The Kind Worth Killing

by Peter Swanson

  After talking about the house through several beers, I said, “I hope Miranda hasn’t been driving you too crazy. She’s very particular about what she wants.”

  “That’s a good thing. The worst clients are the ones who keep changing their minds. No, Mrs. Severson’s been great.” Brad slid a Marlboro Red out of the pack that had been sitting on the table since we’d sat down. He tapped the filter a few times against the varnished wood, then asked if I’d mind if he stepped outside to smoke.

  While he was gone, I took a look at my phone, which had been vibrating silently off and on in my pocket for the past twenty minutes. Miranda had sent me a succession of texts, culminating in: SERIOUSLY, WHERE THE F ARE U? I texted her back that I was having a few drinks with Brad and would be back to the hotel shortly. I told her to feel free to get dinner without me. She texted back OK, then a few seconds later XOXOXO.

  I spun around in my booth and looked out through Cooley’s front windows toward where Brad was standing, blowing smoke into the now-dark evening. From the angle of his head, it looked as though he were staring at his phone as well, possibly typing into it. Maybe he was texting my wife as well. A moment of rage flared up in me, but I reminded myself that I was on a fact-finding mission. The war had begun with this slightest of skirmishes, and the more Brad drank, the more chance I had of discovering his weak points. I went to the bathroom, bringing my three-quarters-full beer, and dumped most of it down the sink, in an attempt to keep relatively sober.

  When Brad returned, the subject of Miranda did not come up again. He started to ask me questions about my work, and my life in general, and when he learned that I’d gone to Harvard he began questioning me on what I knew about their hockey program, and how many Beanpot tournaments I’d been to. Despite not caring, I had actually been to a couple of hockey games with my sophomore-year roommate, a sports-obsessed English major who went on to become a successful magazine editor. From hockey, we moved on to the previous year’s Red Sox season, a subject I knew a little more about. I told him how I shared a block of season tickets in one of the luxury boxes, and I promised to take him to a game the following year. After switching to Jamesons, and feeling that I had exhausted my limited repertoire of sports conversation, I asked him about his divorce.

  “I have two great kids,” he said, after removing another cigarette from his hard pack and tapping it down on the table. “And a fucking ballbuster of an ex-wife.”

  “Does she have the kids?”

  “Except for every other weekend. Look, I’ll say this for her, and it’s all I’ll say, but she’s a good mom, and the kids are better off with her. But if the marriage hadn’t ended when it did, I was going to kill her, or she was going to kill me, and that’s all there is to it. It was fucking nonstop. Brad, where the fuck are you? Come home early and fix the toilet, Brad. Brad, when are you going to take me and the kids to Florida again. Brad, doesn’t it bother you to work on all these beautiful homes while your wife and kids live in a shithouse. Nonstop. It’s a good thing I didn’t own a goddamn gun.” He grinned. His teeth were slightly yellowed from the nicotine.

  “You know what I’m talking about, brother,” he continued. “Or maybe you don’t. What’s the dirt on Miranda?”

  “No dirt. We’re like newlyweds. All’s well in paradise.”

  “Oh, fuck,” he said in a loud voice. “I’ll bet it is,” he said. He had begun to slur. I’ll bet it ish. Then he presented me his fist from across the table, and I bumped it, awkwardly, grinning back at him. How had he suddenly become so drunk? Even though we’d been drinking steadily for about two hours, Brad had seemed sober five minutes earlier.

  “No, Miranda’s great,” I said.

  “No shit,” Brad said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re not a bad-looking guy or anything, but how did you score a wife like that?”

  “Just lucky, I guess.”

  “Yeah, luck and a few million dollars.” As soon as he had said it, his face fell with regret. I didn’t have a chance to respond because he instantly put a hand, palm up, toward me, and said, “Aw, man. That was uncalled for. I didn’t mean that the way it came out.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “No, it’s not okay. Totally uncalled for. I’m an asshole, and I’ve had too much to drink. Sorry, man. She’s lucky to have you. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the money.”

  I smiled. “No, I’m sure it has something to do with the money. I can live with that.”

  “No, man. I don’t know Miranda well at all, but she doesn’t care about that stuff. I can tell.” Brad seemed to be ramping up for a long apologetic monologue, so I was pleased when a heavily made-up blonde slid into the booth next to him and bumped him on the hip.

  “Hey, Braggett,” she said, then extended a hand toward me. I gripped her limp fingers in what was technically a handshake as she said, “Hi, Braggett’s friend. I’m Polly. I’m sure you’ve heard nothing at all about me.”

  “Pol,” Brad said. “Meet Ted Severson. He’s the one building the new house out on Micmac.”

  “No shit.” Polly smiled at me. Even with the clownlike makeup you could tell that she was pretty, and had probably once been beautiful. Natural blond hair, blue eyes, and large breasts that she was showing off in a V-neck shirt and cardigan sweater. The portion of her chest that was visible was deeply tanned and freckled. “Brad told me all about that house. It’s gonna be beautiful, I hear.”

  “That’s the plan,” I said.

  “Well, boys, I was going to intrude on your manly little bonding session, but now that I see you’re talking business, I have lost interest.”

  “Have a drink,” I said.

  “Thanks, anyway. I’ll let you two talk.”

  She slid out of the booth, leaving behind a hefty waft of perfume.

  “Girlfriend?” I asked Brad.

  “In eighth grade maybe,” Brad said and laughed, showing a lot of his teeth. “But now that she’s here I wouldn’t mind taking off. I live right around the corner. You got another drink in you, then I’ll take you home?”

  “Sure,” I said, although the last thing I wanted was another drink, and the next-to-last thing I wanted was to get in a vehicle with a drunken Brad behind the wheel. But this was a chance to see where Brad lived, and I couldn’t pass that up.

  The night had turned cold, but the mist had lifted and a multitude of stars wheeled in the sky. Even though Brad’s rental cottages were about three hundred yards away, he drove me in his truck, parking erratically in front of the first of about a dozen boxy cottages that formed a semicircle across the road from the beach. A hand-painted sign said CRESCENT COTTAGES, then a phone number.

  “Miranda told me you own these,” I said as he unlocked the dark cottage. All of them were dark, illuminated only by a streetlamp, and by the bright night sky.

  “My parents own them but I run them. We’re out of season now but they do good in the summertime.”

  He flipped on a tall floor lamp as we walked through the front door. It was nicer inside than I expected but also bleaker, just a few pieces of utilitarian furniture, the walls painted white and mostly empty. The one item that marked it as Brad’s home and not a rental was an enormous TV on a stand that looked out of place in the relatively small living room. I thought it would smell of cigarettes inside but it didn’t.

  Brad went straight to the fridge in the alcove kitchen, and I shut the flimsy front door behind me. I heard two caps popping off bottles, and he returned and handed me a cold Heineken. We sat on the beige couch. Brad slumped a little, his legs spread wide. The beer bottle looked small in his big tanned hands.

  “How long have you lived here?” I said, just to say something.

  “’Bout a year. It’s a temporary situation.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I can see that. I mean, you wouldn’t want to live here too long.”

  As soon as I said it, I felt a little bad, and I watched a hateful flicker darken Brad’s face that he quickly replaced
with a thoughtful frown. “Like I said, only temporary. Till the old ship comes in.”

  I said nothing back and we lapsed into a silence. I looked around, noticing that the stack of fishing magazines on the coffee table were squarely lined up with the corner of the table. On top of the magazines was the remote control, also squarely lined up. On the side table closest to me was a framed picture of a boy and a girl, taken on a boat. Both kids, who looked to be about twelve and ten, wore orange life vests.

  I picked up the picture. “These your kids?”

  “Jason and Bella. That’s taken on my old boat, though. I sold it the beginning of this summer, and bought myself my Albemarle. You fish?”

  I told him no, but he continued to talk about his boat. I was barely listening, but it didn’t really matter. I was learning some things about Brad Daggett. Putting aside for now the matter that he was sleeping with my wife, I was discovering that I didn’t like Brad Daggett at all. He was a selfish drunk, who was probably only going to get more selfish and alcoholic as he got older. He didn’t care about his kids beyond placing a photograph of them in his home, and it wasn’t clear if he really cared for anyone besides himself. He was a negative in this world. I thought of Lily, and I thought about Brad coming to a sudden end, and I didn’t really mind. In fact, I wanted it to happen. Not just because it would punish Brad for what he was doing with my wife, but also because Brad disappearing off this earth would be a good thing. Whose life was he making better? Not his kids, or his ex-wife. Not Polly at the bar, who maybe thought she was his girlfriend. He was an asshole, and one less asshole around was good for everybody.

  I interrupted Brad in his monologue about his boat, and told him I was going to the bathroom. It was as clean as the rest of the apartment. I dumped my beer down the sink, and took a look in Brad Daggett’s medicine cabinet. There wasn’t much to look at. Razors and deodorant and hair product. A large bottle of generic ibuprofen. A box of hair dye that hadn’t been opened. A prescription bottle for antibiotics that had expired over five years earlier. I opened it up and looked inside; the bottle was filled with blue, diamond-shaped pills that I recognized as Viagra. So Brad the stud wasn’t such a stud, after all. I actually laughed out loud. When I returned to the living room, Brad hadn’t shifted position from the couch, but his eyes were closed and his chest was lifting and falling steadily. I watched him for a while, trying to feel something besides disgust—trying to feel some pity, maybe, just as a way to test myself. I felt none.

  Before leaving I quietly searched a few of the drawers in the kitchen alcove. One of them was a utility drawer, filled with tools, measuring tape, a spool of twine, a roll of duct tape. Toward the back of the drawer was a Smith & Wesson double-action revolver. I was surprised, only because he had made that earlier joke that he would have killed his wife if he’d owned a gun. For one rash moment, I considered stealing it, then realized he would most likely know who took it. I left it where it was, but I did take a newly minted key from a small box filled with similar keys. He would never miss it, and it was possible that it opened the door to this cottage, or maybe all of the Crescent cottages.

  I took one last look around before leaving. Brad hadn’t moved from his position. I stepped out into the cold, brackish air, then quietly tried the key on Brad’s front door. It slid in and turned. I left the door unlocked, and pocketed the key. I pulled out my phone and was about to call Miranda to have her come and pick me up, when I decided I might walk. The cold felt good against my skin. I breathed deeply through my nostrils, the salt in the air making me feel more alive than I’d felt in a while. I began to walk. It was only a few miles, and I felt like I had all the energy in the world.

  CHAPTER 10

  LILY

  For all of my sophomore year, and Eric’s senior year, I spent almost every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night at St. Dunstan’s Manor in Eric’s second-floor bedroom. At the time, I thought of this period as the happiest of my life. In retrospect, and not just because of what happened later, I realized that it was also a time of uncertainty and anxiety. I was in love with Eric Washburn, and he said he was in love with me. I believed him, but I also knew that we were young, and that Eric was graduating soon, with plans to move to New York City and get a job in the financial sector. And my plan was to spend the following school year in London at the Faunce Institute of Art, studying conservation. Even though Eric and I would talk about our future, I told myself I knew that everything was going to change when he graduated.

  I led two separate but compatible lives that year. From Sunday to Thursday I did all my reading and schoolwork. My roommates, the Three Winonas, played loud music and smoked nonstop cigarettes, but were surprisingly quiet, and relatively good-natured. I found I had a lot in common with Mermaids Winona, a bookworm who, like me, grew up idolizing Nancy Drew. On Thursday evening I would go to St. Dunstan’s Manor for the weekly party. I would bring my largest purse, packed with a change of clothes and a few of my toiletries, since I would always spend the night, and sometimes the weekend. From Friday morning until Sunday evening Eric and I were rarely apart, with the exception of classes, and Eric’s racquetball matches, or Ultimate Frisbee, or any of the numerous pickup games that it was important for him to win. We saw movies at the campus repertory theater, and would venture into New Chester to eat Italian food, and would sometimes go to parties not hosted by St. Dunstan’s or any of its members, but that was rare. We slid into a comfortable relationship filled with predictable routine, a day-to-day of inside jokes and what seemed to me to be some highly well-suited sex. We called one another Washburn and Kintner. We were blessedly free of the dramatics of disappointment or infidelity. I cherished what we had become but kept it to myself, telling Eric and no one else how strong my attachment was. He echoed my feelings, and sometimes talked of our future together after Mather.

  Eric’s ex-girlfriend Faith was also a senior, and still a regular at Thursday night parties. She was now dating Matthew Ford, and because Faith and I were the respective girlfriends of the two most prominent members of St. Dun’s, Faith attached herself to me that year, even occasionally asking me questions about my relationship with Eric, although I never took the bait. I didn’t particularly like Faith, who was bubbly and devious and liked to be the center of attention, but I didn’t mind spending time with her. If Faith hadn’t been around at all, curiosity about the girl who had spent two years with Eric might have escalated into obsession. But she was around, and I got to know her, and, because of that, she had no place in my imagination.

  I could see what had attracted Eric to Faith. She was round-faced and sexy, with short black hair. Her clothes were straight out of The Official Preppy Handbook but her sweaters were always a little too tight, and her skirts were always a little too short. When she talked, she came in close and made disarming eye contact, but she laughed often, and made funny jokes about herself. If we went anywhere together, Faith would push her arm through mine, and if she was standing behind me, she would run her fingers through my hair. Neither of my parents had been physically affectionate with me, so I found Faith’s touchiness often disturbing and occasionally reassuring. Once, when Faith was drunk, she told me she wanted to study the color of my eyes. She came in close, her own brown eyes huge in my vision.

  “It’s like a tapestry in there,” Faith said, her breath warm against my cheek. “There are flecks of gray and yellow and blue and brown and pink.”

  Eric rarely spoke of Faith, but one night as we lay in his bed, he asked if it bothered me that Faith was around so much.

  “Not really,” I said. “She’s decided we’re best friends. Have you noticed that?”

  “She’s best friends with everyone. No, delete that. I think she genuinely likes you and wants to be your friend, it’s just that . . .”

  “Don’t worry. I know what you mean. I have no intention of becoming her best friend. I’m not sure we have anything in common. Besides you.”

  “No, you have nothing in common.
I can vouch for that. She’s not a bad person, and she and Matt make a good pair.”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  And that was the extent of our conversation on the subject of Faith.

  That summer I returned to Monk’s. My mother had a new boyfriend, Michael Bialik, a bearded linguistics professor from the university, who was surprisingly grounded. He had his own place about a half mile from ours, a converted barn where he lived with his son, a piano prodigy named Sandy. Michael loved to cook, and because of this, my mother spent a lot of her time at his house, leaving Monk’s to me. My library job was only four hours a day Monday through Friday, and I spent the rest of my weekday time either reading or puttering around the property. I was in love, and I was at peace. I even returned to my favorite meadow, the final resting place of Chet. The well cover was still in place; it looked the way it had—years ago—when I had first discovered it, hidden by winter-yellowed grass. The nearby farmhouse was still unoccupied.

  My plan had been to visit Eric in New York on the weekends, but when Eric came to visit Monk’s he fell in love with it, or at least he claimed he had.

  “I want to spend every weekend here, Kintner. This will be the perfect life. Weeks in the city, and then I can take the train out Friday evening and be here with you. Country weekends.”

  “You won’t get bored?”

  “Not a chance. I love it here. What about you? I’d be asking you to spend all your time here.”