Richard had thought about that encounter multiple times since it had happened. Danny had been the kid that Richard had agreed to murder on the same day that James Pursall shot Madison Brown. Of course, Richard hadn’t done it—had never planned on doing it—but he could have, and Danny had zero fucking idea that his customer was an old member of his high school class, let alone someone who could have sprayed his brains all across the art room.

  On a few occasions Richard had driven back to the dealership around closing time and watched Danny Eaton leave and get into his C6 Corvette parked out front. He followed him a few times, once when Danny went straight home to his town house condo, and once when he drove to a sports bar called Fair Ball in a strip mall off Route 23. Richard’s plan was to drive to the dealership before closing time and slide one of his bombs right below the passenger-side door of Danny’s Corvette. Then he’d park next door in front of the sushi place and activate the trigger just as Danny reached for his door handle. The only thing stopping him was the possibility of getting caught before he had a chance to do something truly momentous. Danny Eaton’s death, like his life, was small potatoes.

  “Hi, Richard,” came a familiar woman’s voice, and Richard swam back up from his thoughts, found himself face to face with Karen Virgilio, her eyes wide and nervous.

  “Hey, Karen,” Richard said, surprised that his voice sounded almost normal in his own head. He hadn’t seen Karen in over a year, and hadn’t expected to ever see her again, to be honest.

  “Sorry to bother you at work, but I think your number changed, maybe.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Richard said. He remembered that Karen used to call him on his landline, the one he’d disconnected.

  “You can say no, if you want, Richard,” she said, and she was doing that thing with her earlobe, where she twisted it between her thumb and finger, “but I was hoping we could talk, maybe get a drink or a meal or something.”

  “Um,” Richard said, not knowing what to say but sure that he didn’t want to talk with Karen, not now, not ever. He was briefly saved by George, waddling across the linoleum, spotting Karen and saying, “Oh, hey you,” clearly not remembering her name.

  “Hi, Mr. Koestler,” she said.

  “Look at your new hair color,” George said, too loudly. “Last time I saw you I think it was a hot pink.”

  Karen touched her hair, and Richard realized that she had dyed it a different color, this time a kind of frosty blue. Richard also remembered that when Karen had been an employee at the hardware store, just over a year ago, George had mentioned her hair just about every time he spoke to her. Richard sometimes thought that the comments were the reason she quit abruptly after working at the store for less than six months, but he knew the real reason she’d quit was because of what had happened with him.

  “Oh, yeah,” Karen said. “It used to be pink.”

  George stood smiling for a moment, trying to think up something else to say, then wandered off, nodding to himself.

  Karen turned back to Richard just as he started to say, “I just don’t think—”

  But Karen was saying, “I know you don’t want to talk but maybe you’d do it as a favor to me. I promise I don’t expect anything from you, besides a conversation.”

  They met that night at the Papa Gino’s that was only a half mile from the store, each getting a large soda, then sitting in one of the booths that still had one of those individual jukeboxes attached to the wall, although it was highly doubtful it worked.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” Karen said. She was wearing the same outfit she’d worn when she’d ambushed him at the store, a baggy flannel shirt and a pair of high-waisted faded jeans. Her outfits stayed the same even if her hair didn’t. She’d been a cutter in high school and both of her forearms were lined with thin white scars, whiter even than her pale skin. He was picturing her naked now, that time, the only time, she’d come back to his place when they’d been dating. She was skinny, her body creased with red marks where her bra and underwear had been after she took them off. She’d shaved her pubic hair and it had left behind angry red spots, like a razor rash. She’d stretched out on his futon bed, and she must have seen something in the way he looked at her, because she said, “I don’t care what we do or anything, but it would be nice if you joined me on the bed.”

  This was after three dates, all initiated by Karen. On the first they’d gone for dinner at the Papa Gino’s they were at now, but on their second and third dates they’d driven to the Fine Arts theater in Maynard to see The Shape of Water and then a film with Kristen Stewart called Personal Shopper. During the second film they’d held hands in the theater, Richard telling himself that Karen would be a good person to have sex with, since it was still something he’d never actually done.

  He’d joined her on his bed that night, stripping down first, but not all the way, just to his boxer shorts. “I suck at this,” Karen said, and laughed.

  Richard was about to tell her he hadn’t done it before but stopped himself. His heart felt strange, as though it had slipped out of place in his chest cavity, but he did have an erection, pressing up against the fabric of his boxers.

  “You okay?” Karen asked.

  “Sure,” Richard said. “It’s just been a while.”

  Karen moved his hand down between her legs, and Richard closed his eyes while he touched her, trying not to think about all the sounds he used to hear coming from his mother’s bedroom after she’d married Don.

  “Let’s put this over us, okay?” Karen said, and while they moved their bodies to get underneath the sheet—Richard trying to remember the last time he’d cleaned it—he wound up on top of her, and Karen took a hold of him and guided him inside of her. He immediately came, his head burrowed into her neck, keeping quiet so she wouldn’t know it just happened. She started to move and make noises and Richard froze, not knowing what to do. When she stopped and asked him if everything was okay, he told her he had finished, and she laughed and said she was happy.

  They’d gone to one more movie after that night, something called Lady Macbeth, although it had nothing to do with the Shakespeare play, and afterward Richard told Karen that it wasn’t a good time for him to be in a relationship. A month later she’d quit the hardware store.

  “Hey, Richard, I’m sorry if this is uncomfortable for you. Trust me, it’s uncomfortable for me, too.” Karen looked extra pale in the harsh light of the pizza restaurant. She had a nose ring that looked like it had been put in recently, the skin around the piercing bright red.

  “It’s fine,” Richard said.

  “Look, I’m going through a thing. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but I just need to know what happened with us. I know we just hung out for a short period of time, and that it was no big deal, but I keep going over it and over it in my mind, and I want to know why you didn’t want to see me anymore.”

  Richard spun his coke on the tabletop and didn’t immediately say anything.

  “There are absolutely no wrong answers, Richard. Like if you found me repulsive then please just tell me that. Or if you were bored, or you’re gay, or I was terrible at sex, or you hated the movies I made you go to. Just … I guess I want to know because it bothers me that I don’t. I want to know the truth.”

  Richard pressed his lips together and looked up from his soda. “I mean,” he said, “it was nothing to do with you. Not really. It was—”

  “Please just tell me,” Karen said, rising a little in her seat. “Sorry to interrupt, but it’s never entirely just about one person, is it? I mean, if I was your perfect match in the whole universe, you’d have tried to make it work, right? There must have been something about me that you didn’t like.”

  Richard was now shaking his head, and for one terrible moment he felt an ache in his throat and thought that he might cry. Words were running through his mind, as though maybe he could just tell her about everything, just let her inside. But as soon as he had that thought it went away. There was too much to tell, for one thing, and too many things to tell that would scare her away. She wouldn’t begin to understand who he really was.

  Sometimes, in hard or awkward moments, Richard would think to himself: What would Joan do? She understood the world, the social world, in a way he never would. So he thought about it now, and he said to Karen, who was rubbing at an earlobe, “I’m into someone else, actually. She’s someone I knew back in high school and now we’ve reconnected, and … the truth is, I guess … the truth is that I’m in love with her and I can’t really be with anyone else.”

  Karen was nodding, and he realized he’d said something that was helpful. “Was she … were you two together when we were together?”

  “Oh, no,” Richard said, before he could stop himself. “I was thinking about her, though. She got married to someone else, but that’s over now. No. We’re not together, it’s just that …”

  “She’s the one for you,” Karen said, and spun her own soda around, taking a big sip through the straw.

  Later, that night while he was in bed, Richard went over the rest of the conversation with Karen, and how he’d told her a little bit about his relationship with Joan. Most was made up, but not all of it. And for whatever reason he was now thinking about Karen again instead of Joan, imagining a scenario where he would tell her even more than he’d already told her, maybe even tell her that the only time he’d had sex was with her. He imagined them doing it again, only this time Richard would last and last, Karen begging him for more.

  He was still thinking about Karen at the hardware store the next day while he was restocking the plumbing aisle. Maybe she’d come back to see him again, but he doubted it. When they’d said good night, she’d seemed happy, as though she’d gotten what she’d come for.

  Richard was crouched over a box when he felt a tap on his shoulder, a man’s voice saying, “Excuse me.”

  CHAPTER 26

  KIMBALL

  On the Emerson College website there was a phone number for Elizabeth Grieve, and also a listing of her office hours. I figured that if I called her directly on her line during her office hours there was a good chance she might pick up.

  I still hadn’t decided what to say yet. All I really wanted to establish was that she’d been at the Windward Resort, with her sister Joan, at the time that Duane Wozniak had drowned. If she confirmed that, then that would be one too many coincidences that linked Joan Grieve and Richard Seddon.

  I did think about calling her up and telling her that I was doing a deep analysis of her poem, “Tides,” from her chapbook Sea Oat Soup, then asking if I could interview her about it. That was a stretch, though. Even if Elizabeth Grieve had illusions of grandeur there was no way she’d buy some critical theorist calling up out of the blue to dissect a poem she’d published in a book that had a print run of two hundred copies.

  So I tried to come up with other ways to ask her. While thinking about it, I read through her poems again. It seemed clear to me that during a trip to Maine (and Kennewick was mentioned twice) she’d discovered that she was a lesbian. There were actually two mentions of her sister in the book, the one that referred to her as being “the tender age of murderers” and that she’d gone swimming with a boy who hadn’t come back. The other mention was vaguer. It was in a poem called “Moonsnail,” and the line went, “my sister has broken out in scales / and they look ravishing on her.” But that was a throwaway line in a poem that seemed devoted to the character of “you,” the sporty girl she’d met on that vacation. I got distracted and wrote a limerick on the back inside cover of Sea Oat Soup.

  There once was a poet named Grieve,

  Whose poems would have you believe

  That at a summer resort

  She met a girl in a skort

  And lost the one thing she couldn’t retrieve.

  Ten minutes after her office hours started, I dialed her number.

  “Professor Grieve here,” she said, her voice throaty and deep, not at all like Joan’s.

  “Oh, hi Professor. You don’t know me but I’m a private investigator, and I was wondering if you had five minutes to answer a couple of questions for me.”

  “Okay,” she said, drawing out the word.

  “Oh, great, great. Sorry to bother you during your office hours, but I thought I’d take a chance. As I said, I’m a private investigator and we’ve been hired to look into an event that occurred back in 2000 at the …” I paused a little as though I was looking it up. “… at the Windward Resort in Kennewick, Maine.”

  “Oh, that,” she said.

  “So you were there?”

  “Is this about the kid who drowned?”

  “Actually, it is. Duane Wozniak. According to the resort’s records you were a guest at the time of the accident.”

  “Yeah, I was there with my family. But I think maybe you want to talk with my sister, Joan.”

  “Because she knew Duane,” I said, hoping I sounded like I knew what I was talking about.

  “Yeah, right. What is this about, anyway? I’m confused. Is someone suggesting that it wasn’t an accident?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I’m not authorized, of course, to divulge my client’s name, but we were tasked to just look into the events that led to his death. I don’t think there’s any suggestion that there was any wrongdoing on anyone’s part.”

  “Well, like I said. I didn’t know him, and I don’t know anything about what happened except for what my sister told me, so I suggest you talk with her.”

  “I will, Elizabeth. So you never met him while you were at the resort?”

  “I remember seeing him, I guess, but my sister and I, both then and now, are not particularly close. I was doing my own thing there, and she was doing hers. He talked her into going out on that jetty on the beach at night, and he was showing off and slipped into the water.”

  I knew I was beginning to push it, but I asked her, “So you had no interactions with Duane Wozniak or Richard Seddon?”

  “Who’s Richard Seddon?”

  “Oh, he was Duane’s cousin. They were sharing a room together.”

  “No, I didn’t. Like I said, you’re talking with the wrong sister.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said. “You’ve been helpful. It’s really just a matter of crossing you off a list of people I’m supposed to talk with.”

  “Well, I’m glad you were able to cross me off that list.” Maybe she thought that sounded harsh, so she laughed after she said it. “How did you find me?”

  “Well, I have the guest register from the time when the event happened, and I’m contacting people from it.”

  “Are you contacting everyone who was staying at Windward Resort at the time?”

  “Well, not everyone, of course, but anyone we think might have had some contact with Duane Wozniak.”

  There was a pause, then Elizabeth said, “This is a strange question, but have you contacted someone named Denise Smith?”

  “The name doesn’t ring a bell. I don’t think she’s on my list.”

  “Never mind. I was just wondering.”

  “Should she be on my list?”

  “Oh, no. I was just curious, honestly. There’s zero chance she had anything to do with Duane Wozniak.”

  After ending the phone call, I spun on my office chair and looked out at Oxford Street, bathed in sunlight even though I could see a bank of clouds moving in from the west. I wondered if I’d made a bad mistake in calling Elizabeth, if she was on the phone right now to her sister to warn her that a private investigator might call to ask about Duane Wozniak and the Windward Resort. Somehow, I didn’t think so, though. As she said, they weren’t that close. And even if she did contact Joan, making the phone call might have been the right move. I’d gotten crucial information. Not only had Joan Grieve been at the Windward Resort when Richard Seddon had been there, but she’d been with Richard’s cousin Duane when he’d drowned.

  The way I now saw it was that Joan Grieve had been personally involved in three separate instances where someone or several someones had died. The first was that she was with Duane Wozniak in the year 2000 when he drowned at night in the ocean. The second was the death of Madison Brown and James Pursall in her honors English class three years later, and now she had lost her husband in a murder-suicide. Out of those three events, Richard Seddon was tangentially involved in the first two. He was staying in the same room as Duane Wozniak, his cousin, at the Windward Resort. And he was best friends with James Pursall. It made me think he might have had something to do with the death of Richard Whalen and Pam O’Neil, as well.