“Mr. Kimball, one more thing, before you go . . .” It was the state police detective, leaning forward now. “Just to reiterate, because I know you answered these questions yesterday, but you saw no other car in the driveway of the house?”
“I saw two cars. The one that belonged to Pam O’Neil and the one that belonged to Richard Whalen. There might have been a car in the garage. I never checked.”
“Thank you. And after you heard the gunshots and approached the house, did you hear anything else? Any other noises coming from the property?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “And I was listening carefully, expecting to hear another shot, maybe, or for someone to come out of the house.”
“I’m sure you were.”
I hadn’t heard from either the Bingham Police Department or the state detective since that second interrogation. The Boston Globe had been reporting on the story daily, and it was now regularly being referred to as a murder-suicide.
After reading Joan’s note several times, I went into my office closet, the one that was filled with all the parts of my life that I no longer looked at. I pulled everything out until I found an old cardboard box from around the time that I was teaching at Dartford-Middleham. Inside I found the notebooks where I’d written out my lesson plans. At the bottom of the box I found a green folder that contained about thirty sheets of paper, each one with a handwritten paragraph and the student’s name on the top. It had been near the end of the semester, which meant it was very near to the day of the shooting, and my seniors had just about lost any interest in anything academic. I remember the windows of the classroom were open, and warm, lilac-scented air was coming in. I’d talked to them about college, and what their expectations were. They were all college-bound, this particular class, and then, just for something to do, I passed out blank sheets of paper and had them all write down where they thought they’d be in ten years. “Maybe I’ll find you in ten years and let you know how close your predictions were,” I’d said.
There’d only been about ten minutes left in the class so mostly what I got was either overly optimistic responses—“I’ll be married to the love of my life. We’ll have a boy and girl, and I’ll be vice president of a finance company in Boston”—or else they were jokes—“I’ll still be in high school trying to pass honors English.”
But there were three people I was particularly interested in. The first two were James Pursall, the kid who had brought a gun to my classroom, and Madison Brown, his victim.
Madison Brown, writing about where she’d be in ten years, had written: “Working in the fashion industry in New York City. Or else at a magazine.” She’d sprawled the words quickly in lavender ink, capitalizing almost every word in the two brief sentences. Writing her name on the top right of the paper, she’d put a little circle as the dot on the i in Madison.
James Pursall’s handwriting was cramped, and I could make out where he’d pressed so hard with his pen that he’d almost torn the paper. He’d written, “In ten years it won’t matter what I’ll be doing because the world will be overrun by either zombies or zoo animals or zombie zoo animals.” At the time I’d simply taken it as a joke, which it essentially was, but in hindsight, maybe the crucial part was his assertion that it wouldn’t matter. James had been a quiet kid, smart enough to be in the honors class, but not particularly motivated to do well. But he did all the reading assignments, and turned in his homework, even though he never spoke in class unless I specifically called on him.
I remembered the wording of James’s prediction, and Madison’s, as well, because I’d obsessively reread each of them several times after the incident, during that terrible year when I’d gone over and over all the different steps I could have taken to stop what had happened. But I didn’t remember what Joan Grieve had written, until I found it in the green folder, and then it came back to me. At the time I thought it was humorous. She’d written one of the longer predictions: “Dear Mr. Kimball, in ten years I’ll be filthy rich because my first husband will have died in mysterious circumstances while boating off Nantucket. The police will suspect me, of course, being his trophy wife, but Richard Gere will provide me with a perfect alibi, since I’ll have been on his yacht at the time of the accident.” She’d drawn a smiley face at the end of the paragraph, and I remembered how I’d felt when I’d first read this fifteen years earlier. That it struck me as a summing up of what I knew about Joan Grieve. She was funny and confident, and a little bit scary, like she was always making a joke that was rooted in the truth.
Now, reading what she’d written, I was stunned. It wasn’t just that her husband had died in strange circumstances, it was also the odd coincidence of the name Richard Gere. Not that I was reading into it, but it was spooky all the same, that she would eventually marry someone named Richard. But Richard Gere was a well-known, handsome actor, especially back when Joan had been a senior in high school. It was a little strange that she’d picked someone so much older than her, but, again, I was probably overanalyzing. Like I said, there had only been about ten minutes left in the class when I gave them this assignment so it’s not as though anyone put a lot of thought into what they wrote.
I left the green folder out on my desk, and went and lay back on my sofa, looking at my phone. But there was nothing there that could stop the constant images that kept coming into my head, alternating between my night spent with Pam in the hazy, cozy light of her bedroom and what she looked like the very next day in that empty house that belonged to no one.
I put the phone down, then got up and took Joan Grieve’s prediction with me to the sofa. I read it several more times. Then I did what I’d been doing for a couple of days now—going over and over everything that had happened since I took the job of following Richard Whalen. I thought about every conversation with Joan, how she’d sounded, how she’d acted. And I thought about Pam O’Neil, and everything she’d told me about her relationship with Richard. I kept going back to something she’d said that first night I’d met her at the Taste of Hong Kong. She’d told me that the relationship she was in was more of a threesome than a twosome. Those had been her exact words, and then she’d said something to indicate she wasn’t involved in a “threesome” in a physical way. So who was the third person? I assumed she meant that it was a threesome because she was involved with a married man, and that his wife, Joan, was the other party. But it still didn’t sit entirely right. People who were involved with someone married didn’t say they were in a “threesome,” at least not that I knew about.
After another sleepless night, and after making arrangements with my upstairs neighbor to feed Pye, I got into the Taurus and drove west out of the city. It was an overcast day, the wind pushing dead leaves across the road. From the turnpike I got onto Route 84 and went through Hartford, stopping for lunch at a diner. Then I drove another hour through farmland and countryside until I reached the town of Shepaug. There were still clouds in the sky, but here and there the sun was breaking through. I drove slowly, using only my memory. I had to double back once but then I found the long driveway that led to Monk’s House, the name David Kintner had given to the restored farmhouse where he currently lived with his ex-wife and his daughter.