The Kind Worth Saving （Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2）
Peter Swanson
Dedication
To David Highfill
Part 1
The Tender Age of Murderers
Chapter 1
Kimball
“Do you remember me?” she asked, after stepping into my office.
“I do,” I said, before I could actually place her. But she was familiar, and for a terrible moment I wondered if she was a cousin of mine, or a long-ago girlfriend I’d entirely forgotten.
She took a step inside the room. She was short and built like an ex-gymnast, with wide shoulders and strong-looking legs. Her face was a circle, her features—blue eyes, pert nose, round mouth—bunched into the middle. She wore dark jeans and a tweedy brown blazer, which made her look as though she’d just dismounted a horse. Her shoulder-length hair was black and glossy and parted on one side. “Senior honors English,” she said.
“Joan,” I said, as though the name had just come to me, but of course she’d made this appointment, and given me her name.
“I’m Joan Whalen now, but I was Joan Grieve when you were my teacher.”
“Yes, Joan Grieve,” I said. “Of course, I remember you.”
“And you’re Mr. Kimball,” she said, smiling for the first time since she’d entered the room, showing a row of tiny teeth, and that was when I truly remembered her. She had been a gymnast, a popular, flirtatious, above-average student, who’d always made me vaguely uncomfortable, just by the way she’d said my name, as though she had something on me. She was making me vaguely uncomfortable, now, as well. My time as a teacher at Dartford-Middleham High School was a time I was happy to forget.
“You can call me Henry,” I said.
“You don’t seem like a Henry to me. You still seem like a Mr. Kimball.”
“I don’t think anyone has called me Mr. Kimball since the day I left that job. Did you know who I was when you made this appointment?”
“I didn’t know, but I guess I assumed. I knew that you’d been a police officer, and then I heard about . . . you know, all that happened . . . and it made sense that you were now a private detective.”
“Well, come in. It’s nice to see you, Joan, despite the circumstances. Can I get you anything? Coffee or tea? Water?”
“I’m good. Actually, no, I’ll have a water, if you’re offering.”
While I pulled a bottle of water from the mini fridge that sat in the south corner of my two-hundred-square-foot office, Joan wandered over to the one picture I had on my wall, a framed print of a watercolor of Grantchester Meadows near Cambridge in England. I’d bought it on a trip a number of years ago not because I’d particularly liked the artwork but because one of my favorite poems by Sylvia Plath was called “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows,” so I thought it would be a clever thing to own. After I’d rented this office space, I dug out the print because I wanted a calming image on my wall, the way dentists’ offices and divorce lawyers’ always display soothing art so their clients might forget where they are.
Joan cracked open the bottle of water and took a seat as I moved around my desk. I adjusted the blinds because the late-afternoon sun was slanting into the room, and Joan was squinting as she took a long sip. Before I sat down myself I had a brief but vivid recollection of standing in front of my English students a dozen years ago, my armpits damp with anxiety, their bored, judgmental eyes staring up at me. I could almost smell the chalk dust in the air.
I lowered myself into my leather swivel chair, and asked Joan Whalen what I could help her with.
“Ugh,” she said, and rolled her eyes a little. “It’s so pedestrian.”
I could tell she wanted me to guess why she’d come, but I kept quiet.
“It’s about my husband,” she said at last.
“Uh-huh.”
“Like I said, it’s probably something you hear all the time, but I’m pretty sure . . . no, I know that he’s cheating on me. The thing is, I don’t really care all that much—he can do whatever he wants as far as I’m concerned—but even though I know he’s doing it, I don’t have proof yet. I don’t really know.”
“Are you thinking of filing for divorce once you know for sure?”
She shrugged, and that childish gesture made me smell chalk again. “I don’t even know. Probably. What really bothers me is that he’s getting away with it, getting away with having an affair, and I tried following him myself, but he knows my car, of course, and I just want to know for sure. I want details. Who he’s with. Well, I’m pretty sure I know that, too. Where they go. How often. Like I said, I don’t give a shit, except that he’s getting away with it.” She looked over my shoulder through the office’s sole window. When the light hit it in the late afternoon you could see just how dusty it was, and I reminded myself to wipe down the panes when I had some spare time.
I slid my notebook toward me and uncapped a pen. “What’s your husband’s name, and what does he do?” I said.
“His name is Richard Whalen and he’s a real estate broker. He owns a company called Blackburn Properties. They have offices in Dartford and Concord, but he mainly works out of the Dartford one. Pam O’Neil is the Dartford office manager, and that’s who he’s sleeping with.”
“How do you know it’s her?”
She held up a fist and stuck out her thumb. “First, she’s the only really pretty employee in his office. Well, pretty and young, which is the way Richard likes them. Second, Richard is a liar but he’s not great at it, and I accused him of having an affair with Pam and he couldn’t even look me in the eye.”
“Have you accused him of having affairs in the past?”
“The thing is, I don’t think he has had an affair in the past, not a real one anyway. He does go to this bullshit conference every year for real estate brokers in Las Vegas, and I’m sure he’s hooked up with a stripper there or something, but that’s not really the same as an affair. And I’m kind of friends with Pam, that’s the thing. When she first got the job at Blackburn I invited her to my book club, which she came to a bunch of times, although none of us thought she really read the books.
“I was nice to her. I even introduced her to the guy who does my husband’s investments, and they went out for a while. I took her out for drinks at least three times.”
“When do you think the affair started?”
“I think it started around the time Pam stopped texting me, which was about three months ago. They’ve made it so obvious it’s like they want to get caught. You must see this stuff all the time?”
It was the second time she’d mentioned that, and I decided not to tell her that it wasn’t something I saw all the time because my only regular clients were a temp agency that employed me to do background checks, and an octogenarian just down the street from my office who was always losing her cats.
“My guess is,” I said, “that they are trying to be secretive and failing at it. Which probably means that your husband, and Pam, as well, haven’t had affairs before. The people who are good at hiding secrets are the people who have practice at it.”