He had something in his hand, a small device that looked like a car remote. I realized his thumb was pressing down on it, and he was looking at the bag in my hand with fear. He backed away, his thumb drumming down on the device, his face twisted into something I didn’t recognize, and I hurled the bag at him.
I stepped back into my office, pulling the door closed behind me. I was moving fast but the door was moving as well, ripping from its hinges, lifting me up. Then came a deafening sound accompanied by a whiteness, and I was in the air, flying, the whiteness turning to black.
Part 3
Dirty Work
Chapter 29
Lily
It was my mother, who never misses the six o’clock news, who told me about the explosion. She says she only watches the news for the weather, and it is true she reports the seven-day forecast to me on a nightly basis whether I am interested or not. But five days after Henry Kimball had come to visit, my mother said, “It wasn’t our friend, was it, who was in that explosion I told you about?”
“What explosion?”
“Last night, darling. I was telling you about that house that blew up in Cambridge, how they thought it might have been a gas-line explosion and then it turned out it was some sort of device. It was the office of your friend . . . they just said his name.”
“Henry.”
“Yes, him.”
I went online. It had been a relatively unimportant story when it had been deemed an accident, but now that it looked like it was an intentional act, the story was getting a lot more attention. The explosion had taken place on the second floor of a commercial property on Oxford Street, outside of Henry Kimball’s office where he conducted his private investigations business. Henry Kimball was in critical condition at Boston Memorial Hospital, while Richard Seddon, a hardware store employee, and resident of Fairview, Massachusetts, had been declared dead at the scene. The only connection that linked the two had been Dartford-Middleham High School, where Henry Kimball had been an English teacher, present in the room when James Pursall killed a fellow student then himself. Richard Seddon had been a senior at the time of the incident but had not been in any of Henry Kimball’s classes. Once that detail had emerged, however, the story had become even larger, the speculation being that the two incidents were somehow connected.
On Sunday the Boston Globe published a lengthy article about Richard Seddon entitled “An Unseen Life: What We Don’t Know About the Oxford Street Bomber.” It was now established that Seddon, who had been living in the basement of his empty childhood home, had created the bomb that he brought to the office building in Cambridge. He had a stepfather in Florida who had refused to answer any questions from reporters, but other than that, Richard had no living relatives. His boss and coworkers from the hardware store he worked at provided very little information, all of them saying that Seddon had kept to himself but had always been friendly and a hard worker.
I was a little surprised to see that, so far, no journalist had made any connection between Joan Grieve and Richard Seddon. Her name would have come up, of course, since Henry had so recently been involved in the deaths of her husband and his lover. And Joan Grieve had gone to Dartford-Middleham, as well. I imagined that some eager journalist, and possibly a detective, was trying to discover a relationship between the two, but they’d clearly had no luck.
I knew, though.
I knew that Richard Seddon had been the third person that Henry and I had discussed when he’d come to visit. Seddon and Joan Grieve had both been involved in the high school shooting, and Seddon had definitely been involved in the deaths of Richard Whalen and Pam O’Neil. Richard was Joan’s partner in crime. Or had been, until recently. Henry had figured it out, and he’d paid the price.
On Sundays my father likes to have a roast dinner. That day, the day the Globe had published their profile of Richard Seddon, I was cooking a pork loin with crispy potatoes and two vegetables. My father was drinking beer instead of his usual whiskey and water, and my mother had made a salad with the last of the kale from the garden, a development that had enraged my father to no end.
“You don’t eat salad with a Sunday roast,” he’d repeated several times.
“I do,” Sharon had said.
It was during dessert that I told them both I needed to be away for a couple of days. My mother merely looked confused, maybe wondering how there’d be any possible reason for me to go anywhere, but my father looked genuinely scared, as though I’d told him I had a week to live.
“Where are you going, Lil?” he said, after we’d moved to the living room, and he’d returned to drinking whiskey.
“Just to Cambridge for a few days. I’ll stay at a hotel and I’m actually going to meet someone who you’ll be interested in. There’s a Margaret Cogswell scholar who’s spending a sabbatical at Harvard, and I’m going to talk with her about some of your archived materials.”
My mother was not in the room at this point, having gone to her studio. I’d already told her, while we were doing dishes, that I was going to Cambridge to visit my old friend Sally Kull from Mather College. There was no way my mother and father would ever compare stories. I’d actually been telling them separate lies for as long as I could remember, even when they’d still been married.
“She’s not from that school,” my father said about the imaginary Cogswell scholar, “the one you told me about with all of Margaret’s stuff, that wants mine now, too?”
“No, but I still want you to think about that offer. It was a good one.”
I’d been spending the summer and the early fall going through all of my father’s papers, and talking with various universities, and some private collectors, about where they might wind up after he died. The best offer so far had come from a private college in Arizona that owned the complete archives of the British novelist Margaret Cogswell, quite a bit more famous than my father, and a woman with whom he’d been involved during the 1970s. I knew that the college only really wanted to buy my father’s papers because of his connection with Cogswell, and my father suspected it too. “We should take the offer,” he’d said on numerous occasions, “then burn all my letters from Maggie, and then see how they like it.”
“I think they’re probably more interested in The Broomfield Tomb,” I said, referencing my father’s unpublished novella, one that had been written while he was still involved with a young Margaret Cogswell, and a book that was far more flattering to her than his novel July and August.
“We’ll burn that too,” my father said. “In fact, let’s burn it anyway.”
“I actually love The Broomfield Tomb,” I said. “It’s very romantic.”
I’d expected him to say something cutting about that, but he’d frowned as though trying to remember, and finally said, “I thought all my books were romantic.”
The next day I packed a small bag and drove to Cambridge. Along the way I kept asking myself if I was making a mistake, wondering if I really needed to get involved. Joan Grieve would be caught, wouldn’t she? There would be some traceable connection between her and Richard Seddon. If Henry had found it—and it looked as though he had—then someone else would too. So why did I need to get involved? As I’d done in the past, I’d made a decision to live out my life as quietly as possible. People were dead because of me, and while the world was most likely better off without them, I had almost been discovered for who I really am. And that, to me, is a fate worse than death.