The Kind Worth Killing (21 page)

I must have fallen asleep because I woke with my mother standing over me in a pink robe, her hair still damp from the shower.

“Jesus, Mom,” I said.

“Sorry, Faithy. I just wanted to look at my peaceful sleeping daughter.”

“That's exactly the point. I was peaceful and sleeping.”

“Go back to sleep, then. I'll be downstairs in the kitchen. I'll keep your breakfast warm.”

After she left, I lay awake in bed, checking my phone. It had been turned off since the previous evening and I had about a thousand voice mails and text messages from friends, sending their sympathy, and asking if I needed anything. I went online to see if there was anything new about Ted's murder, and it didn't appear that there was—the reports still focused on a random home invasion, the neighborhood banding together in solidarity and fear. No news was good news, I told myself, and decided I would return to Boston that day, or maybe to Kennewick. Another day and night with my mother was out of the question.

At breakfast we talked about my plans, my mother only asking questions for which she already knew the answer. It had always been that way.
What outfit are you going to wear for your first day of school? Where were you thinking of applying to college? Why do you think your father would go and do something like that?
That morning she asked me where I was planning on living now that Ted was gone. “Not in Boston, of course,” she answered before I could. “I know that already.”

“Boston, probably,” I said in response.

“Faithy, don't say that. After what happened. Your neighborhood is
obviously not safe. I never really thought it was and I was right. I saw that movie with Matt Damon about Southie—”

“Mom, I live in the South End, not South Boston. They are entirely different neighborhoods.”

“Clearly they are not. Or if they are, they are both violent and dangerous. You could move up here, show everyone in Orono what you made with your life. With your money you could buy the biggest house here.”

“Mom, I don't want to talk about it—not right now, okay?”

To her credit, she nodded solemnly and began to wash dishes at the sink while making little sighs for my benefit. I forgave her for her bad manners and her selfishness. I always did. People say that personalities are formed and set by the time we hit the age of five, but Sandra Roy's personality, at least for the second half of her life, was entirely formed by the day my father, head of the history department at the University of Maine, lost his tenured position for coming on to a freshman girl. Until that moment, my mother thought she was living a life of luxury. I guess she was in a way—she'd been raised in a tenement in Derry, and she'd made it all the way to the University of Maine, where she met Alex Hobart, a grad student from a middle-class town in Vermont. She dropped out of college her junior year to marry him, and a few months later she gave birth to my brother, Andrew, then a year later gave birth to me. When we were both young, my father secured a tenure-track position in the history department at the university. He excelled, becoming the youngest department head in the school's history; his yearly-increasing salary was practically a fortune in Orono, and my mother, happy with just the two children, turned our custom-built Colonial into her special project. When I was nine, the family traveled to Europe, and my mother came back with a new way of speaking, sounding like an American actress in the 1950s, all clipped words and vaguely English vowel sounds.

Then it all fell apart the year I started high school. A freshman girl taking my father's seminar on ancient Egypt taped him soliciting her for
sex in exchange for grades. The situation went public, and my father was immediately fired. My mother threw him out of the house and filed for divorce. I remember that year as one long rage-fueled monologue from my mother, who seemed to blame my father more for losing his well-paying job than for his attempt at sexual blackmail. These monologues were directed at me. Andrew had discovered pot, then Phish, and spent all his free time in his bedroom, his head encased in large headphones. There were no savings; all of my parents' money had gone into house furnishings and vacations, and two years after the divorce, my mother sold the Colonial, and we moved into a three-bedroom attic apartment normally rented to students. Andrew, a senior at high school then, stayed in the apartment for less than a month, before moving into a friend's house. My mother protested, but I knew she didn't really mind. She'd turned against all men, and that included my shiftless brother. “Just us girls, now,” she'd say, insisting that the apartment was temporary. But we stayed there all through my junior and senior years of high school. My brother graduated, then spent a year following a Phish tour around the country, ending up in San Diego, where he still lived. Last I'd heard, he was working at a brewpub and shacked up with a woman he'd met who already had four children. He'd called and left a message on my phone after Ted had died but I hadn't called him back, and probably wouldn't.

After the divorce, my father moved to Portland, where he got an adjunct position at a community college. My mother got work as a receptionist in a dentist's office, and between her salary, and my father's meager child support checks, we made ends meet. The constant refrain of our two-women house was that my mother's life was ruined, but that mine could be better. And by better, my mother meant more money.

In high school I was pretty average, but I did turn myself into a world-class shoplifter. Most of my thefts occurred outside of Orono, in either Bangor or Portland during one of my visits to my father. I mostly stole from department stores, the places that employed store detectives who prowled around trying to look like customers. Those detectives were trained to look for shoplifters by observing their body language,
looking for someone who was acting nervous or suspiciously. I was never caught because I never acted like a thief. I perfected the casual nonchalance of a girl with her parent's credit card doing a little aimless shopping. I brought a big purse with me wherever I went, and I looked for small expensive items. Scarves. Perfume. I became very skilled.

The only time I was spotted stealing was by a classmate at the pharmacy in Orono. I rarely shoplifted there—it was too close to home, and a store that I went to a lot. I was a junior in high school then. I purchased several items from one of the hawk-eyed old lady cashiers, but walked out with three packs of replacement razors for my Gillette Venus in my purse.

After exiting through the automatic doors I heard a guy's voice say, “I think you forgot to pay for something.”

I turned. It was a kid I knew from school. James something. I didn't realize he worked at the pharmacy. “Excuse me?” I said, trying to sound like I had more important things to do than talk to a drugstore employee.

“In your purse. I saw you put the razors in there.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, making my face look shocked. “I totally forgot about those.” I began to step toward the store. “I'll just—”

The boy laughed, and grabbed my arm and steered me away across the sweltering parking lot. It was August, that annual two-week period when northern Maine turns hot and muggy and mosquito-infested. The asphalt had softened and filled the air with the smell of hot tar. “I'm not busting you,” he said. “I just saw you. I don't give a fuck if you steal. I do it all the time.”

“Oh.” I laughed. “I know you, don't I?”

We introduced ourselves. His name was James Audet, and he was a junior as well, although he'd started at Orono High halfway through the previous year. He was handsome, with light blue eyes, high cheekbones, and thick blond hair. He was also short, and tightly muscled to make up for it, which caused him to walk like a gymnast, bouncing on the tips of his feet. I was a bit of a loner in high school, biding my time until
college, and determined to make sure my grades were good enough to secure financial aid somewhere out of state. James and I became fast friends. He confessed to me that he believed the only thing that mattered in life was money, and that he planned on making a lot of it.

“Then marry a rich woman,” I said. We were at the Friendly's two towns over where we liked to hang out.

“I'm too short. Rich women want tall husbands.”

“Is that true?”

“Proven fact. You, however, could definitely marry a rich man. Look at those tits.”

“Ugh. I look like a freak.”

“Trust me. You're the slightly awkward girl in high school who comes back for the reunion and looks like a model. I've seen it a hundred times.”

“Seen it where?”

“Movies, of course.”

After graduation we both got jobs in what passed for a downtown in Orono, James at a pizza place, and me at that same pharmacy I used to sometimes steal from. I had gotten into Mather, a private college in Connecticut. It was a school that primarily catered to rich kids from New York and Boston, but I'd graduated third in my class, and my parents' financial situation ensured that more than half of my tuition would be paid for with aid. James was going to the University of Maine, where his father coached the wrestling team. We were both virgins, and by July of that summer, decided to have sex with each other so that we wouldn't enter college with no experience. We did it in the back of James's Caprice Classic. Afterward, he asked me how it felt. “Incestuous,” I said, and we both laughed so hard that James fell off the backseat and bruised his hip. We kept at it, though, telling ourselves that we'd seen every good movie that was out that summer, and the hookups passed the time. On our last night together before my father was going to pick me up and drive me to Connecticut, James said, “It was nice knowing you.”

“Um, we'll see each other at Thanksgiving.”

“No, I know. I just assume you'll have some rich boyfriend by then and won't even talk to me.”

“I'll
talk
to you,” I said.

But he was right, and we barely saw each other again after we each started college. I only ever thought of him when I came back to Maine. I wondered if he knew how rich I was.

“You ever hear anything about the Audets?” I asked my mother after we'd cleared the breakfast things, and moved to the living room with the high bay windows that looked out over the Methodist Church adjacent to the graveyard.

“Their son Jim got married. You knew that. He works at a bank in Bangor, and I heard his wife's pregnant.”

“He goes by Jim now?”

“That's what Peg calls him. I haven't seen him since he was in high school. He's still short, I hear.”

My cell phone rang. I recognized the number as Detective Kimball's from the night before. A pulse of fear went through me. “Mom, I need to take this.”

I answered the phone while walking toward the kitchen.

“Mrs. Severson?”

“Yes.”

“It's Detective Kimball again. How are you doing?”

“All right,” I said in a raw voice.

“I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm going to need to request that you return to Boston.”

“Okay. Why?”

“A neighbor of yours thinks she saw the man who may have killed your husband. We have a sketch, and we need you to come down and take a look at it.”

“Why? Do you think it's someone I might know?” I said, immediately regretting my tone. I sounded defensive.

“Not necessarily. We're still treating this as a burglary gone wrong,
but we need to rule out every other possibility. It's a possibility that whoever did this was someone who wanted your husband dead, and if that's the case, then you might be able to identify him.”

“I'll drive back down this afternoon.”

“That's great, Mrs. Severson. I know it won't be easy for you, but any help—”

“It won't be a problem.”

The detective coughed about six times in a row. “Sorry, cold. One more thing. Any luck on coming up with anyone your husband might have known in Winslow? Remember, I'd asked you about it last—”

“No. I thought about it, but nothing. I'm sorry.”

“Just wondering. Please call me when you're back in Boston. I can bring the sketch to you wherever you're . . .”

“I'll call you,” I said and hung up.

I could hear my mother talking on her own phone in the living room. All I could make out was the word
terrible
repeated several times. I stared out the window. The afternoon had turned dark, the fast-moving clouds swollen and inky, a rainstorm approaching. Because of the darkness outside, I could make out my reflection in the kitchen window. I stared at myself, thinking hard about Winslow. I knew I knew someone who lived there . . . was it someone from high school, or someone from Mather? And then it came to me, and I suddenly knew who it was I was thinking of. It was Lily Kintner, that spooky girl from Mather who was with Eric Washburn when he died in London. I remembered hearing that she'd been living in Winslow, working at the college as a librarian. But she didn't know Ted. At least I didn't think she did. Was it possible they had met once, years ago, when I ran into her in the South End? Was it her that Ted was visiting?

My mom was still on the phone, whispering loudly, as though I couldn't hear everything she was saying, and I went upstairs to pack for my return to Boston.

Ted had told me that Cooley's was a dive, and he was right. It was a bar that had gotten its look and feel from years of accumulated kitsch, to the point where it looked fake. If this place were in New York City or Boston you'd almost think that some enterprising hipster had opened it the year before. But here, the World of Schlitz light fixtures were coated with a genuine film of grime, and the grumpy bartender was in an actual bad mood, and not just some actor trying to look the part. I sat at the far corner of the bar with a view of the front door. I wondered if I'd recognize Brad Daggett when he came in. I thought I would. Ted had described him as a big handsome cretin who was starting to show his age. That could describe about half the men who would come to a bar like Cooley's on a Monday night, but I was also counting on my knowledge that Brad had recently killed a man. I knew I could recognize a murderer.