What if Richard Seddon and Joan Grieve had met at Windward Resort all those years ago and plotted to murder Duane Wozniak? What if they’d been so thrilled to get away with it that they’d decided to keep planning murders? It sounded ludicrous, I realized. For one, James Pursall had pulled the trigger in my classroom, not Richard Seddon. Did I really think that somehow Richard or Joan had made it happen? Had they talked him into it?

  And what about the deaths of Richard Whalen and Pam O’Neil? If Richard Seddon had been involved then how would that have worked? Would he have been waiting for them in the house? If so, where was his car?

  My afternoon, like most of my afternoons, was free. I drove back out to the northwest suburbs, a drive I was getting very used to. By the time I reached the deck house in Bingham that was still for sale, the dark clouds I’d first noticed in Cambridge were smothering the sky, and light rain had begun to fall. I pulled directly into the driveway, not worrying about anyone seeing me, then got out of the car and looked at the house. It was exactly as I remembered it, a brown deck house that blended into the woods around it. The last time I was here I’d heard the three gunshots coming from inside and forced myself to go in and look. I could remember every detail of what I’d found.

  Instead of trying the front door I went around the side of the house, walking across the narrow strip of lawn that led to the back of the property, with a screened-in back porch and another narrow strip of lawn bordering the thick woods. The rain was picking up, coming in gusts, and I turned up the collar of my Harris Tweed jacket. I walked over and looked at the door that led to the porch, tried it but it was locked. The lock was a spring latch, and I considered digging out a credit card to find out how easy it was to open but decided against it. Instead, I skirted the edge of the property, spotting what looked like a seldom-used path heading into the woods. About fifty yards along the path it met up with a definite trail, the ground hard-packed soil, and the trees cut back. I turned right and walked slowly. It was dark in the woods, but the rain had either temporarily stopped or was not penetrating the thickly clustered pine trees. I passed a tree that had a blaze of yellow paint on it, so I knew I was on some sort of official trail. I walked through a clearing, disturbing a trio of crows that scattered from the ground to lower branches, cawing at one another, and probably me. Then I reached a road. A small sign nailed into a tree told me I’d been walking in the Bingham Town Forest. There was no parking lot at the trailhead but the road widened a little and there were tire ruts along the side of the road. I crouched and looked at one of them, pretending for a moment that I was the type of detective that could look at treads and know what kind of tire had made them.

  I reversed course back through the woods, managing to find the path that led to the deck house. Sitting in my car, the heater running, I now knew that it was entirely possible that someone else had been in the house on the day that Richard and Pam had been shot. The killer could have parked along a parallel road and gone through the woods. I would never have seen them from the front of the house. There was no definitive proof that this had happened, but I’d learned it was a possibility.

  I sat there for a while, making assumptions as I’d been doing all day.

  Joan’s husband was having an affair and she decided she wanted to kill him, plus the woman he was cheating with. She knew she couldn’t do it herself, but she had an accomplice. He was an outcast named Richard Seddon and they’d killed together before, or at least instigated murders. So she contacted him, told him the place that her husband conducted his afternoon trysts, and Richard lay in wait, having parked on a nearby street. But even that plan wasn’t good enough, so she decided to add a witness, a detective who would find the bodies, and confirm that it looked like murder followed by a suicide.

  I decided that the time had come to talk with Richard Seddon. If all of what I was thinking was true—if he was the third person—then questioning him might provoke him into contacting Joan. What I really wanted to do was to talk with Lily again, or maybe it was time to talk with Roberta James. Tell her what I knew, and leave it to her. Instead, I formed a plan. Tomorrow morning I would park my car down the street from where Richard Seddon lived in Fairview, and sit and wait for him to go by. I needed to find out where he worked, and if I should approach him there or at his house. I already knew the questions I would ask him, that I would try the same ruse I’d used when talking with Elizabeth Grieve, telling him I was hired to investigate the drowning accident of Duane Wozniak. It would be just plausible enough, and also just suspicious enough that he would contact Joan. And if that happened, then I’d know for sure, and then I could hand the whole thing over to Roberta James and the Bingham Police Department. Easy peasy.

  CHAPTER 27

  RICHARD

  Richard looked up, and there was the man with the jeans and the tweedy jacket that he’d seen outside his house the day before. “Are you Richard Seddon?” the man asked. Richard stood up too fast and immediately felt the blood rushing from his face, and for a brief moment thought he might pass out.

  The man said, “Whoa, you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Richard said.

  “I know you’re working right now, but is there any chance we can have a quick conversation? I have a couple of questions for you. Won’t take long.”

  “Okay, sure,” Richard said, regretting the words as soon as they came out of his mouth. He was working, after all, and he could have told the guy he’d talk with him later.

  But they wound up stepping outside, and walking to the picnic table on the strip of grass across the parking lot, Richard telling Mr. Koestler he was taking his break.

  Once they were seated, the man slid a card over to Richard and introduced himself. Richard looked at the card even though he’d already realized that the man was Henry Kimball, the old teacher that Joan had hired to follow her husband. Richard’s mind was anticipating questions, desperately trying to decide how he would answer. He was obviously going to be asked something about the murder of Richie Whalen and that woman he was with, or maybe even be asked about Joan Grieve. Should he at least say he’d heard about it? Should he acknowledge that he went to school with both Joan and Richie?

  But the first thing the detective said was far more disturbing than he could have imagined. “Richard, I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about what happened with your cousin Duane Wozniak?”

  “Oh,” Richard said, and he could actually feel his eyes rapidly blinking. “He was my cousin who drowned. Why are you asking about him?”

  The detective smiled. “Sorry. I feel like I just dragged you out of your job, and now I’m throwing crazy questions at you. Let’s back up. All I can tell you is that someone was interested in taking another look at Duane’s drowning death. It’s sort of like a cold case situation. I can’t tell you who my client is, but I need to basically interview people who were there when it happened and just corroborate that what the official police file from the time said is correct.”

  “I’m sure it’s correct.”

  The detective ran his fingers through his disheveled hair, and said, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s correct too. But just so that I can cross this interview off my list, can you tell me what you remember from that time?”

  “Um, it was a while ago. I was with my aunt and uncle and my cousin Duane, and I was sharing a room with Duane. We kind of did our own thing, though, since Duane and I weren’t all that close.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “He was older than me, and he’d made some friends at the resort so basically he was off doing his own thing.”

  “And one of those friends was Joan Grieve, right?” the detective said.

  “I don’t know, maybe,” Richard said.

  “She was with him the night he drowned, right? That’s what the police report said at the time. And I figured that you knew Joan because you went to school with her at Dartford-Middleham, right?”

  “I don’t know her, actually. Didn’t know her. I knew her name, but I’ve never talked with her or anything.”

  “You didn’t talk with her at the Windward Resort when you realized that you knew each other from your hometown?”

  Richard felt a sudden panic that this detective had already questioned Joan and that maybe she’d said they had recognized each other at the resort. He said, “I can’t really remember. I mean, I remember knowing that she was there because she’d been with Duane that night, but I can’t remember if we ever talked or anything. I mean, we weren’t friends.”

  “Right, that makes sense. So at the time you don’t remember thinking there was anything strange about the way in which your cousin died?”

  Richard shook his head no, then quickly added, “Well, it was a strange way to die, drowning at night. It was a shock. The thing about Duane, though, was that he was kind of reckless. I remember thinking at the time that it was the type of stupid thing he would do to impress a girl.”

  “So you didn’t think it was out of character for him to be going out onto the jetty late at night and during a rainstorm?”

  Richard shook his head. “No, not really.”

  “Okay,” the detective said, and rolled his head on his neck like he was trying to get a kink out. Richard now remembered this guy from high school and he looked pretty much the same, one of those English-teacher types who thought they looked cool because they wore a fancy jacket but with crummy jeans. And even though he had messy hair and hadn’t shaved, you could tell the guy thought he was good-looking.

  “Anything else?” Richard said.

  “Not unless you can think of something, honestly,” he said. “Thanks for talking with me during your work hours. I appreciate it.”

  Richard stood up from the picnic table, holding on to it while swinging a leg over the bench. “Oh, one last question,” the school-teacher said, “and then I’ll let you go. Do you keep up with Joan Grieve since high school? I know she doesn’t live too far from here.”

  Richard shook his head, and said, “How could I keep up with her if I never knew her?”

  When he ended his shift, Richard almost decided to drive out to Dartford and go past Joan’s house. He knew where she lived, of course, because he’d looked it up. It was the house Richie Whalen had grown up in. About a year ago he’d even driven past a couple of times just to get a look at it. The only reason he wanted to swing by this evening was on the off chance she’d be out in her yard raking leaves or something and he could catch her eye from the car. But that was ridiculous, the chances being about one in a thousand. If she had an actual workplace then he could swing by and make sure she saw him, but she worked out of her home. Maybe he could call her work line that she listed on her website, and then after she answered he could say he’d dialed the wrong number. Would that be enough for Joan to realize they needed to meet as soon as possible at the library? He didn’t really know, and besides, calling her could be a huge mistake, proving that they’d had contact, breaking their one unbreakable rule.

  Although he’d never given it too much thought, Richard was realizing now that it had always been Joan coming to him, and never the other way around.

  And now that he badly needed to see Joan, and tell her about the private detective, that old schoolteacher Henry Kimball, and how he’d figured something out about their connection, he wasn’t sure how to initiate contact.

  He drove back to his house, wondering if he was being watched. He unlocked the back door, stepping into the kitchen that had belonged to his mother and stepfather. Most nights he didn’t notice the smell of the house as he passed through it to the door that led to the finished basement where he lived since moving down there his sophomore year of high school, but tonight it was worse than usual, both a lingering smell from some member of the raccoon family dying in one of its walls, and something else, animal feces probably, mixed with the persistent smell of mold and mildew. But with the basement door shut behind him he entered his own domain, his heavily fortified basement that contained everything he owned in the world, all the contents of his childhood room, plus his computers, a flat-screen television, and, most importantly, his workstation, where he’d created the small, portable bombs that one day would become his signature achievements.

  He’d lived in the basement so long that he never really registered it in its entirety, but maybe because of the visit from Henry Kimball and the feeling of being watched, he was now seeing it through an outsider’s eyes. There were his old LEGO creations alongside the shelf containing his mother’s romance novels he was somehow unable to throw away. It wasn’t just his mother’s books he kept down here, but he’d also brought down her old armoire, the one she’d gotten from her own mother, that was filled with her best dresses. That armoire was next to the single bed he’d slept in for most of his life, its headboard covered in Pokémon stickers. And while the basement didn’t smell as bad as the house, there was water damage on two of the walls and the smell of mold had been getting worse over the years. And something was wrong with the toilet in the makeshift bathroom he used; the water that flowed into it was rusty brown and smelled like death.

  Of course, he’d burn it all down when he finally made his move. It was really the only reason he’d continued to live in the house after his mother drowned in the upstairs tub and Don moved to the condo in Florida. He’d stockpiled enough gasoline to make sure that there’d be nothing left of this place by the time police detectives and journalists arrived to take a look. No, by then he’d only be known by what he’d done, and not how he’d lived. And it wasn’t like he did anything creepy with his mother’s dresses or her old hairbrushes, but they were all he really had left of her. Most of the time he had fond memories of his mother from the time when it was just the two of them, when she looked out for him. The time before Don.

  After microwaving and eating two burritos Richard got onto his computer and looked up Henry Kimball. Ever since the interview he’d gone over and over the questions he’d been asked, and now he was convinced not only that somehow Kimball had figured out there was a connection between Joan and him, but that he’d figured it all out. He knew about Duane, and about James Pursall, and how they’d arranged Joan’s husband’s death. The only question now was whether there was any way Henry Kimball could prove it. Richard doubted it, because he’d been careful, and Joan had been careful. They always had been. Still, this asshole somehow knew. Had he told anyone else? Or was he just sniffing around, hoping to get more evidence? He wasn’t a real cop, after all. He couldn’t go back into that house in Bingham and start snooping around for DNA. But he could tell someone else to do it, couldn’t he?

  In bed that night he made a decision. There was a good chance that the detective was simply fishing, that he knew nothing. More importantly, he had probably not told anyone about his suspicions. Richard didn’t need Joan for this. He could take care of it himself. And after he took care of the detective it was time for him to put some of his other plans into action. He’d waited too long. The world needed to know his name.

  CHAPTER 28

  KIMBALL

  After meeting with Richard Seddon at the store, I’d returned to my office in Cambridge. I’d already installed the tracking software onto my desktop computer and I booted it up; the magnetic device that I’d attached to Richard’s Altima was telling me he hadn’t left the parking lot of the store yet. I settled in. There was a way to set up alerts so I’d know when he started to move, or if he drove toward Dartford, but I hadn’t figured out how to do that yet. I was happy to sit and wait.

  I had a copy of David Kintner’s worst-reviewed novel, a slim paperback called July and August. I’d never read it, even though I’d had the book for a while. But I was halfway through it, now, thoroughly enjoying the story even though I could see why the critics pounced. It was a thinly veiled account of his affair with the writer Margaret Cogswell, written in 1978. The first section, “July,” was narrated by Douglas MacLeod, an alcoholic journalist who meets the sculptress Angela Hardwick on an unnamed Greek island, the two of them guests of a dying patron of the arts with the overly symbolic name of Athena. It was a pretty simple tale of reversal, Douglas seducing and controlling Angela in the first section, then Angela destroying Douglas in the section called “August.” That was the section I was reading now, and even though it was told through the voice of Angela, it was blatantly obvious that it was David Kintner’s voice taking revenge on a woman who betrayed him. Angela is a manipulative monster with no redeeming characteristics.

  Still, I was caught up in it, and almost missed the moment that Richard Seddon left the store in his car, but the movement of the map on my screen caught my attention. He drove across Fairview to his home address, and it was there that the car stopped. I was disappointed, hoping, of course, that he would drive straight to Joan’s house in Dartford, or to some meeting place. There was still time, though, so I kept watching the screen.

  By eleven that night I’d finished my book, Richard’s car hadn’t gone anywhere, and I’d figured out a way to send myself an alert on my cell phone if there was any movement with the tracker. I went home, fed Pyewacket, then lay in bed and started Margaret Cogswell’s debut novel The Green Marriage, the book that had put her on the map. I’d had the original Penguin paperback forever, but it was very thick and had very small print and I’d always been intimidated by it. I read the first chapter while Pyewacket settled down in his spot by my feet, purring. I apologized to him for my absence lately, and he opened his mouth to answer back but only managed a feeble, sleepy meow.

  When I got back to my office the following morning at just past nine Richard Seddon’s car had still not moved. I split the screen on my computer between the map of Fairview and an internet browser, then I read about what was happening in the baseball playoffs, googled Richard Seddon again to see if I’d missed anything, then read the Wikipedia entry on Margaret Cogswell. It didn’t mention her affair with David Kintner, who was probably the least famous of her many famous lovers. She had died just two years earlier, three months after winning the Booker Prize for her final novel, A Room by the Sea. I remember that the common joke at the time was that she’d been holding off death until she finally made it off the Booker short list (she’d been there seven times) and into the winner’s circle.