A Perfect Crime

6

Thursday. Francie spent the day in her office, preparing a report (negative) for the acquisitions committee. “… menstrual performance, coupled with an installation consisting of outsize Tupperware (e. g., casserole dish-10 ft. diameter) suspended from a..” She found she’d already typed that sentence, not once but twice, as a quick scroll through the text revealed. She couldn’t concentrate at all. This often happened on Thursdays, but this Thursday more than ever.

The phone rang. Francie reached for it with dread. Once before Ned had called to cancel, at about this same time. But it wasn’t Ned.

“Francie? Tad Wagner here.”

“Yes?” She’d heard the name but couldn’t place it.

“Your insurance agent-classmate of Roger’s.”

“Oh, yes.”

“How’re you doing?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“So I understand. I saw a nice article in the Globe.”

“That was really about the foundation. I wasn’t even supposed-”

“I’m impressed. But the reason I’m calling-now that this career of yours is taking off, have you given any thought to a term policy in your own name?”

“A term policy?”

“That’s the instrument I’d recommend in your case.”

“Are you talking about life insurance?”

“That’s my forte.” He pronounced it correctly-at least Harvard gave you that.

“I have no dependents, Tad.”

Pause. “What about Roger? Word is he’s…”

What about Roger? Roger had supported her for years. And if they did end in divorce, she could change the beneficiary: to Em. “How much does it cost?”

Tad described different options. Francie settled on a term policy for $500, 000 with Roger as beneficiary and hung up. Tad must have been desperate for business: that Globe article was six months old.

Ten to four. Enough. She saved and printed her report. Then she wrote To Ned, with all my love, Francie on a plain sheet of paper. She stared at the words. They seemed alive on the page.

Francie folded the paper, put it in an envelope, taped it to the rewrapped painting leaning against her desk. She’d never written Ned a note before-written communication was out-but this was special. He could destroy the note if he wished. The pleasure of writing it had been exquisite: it made their relationship real. Francie packed her briefcase, picked up the painting, took the elevator down to the garage.

She drove out of the city under a low and fast-darkening sky, planning what she would say about Nora. It was just a question of making him see how close they were, how trustworthy Nora was. Francie was sure he would understand. Her heart grew light and buoyant-she could feel it, high in her chest, like a bird about to fly. She felt as happy as she’d ever been, at least as an adult, until just across the New Hampshire line, when the car phone buzzed. She realized immediately that she’d forgotten to send the goddamn report upstairs to the acquisitions committee.

“Hello?” she said.

But it wasn’t the committee. First a faint background voice, female, said, “Three minutes to air,” and then Ned came on. “Hello,” he said.

“Ned.”

“Hi.” He never spoke her name on the phone. There was a pause, and in it Francie thought: Say you’ll be a little late. He said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t make it today.”

“Oh.”

“Two minutes to air.”

“Really sorry. Something’s come up; I’ll explain later.”

“Something bad?”

“Nothing bad, but I’ve got to go.”

“Bye, then.”

“I’ll call.”

Too late to go back to the office, and Francie didn’t want to go home. She kept driving, wishing she hadn’t said Bye, then like that. Something coming up had to mean something involving Em-a parent-teacher meeting, a dance recital. Em came first. Em was the reason Ned couldn’t get divorced; Em was the reason for secrecy. Francie understood that, accepted it. If she had a child, she would be the same… Francie didn’t finish the thought. A competing one had risen in her mind, obtrusive: If I had a child, I would never take the risk, not for anyone. She shoved this second thought away, back down into her unconscious or wherever it had sprung from. She didn’t have a child: she couldn’t know. And how unfair to Ned. He loved her, he loved Em. Did that make him bad?

Francie was almost at Brenda’s gate before she remembered the show. Switching on the radio, she caught Ned in midsentence, the signal weak and scratchy with static but audible: “… pain will ever go away? Maybe not-that’s the truth of it. But it will change into something else, something more manageable. Time may not be a healer, but at least it turns wounds into scars, if you see what I mean.”

“I think I do, Ned.” The woman was crying. “Thank you.”

“Rico from Brighton. Welcome to Intimately Yours.”

“Hey. Great show. Can we switch to something different for a second?”

“Thursday, Rico. Anything goes.”

“I’d like to talk about the Big A.”

“The Big A?”

“The A-word, Ned.”

“Adultery?”

“You got it.”

“And what’s your angle?”

“The scientific angle.”

“Which is?”

“You know,” said Rico. “Nature’s law. It’s in a man’s best interest to get his genes out there as much as possible and it’s in a woman’s best interest to have a man around to help with the kids. I mean, that’s a contradiction, right?”

“And the implication?”

“That it’s not about morality. You do what you gotta do.”

There was a long pause, full of static. Then Ned said, “Why don’t we throw that out to the listeners-the Big A, a question of-”

Francie lost him completely. Night had fallen now. Her headlights glinted on Brenda’s gate. She unlocked it, drove through and up the hill. At the top, she tried the radio again, and Ned came in clearly. “… reduce this to a bunch of genes? Let’s take another call.”

All at once, Francie had a crazy idea. She had a phone, it was a call-in show, she knew the number. Why not call him? He’d never said not to call the show. Free-form Thursday. She picked up the phone and dialed; no chance of getting through anyway.

“Intimately Yours,” said a voice. “Who’s this?”

“Iris,” said Francie. “On a car phone.”

“And what did you want to talk about?”

“Genes.”

“Mind turning off your radio? You’re next.”

Francie waited, her heart beating its Thursday beat again. What was the saying? Hide a tree in the forest. Did it apply to what she was doing? Maybe not. Maybe this wasn’t such a good “You’re on.”

Ned spoke, right in her ear, but with a tone he never used with her: “Iris on her car phone, welcome to the show. What’s on your mind, Iris?”

Maybe not a good idea.

“Iris? You there?”

Francie said, “I just want to tell you how much I like your show. Thursdays especially.”

Silence. It seemed endless. Then the line went dead. She turned the radio back on, felt herself blushing like a schoolgirl.

“… lost Iris. Let’s take another call.” Ned, his voice pitched higher than she’d ever heard it. Not a good idea, not well executed, not funny. Francie pounded her hand on the steering wheel.

Early retirement: an infuriating suggestion. On the computer in his basement office, Roger opened the file containing his resume and made a single change, adding IQ-181 (Stanford-Binet) on the line below the date of his birth. He printed the resume, read it over. The new entry didn’t look bad, no worse than a long list of specious awards, for example. Quite professional. He prepared a mailing list of potential employers for the revised resume.

After that, Roger logged on to the Puzzle Club, started the Times of London crossword. Where was he? Hell, in ideal form: that would be dystopia. Seven across, six letters: ugni, sylvaner. He typed in grapes. Ten down, nine letters: loss. Roger paused, sat for a few moments, then went up to Francie’s bedroom; their bedroom. He bent, looked under the bed. The painting of the grapes and the skateboarding girl was gone.

Roger grew aware of Francie’s clock radio, broadcasting to an empty room; she was like that, leaving on lights, running the tap the whole time she brushed her teeth. “Genes or no genes, Ned, ” a woman on a phone line was saying, “it’ll always be cheating in my book. ”

“Sounds like the first line of a country hit,” said a studio voice, gentle and sympathetic: the kind of male tone suddenly common in broadcasting, a tone Roger hated.

“Let’s take another caller,” the man said as Roger moved to shut him off. “Who have we got? Iris on her car phone, welcome to the show. What’s on your mind, Iris?”

A long pause. Roger was unfamiliar with Francie’s clock radio; he fumbled for the switch, found the volume instead, turning it louder.

“Iris? You there?”

“I just want to tell you how much I like your show,” a woman said. “Thursdays especially.”

Roger froze. Time seemed to freeze with him. The radio went silent, until at last the smooth-voiced man cleared his throat and said, “Oops, looks like we lost Iris. Let’s take another call.”

“Hi, Ned. Can we get off this adultery thing for a minute? I’m having a problem with my-”

Roger turned off the radio, stood motionless by the bed.

Francie. Beyond doubt. What had become of her, calling any talk show at all, to say nothing of a smarmy, prurient one like that? To let herself be used by them, like one of those pathetic big-haired women on television? He left the room, closed the door, stopped. And why would she call herself Iris?

Car phone. What was the number of Francie’s car phone? Roger didn’t know, had never called it. He went downstairs to the kitchen desk where Francie kept all the household accounts. He found the latest cellular phone bill, noted her number, and dialed it, leafing through the bill as he waited for a ring.

“The cellular phone customer you have called is not available at this time,” said a recording.

Roger wondered where she was.

Francie drove down to the stone jetty, printing fresh tire tracks in unbroken snow. The snow should have warned her of what lay ahead, but not until her headlights shone on the river, white instead of black, did she realize it was frozen. She got out of the car, stepped onto the jetty, looked down into the dinghies: five or six inches of snow on their floorboards, caught in the ice.

Francie gazed across at the island, the tops of the elms white against the night sky. She hadn’t anticipated this; a New England girl, and she hadn’t foreseen winter, the changes it would bring for Ned and her. Now she saw them very clearly-motel rooms, dark parking places, furtiveness. Her mind recoiled, and Ned’s would, too. Without the cottage, they had a relationship entirely mental, like some Victorian exercise in frustration. How long could that last?

Francie walked to the end of the jetty, sat down. Her feet took charge, lowering themselves to the ice. Then she was standing. Nothing cracked, nothing split; the ice felt thick and solid. She went back to her car for the painting, then moved out onto the ice, one step after another.

Francie walked across the river. She wore leather city boots, not even calf-high, but high enough. The snow on the river was only an inch or two deep, the rest blown away by the wind. This was easy-good traction, and no rowing, no tying up-with Brenda’s wintry island more beautiful than ever. A moonless, starless sky, but she could see her way easily; the snow brightened the night. A shadow stirred in the elm tops, rose high above. The owl. Francie paused to watch, lost it in the darkness, took another step. The next moment she was plunging to the bottom.

Down she went in complete blackness, icy water bubbling around her, so cold it made her gasp, swallow, gag. Her foot touched something: the bottom? She pushed off, a panicked, reflexive kick, and frantically kicked toward the surface-or what she hoped was the surface, because she could see nothing but bubbles, silver on the outside, black within. But the surface didn’t come. Was she moving at all? So heavy: she struggled with her coat, freed herself from it, tried to get rid of her boots, could not. She kicked, wheeled her arms, felt pressure building in her chest like an inflating balloon, and always the never-ending shock of cold. Her head struck something hard and she sank.

As Francie sank, she had a strange thought, not her kind of thought at all. She wasn’t religious, certainly didn’t believe in any kind of quid pro quo, deal-making God. But still, the thought came- If you let me live, I’ll never see Ned again — as though she were guilty, and this the punishment.

Francie kicked again, once, twice, the bubble about to burst from her chest. Her head had struck something hard: the underside of the ice? She raised her hands in protection, and her fingers reached into night air. Francie broke through the surface, choking, retching, but alive. She floundered in a pool of black water, no wider than the top of a well.

Francie commanded her hands: on the ice. They obeyed. Pull. They pulled, but the ice broke off. Francie tried again, and again, and again, hands, face, body numb, teeth chattering at an impossible speed, breaking off chunks of ice, breaking, breaking. She heard a terrible cry, her cry, and then the ice held for her. She flopped onto it, drew herself up, inches at a time, to her chest, her waist, and out.

Some shivering mechanism now controlled her body. She staggered across the ice, onto the jetty, into her car. The keys? In her coat: gone. But then she saw them glinting in the ignition, left by mistake. What was happening to her? She turned the key, switched on the heater, full-blast. The engine was still warm. It had been only a few minutes. She clung, shaking, to the steering wheel, and remembered oh garden, my garden: gone, too.

It was after midnight when Francie got home. From his basement office, Roger heard her footsteps overhead. He waited an hour by the clock and went upstairs.

Francie’s boots were on the mat by the front door. They looked wet. Roger went closer. They were wet. He picked one up. Soaked, inside and out, and it was too cold for rain. Had she gone for a walk on the beach, strayed too close to the surf? He sniffed: no salty smell, but to be sure he gave the leather a lick of his tongue as well. Freshwater, then, and at least a foot deep. Fresh-water: ponds, lakes, rivers. He gazed up the stairs, thinking.

Roger put the boot down, aligned the pair neatly. He went into the kitchen. Francie’s purse lay on the table. He looked through it: wallet, with driver’s license, credit cards, forty-two dollars; zinc lozenges, tissues, vitamin C, a key ring. Key ring. Not like her. She always left her keys in the ignition when she parked in the garage, no matter what he said.

There were seven keys on the ring: car key; two house keys, front and back; a key to her locker at the tennis club-he had had one just like it-a small key that would be for luggage; and two he couldn’t identify. These two he removed from the ring and laid on the table.

Roger went to Francie’s kitchen desk, found paper and a pencil. He placed the keys on the paper and traced their patterns. Then he pocketed the paper, put the keys back on the ring, left the purse the way he’d found it, went downstairs to his basement room. The crossword waited, unfinished. One down, nine letters: loss. That would be ruination.