I've Got You Under My Skin

6

Rod Kimball signed for the certified letter and opened it while his wife, Alison, was busy filling a prescription. When the customer left she hurried over to take it from him.

“Who’s sending a registered letter?” she asked, her tone worried, as without breaking stride she took it from him, turned, and went back to the pharmacy area of their drugstore, giving him no chance to warn her of the contents. Dismayed, he watched as her face flushed, then paled as she read the two-page missive. Then she dropped it on the counter. “I can’t go through that again,” she cried, her voice trembling. “My God, do they think I’m crazy?”

“Take it easy, love,” Rod cautioned. Trying not to grimace with pain, he slid off the stool behind the checkout counter and reached for his crutches. Twenty years after the hit-and-run accident that had crippled him, pain was always a fact of life for him. Yet some days, like this one, cold and wet in late March in Cleveland, Ohio, it was more severe than others. Pain was etched into the lines around his eyes and the resolute set of his jaw. His dark brown hair had turned almost completely gray. He knew he looked older than his forty-two years. He hobbled over to Alison. Across the counter from her, his six-foot body towering over her petite frame, he felt an overwhelming need to protect her. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” he said firmly. “Tear up that letter.”

“No.” Shaking her head, Alison opened the drawer beneath the counter and shoved the letter into it. “I can’t talk about it now, Rod,” she said.

At that point the jingling sound that signaled the opening of the door told them that a customer was coming into the store, and Rod made his way back to the checkout counter.

He had been a rookie quarterback for the New York Giants when he and Alison were married. He was raised by a single mother who worked as a caretaker for an invalid to support him. His father, a hopeless alcoholic, died when he was two. The sportswriters were unanimous that a brilliant career was ahead of him when he had signed his first big contract. He and Alison were both twenty-two then, and he had been crazy about her since kindergarten. In fact, when they were in kindergarten together he had announced to the class that he was going to marry her someday.

Alison’s family had never had any money. Her father was the produce manager in a grocery store. Alison went to college on a mix of student loans and working part time. She had lived in a modest section of Salem Ridge, not far from where Rod Kimball had lived. She had missed out on a scholarship to graduate school.

He officially proposed the day he was offered the big contract with the New York Giants. That was two months after Betsy Powell’s murder. An important part of the proposal was that he knew Alison wanted to go to medical school and then into research. He promised to pay for her education, to tiptoe around the house when she was studying, and to delay having children until she obtained the degree she wanted so badly.

Instead, three weeks after the wedding, he had been in the accident, and Alison had spent the better part of the next four years at his bedside helping him to heal. The money he had saved from his one season with the Giants was soon exhausted.

At that point Alison had taken out more loans and gone back to school to become a pharmacist. Her first job came about because her elderly childless cousin had hired her to work with him in his drugstore in Cleveland. “Rod, there’s a job for you as well,” he had said. “My assistant is leaving. She does the ordering of everything except for the drugs, and she handles the cash register.”

They had both been glad to get out of the New York area, where they always seemed to encounter speculation over Betsy Powell’s death. A few years after they moved to Cleveland, the cousin retired and they took over the store. Now they had a wide circle of friends, and no one ever asked them about the Graduation Gala murder.

The nickname “Rod” had come about because in his college years on the football field, a sportswriter had commented that he moved as fast as a lightning rod. After the accident, Thomas “Rod” Kimball had managed not to let that nickname become a source of bitter irony.

The morning was fairly quiet, but in the afternoon business was brisk. They had two part-time assistants, a semiretired pharmacist and a clerk who stocked the shelves and helped at the cash register. Even with their help it was an exceptionally busy day, and by the time they closed at 8 P.M., he and Alison were both bone tired.

By then it was raining hard, a cold driving rain. Alison insisted that he use the wheelchair to get out to the car. “We’ll both be drowned if you try to use the crutches,” she said, an edge in her voice.

Many times over the years he had sought the courage to insist that she leave him, that she meet someone else and have a normal life. But he had never been able to bring himself to utter those words. He could not visualize a life without her now, any more than he could have visualized it all through his growing years.

He sometimes thought of an observation his grandmother had made long ago. “In most marriages, one of the couple is more in love than the other, and it’s best if it’s the man. The marriage will have a better chance of going the whole way.”

Rod did not need to be told that with Alison, he was the one who loved the most. He was almost sure that she would not have accepted his proposal if he had not offered to send her to medical school. And then, after the accident, she was too decent to walk out on him.

Rod didn’t let himself drown in that kind of speculation often, but the letter today brought back so much-the Graduation Gala, the pictures of the four girls plastered all over the newspapers, the circus the media had made of their wedding.

When they reached the car, Alison said, “Rod, let me drive. I know you’re hurting.”

She was shielding him with the umbrella as she opened the door, and without arguing he slid into the passenger seat. It was impossible for her to hold the umbrella and fold the wheelchair at the same time. He watched regretfully as the rain pelted her face and hair until she was finally settled behind the wheel. Then she turned to him. “I’m going to do it,” she said. Her tone was defiant, as if she expected him to argue with her.

When he said nothing, she waited for a long minute, then started the engine. “No comment?” Now he detected a slight tremor in her voice.

He was not going to tell her what he was thinking-that with her long brown hair wet on her shoulders, she looked so young and so vulnerable. He knew she was frightened. No, he thought. Make that terrified.

“If the others agree to take part in the program and you don’t, it wouldn’t be good,” he said quietly. “I think you have to go. I think we have to go,” he corrected himself quickly.

“I was lucky last time. This time I may not be so lucky.”

They were both silent for the rest of the trip. Their ranch-style home, designed to accommodate his disabilities, was a twenty-minute drive from the pharmacy. They were spared any further exposure to the downpour because a door from the garage opened into the kitchen. Once inside, shaking off her wet raincoat, Alison sank into a chair and buried her face in her hands. “Rod, I’m so scared. “I never told you but that night when we all went up to bed all I could think of was how much I hated Betsy and Rob Powell.” She hesitated and continued haltingly, “I think I was sleepwalking that night and I might have gone into Betsy’s room.”

“You thought you were in Betsy’s room that night!” Rod dropped his crutches as he pulled a chair closer to Alison and eased himself into it. “Do you think there is any possibility that anyone saw you?”

“I don’t know.”

Alison pulled away from his embrace and turned to face him. Her large, expressive light brown eyes were her dominant feature. Now with tears streaming from them, they looked haunted and defenseless. Then Rod heard a question he never expected to hear from his wife’s lips.

“Rod,” she asked, “isn’t it a fact that you have always believed that I killed Betsy Powell?”

“Are you crazy?” he asked. “Are you absolutely crazy?”

But even to his own ears, he knew that his protest sounded hollow and unconvincing.