The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

cigarette in a high arc. It landed on the driveway, showering sparks. He went back inside his apartment and I waited. I thought I would be nervous, but I wasn’t.

CHAPTER 5
TED
    After retrieving our luggage at Logan, I walked with Lily past the idling taxis at Terminal E and toward Central Parking. She stopped me as soon as we were alone in the dark lot. The pilot had told us that the current temperature in Boston was fifty-four degrees, but a whistling, litter-dispersing wind made it feel much colder.
    â€œLet’s meet in one week,” she said. “We’ll pick a place. If I change my mind, I won’t show up. And if you change your mind, then don’t show up either, and it will be like this conversation never happened.”
    â€œOkay. Where should we meet?”
    â€œName a town where you don’t know anyone,” she said.
    I thought for a moment. “Okay. How about Concord?”
    â€œConcord, Mass., or Concord, New Hampshire?”
    â€œConcord, Mass.”
    We agreed to meet in the bar of the Concord River Inn the following Saturday at three o’clock in the afternoon. “I won’t be shocked if you’re not there,” she said. “Or upset.”
    â€œDitto,” I said, and we shook hands. It felt oddly formal to shakethe hand of someone who had offered to help you murder your wife. Lily laughed a little, as though she felt the same way. Her hand was small in mine and felt as frail as expensive porcelain. I resisted the urge to pull her toward me.
    Instead, I said, “Are you for real?”
    She released my hand. “You’ll find out in a week.”
    I arrived early that Saturday at the Concord River Inn. When Lily had asked me to pick a town where no one knew who I was, I had picked Concord, and while it was true that I knew no one there, it was also true that it was a place that had played a large part in my childhood. I grew up in Middleham, about ten miles west of Concord, and about thirty miles from Boston. Middleham is an old farming community, a sprawl of open fields and new-growth forest. In the 1970s, two extensive developments had gone in—dead-end streets named after the trees that were no longer there, and single-acre lots with cookie-cutter deckhouses, all popping up to accommodate employees from nearby Lextronics, the company where my father worked.
    My father, Barry, was an MIT graduate, and a computer programmer when most people didn’t know what a computer programmer was. He met Elaine Harris, my mother, at Lextronics, where she was a receptionist, and undoubtedly the prettiest woman he’d ever seen. I don’t know for a fact that my father had never dated anyone before meeting my mother in his thirtieth year, but it would shock me if he had. My mother, on the other hand, had spent her twenties in an on-again, off-again relationship with a fellow Boston University grad who played professional hockey for two years before a knee injury ended his career. She told me once that when their relationship ended—and she realized she had wasted eight years with a “playboy type”—she swore on the spot that she would find a husband who was plain and dull and reliable. And that turned out to be Barry Severson. They dated for six weeks, were engaged for another six, then were married in asmall ceremony in West Hartford, Connecticut, my mom’s hometown.
    The reason that Concord became an important place for me was that my mother dreamed of moving there. Early in the marriage, she had decided she hated the isolation of Middleham, and had become fixated on this particular wealthy suburb, with its gabled houses, its well-dressed housewives, its arty jewelry stores. My father got sick of hearing about it, so my mother would dress me up and take me, and sometimes my older sister as well, to lunch in Concord, often at the Concord River Inn, and afterward we would visit shops; she would buy new outfits, or jewelry, or