The Kind Worth Killing (15 page)

“No nuts in the rogan josh but, yes, cashews in the chicken korma.”

“Right, I know. Thanks.”

I took the bags of food back to the flat. I left them on the small wooden table in the kitchen and went into the bedroom to look through Eric's suitcase. He'd brought several changes of clothes,
One Up on Wall Street
by Peter Lynch, and a running outfit. His two EpiPens were in a plastic sandwich bag in an interior zippered pocket.
He should have had one of them with him—I'd told him that a hundred times—but I knew that he wouldn't. His nut allergy was fatal, but it was vanity that kept him from taking the pens around with him. “What am I supposed to do, Kintner, wear them in a fanny pack?” He convinced himself that he would never eat anything in public that would remotely have the chance of having nuts in it. I took the EpiPens and shoved them under the mattress, then went back to the kitchen. I was hungry and ate some of the Indian food directly from the containers before dumping the chicken korma into a wide bowl. I spread the chicken and its yellow sauce out evenly and methodically picked out every cashew, placing them into the stone mortar I'd found in one of the cluttered cabinets of our kitchen. When I was sure that I had found every cashew, I got the pestle and ground half of them up into a fine paste, then mixed the cashew paste back into the korma, and put everything back in its container. I took the remaining cashews, placed them in a folded piece of paper towel, and hid them behind the condiments in the fridge. I washed the mortar and pestle, plus the bowl, and put them back where I'd found them. I put the containers of Indian food in the flat's quarter-size refrigerator. Chicken korma was one of Eric's favorite, and the restaurant we'd gotten it from in New Chester never put nuts into it. The stage was set. All I needed to do now was wait.

I tried to read
Gaudy Night
but had trouble concentrating. I wasn't nervous, exactly, but I wanted it to be over with. Eric had started his challenge at around one thirty, so he would be finished, one way or another, at six thirty. At about six fifteen the harsh din of the door buzzer sounded. I jerked upright. I wondered if he'd given up, but when I got to the front door and opened it, I found Addison. She was crying, her shoulders hitching up and down, and searching through her purse for the key.

My junior year at Dartford-Middleham High School I asked a sophomore girl named Rebecca Rast to the junior prom. She was a popular blond student I'd gotten to know while we both worked at the school newspaper. She seemed happy when I asked her, even though I knew she was more interested in the school's jocks. It was fine with me; I was just looking for a date.

But a week before the prom, I ran into Rebecca at a beer party at an abandoned military base the next town over. I'd heard about these parties but had never gone to one. About a hundred students were there, cars parked on the broken asphalt of the base's old parking lot, the kids milling around the sloping hill on the south side of the boarded-up buildings. Most of the kids had brought six-packs lifted from their parents' homes, or bought by older brothers and sisters. I had come with my best friend, Aaron, who was, like me, neither popular nor an outcast. Before getting out of our cars we had nearly turned back, intimidated by the scene, and embarrassed that we had brought no alcohol. But then I spotted Rebecca clambering out of a nearby
convertible with a bunch of her girlfriends, and I convinced myself that I should, at least, say hello to the girl who would be going with me to the prom the following week.

To my surprise, she seemed thrilled to see me, and we spent most of the party together, drinking warm beers on the hill, then exploring the abandoned base. We wound up on a low flat roof that we reached by a rusted fire escape. We stared at the stars, the beer we'd drunk making them slide in and out of focus, then we started to kiss. It was a warm spring night, and Rebecca wore a midriff-baring halter top and a short denim skirt, and she let me touch her everywhere, at one point whispering to me that we should slow down unless I had a condom. I didn't, but, lying in bed later that night, I told myself that I needed to get one as soon as possible and definitely before prom night. It was an exhilarating thought, but more exhilarating was the fact that I had my first girlfriend.

On the evening of the prom I picked Rebecca up at her parents' modest house near Middleham pond. While Rebecca's mother took pictures, her father leaned against his Dodge Dart, smoking a cigar and giving me icy looks from under a Patriots cap. I was glad when we were safely in my car on the way to the Holiday Inn where the prom was being held. Rebecca wore a light blue dress with a low neckline. Her hair was French-braided, and she smelled like vanilla.

Despite some bad nerves on my part, the first few hours of the prom went well. Rebecca was chatty and flirty. We ate the dried-out chicken cordon bleu, and danced several times. During one of the slow dances, I gently kissed Rebecca on the side of her head. She pulled me in closer to her, and I thought about that foil-wrapped condom hidden behind my driver's license in my wallet.

It wasn't until about twenty minutes before the end of the prom that everything fell apart. I'd gone to the bathroom, and when I returned, Rebecca was no longer at our table. I spotted her on the far side of the ballroom, leaning up against the wall and talking to a junior I recognized as Bill Johnson, a linebacker on the school football
team. I stopped in my tracks, my limbs turning cold and my throat tightening. Instead of crossing the endless yardage of the room to confront them, I went back to my table, and it was from there that I watched Rebecca and Bill hug, then kiss, then leave the prom together.

I saw Rebecca in the hallway of the high school on Monday afternoon. I thought she might apologize, but I watched as her eyes skidded over me, and she turned away. I learned that week that she and Bill were definitely an item. I don't know if it was easier or harder that very few of my fellow students seemed aware that I had been humiliated on prom night. I do know that if Rebecca had at least attempted to apologize to me, things might have turned out differently.

I plotted my revenge for over a year. It made sense that if I was going to do something to Rebecca, I should wait for some time to pass. Otherwise, I'd be a natural suspect. I devoted my senior year to getting the best grades I could, keeping my head down, and not allowing myself to get into any more potentially humiliating situations. I was accepted at Harvard, surprising even my guidance counselor, and while this acceptance felt like one kind of revenge, I still wanted to pay Rebecca back. Ideally, I would find a way to humiliate her in the way she had humiliated me, but I couldn't figure out a way to do that. I opted for my second choice—I would scare her very, very badly.

A week before graduation I parked my Ford Escort at the back parking lot of Arnie's Liquors on a sunless afternoon, then walked through a brief stretch of state forest that led to the back of the Rasts' house. If anyone saw me, they would have seen a kid wearing a denim jacket and a baseball cap pulled low, something I would normally have never worn. But no one saw me. I had brought a crowbar in my backpack to break through the back door, but it was already open. I knew that no one would be home, that Mr. Rast had left months ago, and that Mrs. Rast worked day shifts at the CVS. And I knew, I hoped, that Rebecca would be coming home alone after school let out at three o'clock. I hid in her bedroom closet and waited.

Thinking back on it now, I remember the terror and excitement I
felt in the small, dark space, Rebecca Rast's clothes rustling up against me, the ski mask on my face starting to make me sweat. I had the closet door cracked a little and was able to hear Rebecca's car pull into the driveway, to hear her enter the house and walk slowly up the stairs. She went to the bathroom first for what seemed a long time, then the toilet flushed, and she entered her bedroom, humming tunelessly to herself. My heart was thudding so loudly in my chest that I wondered how she hadn't heard it. I had planned on leaping out of the closet in my ski mask, but I didn't need to. She came straight to the closet door and slid it open along its tracks. I stepped toward her, scissors in one hand, duct tape in another. She opened her mouth to scream but nothing came out. I watched all the color drain from her face, and I was sure that she was about to faint, but instead she turned to run. I tackled her from behind, realizing as I did it that she had stripped to just her underwear. I held her down and managed to wrap duct tape first around her face and mouth, and then around her hands and ankles. It wasn't easy; I got kicked several times but refrained from making any noise, from letting her know who I was. After she was securely bound in duct tape, I dragged her into the closet, and before I shut the door, I ran the edge of the scissors along her neck. Her eyes were squeezed shut, tears coming out of them. I could smell the sharp tang of urine.

I dumped the coat, the ski mask, the scissors, the crowbar, and the backpack into the Dumpster behind the liquor store. I drove home shaking, my emotions alternating between enormous satisfaction that I had paid Rebecca back for the pain she had caused me, and a sickening shame that I had gone too far. Those feelings lasted through the summer, the shame temporarily replaced by the horrible fear that I was going to get caught. I would be publicly shamed, and sent to prison, and I wouldn't get to go to Harvard. But the police never showed up, and, as the summer progressed, I began to believe I'd gotten away with it. I did hear about the incident once, from a gossipy friend of mine named Molly. She told me that Rebecca
Rast—“You know her, right? Oh my God, you went to the prom with her, didn't you?”—had been assaulted in her own home, tied up and left in the closet, and that everyone thought it was her own father, that creepy dude who used to work at a gas station. That was all I ever heard about it.

I still dream about Rebecca Rast. In these nightmares—and they are definitely nightmares—Rebecca dies the night I duct-taped her and left her in the closet. In these dreams I am plagued with guilt, and terrified of being caught, and I can never remember whether I meant to murder her or whether I meant to just scare her. But either way, I am a murderer, and that knowledge has taken over my life.

On the Friday morning that Miranda was flying down to Miami Beach for a bachelorette party, I woke, having had one of these dreams. I was alone in the bed, and I lay there for a moment, the images from the nightmare flashing in my brain, then disappearing. At first I thought it was a Rebecca Rast dream, but then I realized that the person in the dream that I had killed had been Miranda. I'd trapped her in Rebecca Rast's closet and she had died there. Other images from the dream came back to me. A funeral where no one would look at me. The terrible fear that I forgot to hide the body. An image of my father, water coming from his nose. A field that I was frantically digging in. For one terrible moment, I thought that these weren't pictures from my dreams, but recent memories. I'd had this feeling before, always when I was in the half state between sleep and wakefulness—this dreadful feeling that what I was dreaming about was in fact real, that I was a murderer, and it was only a matter of time until the whole world knew it. I shook my head and told myself I'd been dreaming, then rose from the tangled sheets and picked up my phone from the dresser. It was past eight, much later than I usually slept. Miranda's car service was coming at eight thirty to take her to Logan. I pulled on a pair of jeans and a cotton sweater and went downstairs.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” she said when I'd found her in the formal dining room. She was sitting at the long Stickley table, her luggage by her
side. She wore a short blue dress and a pair of red cowboy boots and was avidly studying her phone.

“Aren't you cold in that?”

She looked up. “Yes, but not for long. I'll tell the driver to turn the heat up to Miami temperatures.” She turned her phone off, slid it into her purse, and stood. “What are you going to get up to while I'm away?”

“First of all, you're always away, so this is nothing new. And second of all, work, obviously.”

“You should have dinner with Mac tonight. I'm sure he's around.”

“He's not, actually. He's at his aunt's funeral. Remember, I told you about that? No, I'm going to take that lamb out of the freezer. Special dinner, just for me.”

“Please. Eat it all. Casey said we're going to Joe's Stone Crab tonight.”

I brought her luggage to the foyer, resisting the urge to comment on how heavy it was for a three-day weekend. Miranda peered through the front door's leaded window. “Limo's here,” she said, and pulled me in for an unusually tight hug. “I'll miss you, Teddy,” she said.

“How long exactly are you going for?”

She slapped my chest. “Don't make jokes. I really am going to miss you. You're a good husband, you know.”

“I'll miss you, too,” I said, trying to get some feeling into my voice. The way Miranda was acting I wondered briefly if the bachelorette party was made up. Was she meeting Brad down in Miami?

Miranda pulled the front door open, and the driver jumped out of his Town Car, bounding up our steps to collect the luggage. Miranda followed him down to the car, a sharp wind plucking at the hem of her dress. She turned to wave at me, and she looked frail and cold in her inadequate clothes. Before I shut the door she pulled her huge sunglasses out of her purse and put them on, then blew me a kiss.

The day loomed before me. I had phone calls to make and a prospectus to proofread, but that would only take about half a morning. I gathered a cup of coffee, then went to my computer. I Googled the
name Lily Hayward for about the hundredth time but nothing came up that seemed like her, besides her job listing at Winslow College. I Googled the town of Winslow and mapped a route from my house to a promising-looking restaurant in the town's center. What harm would it do if I drove out there for lunch? It was going to be a beautiful October day; after a hot, extended summer the leaves were just now at their peak. I could take a walk, eat some lunch, see the town that Lily lived in. And if I saw her—and the chances of that were slim—then what would the harm be? We wouldn't need to say hello, and if we did, would it possibly make a difference?