I wanted to stay, but I had nothing left to ask. I still didn’t believe that Lily was telling me the whole truth, but her answers were reasonable enough. “Your father,” I said. “How’s he doing?”
“Oh, he’s . . . he’s about the same. I think getting him out of England is the best thing for him. He took a beating from the press.”
“Is he still writing?”
“He told me he thinks he might have one more book in him, but I don’t know about that. We’ll see. Maybe he’ll get inspired now that he’s back living with my mother.”
“I thought your parents were divorced.”
“They are. Thank God. This is just an arrangement. Strange, I know. But my mother needs money, and my father is going to help out now that he’s staying in her house. Plus, my father can’t be alone. It’s a shot in the dark, but if it works, it will solve both their problems. If it doesn’t, my father could come here and live with me.”
I wanted to ask her more about her father, partly because I was interested in him, but mostly because I wanted to stay out here on Lily Kintner’s back deck. I wanted to keep looking at her. The sun was behind her, turning her hair into a fiery red. She had crossed her arms across her middle, tightening her sweater against her body, and I could see the high swell of her breasts, and the faint outline of a pink bra, beneath the thin white cashmere. I thought of ways to prolong my stay. I could ask more questions about her father, about her love of Nancy Drew, about her job at Winslow, but I knew that I shouldn’t. This hadn’t been a social call. I stood up, and Lily also stood. Mog finished eating and came and rubbed his side against Lily’s ankle, then bounded off the way he had come.
“Oh, one more thing,” I said, remembering a last question that I’d meant to ask. “You said the first time we met that Miranda and you knew each other in college.”
“Uh-huh. At Mather College in New Chester, Connecticut.”
“Miranda told me you stole her boyfriend.”
“She did, did she? Well, we dated the same guy. Miranda dated him first, then I did, then he went back to her. It was a mess at the time, but it was years ago.”
“So, when you met Ted and realized he was married to Miranda, and that he was unhappy, you didn’t think it was your opportunity for revenge?”
“Sure. It crossed my mind. I liked Ted, and I didn’t like Miranda, but no, that’s not what was between Ted and me. We weren’t romantic. I was just someone for him to talk to.”
Lily walked me back through her house and out to my car. She held out her hand and I shook it, her palm dry and warm. When we let go, Lily’s fingertips gently ran along my hand, and I wondered if it was intentional, or if I was imagining something between us that wasn’t there. Her face told me nothing.
Before getting into my car, I turned and asked her, “What was the name of the boyfriend?”
“Excuse me?” she said.
“The boyfriend in college that both you and Miranda went out with?”
“Oh, him,” she said, and a slight flush of color crossed her cheeks. She hesitated, then said, “It was Eric Washburn, but he’s, uh, dead now.”
“Oh,” I said. “How did that happen?”
“It was right after college. He died from anaphylactic shock. He had a nut allergy.”
“Oh,” I said again, not knowing what else to say. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “It was a long time ago.”
I drove away. As I headed back to Boston, a ledge of low clouds began to blank the sun. It was early afternoon but felt like dusk. I was going over the conversation with Lily. I believed a lot of what she had said to me but still felt lied to. I knew that she had left some things out, just as she had the first time we talked. But why? And why had Lily hesitated at the end when I asked her the name of her college boyfriend? It felt as though she didn’t want to tell me. She’d told me that it had been a long time ago, but it wasn’t really. She was only in her late twenties. Eric Washburn. I said the name out loud to myself to make sure I remembered it.
CHAPTER 32
LILY