“I doubt it. No, I’m sure he didn’t. He was only there a year, you know. Mr. Kimball. He came in as a student teacher for my honors English class and then he stayed on.”
“What kind of teacher was he?”
“Oh,” Joan said. “He was kind of like the cliché of an English teacher, if you know what I mean. He was really into it, especially poetry, and he wore ties sometimes, and you’d always see him smoking in the parking lot. It’s weird because he was probably only a few years older than me back then, but he seemed older, you know, because he was a teacher.”
“So what made you pick him when you were looking for someone to investigate your husband?”
“I wanted a detective to confirm what I knew about my husband, so I googled local ones. I saw Mr. Kimball’s name and it made me wonder if it was the same Henry Kimball who’d been my teacher. So I looked him up, and it seemed like it was him. He’d become a police officer, right, after leaving teaching?”
“He was my partner for a while, yes.”
“And there was some kind of controversy. He was suspended.”
The detective said, “Something like that.”
“So yeah. I realized I probably knew him. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but I booked an appointment, and it was him, and he agreed to do the job. Obviously, I feel a little bit bad about it because of what he walked in on, but, honestly, I had no idea.”
“No, I’m sure you didn’t.” The detective pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket and checked it.
Joan said, “Is there a chance I can see him?”
“Not now there isn’t. Like I said, he’s not responsive, and it’s only really family who have been in.”
“No, I understand. It’s good that I got a chance to talk with you. I don’t know what it was but when I heard the news I needed to come here.”
The detective nodded, put the phone back in her jacket, then reached into another pocket to pull out a card. “You’ll call me if you think of anything else, any other connection there might be between Richard Seddon and Mr. Kimball. Even if it seems unimportant.”
“Of course. But I don’t think I’ll think of something. I honestly haven’t heard his name in years.”
The detective stood up, and so did Joan. They shook hands, the detective’s dry and warm. “One more thing, Mrs. Whalen,” she said. “You were in the classroom during the shooting, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How did Mr. Kimball react?”
“Oh,” Joan said. “He was pretty amazing. He stood his ground and tried to talk that kid into giving up his gun. I mean, it didn’t work, but he tried. Everyone else in the room—all the other kids—we just cowered on the floor.”
“Okay,” Detective James said, and walked back across the lobby floor.
Joan left the hospital, breathing deeply once she was through the rotating doors. There was mist in the air, and the tops of all the buildings were hidden by low clouds.
She returned to her car, feeling good about her visit. She’d gotten a lot of information, and while it had been unnerving to be interviewed by that police detective, it was obvious she knew absolutely nothing. She was curious, of course, about the connection between her and Henry Kimball and Richard Seddon. That made total sense, since all three of them had been associated with DM High School at the same time. But the detective hadn’t asked anything about Kennewick, hadn’t asked anything about the Fairview library. It was pretty clear there was no evidence that she and Richard were connected, at all. Her only fear was that Mr. Kimball had figured something out, and that if he recovered consciousness, he’d tell what he knew. But what could that even be?
Joan got off Memorial Drive in Cambridge, then got stuck in bad traffic through Harvard Square. At a red light she punched “Henry Kimball” and “address” into her phone and was given lots of listings with the Oxford Street address, but one with another address in Cambridge. She put that one in her GPS and wound up outside a run-down apartment building, where she sat in her car for a while. Would the police have searched Henry Kimball’s apartment? She doubted it. They’d have searched Richard Seddon’s house, of course, since he was the apparent perpetrator of the bombing, but Henry was just the victim. Joan wondered if it made sense for her to try to get in there, just on the off chance Henry had written something down. It was a huge risk, though. It was one thing for her to show up at the hospital, but another thing entirely for her to break into his apartment. Besides, she didn’t know how to break into apartments.
She drove back to Dartford, and it wasn’t until she was pulling onto her street that she remembered her mother and her sister were coming over around lunchtime. As soon as she had that thought her phone buzzed, and she looked down to see that a message from her mother had just popped up on her screen. She turned into her driveway. Her sister, Lizzie, was peering through the cut-out window of the front door, and her mother was pacing in the driveway, looking at her phone.
“I’m here, I’m here,” Joan said, getting out of her car.
Her mother came over and hugged her. “Sweetheart, we were so worried. Where did you go?”
Deciding she didn’t want to get into it, Joan said, “I went to a client’s house, just to do an estimate.”
“Seriously, Joan, do they even know what you’ve been through? You need to take some time away from all that.”
Lizzie came over, holding a large casserole dish, and Joan was relieved that it meant they wouldn’t have to hug. “Mom made four pounds of chicken and rice. Please open the front door so I can put this down.”
They ate at the island in the kitchen. The casserole had been something Joan’s mother used to make years ago, and Joan discovered she was famished, eating two heaping portions.
For dessert Joan’s mother found a quart of coffee ice cream in the freezer that had a layer of frost on it, but was otherwise fine. “What I’ve read, Joan,” her mother said, “was that it will really take two whole years for you to get back to a normal life. It’s a whole process, you know.”
“What’s the process when your husband is a murderer?” Joan said.
“Oh, Joan,” her mother said and stretched out to put her hand flat against the island’s tiled top in Joan’s direction.
Joan looked at her sister and thought that Lizzie looked strangely concerned. She said, “It’s probably going to be longer, you know, Joan. I think you must still be in shock.”
“Are you planning on writing a poem about it?” Joan said.
Lizzie shook her head slightly, a half smile on her lips. Joan thought she looked closer to their mother’s age than she did to her own. It wasn’t just the gray hair or the lack of makeup. It was also just the resignation in her body. “Probably not.”
“I don’t care, Lizzie. Feel free to write as many dead brother-in-law poems as you’d like.”
“Oh, that reminds me, Joan,” Lizzie said. “Did you hear from that private detective, the one that’s looking into the boy who drowned in Kennewick?”