If Richard could pull it off, and he really believed he could, his name would be remembered forever.
But for right now, now that Joan was back, he’d put the prom night planning on the back burner. Joan had work for him to do, and she would always come first. She was the one, after all, who had shown him his true world, back when they’d been fifteen years old in Kennewick, Maine. She’d shown him that you didn’t need to accept your reality, that you could change it. She’d shown him colors he’d never known existed.
On their third meeting at the Fairview Library Joan confirmed that she’d hired Henry Kimball, the teacher she knew who was now a private investigator, and he would be following either her husband or her husband’s girlfriend all week. Richard wasn’t too nuts about bringing in the private detective. It seemed unnecessarily complex, but Joan really believed that having a witness, someone who confirmed that an affair was taking place, and someone who would likely find the bodies, added an element of believability. Richard suspected she just wanted to bring in this man from her past, this man who was in the room when all their work paid off and Madison Brown got what she deserved. There was a theatrical element to Joan. Maybe it came from being a gymnast. She wanted things to be beautiful, and she wanted them to be perfect.
On their last meeting together at the library, Joan brought Richard her husband’s Smith & Wesson handgun, fully loaded, taking it out of her leather purse and casually handing it across to him.
“He won’t miss it this week?” Richard said.
“Highly doubtful. We keep it in our safe, and there’s no reason for him to go there. If he does, I’ll tell him that I got rid of it. I’ve told him many times that I hate having it in the house. Do you know how to use it?”
“Point and shoot,” Richard said.
Joan pressed her lips together, shrugged a little. She hadn’t changed much since he’d first gotten to know her, in Maine. She still acted the same, half amused at everything, at ease in her own skin. Her gestures and her facial expressions seemed the same to him too, and he wondered if she really hadn’t changed, or if she acted differently when she was with him, if somehow just being with him caused her to revert to the person she was when they’d first had that incredible experience at the Windward Resort.
“How do you feel about this?” she said, whispering a little because there were actually library customers on the first floor, two teenage girls who kept breaking into fits of giggling.
“You know how I feel,” Richard said.
“Do I?”
“I think so.”
“You feel good about it, and a little excited, and, most importantly, you are happy to have me back in your life.” Joan tilted her chin at him, mugging a little.
“All those things,” Richard said. “How do you feel about it?”
“Like I’m going to get my life back. That I’m ridding the world of two insignificant people. And sometimes I even feel like I’m back on the jetty at night. Do you remember that? What it felt like?”
Richard just nodded, and Joan stared at him. He stared back, her eyes hard and blue and looking right into him.
On Friday Richard called in sick to work. It wasn’t the best timing because Fridays could be busy, but Richard also knew that George Koestler, who owned the store, could recruit his son, back from college for a long weekend, to help out if he needed him. Richard left his cell phone behind in his apartment. He wore hiking shoes, his oldest jeans, and a fleece top that had been sent to the store by a company that specialized in ripsaws. Their logo was on the front right of the fleece, but it was pretty small and unreadable from more than ten feet away. The Smith & Wesson was in a small backpack along with gloves, a nylon balaclava, and plastic bags that he could wrap around his shoes with rubber bands.
He had considered seeing if he could steal one of his neighbor’s cars and return it without them noticing, but decided he was being overly careful. As Joan had said many times, there was absolutely nothing to connect him with her husband, or with her. So he took his own car and drove to Bingham, then down the heavily wooded street to the playground, slowing down to turn into its parking lot, but then driving past because there was another car parked there already, and he’d caught a glimpse of a mother pushing a child on a swing set. He decided to pull his Altima along the shoulder of the road near where the trailhead started. His car jutted a little onto the road, but it was better than having an anxious mother decide to memorize his license plate because he was a sole man parking in a playground lot.
Even though he’d studied the satellite maps about a hundred times he still got a little bit lost on the overgrown trails through the pine forest. But he eventually found the deck house, hard to see in the darkness of the woods because of its exterior stain. Kona Brown, Richard thought, a popular seller at the store. He was early—it was creeping up on eleven a.m.—but he decided to wait inside the house. He got out the laminated lockpick card but the back-porch door was open. He sat on a plastic Adirondack chair and pulled bags over his shoes, securing them with rubber bands, then entered the dim interior of the house, standing for a moment to allow his eyes to adjust.
Richard had grown up in a deck house with a similar layout, the short stairway that led from the front door up to the main floor of the house or led down to a finished basement level. But that was where the similarities ended. His house had been tainted by the arrival of Don, and the ways in which Don made his mother change. It had smelled of garbage and sex, and even thinking of it now made Richard almost throb with rage. This house felt as though no one had ever lived there, devoid of personality, of any vestige of human life. The art on the walls was generic, the living room empty except for two oatmeal-colored sofas facing one another. Through the living room was a master bedroom with a king-sized bed. The blinds were drawn, and the room had that fuzzy surreal look of a dark room in the middle of the day.
After exploring a little more Richard decided he’d wait in the second bedroom, this one completely unfurnished, on the north side of the house. There would be no reason for them to come into that room, and he wouldn’t even bother to shut the door. He assumed that they would go straight to the bedroom; he’d follow them inside, shooting the woman first while positioned near the man, then shooting the man on the side of his temple. He thought if he moved quickly there wouldn’t be time for either of them to react, to fight back. Still, he felt a tightness in his chest, part uncomfortable and part pleasurable, the way he felt whenever he was on the cusp of violence.
He opened his backpack, removed the balaclava and put it on his head, then took out the gun, sliding the safety off. He waited.
Sometime after twelve he heard the distant sound of a car on a gravel driveway, followed by the sound of the front door opening, then muffled voices. He stood rigid against the wall, listening intently.
It was the woman’s voice that he first heard clearly, her saying, “No, no. Let’s sit for a moment. I want to have a talk with you.”
Then Joan’s husband’s voice: “We can talk in the bedroom, as well, you know?” And even through the walls Richard could tell he’d said it with a smirk on his face, like he’d just uttered the world’s most original joke.