it was. That’s actually why I’m here. Let me talk for a moment, okay, Brad? You’re not going to like what I’m going to say, but I need you to listen. Do you think you can do that?”
I looked right at him. His eyes were rimmed in red, and his skin, despite a deep, leathery tan, had the distended look of a man who was unwell. His breath smelled like wet grain, and I wondered how much he’d already had to drink. He nodded. “Sure, sure.”
“Brad, I need you to do me a favor. A big favor. And if you do me that favor, then I won’t tell anyone that you drove down to Boston last Friday night and murdered Ted Severson.”
I braced myself, one hand resting on the stun gun in my open purse. I thought he might lunge at me, or at least violently tell me that he had no idea what I was talking about. Instead, his heavy lower lip drooped a little, and his jaw tightened, and for a moment I thought he was going to burst into tears. Instead, he said, in a voice that sounded dry and desperate, “Who are you? What do you want from me?”
“Right now,” I responded, “I’m your best friend in the world.”
CHAPTER 21
MIRANDA
I left Orono the way I had come, driving back through Bangor. Before getting onto I-95, I stopped for gas at a locally run station, where a teenage boy pumped it for me. I sat in the car and worried about Brad. Had the idiot actually been spotted in my neighborhood on the night of the murder? I was just praying that whatever sketch the detective had was of someone else altogether, or else didn’t look remotely like Brad, because if it looked like him—even a little bit—I was going to have to say something about it. And if that happened, then Brad Daggett would be questioned by the police, and I just didn’t think he was going to be able to handle that. I pictured his sweaty face, and darting eyes; the police would take one look at him and know they had their man. And he’d crack, that much was sure. One hour in an interrogation room was about what it would take. And then my only option would be to claim that Brad was delusional, that he’d clearly become obsessed with me, and killed Ted all on his own. I could even tell the police that Brad and I had had sex, a couple of times, in the house I was building, but that I never suggested he murder my husband. It would be his word against mine, and they could never prove that I had anything to do with it. But people would know. Of course, they would. I caught myself clenching my teeth and stopped doing it.
I breathed through my nose, savoring the smell of gasoline while I waited for the attendant to run my credit card. The rain began—fat, intermittent drops that made snapping sounds on the roof of the car as I drove away from the gas station toward I-95.
I kept worrying about Brad for most of the drive to Boston. Maybe he’d rise to the occasion when the police spoke with him. Maybe his alibi would hold up. And maybe—hopefully—the sketch that the detective had wouldn’t look anything like Brad. That would be the best-case scenario, but, down deep, I knew somehow that the sketch was going to look just like Brad, that he had fucked up and let someone see him. After a while, I forced myself to think of something else, and began to think about Lily Kintner, the woman who lived in Winslow, and about whom I would never be thinking if Ted hadn’t gone there last Friday and gotten a parking ticket. There had been a time when Lily had been a constant and annoying presence in my life. She was two years behind me at Mather. I’d met her my junior year when my boyfriend Eric Washburn gave her an invite to St. Dun’s.
“Who is she?” I’d asked. I hadn’t been invited to a St. Dun’s Thursday night party until my sophomore year, and only after I’d been fucking Eric Washburn for three weeks.
“Do you know David Kintner, the novelist?” Eric said.
“No,” I said.
“She’s his daughter.”
She came to that first Thursday night party, and I almost didn’t see her. She was like some waif from a Victorian novel—thin and pale with long red hair.