one who deserves blame for what happened. Besides me, of course.
It’s funny, I just now realized that Marty Kingship has my initials. Freudian slip, I suppose. I also suppose that astute readers out there will be convinced that there is no Marty Kingship, that there is only Malcolm Kershaw, and that I did all the killings myself. It’s not true. I wish it was, in a way. It would make for a clever ending.
What is true is that I am responsible for everything that happened. Marty carried most of the acts out, but I was the architect. It all started with me.
That is the truth. I have committed the sin of omission, but when I say something is true, it is. Believe me.
*
I AM IN ROCKLAND, Maine.
After shooting Marty Kingship (he looked almost pleased as he touched the blood coming through his sweater, then shuddered and died), I went first to Brian Murray. He’d woken when I’d fired the shot, of course, lifting his head, and muttering something. I sat by his side and told him that it was a champagne bottle he’d heard. He rolled over and began to snore again.
Then I checked on Tess. Humphrey was no longer occupying the sofa across from her. He’d heard the shot and disappeared. As Marty had said, “Some guard dog.”
Tess was still breathing, and she was on her side so if she did vomit, I thought she’d be okay. It meant that I didn’t need to call 911 right away. I would call them soon enough, but I wanted just a little bit of time.
I returned to my own apartment and packed a bag. Cold weather clothes, some toiletries, my favorite picture of Claire. It was from our honeymoon, two rainy weeks in London, the best weeks of my life. The picture was taken in a pub, Claire sitting across from me, a slight smirk on her face, not sure she really wanted to have her picture taken, but happy nonetheless.
I thought about going to Old Devils one last time, saying good-bye to Nero, but it would take time that I wasn’t sure I had. I needed to call the police and let them know that there was a dead body in the residence of Brian and Tess Murray. I wanted to do this soon, of course, because of Tess and the drugs in her system. But I also didn’t want Brian to wake up early in the morning to find a corpse in his bedroom.
The sky was beginning to lighten as I drove into New Hampshire. I pulled off the highway next to a twenty-four-hour convenience store, and using cash, I bought enough canned food and bottled beer to last me a week. After loading up the trunk of my car in the parking lot, I called 911 on my cell phone, identified myself, and said there was a dead man at 59 Deering Street in Boston. Then I called Gwen, and when she called me back, we had the conversation that I’ve already written about. Afterward, I smashed the cell phone with a brick I found in the parking lot, then put the pieces in a trash bin outside of the store. If they decided to trace me, then I guess they’d figure out that I was traveling north. But I wasn’t too worried about it.
It had actually snowed a lot less north of the city. There was a scrim of white over everything, more frost than snow, and in the dawn hours the sky was a checkerboard of thin clouds. The world was colorless.
I reached Rockland by midmorning. I considered waiting somewhere until it was dark again but decided to risk it instead. There was only one other house with a view of Elaine Johnson’s old property, and I would just have to hope that whoever lived there was not spending the morning looking out the window. From my previous visit to Elaine’s house, I’d noticed the single-car garage. Its door had been up, and I remembered it as being empty inside. Elaine’s car, a rusty Lincoln, probably too big for the garage, had sat encased in ice in the driveway.
I found the house immediately, not far from Route 1, and turned into the unplowed drive with enough speed so that I didn’t get stuck. I pulled around the Lincoln and into the garage, killed the engine, then got out and yanked down the garage door by its rusted handle. I had briefly looked across the street before