Before She Knew Him Page 16

  In the afternoon she returned to the studio, taking the car because the rain that had begun on Sunday had crept into Monday as a steady, cold drizzle. It was quiet on the basement level, and Hen was glad that the exterior door was locked, unlike yesterday. Back in the studio, she tidied up, trying hard not to think too much about Matthew’s visit the day before. She’d hoped to be able to get a little bit of work done—put down some preliminary sketches based on the outline she’d received for the next Lore Warriors book, tentatively titled The School for Lore Warriors: Scary Godmothers—but she found herself still thinking about meeting with Matthew, wondering if there was more to it than just trying to do a good deed, trying to stop a criminal. Was there a part of her that was a little bit interested in hearing the details of what he’d done? She was, after all, being offered something that most people were never offered: A look inside someone’s mind. A look inside a monster’s mind. Of course anybody would be interested. It was why people watched true-crime shows and read books about serial killers. It was why people liked her artwork. She was well aware that the more disturbing her etchings, the more interest they received.

  She was about to leave the studio when Lloyd texted her: Slow day. Coming home early.

  Hen knew that it probably wasn’t that slow—nothing at his company was slow—and that he was more likely coming home early because he was worried about her. She wrote back, See you soon, and then added a smiling emoji face.

  She left the studio, locking up behind her, and got back in the car. If Lloyd was leaving the city now, he wouldn’t be home for another hour, give or take. Hen was still thinking about where to meet Matthew. It would have to be a public place. She remembered passing by what looked like a well-lit sports bar two towns over in Wickford. It was along Route 117. She’d passed it a few times because it was on the way to the best art supply store in the area. It wasn’t far—a fifteen-minute drive—and Hen left the studio and headed toward 117.

  It actually took her closer to twenty minutes, but that was because rush-hour traffic was beginning to pile up. The bar was called the Winner’s Circle and was one of four businesses located in a single-story strip mall right after you crossed into Wickford. The windows advertised keno and the Massachusetts Lottery and forty-cent wings during all Patriots games. Hen parked next to a pickup truck with a Bruins bumper sticker and got out of her car. She really just wanted to look at the bar’s interior, to see how dark it was, to see if anyone was there. She wondered if she could go in and pretend she was looking for someone, but didn’t really want to draw attention to herself. Instead, she pushed through the door, then pulled herself up on one of the vinyl-covered stools along the bar. She was pleased that she wasn’t the only customer, even on a Monday afternoon. There was one man at the other end of the bar, drinking a bottle of Coors Light and keeping his eye on one of the multiple televisions that were all showing what looked like a talk show devoted to sports. And there was a youngish couple in one of the booths along the other side of the bar. Between them was a pile of nachos the size of a bowling ball.

  The bartender, a stringy blonde in black jeans and a white tank top, came down the bar, and Hen ordered a Shock Top, the only beer pull she could read from where she was sitting.

  “Orange in that?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Orange slice. In your beer.”

  “No, thanks.”

  The beer came. Hen paid in cash, left a tip, and the bartender returned to the other end of the bar and began scrolling through her phone. Hen took a long sip of her beer, then looked around. The place was fine for a meeting with Matthew. The booths had high backs, and Hen assumed they’d be able to have a conversation without being overheard. It wasn’t overly lit, but it was wallpapered in television screens, so it also wasn’t that dark. And Hen assumed that no one she knew—not that she knew many people—would be hanging around the Winner’s Circle in the afternoon.

  She assumed that afternoons would work for meeting with Matthew. He was a schoolteacher, so he got out early. And there was simply no way that she could sneak out again at night. Lloyd would never forgive her.

  She drank the rest of the beer, a light buzz settling into her body, relaxing her muscles, then checked the time. She’d have to leave now if she wanted to beat Lloyd home.

  The following day Hen didn’t go back to the studio. It was sunny again after two days of rain, and the leaves that had held on to the trees were more vibrant than ever. All of Sycamore Street shimmered with color. After lunch, she pulled her winter clothes from the plastic storage containers they’d been in since the previous winter in Cambridge. She found her warmest sweater, a wool turtleneck in a color Lloyd liked to call “fungus” and she thought of as a muted orange, plus a fleece-lined cap, and went out onto the porch with a big mug of tea and her sketchbook. The sun was already low in the sky, just over the tops of the roofs across the street, but it kept the porch relatively warm. She moved her chair to the sunniest portion, put her feet up on the bench they’d been using as a table, and kept her eye on the road.

  It was almost dark when Matthew’s Fiat came down Sycamore and pulled into the driveway. Hen froze. She’d been so keyed up waiting to see when her neighbor returned home that she hadn’t entirely decided what to do when he did.

  He parked halfway down the driveway and got out of his car. Hen stood, forcing herself to push through the screen door, then walk down the three steps so that she was on the edge of her own driveway, looking across at Matthew.

  He turned to her and Hen walked toward him, her head down a little, not wanting to make eye contact until they were talking. He waited for her, a leather briefcase in his left hand.

  “Let’s meet,” she said, when she was close enough.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now?”

  Hen hadn’t been prepared for that and quickly shook her head. “No, let’s meet tomorrow. There’s a bar in Wickford called the Winner’s Circle. On 117. Do you know it?”

  He shook his head. “No, but I can find it. Why do you want to meet in a bar?”

  “I’m not meeting with you alone,” Hen said.

  “Right,” he said, as though he just remembered why they were having this meeting in the first place.

  “When can you get there?”

  “I can get there by three thirty.”

  “That works. Three thirty. There are booths to the left when you walk in.”

  “Okay,” he said, nodding.

  Hen turned and walked back to her house before he could see how badly she was shaking.

  Chapter 25

  Matthew parked in front of the used sports equipment store that was next to the Winner’s Circle. He didn’t see Hen’s Golf in the parking lot and wondered if he’d beaten her here or, maybe, she’d changed her mind.

  He turned the engine off and got out of the car. It was a bright, blustery day, the parking lot littered with fallen leaves that skittered in the wind.

  He pushed through the front door of the Winner’s Circle. There were two middle-aged women at the bar and no one in the booths. Football highlights played on all the televisions. He walked up to the bar, trying to seem casual, and asked for a ginger ale with a lime wedge. He paid and brought the drink back with him to the booth in the far corner, and sat so that he could watch the doors.

  One of the women from the bar slid off her stool and went to the jukebox, inserting a bill, then punching several numbers. The first song to come on was a hard rock ballad he recognized, although he couldn’t remember the name of the band that performed it. He thought the song was called “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” and the chorus confirmed that he was right. The woman who chose the song kept peeking over at Matthew as it played, maybe looking for validation. He glanced down at his drink. The wedge of lime that floated on top of the ginger ale was dotted with dark brown spots.

  The outside door opened, and Hen entered, ushering in with her a brisk gust of wind that Matthew could feel all the way at the back of the bar. He
began to stand up to greet her, but she went straight to the bar without meeting his eye, so he stayed put. She brought her draft beer over to the booth and slid in across from him. She was wearing the same sweater she’d worn the previous day when she’d invited him to this bar. A thick, rust-colored turtleneck that had started to pill a little.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “I’m going to have to pat you down, you realize that?” Those were the words he’d been planning on saying first. He was surprised that she looked surprised.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Otherwise, we can’t have this conversation. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “You’re looking for a wire?” she said, and made a quizzical expression. “I’m not wearing one.”

  “I believe you, but I have to check.”

  “Okay, how?”

  “I’ll just slide in next to you for a minute. It will look like we’re hugging hello.”

  “I don’t know,” Hen said.

  “It’s up to you, of course, but I need to know for sure.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Matthew slid out of his side of the booth. The woman who’d picked the music was now back at the bar with her friend. “Under My Thumb” by the Rolling Stones was playing. He slid in next to Hen and said, “Sorry about this,” as he ran his hands along the sides of her bulky sweater.

  “What are you wearing under the sweater?” he asked.

  “A flannel shirt.”

  He put his hands under the sweater, thinking she’d object, but she lifted her arms, and he ran his hands along the soft flannel, up and down her sides, then along her back and briefly over her stomach. He felt nothing but her rib cage and the rapid movement of her lungs. Under the sweater she was wearing tight jeans, and he ran his hands down her legs as professionally as he could. He could feel the edges of her cell phone in her front pocket.

  “Can I check your phone, make sure you’re not recording?”

  “Okay,” she said, and showed him her phone, turning it on with her thumbprint, flicking through the different apps. Matthew didn’t exactly know what he was looking for, but he didn’t see anything suspicious. He hadn’t thought that she’d come wired, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “Thank you,” he said, and returned to his side of the booth. He attempted a joke, saying, “Now that the awkward part is out of the way . . .”

  She frowned at him. “Don’t try and be funny,” she said. “It doesn’t really suit you.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You found the bar all right?” she asked.

  “At least I’m not attempting small talk,” he said.

  She smiled at this. “Right. Tell me why you killed Scott Doyle.”

  “I thought you’d be more interested in Dustin Miller.”

  “I think I already know why you murdered him. He’d raped someone, right, when he was at Sussex Hall?”

  Matthew sipped at his drink, a little thrown off by Hen’s wording. “It wasn’t just a ‘someone,’” he said. “Her name was Courtney Cheigh.”

  “I didn’t know that. I mean I didn’t know her name.”

  “She was one of those students that stay after class and ask you more questions about what you’ve been teaching. She probably did it because she was too shy to ask the questions in class, but, still, she had a genuine intellectual curiosity.”

  “Is she . . . dead?”

  “Oh, no. Sorry. I think I always refer to my students in the past tense. No, she’s fine, as far as I know. She didn’t come back to the five-year reunion, but one of her friends said she’s in law school down in D.C. and doing well. I like to think she’ll become a prosecutor and go after men like Dustin Miller.”

  “She won’t have to go after him, though. You took care of that.”

  “Yes, I did. Right before he died I said Courtney’s name to him so that he would know why he was dying.” Saying those words out loud felt immensely satisfying, and Matthew worked to not let it show on his face. To not smile.

  “And you think he knew in that moment. You think that he wasn’t just utterly terrified.”

  Matthew leaned forward a little. “If all he felt was utter terror, then I still did my job. He was a bad man. He was going to make many, many women miserable.”

  “But wasn’t there a possibility that he would change? That maybe what happened with the student at your school, as horrible as it was, was just a one-time thing? Maybe he would have gone on to get married, raise children, become an okay person.”

  “First of all, what he did to Courtney was enough. For that he deserved to die. You know, I overheard him make a joke about her after she left school. He and his friend were talking about which girl had the biggest breasts now that Courtney was gone. They didn’t use the word breast, of course. No, trust me. He was a bad person. Personalities don’t change. Do you remember the night you came over for dinner with your husband? You asked me about teaching, and I said something about how wonderful it is to watch kids grow up before my eyes, the changes that take place between freshman year and senior year?”

  “I remember that.”

  “It’s only partly true. I watch these kids mature, watch them go from awkward adolescence into adulthood, but what I never see is their personalities change. They are who they are. If they are kind their freshman year—even if they make mistakes or get in trouble—then they are kind senior year. It goes the other way as well. I knew that Dustin Miller was going to be an abuser of women his whole life, before I even heard what he’d done to Courtney in St. Louis. It was just in him. It was the same way with my father—he preyed on the weak.” Matthew felt his voice rising, and he took a breath, told himself to talk at a lower volume. “Nothing would ever change that fact. He was what he was.”

  “And you changed him? You changed Dustin Miller?”

  “Yes, I did. I changed him from the living to the dead.”

  “That’s, uh, a pretty big change. Lots of people probably think like you do, but not many people act on it.”

  “I’m not like many people.”

  She hadn’t touched her beer since sitting down, but she looked at it now and took a small swallow. “Do you think you can stop?”

  “Stop killing people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why you’re here, because you think you can stop me?”

  “I’m here because you asked me to meet with you, because you said you wanted to tell the truth to someone. I assumed that maybe you wanted to unburden yourself of some guilt, maybe find a way to stop what you’re doing.”

  “I can see why you’d think that, but that wasn’t why I wanted to talk with you. I thought, maybe, that you’d understand what it is that I do. I’ve seen your artwork, and I thought—”

  “You think you’re some kind of artist as well.”

  “No. I don’t. I don’t think that, but I do know that when I kill someone—when I do it well enough—that what I feel afterward is close to the way I feel when I look at a piece of perfect art.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You must know the feeling. When you create something—like that picture you drew of the teenage girl looking in the mirror and seeing herself with the . . . with the . . .”

  “With the deer horns.”

  “Yes. When you first drew that—or engraved it, or whatever you do—how did you feel? It didn’t exist until you drew it, right? You brought it into the world out of nothing. That’s what I do but in reverse. I take a living, breathing person, and I subtract him from the earth. When I’m done with him, he is entirely changed—the most changed a person can be—and that’s a monumental thing. You have to understand that.”

  “I understand that it’s a monumental thing, but I don’t understand what’s good about it.”

  “You wouldn’t go back in time to kill Hitler if you had a chance?”

  “I’m not sure that really applies here.”

  “All right, then, would you go back and kill Te
d Bundy if you had a chance?”

  “You’re saying that Dustin Miller would have become a serial killer? Or Scott Doyle? How could you possibly know that?”

  “I’m saying that they were going to spread unhappiness—that they were going to make life miserable for people. By subtracting them from the world, I’ve added to the world’s happiness.”

  Hen looked skeptical, and Matthew decided to stop talking for a moment, even though he was just getting going and felt like he had a lot to say. Hen didn’t speak, either, so Matthew said, “Can you at least admit that I might be right?”

  “That you might have been right in killing them? No, I can’t admit that. You don’t have the right to make that decision. It’s not up to you. That’s not the way it works. Look,” Hen said, shifting in her seat. “I think coming here was a mistake. I don’t know what I was looking for exactly. I think you need to get professional help. I think you need to stop doing what you’re doing. You’re not an artist; you’re just a criminal. I watched Scott Doyle die, do you know that?”

  “You mean that you saw him when he was dead.”

  “No, he wasn’t dead when I got there. I saw him die.”

  “What was it like?” Matthew said.

  “It was fucking awful. He was confused, and scared, and his brain was coming out of his head.”

  Hearing the words, Matthew’s stomach turned over. He’d worried about that, worried that he’d broken through the skull the final time he hit Scott Doyle. He shook the feeling off and said, “Then he had two seconds of fear and confusion. Michelle Brine has felt a lot more than that.”