With the camera in a fanny pack I walked back along the road. My stomach was queasy and my body ached. I didn’t relish the thought of spying on a woman whom I’d been in bed with less than twelve hours ago. Part of me kind of hoped that they’d gone to their hideaway just to have a breakup conversation, although I doubted it. The weather was cool, and I pulled the hat down far over my ears. There was a low, gray sky, and a high wind that moved the top of the pine trees. When I reached the for sale sign I took out my camera and snapped a picture of it, before heading down the gravel driveway. If for whatever reason Richard came out to confront me, I could tell him I was interested in the house. If Pam came out that particular story probably wouldn’t hold up. When I was about halfway down the driveway, already studying the blank windows, and trying to imagine where the bedroom might be, I heard two sharp pops that sounded as though they came from the house. I froze for a moment, knowing somehow they were gunshots while still trying to imagine they might be something else. When I heard the third popping sound I was on the move, my feet crunching on the gravel. I passed the two cars and went to the front door. It was painted a dark brown like the rest of the house and there were two strips of beveled glass inlaid on either side. I peered through but could see nothing but a short, carpeted stairway and large ornate vase at its base. There was a doorbell and I debated ringing it, but if someone inside had a gun I’d be in trouble. I owned both a license and a .38 revolver, both of which were locked up in a file cabinet at my office in Cambridge.
I touched my cell phone through the front pocket of my jeans and wondered if I should just call 911. Was I absolutely positive I had heard gunshots coming from inside the house? Could I have heard a hunter in the nearby conservation land? No, it had been gunshots. And they had definitely sounded as though they’d happened in the house. I called 911 and reported the address and what I’d heard, and my name. When they asked me where I was in relation to the house, I hung up.
Phone back in my pocket, I tried the handle of the door. It was unlocked and I swung the door inward. There was the acrid tang of a discharged gun hovering just over the smell of a clean and disinfected house. It was silent.
I walked up the five carpeted steps, which brought me to a hallway with a kitchen on my left, and a living room to the right. I saw Pam’s body first. She was seated on a beige couch, her head tipped all the way back, blood pooling in her lap, and running down one side of her neck. I was looking at her from over the back of another beige couch, its twin, that was facing toward her. I stepped into the room, still moving quietly, but as I came up behind the other couch I could make out the body of Richard. He’d been sitting across from Pam, but now he was on his side while his feet were still planted on the floor. In his right hand was a gun I recognized as a Smith & Wesson M&P, and on his right temple was a scorched bullet wound. Where his head lay was soaked in bright red blood and there were white flecks of brain and skull across the sofa’s armrest.
I wanted to turn around and walk out of the house, wait for the police. But I forced myself to come around to the front of Richard’s body, where I very carefully put two fingers underneath his jaw and felt for a pulse that wasn’t there. I only kept my fingers there for about a second and a half, but he was obviously dead. The force of the bullet had bulged his right eye from its socket. I turned to Pam. She’d been shot in the middle of the chest, but also in the center of her forehead. Her blond hair lay feathered down her shoulders as though she’d been posed. I couldn’t bring myself to feel for a pulse.
Breathing in through my mouth and blowing out through my nose, I retraced my steps and exited the house by the front door. I walked as far as I could into the woods that skirted the property—only about fifty feet—then bent over and was sick on the fallen orange pine needles.
I heard sirens in the distance.
Part 2
The Third Person
Chapter 16
Kimball
One week after I’d walked into a staged deck house and found the corpses of Richard Whalen and Pam O’Neil, I received a check in the mail from Joan Whalen. I had never invoiced her, of course, and the amount in the check was much higher than what she owed me. She also included a short note:
Mr. Kimball, I knew you would never ask for money from me, but I want to pay you for your time. I am sorry you had to find the bodies, but at least you were able to tell the police what you saw. I never suspected Richard would be capable of such a thing, and if I had I would never have gone to you. Best regards, Joan Grieve Whalen
I tried to imagine Joan’s state of mind when she’d written that note, and signed the check, and mailed them both to me at my office in Cambridge. I couldn’t. I simply didn’t know her well enough, and I’d found myself, during the past week, picking through my memories of being a high school English teacher for one year, and having Joan in my senior honors class.
After giving my initial statement to the lead detective—a young, pale redhead named Jimmy Conroy—I had returned to the Bingham police station the following day and given that same statement again. I had tried to parse the questions that were coming at me, this time with a state detective sitting in the back of the interrogation room, her eyes either on me or on the back of her hand. There were more questions the day after about my relationship with Pam O’Neil, and I answered them truthfully. I could feel the disapproval every time I admitted we’d had a sexual relationship.
“Did she ever give you any indication that she was afraid of Richard Whalen, or that she was nervous about ending the relationship with him?” Detective Conroy said. Even with his thinning hair he didn’t look a day over twenty-five.
I told them she had never even confirmed to me the identity of the man she was involved with, and that she had never said anything about being scared of him.
“Is it your opinion that she was definitely going to tell him that she wanted to end the relationship?”
I thought for a moment, then said, “My opinion was that she wanted to end the relationship. I have no idea what happened on the Friday when she met him.”
I knew what Detective Conroy was doing, that he was trying to build a story that would account for Richard Whalen putting two bullets into Pam O’Neil and then a third bullet into his own head. And, honestly, it wasn’t a very complicated story at all. Richard knew Pam was going to stop seeing him, and she had probably even indicated to him she wanted to talk to him that Friday at lunchtime; maybe she’d already told him it was over. So he killed her, and then himself. Of course, why did he have the gun with him, unless he suspected what might happen? I also wondered why Pam had never indicated to me that Richard had become possessive or unhinged. Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she thought they were having a casual fling, while Richard believed they were Romeo and Juliet. People were like that.
“Do you think she was breaking up with Whalen because of you? Because she hoped that the two of you might continue your relationship?”
It was the same question I’d been asking myself since the day I’d discovered the bodies. “I don’t think so, only because she told me she wanted to break off the relationship before we slept together, but, who knows, maybe.” He looked at me with dead eyes, and I understood his antipathy.