“It’s Richard Seddon,” he said, and I could detect no particular emotion in the voice that hummed through the tinny speakers.
I cracked my door then went back to my chair behind the desk. The sound of his footsteps told me he was climbing the stairs quickly, and I removed the gun from the front drawer, took the safety off, and dropped my hand, with the gun in it, straight down and out of sight behind the desk.
But when Richard Seddon stepped into my office, he looked more like a befuddled college student than a killer. He wore jeans and a dark green hooded sweatshirt, and was wearing a backpack, its straps on both his shoulders. He came in tentatively, looking around my office. There was nothing in his hands.
“Hi, Richard,” I said, and slid the gun into my jacket pocket.
“Hi, Mr. Kimball,” he said, the address bringing me back not just to my teaching days, but to the time that Joan had called me the same thing in this very office, just a little over two weeks ago.
I stood up and gestured to the chair facing my desk. “Have a seat.”
He perched on the padded wooden chair, sliding his backpack off and putting it on the floor. “I thought about calling but I guess I didn’t want there to be a record for what I’m about to tell you,” he said. “Not that there’d have been a record of what I’m going to say, but just that I called you in the first place. Do you understand?”
“Sure,” I said.
Neither of us spoke for a moment and I tried to read his body language. He seemed resigned, his body limp in the chair. “I guess you know why I came here?” he said at last.
“I have no idea, but I suppose it has something to do with what we talked about yesterday.”
“Yeah. It’s about my cousin Duane. I feel like I should have told you that even though he was my cousin I thought at the time that he deserved to die.”
“Okay,” I said.
“He was a horrible guy, and I think that he was probably a rapist, or would be a rapist if he was given a chance.”
“Do you think that’s why he died that night? Do you think he’d tried to do something to Joan Grieve out on that jetty and she pushed him in the water?”
“I don’t really know,” Richard said quickly, “but it wouldn’t surprise me.”
“That’s helpful to know,” I said.
Richard looked around my office, as though he’d just been transported into it. “You work here all alone?”
“I do, for now. It’s a new business so it’s just me. I hope to hire help at some point.”
He nodded, still looking around the room. “You were a teacher at DM, right? You were the teacher in the room when James killed that girl and then himself?”
“I was, actually. I was going to bring that up the other day, but it’s not like it’s relevant to the case of your cousin.”
“Yeah, I get it,” Richard said.
“You were friends with James,” I said.
“I was, I guess. We weren’t best friends or anything, but we knew each other. The thing about him . . . about what he did . . . was that the girl he killed, Madison Brown . . . she wasn’t a good person, either. She was a bully, like a lot of people are, but she was smart, too, which made it worse, in a way, like she didn’t have an excuse, really.”
“I can see that. I remember her, of course, but only knew her as a student. But her being a bully doesn’t make it okay that James killed her, does it? I mean, she was just a teenager.”
“You think that people change that much from when they’re teenagers?”
“God, I hope so,” I said. “I was a pretentious shit when I was a teenager. I’m sure there were some people who wanted to kill me.”
“Being pretentious is different than being a bad person,” Richard said.
“I guess so.” I was beginning to wish I’d recorded this conversation. It felt like a confession even though Richard hadn’t actually confessed to anything yet. My phone was on my desk and all I would have had to do was press the record button on the audio app. Instead, I’d been focused on getting my gun from the locked file cabinet, a move that, I had to admit, was bringing me some comfort. Even though there was no evident weapon on Richard, if he went to open his backpack or reached toward his waistband under the large hoodie, I was ready to pull my gun.
“Anyway, all I really came to tell you was that Duane Wozniak probably deserved to die that night in Maine. I didn’t have anything to do with it, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t a little bit happy.”
“It’s okay to be happy about something like that. It’s not a crime to have a feeling.”
“Right, it was just a feeling. I had nothing to do with it.”
“But Joan Grieve might have had something to do with it?”
Richard was picking at what looked like a scab on the back of his hand. “I honestly have no idea. But if she did, she had a good reason. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Right. Just like James Pursall had a good reason for killing Madison Brown.”
Richard’s eyes shifted a little, and I worried I’d taken it too far. It was clear he’d come to me in order to offer up some sort of justification. I was torn between letting him walk out of the office before something bad happened or pushing him to learn more.
“Richard,” I said, before he had a chance to respond. “Thank you for coming in and talking with me. I appreciate it. I’ll be talking with Joan soon. Should I say hi for you?”
“That would be nice,” he said, and I was surprised, expecting him to deny that he knew her, like he’d done before. “I should actually get going. I have a shift today.”
“At the hardware store,” I said.
“Yes.” He stood up, his head almost coming as high as the ceiling fan in my office that I used during the summer months.
“So if I need to ask you some follow-up questions,” I said, “and I doubt that I will, but you never know . . . Should I come to the store again, or call you, or maybe come to where you live?”
“I don’t care,” he said. “Or come to the store, I guess. I’m running late . . .”
He turned and walked toward the office door, stopping briefly to look at my Grantchester Meadows watercolor. “Pretty,” he said, and then I watched him exit. There was something strange about the way he was moving, and it took a moment before I realized that he was moving like an amateur actor in a stage play. He looked as though he’d forgotten how to make an everyday occurrence look natural.
I stood up and saw the backpack still on the floor by the chair Richard had just vacated.
Time slowed down, and as I moved quickly around the desk and took hold of it by the looped strap near the top, the phrase I was there ran through my mind, and for some reason I saw Lily’s face moving away from me. The bag was heavy to lift, and my heart began to thump. For one second I thought about racing to the window and hurling it out onto the street, but something stopped me. Embarrassment, maybe, that I’d be overreacting to something innocent.
Richard had just left the room so I took two long strides to the door, swung it open and saw him at the top of the stairs. His hood was up, but even so I could see how pale his face was. Had it been that pale in my office?