on postwar reorganization. He’d been at his desk nearly an hour when he heard the loud metallic screech of the back door opening, then a timid “Anyone here?”
He stepped out of the room into the dim hallway and shouted, “Hello.”
Michelle Brine came up the stairs, said, “Thank God. I hate being here alone on weekends. It gives me the creeps.”
He wasn’t surprised to see Michelle here. It was her second year teaching, and he was amazed she’d survived the first. Timid, mousy, and imbued with the honest belief that her students cared about history, she had faltered, frequently crying, through her first year. Matthew had taken her under his wing, offering up his lesson plans, his strategies for discipline, and then, toward the end of the spring semester, his thoughts on her personal life as well, coaching her through her relationship with her asshole of a boyfriend.
“I’m so glad I’m not the only one panicking and coming in here on a Sunday. I’m so behind already.” She had followed Matthew back to his classroom. She wore jeans, something she never did while teaching, but he recognized her black blouse, buttoned to the top button, as something she sometimes wore with a skirt while teaching.
“It’s nice in here on weekends, don’t you think?”
“I hate it when I’m the only one. How long are you staying?”
“I was getting ready to leave, actually.”
“Oh no,” she said, unzipping her backpack. “Can you look at something real quick? It’s something I’m planning with my sophomores.”
After he’d gone over one of her lesson plans that had the students creating their own mock Constitution—“Maybe teach them the actual Constitution first,” he’d suggested—she’d instantly launched into a new story about her boyfriend, Scott, how he’d played a gig with his band two nights ago and didn’t get home until three in the morning. She went to look at his phone while he was sleeping in, and he’d changed his passcode.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Matthew said.
“I know. I know. He’s cheating on me, isn’t he?”
“Tell me exactly what he said when you called him out on it.”
Matthew, who’d already texted Mira to tell her he was running a little late, leaned back behind his desk and did one of the things he was very good at doing. He listened to a woman.
Chapter 3
On Sunday Hen considered calling the police tip line or trying to get in touch with the lead detective in charge of the homicide of Dustin Miller—it was two and a half years ago now—but she knew if she was going to notify the police, she’d have to tell Lloyd, and she didn’t want to do that quite yet.
Instead, after coffee and breakfast, when Lloyd went out for a run, she sat down with her laptop and typed “Dustin Miller death” into the search engine. As soon as the string of articles appeared on her screen, Hen felt a surge of nausea and excitement. Three years earlier, Hen had agreed to a med switch recommended by a new psychopharmacologist she’d gotten when Lloyd had switched jobs and their health insurance had changed. It had sent her into a manic period during which, along with the upside of getting a ton of work done, she became obsessed with the homicide of Dustin Miller, who had lived in Hen and Lloyd’s old neighborhood. She’d actually been on a walk in the Huron Village section of Cambridge when she’d seen the EMTs wheeling a gurney topped with a body bag out of the Victorian down the street from her house. She’d stopped and stared, watched as more police cars and unmarked vehicles arrived and then two tall men in gray suits.
It was on the news that night, the suspected homicide of a recent Boston College graduate who’d been found dead in his home. At first, Lloyd, shocked as she was by the proximity of the crime, had been as interested as Hen. But as time wore on, as more details emerged, and as it became clear that the police, despite “promising leads,” had not identified a single suspect, Hen found herself more and more obsessed, poring over every detail the police released and walking by the rose-colored Victorian several times a day. There had been no signs of a forced entry, and Hen assumed that whoever had killed Dustin had probably known him. He’d been found tied to a chair, asphyxiated by a plastic bag secured over his head with duct tape. There had been a few items missing from