The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(80)

“So you told Richard all that?”

“I told him on the message board. Well, I told everyone on the message board because it was anonymous. But then he and I started sending private messages back and forth and eventually we told each other our real names. And then, eventually, we met.”

“And what did he tell you?”

“He was really vague, at first. He said he’d been involved in two incidents he could talk about. The first was when his cousin drowned in Maine when he was just fifteen. And the second was a school shooting. He didn’t go into specifics, but he said that he had help from the same person in both circumstances.”

“And he said that person was me,” Joan said.

“He didn’t, actually. Not at first. He said it was a girl, and that he would never tell me your name, even though he trusted me. He wouldn’t have, either. But then that detective showed up, and he really freaked out.” I lowered my voice, and leaned in. “We met, the two of us, at the place we always meet. It’s this divey bar in Waltham, and he told me how he was involved with the murder-suicide that had happened in Bingham. I knew all about it, because it was big news, and I was just interested, I guess. I’d read about it, and I read how both the dead man and his wife had gone to the same high school. To Dartford-Middleham. And I read your name, and I knew. I mean, I knew even before I googled you and found out that you had been one of the survivors of the school shooting. I told Richard, our Richard, about it, saying your name, and he tried to deny it but he couldn’t. I saw it in his eyes, and eventually he told me that you were the one. He didn’t want to tell me, but he knew he was caught out.

“The other thing you need to know is that at this point he wasn’t worried about my knowing who you were, he was worried about the detective. That detective had tracked him down, and asked him all these questions, and Richard knew that it was just a matter of time. The last thing he told me was that he was going to take care of it.”

Joan was thinking. I had tried to keep things vague enough, to make it look as though I only had the most general picture of what had happened, so that I wouldn’t screw up a detail. I knew that she wanted to trust me.

When she finally spoke, she said, “Do you know if Richard meant to kill himself at the same time as Henry Kimball, or was it an accident?”

I leaned back in my chair, realizing just how tense my body had been. “I don’t know,” I said.

Joan turned her head slightly, her eyes on a tall painting on the wall, a full-body portrait of some long-dead library patron, holding a leather-bound book in one hand. She was deciding whether she could trust me or not, and I honestly didn’t know which way she would go. But when she turned her eyes back to me I knew somehow before she spoke that I had hooked her.

“You think if Henry Kimball lives, he’ll be able to prove that Richard killed my husband?” she said.



We stayed in the library for another hour. As far as we knew no one had even come up to the balcony level all afternoon. I left first, walking briskly to my car that I had parked along the street instead of in the lot. I’d been stupid to not change the license plates and if she’d left first, then there would have been a possibility of her seeing me get in a car with Connecticut plates. Driving back to Cambridge I told myself that I needed to be even more careful moving forward, especially now that I knew what I had to do.

I was sick of eating out, so I bought a sandwich at a sub shop in Huron Village, and took it back to the apartment. It had just gotten dark, and there were no lights on in any of Henry’s windows. I went upstairs and pushed open the door, stepping inside, and heard the sound of Pye jumping from the bed to the floor, then bounding toward me. I looked him in the eye to see if he was disappointed it was me returning to the apartment and not Henry. I couldn’t tell. Maybe he was simply hungry.

After eating I got into bed and continued to read The Green Marriage, but only managed a chapter before putting it back on the bedside table. I turned off the light and went over the entirety of the conversation with Joan Whalen. The more we had talked the more I had sensed in her the excitement she felt at what we were planning to do. I don’t think I generally understand people, but I had understood Joan that afternoon. She and Richard had taken lives together, and once you’ve done that and gotten away with it, everything else in life pales a little. And now she’d found me—not me, exactly, but Addie Logan—and her life was exciting again. It wasn’t meaning she was after, but the thrill of transgression.

“How are you planning on killing him?” she’d asked me.

“I’m going to smother him with a pillow. It shouldn’t be too hard.”

“I have a better way,” she said, her voice just a whisper. “Get a piece of piano wire and sharpen one end, bending it slightly. It just needs to be about five inches long. You push the sharp end through the inside corner of one of his eyes, straight into the brain, then twist it around. Do it a couple of times, and if you do it right, there won’t be any external sign of damage. It will just look like he had a brain hemorrhage. They’ll never even know it was a murder.”

I’d widened my eyes, and said, “How do you know all this? Did you do it?”

I saw her contemplate lying, but instead she said, “No, but I read about it. It’s just a suggestion. I trust you.”