By early afternoon, we’d put an all-points bulletin out for Brad and his vehicle. His ex-wife had been interviewed, plus several employees and work colleagues. No one had seen him since the previous day at lunch, when he’d bought a large meatball sub at a pizza place in York that he frequented. He’d disappeared.
I left Maine late in the afternoon, taking I-95 back down toward Boston. On the way, I received an excited call from Billy Elkins, the officer I’d tasked with looking into Lily Kintner, the woman that Miranda Severson said she knew in Winslow, Massachusetts. He’d found out a lot. Lily Kintner worked at Winslow College in the library department, apparently under the name of Lily Hayward. But she owned a house on Poplar Road in Winslow under her real name. Most importantly, Ted and Lily had shared a flight back from London on the twentieth of September. I pumped my fist in the car, then took down her address.
Asking Billy to check passenger manifests had been a total hunch, but an educated one, and I couldn’t believe that it had paid off. As soon as Miranda had identified Lily Kintner as the one person she knew who lived in Winslow, I had wondered if Lily Kintner was the same Lily Kintner who was the daughter of David Kintner, easily my favorite living novelist. I didn’t know much about Kintner’s daughter, just that her name was Lily, and that she was born in America while David had been living in Connecticut, married to an American artist named Sharon Henderson. Mather College was in Connecticut, and if Lily was Miranda’s age, then she’d be just about the right age to be Kintner’s daughter.
The thing about David Kintner was that he wasn’t just famous for being a novelist; he had become infamous for accidentally killing his second wife in a drunk driving accident in England. It had been huge news in England, less so in America. I followed it because I was a fan of his books. He’d done time and just been released, less than a month ago. It would make sense that his American daughter had flown over to London to see him. I had also learned from Miranda Severson that Ted had flown to London recently for work, so it occurred to me that Ted and this Lily Kintner had possibly met on an airplane. I had Billy take a shot and check the manifests, and got a hit. After a fruitless day trying to find Brad Daggett, it felt good that some detective work had actually paid off. She must have been the reason he traveled to Winslow that day, even though she probably had nothing to do with his death.
When I reached the I-95/I-93 split, instead of getting onto I-93 to head into Boston, I stayed on I-95, looping west toward Winslow. I didn’t expect much to come from questioning Lily Kintner, but I needed to check it out.
She’d been home, and she did turn out to be David Kintner’s daughter, just as I suspected. She lived in a book-filled house on a pond with only a few other houses on its leaf-plastered shore. She greeted me at the door, looking a little disheveled, her eyes taking a moment to focus on my face. I wondered if I’d woken her from a nap. She invited me in. I asked her about Ted Severson and she told me she knew him, but only from the newspaper reports of his death, and from knowing that he had married someone she knew from college. She offered coffee and I accepted. While she made it, I looked over her bookshelves, finding a row of all of David Kintner’s novels. I ran a finger across their spines, remembering pictures I’d seen of him. Tall and angular with a thatch of white hair. A drinker’s face—sallow and hollow-cheeked. Lily returned with the coffee, her hair pushed back behind her ears, her sleepy eyes now sharp and watchful. I told her I knew her father’s books, was a fan actually, and she seemed unimpressed, as though she’d heard way too much about her father’s genius. I told her I knew about the situation in England, and that allowed me to bring up the flight she’d shared with Ted Severson. Something clicked in her luminous green eyes, and she told me that she had met a man on the plane, and that he’d seemed familiar, and it was probably him. They’d spoken at