The last thing I did before leaving the meadow was to drop the rusty trowel down into the well, then replace the cover. Using my already filthy fingers I swept some of the long, dried-out grass across the cover to try and camouflage it. I circled the area before leaving it, an eye on the ground to make sure that nothing had been left behind, but there was nothing, not even a cigarette butt. Chet was gone from the world. The morning was quiet, just the rising hum of bugs, and the cawing crows that were the true owners of this meadow. I cawed back at them, like I sometimes did, and wondered what they thought of me.
Back at the house I showered for a long time, scrubbing at my fingers to get at the last of the dirt. The hot water humming over my body made me feel both powerful and safe at the same time. When my mother opened the bathroom door and said my name, I jumped and nearly fell, my foot squelching along the bottom of the shower.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Nothing, darling. Daddy and I were wondering if you wanted to go get breakfast at Shady’s?”
“Okay,” I said. “When?”
“Soon as you’re out of that shower.”
We used to go to Shady’s Diner more often. It was my father’s favorite and probably my favorite, too, especially for breakfast. I got the French toast with a side of extra crispy bacon. My parents sat across from me in the booth, their shoulders touching, even sharing a fruit bowl to go with my dad’s corned beef hash and my mom’s omelet. Thoughts about Chet crept into my mind all during breakfast, then they would disappear when one of my parents said something to make me laugh, or when I was thinking about how good my food was. My stomach felt like a hollow bowl that I could fill forever.
“You’re hungry, Lily,” my mother said.
“She’s a growing girl, almost a woman,” said my father.
Breakfast was a good time, even when my parents ruined it by asking me again if I wanted to skip another grade. Some of my teachers had recommended it at the end of the school year and I had already said no at the beginning of the summer. My mother had kept bringing it up, so I punished her by refusing to go to art camp in July. I knew that the two weeks when I was away was something she looked forward to. I was surprised that the subject came up again, but it didn’t last long and it didn’t entirely ruin breakfast.
I didn’t hear anything about Chet for a week, and began to worry, wondering if it was unnatural that I hadn’t said anything about it. So one day during lunch, my father nowhere to be found, and my mother in a silent mood, I asked what happened to Chet.
“Chet left. Didn’t you know that?”
“Where’d he go?”
“God, Lily, I don’t know. Someone else’s couch, I guess. He never said good-bye, ungrateful prick.”
That afternoon I wandered out to the apartment. It looked as though my mother or father had been in and straightened it out a little. The cot had been stripped of sheets and the trash bucket in the kitchen area was emptied. I sat on my chair for a moment, even though I didn’t have a book. The windows were open and a cool breeze, the first we’d had for a while, came through into the apartment. I’d been waiting for two things since killing Chet. Waiting to get caught and waiting to feel bad. Neither had happened yet, and I knew that neither would.
CHAPTER 7
TED
When I told Miranda that I was planning on coming up to Kennewick for a week at the beginning of October, there was a look of genuine pleasure on her face. We were sitting across from one another in the first-floor kitchen of our brownstone, eating linguini with clam sauce (the one dish I can make), and finishing a bottle of pinot gris. “That’ll be amazing,” she said. “I’ll get you all to myself for an entire week.”
I watched her face for any signs of deceit, but saw none. Her dark brown eyes had brightened with what looked to me like real excitement. And for a moment, I believed her and felt the warmth and reassurance one feels when someone else wants to spend time with you. A second later that feeling passed, and I was again amazed at my wife’s acting skills, her duplicitous nature. Did she feel no guilt for what she was doing with Brad Daggett?
“Should we get that suite again?” she asked.
“Which one?”
“Boo. How soon you forget. The first place we stayed. With the whirlpool tub.”
“Right. Sure.”
After cleaning up, we went upstairs to watch television, settling on a remake of Sleuth that was being shown on one of the five hundred movie channels we had. Miranda had changed into the short nightshirt she’d taken to wearing in the evenings and was stretched out along our couch, her feet in my lap. I studied her toes, meticulously painted a deep shade of pink. I took one of her feet in my hands and pressed a thumb along its baby-soft sole. She said nothing but her body reacted by sliding almost imperceptibly closer to me, her feet arching. Her languid presence made me acutely aware of myself, my knotted shoulders, the uncomfortable shirt I was still wearing, the way I sat rigidly by the armrest, my elbow cocked unnaturally. I took my hand off my wife’s foot, but she didn’t seem to notice. I knew that she would be asleep soon, before the movie had finished.
Going to Maine for the week had been Lily’s idea, suggested toward the end of our meeting at the Concord River Inn. She said it was important for me to know what went on up there, what Brad’s work schedule was like, how Miranda spent her days.
“With me up there, everything will be different,” I had said. “Miranda and Brad will act differently.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m more interested in the work habits of the crew on your house. How many people are there on a regular basis? How often is Brad there alone? Just observe. The more information you get, the better off we’ll be.”
I’d agreed. The hardest part was clearing my schedule for a week. But I’d insisted, and Janine, my assistant, had managed to reschedule everything. The plan was that I’d go up to Kennewick late on a Friday and return to Boston nine days later on a Sunday afternoon. In a strange way I had begun to look forward to the extended time away, and I was secretly reveling in the idea that I would be putting Brad and Miranda’s affair on hold. I wondered what Brad’s reaction would be when Miranda told him. Even sitting there on my couch having broken the news to Miranda I felt the power shifting in my favor.
Miranda twitched and I turned to look at her in the flicker of the television’s eighty-four-inch screen. Her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted. She had fallen asleep. I stared at her for a while instead of at the movie. Deep shadows accentuated her curves, and her face, cast in the TV’s light, seemed a black-and-white version of herself. Her mouth opened a little farther, a nerve fluttered in her temple. I was fascinated by her raw beauty while at the same time realizing that she would not age well. Her face, rounded and doll-like, would turn puffy, and her pinup body would sag. But she wouldn’t grow old, would she? I was going to kill her, wasn’t I? That was the plan, and the thought of doing it, and getting away with it, filled me with a sense of gratification and power, but also fear and sadness. I hated my wife, but I hated her because I had loved her once. Was I making a mistake that I would regret for the rest of my life? When I thought this way, when I began to be frightened by what I was planning to do, I wanted to make contact with Lily, to hear her talk about murder in her casual way, as though she were talking about throwing away an old couch. But we had agreed to not talk for a while, to not meet until I had spent my week in Maine, and that was another reason I was looking forward to that week in Kennewick. Each day was getting me one day closer to being back with Lily.
John, the hotel concierge who often manned the check-in desk, told me that Miranda was in the Livery, then offered to have my bags taken to the suite. I thanked him and went to find Miranda, navigating the narrow, Colonial-era stairs that pitched steeply toward the inn’s lower levels. The tavern, named for the livery stable it had once been, had stone floors, a stone fireplace, and a long oak bar that curved like the lines of a yacht. Miranda was alone at the bar but talking
animatedly to the tattooed bartender, whose name was either Sid or Cindy. I could never remember.
I interrupted them, kissed my wife, noting the absence of the taste of cigarettes on her mouth, then ordered a Hendrick’s martini. I shed my wool blazer, soaked from the walk from the car to the inn. It had been drizzling in Boston, but in Maine, the rain had become biblical, my wipers on full speed barely able to clear the windshield.
“You’re soaked,” Miranda said.
“It’s pouring.”
“I had no idea. I haven’t been outside all day.”
Sid/Cindy was delivering my drink. “She lives the life, your wife,” she said and laughed hoarsely as she said it.
“I know she does.” I turned to Miranda. “What did you do all day?”
“It wasn’t an entire waste. I made decisions on furniture for all the guestrooms, and I got a massage, and I waited, with bated breath, for my husband. Oh, I almost forgot.” She held up her nearly empty beer. “To one whole week.” I clinked it with my glass of cold gin and took a long sip, the drink instantly making me feel warmer. “Have you eaten?” Miranda asked.
I told her that I hadn’t, and flipped open a menu to take a look.
We stayed till closing time, and I got drunk enough so that when Miranda and I stumbled to the suite at the back of the inn, then fell naked across the king-size bed, I barely thought of the reasons I was in Maine for an entire week, or of Brad Daggett, or even of Lily.
The following morning the rain was done, the clouds all swept out to sea, and it was one of those October days that sell calendars. The sky was a hard, metallic blue, and the trees had turned into bouquets of red and yellow. After lunch, Miranda and I walked to the house. I timed it; it took twenty-five minutes along Micmac Road, not much longer than it took along the cliff walk. Route 1A was the busiest road in this part of the world, but this section of Micmac was scenic, with its periodic views from the bluff above the Atlantic, so a lot of cars went by during my walk. Micmac Road branched out from 1A at Kennewick Center, then passed Kennewick Harbor and Kennewick Beach, the three major sections that formed the town. Kennewick Beach was the less exclusive section of the Kennewick shoreline, a long sandy stretch bunched with rental cottages and, across the road, a campsite that became filled with Winnebagos in the summertime. I didn’t know this for a fact but I thought I remembered Miranda telling me that Brad owned one of those semicircular clusters of rental cottages, and that, since his divorce, he was living in one of them year-round. I hadn’t paid attention when she told me these facts because at the time I didn’t know that he was sleeping with my wife. But now I was paying attention. To everything.
There was only one vehicle parked in our driveway, a Toyota pickup truck with a bumper sticker that read IF GOD DIDN’T WANT US TO EAT ANIMALS, HE WOULDN’T HAVE MADE ’EM OUTTA MEAT.
“That’s Jim,” Miranda said. “Brad’s having him do the drywall in the basement.”
We walked around to the back of the house and entered through the patio doors. It was impossible to not think of the last time I’d been here, of first spying on Brad and Miranda sharing a cigarette in the kitchen, then later, crouching at the terminus of the cliff walk, watching them fuck in our future living room.
“Wait till you see the bar downstairs.” Miranda led me across the finished hardwood floors of the foyer, her steps echoing sharply in the empty space. Jim was downstairs, listening to classic rock on a dusty radio, and eating his lunch, perched on a plastic Quikrete barrel that had been turned upside down. He seemed flustered and embarrassed by our presence, as though he’d been caught asleep on the job instead of simply eating a sub.
He turned the music down. “Brad’ll be out a little bit later. You looking for him?”
“We’re just looking. Ted hasn’t even seen it down here since, since . . .”
She turned to me, and I shrugged. I didn’t think I’d been to this part of the house since just after the house had been framed. I knew that Miranda was insisting on making an extensive man cave for me, even though it was something I had never asked for. She was picturing leather furniture, a pool table, a full bar, and dark red walls. When she had first mentioned this, I had viewed it as a sign of Miranda’s generosity, that she wanted to make a special place in the house just for me. Now, thinking about it, it just pissed me off that she was spending my hard-earned money on something I wasn’t sure I would ever use.
She gave me a tour, showed me the finished bar shelving, the space where the pool table would go, and let me see swatches of the possible color she had in mind for the walls. When we left, Jim had finished his lunch and resumed his work. A Steely Dan song played from the radio.
We didn’t see Brad that day till we were all done with our tour and walking back down the driveway toward the road. He roared up in his truck, scattering gravel as he came to a sudden halt. He killed the engine and swung out of the driver’s seat. He wore navy blue chinos and a tucked-in flannel shirt, and moved with an easy athleticism. He shook my hand, as he always did, and made solid eye contact when he asked me what I thought of the progress so far. As we talked, Miranda appeared disinterested, gazing back toward the house, and its view of the ocean, placid and still in the quiet afternoon.
“I hear you’re here all week,” Brad said.
“Thought I’d take a little vacation. Keep an eye on Miranda.”
Brad laughed, and maybe I was overanalyzing, but he laughed a little too heartily. I could see the fillings in his teeth. In my peripheral vision I saw Miranda swing her head back to take a look at him.
“She’s the real general contractor on this job. She missed her calling, this one,” Brad said.
“That’s what she keeps telling me.”
“I’m right here, you know,” Miranda said. “You can include me in this conversation.”
Before Miranda and I left to walk back to the inn, I told Brad that he should swing by the tavern that night, have a drink with us. He told us he’d try and make it.
“Aren’t you chummy,” Miranda said when we were back on Micmac.
“He’s your chum. I was just trying to be friendly so that he doesn’t feel like he has to stay away now that I’m in town.”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought you two were friends. He’s never met you at the inn for a drink?”
“God, no. He lives in this town. He’s not going to pay five bucks for a Bud Light.”
“Where do people who live in this town go to drink?”
“There’s someplace called Cooley’s, along Kennewick Beach, where I have not personally been invited yet. We should go sometime this week. We can’t eat at the inn every night.”
“I’d be up for that,” I said. The sidewalk narrowed for a stretch, and Miranda slid her arm through mine, pulled us closer together. Despite the brightness of the sun, it was cold where the sidewalk was shaded.
I asked, “So you don’t think Brad will show up tonight?”
“I have no idea. Maybe he’ll feel he has to, since you’re writing the checks and you asked. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t.”
“You and him have really never had a drink together? I just figured you had, since you shared cigarettes and all that.”
“God, that really bothered you, didn’t it? No, Brad and I are not friends, but we are friendly. He’s an employee and he’s doing a great job, and I respect him, but I don’t necessarily need to become his drinking partner. Besides, from what I hear, he has plenty of drinking partners already in this town.”
“What do you mean? What do you hear?”
“I’ve heard from some of the other guys on the crew that he drinks a lot, and screws around a lot. That’s why his wife left him. Not that it’s any of our business so long as he gets the job done. Why are you suddenly so interested?”
“I’m up here for a week. I thought I’d get to know some folks, some of the people you’ve been spending time with.”
“I’ve made one friend her
e, and it’s Sid. She’s the one who told me about Cooley’s, and about Brad’s reputation. Let’s go back to our room, take a nap, then get a drink. Sound good?”
Brad didn’t show up that night at the tavern. Miranda and I sat at the curving end of the bar, drinking wine and talking with Sid, even though she was busy with the Saturday night crowd. Sid had spiky blond hair, and intricate tattoos that covered one entire arm. When she spoke to us she never took her eyes off Miranda, something I was familiar with, and something that at other points in my life I had actually enjoyed. Maybe Miranda and Sid were having sex as well. Maybe Miranda was having sex with every Tom, Dick, and Sally in Kennewick.
Throughout the course of the evening, every time someone swung through the heavy tavern doors I would glance over to see if it was Brad. Miranda never looked. Either she knew he wasn’t coming, or she didn’t care, and since I doubted that she didn’t care, I assumed that somehow she knew something I didn’t, that they’d found a way to communicate, or that she already knew he had plans.
I didn’t see Brad again until Monday afternoon, when a cold mist was coming off the ocean, and I decided to explore the cliff walk. Miranda was napping. That morning we had driven up the coast to look at a lighthouse that was apparently worth looking at. It was at the end of a hook of land where the fog was particularly thick. We took photographs in which the lighthouse was barely visible, then drove farther up the coast and ate lunch at a clam shack that was closing for the season that week. Returning to the inn, Miranda suggested a nap, as she did every afternoon, and I joined her. In a strange way, the sex we’d been having since I knew that Miranda was unfaithful was better than it had been before. Anger toward my wife had made me become selfish, less interested in her needs, and only interested in mine, and she was responding to me in ways she never had before. That afternoon I had flipped Miranda onto her stomach and entered her from behind, holding her in that position even after she told me she wanted me facing her. I spread my body along hers, pushing my face into the tangled hair at her neck, gripping her wrists. I was surprised when she came shortly before I did, emitting a strange yelping sound. Afterward, she murmured, “You were quite the animal today. I liked it.” She curled into the fetal position and I watched her fall asleep. I counted the knuckles of her spine, studied the dual dimples above her buttocks, wondered about a quarter-size bruise high up on her thigh. As she began to lightly snore, my thoughts turned paranoid again. Was she this relaxed after having sex with Brad? Did she consider this her due, a lifetime of men catering to all her needs? All the tension that the sex had temporarily extinguished came flooding back. I wondered what it would feel like to punch her as hard as I could in the back of the neck.
The Kind Worth Killing Page 7
