“You can’t really know that,” Lily said.
“I know,” I said. “Here’s the truth. Nothing that I saw over the past week makes me think I was somehow set up. Except for maybe this weird remark that Pam made about being in a threesome, but I’ll get to that. The reason I think I’ve been set up is because of what happened fifteen years ago in my classroom with Joan Grieve. That’s what I keep thinking about.”
“What happened there?”
“You don’t know about it?”
“I know a little. I know that you were an English teacher at Dartford-Middleham High School and that a student in one of your classes shot a girl and then himself.”
“He held us hostage for a while before he did it.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that.”
“And Joan was in my class, as well. The girl who was killed was one of her friends.”
“Joan who hired you Joan?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And what about the boy with the gun? Who was he?”
“Kind of a loner. Like if you were making a movie and wanted your school shooter to be a total cliché you would cast him. Not many friends, crappy home life, into violent video games and comic books.”
“But not friends with Joan Grieve?”
“Joan Grieve was a star gymnast and super popular. She didn’t hang out with kids like James Pursall. But she was there in the room when it happened, and I think she might have had something to do with it. And then, fifteen years later . . .”
“She comes back to you and the same thing happens again.”
“Exactly. And there’s one other thing, but I’m almost embarrassed to tell you about it.”
Lily shrugged, and I said, “It’s actually in my car, in my overnight bag that I packed out of pure hope you’d ask me to spend the night.”
“Go get it,” she said.
I walked across the driveway to my car to get my bag. The night sky was inky black and dense with stars. The only sign of nearby human habitation was a brand-new house on the far edge of an adjacent meadow, its enormous front door lit by overhead lighting. Before going back into Monk’s House I stood for a moment on the front stoop, watching my breath condense and trying to figure out why I was so happy to be here.
Back inside I showed Lily the three pages I’d brought with me, the responses from Madison Brown, James Pursall, and Joan Grieve to the question of what they’d be doing in ten years’ time. Lily read all three, then looked at me. She had pale red eyebrows, almost undetectable against her milky skin, but I saw that she had raised them slightly.
Chapter 19
Richard
For as long as he could remember Richard had narrated his own life. Sometimes it was simply that he recounted his day-to-day existence in a series of interior monologues. Sometimes he imagined he was subject to an extensive experiment, where an alien species had selected him from all the other humans on the planet as a subject to analyze, and he was being watched every moment of his life. He often had these fantasies—the alien ones—when his life was at the most tedious, when a day was defined by nothing more than one elitist comment from a customer at the store, or by an entire evening and night playing Assassin’s Creed until his eyes stung. When his life was interesting—and his life was seldom interesting—then the narrative would take the form of a future bestselling book, written about him after he had wreaked havoc on the world then left it all behind.
In the weeks after Joan had walked into the store and met him at the library to ask him to murder her husband, he found himself imagining the book version of his life. The author would have to theorize about the facts, of course, and fill in the details. We’ll never know for sure, but it is clear that at some point in time Richard Seddon and Joan Grieve, now known as Joan Whalen, met again. Maybe it was an accident, and maybe it was arranged, but either way, the moment they met a death sentence for Joan’s husband was now firmly in place.
Richard had met Joan a second time in the library late on the following Tuesday night. She had explained to him exactly what she wanted him to do. She knew the house that her husband and his girlfriend went to on Fridays during lunch. She had scouted the location and knew he could park his car on the parallel street in the small parking lot of a neighborhood playground. There were hiking trails nearby, so it made sense that he should dress as though he was a hiker, and then he could make his way through the woods to the back side of the deck house that was for sale. According to Joan, the door that led to the back porch could be opened with a credit card, and the door that led from the porch into the interior of the house was never locked. He should get there before they did, and make it look as though Richard shot Pam then himself.
“That’s not easy to do,” Richard said.
“Shooting them, or making it look like my husband shot himself?”
“Shooting them won’t be hard. The other thing will.”
“I know. But if you can pull it off, then we’ll have committed a perfect crime. It will be amazing. And if you can’t pull it off, if the police suspect that someone else was in the house, they will never in a million years suspect it was you. They’ll probably suspect it was me, but I’ll be having coffee with one of my clients, so I’ll have an alibi. And there is nothing in this world that connects us. Only our own memories. Trust me, it will be perfect, even if the killing doesn’t go exactly as planned.”
“Okay,” Richard said, relieved to know she didn’t expect him to be perfect. It wasn’t a surprise; it was the way she’d always acted. When she’d helped him to kill his cousin Duane she’d known that things might go wrong. And when Richard had gotten James Pursall to kill Madison Brown for Joan during their senior year of high school there was no guarantee that it would have worked. But the important thing, the only thing, was that Joan and Richard were strangers to one another, that no one knew how close they were, and that would always protect them. It was their superpower.
They’d agreed to meet again in another week. Joan was going to go to Henry Kimball, the ex-cop who used to teach at Dartford, and have him follow Richard and Pam.
“What if he sees me?” Richard said.
“He won’t. Just so long as you kill Richard and Pam right after they get in the house, then leave right away through the back. He won’t see you, I promise. And just to be safe you should wear some kind of disguise or mask when you’re in the house, so even if he sees you, he won’t be able to identify you.”
“Okay,” Richard said.
And then he had to wait another week to see Joan again, to make the final plan. The excitement had been almost unbearable, his days at the store starting to crawl, and his nights at home not a whole lot better. He studied satellite maps of the deck house, and the lot lines around it, planning where he’d park, and where he’d make his way to the house. He wanted to go scout the area but didn’t want to take an unnecessary risk. If someone saw him there more than once they might remember him.
Even though the waiting was unbearable, it was only because he was so excited to have Joan back in his life. And to have purpose. No, it wasn’t all about purpose, because his life did have purpose, even without Joan in it. He’d spent the past two years drawing up an elaborate plan where he’d use four carefully placed fertilizer bombs to drop all three stories of the Winslow Oaks Convention Center onto their largest hall during a packed event. He’d been considering the best time to enact this plan, at one point flirting with the idea of doing it during the annual New England Concrete Professionals Convention, the one his stepfather used to attend every year until he’d retired and moved down to Florida. That would be very satisfying, except for the fact that Don Seddon himself wouldn’t wind up crushed to death under a ton of his own product when Richard brought down the building. No, the real problem with killing a bunch of smug, witless concrete experts was that who the fuck would even care. Richard had a better plan. The Winslow Oaks Convention Center hosted at least two huge proms every spring, one for a regional tech high school, and the other for Chilton High School, one of the ritzier schools west of Route 495. The type of kids who went there were probably a lot like the type of kids who went to Dartford-Middleham, and Richard could only imagine the news headlines if he killed every single graduating senior in that particular town. All those kids in their bad tuxedos and all the girls in their glitzy dresses, acting like they’d accomplished something by graduating from high school and finding someone to have sex with.