The Kind Worth Killing (24 page)

I thought for a moment, telling myself that the real answer was a resounding
no
. “I could see that,” I said. “He lived a charmed life and nothing bad had ever happened to him. You'd think that, with all the money he made . . . but he was pretty trusting.”

Detective Kimball leaned back in his swivel chair and nodded at me. I could feel that we were winding down. It made me nervous. I knew that as soon as he was alone, the detective was going to call Brad, and I did not trust that Brad would handle that call well at all, even though we'd been over what he was going to say a hundred times. I thought about trying to call him first to warn him and calm him down, then realized that there would be phone records, that the police would know I called him immediately after identifying him in a sketch.

“You know,” I said, realizing that it was important that I didn't hide any information from the police. “I actually saw Brad Daggett yesterday morning. I needed to tell him to suspend work on the house. I was on my way up to Maine.”

“Oh.” The detective let the chair tilt forward.

“He was totally normal. A little shocked, I thought, about what happened to Ted.”

“Like I said, we just need to eliminate him. I'm sure he has an alibi. From what you're saying, it doesn't sound like he had anything to do with this. Oh, one other thing, Mrs. Severson, the scene-of-the-crime officers are done at your house, which means you're free to go back there. I didn't know if you'd . . .”

“I need to go back,” I said, “just to pick up some clothes, and then I'll see how I feel about staying there.”

“Okay.” He stood, and so did I. “I need to stay here at the station,” he said, “but can I get an officer to give you a ride back to your car, or to your house?”

“No, thanks. I can take a taxi.”

“Well, then, I'll call you a taxi. I can't thank you enough for coming in and looking at our sketch. You've been very helpful, and in my experience, once we get a likeness, an arrest is not far behind. Someone will know this guy.”

I continued to stand for a moment, hesitant to leave, knowing that things might start to unravel fast. My mind reeled, knowing that Brad would be questioned, probably within hours, by the police. I'd coached him, but not enough. And then there were other things, like the fact that Ted, on that last visit to Kennewick, had met up with Brad and gotten drunk with him at that bar at the beach. It was such an odd thing for Ted to do. It made me wonder about what Brad had said the day before—how he was convinced that Ted knew about us. Maybe he did, but how was that possible? And if he did, would he have told anyone? But even if he hadn't known, the fact that Brad and Ted had drinks together would only make the police more suspicious of Brad.

“You okay?” Detective Kimball asked awkwardly, and I realized he'd caught me standing there, lost in thought, for about five seconds. I dropped my shoulders, pretended to suppress a sob, then looked up at him, and let tears run out of my eyes. He quickly glanced around the office, but I stepped into him and he was forced to take me in his arms. I began to sob, pulling him in close to me, burying my head under his chin. I pressed hard enough so that I could feel my breasts flattening out against his chest. “It's okay, Mrs. Severson,” he said, and put a hand around my shoulders, keeping his other one down by his side. I separated from him, apologizing madly, just as Detective James, his partner, a tall, black woman, floated over, and asked me if I needed anything.

“Just a taxi,” I said. “I'm sorry. So sorry.”

“Don't worry about it. I totally understand.” Detective James had smoothly taken over the distraught widow and was gently but firmly leading me away from Kimball's desk. I stopped and turned.

“Oh, Detective,” I said. “Remember what you asked me yesterday, about whether I knew anyone from Winslow?”

He was still standing, his cell phone in one hand. “Yeah, I remember.”

“I thought of someone. Her name's Lily Kintner. I went to Mather College with her. I'm sure she has nothing to do with why Ted went out there on Friday, but . . .”

“Did they know one another? Were you close with her?”

“No. We weren't. She stole my boyfriend in college, actually, so I'm not a huge fan . . . but Ted and she didn't know . . . well, they might've met a couple of times, if I think about it. I ran into Lily in Boston a couple of years ago.”

“How do you spell her name?”

I told him. There was obviously no connection between Ted and Lily, but I figured it couldn't hurt to give the police another lead to track down. It might delay what now seemed inevitable—that Brad was going to get caught, and that he'd most likely give me up as well.

I told Detective James that I was okay, that I'd just like to leave. “You sure I can't get you a drink of water before you go?” she asked in her husky voice, looking down at me. I figured she was close to six feet tall. She must have been a little bit self-conscious about it, because every time I'd seen her she was wearing flats. Dark pantsuit, collared shirt, and flats. And she never wore jewelry. She made me nervous in a way that Detective Kimball didn't. It wasn't that I thought she suspected me; it was that I truly had no idea what she was thinking. She looked at me the way she might look at a tollbooth collector.

“Can I walk you out, Mrs. Severson?”

“No. I'm fine. And it's Miranda.”

She nodded at me and turned away. I was pretty sure she didn't wear any makeup either.

Detective Kimball must have made a call because when I got to the front of the station a taxi was waiting. It was already dusk, rain beginning. It felt as though the bad weather had followed me all the way down from my mother's house.

I checked out of the Kennewick Inn very early on Tuesday morning, figuring I could drive directly to Winslow College. It didn't make sense to miss another day of work and draw attention to myself. I'd drunk two cups of coffee at the inn, but stopped in Kittery at a Dunkin' Donuts for another coffee to go. I was exhausted. Brad and I had talked for several hours the night before, first in his truck, then in the rental cottage that he lived in. Despite what he'd done to Ted, I felt a little bad for Brad. He was a wreck, and once he realized that I wasn't going to turn him in, he latched onto me like a drowning man coming across a lifeboat. He told me he would set up the meeting with Miranda for that night at 10:00
P
.
M
. If she agreed, he would call me at my house from the public phone at Cooley's. He would only let the phone ring twice, but the number would appear on the digital readout on my landline.

I made it into my office before anyone else arrived. After logging in to my work e-mail account, I wasn't surprised to learn that my boss, Otto, had left early on Monday, the previous afternoon, having felt a
cough coming on himself, and that he thought he'd take Tuesday off as well. Otto Lemke was easily the most suggestible man alive, especially when it came to any kind of ailment. Just letting him know on Sunday that I wasn't feeling well had probably sent him into a spiral of psychosomatic illness. I spent the morning writing short descriptions of our archived collections to go on our internal site for students and faculty. When I'd done enough to justify a morning's worth of work, I walked across campus to the student-run café where I got most of my lunches. The rainstorm from the previous day had left the world looking bright and washed, like a car emerging from a car wash. The cloudless sky was a deep metallic blue. The air was crisp and smelled of apples. At the café I got curried tuna salad on wheat, and took my sandwich out to one of the stone benches with a view of the line of oak trees, bright red and bristling in the high breeze, that split Winslow's main quad. My life was good, and I wondered briefly why I'd gotten involved in the sordid affairs of Miranda and Ted and Brad. What I was planning on doing in Kennewick tomorrow night was a huge risk. It was dependent on Brad, who was so fragile you could almost see the cracks in him, and it was also dependent on Miranda's not becoming suspicious when Brad suggested the meeting. I felt exposed, and less than 100 percent confident, but knew that I had gone this far, and would go to the end. Ted deserved to be avenged, and Miranda deserved to be punished, now more than ever.

That afternoon I had scheduled an off-site visit to a former student, now in her eighties, who was offering to donate items from her school years to the archives. These visits were often the best part of my job, and sometimes the worst. It all depended on the lucidity and expectations of the former student or professor. Sometimes all they had were a few battered textbooks and some class notes; these were often lonely people looking for someone to talk with for a while, someone who would have to listen to long tales from their college days. Sometimes, however, these former students would turn out to have treasure troves of archival materials. These were the girls who kept
everything. The printed menus from the Midwinter Formal of 1935. Photographs from the March blizzard of 1960, when the drifts of snow were seven feet high. A handwritten poem from when May Gylys was the visiting writer. I never knew what to expect with these visits, and I only scheduled them when the person was within close driving distance. Otherwise, we would ask the donors to mail us their materials.

I nearly canceled that afternoon's visit. I was still tired from lack of sleep, and was not sure that I had it in me to accompany some stranger down her own personal memory lane. But I told myself that I should keep my schedule as normal as possible, so I went, driving several towns west to Greenfield, where Prudence Walker, class of 1958, lived. She was raking leaves when I arrived and had filled several bags, all of which had already been placed on her curb for pickup. Her house was a neat, orderly Cape Cod in a neighborhood of Colonials and deck houses. I pulled into her driveway behind a new-model Camry, and Prudence Walker put down her rake and came over to greet me.

“Hello, there. Thank you so much for coming out. You've done an old lady a huge favor.” She was wearing a faded denim skirt and a green windbreaker. Her gray hair was pulled back in a bun.

“It's not a problem,” I said, getting out of my car.

“It's all boxed up, and right there on the front step. I'd carry it over to you, but it took all I had to get it from the attic to where it's sitting. Apparently, back then, I decided I needed to keep
everything
. Most of it's my scrapbooks, but I included all my notes from class, and syllabi, and there's a bunch of exam papers, as well. You said you wanted those, didn't you?”

“I'll take it all. Thank you, again, for this.”

I walked over to the front step, and picked up the heavy box. Prudence Walker came with me, walking with an uneven gait that dipped her right shoulder down every time she took a step with her right leg.

“I hate to make you drive all the way out here, then send you off
just like that, but I'm trying to get all these leaves raked up before we lose the sun. Can I get you a glass of water, or anything?”

“No, thanks,” I said, loading the box into my trunk.

As I backed out of the driveway, I watched her walk unsteadily back to the rake she had left leaning against a maple tree. I felt a surge of love for this woman, so willing to discard her old life, to not look back, but really I was just grateful that I didn't need to sit for an entire afternoon going through scrapbooks.

I dropped the box back at Winslow, answered a few more e-mails, then drove to my house, a cottage-style two-bedroom built in 1915. It overlooked a picturesque pond, lousy for swimming (it bred mosquitoes all summer), but decent for ice-skating in the cold winter months. I checked my phone, and there was no call yet from Cooley's. My doctor's office had called to remind me of an appointment, and my mother had called but had not left a message. It wasn't yet five o'clock, and I thought I'd try to take a short nap before making dinner. I lay down on the couch in my living room, and just as I was falling into a light sleep, the doorbell chimed and I jerked upright, confused for a second about where I was. I ran my fingers through my hair, stood, and walked to the foyer. I peered through the leaded glass that ran along the side of the front door. A slightly shaggy-looking man in his thirties stood there, scratching at the back of his neck. I partially opened the door, keeping the chain on.

“Can I help you?” I said.

“Are you Lily Kintner?” said the man, pulling his wallet out of his herringbone tweed jacket. Before I had a chance to answer, he flipped the wallet open to show a Boston PD Detective badge. “I'm Detective Kimball. Do you mind if I have a quick word?”

I unchained the door and swung it open. He scraped his feet on my welcome mat and stepped inside the house. “I like this house,” he said, glancing around.

“Thank you. What can I help you with? You've got me curious.” I took a few slow steps into the living room and he followed me.

“Well, your name has come up in an investigation, and I have a few questions. Do you have a moment?”

I offered him the red leather club chair and he perched on its edge. I sat down on the couch. I was scared to hear what he was about to say, but also anxious to hear it.

“What can you tell me about Ted Severson?”

“That man who was killed in Boston over the weekend?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I can tell you what I read in the newspaper, but that's about all. I do have a vague connection with him, but I don't know him. He was married to someone I went to school with.”

“You went to school with Miranda Severson?” The detective pulled a notebook from his coat and flipped it open. He pulled a small nub of a pencil from its spiral binding.

“Yes, Mather College. She was Miranda Hobart then. Faith Hobart actually.”