At the top of the stone was a winged skull, a banner around it that said BE MINDFUL OF DEATH. I stayed crouched, studying the headstone, wondering what Elizabeth Minot’s short, hard life had been like. Truth was, it didn’t matter anymore. She was dead, and so was everyone who ever knew her. Maybe her husband had smothered her with a pillow to end her misery. Or to end his own. But he was long gone now, as well. Their children were dead, and their children’s children dead. My father used to say: every hundred years, all new people. I don’t know exactly why he said it, or what it meant to him—a variation on being mindful of death, I suppose—but I knew what it meant to me.
I thought of the people I’d killed. Chet the painter, whose last name I still didn’t know. Eric Washburn, dead before his life really got started. And poor Brad Daggett, who probably never stood a chance from the moment he first laid his eyes on Miranda Severson. I felt an ache in my chest; not a familiar feeling, but one I recognized. It wasn’t that I felt bad about what I had done, or guilty. I didn’t. I had reasons—good ones—for everyone I’d killed. No, the ache in my chest was that I felt alone. That there were no other humans in the world who knew what I knew.
I came down off the hill and walked back into town. I felt my cell phone vibrating in my purse. It was my mother. “Darling, have you read the Times yet?”
“I don’t get the Times,” I said.
“Oh. There’s a whole piece about Martha Chang. You remember Martha, don’t you? The choreographer?” She described the feature in detail, reading parts out loud to me. I sat down on a cold bench with a view of Main Street.
“How’s Dad?” I asked, when she was done.
“Woke up screaming in the middle of the night last night. I went in, thinking he was just trying to get me into the bedroom, but he was a wreck. Shivering and crying. I went to get him some hot milk and whiskey and when I came back he was asleep again. Honestly, darling, it’s like having a child in the house.”
I told her I had to go, and she told me a few more stories about friends of hers I didn’t remember. When we hung up I noticed that the crowds around the lunch place had thinned, and I went in, got a large coffee to go. Then I walked some more, back past the Concord River Inn, where I’d had drinks with Ted and plotted the murder of his wife. Our plan would have worked. It was very close to what had eventually happened. Framing Brad for the murder of Miranda, then making sure Brad disappeared forever, that his body was never found. The details were different. His body was going to be dumped in the ocean while I drove his truck into Boston, leaving it where it would get stolen and stripped, but the outcome would have been the same.
I strolled along quiet back roads, lined with stately Colonials. I was working my way toward the back side of the cemetery I’d just been in. A crew of gardeners was clearing leaves from one of the larger yards. A preteen boy was throwing a football straight up in the air, then catching it himself. I saw no one else. I got onto a dead-end street that abutted the back side of the cemetery. I hopped a short fence, leaned against a tree, and waited. I could see the top of the hill, the headstones spread along it like the knuckles of a spine. The sun, a glimmer of whiteness behind the pall of clouds, was low in the sky. I pulled my coffee close into my chest to keep me warm. My hair was up under the same dark hat I’d worn the night that Brad and Miranda had died. I wondered, not for the first time, what would have happened between Ted and me if things had gone according to plan. We would have become involved, I knew that, but how long would we have stayed together? Would I have told him everything? Shared my life with him? And would that knowledge—the knowledge both of us would have had about each other—have made us stronger? Or would it have killed us in the end? Probably killed us, I thought,