I arrived back in Boston just as the rising sun was beginning to edge the city roofs in a thin cold light. I entered my house, taking Tuesday’s newspaper in with me, and made a pot of coffee. While it brewed I showered and changed. I would try and nap later in the day but knew that I wouldn’t be able to sleep right now. I was in a shit storm. The police hadn’t bought the burglary angle, and they were closing in on Brad. And now, this craziness with Lily. I couldn’t even wrap my head around it. There had always been something freakish about Lily Kintner. She was watchful. I remembered that. I’d met her when she was probably eighteen, but she seemed much older at the time. Composed, and sure of herself, and definitely not like other freshman girls.
Had she known that I’d stolen Eric from her that one summer before he died? I hadn’t stolen him, not really, but we were sharing him without Lily’s consent. Had she found out and been stalking me ever since, waiting for an opportunity to kill me? If Eric were still here, I thought . . . and suddenly I went back to that half-formed thought. Had she killed Eric in London? He’d died of an allergy attack, but she could have been the one to give him the nuts, knowing he couldn’t get to his medicine. It was crazy, but it was also possible. I tried to remember back to what I’d heard around that time. All my friends in New York had been talking about it. He was drunk and went out for Indian food and the chicken dish he got had nuts in it, and he died. Something like that. One thing I remembered for sure was that Lily had been right there with him, probably watching him die. Had she kept his medicine away from him? It now seemed entirely possible that she had.
The day passed, in slow chunks of time. I kept changing my mind about what to do that night. I wanted Lily dead, but what worried me was being present at the scene of a crime. I’d been so careful to make sure that I would never be convicted for Ted’s murder, that there would be no evidence connecting me to any crime. Picturing the night ahead, I felt like I was walking into a trap. I was walking into a trap—Brad had told me that much—but even knowing what Lily had in mind, I felt unsettled, unsure of myself for the first time in a long time. But I also knew, without a doubt, that if Lily somehow knew everything she said she knew, she needed to be eliminated. With Lily gone, I’d be able to breathe a little easier. And then I could focus on dealing with Brad.
My phone was charging on my bedside table. I went and lay down, scrolling through the missed calls and listening to the voice mails. One of the messages was from Detective Kimball, letting me know that the coroner was done with Ted’s body, and I could alert the funeral home that they could pick him up at their convenience. He also asked if I knew of a good way to get in touch with Brad Daggett. Hearing that was a relief; Brad was doing what I’d told him to do, and disappearing for a while. I thought of calling the funeral home but decided against it. Instead, I sent text messages to a couple of friends letting them know that I was okay, just lying low. I called my mother, and we spoke briefly. I told her I was overwhelmed by all the little chores associated with a husband’s death. “Tell me about it, sweetheart,” she said. “Divorce is no picnic either. All that paperwork.” I tried to sleep, falling into a doze as thin as tissue paper, but thoughts of Lily kept rippling up at me. I tried to remember what she looked like, and all I could see was her slender, hipless frame, her shiny red hair, her unsettling stillness. When I tried to picture her face, I could get a general sense of it, but I couldn’t picture any specific features. What did her nose look like? Her mouth? Every time I thought I had it, it flew away from me, like a butterfly I couldn’t quite net. I realized I was chewing at the edge of my thumb, and made myself stop before I drew blood. I was wearing yoga pants, and I touched myself through them, thinking of a featureless man, someone rich, in Italy, a married neighbor who came over to my lakeside villa to fuck me. It started to work, and I shucked the yoga pants halfway down my thighs, but before I could come, I started to think of Ted, how on the first night in this house, on this bed, he had sprinkled rose petals, and laid out an expensive negligee for me, and how much it had turned me off.
I parked my car in the back alley behind the restaurant in Portsmouth where Brad and I had agreed to meet. It had turned cold, and I wore a long coat and a cap with my hair tucked up under it. One of the streetlamps in front of the restaurant was busted, and I stood under it, watching for Brad’s truck. It was a bright night, though, and I still felt exposed. Brad showed up, exactly at the time we had planned, and I hoisted myself up into the passenger seat, hoping that he was relatively sober.
“We still doing this?” I asked as he pulled away from the curb.
“Fuck, yeah,” he said, and I recognized from his overly loud intonation that he was at least partly loaded, but not wrecked.
“Tell me again what we’re going to do.”
“On Micmac Road I’ll turn off my lights and drive up to the house. You get out and go in the front door using the key. I’ll go around to the back of the house and come in through the patio doors. Then I’ll walk up to both of you and hit her on the head with a wrench.”
“Why don’t you just shoot her?”
“I don’t have that gun anymore. You knew that.”
“Right. I forgot. Then what?”
“I left plastic wrap in the house. You help me roll her up. She goes in the truck and I take you back to your car. I can get rid of her body.”