sat on a low stone wall, and began to roll a cigarette. She was about two hundred yards away but easy to see in her green jacket. I watched her slowly walk up the cemetery path. She wandered for a while, briefly disappearing behind the slate roof of an old stone house with a pergola. I lit my cigarette, and a middle-aged woman in a spandex biking outfit clattering by on her biking shoes shot a look in my direction as though I’d just murdered her children. I kept my eye on the cemetery. Eventually, I could see Lily again, walking along the top of the hill. She must have found the grave she was looking for, a stone marker under a twisted tree. She crouched and read its inscription, staying in that position for a while before standing and coming back down the hill. I wondered whose gravestone that was, and if it meant anything.
When Lily reached the sidewalk in front of the cemetery, and began to cross Monument Square in my direction, I retreated, crossing Main Street, and going into an upscale women’s clothing store that was fronted with glass. I pretended to study a rack of scarves—all priced at about the cost of a decent used car—and kept my eye on Lily, who had made her way to a stone bench, where she was now talking on her cell phone. I was close enough to see that one strand of her red hair had fallen out from under her dark hat.
“They’re all cashmere,” said the shopkeeper, who was suddenly about two inches behind me.
I jumped a little. “They’re beautiful. So soft.”
“Aren’t they?”
I moved away from the scarves, and looked around the little store some more. Lily looked like she would be at the bench for a while. After a few minutes I thanked the woman who worked there and headed back out onto the sidewalk. Lily was gone. I was worried that maybe she’d crossed the street toward me to shop and that I would accidentally bump into her, so I walked away from the shops, back toward the low wall I’d sat on earlier. What I really wanted to do was walk up the hillside cemetery myself and take a look at the gravestone that Lily had read with such interest. The grave was immediately under a gnarled tree that jutted out from the crest of the hill, and I was sure that I could find it. But it would be better to visit the cemetery when I knew that Lily wouldn’t spot me there. I decided to wait.
I took a long look around from my perch. Lily had disappeared, and I began to get nervous that she would suddenly appear and spot me. I decided that I didn’t need to find her again. Instead, I stood and walked away from Concord Center. I passed an old gray-shingled hotel called the Concord River Inn. Smoke was issuing from its chimney and it looked like the type of place that probably had a bar. I went in. There was a dining room in front with white tablecloths and ornately papered walls, but I could hear voices coming from the rear of the inn. I walked down a low-ceilinged hallway and found a small bar, wedged into a space not a whole lot bigger than a parking space. I quickly scanned the room to make sure Lily wasn’t there—there were two couples finishing up their late lunches, and one lone man reading the newspaper and drinking a bottle of Grolsch. I pulled myself onto an uncomfortable wooden stool at the short bar, and ordered a Boddingtons on draft. My plan was to slowly drink my beer, then go and check out the gravestone that Lily had been looking at. I didn’t expect to learn anything from it. In that old cemetery, it was probably a marker for someone who had died over two hundred years ago—but I felt a compulsion to look at it. Lily had stared so intently at its words and I wanted to know why. I thought of my dinner with James the night before, and her unspoken warning that I was becoming obsessed with Lily Kintner in an unprofessional manner. Probably I was.
I took a sip of my beer, ate a tiny pretzel stick from the bowl on the bar, and took out a pen from my jacket pocket. On one of the bar napkins I scrawled a limerick.