Richard pressed his lips together and looked up from his soda. “I mean,” he said, “it was nothing to do with you. Not really. It was—”
“Please just tell me,” Karen said, rising a little in her seat. “Sorry to interrupt, but it’s never entirely just about one person, is it? I mean, if I was your perfect match in the whole universe, you’d have tried to make it work, right? There must have been something about me that you didn’t like.”
Richard was now shaking his head, and for one terrible moment he felt an ache in his throat and thought that he might cry. Words were running through his mind, as though maybe he could just tell her about everything, just let her inside. But as soon as he had that thought it went away. There was too much to tell, for one thing, and too many things to tell that would scare her away. She wouldn’t begin to understand who he really was.
Sometimes, in hard or awkward moments, Richard would think to himself: What would Joan do? She understood the world, the social world, in a way he never would. So he thought about it now, and he said to Karen, who was rubbing at an earlobe, “I’m into someone else, actually. She’s someone I knew back in high school and now we’ve reconnected, and . . . the truth is, I guess . . . the truth is that I’m in love with her and I can’t really be with anyone else.”
Karen was nodding, and he realized he’d said something that was helpful. “Was she . . . were you two together when we were together?”
“Oh, no,” Richard said, before he could stop himself. “I was thinking about her, though. She got married to someone else, but that’s over now. No. We’re not together, it’s just that . . .”
“She’s the one for you,” Karen said, and spun her own soda around, taking a big sip through the straw.
Later, that night while he was in bed, Richard went over the rest of the conversation with Karen, and how he’d told her a little bit about his relationship with Joan. Most was made up, but not all of it. And for whatever reason he was now thinking about Karen again instead of Joan, imagining a scenario where he would tell her even more than he’d already told her, maybe even tell her that the only time he’d had sex was with her. He imagined them doing it again, only this time Richard would last and last, Karen begging him for more.
He was still thinking about Karen at the hardware store the next day while he was restocking the plumbing aisle. Maybe she’d come back to see him again, but he doubted it. When they’d said good night, she’d seemed happy, as though she’d gotten what she’d come for.
Richard was crouched over a box when he felt a tap on his shoulder, a man’s voice saying, “Excuse me.”
Chapter 26
Kimball
On the Emerson College website there was a phone number for Elizabeth Grieve, and also a listing of her office hours. I figured that if I called her directly on her line during her office hours there was a good chance she might pick up.
I still hadn’t decided what to say yet. All I really wanted to establish was that she’d been at the Windward Resort, with her sister Joan, at the time that Duane Wozniak had drowned. If she confirmed that, then that would be one too many coincidences that linked Joan Grieve and Richard Seddon.
I did think about calling her up and telling her that I was doing a deep analysis of her poem, “Tides,” from her chapbook Sea Oat Soup, then asking if I could interview her about it. That was a stretch, though. Even if Elizabeth Grieve had illusions of grandeur there was no way she’d buy some critical theorist calling up out of the blue to dissect a poem she’d published in a book that had a print run of two hundred copies.
So I tried to come up with other ways to ask her. While thinking about it, I read through her poems again. It seemed clear to me that during a trip to Maine （and Kennewick was mentioned twice） she’d discovered that she was a lesbian. There were actually two mentions of her sister in the book, the one that referred to her as being “the tender age of murderers” and that she’d gone swimming with a boy who hadn’t come back. The other mention was vaguer. It was in a poem called “Moonsnail,” and the line went, “my sister has broken out in scales / and they look ravishing on her.” But that was a throwaway line in a poem that seemed devoted to the character of “you,” the sporty girl she’d met on that vacation. I got distracted and wrote a limerick on the back inside cover of Sea Oat Soup.
There once was a poet named Grieve,
Whose poems would have you believe
That at a summer resort
She met a girl in a skort
And lost the one thing she couldn’t retrieve.
Ten minutes after her office hours started, I dialed her number.
“Professor Grieve here,” she said, her voice throaty and deep, not at all like Joan’s.
“Oh, hi Professor. You don’t know me but I’m a private investigator, and I was wondering if you had five minutes to answer a couple of questions for me.”
“Okay,” she said, drawing out the word.
“Oh, great, great. Sorry to bother you during your office hours, but I thought I’d take a chance. As I said, I’m a private investigator and we’ve been hired to look into an event that occurred back in 2000 at the . . .” I paused a little as though I was looking it up. “。 . . at the Windward Resort in Kennewick, Maine.”
“Oh, that,” she said.
“So you were there?”
“Is this about the kid who drowned?”
“Actually, it is. Duane Wozniak. According to the resort’s records you were a guest at the time of the accident.”
“Yeah, I was there with my family. But I think maybe you want to talk with my sister, Joan.”
“Because she knew Duane,” I said, hoping I sounded like I knew what I was talking about.
“Yeah, right. What is this about, anyway? I’m confused. Is someone suggesting that it wasn’t an accident?”
“Not really,” I said. “I’m not authorized, of course, to divulge my client’s name, but we were tasked to just look into the events that led to his death. I don’t think there’s any suggestion that there was any wrongdoing on anyone’s part.”
“Well, like I said. I didn’t know him, and I don’t know anything about what happened except for what my sister told me, so I suggest you talk with her.”
“I will, Elizabeth. So you never met him while you were at the resort?”
“I remember seeing him, I guess, but my sister and I, both then and now, are not particularly close. I was doing my own thing there, and she was doing hers. He talked her into going out on that jetty on the beach at night, and he was showing off and slipped into the water.”
I knew I was beginning to push it, but I asked her, “So you had no interactions with Duane Wozniak or Richard Seddon?”
“Who’s Richard Seddon?”
“Oh, he was Duane’s cousin. They were sharing a room together.”
“No, I didn’t. Like I said, you’re talking with the wrong sister.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said. “You’ve been helpful. It’s really just a matter of crossing you off a list of people I’m supposed to talk with.”