The Kind Worth Killing

by Peter Swanson

  “You’re describing every summer I’ve ever had. I don’t mind. And I’ll have you to look forward to on the weekends.”

  And so our summer turned out to be a replication of our school year. Weeks alone. Weekends together. I didn’t mind, because I had never minded spending time alone. And the days I spent alone were days that were getting me closer to the weekend, to seeing Eric step off the commuter train, overnight bag slung across his shoulders, huge grin on his face. And these weekends were that much more intense. Away from Mather, our relationship seemed more mature, more comfortable. We felt married. So, no, I didn’t mind just seeing Eric two days each week.

  And Eric didn’t mind, for reasons of his own.

  I might never have found out about those reasons, and might have left for London in the fall feeling as though Eric was still the love of my life, if it hadn’t been for my father’s visiting New York in the last week of August and asking to see me for lunch. He had a new book coming out, a collection of short stories, and was in New York to meet with his American agent and his American publisher, and to give a reading at Strand Books. He hadn’t invited me to the reading, which wasn’t a surprise. I’d asked him once—my junior year of high school, I think—if I could go to one, and he’d replied, “God, Lily, you’re my daughter. I wouldn’t expose you to that. It’s bad enough you’ll eventually feel the need to read my books, let alone have to listen to me speak them out loud.”

  So I took a day off from the library and caught the train to New York City. My father and I ate lunch in a swank restaurant attached to the lobby of his midtown hotel, and we talked about my upcoming year in London. He promised to e-mail me a list of friends and relatives I had to visit, along with a few of his favorite London landmarks, most of which were pubs. Then he drilled me for tidbits about my mother and the new boyfriend. He was very disappointed to hear that the linguistics professor was, on the whole, a decent man. After lunch, we parted ways in front of the hotel. “You turned out all right, Lil, despite your mother and me,” he said, not for the first time. We hugged good-bye. It was a strangely nice day for late August in the city, so I headed downtown, toward Eric’s office, a place I had never visited. The air that had been stifling for the entire month was suddenly free of humidity, and I was just happy to be walking along the quiet midday corridors of the city. I hadn’t decided whether I would intrude on Eric’s workday to surprise him or not, but was considering it, beginning to imagine the look on his face as I stepped into his office. I was taken out of this reverie by hearing someone shout my name. I turned to see Katie Stone, a junior at Mather, and someone I knew from St. Dunstan’s parties, crossing the street and waving at me.

  “I thought that was you,” Katie said, stepping onto the curb as a yellow cab hurtled by. “I didn’t know you were in the city this summer.”

  “I’m not. I’m at my mom’s house in Connecticut, but my dad’s here and I had lunch with him.”

  “Do you want to get coffee? I got let out of work early. God, New York’s depressing in August.”

  We went to a chain coffee shop at the nearest corner and both ordered iced lattes. Katie prattled on about Mather students we both knew, and several I’d never heard of. She was a gatherer and purveyor of gossip, and I was surprised that she wasn’t asking me about Eric, so I asked her, “Do you see Eric much?”

  Katie’s eyes widened a little at the mention of his name. “Oh. I wasn’t going to bring him up. No, not much, but a little. He works around here somewhere, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know. Why weren’t you going to bring him up?”

  “I just didn’t know how you felt, now that you’re not seeing each other. I didn’t know if you wanted to hear about him.”

  A cold flush went over my skin. I very nearly told Katie that of course I was still seeing Eric but something stopped me. Instead, I asked, “Why, what’s going on with him?”

  “Nothing that I know of. I’ve seen him a little, but he’s never here on the weekends. His dad’s sick. Maybe you knew that?”

  “No,” I said. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Cancer, I think. Eric goes there every weekend. They must be close?” She phrased it like a question, and I managed to nod, despite the sudden need to get out of the coffee shop, and away from Katie. Fortunately, Katie’s cell phone began to ring, and as she dug within her enormous purse, I excused myself. I borrowed the key from the barista, then locked myself into the closet-size restroom. My mind galloped, desperately trying to understand the information I had just received, and while there was a part of me that was questioning what Katie had said—that it must be some ridiculous misunderstanding—there was a more logical part of me that knew it was true, that I had been a fool. Eric was leading two lives, and no one knew that he was seeing me on the weekends. After returning the key I saw that Katie was still on her phone, and I took the opportunity to tap her briefly on the shoulder, point at my watch, and move quickly toward the door. Katie lowered the phone and stood, but I simply mouthed the word “sorry” and kept moving.

  Once outside, I went down a residential side street. One of the brownstones had stone front steps that were shaded by a leafy tree. I crouched high up on the steps, not caring if the owner spotted me and told me to leave. I don’t know how long I sat on those steps, but it was probably about two hours. I felt miserable for some of that time, but pretty soon I began to feel calm. I analyzed the situation. Eric had compartmentalized his life with me so that it only happened on the weekends and never in the city. It was the way he operated; it was the way he had operated at college. But why was he lying about where he was on the weekends? There could be only one reason—that Eric was involved with someone here in New York.

  A little before five o’clock I walked down toward Eric’s office building. I knew the address but not what it looked like. I walked slowly, my eyes scanning the crowd. I knew that I would not be able to handle running into Eric, but I wasn’t ready to leave the city yet. I wanted to see where he worked, maybe even see him without letting him see me.

  His office was in a nondescript four-story stone building next to a Gray’s Papaya. I sat on a bench across from its entrance, and pulled a New York Post from a nearby trash can, unfolding it in front of me but keeping my eyes on the building’s front doors. At a little after five a few men in suits, plus one woman in a skirt and blouse emerged. No Eric, but he came out in the next group of three men. He wore a light gray suit, and as the three men hit the sidewalk, they all simultaneously lit cigarettes. I wasn’t surprised to see Eric smoking, even though he’d told me he quit on the day of graduation. He’d never once smoked a cigarette while visiting me in Connecticut on the weekend, but that was because he was two people. His coworkers, their cigarettes lit, began walking downtown, but Eric stood for a moment, glancing at his phone. A yellow cab pulled up, and I thought that Eric was going to get into it, but instead, a redhead in a retro minidress got out and kissed Eric on the mouth as he flicked away his cigarette.

  They spoke for a moment, Eric’s hand on the curve of her hip.

  My chest hurt, and the world shimmered in front of my eyes, and, for a brief moment, I thought I was having a heart attack. Then the worst of it passed. I straightened my back, and took a deep breath, studying the girl. She looked familiar, but I had yet to see her face. The fact that she was also a redhead was a twist of the knife, even though I could tell from this distance that this woman’s hair came from a hairstylist and not from genetics.

  Eric and the redhead turned and for one horrible moment I thought they were going to step off the curb and cross the street toward me, but they headed north, arms linked. I watched them from over my newspaper and finally caught a good look at the face of Eric’s city girlfriend. It was Faith, a redheaded Faith. Looking back, I wasn’t really surprised at all that it was Faith—of course it was—but I remember being shocked by the way she had changed her looks, her hair now red like mine. And I was angry. I was the angriest I’d been in years.r />
  CHAPTER 11

  TED

  Before saying good-bye at the Concord River Inn, after we had decided that it made sense for me to spend some time in Maine with Brad and Miranda, Lily and I had planned our next meeting. It was to be two Saturdays from our first meeting, at the same time, but in the Old Hill Burying Ground, a hillside cemetery that rose above Monument Square in Concord Center. There were benches there and we could sit beside one another and talk, and we would be less visible than we had been at the inn’s tavern.

  I showed up early that Saturday afternoon. There were tourists in town, but none of them were on the hill. I sat alone on a cold, wrought-iron bench, looking out over the shingled roofs toward Main Street. The sky was low and the color of granite. A steady purposeful wind blew colored leaves through the air. I looked for Lily, studying the cars that circled Monument Square, even though I had no idea what kind of car Lily drove. I tried to guess. Something classic, I thought, but with just a little bit of flair. A vintage BMW maybe, or an original Austin Mini. But when I spotted Lily, she wasn’t coming out of a car, but walking briskly down Main Street, wearing a knee-length green coat, her red hair bouncing with each step.

  I watched her walk toward the cemetery, losing sight of her when she dipped below the rooflines. I felt a surge of excitement that I was going to see her again. Part of that was my burgeoning romantic fixation, but I was also excited to tell her about my trip, and to tell her about the key I had stolen from Brad that opened his front door. In a way, I felt like a child bringing home a good report card to my mother.

  Lily came back into view along the cemetery’s flagstone path. She smiled at me before sitting down on the opposite side of the bench. “Quite the view,” she said, her voice slightly breathless from the steep hill.

  “I saw you coming down Main Street. Could you tell you were being watched?”

  “No, I wasn’t even thinking about it. I was worried I was late and that you would have left.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t have left. I have too much to tell you.”

  She turned toward me. In the gray October light her face seemed bleached of color, while her hair was redder than I remembered, an alarmingly alive color among the monochrome graves. I wanted to reach out and touch her, to make sure she was real, but held back. “You went to Maine?” she asked.

  “I did,” I said, then told her the story of my week, of the time spent with Brad, of being in his house, and taking his key.

  “You don’t think he’ll miss it?” she asked.

  “I don’t. He had a whole pile of them in his drawer. It’s a business he runs, so I assume he needs lots of keys. For all I know, those are masters that open all of the cottage doors.”

  “Well, it can only be helpful. Just remember to make sure that after all of this happens, you get rid of that key, or leave it back in his house. You can never get caught with any kind of physical evidence. You know that.”

  I nodded, and Lily asked, “What else did you find out about your house? Is there a completion date?”

  I told her that Brad had told me that he expected to be done with his work in early December, early January at the latest.

  “That means we need to act relatively fast. It’s important that it happens before the house is finished, I think.”

  We created a plan, where I would need to be and when, and what we would both be doing. Lily discussed it as if we were a couple of seniors in high school discussing who would be doing what when we presented our final science project. I was a detail-oriented person—I had to be, for the work I did and the money I made—and my natural inclination was that I should be taking notes, but I knew that nothing could be written down. Ever. As Lily had said earlier, this would be the last time we saw each other before I became a widower, and then we could meet again, accidentally, as though we’d never met before. As we talked, and as I memorized what needed to be done, I felt the start of some tightness in my chest, a feeling of constriction in my throat and jaw. I tilted my head. My neck cracked.

  “You okay?” Lily asked.

  “Fine. It’s just becoming real. It was one thing to plan my scouting trip to Maine, but this is a little different.”

  Lily straightened up, pulled her lower lip under her upper. There was concern in her eyes. “You don’t have to go through with this, you know,” she said. “This is for you, and not for me, and the last thing I want is for you to do something that will haunt you for the rest of your life.”

  “I’m not scared of that. Maybe I’m worried about something going wrong.”

  “If we do this the way we’re planning, then nothing will go wrong. Let me ask you—if there were an earthquake today in Maine and Miranda and Brad were killed, how would you feel?”

  “I would be happy,” I said, without having to think about it. “It would solve all my problems, and they would deserve it.”

  “That’s all we’re doing, then. We’re creating an earthquake, one that will bury them both. And if we do it right, everyone, including the police detectives assigned to the case, will naturally assume that Miranda was murdered by Brad, and that Brad skipped town. All their efforts will go toward finding him, and they never will. They might suspect you briefly. It would be strange if they didn’t, but nothing they find will point them toward you, and your alibi is going to be rock solid.”

  “Okay, I trust you.”

  “Look, if at any point you decide you don’t want to do this, then just let me know. But if you’re worried about something going wrong, I don’t think you need to worry. If we stay sharp and do everything the way we planned it, you’re not even going to be a suspect. Miranda and Brad will get what they deserve, and not only that, but think of the sympathy you’ll receive. Your beautiful young wife killed by her brutish lover. You’ll be fighting them off with a stick.”

  Lily was smiling. She pushed a strand of hair off her forehead.

  “Just for the record,” I said. “That’s not my motive.”

  “No?”

  “No, not unless you . . . uh, you were volunteering for the position.”

  Lily was still smiling. “Ah, the plot thickens.”

  “Or thins,” I said.

  She laughed. “Right. Or thins.”

  We looked at each other for a moment, and Lily’s smile faded. She hunched her shoulders, and buttoned her coat a little higher. “Cold?” I asked.

  “A little. Should we walk around? I’ve never been here before.”

  I agreed, and we strolled among the tottering, timeworn gravestones, Lily’s arm through mine. We moved comfortably together, not having to talk, as though we were an old couple with years and years of memories between us. We read some inscriptions, most commemorating lives lived in the eighteenth century, many cut short at ages that nowadays would be deemed a tragedy. But they had had lives. And no matter how young they had been when they died, they would still all be long gone by now.

  Some of the gravestones had lettering that had worn away to unreadable hieroglyphs, and many depicted winged skulls, and the words Memento Mori. Remember that you will die. I ran a finger over one of the carvings, a skull in the shape of a lightbulb with round owl’s eyes and a full set of teeth. Between the skull and the inscription were two sets of crossed bones. “I wonder when they stopped putting death imagery on gravestones,” I said. “It’s so appropriate.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Lily said, pulling me in closer with her arm. The cemetery dipped a little on its far side, and we found ourselves below its highest ledge and underneath a tree, still festooned in yellow leaves. Almost simultaneously we turned, and I took Lily in my arms, and we kissed. I unbuttoned her coat and slid my arms inside of it, around her waist. Her sweater felt like cashmere. She shivered.

  “Still cold?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, and we kissed more, the kiss getting wetter, each of us pulling the other closer into our bodies. I ran a hand up the front of her sweater, feeling the ridges of her ribs, then the small swell of a brea
st, a hard nipple. The sound of a branch snapping made us each turn our heads. On the cemetery’s bluff a lone figure crouched, taking a photograph of one of the gravestones. We broke apart, but continued to look at each other.

  “We should call it a day,” she said.

  “Okay.” My voice was a little hoarse.

  “Do you know the plan? Should we go over it again?”

  “I’ve got it. All up here.” I tapped my forehead.

  “Okay, then.”

  Neither of us immediately moved. “So afterward,” I said. “Can we continue this?”

  “I’d like that.”

  “And you’ll tell me all your secrets?”

  “I will. I’ll tell you everything. I’m looking forward to it.”

  I remembered the half joke I had made at the Concord River Inn, asking her how many people she had killed. Again, I asked myself who I was becoming involved with. Again, I told myself I didn’t care.

  “We should leave here separately.”

  “I know. Before we wind up in one of that man’s photographs.”

  I looked up at the bluff. The man was standing now, peering through his camera along a line of leaning gravestones. “I’ll go first,” Lily said.

  “Okay. Until next time . . .”

  “Right. Until then . . . and good luck.”

  She walked away from me, up and over the cemetery’s ridge, the man with the camera never even turning to watch her. I stayed where I was, the taste of her lips still on mine. I zipped up my coat, then shoved my hands deep into my pockets. The sky, still the color of granite, had brightened a little, so that I squinted as I watched her. For the first time since I had decided to kill my wife, I wanted it to happen right away. I felt like a kid the week before Christmas, the days stretching out, each one a miniature version of eternity. I wanted Miranda dead. She had taken our love and made a mockery of it. She had made a mockery of me. I kept thinking of the way that Miranda used to look at me, still looked at me sometimes, like I was the center of her universe. And then she had ripped out my heart. And how could I share the money I had made with a woman who had done that, who had ripped out my heart like it didn’t mean a thing to her? This was my reason, and I told myself I believed in it.