“I’m serious,” said the woman.
“Okay. Hearing you loud and clear.” And then there was a brief pause and Richard thought that they’d probably sat down on one, or both, of the sofas. He took a deep breath, relaxed his grip on the gun, and emerged from the spare room, crossing the short hall into the main living area. They were on opposite sofas, the woman sitting facing him, and the man facing toward her, so that Richard could just see the back of his head. The woman looked up, her face instantly draining of color, her mouth opening and closing without making a sound.
Richard aimed at the very middle of her and pulled the trigger, hitting her somewhere between her chest and her stomach. Then he inched the barrel of the gun up just a little, aimed, and shot her in the forehead, her head whipping backward, a spray of blood hitting the picture window behind her.
Moving quickly, Richard took two steps forward and pressed the gun against the side of Richie Whalen’s head. He was just about to pull the trigger, but Richie was speaking in an almost inaudible voice, saying the word please over and over. Richard leaned over him and the man had his eyes squeezed shut, like a child thinking he’d be invisible.
Richard, who’d already imagined this possible scenario, said, “Richie, I’ll let you live, but I need you to do something for me, okay?”
“Yes, anything.”
“I just need your prints on this gun, okay, so hold out your hand and I’m going to put the gun in it, okay?”
Richie held out a shaking hand and muttered something that sounded like a yes to Richard.
“No sudden movements, okay, Richie, or else I kill you. I’m just going to get your prints here on the handle . . . that’s good, and on the trigger. You’re doing great.”
Later, Richard went over in his mind how easy it had been to simply lift Richie’s hand with the gun in it and press it to his head and pull the trigger, his finger over Richie’s. The man had not fought back, maybe simply hoping that the bad moment would just go away, maybe simply hoping that if he did what he was told he’d be allowed to live.
As Richie lay dead on the couch, the gun in his hand, Richard moved fast, backtracking out of the house, then through the woods to his car. Driving home a light rain began to fall, peppering the car. Richard flipped through radio stations, and landed on “Beautiful Day” by U2, a song that until this moment had never meant anything to him. A song that assholes sang when their team won a championship. It was still playing when he pulled into the driveway of his house, and he sat there, listening, even mouthing along with the words.
Chapter 20
Kimball
I told Lily, in what felt like extraneous detail, the entire story of the shooting in my classroom. I told her how I’d frozen up while it had unfolded, paralyzed with fear, and how I’d never really forgiven myself for that.
“You could have made it worse,” Lily said. “If you’d tried to wrestle the gun away he might have shot everyone in that classroom.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s a possibility.”
“Or you’d have been shot, yourself.”
“A much greater possibility.”
“I know you’ve probably thought a lot about this, but ultimately there’s no way of knowing what would have happened if you rushed him. Could have made it better, could have made it worse. I’m just telling you things you already know, right?”
“Yes, I have gone over this a few times in my head over the years.” I smiled.
“I’m sure you have. I’m sorry. It sounds scary,” Lily said, leaning back farther into her sofa. A nearby lamp allowed me to see only half of her face.
“It’s not really the choices I made that I’ve kept going over for years,” I said. “It was the fact that I froze. At the time, even if I thought the right thing to do was to charge James Pursall there was no way I could have done it. I couldn’t have done anything, really.”
“So you became a cop,” Lily said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. I couldn’t go back into the classroom. And I couldn’t make a living writing poetry. Plus, I hated therapy.”
“And you had a secret fantasy that if you were able to save someone when you were a police officer then that would even the score.”
“Probably,” I said. “I’m not sure I ever put it that way exactly in my own mind, but, yeah.”
“And then I came along and ruined being a police detective for you.”
“We don’t need to talk about that tonight,” I said. “It’s late.”
“It is late,” she said.
“Before we go to sleep, tell me what you think about my story, about Joan Grieve.”
Lily touched an earlobe and was quiet for a moment. “What I think is that Joan Grieve absolutely had someone kill her husband and her husband’s lover. Just like she absolutely had James Pursall kill Madison Brown for her. I don’t know how she did it, but she did. There’s a reason she came back to you and asked you to follow her husband. It was nostalgia, I think. She has good memories of what happened in your classroom, and she wanted to replicate the experience.”
“She did replicate the experience. At least for me. Two bodies dead by gunshot wounds. Something I never thought I’d see again.”
“So here’s the thing about Joan,” Lily said, and she moved forward on the couch in preparation for getting up and going to bed. “She doesn’t do these things on her own. Somehow, back in high school, she got James Pursall to do her dirty work. Last week, she got someone else to murder her husband. All we need to do is find that person.”
“Okay. How do we do that?”
“I can help you. We need to find out everything about Joan’s life. My guess is that some other people in her orbit might have come to bad ends. We’ll find something. I just don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we will.”
“So you’ll help me?”
Her face was below the lamp now, and I could see both her eyes, pale and green. “Of course I will,” she said, “I’ll always help you, no matter what.”
I woke up in Shepaug, confused for a moment about where I was. The house was quiet, and after walking carefully down the hall to the bathroom, I returned to the attic room, got out my computer, and continued my online search of Joan Grieve.
It was strange, but her name did not come up in any stories relating to the shooting that had taken place in my classroom. My name was mentioned, obviously, as were the names of the deceased. And a few other members of that class had been quoted by the papers. Ultimately, though, the story didn’t really have any legs, probably because James Pursall killed only one other person before taking his own life. We live in an age of mass murder, and two dead bodies, even young ones, just don’t cut it, anymore.
I stared past my computer screen for a few minutes, my mind still back in that classroom, especially since telling Lily the entire story the night before. One day in the future everyone who was there would be dead and there would be zero memory of the event. And even right now, I knew that my memories were faded and falsified by the passage of time. I opened a blank document, thinking for a moment of a poem, ideas streaming through me just out of reach. I have believed for a while that all poetry is saying the same thing—I am here—although what the poet really means is, I was there, because all poetry is just a letter to some future reader. Everything boils down to that one sentiment. I was there. I was there, and I felt things and saw things and sometimes I understood them, but most of the time I did not. I started to jot down a few lines, along this line, erased them, and wrote: