Kimball
“Do you remember me?” she asked, after stepping into my office.
“I do,” I said, before I could actually place her. But she was familiar, and for a terrible moment I wondered if she was a cousin of mine, or a long-ago girlfriend I’d entirely forgotten.
She took a step inside the room. She was short and built like an ex-gymnast, with wide shoulders and strong-looking legs. Her face was a circle, her features—blue eyes, pert nose, round mouth—bunched into the middle. She wore dark jeans and a tweedy brown blazer, which made her look as though she’d just dismounted a horse. Her shoulder-length hair was black and glossy and parted on one side. “Senior honors English,” she said.
“Joan,” I said, as though the name had just come to me, but of course she’d made this appointment, and given me her name.
“I’m Joan Whalen now, but I was Joan Grieve when you were my teacher.”
“Yes, Joan Grieve,” I said. “Of course, I remember you.”
“And you’re Mr. Kimball,” she said, smiling for the first time since she’d entered the room, showing a row of tiny teeth, and that was when I truly remembered her. She hadbeen a gymnast, a popular, flirtatious, above-average student, who’d always made me vaguely uncomfortable, just by the way she’d said my name, as though she had something on me. She was making me vaguely uncomfortable, now, as well. My time as a teacher at Dartford-Middleham High School was a time I was happy to forget.
“You can call me Henry,” I said.
“You don’t seem like a Henry to me. You still seem like a Mr. Kimball.”
“I don’t think anyone has called me Mr. Kimball since the day I left that job. Did you know who I was when you made this appointment?”
“I didn’t know, but I guess I assumed. I knew that you’d been a police officer, and then I heard about . . . you know, all that happened . . . and it made sense that you were now a private detective.”
“Well, come in. It’s nice to see you, Joan, despite the circumstances. Can I get you anything? Coffee or tea? Water?”
“I’m good. Actually, no, I’ll have a water, if you’re offering.”
While I pulled a bottle of water from the mini fridge that sat in the south corner of my two-hundred-square-foot office, Joan wandered over to the one picture I had on my wall, a framed print of a watercolor of Grantchester Meadows near Cambridge in England. I’d bought it on a trip a number of years ago not because I’d particularly liked the artwork but because one of my favorite poems by Sylvia Plath was called “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows,” so I thought it would be a clever thing to own. After I’d rented this office space, I dug out the print because I wanted a calming image on my wall, the way dentists’ offices and divorce lawyers’ always display soothing art so their clients might forget where they are.
Joan cracked open the bottle of water and took a seat as I moved around my desk. I adjusted the blinds because the late-afternoon sun was slanting into the room, and Joan was squinting as she took a long sip. Before I sat down myself I had a brief but vivid recollection of standing in front of my English students a dozen years ago, my armpits damp with anxiety, their bored, judgmental eyes staring up at me. I could almost smell the chalk dust in the air.
I lowered myself into my leather swivel chair, and asked Joan Whalen what I could help her with.
“Ugh,” she said, and rolled her eyes a little. “It’s so pedestrian.”
I could tell she wanted me to guess why she’d come, but I kept quiet.
“It’s about my husband,” she said at last.
“Uh-huh.”
“Like I said, it’s probably something you hear all the time, but I’m pretty sure . . . no, I know that he’s cheating on me. The thing is, I don’t really care all that much—he can do whatever he wants as far as I’m concerned—but even though I know he’s doing it, I don’t have proof yet. I don’t really know.”
“Are you thinking of filing for divorce once you know for sure?”
She shrugged, and that childish gesture made me smell chalk again. “I don’t even know. Probably. What really bothers me is that he’s getting away with it, getting away with having an affair, and I tried following him myself, but he knows my car, of course, and I just want to know for sure. I want details. Who he’s with. Well, I’m pretty sure I know that, too. Where they go. How often. Like I said, I don’t give a shit, except that he’s getting away with it.” She looked over my shoulder through the office’s sole window. When the light hit it in the late afternoon you could see just how dusty it was, and I reminded myself to wipe down the panes when I had some spare time.
I slid my notebook toward me and uncapped a pen. “What’s your husband’s name, and what does he do?” I said.
“His name is Richard Whalen and he’s a real estate broker. He owns a company called Blackburn Properties. They have offices in Dartford and Concord, but he mainly works out of the Dartford one. Pam O’Neil is the Dartford office manager, and that’s who he’s sleeping with.”
“How do you know it’s her?”
She held up a fist and stuck out her thumb. “First, she’s the only really pretty employee in his office. Well, pretty and young, which is the way Richard likes them. Second, Richard is a liar but he’s not great at it, and I accused him of having an affair with Pam and he couldn’t even look me in the eye.”
“Have you accused him of having affairs in the past?”
“The thing is, I don’t think he has had an affair in the past, not a real one anyway. He does go to this bullshit conference every year for real estate brokers in Las Vegas, and I’m sure he’s hooked up with a stripper there or something, but that’s not really the same as an affair. And I’m kind of friends with Pam, that’s the thing. When she first got the job at Blackburn I invited her to my book club, which she came to a bunch of times, although none of us thought she really read the books.
“I was nice to her. I even introduced her to the guy who does my husband’s investments, and they went out for a while. I took her out for drinks at least three times.”
“When do you think the affair started?”
“I think it started around the time Pam stopped texting me, which was about three months ago. They’ve made it so obvious it’s like they want to get caught. You must see this stuff all the time?”
It was the second time she’d mentioned that, and I decided not to tell her that it wasn’t something I saw all the time because my only regular clients were a temp agency that employed me to do background checks, and an octogenarian just down the street from my office who was always losing her cats.
“My guess is,” I said, “that they are trying to be secretive and failing at it. Which probably means that your husband, and Pam, as well, haven’t had affairs before. The people who are good at hiding secrets are the people who have practice at it.”
She frowned, thinking about what I’d just said. “You’re probably right, but I guess I don’t particularly care one way or another if my husband is cheating on me for the first time. I don’t know why I feel this way but, honestly, it’s Pam that is pissing me off a little more than he is. I don’t know what game she thinks she’s playing. Hey, did you keep teaching after the seniors graduated early that year? I know you didn’t come back the next year.”
It was an abrupt change of topic and for that reason it made me answer honestly. “Oh, God, no,” I said. “I don’t think I could’ve ever walked back into that school. I felt bad about it, but there was only about two weeks left anyway.”
“You never taught again?”
“No, not high school. I do occasionally teach an adult ed class in poetry, but it’s not the same thing.”
“The basketball player,” she said, and her face brightened as though she’d just won a trivia contest.
I must have looked confused because she added, “It’s all coming back to me, now. For the last month of classes you had us read poetry because you knew we wouldn’t be able to focus on full books.”
“Right,” I said.
“And we read this poem about a kid who used to be—”
“Oh, right. John Updike. The poem was called ‘Ex-Basketball Player.’ I haven’t thought of that for—”
“And you got in a fight with Ally Eisenkopf because she said you were making up all the symbolism in it.”
“I wouldn’t call it a fight. More like a spirited intellectual debate.” And now I was remembering that day in class, when the lesson plan was to dissect that poem line by line, and I’d drawn a map on the chalkboard that located the gas station described in the poem, and the street it was on. I was trying to show how a relatively simple poem such as “Ex-Basketball Player” by John Updike could be as carefully constructed as a clock, that every word was a deliberate choice for both the text and the subtext of the poem. The students that were paying attention had rebelled, convinced I was reading things into the poem that didn’t exist. I’d told them I found it interesting they could believe that someone could go to the moon, or invent computer coding, yet they couldn’t quite believe that the described location of the gas station in a poem was a metaphor for the stalled life of a high school basketball champion.
Ally Eisenkopf, one of my more vocal students, had gotten visibly upset, claiming I was just making stuff up, as though I’d told her that the sky wasn’t blue. I was very surprised that Joan remembered that particular class. I told her that.
“I have a good memory, and you were a good teacher. You really made an impression on me that year.”
“Well,” I said. “You and no one else.”
“You know that Richard, my cheating husband, went to DM too.”
It took me a moment to remember that DM was what the kids called Dartford-Middleham High School. “No, I didn’t know that. Did I have him in a class?”
“No, you didn’t have him in one of your classes. No way did he do honors English.”
I was surprised that Joan had married a high school boyfriend. The towns of Dartford and Middleham might not be as ritzy as some of the other towns around them, like Concord, or Lincoln, but most of the kids from the public high school went on to four-year colleges, and I doubt many of them married their high school sweethearts.
“Were you dating him back then, in high school?”
“Richard? No, hardly. I knew him, of course, because he was a really good soccer player, but it was just random that we got together. We met in Boston, actually. I lived there for a year after college, and he was still at BU and bartending in Allston. That’s where I lived.”
“Where do you both live now?”
“In Dartford, I’m sorry to say. We actually live in Rich’s parents’ house. Not with them. They live in Florida now, but they sold us the house and it was such a good deal that we couldn’t really pass it up. I suppose you’ll need to know our address and everything if you’re going to be following Rich?” She pulled her shoulders back a fraction and raised her head. It was a gesture I remembered.
“You sure you want me to do this for you? If you already know that he’s cheating—”
“I am definitely sure. He’s just going to deny it unless I have proof.”
So we talked terms, and I gave her a rate that was slightly less than I should have, but she was a former student, and it wasn’t as though I didn’t have the time. And she told me the details about Richard’s real estate office, and how she was convinced that the affair was only taking place during work hours. “You know it’s the easiest profession for having affairs,” she said.
“Empty houses,” I said.
“Yep. Lots of empty houses, lots of excuses to go visit them. He told me that, a while ago, when two of the agents in his company were sleeping with one another, and he had to put an end to it.”
I got more details from her, then let her know I’d work up a contract and email it to her to sign. And as soon as I had her signature and a deposit I would go to work.
“Keep an eye on Pam,” she said. “That’s who he’s with, I know it.”
After Joan left my office, I stood at my window with its view of Oxford Street and watched as she plucked fallen ginkgo leaves off her Acura before getting inside. It was a nice day outside, that time of year when half the leaves are still on the trees, and half are blowing around in the wind. I returned to my desk, opened up a Word document, and took notes on my new case. It had been strange to see Joan again, grown up but somehow still the same. I could feel myself starting to go over that period of time when I’d last known her but I tried to focus instead on what she’d told me about her husband. I’d tailed a wife once before, but never a husband. In that previous case, just over a year ago, it turned out the wife wasn’t cheating, that she was a secret gambler, driving up to New Hampshire to visit poker rooms. Somehow, this time, I thought that Joan’s husband was probably exactly who she thought he was. But I told myself to not make assumptions. Being at the beginning of a case was like beginning a novel or sitting down to watch a movie. It was best to go in with zero expectations.
After locking up my office and leaving the building I was surprised to find it was dusk already. I walked home along the leaf-strewn streets of Cambridge, excited to have a paying job, but feeling just a little haunted by having seen Joan again after so many years.
It was mid-October and every third house or so was bedecked with Halloween decorations: pumpkins, fake cobwebs, plastic tombstones. One of the houses I passed regularly was swarmed with giant fake spiders, and a mother had brought her two children, one still in a stroller, to look at the spectacle. The older of the two kids, a girl, was pointing to one of the spiders with genuine alarm and said to her mother that someone should smush it.
“Not me,” the mom said. “We’d need a giant to do that.”
“So, let’s get a giant,” the girl said.
The mother caught my eye as I was passing and smiled at me. “Not me either,” I said. “I’m tall, but I’m not a giant.”
“Then let’s get out of here,” the girl said, her voice very serious. I kept walking, thinking ominous thoughts, then disregarding them, the way I’d taught myself to do.
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