him down the long hallway I scramble through my options. I could still follow through with my plan. I can tell them the sweatshirt is Rudy’s and that he was wearing it when I picked him up last night. That will divert the investigation from Harmon to Rudy.
But I can’t do it. I can’t offer Rudy up to save Harmon.
And besides, I don’t have to. I can save Harmon by giving him an alibi—of course he was upstairs when I came home—and paint a heartwarming picture of Lila cutting carrots in that sweatshirt. Harmon deserves that much, surely, after everything he’s given me.
I’ve never really belonged in Harmon’s world. A single mother from Long Island. Jewish (even though it was my father who was Jewish, which meant I wasn’t technically Jewish). Belatedly getting her degree from a state college, not one of the Ivies or Seven Sisters, where Harmon’s crowd had gone. I was always suspect. An outsider. Why me? I asked him once, meaning, Why not one of those girls from Smith or Vassar? And he had told me he had fallen in love with me the first day of class when I’d taken out my worn copy of The Scarlet Letter and, when asked by the student next to me if I’d read it, replied, Five times. I keep hoping for a better ending.
It made me want to find that better ending with you, he told me.
I never told him that the reason I’d read The Scarlet Letter five times was that it was the only novel I’d brought with me to the island.
Kevin opens a door at the end of the hallway and waves me inside and toward a chair on the near side of a table. He sits on the other side, next to a young female officer, the one whom Harmon asked earlier to go back to the dorm with Paola Fernandez. I wish I remembered her name. Although she doesn’t smile she does make eye contact with me and I think I detect a hint of sympathy there.
Kevin doesn’t look at me. He’s too busy lining up the tape recorder, notepad, and pencils in front of him. I recall this punctiliousness from class. He always had the day’s reading assignment, notebook, and pencils lined up on the desk in front of him. OCD much? some girl had teased.
I like to be prepared, he’d replied.
He reels off his name, his partner’s—Katherine Gough—the date, my name, and then finally looks at me. “Thank you for coming in, Ms. Henshaw.”
“Anything to help find who hurt Lila,” I say.
“You were close to her?” Kevin asks.
“Yes. She was my student. A lovely girl.”
“She was at your house a lot, wasn’t she?”
“Yes,” I say, torn between saying she was my son’s friend, and that Harmon was helping her with her essay. “I think she was homesick. She liked being with a family. She liked to cook . . . and she hated the cafeteria food . . .” I laugh and it turns into a sob.
“Do you invite all your students over for family dinner?” Officer Gough asks.
“Not all,” I say, considering, “but a few. Paola Fernandez, for instance, whom you met earlier today. Harmon and I were both tutoring her. She comes from a very underprivileged background—”
“Are all the students you and your husband tutor girls?” Kevin asks, cutting short my transparent virtue-signaling.
I consider. Surely either Harmon or I have tutored a male student, but I can’t for the life of me think of one at the moment. “Well, you know,” I say, “we’re still sixty–forty female to male. Haywood only went coed in the late nineties, as you must well remember, Officer Bantree. You were one of the first male students.” I look at Officer Gough to see if she knew Kevin went to Haywood but her face is carefully neutral.
“Where did your husband work with Lila?” Bantree asks.
“Where?” I parrot.
“At the kitchen table? In the living room?”
“In his study mostly,” I say.
“With the door closed?”
“Honestly, I don’t recall,” I say in an offended voice that doesn’t sound like my own. I sound like one of the wives at those cocktail parties telling the caterer she hasn’t replenished the drinks promptly enough.
“You don’t remember whether the door would be closed or not?”
“No.”
“Do you remember what time you got home from picking up your son last night?” Officer Gough asks.
“Yes,” I say, dizzy at the quick change. “I already said. Three-thirty—”
“And where was your husband at that time?” Kevin