Before getting into my car, I turned and asked her, “What was the name of the boyfriend?”
“Excuse me?” she said.
“The boyfriend in college that both you and Miranda went out with?”
“Oh, him,” she said, and a slight flush of color crossed her cheeks. She hesitated, then said, “It was Eric Washburn, but he’s, uh, dead now.”
“Oh,” I said. “How did that happen?”
“It was right after college. He died from anaphylactic shock. He had a nut allergy.”
“Oh,” I said again, not knowing what else to say. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “It was a long time ago.”
I drove away. As I headed back to Boston, a ledge of low clouds began to blank the sun. It was early afternoon but felt like dusk. I was going over the conversation with Lily. I believed a lot of what she had said to me but still felt lied to. I knew that she had left some things out, just as she had the first time we talked. But why? And why had Lily hesitated at the end when I asked her the name of her college boyfriend? It felt as though she didn’t want to tell me. She’d told me that it had been a long time ago, but it wasn’t really. She was only in her late twenties. Eric Washburn. I said the name out loud to myself to make sure I remembered it.
CHAPTER 32
LILY
One week after I’d been interviewed for a second time by Detective Kimball, I drove back to Concord Center. I’d been following the progress on the Severson murder case every night on the local news, even though there were never any developments. I knew there wouldn’t be. Brad Daggett was not going to be found. It felt good knowing that I was the only human being in the world who knew where Brad was—who knew that he was never going to be found drinking a daiquiri on some beach in the Caribbean. He was slowly rotting in a forgotten meadow. I knew it, and so did the birds and animals that passed his way. They’d smell him, and think that some large animal had died, and then they’d go about their day.
It was the first Sunday since daylight savings time had ended. The morning had started cold, snow squalls moving through at dawn, but the snow had cleared by noon, the sky now a low, threatening shelf of chalky clouds. I took back roads from Winslow to Concord, driving slowly, listening to classical music on one of the public radio stations. It was midafternoon by the time I arrived in Concord, and I parked my car along Main Street. The sidewalks were busy: a throng of families waited outside a popular lunch place; middle-aged women in sporty gear came in and out of the jewelry shops. I walked slowly toward Monument Square, crossing the wide intersection toward the entrance to the Old Hill Burying Ground. I squeezed through the stone markers and trudged up the steeply inclined path to the top of the hill. There was no one else in the cemetery.
I went to the very peak of the hill, passing the bench where I’d sat with Ted Severson the last time I’d met with him, just over a month ago, and looked out over the roofs of Concord. Since I’d last been here, the trees on the hill had shed all their leaves and I could see all the way to where I’d parked my car. I stood for a while, in my bright green jacket, enjoying the solitude, and the bite of the cold New England air, and the godlike view of the scurrying pedestrians, going about their errands on a Sunday that came with an extra hour. I looked at the spot where Ted and I had kissed, tried to remember what it had felt like. His surprisingly soft lips, his large strong hand sliding up against my sweater. After five minutes, I turned my attention back along the spine of the hill with its sparse stone graves. Dead leaves had been blown by the wind and piled up against the backs of several stones. I walked slowly back down the flagstone path, randomly picked a grave that was partially obscured by a twisted, leafless tree, and knelt in front of it. It marked a woman named Elizabeth Minot, who had died in 1790 at the age of forty-five. She “met lingering death with calmness and joy.”