was sixty-eight years old, had sounded like a small boy speaking to his mother before being sent to boarding school.
“This is pretty,” my mother said as I wound her Volvo toward Kennewick Cove. It was still light out, but the sun was low in the west, casting long shadows across the road. The sky was a deep electric blue.
I pulled into the parking lot of the Admiral’s Inn, where I’d left my car less than twenty-four hours earlier. It was still there. Before driving back to Winslow, my mother and I stretched our legs, walking down to the edge of the beach, looking out at the slate-colored ocean. “I always loved the ocean, but your father hated it.”
“Yes, he does,” I said, and laughed. “He said it was like looking at death.”
“‘It’s like looking at death and everyone saying how lovely it is,’” my mother said in an English accent, mimicking my father.
“Right. That’s what he always said. What was the other one? ‘I love the beach, everything except the fucking sand, the fucking sun, and the fucking water.’”
“Yes, I remember that. What he meant was that the only thing he liked about the beach was the girls in bathing suits.”
We laughed together, then my mother shivered from the cold, and we got back into our respective cars to drive to Winslow. I was tempted to drive north along Micmac Road a little ways to see if there was any activity at Ted and Miranda’s house but decided not to risk it. I would find out soon enough how long it took the police to discover Miranda’s body. I turned south instead, taking the fastest route to I-95. At a little before six, I pulled into the driveway in Winslow, my mother still behind me. There were no police officers waiting for me, no SWAT team emerging from the woods. I was home, and I had gotten away with it. A surge of elation went through me, a feeling similar to what I’d felt in the meadow fifteen hours earlier. I had changed the world, and no one would ever know it. And even if they found Brad’s truck in New York City, they would assume that he had simply left it there. They would never find him, and they would never connect me to any of this. Miranda would be found dead, all evidence pointing to Brad Daggett as the killer. And Brad would disappear forever. The police would assume he went on the run, but they would never find him. Case closed.
I remembered telling Ted that there were two ways to hide a body. One was literal, but the other way to hide a body was to hide the truth of it, to make it appear as though something else had happened to it. We did it, I whispered as I got out of the car, allowing myself a moment to believe that there was someone out there to share this with me. My mother followed me into my house. I flipped on the foyer light, and took her overnight bag from her.
“Oh, so quaint,” she said, as she always did when she came to my house.
CHAPTER 29
KIMBALL
By the time Detective James and I reached the Severson house in Kennewick, there was barely room to park our car along the driveway. It was already a jurisdictional mess, as we knew it would be. The entire Kennewick Police Department had turned out, but because of the limited resources of their detective department, the state police detectives had been called in as well. The chief medical examiner was there, and I heard that the U.S. Marshals Service had been advised that a possible murder suspect had most likely crossed state lines. We did manage to work our way into the house, getting past the miles of yellow police tape and about seven uniformed officers, all determined to protect the scene.
I’d seen the gigantic house from the outside the day before, when we’d been looking for Brad Daggett, but hadn’t been inside yet. The foyer was the size of my apartment. Miranda Severson was facedown on the unfinished floor. She wore an expensive-looking dark green coat over jeans and boots. One of her gloved hands was up near her destroyed head. Her hat—gray tweed with a short brim—had come off. Her black hair was loose, spilling around her head. It was hard to tell where the hair stopped, and where the blood, dark and congealed, began. Together, the hair and the