The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(86)

“Physically I’m okay. Emotionally I’m a little shaky, like I’m living in a strange new world. It’s not a good feeling when you wake up in the hospital and don’t know why you’re there.”

“Is that what happened?”

“They told me that a bomb had gone off outside of my office and that it was brought there by Richard Seddon, but I don’t remember that.”

“Do you remember who Richard Seddon was?”

“A little bit. I know that he was friends with James Pursall, and I know that he was somehow connected with Joan Grieve, but it’s fuzzy.”

“You remember Joan?”

“Yes, I remember the case, and I remember finding her husband’s body, and Pam’s body. That’s the last completely clear memory I have. The rest is . . . incomplete.”

“Do you remember coming here?”

“When? After I’d found the bodies?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I kind of remember that. No, I do remember. I wanted to talk with you about what had happened.”

“You thought that there was a third person involved, someone Joan knew who had killed her husband and his girlfriend, and you wanted help figuring out who that person was.”

Henry was nodding his head, his eyes on the ceiling, trying hard to remember. He sat down on the edge of the bed, and I moved into the bedroom, turning the desk chair so that it faced him and sitting down. “I told you all that?” he said.

“You did. And I think that you figured out that Richard Seddon was the third person, and he knew that you knew, and that was why he tried to kill you.”

“And kill himself?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know. He brought a bomb to your office. Maybe he was going to leave it there or maybe he was going to blow both of you up.”

“The police told me that I was on the other side of my office door when the bomb exploded, otherwise I wouldn’t be here right now.”

“That makes sense. You look pretty good, considering.”

He pushed a lock of hair off his forehead and revealed a faded triangular scar. “My souvenir.”

“Looks good.”

“Your hair is different.”

I reached up and touched it. I was wearing a headband that served no practical purpose except to cover up the awkward length of my hair. I hadn’t decided whether I was going to tell Henry what had happened while he was in the hospital, recovering. If he specifically asked, I’d tell him, but he was clearly catching up with his own memories, and the thought that I had lived in his apartment for a time, and that I’d met Joan, might be too much for him.

“I’m growing it back out,” I said.

“It looks good short, too.”

He seemed tired, so I stood up, and told him to get settled, and that he should come down and join us at six, when my father would officially declare that cocktail hour had begun.

He did come down, only a little bit late, and he seemed much more like himself than he had that afternoon, maybe because he wasn’t being asked to think about the time and the memories he’d lost. My father was thrilled to see him, of course, and I told him to tell Henry his theory about novelists being either observers or imaginers, and the three of us spent an hour categorizing all the writers we could think of. My mother came in, and even joined the conversation, saying, “My friend, Martha Grausman, you know the one who got that one-person show for what are basically collages . . . I guess she’s got imagination because I actually think she might be color-blind.”

I went to bed early that night, before either Henry or my father, and lay in my childhood bedroom, listening to the sounds of the house, listening to the people who were still up and about, something I’d been doing for as long as I could remember. Listening to people I loved, for better or worse.

About fifteen minutes after I heard my father gallop recklessly up the back stairwell to his room, I listened as Henry walked slowly past my door, making his way down the second-floor hallway, then taking the old attic stairs to his guest room. And then the house was quiet.



After breakfast the following morning Henry and I took a long walk, skirting the meadow, then picking up the trail that connected with the conservation area where my favorite pond was located. Along the walk, he said, “Do you remember the first time we met?”

It was a game we had played before, reconstructing the way we had gotten to know each other. It was something I’d done maybe once or twice with Eric Washburn, the only serious boyfriend I’d ever had, and I recognized it as something lovers do. Construct a narrative. Tell it to each other. Ours, of course, was a warped version of that particular game. I said, “When you came to my house in Winslow to ask me about Ted Severson.”

“And I knew that you were lying to me,” Henry said.

“And I knew that you knew.”

“So I came back to ask you why you lied to me.”

“And then you started following me.”

“Yes, I started to follow you.”

“And then I tricked you into going to an empty cemetery, and I stuck a knife in you.”

Henry had stopped, breathing a little bit heavily. We were at the top of a ridge and because most of the leaves were now off the trees there was a view down the slope of a hill, across a wooded area, all the way to the edges of McElligot’s Pond, and he was looking at the view before turning to me.