He hugged back, then let her go. “Sure, anytime.” His voice was hoarse and just as she was turning to leave she saw him adjust the material around his crotch.
She walked the rest of the way to the front of the hotel herself. There was cigar smoke in the air, and as she went up the wooden steps to the wide front porch, an older man on one of the rockers said, “It’s nice being young, eh?”
Joan pretended she didn’t hear him and entered the lobby.
The following day, because she didn’t want to have to deal with Duane, she agreed to drive with her parents to Ogunquit. They had lunch at a pretty good restaurant, even though her father kept saying how they were basically paying double for lunch because they could be eating at the Windward. Then they walked on a path that wound along the rocky coast and got ice cream in a place called Perkins Cove, sitting at a picnic table and watching boats come and go on the water.
“You having fun on this trip?” her mother asked. They were sitting on a bench near a cluster of shops while her father browsed in a used bookstore.
“Yeah,” Joan said, as brightly as possible, not wanting to have a conversation about her feelings with her mom.
“Oh, okay. Just checking. Sometimes I can’t read you at all, not like Lizzie.”
“Lizzie is having fun on this trip,” Joan said.
“Yes, she certainly is.”
“Do you think that girl Denise is her girlfriend?”
“I think your sister is in an experimental phase, if that’s what you mean. I’m not sure she knows exactly who she is right now.”
Joan, not really caring one way or another about her sister, talked about it with her mother for a while, only to avoid having to answer questions about herself.
“Here’s your father, with a stack of books he won’t read,” her mother said, and they each watched her father step out of the store and squint into the sunlight, trying to find his family. “Let’s stop talking about Lizzie for now. I’m not sure your father’s handling this new version of her.”
That night at dinner, they all ate as a family in the dining room, Lizzie noticeably quiet. Denise was nowhere to be seen. Duane, wearing a baseball cap and a T-shirt with cut-off sleeves, said hi to Joan in the buffet line, asking her why she hadn’t been to the beach that day.
“I went with my parents to Ogunquit,” she said.
“Oh, cool,” Duane said. “Wanna meet up tonight? We could do another fire on the beach, just the two of us.”
“I can’t tonight,” Joan said. “Tomorrow, maybe?” She remembered what Richard had said about baiting the hook.
“Cool,” Duane said.
She hadn’t seen Richard in the dining room, but when she went to the library around nine o’clock he was there, sitting in his usual chair, reading a paperback called The Forever War that looked like science fiction. He immediately closed the book when he saw her.
“I didn’t see you at dinner,” she said.
“I walked into town and got a pizza,” he said. “I don’t think I can take another night with my aunt and uncle and with Duane.”
“Duane and I are like this now,” Joan said, holding up two fingers, pressed together, and smiling.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. He walked me back to the hotel after I’d hung out at the beach.”
“Yeah, I know all about it. I was watching you.”
“You serious?”
“I was sitting over on that bench swing. I watched you guys walk across the lawn.”
“Did you see us hug?”
“Yeah,” Richard said, and Joan thought back to what her mother had said earlier about not being able to read her. She couldn’t read Richard, she realized. Not his emotions, anyway. Was he jealous? Or was he simply scheming? “This morning Duane was telling me all the things he was going to do to you.”
Joan, even though she wasn’t surprised, felt blood rush into her face. “Ugh,” she said. “That is so gross.”
“He’s gross, I told you.”
“What did you say when he told you that?”
“I don’t say anything, really. I just listen.”
“You don’t defend my honor, Richard,” she said in what she hoped sounded very dramatic and sarcastic, but as soon as she’d said it, she realized she sounded like her mother in one of her moods.
“I want to kill him,” Richard said. “That’s pretty much defending your honor, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I guess so. What else did he say?”
“He said you made out with him, and that he could tell you were super horny.”
“He really said that? I totally didn’t make out with him. In fact—you saw it—I had to hug him to keep him from trying to kiss me.”
Richard was laughing.
“He’s such a liar,” Joan said.
“Yeah, he is. So what are we going to do about it?”
Joan, who had been thinking a lot about Duane the past few days, said, “Are you serious when you say you want to kill him?”
Richard thought for a moment, then said, “Sometimes I am and sometimes I’m not. But I am one hundred percent serious that I wouldn’t feel bad for a moment if Duane died, whether I had anything to do with it or not. Why? Are you serious about it?”
“I think so,” Joan said. “Let’s teach him a lesson.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s push him in the ocean.”
Richard was very still, but Joan could tell from his eyes that his thoughts were moving fast. “I’m not kidding,” she said. “Let’s do this. It’ll be fun.”
“You’d have to be the one to get him to the end of the jetty at night.”
“That’s not going to be a problem,” Joan said.
“But I can push him into the water.”
“Okay.”
“You’re going to have to lie to some people after it happens. You’re going to have to act a part.”
Joan didn’t need to think. She said, “That’s not going to a problem, either.”
Chapter 11
Kimball
I was sitting in my car, torrential rain drumming on the metal roof, keeping an eye on the Blackburn Properties in Concord. Something seemed to be happening in the real estate world, because Richard Whalen had driven to the Dartford office in the morning, stayed there an hour, then driven over to Concord. After having lunch at a Thai restaurant with two women whom I recognized from the website as real estate agents, he’d returned briefly to the Dartford office and now he was back in Concord. The rain that had been threatening all day began just as Richard parked in the lot of the smaller office, part of a strip mall halfway between West Concord and Concord center. Richard pulled his suit jacket up over his head and ran from his BMW to the front door just as the sky split open, dumping the remnants of a hurricane that had been slowly climbing the coast for the past week.
The Concord office was harder to watch than the Dartford one. The only vantage point was its rather small front parking lot; there were no coffee shops or bars nearby, no places to park your car and be hidden. It helped, of course, that anyone looking outside from the office at this particular moment would be looking at the rising floodwaters, and not my car. I wasn’t particularly worried about Richard, partly because Joan had told me he had his head in the clouds, but I was worried about running into Pam again, since we’d already met. But so far, I’d seen very little of her. She parked on the street in front of the Dartford office, and her car stayed there all day. I’d never seen her in the presence of Richard.