“Jesus, Brad, think for a moment.” I stared at the gun, probably the same one I’d seen in Brad’s drawer in Kennewick. A double-action revolver. I watched as Brad slid his thumb onto the hammer. Did he not know that he could just pull the trigger? I needed to make a move, either attack or run. I was less than two feet from him, and I found myself lunging forward. The last time I’d been in a fight I was a third grader and I’d lost to a kid named Bruce in the first grade. I simply shoved at Brad as hard as I could, spinning his body so that the gun pointed away from me. He flew backward, his head striking the front door with a loud crack. I thought he might have been knocked out, but he hissed out a word I didn’t understand. I turned and ran toward the stairs. As I hit the first step, already thinking about the phone on the first landing, I heard the loud pop of Brad’s gun, and felt a slap of air at my back, as though the bullet had missed me by less than an inch. I kept bounding up the stairs. By the time I reached the top I could hear Brad behind me, his work boots hitting the first few steps of the stairway. I reached toward the phone, sitting on an antique phone table, and stumbled, falling to the carpeted floor, knocking the phone and the table over. Something warm had spilled across my stomach and I put my hand there. When I pulled it back I was surprised to see blood, and for a second, wondered where it was coming from. Then Brad was standing over me, the gun pointed in my direction. He was breathing heavily, a strand of saliva hanging from his lower lip.
“Why?” I said, but as soon as I said it, I knew. Brad was no psychotic, deciding to kill me because I’d insulted where he lived. He was doing this because of my wife. And in a few moments, it all unfolded in front of me. Miranda was using Brad to get rid of me. She wanted all the money for herself. Why hadn’t I seen this before? A sharp pang of pain went through my gut, and I grimaced, then almost laughed.
I looked up at Brad with his stupid face and shaking gun. “Miranda would never be with you,” I said.
“You don’t know a fucking thing.”
“Brad, she’s using you. Who do you think they’re going to suspect? She’s in Florida. You two are having an affair. Everyone knows it.”
I saw an expression of doubt on his face, and felt a sliver of hope. I held my hand against the exit wound on my stomach. The blood pulsing through my fingers was warm and thick.
“You think you’re such a big deal,” he said.
“Brad, you’re an idiot.”
“We’ll see,” he said, and pulled the trigger.
PART II
The Half-Finished House
CHAPTER 16
LILY
“Hello, there,” I said to Ted Severson. He was sitting at the bar in the business class lounge at Heathrow Airport. I had recognized him right away but doubted he recognized me. We’d only met once, a couple years ago, when I had run into Faith Hobart at an outdoor market in the South End.
“I go by Miranda now,” Faith had said to me, then.
“Oh.”
“It’s my actual name. Faith’s my middle name. Miranda Faith.”
“I don’t think I knew that. So you’ve lost your faith.”
She laughed. “I guess you could say that. This is my fiancé, Ted.”
A handsome, somewhat stiff man turned from looking at a vintage letterpress tray and shook my hand. He had the dry, firm grasp of the professional hand shaker, but after a cursory few words about how nice it was to meet me, he turned back to the stall. I told Faith/Miranda that I was meeting someone, and needed to go. Before leaving, she said, in a low voice, “That was terrible about Eric. I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch with you afterward but you were in London, and . . .”
“Never mind, Faith, it’s okay.”
I walked away. I had thought many times about what might happen if I ran into Faith again. (I suppose I should call her Miranda now.) How would she react to me? Had she been surprised when she found out Eric died in London while visiting me? Had she been two-timed as well? But after meeting her at the market, seeing her with her new ink black hair and her five-hundred-dollar boots and with an oblivious fiancé, and seeing the casual way she expressed concern for me, I knew. I knew that she had actively deceived me as well. When she was with Eric in New York, she knew he was still seeing me on the weekends in Shepaug. Was it payback for my dating Eric in the first place? Was she just one of those women who got off on taking men away from other women? For a brief moment, there in the South End of Boston, I re-experienced that stab of pain in my chest I had felt when I knew for sure that Eric had betrayed me with Miranda, and that my life would never be the same again.
I told myself not to worry about it, and I didn’t particularly, but when I saw Ted Severson at the airport (Miranda and he were married now; I’d read the announcement in the Globe) I decided to talk with him. “Hello, there,” I said, giving him a chance to recognize me, even though I doubted that he would. He looked up, no idea who I was. He was visibly drunk, his eyes red-rimmed and his lower lip slack. He was drinking martinis. I ordered one as well, even though I hated martinis.
We shared a flight back to Boston, and he told me all about his sad life, about how Miranda was cheating on him, about his feelings of rage and resignation. He told me these things because he thought he would never see me again. At another time, another place, he would never have told me what he did. He even told me how much hate he felt for his wife, and jokingly said that he wanted to kill her. I told myself not to get involved, but I knew the moment we began to talk that it was too late. Miranda had come into my orbit again, and for a reason. Maybe it was selfishness, or maybe it was justice, or maybe it was something else altogether, but over the next few weeks I convinced Ted Severson to murder Miranda, as well as Brad Daggett, her lover. It wasn’t hard. And just when the plan was set to happen, I gathered the Sunday Globe from my stoop one morning, and over coffee at my kitchen table I saw a picture of Ted, a small pixelated square on the top of a column in the Metro section.
I read the accompanying story, my mug of coffee halfway to my lips.
SOUTH END RESIDENT SHOT IN OWN HOME