president of Severson Inc., a consulting firm, is survived by his wife, Miranda Severson, née Hobart, who was in Florida at the time of the shooting.
According to a neighbor, Joy Robinson, Ted and Miranda Severson “were a beautiful young couple. They looked like people you would see on television. I can’t believe this happened to them. And in this neighborhood.”
Anyone with information on either the homicide case or the burglary may call the Boston Police Crime Stoppers line.
I set my coffee down, then read the story again. I felt cold all over.
It had never occurred to me that, while Ted and I were setting up Miranda to be killed, she might be doing the same thing with Ted. It had to be Miranda, with the help of Brad. There was no way this was a random burglary that had turned into a murder. It was too perfect that Miranda was out of town in Florida, with a solid alibi. Brad must have come down from Maine and shot Ted. Maybe he burglarized a nearby house to muddy the waters. Maybe not. Either way, Ted was out of Miranda’s way, and all his money would go to her.
I thought of Ted. He had been found shot to death on the second-floor landing of his house. He must have let Brad into the house, then made a run for it. He must have known he was about to die, and he must have known that Miranda had engineered it. My throat closed up and I felt tears well up in my eyes, but they didn’t fall. I had grown fond of Ted. When we talked on the plane, I had seen him only as a way to find out more about my college nemesis. Miranda Faith Hobart was a loose thread in my own narrative, and I had told myself that, even though she had wronged me by stealing away my boyfriend, I was never convinced that she was a truly poisonous person. But after talking with Ted on the plane, and hearing his story of her betrayal, I knew that this was not the case. She was rotten to the core.
And maybe I was excited to have a prey again. I will admit that. Killing was a little bit of an itch that I hadn’t scratched in many years.
But Ted grew on me. More than grew on me, really. When we kissed in the cemetery in Concord I was surprised by my reaction, by how much I felt from a kiss. I told myself—as I always told myself when getting involved with a man—that falling in love was never an option. I knew I could never go through that again. But I liked Ted a lot. He was handsome, and yet somehow awkward, as though he had never really grown accustomed to his good luck. One of those men who own the world but don’t quite know it. I could see how Miranda would have appealed to him. Not only was she the sexiest woman in any room, but she was also incredibly comfortable with herself. He must have been attracted to that quality. But besides the intensity of our kiss—the yellow leaves around us, his hand on my sweater—what I really felt with Ted was the unusual sensation of being able to be myself with him, of being able to share secrets with another human being. He was telling me his deepest thoughts, his desire to murder his wife, and, one day, I told myself, I might be able to tell him about my past.
But now Ted was gone.
And all I could think about was how badly I wanted to see him again, and how that was never going to happen.
I went online to see if I could learn anything more about what had transpired on Friday night. There was nothing, just a few newspaper articles that repeated the information from the Globe piece. I thought more about the murder, and how Miranda had engineered it. It had to have been Brad that pulled the trigger. There was a possibility that there was a third person involved, but I doubted it. So how did they work it? Miranda leaves town and makes sure that Ted will be home alone on that Friday night. Brad drives down from Maine. First, he breaks into a neighbor’s house and burgles it. It would have been a neighbor about whom Miranda had information. She would have known the homeowner was away, and that he