hope that the police kept their investigation to Boston, and never questioned him.
I got back onto I-95 and settled in for the long haul to Orono. After marrying Ted I’d tried to talk my mother into moving closer to Boston, but she’d insisted on staying up in Maine. I gave her some money and she ended up buying a 1,600-square-foot town house that she fell in love with because of a stainless steel fridge and some granite countertops. I told her that owning a nice house in Orono was like owning half a parking spot in Boston, but she still didn’t want to move down. I think the reason she wanted to stay in Maine was to rub her newfound money in the faces of her friends. Along with the condo, she also got a new wardrobe and a Mercedes.
“Did you tell your father I’m driving a Mercedes now? We had one once, you know, for about five minutes,” she said to me after she’d bought the car.
“Dad doesn’t care what car you drive, Mom.”
“You think because he’s some kind of intellectual he doesn’t care what car someone drives.”
“No, he just doesn’t care what kind of car you drive, Mom.”
That had been a few weeks ago. We hadn’t spoken again till yesterday, when I called her to let her know that Ted, her son-in-law, had been killed in an attempted burglary. I told her I was coming up for a couple of nights, that I didn’t want to stay in Boston.
“Of course you don’t, Faith.” My mother still called me Faith, my middle name and the name I’d gone by from the age of six to the end of college. I’d insisted on changing it when there was another girl with the name of Miranda in my first grade class. When I told my mother I was switching back to Miranda, she’d refused. “I’ve only just gotten used to it, Faithy, and I’m not turning back.”
I could tell that Detective Kimball wasn’t too pleased when I told him I was driving to Maine to be with my mother. “We could get you a hotel room here in town,” he’d said. “Your mother could come down here.”
“Is it important that I stay in Boston?”
“It would be helpful to have you here to answer any questions we might have.” Detective Henry Kimball talked in a low voice, and seemed far too nervous to have reached any kind of rank in the police department. He had brown hair that was a little too long, and brown eyes. He wore a tweedy coat over a pair of jeans. I thought he looked like one of the lost souls who used to work at the literary magazine at college. I wondered how quickly I could make him fall in love with me. Pretty fucking quickly, I thought.
“I’m only going to Maine. You have my cell phone number. I can’t stay . . . I can’t stay in my house, right now. You understand . . .”
“Of course, I understand, Mrs. Severson. Completely. Well, then, we’ll be in touch. I’ll call you immediately if something comes up in the investigation.”
We’d had this conversation after I’d identified Ted’s body. I took a cab from the police station back to our house, and packed a bag. Brad had thought that driving to Maine so soon would look suspicious, but I thought it would look completely natural.
After losing my husband it would make sense that I would want to spend time with my mother. That is, if you didn’t happen to know my mother. But driving up to Maine gave me a chance to stop over in Kennewick and check on Brad and find out how much I needed to worry about his nerves. And, as it turned out, I definitely needed to worry.
Up past Portland I started losing decent radio stations and slid in one of the mix CDs that Ted had made for me. It began with a song that he claimed was playing at the party where we met. “Mansard Roof” by Vampire Weekend. I couldn’t remember the song from that party, but I liked it, and sang along. When I married Ted I hadn’t planned on killing him. I didn’t love him, but I liked him enough. And he was generous. He let me spend his money without complaining. Not that he really had anything to complain about; as far as I could tell, the money would never run out. Then one morning I woke