The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson Page B

sudden urge to spin her around and bend her over the card table, the way I’d seen Brad Daggett fuck her, but I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust that I wouldn’t smash her face into the catalogs, or call her a cheating bitch. Instead, I told her that I probably wouldn’t get to Maine till Saturday night at the earliest. She didn’t seem too disappointed.
    After she’d packed for the long weekend, I walked her to the garage where we kept our cars. After loading up the Mini Cooper, I said to her, “I hope Brad doesn’t give you any trouble up there. All that time you spend together.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œHe’s never hit on you, has he?”
    She turned, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Brad? No, he’s a total professional. Why, you jealous?”
    She delivered the line perfectly, a mixture of surprise, contemplation, and casualness. If I hadn’t seen them together through the binoculars, I would never believe that there was anything going on between my wife and my contractor. The first few years I knew Miranda, I thought of her as someone whose every emotion was on the surface, someone incapable of deception. How had I been so wrong?
    She folded herself into the driver’s seat, and blew me a kiss through the window before whipping her car away through the tight channels of the garage. A sense of certitude washed over me. With those few simple words—denying her relationship with Brad—any doubt I had was erased.
    Lily was late, and as I slowly sipped my Guinness, I became convinced she was not going to show up. I felt a strange combination of relief and disappointment. If I never saw Lily again my life wouldreturn to normal. Could I honestly say that I would still murder my wife without her help and her encouragement? Would I even be willing to try? If I did get away with it, what would stop Lily from coming forward, from telling the police that I’d drunkenly preconfessed my crime on a transatlantic flight? No, if Lily didn’t show up, then I would confront my wife, tell her I knew about the affair, and ask for a divorce. What would follow would be an eternity of legal wrangling and ritual humiliations, but I would survive. Miranda would take a lot of my money—even with the prenup—but I could always make more. And Brad would get what he deserved. My wife.
    But some of the disappointment I felt as I sat alone at the Concord River Inn, now convinced that I would never see Lily again, was that I was secretly hoping that part of her reason for this meeting was a romantic one. I had not been able to shake the image of her pale, beautiful face, or the feel of her slender hand in mine. Maybe an affair with Lily would be the real revenge that I could unleash upon Miranda and Brad. An eye for an eye. And it had not escaped my notice that the place we had chosen for an afternoon drink was also a hotel. I could feel the presence of all those empty beds just above the half-timbered ceiling of the bar.
    As I’d been doing all week, I began obsessively reconstructing the night flight to Boston, the sudden appearance of a woman who wanted to help me murder my wife. I remembered the evening well, despite the gin. Perfectly, in fact, line for line, but it was like recalling a slightly unreal dream. I wasn’t sure I trusted the clarity of all my memories, or whether I had begun to project my own ambitions and desires onto the event. Since being home, I had tried to find out information about Lily, of course. I visited Winslow College’s Web site, found a bare-bones page that summarized the goals and accomplishments of the Winslow Archives. There were two names listed in the department. Otto Lemke, college archivist, and Lily Hayward, archivist. Each had a phone number, but their mutual e-mail address was the same: [email protected]. I searched the Web for anything else about a Lily Hayward, andfound nothing that