When I reached the I-95/I-93 split, instead of getting onto I-93 to head into Boston, I stayed on I-95, looping west toward Winslow. I didn’t expect much to come from questioning Lily Kintner, but I needed to check it out.
She’d been home, and she did turn out to be David Kintner’s daughter, just as I suspected. She lived in a book-filled house on a pond with only a few other houses on its leaf-plastered shore. She greeted me at the door, looking a little disheveled, her eyes taking a moment to focus on my face. I wondered if I’d woken her from a nap. She invited me in. I asked her about Ted Severson and she told me she knew him, but only from the newspaper reports of his death, and from knowing that he had married someone she knew from college. She offered coffee and I accepted. While she made it, I looked over her bookshelves, finding a row of all of David Kintner’s novels. I ran a finger across their spines, remembering pictures I’d seen of him. Tall and angular with a thatch of white hair. A drinker’s face—sallow and hollow-cheeked. Lily returned with the coffee, her hair pushed back behind her ears, her sleepy eyes now sharp and watchful. I told her I knew her father’s books, was a fan actually, and she seemed unimpressed, as though she’d heard way too much about her father’s genius. I told her I knew about the situation in England, and that allowed me to bring up the flight she’d shared with Ted Severson. Something clicked in her luminous green eyes, and she told me that she had met a man on the plane, and that he’d seemed familiar, and it was probably him. They’d spoken at length, and it was possible she’d told him who she was and where she lived. We found a picture on the Internet and she confirmed that it was Ted Severson she had spoken to, but she claimed to have no idea why he would have come to Winslow.
I believed some of what she told me. I believed that she hadn’t known Ted Severson had come to her town to look for her, and I believed that she was surprised that I’d shown up at her house, but I didn’t believe that she hadn’t figured out that the man on the plane was the husband of a friend of hers. It made no sense. But why would she lie to me about such a thing?
At her door I put my hand in my pocket, my fingers touching the key we now knew belonged to Brad Daggett’s cottage in Maine. Even so, I asked Lily if she’d mind if I tried her door with it. I just wanted to gauge her reaction. She seemed perplexed, but not worried. I left, not really knowing what to think. But I did know why Ted Severson had gone to Winslow that day. He’d met Lily Kintner on a plane, and he’d fallen in love with her. That much was sure. I empathized. In fact, I’d been thinking about Lily Kintner almost nonstop since meeting her the day before. She was beautiful, that much I remembered, but I was having trouble reconstructing her facial features in my mind. I could picture her long red hair, and her green eyes, so much like a cat’s, but her face kept slipping in and out of my mind’s grasp. But more than her physical presence, I had been taken in by her almost otherworldly self-possession, and by the way she inhabited her book-lined cottage in the woods of Winslow. Was she lonely out there all alone? Or was she one of those rarities, a human who didn’t need other humans in her life? It was something that I intended to find out.
My younger sister, Emily, who knows me better than anyone in the world, told me recently that my problem with relationships is that I fall in love with every woman I’m attracted to.
“Don’t most guys?” I said.
“No,” she said. “Most guys just want to sleep with all the women they’re attracted to. The last thing they want to do is fall in love. You call yourself a detective, and you don’t know that?”
“Trust me. I also want to sleep with these women.”
“Yeah, but then you fall in love with them, and either they break your heart, or—”
“Can we talk about your love life now?” I interrupted. It was how I got Emily to change the subject when she was analyzing my failed romances.
Pyewacket stirred, which meant it was 5:00 A.M. He leaped onto my bed, prepared to breathe on my eyelids to wake me up, but I swung my legs out from under the covers before he had a chance. I let him out of my apartment’s side door, which led to the fire escape. He darted out, nimbly walking on the metal slats, heading down to the small backyard, where it was his job to protect our kingdom from falling leaves and rogue squirrels.
I got back into bed, now certain that there was no chance I’d get any more sleep. I kept a spiral-bound notebook and a pen on top of the pile of books by my bed. It was supposed to be an idea book, a place to record late-night thoughts about cases I was working on, but also lines of poetry. I still considered myself a poet (something no one in the force knew about), even though I’d lost the ability to write anything but limericks these days. I told myself I was at least writing something, and that maybe it would help me think about cases. Earlier the day before I’d written these two: There once was a husband named Ted,