The library was a hundred-year-old structure of brick and slate roof, with a large addition that looked as though it had been added sometime in the 1970s. I pushed my way through the front doors into the familiar smell that was a combination of well-preserved books and the acidity of newsprint. It was quiet in the library on a weekday afternoon, a few mothers with small children in the annex to the left of the front desk. I turned right and headed into the high-ceilinged main room, an open balcony running along three of its sides. I cut down one of the aisles between shelves and found a small seating area but no one was there. I wandered the entire first floor, only spotting an elderly man, asleep with that day’s Boston Globe across his lap. I climbed a spiral staircase to the balcony level, lined with shorter shelves, and found Joan in one corner, seated on a wooden chair that was upholstered in sturdy green fabric. She held a hardcover book, Full Dark, No Stars, by Stephen King. I sat down across from her.

“Tell me everything Richard said about me,” she said, “and keep your voice low.”

I expected this. I knew she wouldn’t admit to anything unless she had total trust in me, and I wasn’t sure I was ever going to get that. But I had to try.

I said, “He wasn’t specific, at all. He said that he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, and he only told me some things because I begged him to. The thing is, the way we met . . . and I’m telling you this in total confidence . . . was from a message board on a website. It’s not there anymore, but it was an anonymous place where you could talk about how you’d gotten away with murder. We met there, and eventually we shared our real emails, and then eventually we met—”

“So you’re telling me you killed someone?”

I looked at her, while chewing on the inside of my cheek in a way I knew was visible. “You’re not wearing a wire or anything, are you?”

She made a face like I’d just told her the dumbest thing she’d ever heard. I imagined briefly the succession of girls in Joan’s past who had seen that very face: the elementary school friend who still believed in Santa Claus; the girl in middle school who’d never kissed a boy; a series of mildly bullied friends and enemies.

“Well, are you?” I said.

She stood up and spread her arms out wide. She was wearing a light gray cashmere sweater, tight white jeans, and black boots. I knew she wasn’t wearing a wire, of course, but stood and ran my hands down her sides, feeling a crackle of static electricity. I took off my leather jacket and she did the same for me, checking the pockets.

“I’m only telling you because I know that Richard trusted you,” I said, “so I suppose I trust you too. When I was in high school, I found out that my best friend was seeing this much older guy, a professor at a nearby university. He’d been invited to give a reading to our English class and that’s how she met him. She told me everything about him, how he was getting her involved in all this creepy sex stuff, and how he’d started to hurt her. I knew the guy, as well, because the three of us had hung out, and he’d hit on me a bunch of times. So one night I went over and told him I wanted to talk with him but in his car. We sat in his back seat, and I made him close his eyes, which was really easy because he thought it was a sex thing. And I slit his throat with a kitchen knife.”

Joan was watching me, and I could tell she wasn’t sure whether to believe me or not. “It wasn’t easy,” I said. “And I knew that if his body was ever found I would get caught. So I made sure to hide that car, and his body in it, in a place that no one would ever find. And they never did. He’s a missing person’s case, now, and that’s all he’ll ever be.”

“Wow,” Joan said. I still didn’t know if she believed me. The story wasn’t true. The part about my friend and the creepy older professor was, however. And I had definitely formed a plan to kill that man and hide him in his car. I had even begun to dig a hole in some nearby woods, but I had never gone forward with it. My friend had stopped seeing the professor, and I hadn’t completed the hole, and I let it go. But sometimes I remember it as something that actually happened, just like occasionally I pretend things that have happened actually didn’t.