Page 38 of Kill Your Darlings

June

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Wendy had registered in advance for the Tinhook Literary Festival, being held in the Berkshires at a dilapidated inn, but

Thom was simply staying in the next town over at a motel that accepted cash payments. It was probably not entirely necessary,

this subterfuge, but the plan to murder Wendy’s husband was more real now than unreal. Why not be careful?

“Can you tell me where the nearest bar is?” Wendy asked the festival volunteer who was shutting down the registration table.

“To here?” the woman said, startled somehow that she was being asked a question.

“Here in Tinhook. Walking distance, I guess.”

“Oh, there’s lots,” she said. She had heavy glasses and a Louise Brooks haircut. Poet, Wendy thought to herself. “But there

will be beer and wine at the reception here.”

“Right, when’s that?”

“Six o’clock. In the Allingham Room.”

Wendy made a show of looking at her watch.

The poet said that the next street over had at least two bars on it.

“The Ginger Door will be opening soon, I think.” It was nearly five.

Wendy thanked her and departed the hotel.

She’d taken a taxi from Albany Airport to get to Tinhook and had been dismayed that it seemed as though the Lord George Inn was in a residential section of the town.

Back when Thom and she had made their plan to meet in Tinhook, they’d decided to meet at the closest bar to the festival site at five o’clock on the Friday.

For some reason it hadn’t occurred to Wendy that there might not be a bar within walking distance.

But now that she was outside in the cool evening, the sun still high in the sky, she spotted a sign that pointed its way toward

the “historic downtown.” In five minutes, she found herself on a wide street, brick buildings on either side. Half the storefronts

seemed shuttered, but the half that weren’t seemed to be either pizza places or bars. She spotted the Ginger Door, calculated

that it was possibly the closest bar to the Lord George Inn, and made her way to it. Thom was already inside. He had a full

beer in front of him and had just lit a cigarette. The only other customers in the bar were four middle-aged ladies at a booth.

All of them were also smoking, and the bar was filling up with smoke, tinged blue by the late-afternoon light coming in through

the plate-glass window.

“This seat taken?” Wendy asked Thom as she slid onto a leather-topped stool.

“Do I know you?” he asked, barely suppressing a grin, but she could see the happiness in his eyes. Wendy realized suddenly

that she’d been nervous about seeing him again, but now that he was here, all that nervousness dissipated, and she felt something

approaching joy as well.

“I don’t know. Do we know one another or don’t we? Had we already made this decision?”

The bartender, an older man wearing suspenders and a belt, was down the other end of the bar slicing lemons.

The women at the table were laughing as though they were already on their second or third drinks.

“I don’t think there’s any harm in our talking together at this bar. God, it’s nice to see you.”

Wendy squeezed his leg with a hand, surprised to find he was wearing shorts. “Oh,” she said.

“I forgot my pants.”

“Yes, you did.”

“What do you want?”

“To drink?”

“Yes, to drink.”

“How about a Tom Collins? That was my father’s drink and this bar reminds me of him.”

After Thom had ordered her drink, but before it arrived, Wendy said, “I’ll just have this one drink. I have to get back for

the reception at the hotel.”

“What’s it like?”

“The hotel?”

“The hotel. The conference.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t notice, and I don’t care. I’m just so glad that you are here.”

“Are you surprised that I came?”

“A little bit, I think, considering what we talked about last time. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you didn’t show up.”

“That’s not going to happen. I mean, I’m always going to show up. No matter what we do or don’t do.”

Wendy’s drink arrived. After tasting it she instantly regretted her choice, because it really did remind her of her father.

“Yuck,” she said.

“Want to swap? My beer is terrible too.”

“Sure.”

They swapped drinks, and Wendy tasted the warm beer. “I like this better,” she said.

“When can we see one another?”

“I’ve thought about that. Just come over tonight and spend the night at the inn. There’s a dinner but that ends at eight o’clock.

There’s a bar there and I’m sure all the other participants will be drinking. I’ll go to my room and you can meet me there.

No one will notice.”

“Drink okay, miss?” the bartender said, noticing that they’d switched.

“Oh, fine. Turned out it wasn’t what I wanted, but there was nothing wrong with it.”

Thirty minutes later, walking back to the Lord George, the sun now casting a long, distorted shadow of her frame along the

sidewalk, Wendy told herself that they needed to start being extra careful. It would be fine if Thom came to the hotel and

spent the night. No one would see them together. But maybe being together in public was now a mistake. Not that she thought

it made any real difference that a bartender had noticed them because they had switched drinks, but it was just the type of

thing that could eventually become a problem. Nobody should notice them. After Bryce was dead it was important that Thom and Wendy meet again as strangers. Well, not total strangers.

They could meet again for the first time since they were kids. That would be okay.

Since the last time they’d seen each other, over six months earlier in Cambridge, Wendy had rented the movie Body Heat at their local Blockbuster.

She’d actually had Bryce rent the film—he’d brought it home with Point Break and they’d watched them as a double feature.

He’d insisted on watching his movie first, which was fine, because he’d passed

out during the opening credits of Body Heat . Thom had recommended it. Well, he had mentioned it, because in Cambridge they had first brought up the idea of murdering

Bryce, talking about it as a joke for a while before realizing that they weren’t exactly joking. “All I know about killing

someone’s husband is from Double Indemnity , of course, and Body Heat .” And then he’d told her how it went spectacularly wrong in both those films.

“Why?”

“Because the woman is just using the man.”

“If we do it, that won’t be the case. I promise that.”

“I know. We’ll break the mold. We’ll kill the husband and live happily ever after.”

Wendy ended up watching Body Heat twice before returning it. Some actor she recognized from the movie Diner gave a great speech about how there were fifty ways to fuck up a crime and that only a genius could come up with twenty-five

of them. And what turned out to be the big fuckup for the two murderers in Body Heat , besides the fact that Kathleen Turner was only ever using William Hurt, was that they’d been spotted together as a couple

before they committed the murder. Wendy decided then and there that Thom and she needed to be virtual strangers until they

met again at some undecided literary festival after Wendy was a widow. But for now, there should be no connection between

them. That was why Thom wasn’t registered here at Tinhook.

Wendy skipped the cocktail reception but went to the dinner, sitting at a table with three other women who were, like herself,

simply attendees. But Wendy wasn’t surprised to learn that they were all aspiring writers, and two of them had signed up for

seminars on small-press publishing that came with a chance to submit work to the editor who was running it. Wendy kept relatively

quiet during dinner. She wanted to be forgettable. And normal. That was another line in Body Heat that she remembered. Kathleen Turner—or was it William Hurt?—said that nothing out of the ordinary could happen in their

lives leading up to the murder.

After dinner she waited in her room, her copy of Possession by A.

S. Byatt open on her lap, but she found she couldn’t concentrate on the words.

Instead, she stared at the wallpaper, deep red and intertwined with roses, or maybe dahlias.

She studied the pattern, trying to figure out at what point it began to repeat.

And she listened to the sounds of the hotel.

There was the faint echo of the music being played in the bar, but what she mostly heard were the creaks in the room above her, some guest pacing the floor.

And she could hear voices talking but without understanding the words.

Maybe they were in the next room, or two rooms down.

She reminded herself that when Thom arrived they should be quiet.

At a little after eight o’clock there was a knock on her door and she leapt off the high bed to swing the door inward, Thom

quickly entering.

“Anyone see you?” she said.

“Not on your hall. And probably not in the lobby. That was a wild crowd down there.”

She smiled. “I’m missing out.”

“You are. You could meet a minor poet with a goatee.”

“I could move with him to some college in North Dakota.”

“Do you think he has tenure?”

“Not yet, but he dreams of it. I will too. We can buy a starter home.”

“The real question is: Would he kill your husband for you?”

“Okay,” Wendy said. “We’re going straight there.”

“No, we’re going straight to the bed first.”

Later, buried under the sheets, the hotel now eerily quiet, Thom said, “I think we should do it. I think we should murder

your husband.”

They were the words that Wendy had hoped to hear, but now that he’d said them, she felt suddenly reticent. “We don’t have

to, you know. I could leave him, move to Connecticut to be with you, get a job. Our lives would be good.”

“Our lives would be normal.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“There’s nothing wrong with it, except that it doesn’t feel right for us. I feel like something began that first night we kissed, and maybe it was all leading up to this.”