“So you’re telling me you killed someone?”
I looked at her, while chewing on the inside of my cheek in a way I knew was visible. “You’re not wearing a wire or anything, are you?”
She made a face like I’d just told her the dumbest thing she’d ever heard. I imagined briefly the succession of girls in Joan’s past who had seen that very face: the elementary school friend who still believed in Santa Claus; the girl in middle school who’d never kissed a boy; a series of mildly bullied friends and enemies.
“Well, are you?” I said.
She stood up and spread her arms out wide. She was wearing a light gray cashmere sweater, tight white jeans, and black boots. I knew she wasn’t wearing a wire, of course, but stood and ran my hands down her sides, feeling a crackle of static electricity. I took off my leather jacket and she did the same for me, checking the pockets.
“I’m only telling you because I know that Richard trusted you,” I said, “so I suppose I trust you too. When I was in high school, I found out that my best friend was seeing this much older guy, a professor at a nearby university. He’d been invited to give a reading to our English class and that’s how she met him. She told me everything about him, how he was getting her involved in all this creepy sex stuff, and how he’d started to hurt her. I knew the guy, as well, because the three of us had hung out, and he’d hit on me a bunch of times. So one night I went over and told him I wanted to talk with him but in his car. We sat in his back seat, and I made him close his eyes, which was really easy because he thought it was a sex thing. And I slit his throat with a kitchen knife.”
Joan was watching me, and I could tell she wasn’t sure whether to believe me or not. “It wasn’t easy,” I said. “And I knew that if his body was ever found I would get caught. So I made sure to hide that car, and his body in it, in a place that no one would ever find. And they never did. He’s a missing person’s case, now, and that’s all he’ll ever be.”
“Wow,” Joan said. I still didn’t know if she believed me. The story wasn’t true. The part about my friend and the creepy older professor was, however. And I had definitely formed a plan to kill that man and hide him in his car. I had even begun to dig a hole in some nearby woods, but I had never gone forward with it. My friend had stopped seeing the professor, and I hadn’t completed the hole, and I let it go. But sometimes I remember it as something that actually happened, just like occasionally I pretend things that have happened actually didn’t.
“So you told Richard all that?”
“I told him on the message board. Well, I told everyone on the message board because it was anonymous. But then he and I started sending private messages back and forth and eventually we told each other our real names. And then, eventually, we met.”
“And what did he tell you?”
“He was really vague, at first. He said he’d been involved in two incidents he could talk about. The first was when his cousin drowned in Maine when he was just fifteen. And the second was a school shooting. He didn’t go into specifics, but he said that he had help from the same person in both circumstances.”
“And he said that person was me,” Joan said.
“He didn’t, actually. Not at first. He said it was a girl, and that he would never tell me your name, even though he trusted me. He wouldn’t have, either. But then that detective showed up, and he really freaked out.” I lowered my voice, and leaned in. “We met, the two of us, at the place we always meet. It’s this divey bar in Waltham, and he told me how he was involved with the murder-suicide that had happened in Bingham. I knew all about it, because it was big news, and I was just interested, I guess. I’d read about it, and I read how both the dead man and his wife had gone to the same high school. To Dartford-Middleham. And I read your name, and I knew. I mean, I knew even before I googled you and found out that you had been one of the survivors of the school shooting. I told Richard, our Richard, about it, saying your name, and he tried to deny it but he couldn’t. I saw it in his eyes, and eventually he told me that you were the one. He didn’t want to tell me, but he knew he was caught out.
“The other thing you need to know is that at this point he wasn’t worried about my knowing who you were, he was worried about the detective. That detective had tracked him down, and asked him all these questions, and Richard knew that it was just a matter of time. The last thing he told me was that he was going to take care of it.”
Joan was thinking. I had tried to keep things vague enough, to make it look as though I only had the most general picture of what had happened, so that I wouldn’t screw up a detail. I knew that she wanted to trust me.
When she finally spoke, she said, “Do you know if Richard meant to kill himself at the same time as Henry Kimball, or was it an accident?”
I leaned back in my chair, realizing just how tense my body had been. “I don’t know,” I said.
Joan turned her head slightly, her eyes on a tall painting on the wall, a full-body portrait of some long-dead library patron, holding a leather-bound book in one hand. She was deciding whether she could trust me or not, and I honestly didn’t know which way she would go. But when she turned her eyes back to me I knew somehow before she spoke that I had hooked her.
“You think if Henry Kimball lives, he’ll be able to prove that Richard killed my husband?” she said.
We stayed in the library for another hour. As far as we knew no one had even come up to the balcony level all afternoon. I left first, walking briskly to my car that I had parked along the street instead of in the lot. I’d been stupid to not change the license plates and if she’d left first, then there would have been a possibility of her seeing me get in a car with Connecticut plates. Driving back to Cambridge I told myself that I needed to be even more careful moving forward, especially now that I knew what I had to do.
I was sick of eating out, so I bought a sandwich at a sub shop in Huron Village, and took it back to the apartment. It had just gotten dark, and there were no lights on in any of Henry’s windows. I went upstairs and pushed open the door, stepping inside, and heard the sound of Pye jumping from the bed to the floor, then bounding toward me. I looked him in the eye to see if he was disappointed it was me returning to the apartment and not Henry. I couldn’t tell. Maybe he was simply hungry.
After eating I got into bed and continued to read The Green Marriage, but only managed a chapter before putting it back on the bedside table. I turned off the light and went over the entirety of the conversation with Joan Whalen. The more we had talked the more I had sensed in her the excitement she felt at what we were planning to do. I don’t think I generally understand people, but I had understood Joan that afternoon. She and Richard had taken lives together, and once you’ve done that and gotten away with it, everything else in life pales a little. And now she’d found me—not me, exactly, but Addie Logan—and her life was exciting again. It wasn’t meaning she was after, but the thrill of transgression.
“How are you planning on killing him?” she’d asked me.
“I’m going to smother him with a pillow. It shouldn’t be too hard.”