Richard and Matt drive together and Matt notices the Dairy Queen, closed until spring, and the two lobster restaurants that were crowded all summer and are now closed as well. As he rides alongside his son’s killer, Matt passes familiar places he and his family have likely known all their lives. He sees the bridge crossing the tidal stream and the moonlit current in the dark, and as they pass the bridge, he gazes out at the salt marsh and the tall grass.

In the car with Richard as they drive out of town, Matt reflects on “this town whose streets had become places of apprehension and pain for Ruth as she drove and walked, doing what she had to do; and for him too, if only in his mind as he worked and chatted six days a week in his store.” The setting of Matt and Ruth’s lives has been transformed and tainted by Frank’s murder, and Matt realizes that if he did allow Richard to live, even it were in a place as far away as Montana, simply picturing him walking the streets of another town would “slowly rot the rest of his days. And Ruth’s.”

When Willis and Matt kidnap Richard, they leave behind the familiar streets of their small town, signaling a break with the normalcy of their former lives. The story then unfolds into the surrounding countryside, into New Hampshire, and back again. Matt recalls that previously, after they prepared the grave for Richard, he and Willis went to a restaurant “farther up” in New Hampshire, a setting whose mundanity—beer, sandwiches, and the baseball game on television—provides a disarming contrast to the act of digging and obscuring a grave in the woods. Yet this sense of mundanity is present in that act as well, with Matt and Willis listening to the game on their radio as they worked.

Willis provides a good sense of local events and helps to expand the sense of the story’s small-town setting. As the owner of a large restaurant, he knows most people in the town. As Matt’s friend, he supports him in his grief and frustrations regarding Richard Strout. In one conversation with Matt, Willis describes a crime involving a woman who is suspected of shooting her husband and includes details that provide readers with a sense of the surrounding area: he mentions the Merrimack River and how the woman fled to the town of Lawrence, where she lives free from the consequences of her crime. Willis’s story reflects the attitudes of the small blue-collar towns in the area while illustrating the way in which the locals gossip about and keep track of each other.

The tension reaches a peak when Richard realizes that Matt has pointed them in a direction other than that of the airport and comments that no planes are leaving in the middle of the night. As they continue down a narrow highway, they cross the border into New Hampshire, representing a final point of no return. Matt is committed now to killing Richard, and Richard knows he will die. As they turn off the road into the secluded spot near an “abandoned gravel pit” where Richard will die, tall trees and an embankment mask the moon and the highway. At this point, it becomes clear to Richard that Matt and Willis plan to kill him, prompting him to make a desperate attempt to run away.

After Matt shoots Richard, he and Willis bury the body and pause briefly to listen to the quiet sounds of the woods. They cover the earth with branches and leaves, and Willis distributes dust over the blood where Richard was shot. The two men then walk through the trees to the shore of a calm, moonlit lake, where Matt flings the gun into the water. For a few moments, these eerily peaceful descriptions of nature seem to close over the story’s violent “killings,” much as the waters of the lake swallow Matt’s gun and the leaves and earth cover Richard’s body.

Upon arriving home, Matt returns to familiar surroundings: his house, its lighted window, its closed curtains, and the tip of Ruth’s cigarette glowing in the dark. In bed with Ruth, where the couple are long accustomed to sharing their private thoughts, Matt admits his crime to his wife; the two now share a bond of secrecy. But his memories of both Frank and Richard isolate him even as he holds Ruth, and he keeps his pain “silent in his heart,” hinting that he will never be able to return to the life he once knew.

Many of Andre Dubus’s short stories concern working-class families, and several have characters who work in bars. In “Killings,” the catalyst for the plot is a bartender, but the main characters are the middle-class family that is forever shattered by the appearance of the bartender’s estranged wife in their lives. Dubus, who spent the last thirteen years of his life in a wheelchair after a freak accident, often uses his fiction to remind readers just how suddenly and unalterably their lives can be changed.

In this story, Dubus invites his readers to ponder the disparity between people’s ethical responsibility to society and the primal urge to protect and avenge their loved ones. Matt, a gentle and devoted family man, tenderly watches his youngest son’s relationship with Mary Ann deepen. When her estranged husband kills Frank, Matt’s grief is intensified by his wife’s pain whenever she sees Richard in town. Matt’s agony that Richard walks free and seemingly unconcerned is compounded when he and Willis talk about the short sentences they have heard of other killers getting. Matt says he has to take care of the situation because it is too hard on Ruth, but the reader may wonder if that is just his excuse. It is also unclear how much Willis is only an accomplice and how much he fuels Matt’s anger.

At the end of the story, Matt tells Ruth what happened, but it is clear that he hardly comprehends his responsibility for it. He, Ruth, and presumably Willis, will be marked forever by the secret of the cold-blooded murder. Nevertheless, Dubus does not judge Matt and label him either a hero or a sinner—he simply presents the ethical problem to the reader.