no way they could convict me. “And you believed all this shit she told you?” I said to Brad, a look of disgust on my face.
“No, I don’t. I believe you, but I told her that I’d help her out. I pretended to believe her. We’re in trouble, Miranda. She knows everything.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll meet her at the house, and you’ll kill her. It will all work out. It needs to be done.”
We talked some more that night, but Brad was drunk, and starting to not make sense, and he needed to sleep. I was paying the price for enlisting a gutless alcoholic to help me kill my husband. Before I left, about an hour before dawn, I told him that he should disappear the following day. Take a drive up the coast and not answer his phone. “You’re not in any condition yet to be questioned by the police,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
“This is going to turn out fine. They might suspect us, but they won’t catch us. We knew this all along.”
“I know.”
“If you wanted to, baby, you could leave after tomorrow night. Skip town. Skip the country. Go down to the islands, and I’ll come and find you when this is all over.”
“They’d know it was me.”
“They would, but they wouldn’t be able to find you. I could give you money to run with, and I’d meet you later, bring more money. You’d be free.”
“What about my kids?” he said, his voice cracking. He raised his big fat head toward me, and I saw that his eyes were genuinely wet. We’d never talked about his kids. Not even once.
“Shh,” I said. “Let’s not talk about it now. You need to get somewhere and sleep, and we can talk about this tomorrow night. Remember: stay away from your house and off your phone. Drive somewhere in your truck and sleep there, okay? Just in case the cops come early in the morning. I’ll meet you in Portsmouth outside that restaurant that Ted and you and I went to way back when. Okay? At nine at night.”
I arrived back in Boston just as the rising sun was beginning to edge the city roofs in a thin cold light. I entered my house, taking Tuesday’s newspaper in with me, and made a pot of coffee. While it brewed I showered and changed. I would try and nap later in the day but knew that I wouldn’t be able to sleep right now. I was in a shit storm. The police hadn’t bought the burglary angle, and they were closing in on Brad. And now, this craziness with Lily. I couldn’t even wrap my head around it. There had always been something freakish about Lily Kintner. She was watchful. I remembered that. I’d met her when she was probably eighteen, but she seemed much older at the time. Composed, and sure of herself, and definitely not like other freshman girls.
Had she known that I’d stolen Eric from her that one summer before he died? I hadn’t stolen him, not really, but we were sharing him without Lily’s consent. Had she found out and been stalking me ever since, waiting for an opportunity to kill me? If Eric were still here, I thought . . . and suddenly I went back to that half-formed thought. Had she killed Eric in London? He’d died of an allergy attack, but she could have been the one to give him the nuts, knowing he couldn’t get to his medicine. It was crazy, but it was also possible. I tried to remember back to what I’d heard around that time. All my friends in New York had been talking about it. He was drunk and went out for Indian food and the chicken dish he got had nuts in it, and he died. Something like that. One thing I remembered for sure was that Lily had been right there with him, probably watching him die. Had she kept his medicine away from him? It now seemed entirely possible that she had.
The day passed, in slow chunks of time. I kept changing my mind about what to do that night. I wanted Lily dead, but what worried me was being present at the scene of a crime. I’d been so careful to make sure that I would never be convicted for Ted’s murder, that there would be no evidence connecting me to any crime. Picturing the night ahead, I felt like I was walking into a