The Kind Worth Killing Read online

  “Let’s meet in one week,” she said. “We’ll pick a place. If I change my mind, I won’t show up. And if you change your mind, then don’t show up either, and it will be like this conversation never happened.”

  “Okay. Where should we meet?”

  “Name a town where you don’t know anyone,” she said.

  I thought for a moment. “Okay. How about Concord?”

  “Concord, Mass., or Concord, New Hampshire?”

  “Concord, Mass.”

  We agreed to meet in the bar of the Concord River Inn the following Saturday at three o’clock in the afternoon. “I won’t be shocked if you’re not there,” she said. “Or upset.”

  “Ditto,” I said, and we shook hands. It felt oddly formal to shake the hand of someone who had offered to help you murder your wife. Lily laughed a little, as though she felt the same way. Her hand was small in mine and felt as frail as expensive porcelain. I resisted the urge to pull her toward me.

  Instead, I said, “Are you for real?”

  She released my hand. “You’ll find out in a week.”

  I arrived early that Saturday at the Concord River Inn. When Lily had asked me to pick a town where no one knew who I was, I had picked Concord, and while it was true that I knew no one there, it was also true that it was a place that had played a large part in my childhood. I grew up in Middleham, about ten miles west of Concord, and about thirty miles from Boston. Middleham is an old farming community, a sprawl of open fields and new-growth forest. In the 1970s, two extensive developments had gone in—dead-end streets named after the trees that were no longer there, and single-acre lots with cookie-cutter deckhouses, all popping up to accommodate employees from nearby Lextronics, the company where my father worked.

  My father, Barry, was an MIT graduate, and a computer programmer when most people didn’t know what a computer programmer was. He met Elaine Harris, my mother, at Lextronics, where she was a receptionist, and undoubtedly the prettiest woman he’d ever seen. I don’t know for a fact that my father had never dated anyone before meeting my mother in his thirtieth year, but it would shock me if he had. My mother, on the other hand, had spent her twenties in an on-again, off-again relationship with a fellow Boston University grad who played professional hockey for two years before a knee injury ended his career. She told me once that when their relationship ended—and she realized she had wasted eight years with a “playboy type”—she swore on the spot that she would find a husband who was plain and dull and reliable. And that turned out to be Barry Severson. They dated for six weeks, were engaged for another six, then were married in a small ceremony in West Hartford, Connecticut, my mom’s hometown.

  The reason that Concord became an important place for me was that my mother dreamed of moving there. Early in the marriage, she had decided she hated the isolation of Middleham, and had become fixated on this particular wealthy suburb, with its gabled houses, its well-dressed housewives, its arty jewelry stores. My father got sick of hearing about it, so my mother would dress me up and take me, and sometimes my older sister as well, to lunch in Concord, often at the Concord River Inn, and afterward we would visit shops; she would buy new outfits, or jewelry, or Roquefort and pinot grigio at the Concord Cheese Shop. It was not a surprise to either my father or me when, during my senior year at Dartford-Middleham High School, Elaine left my father and moved into a rental apartment along Main Street in Concord Center. She lived there for a year, before moving to California with a divorced accountant.

  My father, retired now, still lives in Middleham, where he spends his time creating Revolutionary War dioramas. I visit him on Thursday nights. If the weather is above sixty degrees, he cooks me a steak on his grill. If it’s below sixty, he makes a pot of chili. My sister visits every other year for Thanksgiving. It’s the only time we see her, since she lives in Hawaii with her second husband and his four children. She sees my mother far more often, partly because my mother still lives in California, and partly because my mother and my sister are so much alike. I sometimes think that when the divorce happened the family split along gender and geographical lines, my father and I staying east, my mother and sister going west.

  Clattering up the steps at the Concord River Inn, it was impossible to not think of my mother and me sitting in the wallpapered dining room with our seafood Newburg lunches, my mother sipping a Pink Lady and me with a Pepsi with a slice of lemon. Lily and I had agreed to meet at the bar, and not the dining room. What I had forgotten was that there were two bars in the rabbit’s warren of the inn, a snug L-shaped one immediately opposite the dining room, and a larger one toward the back. I chose the smaller bar, since it was empty, and from my barstool I could watch the hallway that led toward the bar at the back. I ordered a Guinness, told myself to sip it slowly. I had no intention of getting drunk this afternoon.

  I had spent a lot of time with my wife in the previous week since returning from my business trip to London. Miranda was filled with ideas for furnishing the house in Maine. We had a vintage card table in our library and she had covered it with clippings from catalogs and printouts from the Internet. I tried not to think of her and Brad Daggett as she showed me item after item of things the house absolutely needed to have. I agreed to everything: the heated tile floors in all the bathrooms; the twenty-thousand-dollar Viking range; the indoor lap pool. And while I was agreeing, what kept me going was the knowledge that she was going to die, and I was going to be the one who made that happen. I thought about it constantly, turning the idea around in my mind like looking at a diamond from every possible perspective, looking for flaws or cracks, looking for guilt or second thoughts, and I found none. All I found was the renewed conviction that Miranda was a monster that I needed to slay.

  She returned to Maine on Thursday, making me promise that I would come join her on the weekend. Before leaving she brought me to the library to show me a few more items she wanted to order from her pile of catalogs. Then she brought up an image on her cell phone, a painting she thought would be perfect for the dining room.

  “It’s six feet by nine feet,” she said. “It will be perfect for the south wall.”

  I looked at the tiny image. It appeared to be a man’s head, his ears on fire.

  “It’s a Matt Christie self-portrait,” she said. “It’s guaranteed to be a good investment. Look him up if you don’t believe me.” Then she named a ridiculous figure in a sentence that also included the word bargain.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  She did a little jump without quite leaving her feet, then kissed me. “Thank you, thank you.” She pressed a hand against my crotch, running a finger along the zipper of my jeans. Despite my feelings for her, I felt myself getting hard. “When you come to Maine I’ll give you a proper thank-you, okay?” she said in a lowered voice.

  I had a sudden urge to spin her around and bend her over the card table, the way I’d seen Brad Daggett fuck her, but I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust that I wouldn’t smash her face into the catalogs, or call her a cheating bitch. Instead, I told her that I probably wouldn’t get to Maine till Saturday night at the earliest. She didn’t seem too disappointed.

  After she’d packed for the long weekend, I walked her to the garage where we kept our cars. After loading up the Mini Cooper, I said to her, “I hope Brad doesn’t give you any trouble up there. All that time you spend together.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s never hit on you, has he?”

  She turned, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Brad? No, he’s a total professional. Why, you jealous?”

  She delivered the line perfectly, a mixture of surprise, contemplation, and casualness. If I hadn’t seen them together through the binoculars, I would never believe that there was anything going on between my wife and my contractor. The first few years I knew Miranda, I thought of her as someone whose every emotion was on the surface, someone incapable of deception. How had I been so wrong?

  She fold
ed herself into the driver’s seat, and blew me a kiss through the window before whipping her car away through the tight channels of the garage. A sense of certitude washed over me. With those few simple words—denying her relationship with Brad—any doubt I had was erased.

  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?”

  “Both. Right now I’m wondering why you’re here. Part of me thinks you’re some sort of law enforcement and you’re going to tape me saying how I want to murder my wife.”

  Lily laughed. “I’m not wearing a wire. If we weren’t in such a public place I’d let you frisk me. But even if I were wearing a wire, could I even arrest you for planning to kill your wife? Wouldn’t that be entrapment?”

  “Probably. I suppose I could just say that I was trying to seduce you by talking about killing my wife.”

  “That would be a first. Are you?”

  “What? Trying to seduce you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are we still playing the game from the plane? Absolute truth? Then I won’t lie and say that I haven’t thought about you in that way, but, no, everything I said about my wife, and how I feel about the situation, is true. I was honest with you on the plane.”

  “And I was honest with you. I want to help.”

  “I believe you,” I said. “It’s just that I don’t entirely understand your motives. I understand what I get from what we’re planning . . .”

  “A quick divorce,” Lily said, and took a small sip of her wine.

  “Yes, a very quick divorce . . .”

  “But you wonder what I get out of it?”

  “I do. That’s what I’d like to know.”

  “I thought you might be wondering about that,” she said. “I’d have been worried a little if you hadn’t.” She fixed her intense eyes on me. “Remember when I was telling you how I felt about murder? How I believe that it’s not as immoral as everyone thinks. I truly believe that. People make a big deal of the sanctity of life, but there’s so much life in this world, and when someone abuses his power or, as Miranda did, abuses your love for her, that person deserves to die. It sounds like an extreme punishment, but I don’t think of it that way. Everyone has a full life, even if it ends soon. All lives are complete experiences. Do you know the T. S. Eliot quote?”

  “Which one?”

  “‘The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration.’ I know it’s not justification for murder, but I think it underscores how so many people think that all humans deserve a long life, when the truth is that any life at all is probably more than any of us deserves. I think most people fetishize life to the point of allowing others to take advantage of them. Sorry, I’m offtrack
here. When I met you in the airport lounge, and then we talked on the plane, you chose to tell me that you fantasized about killing your wife, and that allowed me to tell you about my philosophies of murder. That’s it, really. I like talking with you, and if you are serious about killing Miranda, then I will help you, in any way I can.”

  I had watched Lily, in the course of her short speech, become briefly passionate, her face pushing toward me like a sun worshiper tilting toward the sun to get the most of its rays. Then I had watched her retreat again, as though she had revealed too much. She turned the stem of her wineglass between her fingers. I wondered briefly if she was insane, and as soon as I had that thought I decided to plunge forward anyway. I knew this feeling well. It was the way I had made enormous sums of money, by taking foolish risks.

  “I want to do this,” I said. “And I want you to help me.”

  “I will.”

  She took another sip of her wine, the light from a brass wall sconce above her making the glass glow, and reflecting onto her pale face. She looked more beautiful, I thought, with her hair pulled back, but also more severe. She reminded me of models in some of the catalogs my wife received. Catalogs full of tall, rich-looking girls in tweeds and jeans, posing next to horses, or in front of country houses made of stone. The models from those catalogs were never smiling.

  “I have one question,” I said. “Exactly, how many people have you killed?” I wanted to phrase it as a joke to give her a way out of the question, but I also wanted to know if she had practiced what she preached.

  “I’m not going to answer that,” she said. “But only because we don’t know each other well enough yet. But I promise you that after your wife is dead I’ll tell you everything you want to know. We won’t have any secrets. It’s something I look forward to.”

  Her face softened as she said this, and I felt as though there were an implied promise of sex thrumming in the quiet room. My glass was empty.