After dinner I left my car in the lot that was shared by the restaurant and several nearby businesses and walked back with my small bag that contained my toiletries and clothes to Henry’s building. The windows to his apartment were dark, so I entered the building and climbed the single set of stairs and let myself inside. I tried hard to be quiet without trying to seem like I was being quiet. I didn’t know anything about the other tenants but hoped that none of them were the type to call the police if they heard a strange noise.
Pye came and greeted me as I stepped inside the dark apartment. I let my eyes adjust then walked toward the bedroom, the cat following me and meowing, and then I shut the bedroom door behind us. The curtains were already pulled, so I flipped on Henry’s bedside lamp. This was a slight risk, but the bedroom’s windows were all to the back of the building, and with the curtains shut tight I didn’t think anyone would notice. Besides, this was the city, not exactly the type of place where neighbors paid close attention to everyone else’s comings and goings.
Henry had an alarm clock by his bed, and I set it to six in the morning. I needed to be up early just in case someone was planning on showing up the next day, maybe to feed Pye. I changed into leggings and a sweatshirt and lay down on the top of the bed. There was a stack of four books on the bedside table, including The Green Marriage by Margaret Cogswell. The other books were a Faber edition of Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and a falling-apart copy of Dorothy Hughes’s In a Lonely Place. The Cogswell was the only one with a bookmark in it and I picked it up and opened it to where Henry had left off. I’d read The Green Marriage in college; it had actually been an assignment in a contemporary British fiction class, and I’d even written a paper on the main character of Muriel Pollock, never mentioning to my professor that I’d actually met the author on at least one occasion, and that my father had been one of her lovers.
I flipped to the beginning of the book and started to read. Pyewacket got onto the bed and meowed a little more, then turned twice and settled onto a furry patch of the quilted bedcover. I read two chapters then managed to fall asleep.
The next morning I hid my overnight bag beneath the living room sofa, then left the apartment shortly after dawn. It was cold outside, and the sidewalks were wet. I walked to Massachusetts Avenue, then headed east, stopping into the first coffee shop that was open. I lingered there until nine a.m., reading the free Boston Globe, and wishing I had The Green Marriage with me, even though bringing Henry’s copy would probably have been a mistake. I walked into Harvard Square, where I found a barbershop that was open, and asked if they were taking walkins.
“It’s all we take,” the nicely dressed man said, and indicated a leather barber chair for me to sit in. “We don’t do too many women’s haircuts, but I’ll be happy to give you a trim.”
“I was hoping for a buzz cut,” I said.
He looked a little surprised, but simply said, “All one length?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And do you know what number?”
“Surprise me,” I said.
I left twenty minutes later, having left my long red hair behind. I’d had the same haircut since high school and walking away from the barbershop I ran my hands over my head, liking the way the short hairs ruffled under my fingers. After stopping for another coffee at an empty café on Bow Street, I went and found a salon on the other side of Harvard Square and asked if they had time to dye my hair. The youngest stylist in the shop said she could squeeze me in, and I asked her to dye my new haircut blond. “Did you buzz this yourself?” she said, running her fingers over my scalp.
“I did,” I said. “What do you think?”
“You did a nice job. What kind of blond are you thinking? Natural or platinum?”
“What do you think?” I said.
I ate lunch at a pizza place in a dark inside shopping area, sitting in a chair that faced a mirrored wall. I kept catching glimpses of myself and thought that the platinum hair had totally transformed me, but that my clothes no longer went with my new look. After lunch I found a used clothing store and bought several new items. A plaid skirt held together with safety pins. Two sweaters, one fuzzy and white, and the other a man’s orange cardigan. I bought fishnet stockings, plus a pair of fake leather pants, and I found a genuine black leather jacket that had once upon a time been bedazzled on the back with an image that might have been a coiled snake, or maybe a beehive. I sold the clothes I was wearing to the unimpressed salesgirl and left the store in one of my new outfits, going up one set of stairs and finding a place where they pierced my nose septum with a silver hoop. The last place I went was Newbury Comics, where I bought some high-end temporary tattoos that I wasn’t sure I needed, but thought I’d get just in case.
Walking back down Mass Avenue in my new clothes, teetering in my high-heel boots, I felt like myself again. Not because I liked the clothes, or even felt comfortable in them, but because I felt invisible, camouflaged. I suspected that if my mother walked past me on the sidewalk she wouldn’t give me a second look. I still didn’t have an exact plan for what I was going to do next, but it felt important that I was essentially in a disguise. I hoped to find a way to meet Joan Whalen, and if she had done her research on Henry Kimball—and I imagined she had—then she’d know about me, maybe even seen a picture of me attached to one of the news stories. But unless she really paid attention to what my face looked like, then I thought my new look would probably fool her.
I passed a library and went inside, finding a free computer and opening up an internet browser. I hadn’t found out too much from my search through Henry’s apartment the night before, but I’d found a little more than the limerick. There had been a stack of books on Henry’s desk, including the 2003 yearbook from Dartford-Middleham High School. I’d found pictures of both Joan Whalen, then called Joan Grieve, and Richard Seddon. Two other books on his desk interested me; they were both volumes of poetry by Elizabeth Grieve, who I guessed was Joan Grieve’s sister. In the slimmer of the two volumes, a book called Sea Oat Soup, Henry had left a pencil marking a poem called “Tides.” Its subtitle was “Kennewick, 1999,” and Henry had faintly underlined the word Kennewick with the pencil. At first, I wondered if he’d done that because of our connection to Kennewick. It was the town where Ted and Miranda Severson （rest in peace to both of them） had been building their dream house. But Henry had also underlined the word sister and the word drowned in the poem, and I’d made a mental note to investigate it later when I could get on an anonymous computer.
It took a while but I eventually found what I was looking for. There had been a drowning off the jetty in Kennewick in the year 2000. A teenager named Duane Wozniak who had been accompanied by an unnamed girl also staying at the Windward Resort. There was very little information but in one of the articles I found it mentioned that a Richard Seddon, Duane’s cousin, had also been staying with the Wozniaks at the resort. It all fell into place. I’d learned what Henry had learned, maybe not all he learned but enough. Richard and Joan had been involved in at least three incidents that had resulted in death. The first was the drowning of Duane Wozniak in Kennewick in 2000. The second was the school shooting three years later in Dartford, and the third was the death of Joan’s husband and Joan’s husband’s girlfriend. Actually, there were four incidents, because now Richard Seddon was dead in an explosion at the offices of the private investigator who’d been hired by Joan.