Suddenly, it appeared Kenneth had found it.
The car pulled well off the pavement. The lights died. Paul, about a tenth of a mile back, could see no reason why Kenneth had stopped there. There was no driveway, no nearby home that Paul could make out.
Paul briefly considered driving right on by, but then thought, Fuck this cloak-and-dagger shit. I need to see if he’s okay.
So Paul hit the blinker and edged his car onto the shoulder, coming to a stop behind the Volvo wagon just as Kenneth was getting out. His door was open, the car’s interior bathed in weak light.
Kenneth froze. He had the look of an inmate heading for the wall, caught in the guard tower spotlight.
Paul quickly powered down his window and stuck his head out.
“Kenneth! It’s me!”
Kenneth squinted.
“It’s Paul! Paul Davis!”
It took a second for Kenneth to process that. Once he had, he walked briskly toward Paul’s car, using his hand as a visor to shield his eyes from Paul’s headlights. As Paul started to get out of the car, leaving the engine and headlights on, Kenneth shouted, “Jesus, Paul, what are you doing here?”
Paul didn’t like the sound of his voice. Agitated, on edge. He met Kenneth halfway between the two cars.
“I was pretty sure that was your car. Thought you might be having some trouble.”
No need to mention he’d been following him for miles.
“I’m fine, no problem,” Kenneth said, clipping his words. He twitched oddly, as though he wanted to look back at his car but was forcing himself not to.
“Were you following me?” he asked.
“Not—no, not really,” Paul said.
Kenneth saw something in the hesitation. “How long?”
“What?”
“How long were you following me?”
“I really wasn’t—”
Paul stopped. Something in the back of the Volvo had caught his eye. Between the headlights of his car, and the Volvo’s dome light, it was possible to see what looked like mounds of clear plastic sheeting bunched up above the bottom of the tailgate window.
“It’s nothing,” Kenneth said quickly.
“I didn’t ask,” Paul said, taking a step closer to the Volvo.
“Paul, get in your car and go home. I’m fine. Really.”
Paul only then noticed the dark smudges on Kenneth’s hands, splotches of something on his shirt and jeans.
“Jesus, are you hurt?”
“I’m okay.”
“That looks like blood.”
When Paul moved toward the Volvo, Kenneth grabbed for his arm, but Paul shook him off. Paul was a good fifteen years younger than Kenneth, and regular matches in the college’s squash courts had kept him in reasonably good shape.
Paul got to the tailgate and looked through the glass.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” he said, suddenly cupping his hand over his mouth. Paul thought he might be sick.
Kenneth, standing behind him, said, “Let . . . let me explain.”
Paul took a step back, looked at Kenneth wide-eyed. “How . . . who is . . . who are they?”
Kenneth struggled for words. “Paul—”
“Open it,” Paul said.
“What?”
“Open it!” he said, pointing to the tailgate.
Kenneth moved in front of him and reached for the tailgate latch. Another interior light came on, affording an even better look at the two bodies running lengthwise, both wrapped in that plastic, heads to the tailgate, feet up against the back of the front seats. The rear seats had been folded down to accommodate them, as if they were sheets of plywood from Home Depot.
While their facial features were heavily distorted by the opaque wrapping, and the blood, it was clear enough that they were both female.
Adults. Two women.
Paul stared, stunned, his mouth open. His earlier feeling that he would be sick had been displaced by shock.
“I was looking for a place,” Kenneth said calmly.
“A what?”
“I hadn’t found a good spot yet. I’d been thinking in those woods there, before, well, before you came along.”
Paul noticed, at that point, the shovel next to the body of the woman on the left.
“I’m going to turn off the car,” Kenneth said. “It’s not good for the environment.”
Paul suspected Kenneth would hop in and make a run for it. With the tailgate open, if he floored it, the bodies might slide right out onto the shoulder. But Kenneth was true to his word. He leaned into the car, turned the key to the off position. The engine died.
Paul wondered who the two women could be. He felt numb, that this could not be happening.
A name came into his head. He didn’t know why, exactly, but it did.
Charlotte.
Kenneth rejoined him at the back of the car. Did the man seem calmer? Was it relief at being caught? Paul gave him another look, but his eyes were drawn back to the bodies.
“Who are they?” Paul said, his voice shaking. “Tell me who they are.” He couldn’t look at them any longer, and turned away.
“I’m sorry about this,” Kenneth said.
Paul turned. “You’re sorry about—”
He saw the shovel Kenneth wielded, club-like, for no more than a tenth of a second before it connected with his skull.
Then everything went black.
Eight Months Later
One
The old man in the back of the SUV could have been taken for dead. He was slumped down in the leather seat, the top of his nearly bald, liver-spotted head propped up against the window of the driver’s-side back door.
Paul got up close to the Lincoln—it was that model the movie star drove in all those laughably pretentious commercials—and peered through the glass.
He was a small, thin man. As if sensing that he was being watched, he moved his head. The man slowly sat up, turned, blinked several times, and looked out at Paul with a puzzled expression.
“How you doing today?” Paul asked.
The man slowly nodded, then slipped back down in the seat and rested his head once more against the glass.
Paul carried on the rest of the way up the driveway to a door at the side of the two-story, Cape Cod–style, cedar shake–shingled house on Carrington Avenue. There was a separate entrance at the back end of the driveway. There was a small bronze plaque next to it that read, simply, ANNA WHITE, PH.D. He buzzed, then let himself in and took a seat in the waiting room, big enough for only two cushioned chairs.
He sifted through a pile of magazines. He had to hand it to Dr. White. In the three months he’d been coming to see her, the magazines—there were copies of Time and The New Yorker and Golf Digest and Golf Monthly, so maybe his therapist was an avid golfer— were always turning over. If there was a fault to be found, it was that she wasn’t scanning the covers closely enough. Was it a good idea, in a therapist’s office, to offer as reading material a newsmagazine with the headline “Paranoia: Should You Be Scared?”
But that was the one he opened. He was about to turn to the article when the door to Dr. White’s office opened.
“Paul,” she said, smiling. “Come on in.”
“Your dad’s in your car again.”
She sighed. “It’s okay. He thinks we’re going to go visit my mother at the home. He’s comfortable out there. Please, come in.”
Still clutching the magazine, he got up and walked into the doctor’s office. It wasn’t like a regular doctor’s space, of course. No examining table with a sheet of paper on it, no weigh scale, no eye chart, no cutaway illustration of the human body. But there were brown leather chairs, a glass-and-wood desk that looked like something out of the Herman Miller catalog with little on it but an open, silver laptop. There was a wall of bookshelves, restful paintings of the ocean or maybe Long Island Sound, and even a window with a view of one of Milford’s downtown parks.