There once was a poet in permanent dread
Over the fact that we all wind up dead,
So he scribbled out verse,
Which just made it worse,
And decided to get laid more instead.
Then I erased that too and went back to thinking about what I might learn about Joan through online searches. Despite not being named as a school-shooting survivor, Joan Grieve Whalen did have an online presence because of her job as an interior decorator. She had a website, a page on LinkedIn, an Instagram account （all pictures of house interiors, either her designs, or ones she admired）， a Twitter account, and a Facebook page that she didn’t seem to use anymore. I searched her friends on Facebook, looking for any names I recognized from my year as a teacher. There was one. A girl named Kristin Hunter that I remembered from that honors English class, one of the best students if you went by her essays and exams. I remember the only conversation I had with her was when she’d approached me to see if she could get out of giving her mock-valedictorian speech in front of the room, saying she had an anxiety disorder. I’d told her I’d be happy to work with her in advance to go over some strategies for public speaking. I wonder if there had been a small part of her that felt relieved she never had to give that speech because of what James Pursall did just a few days later. As someone who’d had my own fair share of public speaking phobia, I knew there were times I would have welcomed a mass shooting to get out of giving a poetry reading.
Kristin’s Facebook page was private, so I didn’t learn anything there, although I doubt there would have been anything of interest. Kristin and Joan had probably not been friends in real life and had just found each other on social media the way that old classmates did. I did find two Grieves in Joan’s list of friends. One was a Dorothy Grieve, who turned out to be Joan’s mother, a woman who posted pictures of either her cats or her Candy Crush scores. Then there was Elizabeth Grieve, clearly an older sister of Joan, and a creative writing teacher at Emerson College, plus a published poet. She had her own website, a picture of herself on it, and it was as though all of Joan’s facial features had been plucked off Joan’s face and rearranged on someone else’s in a less successful way. The same eyes but too close together, the same beautiful mouth but marooned by a square chin. Elizabeth Grieve’s black glossy hair was cut short and turning gray in places. I read the few poems that were on the website, free verse mostly, and confessional. There were several about being a childhood leukemia survivor and one about her father’s funeral, and how afterward she’d touched herself in her childhood bedroom looking at the cover of a Nancy Drew novel and dreaming of Bess. There was no mention of a sister. On a whim, I looked Elizabeth Grieve up on Amazon, found her two books—the first was called Variations on a Theme and the second Sea Oat Soup—and ordered them both to arrive the following day.
I put my computer away, packing it in the backpack I’d brought with me. It was seven in the morning and I couldn’t sleep anymore, despite staying up late the night before telling Lily Kintner about recent and past events.
I was in a small bedroom with a slanted ceiling on one side, and a view across a misty field that ended in a line of trees. The walls were painted a ghoulish yellow color, and one of the windowpanes was cracked. I’d slept on a thin mattress on a wooden cot and was now sitting at a child-sized desk trying to figure out if it was too early to go downstairs and see if anyone had made coffee. I could hear a scratching sound at the door and opened it up, letting in a slate-gray cat who stopped to look at me like I was the ghost of a man who’d drowned her kittens. We stared at one another until she decided I was a mere mortal, then she circled the room, eventually coming over and rubbing against my ankle. I thought of Pyewacket, who hated to be left alone overnight at home, and I suddenly longed to be back in Cambridge. In the light of day it seemed strange I’d come here in the first place. Maybe Richard Whalen had really fallen in love with Pam O’Neil, so much so that when he knew she was going to break up with him, he did the only logical thing he could think of. He shot her and then himself, ensuring that neither of them would ever be free to love anyone else ever again. It was certainly the way that it looked. Why was I so suspicious of Joan Grieve Whalen? Was it because if she wasn’t involved, then I was, in some part? By sleeping with a woman I shouldn’t have slept with, had I brought about her violent death? I pushed the thought out of my head.
The collarless cat leapt onto the small blond-wood desk, and I jumped a little. I scratched her under the chin, then got my backpack and went down the backstairs toward the first floor of Monk’s House.
In the kitchen I found Lily’s mother, Sharon, wearing a loose lavender dress and frying bacon at the stove, while Lily was putting last night’s dishes away. Both turned to look at me, and Lily said, “Coffee’s next to the fridge. Help yourself.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I won’t stay long, but I will drink a cup of coffee.”
“You won’t stay for breakfast?”
“Of course, he will,” Sharon said. “I’ve made double.”
After agreeing to stay I sat down at the wooden kitchen table. “I met your cat,” I said into the room.
“I don’t think so,” Sharon said loudly, as Lily nodded only at me, then said, “That’s April. She’s not really our cat, but she likes to come into our house.”
“I’m very allergic, you know,” Sharon said. “Lily knows that better than anyone, so I really doubt we have a cat.”
Lily said, “She likes the room you stayed in last night, and we think she gets in through the greenhouse at the back, but we haven’t figured out how she does it. I’ve always had a cat here. They just arrive somehow.”
Sharon kept putting platters on the table, one of bacon, one of scrambled eggs, one of fruit. David Kintner came down, wearing the same clothes he’d had on the night before, but he’d added a tie, tucked into his buttoned-up cardigan. He sat next to me without saying anything and Lily put a boiled egg in a cup in front of him, plus coffee in a bowl. He proceeded to tap on his egg with the edge of a spoon.
After eating, David said his first words of the day, which were to me. “How long are you here? Do you propose to spend your time rambling the countryside, or drinking, or a little bit of both?” It sounded a little rehearsed.
“I’m leaving, unfortunately, right after breakfast.”
“He’ll be back, Dad,” Lily said. “He promised me.”
“Ah, good,” David said, rubbing at a stain on his tie.
Lily showed me her garden before I got back into my car. It was dying, of course, but there was still color in places, bronze mums in pots, withering sunflowers, a shrub with tiny leaves that had turned various shades of purple. April, the cat, appeared, skirting quietly along an old stone wall, and looking back at me, trying to figure out if I was the same ghost that had been up in her room.
“I did some research on Joan this morning, just googling her and looking at her social media,” I said.
“And?”
“And I began to feel stupid. Maybe her husband just snapped. Maybe she’s just one of those unlucky people who find themselves near violent death at different times in their life.”