One week after I’d been interviewed for a second time by Detective Kimball, I drove back to Concord Center. I’d been following the progress on the Severson murder case every night on the local news, even though there were never any developments. I knew there wouldn’t be. Brad Daggett was not going to be found. It felt good knowing that I was the only human being in the world who knew where Brad was—who knew that he was never going to be found drinking a daiquiri on some beach in the Caribbean. He was slowly rotting in a forgotten meadow. I knew it, and so did the birds and animals that passed his way. They’d smell him, and think that some large animal had died, and then they’d go about their day.
It was the first Sunday since daylight savings time had ended. The morning had started cold, snow squalls moving through at dawn, but the snow had cleared by noon, the sky now a low, threatening shelf of chalky clouds. I took back roads from Winslow to Concord, driving slowly, listening to classical music on one of the public radio stations. It was midafternoon by the time I arrived in Concord, and I parked my car along Main Street. The sidewalks were busy: a throng of families waited outside a popular lunch place; middle-aged women in sporty gear came in and out of the jewelry shops. I walked slowly toward Monument Square, crossing the wide intersection toward the entrance to the Old Hill Burying Ground. I squeezed through the stone markers and trudged up the steeply inclined path to the top of the hill. There was no one else in the cemetery.
I went to the very peak of the hill, passing the bench where I’d sat with Ted Severson the last time I’d met with him, just over a month ago, and looked out over the roofs of Concord. Since I’d last been here, the trees on the hill had shed all their leaves and I could see all the way to where I’d parked my car. I stood for a while, in my bright green jacket, enjoying the solitude, and the bite of the cold New England air, and the godlike view of the scurrying pedestrians, going about their errands on a Sunday that came with an extra hour. I looked at the spot where Ted and I had kissed, tried to remember what it had felt like. His surprisingly soft lips, his large strong hand sliding up against my sweater. After five minutes, I turned my attention back along the spine of the hill with its sparse stone graves. Dead leaves had been blown by the wind and piled up against the backs of several stones. I walked slowly back down the flagstone path, randomly picked a grave that was partially obscured by a twisted, leafless tree, and knelt in front of it. It marked a woman named Elizabeth Minot, who had died in 1790 at the age of forty-five. She “met lingering death with calmness and joy.” At the top of the stone was a winged skull, a banner around it that said BE MINDFUL OF DEATH. I stayed crouched, studying the headstone, wondering what Elizabeth Minot’s short, hard life had been like. Truth was, it didn’t matter anymore. She was dead, and so was everyone who ever knew her. Maybe her husband had smothered her with a pillow to end her misery. Or to end his own. But he was long gone now, as well. Their children were dead, and their children’s children dead. My father used to say: every hundred years, all new people. I don’t know exactly why he said it, or what it meant to him—a variation on being mindful of death, I suppose—but I knew what it meant to me.
I thought of the people I’d killed. Chet the painter, whose last name I still didn’t know. Eric Washburn, dead before his life really got started. And poor Brad Daggett, who probably never stood a chance from the moment he first laid his eyes on Miranda Severson. I felt an ache in my chest; not a familiar feeling, but one I recognized. It wasn’t that I felt bad about what I had done, or guilty. I didn’t. I had reasons—good ones—for everyone I’d killed. No, the ache in my chest was that I felt alone. That there were no other humans in the world who knew what I knew.
I came down off the hill and walked back into town. I felt my cell phone vibrating in my purse. It was my mother. “Darling, have you read the Times yet?”
“I don’t get the Times,” I said.
“Oh. There’s a whole piece about Martha Chang. You remember Martha, don’t you? The choreographer?” She described the feature in detail, reading parts out loud to me. I sat down on a cold bench with a view of Main Street.
“How’s Dad?” I asked, when she was done.
“Woke up screaming in the middle of the night last night. I went in, thinking he was just trying to get me into the bedroom, but he was a wreck. Shivering and crying. I went to get him some hot milk and whiskey and when I came back he was asleep again. Honestly, darling, it’s like having a child in the house.”