Lily was late, and as I slowly sipped my Guinness, I became convinced she was not going to show up. I felt a strange combination of relief and disappointment. If I never saw Lily again my life would return to normal. Could I honestly say that I would still murder my wife without her help and her encouragement? Would I even be willing to try? If I did get away with it, what would stop Lily from coming forward, from telling the police that I’d drunkenly preconfessed my crime on a transatlantic flight? No, if Lily didn’t show up, then I would confront my wife, tell her I knew about the affair, and ask for a divorce. What would follow would be an eternity of legal wrangling and ritual humiliations, but I would survive. Miranda would take a lot of my money—even with the prenup—but I could always make more. And Brad would get what he deserved. My wife.
But some of the disappointment I felt as I sat alone at the Concord River Inn, now convinced that I would never see Lily again, was that I was secretly hoping that part of her reason for this meeting was a romantic one. I had not been able to shake the image of her pale, beautiful face, or the feel of her slender hand in mine. Maybe an affair with Lily would be the real revenge that I could unleash upon Miranda and Brad. An eye for an eye. And it had not escaped my notice that the place we had chosen for an afternoon drink was also a hotel. I could feel the presence of all those empty beds just above the half-timbered ceiling of the bar.
As I’d been doing all week, I began obsessively reconstructing the night flight to Boston, the sudden appearance of a woman who wanted to help me murder my wife. I remembered the evening well, despite the gin. Perfectly, in fact, line for line, but it was like recalling a slightly unreal dream. I wasn’t sure I trusted the clarity of all my memories, or whether I had begun to project my own ambitions and desires onto the event. Since being home, I had tried to find out information about Lily, of course. I visited Winslow College’s Web site, found a bare-bones page that summarized the goals and accomplishments of the Winslow Archives. There were two names listed in the department. Otto Lemke, college archivist, and Lily Hayward, archivist. Each had a phone number, but their mutual e-mail address was the same: [email protected]. I searched the Web for anything else about a Lily Hayward, and found nothing that seemed to relate to her. No Facebook page. No LinkedIn page. No images. I wasn’t surprised. She hadn’t seemed the type who would have any kind of Web presence. And even if she had a Web presence, I doubted that it would have shone any light on what I really wanted to know. Why does a stranger agree to help someone murder his wife? What does she get out of it?
I had just finished my pint when I spotted her. She was slowly walking down the crooked hallway, peering into doorways, and I spun on my stool to wave her into the bar.
“You’re here,” she said, sounding surprised.
“You’re here, too,” I responded. “Let’s go sit at one of those tables. What can I get you?”
She asked for a glass of white wine. I ordered her a sauvignon blanc, got another Guinness for myself, and brought both glasses to the corner table she had selected. She looked as I’d remembered her, except that her long red hair was pulled back into a simple bun. As I placed her wine in front of her she was sliding out of a gray blazer. Underneath, she was wearing a beige cardigan over a dark blue blouse. Her cheeks were flushed from the outdoors.
There was a moment of awkwardness as we each took sips of our drinks, and neither of us said anything right away.
“It’s like a bad second date,” I said, to break the ice.
She laughed. “I don’t think either of us expected the other one to show up.”
“I don’t know about that. I thought that you would.”
“I guess that I didn’t expect you to show up. I figured you woke up the following morning with a terrible hangover, and a vague memory of plotting to murder your wife.”
“I did have a terrible hangover, but I remembered everything we talked about.”
“And you still want to kill her?” She said this as though she were asking me if I still wanted to order French fries. But there was amusement in her eyes, or maybe a challenge. She was testing me.
“More than ever,” I said.
“Then I can help you. If you still want my help.”
“That’s why I came here.”
I watched as Lily leaned back fractionally in her chair, her eyes leaving me to look around the small bar. I followed her gaze, taking in the unvarnished wood floor and the ceiling that could not have been much higher than seven feet. There was one other customer in the bar, a man in a suit who had taken over my vacated stool and was drinking an Irish coffee with whipped cream on top. “Is this place okay?” I asked.
“No one knows you here, right?”
“I’ve been here before, but no, I don’t know anyone in Concord.”
I thought of my mother, of the year that she spent living in this town. I wondered if she had frequented this bar. Was this where she came to look for a second husband? Had she met Keith Donaldson here, the divorcé who talked her into moving to California? They hadn’t married but she was still in California, with another man now. I saw her less than once a year.
“You seem nervous,” Lily said.
“I am. Don’t you think it would be strange if I wasn’t nervous?”
“Are you nervous about what we’re planning to do, or are you nervous about me?”