“Yeah, I figured he probably would the way he talks about girls. You’re lucky, I guess.”
A large, bearded man was now across from them on the other side of the buffet, meticulously touching the rim of each dessert plate before selecting the biggest piece of cake.
“I should go back to my table,” Richard said.
“Okay. Maybe I’ll see you at the beach tomorrow,” she said.
“Oh, yeah,” Richard said, almost as though he weren’t really listening to her, and then went back to his table with a bowl of rice pudding.
That night, lying in bed, Joan couldn’t sleep. Her whole body felt as though tiny pins were being poked through her skin, and she was too warm. Lizzie had spent all night reading a book called White Teeth in bed, wearing headphones, while Joan had flipped through channels trying to find something to watch. There were only about twelve channels here, three of them showing baseball games. She ended up watching the Julia Roberts movie where she runs away from her husband. When it was over it just started up again, and now she was wide awake in her bed. Lizzie was asleep.
She kept thinking about the close call the night before with Duane, but also Richard. Even though he’d grown up in the same small town as she had, she probably hadn’t thought once about him since that time in middle school when she’d walked into Mr. Barclay’s science class and Mr. Barclay was handing Richard a stick of deodorant. It was not a total surprise. Richard basically wore the same shirt to school every day, and he reeked. Joan had run to lunch and told everyone at her table what she’d seen, and for a while everyone called Richard Old Spice, which was probably an improvement on Dickless.
After eighth grade all the Middleham kids went to the Dartford-Middleham High School, and Joan barely saw Richard anymore. He’d grown a ton between middle school and high school and looked less like that scrawny kid with clothes that didn’t fit and a homemade haircut. He was still a complete freak, though. It was strange that, right now, he felt like an actual friend in this place. They had stuff in common. Not just that they grew up in the same town and went to the same school, but it turned out that they shared a common enemy. She was hoping to find Richard tomorrow, and get more information about Duane.
Chapter 3
Kimball
The night after seeing Joan Grieve Whalen again I went online and studied her husband’s company’s extensive website. Blackburn Properties had photographs and profiles of the brokers, the agents, and the office staff. Richard Whalen’s profile picture had been taken outside on a sunny day, some sort of parkland behind him. He had short cropped gray hair and the kind of raw but handsome face that looked as though he spent time on boats. In the short biography that accompanied his picture he mentioned his hobbies were paddleboarding, freshwater fishing, and road biking. There was no mention of a wife.
Pam O’Neil, the woman Joan was convinced was sleeping with her husband, listed her hobbies as horseback riding and boogie boarding. She had long blond hair, and very white teeth, although it was possible the picture had been touched up. She looked as though she was in her mid-twenties, about ten years younger than Richard Whalen or Joan.
I tried to imagine the two of them together, and it wasn’t particularly hard. My guess was that if Joan thought they were having an affair, then they were having an affair. Smoke and fire and all that. I tried to form a plan in my mind, the best way to move forward on this case, but found I kept thinking about Joan instead. And not the Joan who had been in my office earlier that day, but the Joan who had been in my classroom fifteen years earlier when I’d been a first-year teacher.
The thing about my year at Dartford-Middleham High School was that I was full of unspecified dread long before James Pursall brought a gun into my classroom. It began during Christmas break, when I’d been prepping furiously to teach my classes the upcoming spring semester. The previous fall I’d been a student teacher, my host a veteran teacher named Larry O’Donnell, who liked to go over lesson plans down at the Bullrun pub when it opened at five p.m. The good thing about Larry was that he didn’t seem particularly interested in sitting in on my class, observing me, then hitting me up later with the multiple things I did wrong. But that was also the bad thing about Larry. While I was teaching, he was in the supply closet, napping.
My hardest classes were the two sections of American lit for sophomores. It was a pretty routine curriculum, covering Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. The kids were unimpressed, and it turned out I was a less than stellar disciplinarian. I spent most of my time each class trying not to turn my back on them for even a few seconds. My third class was senior honors English, the class that Joan Grieve was taking. The kids were essentially respectful, and there were even a couple of them who seemed to enjoy reading and talking about books. Most of the kids, however, just thought the class would look good on their college applications. They were well behaved but absent.
By early December I was looking forward to the semester being over, counting the days, and wondering if I’d made the correct career choice. Then one afternoon, just after my last class of the day, when I’d been erasing the chalkboard and mentally replaying the class that had just ended, Larry O’Donnell and Maureen Block, the English department head, came in to see me, shutting the door behind them. They asked me if I’d noticed that Paul Justice, one of the veteran teachers, hadn’t been in for a few days. I had noticed, but hadn’t thought too much about it.
“He’s not coming back,” Maureen said. “And I’m not sure, but I think we’ve dodged a major bullet. The girl who made the complaint said she’s not going to the police.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Larry has kindly offered to take over Paul’s freshman classes for next semester, but that means someone has to keep going with senior honors, plus Paul’s composition classes. We were hoping you might consider helping us out.”
“Oh,” I said again.
They gave me a night to think about it, and Dagmar, my girlfriend at the time, convinced me that it was too good an opportunity to pass up. “They’ll offer you a full-time job at the end of the year,” she said. “It’s a good school.” Dagmar and I had met at the same master’s program out in Western Mass and she was teaching middle school in the Hudson school system. I had a sudden vision of the two of us fixing up a farmhouse in Central Massachusetts, and spending our lives complaining about grading papers. I couldn’t quite decide how I felt about that.
I took the job, and that December, with Dagmar back in the Midwest with her family, I holed up in my squalid apartment in Cambridge and planned the remainder of the year with my honors class. They’d given me leeway, so I planned a whole unit on poetry, and one on mid-century suburban literature, thinking they might enjoy some Cheever stories, and was considering assigning Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith or some Richard Yates. I was reading a lot, and I was trying to write poetry, but I could feel my life unfolding before me, and it felt like a life both quiet and a little bit desperate. And once that thought got into my head, it was like catching a chill from a cold swim—I just couldn’t shake it.