asks.
“At home, of course.”
“Where at home?” Officer Gough asks. They’re trading off now in a brisk rhythm that I imagine they’ve practiced. Trying to wear me down.
“Upstairs in the guest room.”
“The guest room?” Kevin repeats, eyebrow raised.
I sigh and look from Kevin to Officer Gough with an I-can’t-believe-I-have-to-go-into-this expression. “When I got Rudy’s text, Harmon went into the guest room so he wouldn’t be disturbed. He gets up early.”
“So when you got home he was still in the guest room?” Officer Gough asks.
“Yes.”
“Did you check?” Kevin asks.
“Check?” He’s managed to make it sound absurd. As if I didn’t trust Harmon. “I didn’t have to check—” I begin, but then realize the trap I’ve strayed into, and start to feel angry. I could say that I heard Harmon walking from the guest room to our room, but that suddenly doesn’t seem definitive enough. “He came back to bed when I got home.” I can feel myself blushing but I stare at Kevin defiantly. Let him think I’m blushing because of the great sex I had with my husband.
Kevin gazes back at me with a neutral expression. “So you were in bed with your husband from three-thirty until . . .”
“Until six-thirty when he got up to jog.”
“And you’re sure about this, Mrs. Henshaw?” Kevin asks.
“I think I know who I share my bed with, Officer Bantree,” I say with confidence, but as the words come out I can’t help thinking about the man I shared my bed with before Harmon. How well had I known him? How good a judge of men am I?
Bantree looks down at his notebook. I expect him to ask me about the sweatshirt but instead he asks, “Lila was working on some kind of history project with your husband?”
“Yes.” This is easy. “Lila had written an essay for a joint project for both our classes.” I start to explain, happy to be on the firm ground of pedagogy. “When the workers began renovations on Warden House they found boxes of records from the old refuge. Harmon had the idea of working with the students to catalog the papers, for each student to choose a case study to write about. Lila chose a sixteen-year-old girl named Cora Rockwell who was arrested on the streets of Boston for prostitution and remanded to the Refuge for Wayward Girls. She became a housemaid in the warden’s house and eventually head matron and Haywood’s first headmistress. It’s just the kind of success story that the school likes to promote. Harmon thought Lila’s paper would win the contest the historical society holds. They award a scholarship for the best essay about local history.”
“I know,” Kevin says. “I won it senior year.”
“Oh,” I say, trying not to look too surprised. I must have already left with Luther before the winner was announced. “That’s—”
“The thing is,” Kevin says, cutting off my eighteen-years-too-late congratulations, “the essay was due yesterday and according to Haywood Hull at the historical society, Lila never submitted hers. Nor was there any sign of the paper in Lila’s room.”
“Oh,” I say, confused. “It wasn’t like Lila to miss a deadline. Did you check her laptop?”
“Her laptop was gone,” Officer Gough says. “You wouldn’t know where it is, by any chance?”
“Or,” Kevin asks, leaning in, “what’s become of this paper Lila was supposedly working on with your husband?”
Chapter Twelve
The interview is a blur after Kevin’s question about Lila’s essay. All I can think about is all those hours Lila spent in Harmon’s study, all those trips to libraries and archives in Augusta and Portland, all those afternoons they spent in the basement of Warden House looking through old school records.
The girl has a real knack for historical research, Harmon would say after one of those afternoons. I wouldn’t be surprised if she went on to doctoral work with this. She could write a dissertation on this topic.
I had thought the glimmer in Harmon’s eyes was from getting the chance to do real history again. When I met him he was a newly minted PhD from Brown. He’d come back to Rock Harbor to take care of his aging mother and was teaching at the state university while searching for a permanent, tenure-track position. He talked enthusiastically about his dissertation on the early colony at Rock Harbor, which he hoped to turn into a book once he got a permanent job. But after two years in the job market he got discouraged. Why take a low-paying job somewhere in the middle of nowhere