James, his partner, a tall, black woman, floated over, and asked me if I needed anything.
“Just a taxi,” I said. “I’m sorry. So sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. I totally understand.” Detective James had smoothly taken over the distraught widow and was gently but firmly leading me away from Kimball’s desk. I stopped and turned.
“Oh, Detective,” I said. “Remember what you asked me yesterday, about whether I knew anyone from Winslow?”
He was still standing, his cell phone in one hand. “Yeah, I remember.”
“I thought of someone. Her name’s Lily Kintner. I went to Mather College with her. I’m sure she has nothing to do with why Ted went out there on Friday, but . . .”
“Did they know one another? Were you close with her?”
“No. We weren’t. She stole my boyfriend in college, actually, so I’m not a huge fan . . . but Ted and she didn’t know . . . well, they might’ve met a couple of times, if I think about it. I ran into Lily in Boston a couple of years ago.”
“How do you spell her name?”
I told him. There was obviously no connection between Ted and Lily, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to give the police another lead to track down. It might delay what now seemed inevitable—that Brad was going to get caught, and that he’d most likely give me up as well.
I told Detective James that I was okay, that I’d just like to leave. “You sure I can’t get you a drink of water before you go?” she asked in her husky voice, looking down at me. I figured she was close to six feet tall. She must have been a little bit self-conscious about it, because every time I’d seen her she was wearing flats. Dark pantsuit, collared shirt, and flats. And she never wore jewelry. She made me nervous in a way that Detective Kimball didn’t. It wasn’t that I thought she suspected me; it was that I truly had no idea what she was thinking. She looked at me the way she might look at a tollbooth collector.
“Can I walk you out, Mrs. Severson?”
“No. I’m fine. And it’s Miranda.”
She nodded at me and turned away. I was pretty sure she didn’t wear any makeup either.
Detective Kimball must have made a call because when I got to the front of the station a taxi was waiting. It was already dusk, rain beginning. It felt as though the bad weather had followed me all the way down from my mother’s house.
CHAPTER 22
LILY
I checked out of the Kennewick Inn very early on Tuesday morning, figuring I could drive directly to Winslow College. It didn’t make sense to miss another day of work and draw attention to myself. I’d drunk two cups of coffee at the inn, but stopped in Kittery at a Dunkin’ Donuts for another coffee to go. I was exhausted. Brad and I had talked for several hours the night before, first in his truck, then in the rental cottage that he lived in. Despite what he’d done to Ted, I felt a little bad for Brad. He was a wreck, and once he realized that I wasn’t going to turn him in, he latched onto me like a drowning man coming across a lifeboat. He told me he would set up the meeting with Miranda for that night at 10:00 P.M. If she agreed, he would call me at my house from the public phone at Cooley’s. He would only let the phone ring twice, but the number would appear on the digital readout on my landline.
I made it into my office before anyone else arrived. After logging in to my work e-mail account, I wasn’t surprised to learn that my boss, Otto, had left early on Monday, the previous afternoon, having felt a cough coming on himself, and that he thought he’d take Tuesday off as well. Otto Lemke was easily the most suggestible man alive, especially when it came to any kind of ailment. Just letting him know on Sunday that I wasn’t feeling well had probably sent him into a spiral of psychosomatic illness. I spent the morning writing short descriptions of our archived collections to go on our internal site for students and faculty. When I’d done enough to justify a morning’s worth of work, I walked across campus to the student-run café where I got most of my lunches. The rainstorm from the previous day had left the world looking bright and washed, like