Page 62 of Nine Lives

A taxi took him from the airport to West Hartford. He moved rapidly through his house, changing his clothes so that he was wearing something more appropriate for the cold, blustery weather. He pulled a few items from his travel bag that had come with him from Bermuda, and went downstairs to the basement, where he added a few more items that would help him deal with his next-door neighbor. That was the real reason he had come back to West Hartford. Since having dinner over a month ago with his lovely neighbor Margaret and her smug, son-of-a-bitch husband Eric, he’d kept thinking about them, kept fantasizing about what he wanted to do to Eric. Maybe it was simply that Margaret, with her long hair and slender neck, and her timid wit, reminded him of his sister. Or maybe it was that she was simply a good person, and Eric wasn’t. And maybe since he was now so close to completing his life’s work, he thought that he might as well do one last favor for Margaret. Did he even know her last name? He couldn’t remember ever hearing it. He did, however, remember talking with her about her part-time job at the library. “I work evenings Monday through Wednesday,” she’d said, “and then all day on Saturday. Just about the worst schedule.” Maybe he’d remembered her schedule because he’d been planning this all along.

After locking up his childhood home for the final time, Jack crossed to his neighbor’s house, and rang the doorbell. What would he do if Margaret answered the door? He supposed that he would simply let her know that he was going away for a while and he’d come to say goodbye. And then he’d be off. It would look strange, but what did that matter in the big scheme of things?

As it was, Eric answered the door. He was dressed in loose shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. His skin glistened with sweat, like he’d been working out, but he was also holding a can of beer.

“Sorry to bother you, Eric, but is Margaret home?”

Eric blinked several times and Jack surmised that Eric was trying to remember his name. Then, apparently remembering, he quickly said, “Sorry, Jack, she’s at work, at the library.”

“Oh, never mind,” Jack said. “I just had a question for her, but . . .” He paused, then said, “Maybe you can answer it for me. Do you mind if I come in for a few minutes?”

Eric hesitated, and Jack waited, not changing his expression or his position on the front stoop, not offering up an apology, and Eric finally said, “Come on in, man. Can I get you a beer?”

Stepping into the foyer Jack said, “No, thank you. As I said, five minutes of your time is all I need.”

Eric led Jack to the living room and indicated a chair. Jack sat, rearranging his jacket so that he had access to the right-hand pocket. After putting his can of beer on the coffee table between them, Eric sat too, an odd expression on his face. It took Jack a moment to figure out what the expression meant, but then he had it. It was that Eric didn’t know how to feel about his neighbor yet. Was Jack a washed-up old man, or was he still someone influential, a best-selling author, a man who still had connections? Eric was trying to categorize him, so that he could know how to act with him.

“I’ll come right to the point, Eric,” Jack said. “I don’t want to waste your time, and I don’t know when Margaret will be coming back.”

“Not for a while,” Eric said.

“So here is the question I was going to ask her, but I will ask you instead. How is it that a decent, kind person like Margaret ended up with a fucking asshole like you?”

An awkward, slowly forming grin creased Eric’s face, as he tried to absorb the question. “Are you serious?” he said, at last.

“Am I serious? Yes. I want to know. I mean, my guess is that she reminds you of your mother, who was probably bullied by your father, and vice versa maybe, or else I don’t see why she puts up with your shit.”

A deep flush of color was rising from Eric’s neck up toward his face. “Hey, Jack,” he said. “I thought you might have some sort of pathetic crush on my wife, and now I know for sure. Why don’t you get the fuck out of my house, before I throw you out myself.”

Jack smiled. He reached into the pocket of his goose-down parka and pulled out his Taurus .44 magnum revolver, the same gun he’d used to kill Matthew Beaumont what felt like years ago in a suburban town outside of Boston. He pointed the barrel of the gun at Eric’s chest.

“What’s your last name, Eric? I don’t think I know it.”

Eric was frozen, his eyes on the revolver, his jaw moving as though he were chewing on something. “Um,” he said, at last.

“I’m going to kill you, Eric, and it doesn’t matter whether I know your last name or not, but I was curious.”

Eric moved his eyes from the revolver to Jack’s face. “Why?” he said.

“Why am I going to kill you, or why do I want to know your last name? I’m going to kill you because you’re a bully and a coward and I don’t like you. You also happen to be married to someone that I do like. So killing you will make her life better, and it will probably make a whole lot of other people’s lives better as well. I’m also killing you because I’ve gotten good at killing people, so I thought I’d use this new skill I’ve acquired late in life. I can tell by the expression on your face that you’re confused, so I’ll make it simple: You are going to die because I want you to die.”

“Look, Jack. If this has to do with Margaret... if you’re in love with her, or something, we can work this out. I mean, Jesus...”

Jack had been briefly tempted to extend the conversation, to tell this man the full story of what he’d been planning over the past two years of his life. And what he’d achieved. The thought of it was tempting, like some supervillain in a James Bond film monologuing away about his plan, but Eric would not have really listened. He was already trying to figure out how to save his own life, his body probably coursing with adrenaline. So Jack shot him in the chest, dead center, and watched as he slumped back onto the pristine white couch, a perplexed and pained expression on his face.

After standing up and looking out the front bay windows to see if anyone had been walking by on the street and heard the gunshot, Jack crouched over Eric’s body and pressed two fingers to his neck to feel for a pulse. There was none. On the table next to Eric’s can of beer was his cell phone. It was locked but that didn’t matter. You could always call 911 on a locked phone. He put the phone into his front pocket, then put the gun into his travel bag, and exited the house, stopping briefly to look at a pile of unopened mail on a waist-high table in the foyer. The first envelope was addressed to Margaret Hutchinson, and the one below it to Eric Miles. He wondered if Margaret had kept her maiden name. It would make it easier for her if she had, not having to change her driver’s license and her bank accounts.

When he was a mile from his neighborhood in West Hartford, and stopped at a red light, Jack called 911, gave them the address of Margaret Hutchinson and Eric Miles, and said that a man had been shot there. The least he could do was to spare Margaret the sight of her dead husband when she returned home from her library shift. He threw Eric’s phone out the window of his car as he merged onto Interstate 84, heading north.

It was just a regular Tuesday in November for most of the world. He thought of his wife, wondering what she’d be doing right now. Drinking chardonnay and watching one of the early evening shows she liked. Either Jeopardy! or the PBS NewsHour. They’d come to her, wouldn’t they, after they figured out what he’d done? Interview her, maybe even try to find out if she had assisted him in anyway. At the very least they’d ask her why he’d done it. He thought that maybe she’d mention the glioblastoma and how his personality had changed after the diagnosis and treatment. She’d mentioned it enough to him, convinced that something had altered in him. He thought she was probably right. He had changed a little after that particular ordeal. He’d realized not just his own insignificance, but the insignificance of everyone else in the world. And, yes, that had been around the time he’d begun to fantasize about killing the children of the Pirate Society, about setting the world to rights.

And he wondered if his wife would mention their only daughter, and how she’d died the year she’d graduated from college. He’d changed then, too, but that was to be expected. It was the second time he’d learned that the world would happily rid itself of its young and beautiful inhabitants. There was no order, only chaos. He’d created the list to bring back order, but his wife would never make that connection, and he doubted that anyone else would either.

It was late by the time he pulled the car into the half-empty parking lot of the Windward Resort. He stepped out into the cold, briny air, and was flooded with the weight of sadness that always accompanied the smell of the seashore.

The young woman at the reception desk took his information and smiled at him with an empty look that made Jack feel pretty certain she hadn’t been told to be on the lookout for anyone checking in under the name Jonathan Grant. He asked if she had a tide table, and she dug around in her desk drawer, finally finding one.

“Are you going fishing, Mr. Grant?” she said.

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