Chapter 35
Lily
Before returning to Henry’s apartment I parked my car in the Summer Shack lot again, then walked until I found a restaurant that seemed busy enough I wouldn’t be noticed too much. It was a Cuban place on the line between Cambridge and Somerville and I sat at the bar, ordered wine and empanadas.
I wondered how Henry was doing. The last time I’d done a Google search on him nothing new had come up, which told me that he was probably still alive.
My wine arrived, delivered by a heavily tattooed bartender who had hair almost as blond as mine, although hers was down past her shoulders. “Here you go, hon,” she said, and I could see myself through her eyes, how my appearance—dyed hair, nose ring, thrift-store cardigan—somehow made me more approachable than I usually was. I sipped my wine and wondered what Joan Grieve Whalen was thinking about me right now. I’d upset her, as I’d known I would, but I didn’t know yet if my upsetting her was going to bring her closer to me or not. My plan was to wait a few days, to see if she tried to get in touch with me. I thought she probably would, just to find out how much I really knew, and to find out if I was serious when I’d told her I wanted to be her friend.
The question now was where I should wait for her. It was increasingly risky for me to be staying in Henry Kimball’s empty apartment, although I liked spending time with Pye. But the longer I hid there the higher the chances that someone would see me. And it was possible it would be someone who would recognize me. I was thinking specifically of Detective Roberta James, Henry’s ex-partner, and someone who I suspected was taking a keen interest in what had happened to Henry in recent weeks.
So I was thinking of returning home, shocking my parents with my new hair, but figuring that I could cover up the temporary tattoos with a pair of jeans. I decided to think about it tomorrow, that it would be fine to spend one more night at Henry’s place.
It turned out I didn’t need to make a decision about where to go next. The following morning at seven my burner phone rang while I was getting ready to leave Henry’s apartment to go seek out coffee and breakfast.
“Hi,” I said into the phone, finding myself naturally using the same nervy voice that I’d given Addie the day before when I’d met with Joan.
“It’s Joan.”
“I know,” I said. “Thank you for calling me.”
“I thought maybe we could continue our conversation from yesterday. I’d like to know everything Richard said about me.”
“You were really important to him.”
“Well . . . we can talk about that.”
“Okay. Where do you want to meet? I could come to that same place again.”
“No. Let’s go somewhere where we can sit and talk for a while. Where do you live?”
“I live in Allston but I can meet you anywhere you want to meet,” I said.
“So there’s a library in Fairview.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let’s meet there at two this afternoon. I’ll find somewhere to sit where no one can hear us talk. Just wander around until you find me.”
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll see you then.”
I sat for a moment thinking about the phone conversation then left the apartment and walked back to my car, driving west toward Fairview. I didn’t know where the town library was, but it wouldn’t be too hard to find. I wondered why she’d picked a library for our meeting place. I suppose she wanted someplace public but also private, a place where we could sit and talk, and other people wouldn’t necessarily see us.
It was another nice fall day and as I took back roads across rural Massachusetts I thought about the years I’d spent here, as an archivist for Winslow College. I’d loved so much about that time in my life. I had a sense of purpose, and a small house of my own. When I had free time I would either read or walk in the woods. It was ideal, in a way, but thinking back on that time now it was all a blur of interchangeable days. I thought much more about the times in my life when I was changing the world around me and not just existing in it. I thought about what I’d done to that predator named Chet who had stayed at my parents’ spare apartment the summer I turned fourteen. I thought about my first and only love, Eric Washburn. And I thought constantly about the events of just a few years ago when I’d met Ted Severson and agreed to help him murder his wife. Nothing good had come of it, any of it really, except for the fact that it led me to Henry Kimball, and the strange relationship that we now shared.
I passed Fruitlands, a nature preserve and the historical site of the farmhouse where Amos Bronson Alcott failed to establish a commune based on transcendentalism and the Shaker religion. It was a place I had visited often when I lived in the area and I pulled into its parking lot now. The buildings weren’t open to visitors but I wandered the woods for an hour, at one point sitting in the hollow base of a twisted apple tree, and just watching the natural world. A family of turkeys wandered by, and chipmunks rustled through the fallen leaves. On my way back I passed a hay meadow that had been recently mown, and saw a dark fox that looked as though it had found a nest of mice. He spotted me too, and we stared at one another for a while before he decided I was not a threat and continued digging in his meadow.
On the way back to my car I passed the farmhouse, remembering a tour I’d taken years ago and how everyone in our group had laughed when the tour guide said that the Shaker religion forbade procreation. A man had laughed and said, “I wonder why that religion’s not around anymore?” as though he’d been the first person to ever say that. And I remembered thinking at the time that I could get behind a religion that would eventually lead to the end of the human race, the world returned to birds and animals.
I arrived at the library exactly at two in the afternoon, after spending the intervening hours at a diner in the next town over. The library was a hundred-year-old structure of brick and slate roof, with a large addition that looked as though it had been added sometime in the 1970s. I pushed my way through the front doors into the familiar smell that was a combination of well-preserved books and the acidity of newsprint. It was quiet in the library on a weekday afternoon, a few mothers with small children in the annex to the left of the front desk. I turned right and headed into the high-ceilinged main room, an open balcony running along three of its sides. I cut down one of the aisles between shelves and found a small seating area but no one was there. I wandered the entire first floor, only spotting an elderly man, asleep with that day’s Boston Globe across his lap. I climbed a spiral staircase to the balcony level, lined with shorter shelves, and found Joan in one corner, seated on a wooden chair that was upholstered in sturdy green fabric. She held a hardcover book, Full Dark, No Stars, by Stephen King. I sat down across from her.
“Tell me everything Richard said about me,” she said, “and keep your voice low.”
I expected this. I knew she wouldn’t admit to anything unless she had total trust in me, and I wasn’t sure I was ever going to get that. But I had to try.
I said, “He wasn’t specific, at all. He said that he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, and he only told me some things because I begged him to. The thing is, the way we met . . . and I’m telling you this in total confidence . . . was from a message board on a website. It’s not there anymore, but it was an anonymous place where you could talk about how you’d gotten away with murder. We met there, and eventually we shared our real emails, and then eventually we met—”