“Brad, she’s using you. Who do you think they’re going to suspect? She’s in Florida. You two are having an affair. Everyone knows it.”
I saw an expression of doubt on his face, and felt a sliver of hope. I held my hand against the exit wound on my stomach. The blood pulsing through my fingers was warm and thick.
“You think you’re such a big deal,” he said.
“Brad, you’re an idiot.”
“We’ll see,” he said, and pulled the trigger.
PART II
The Half-Finished House
CHAPTER 16
LILY
“Hello, there,” I said to Ted Severson. He was sitting at the bar in the business class lounge at Heathrow Airport. I had recognized him right away but doubted he recognized me. We’d only met once, a couple years ago, when I had run into Faith Hobart at an outdoor market in the South End.
“I go by Miranda now,” Faith had said to me, then.
“Oh.”
“It’s my actual name. Faith’s my middle name. Miranda Faith.”
“I don’t think I knew that. So you’ve lost your faith.”
She laughed. “I guess you could say that. This is my fiancé, Ted.”
A handsome, somewhat stiff man turned from looking at a vintage letterpress tray and shook my hand. He had the dry, firm grasp of the professional hand shaker, but after a cursory few words about how nice it was to meet me, he turned back to the stall. I told Faith/Miranda that I was meeting someone, and needed to go. Before leaving, she said, in a low voice, “That was terrible about Eric. I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch with you afterward but you were in London, and . . .”
“Never mind, Faith, it’s okay.”
I walked away. I had thought many times about what might happen if I ran into Faith again. (I suppose I should call her Miranda now.) How would she react to me? Had she been surprised when she found out Eric died in London while visiting me? Had she been two-timed as well? But after meeting her at the market, seeing her with her new ink black hair and her five-hundred-dollar boots and with an oblivious fiancé, and seeing the casual way she expressed concern for me, I knew. I knew that she had actively deceived me as well. When she was with Eric in New York, she knew he was still seeing me on the weekends in Shepaug. Was it payback for my dating Eric in the first place? Was she just one of those women who got off on taking men away from other women? For a brief moment, there in the South End of Boston, I re-experienced that stab of pain in my chest I had felt when I knew for sure that Eric had betrayed me with Miranda, and that my life would never be the same again.
I told myself not to worry about it, and I didn’t particularly, but when I saw Ted Severson at the airport (Miranda and he were married now; I’d read the announcement in the Globe) I decided to talk with him. “Hello, there,” I said, giving him a chance to recognize me, even though I doubted that he would. He looked up, no idea who I was. He was visibly drunk, his eyes red-rimmed and his lower lip slack. He was drinking martinis. I ordered one as well, even though I hated martinis.
We shared a flight back to Boston, and he told me all about his sad life, about how Miranda was cheating on him, about his feelings of rage and resignation. He told me these things because he thought he would never see me again. At another time, another place, he would never have told me what he did. He even told me how much hate he felt for his wife, and jokingly said that he wanted to kill her. I told myself not to get involved, but I knew the moment we began to talk that it was too late. Miranda had come into my orbit again, and for a reason. Maybe it was selfishness, or maybe it was justice, or maybe it was something else altogether, but over the next few weeks I convinced Ted Severson to murder Miranda, as well as Brad Daggett, her lover. It wasn’t hard. And just when the plan was set to happen, I gathered the Sunday Globe from my stoop one morning, and over coffee at my kitchen table I saw a picture of Ted, a small pixelated square on the top of a column in the Metro section.
I read the accompanying story, my mug of coffee halfway to my lips.
SOUTH END RESIDENT SHOT IN OWN HOME
Boston—Police are investigating the homicide of a Boston resident that occurred in the Worcester Square section of the South End early Friday evening.
Police responded to a call for shots fired at 6:22 P.M. According to Boston Police Detective Henry Kimball, the victim, 38-year-old Ted Severson, was found on the second-floor landing of his residence and pronounced dead at the scene.
“We are also investigating a burglary that occurred on Friday night on the same block as the homicide,” Kimball said. “We don’t know yet if the two crimes are related, but we are asking anyone who might have information to step forward.”
Ted Severson, president of Severson Inc., a consulting firm, is survived by his wife, Miranda Severson, née Hobart, who was in Florida at the time of the shooting.
According to a neighbor, Joy Robinson, Ted and Miranda Severson “were a beautiful young couple. They looked like people you would see on television. I can’t believe this happened to them. And in this neighborhood.”
Anyone with information on either the homicide case or the burglary may call the Boston Police Crime Stoppers line.
I set my coffee down, then read the story again. I felt cold all over.
It had never occurred to me that, while Ted and I were setting up Miranda to be killed, she might be doing the same thing with Ted. It had to be Miranda, with the help of Brad. There was no way this was a random burglary that had turned into a murder. It was too perfect that Miranda was out of town in Florida, with a solid alibi. Brad must have come down from Maine and shot Ted. Maybe he burglarized a nearby house to muddy the waters. Maybe not. Either way, Ted was out of Miranda’s way, and all his money would go to her.
I thought of Ted. He had been found shot to death on the second-floor landing of his house. He must have let Brad into the house, then made a run for it. He must have known he was about to die, and he must have known that Miranda had engineered it. My throat closed up and I felt tears well up in my eyes, but they didn’t fall. I had grown fond of Ted. When we talked on the plane, I had seen him only as a way to find out more about my college nemesis. Miranda Faith Hobart was a loose thread in my own narrative, and I had told myself that, even though she had wronged me by stealing away my boyfriend, I was never convinced that she was a truly poisonous person. But after talking with Ted on the plane, and hearing his story of her betrayal, I knew that this was not the case. She was rotten to the core.
And maybe I was excited to have a prey again. I will admit that. Killing was a little bit of an itch that I hadn’t scratched in many years.
But Ted grew on me. More than grew on me, really. When we kissed in the cemetery in Concord I was surprised by my reaction, by how much I felt from a kiss. I told myself—as I always told myself when getting involved with a man—that falling in love was never an option. I knew I could never go through that again. But I liked Ted a lot. He was handsome, and yet somehow awkward, as though he had never really grown accustomed to his good luck. One of those men who own the world but don’t quite know it. I could see how Miranda would have appealed to him. Not only was she the sexiest woman in any room, but she was also incredibly comfortable with herself. He must have been attracted to that quality. But besides the intensity of our kiss—the yellow leaves around us, his hand on my sweater—what I really felt with Ted was the unusual sensation of being able to be myself with him, of being able to share secrets with another human being. He was telling me his deepest thoughts, his desire to murder his wife, and, one day, I told myself, I might be able to tell him about my past.
But now Ted was gone.
And all I could think about was how badly I wanted to see him again, and how that was never going to happen.
I went online to see if I could learn anything more about what had transpired on Friday night. There was nothing, just a few newspaper articles that repeated the information from the Globe piece. I thought more about the mur
der, and how Miranda had engineered it. It had to have been Brad that pulled the trigger. There was a possibility that there was a third person involved, but I doubted it. So how did they work it? Miranda leaves town and makes sure that Ted will be home alone on that Friday night. Brad drives down from Maine. First, he breaks into a neighbor’s house and burgles it. It would have been a neighbor about whom Miranda had information. She would have known the homeowner was away, and that he didn’t have an alarm system. That would be fairly easy. After the burglary, Brad must have gone to Ted’s house and knocked on the door. Ted would have let him in, then all Brad had to do was shoot him. It would look like a burglary gone wrong. Then Brad returns to Maine.
I wondered about Brad’s alibi. He had to have one, but how could he if he drove from southern Maine to Boston and back and committed two crimes? It would take at least three hours, probably more, because he’d need to keep to the speed limits on the highway. Maybe Miranda was counting on the fact that absolutely no one knew about her and her building contractor. But was that a possibility? Ted had found out. Someone else in town must have known. Members of his crew? The bartender at the Kennewick Inn? It didn’t seem likely that they’d managed to keep it a total secret.
I knew, of course. It put me in a unique position—possessed of all this information from Ted Severson, and no one in the world was aware that we had even known each other. I could go to the police, of course, and tell them everything, without ever mentioning that Ted had also been planning on killing his wife. But I wasn’t going to do that. There was a good chance that the police would botch the prosecution and Miranda would go free. And even if she was arrested and convicted, she would become a national celebrity. I could see it already—a woman with her looks who had convinced her lover to murder her husband. It would play out on television for years to come.
Miranda deserved punishment, now more than ever.
I sent a text message to my friend Kathy, telling her that I didn’t feel well and canceling our plans to catch an afternoon movie. Then I sent an e-mail to my boss at Winslow College, letting him know that I felt a cold coming on, and planned on taking the following day off. My boss was deadly afraid of germs, and always happy to grant sick days.
I had work to do, and the first step was to visit Kennewick and meet Brad Daggett. I knew I had to move fast, because the police might already be closing in, and I needed to get there ahead of them.
CHAPTER 17
MIRANDA
It was just past ten in the morning and I could smell the alcohol on his breath. There were dots of sweat along his hairline, and the skin under his eyes was puffy and bruised-looking.
“You here alone?”
“Yeah,” Brad said.
We were standing on the gravel driveway of the half-finished house in Maine. It was Sunday. Brad had killed my husband on Friday night, and I knew, just looking at him, that I’d misjudged his capabilities. He looked feverish, his eyes too bright.
“It went okay,” I said. “Police think it’s a burglary that went wrong. Just like we planned.”
“Yeah,” he said again.
“How do you feel? You look sick.”
“I don’t feel so good. It was harder than I thought it would be.”
“Baby, I’m sorry,” I said. “You won’t feel that way for long. I promise. We’re going to get married. You’re going to be rich. Trust me, this feeling won’t last.”
“Yeah, I know that.”
“Then you’ve got to pull yourself together. If the police come and talk with you, you can’t look like a zombie. Okay? It’s done now. Ted is dead, and there’s no going back.”
A car slid past on Micmac Road, and Brad turned his head to watch it. I watched Brad. It was a cold morning, and his breath condensed in the air. He turned back to me. “I don’t know if we should be meeting here like this,” he said, and pulled a Marlboro Red out of the hard pack in his jacket’s front pocket. He lit it with a match, cupping with both hands even though there was no wind.
“You’re my building contractor. My husband was just murdered, and I needed to tell you to suspend work for a few days, just while I figure out what needs to be done. It’s no big deal. I’m on my way to see my mother. No one knows about us. No one. You’ve got to pull it together, Brad.”
“I know. I will. It’s just that . . . You weren’t there. He looked scared.”
“Of course, he looked scared, baby.”
“And there’s something else, too.”
“What?”
“I think he knew about us.”
“What do you mean?”
“He said some things. He said you’d never be with me, and that you were using me.”
“He probably just put it together. As soon as he saw you coming through the door with the gun, he figured that you and I were together. There’s no way he knew about us before.”
“I think he did. It’s not like he was surprised. He acted like he’d known all along.”
I thought for a moment, wondered if it were possible, but decided it wasn’t. “How would he have known?” I said to Brad.
“I don’t fucking know, Miranda, but I’m telling you. He knew.” His voice was pitched high, and his hand with the cigarette bobbed up and down as he spoke.
“Shhh, it’s okay. Maybe he knew about us, but now he’s dead, so it doesn’t matter, okay?”
“He could have told someone.”
“Who would he tell? I know him. He had no close friends. Maybe he just suspected us, but he wouldn’t have told a soul. I promise.”
“Okay.” He took a long gulping drag at his cigarette.
“Baby, listen to me. You’ve got to be prepared with your story. You’re a building contractor, and you were working for Ted and me. Ted was never around but I was. I seemed a little bit bored, had my nose in every detail, but other than that I was all right. I never hit on you. You never hit on me. Why would you mess up a sweet deal like the one you had? They were filthy rich. You have no idea who might have killed Ted. You have no idea if Ted and I were happy. We seemed happy when you saw us together, but, honestly, you weren’t paying that much attention. That’s it. That’s all you know.”
“Okay.”
“Repeat it back to me.”
“Jesus, Miranda, I got it.”
“Okay. So tell me about your night with Polly. How’d that go?”
“Fine. We had lunch at Cooley’s, kept drinking and left around three. We went back to my place. She was hammered, passed out before I left.”
“Did you fuck her?”
“Jesus, Miranda.”
“I’m not asking for me. I don’t care. It’s probably best that you fucked her, in case she gets asked about the story.”
“Why would she get asked? I thought you said—”
“She’s not going to get asked, but I’m just making sure. She’s your alibi. I want to know what she’s going to say on the off chance that the police check your alibi.”
“She’ll be good. She’ll probably say I’m her boyfriend, and we did some drinking, then had sex back at my place. She’ll say I was there all night. She’s not going to say she passed out. I know her.”
“She was still there when you got back?”
“Yeah, she hadn’t moved.”
“You woke her up?”
“Yeah, I did just what you said. I woke her up. It was about ten, and I took her back to her car.”
Another car wound by out on Micmac, and Brad watched it again. He’d tossed his cigarette, and with his free hand he tugged a little on one of his sideburns. “Okay,” I said. “I’m going to get going. Tell the crew to take a couple days off, okay, just till I figure out what I’m going to do. I’ll call you, but only for work reasons, okay?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Nothing bad’s going to happen, Brad. I promise. I don’t think the police are ever even going to talk to you.”
“I know.”
I stepped forward, glancing toward the r
oad to make sure it was empty, then took Brad’s big knuckly hand and guided it down the front of the yoga pants I was wearing. I wasn’t wearing any underpants, and on Friday, during the few hours that I was in Miami, I’d gone with my girlfriends to a spa and suffered through a complete Brazilian. I pushed Brad’s fingers down far between my legs. “And when this is all over,” I whispered, “you and I are going to take a long vacation on some tropical island where no one knows us, and I am going to fuck you blind.”
“Okay, Jesus,” he said, pulling his hand away from me and taking a step back. “Someone will see us.”
“You worry too much,” I said. “That’s your problem.”
“Okay,” he said again, and pulled another cigarette from his pack. He glanced back at his truck, probably thinking about the bottle he kept there in the glove compartment.
“Gotta go, baby,” I said, and got in my car. “Stay cool, okay?”
He nodded, and I U-turned out of the driveway. Brad had been a big mistake. That was pretty clear, and all I could do was hope that the police kept their investigation to Boston, and never questioned him.
I got back onto I-95 and settled in for the long haul to Orono. After marrying Ted I’d tried to talk my mother into moving closer to Boston, but she’d insisted on staying up in Maine. I gave her some money and she ended up buying a 1,600-square-foot town house that she fell in love with because of a stainless steel fridge and some granite countertops. I told her that owning a nice house in Orono was like owning half a parking spot in Boston, but she still didn’t want to move down. I think the reason she wanted to stay in Maine was to rub her newfound money in the faces of her friends. Along with the condo, she also got a new wardrobe and a Mercedes.
“Did you tell your father I’m driving a Mercedes now? We had one once, you know, for about five minutes,” she said to me after she’d bought the car.
“Dad doesn’t care what car you drive, Mom.”
“You think because he’s some kind of intellectual he doesn’t care what car someone drives.”
The Kind Worth Killing Page 14