We looked at each other for a moment, and Lily’s smile faded. She hunched her shoulders, and buttoned her coat a little higher. “Cold?” I asked.
“A little. Should we walk around? I’ve never been here before.”
I agreed, and we strolled among the tottering, timeworn gravestones, Lily’s arm through mine. We moved comfortably together, not having to talk, as though we were an old couple with years and years of memories between us. We read some inscriptions, most commemorating lives lived in the eighteenth century, many cut short at ages that nowadays would be deemed a tragedy. But they had had lives. And no matter how young they had been when they died, they would still all be long gone by now.
Some of the gravestones had lettering that had worn away to unreadable hieroglyphs, and many depicted winged skulls, and the words Memento Mori. Remember that you will die. I ran a finger over one of the carvings, a skull in the shape of a lightbulb with round owl’s eyes and a full set of teeth. Between the skull and the inscription were two sets of crossed bones. “I wonder when they stopped putting death imagery on gravestones,” I said. “It’s so appropriate.”
“Yeah, it is,” Lily said, pulling me in closer with her arm. The cemetery dipped a little on its far side, and we found ourselves below its highest ledge and underneath a tree, still festooned in yellow leaves. Almost simultaneously we turned, and I took Lily in my arms, and we kissed. I unbuttoned her coat and slid my arms inside of it, around her waist. Her sweater felt like cashmere. She shivered.
“Still cold?” I asked.
“No,” she said, and we kissed more, the kiss getting wetter, each of us pulling the other closer into our bodies. I ran a hand up the front of her sweater, feeling the ridges of her ribs, then the small swell of a breast, a hard nipple. The sound of a branch snapping made us each turn our heads. On the cemetery’s bluff a lone figure crouched, taking a photograph of one of the gravestones. We broke apart, but continued to look at each other.
“We should call it a day,” she said.
“Okay.” My voice was a little hoarse.
“Do you know the plan? Should we go over it again?”
“I’ve got it. All up here.” I tapped my forehead.
“Okay, then.”
Neither of us immediately moved. “So afterward,” I said. “Can we continue this?”
“I’d like that.”
“And you’ll tell me all your secrets?”
“I will. I’ll tell you everything. I’m looking forward to it.”
I remembered the half joke I had made at the Concord River Inn, asking her how many people she had killed. Again, I asked myself who I was becoming involved with. Again, I told myself I didn’t care.
“We should leave here separately.”
“I know. Before we wind up in one of that man’s photographs.”
I looked up at the bluff. The man was standing now, peering through his camera along a line of leaning gravestones. “I’ll go first,” Lily said.
“Okay. Until next time . . .”
“Right. Until then . . . and good luck.”
She walked away from me, up and over the cemetery’s ridge, the man with the camera never even turning to watch her. I stayed where I was, the taste of her lips still on mine. I zipped up my coat, then shoved my hands deep into my pockets. The sky, still the color of granite, had brightened a little, so that I squinted as I watched her. For the first time since I had decided to kill my wife, I wanted it to happen right away. I felt like a kid the week before Christmas, the days stretching out, each one a miniature version of eternity. I wanted Miranda dead. She had taken our love and made a mockery of it. She had made a mockery of me. I kept thinking of the way that Miranda used to look at me, still looked at me sometimes, like I was the center of her universe. And then she had ripped out my heart. And how could I share the money I had made with a woman who had done that, who had ripped out my heart like it didn’t mean a thing to her? This was my reason, and I told myself I believed in it.
But now I had a new reason. I had Lily. I was doing this because of Lily. I was going to kill my wife so that I could be with her.