Chapter 70
Edward Kenney ate a quarter of the beef pot pie his wife had baked for dinner, she and the kids having already eaten.
He’d warned her that he’d be delayed—paperwork to catch up on at the office—but could tell she was annoyed.
Unless he was away from home for the night, she preferred him to be present for the evening meal.
She’d grown up in a household where the kids were left to fend for themselves, less from neglect than a consequence of struggling parents working long hours, and she hadn’t liked what it did to her family.
As soon as she and Edward began talking seriously about marriage and kids, she’d laid down some ground rules, and household dinners were among the first.
She asked whether he wanted to watch a movie on TV later, but he told her he had to go over one or two more bits of business while they were still fresh in his mind, and she didn’t argue.
While Mia Kenney was a registered owner of the Smiling Seed Company, she left the day-to-day running of it—the finances, the tools and supplies side, the farm seed—to her husband.
Her aptitude was more hands-on, and the land on which their home stood functioned as both a nursery and testing bed for the new varietals she bred each year. Together, they made a good team.
Kenney poured himself a bourbon and retreated to his small home office.
He turned on the desktop computer and reopened the last Excel spreadsheet for the sake of appearances, but didn’t glance at the figures on the screen.
He was going back over all that Teal had told him, and what he, in turn, had shared with Teal, because the threats to them were multiplying.
Not alone had they murdered an undercover agent, but a private investigator was now sniffing around Spero, drawn by the death of Scott Theriault.
Worse, the private investigator in question had a deserved reputation for tenacity, resilience, and violence.
According to the Bangor Daily News website, detectives were not dismissing the possibility that Theriault and the missing Mallory Norton might have known each other.
Some of the more downmarket media outlets had even concocted a Romeo-and-Juliet scenario in which the star-crossed lovers, instead of falling prey to poison and daggers, fled into the wilderness, where one of them died.
Kenney might even have been tempted to believe it was true, if only to ease his mind, were it not for what Teal claimed to have heard the Saint say, back before Teal and Kenney left for Detroit.
The Saint mentioned that one of the boys at the school was sneaking out to meet a local girl. He said something would have to be done about it.
Which was why Teal said he was so against the idea of Kenney confronting the Saint.
It was one thing to accuse the Saint of something he hadn’t done, and quite another to accuse him of something of which he might be guilty.
The former would arouse justifiable anger, but the latter could lead the Saint to seek to protect himself.
He already had reason to move against Kenney and Teal because of what they’d done in Detroit, assuming Teal was right and he had, in fact, inadvertently let slip the name of the dead woman, a name now revealed to have been part of Special Agent Gai Cotter’s cover.
That element of Teal’s story rang true to Kenney, but at the same time he had long harbored suspicions that Teal was not being completely honest about his earlier dealings with Spero.
Of the four original players, only Teal was not a former student of the élan School, though he had grown up with Kenney and Hurvich, both of whom were at Parsonsfield.
Later in life, Teal had reconnected with Kenney, but only after Teal was appointed by the Maine Department of Education to liaise with and inspect Spero.
After three years, the Saint nominated Teal as a fourth player (“He’s like us, and he’ll break the pattern”), supported, after only minimal hesitation, by Kenney.
Out of caution, Hurvich made some cursory objections, but was outvoted by the others, who vouched for Teal’s bona fides—or, since they were talking about someone they believed capable of committing crimes of rape and murder while concealing the same, his absence of it.
Once, when drunk the night before a Game, Teal had spoken to Kenney of Jenny Berrien’s animosity toward him while skating over the reasons behind it, but one or two hints indicated that she suspected him of financial impropriety.
When Kenney asked if she might have cause, Teal got all self-righteous and Kenney immediately dropped the subject, but the strength of Teal’s reaction signified that Berrien might have been right about sticky fingers.
Now Parker was nosing around Spero’s affairs, and thanks to Berrien, Teal was on the list, making him susceptible to pressure if, as Kenney feared, he’d been skimming department funds as part of an earlier arrangement with the Saint.
Meanwhile, if the police kept digging, they’d find proof of a relationship between Scott Theriault and Mallory Norton in a region as sparsely populated as the Kennebec Valley, where the ties between people were more apparent than in a big city.
That would return the focus of their inquiries to Spero.
If the police or Parker managed to obtain evidence linking the Saint to the disappearance of Mallory Norton, it wouldn’t take much more work to uncover details of his trips outside the state to play the Game, which in turn would lead them to Mr Smiling Seed himself, Edward Kenney, and Ride-along Roger Teal, who got his kicks from dragging terrified kids from their beds in the dead of night, tightening the old cable ties, and shipping them to Bumfuck, Maine, for some serious attitude adjustment.
And then there was Renders, the new player the Saint wanted to introduce to the Game.
Kenney didn’t know how much the Saint might have shared with him, but if he and Renders had together killed Mallory Norton, after first taking their pleasure with her, Kenney feared the postcoital pillow talk might have included the Game and its existing players.
If so, Renders owed nothing to Kenney and Teal; if he was allied to anyone, it was to the Saint.
Kenney sipped his bourbon. The top two buttons on his shirt were undone, revealing the tip of a long vertical scar on his chest, a souvenir of a heart procedure in his teens.
He touched an index finger to it, following the route of the old incision.
Were his wife present, she would have identified it as a sign of anxiety.
Rubbing his scar was Edward Kenney’s tell; had he been playing poker, his opponents would have commenced raising their bets.
Kenney kept a small safe in his office, concealed behind a panel in the closet.
In the safe was stored $10,000 in cash for emergencies, as well as five one-ounce gold American Buffalos and eight quarter-ounce American Gold Eagles, together worth about another $30,000, in case the economy tanked, temporarily or otherwise.
The safe also contained a Taurus Raging Hunter .
38 Special with a micro red dot mounted on the rail machined into the top of the barrel, which gave Kenney the reassurance of being able to see where his shots would land.
He stored a similar model in his office at the seed company.
Kenney didn’t plan to end up in prison for life, or sweating out his days in a federal penitentiary while he waited for the needle.
If the police came for him at home or work, he was confident of getting to a gun in time to kill himself before anyone could lay hands on him.
Neither did he have any doubts about his willingness to pull the trigger.
He’d rather die than witness the disappointment on the faces of his wife and children.
Teal, Kenney knew, also owned a firearm, and for similar reasons, at least when it came to the police.
Kenney opened the safe and removed the gun.
He cleaned it regularly and kept it loaded, with the hammer resting on an empty chamber.
Only he and Mia had the combination, but his wife never went near the safe.
She tolerated the gun as a last line of defense, but preferred it to be out of sight and out of mind.
As for the cash and coins, she was aware that her husband held emergency reserves in the safe, but had no idea of the amount.
Kenney could use it as an escape fund, if given the chance to run, but he didn’t see himself blasting all the way to Mexico.
He doubted he’d get as far as New Hampshire.
No, if the Game concluded badly, the final taste in his mouth would be of metal and gun oil.
Kenney sighted along the barrel as the shake-awake tech activated the micro dot.
Teal: vulnerable, unreliable.
The Saint: vulnerable, unreliable.
Renders: unreliable, and an unknown quantity.
What worried Kenney most was that, over in The Plains, the Saint might be engaged in a similar process of risk assessment.
Teal: vulnerable, unreliable.
Kenney: vulnerable, unreliable.
Renders—
Reliable. The Saint’s new best friend, he and Renders bound together by Mallory Norton—and Scott Theriault too, because whatever the police said, Theriault must have been the kid at Spero who was meeting up with her.
Kenney felt this phase of the Game drawing to a close, but it didn’t have to be an ending, more a pause before a new beginning.
He could reboot, but this time as the only player.
It would be risky without a second pair of hands, but if he picked the right victims, it would be okay.
He might have to plan differently, and select his targets in advance, but he’d try to be open to chance as well.
Yet he kind of liked Teal. They played the Game well together.
Why not keep it as two? And Teal might well be thinking along the same lines …
Kenney put the gun away, locked the safe, and went to check on his children.
Oliver was in bed reading. It was past lights-out, but Kenney wasn’t about to bitch at him for reading a book.
Even if he did, Oliver would just use the light on his phone to resume once his dad had gone, potentially damaging his eyesight, and Kenney didn’t want his son to blame him later in life for having to wear glasses.
Kenney kissed him, warned him not to be up too late, and went to the next room, where Suze was working on a project for school—“working,” by her definition, involving watching videos on her phone, messaging her friends, and listening to music, despite a next-day deadline for delivery.
But she’d get the project done, because she always got things done, even by the skin of her teeth, and the resulting grades would be better than they had any right to be since she had brains to burn.
If she ever decided to apply herself, Kenney believed she could be president, though that wasn’t the high bar it might once have been, given the quality of some recent incumbents.
Kenney kissed Suze on the top of the head.
He considered suggesting she turn off the phone before thinking better of it.
From discussions with other fathers of teenage daughters, Teal among them, thinking better of getting into any kind of confrontation was part of the job description.
But Kenney loved his daughter deeply, so much so that Mia was of the opinion he could be overprotective.
Suze, Mia would tell him, needed her space.
She was nearly sixteen (“So she’s fifteen,” Kenney would reply.
“Fifteen!”), and if her father thought he could keep her locked up until a suitable candidate for marriage presented themselves—assuming such a creature existed, which Kenney questioned—he was destined for disappointment.
Kenney could only nod along, and reply that all fathers, or all fathers who cared, felt the same way about their daughters.
What he couldn’t add was that he had a special insight into the kind of predator who would target a young girl walking home alone because he was that predator.
The only way he could play the Game and enjoy it was by closing a door on his wife and daughter and pretending they did not exist; by not thinking of the unwilling third party in the Game as someone else’s daughter, someone who might be loved by her father as much as he loved Suze.
And if there was a foul, uncontrolled corner of Kenney’s imagination, one that smelled of blood and intimate fluids, one in which, despite his every effort, the features of a woman in the Game would occasionally transmute into those of his daughter, he chose to avoid exploring it.
It wasn’t unlike what happened when you tried too hard not to think of a song, an animal, or an image: It forced its way in.
It was a nasty trick of the mind and nothing more.
Kenney left the kids to join his wife and their dog on the couch.
The movie was one he and Mia had seen before, but he was happy to watch it again because the movie, like her, represented the familiar.
This was what was meant by home, by family: the same faces, the same experiences, day after day, yet each time subtly different.
“Family” and “familiar” even had a common origin in familia, the Latin word for “household.” To be a family man was not only to accept the commonplace but also to take pleasure in it, and thereby achieve contentment.
It was the Game that had enabled Edward Kenney to reach this accommodation.
In an unexpected way, it had made him a better father and husband, if not a better man.