The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

FROM Thuglit

1

We were at the Allens’ anniversary party, which I hated, and Hannah hated it too. It was not as though we didn’t like the Allens-Joe Allen, anyway, a big, fat, affable bear of a man-it was all just so tacky. I was of the opinion that notifying other people of one’s forthcoming birthday was vulgar enough (Don’t forget my gift!), but an anniversary always seemed like a private thing, a husband/wife thing, nothing to do with me or my debit card. Joe could buy his wife lunar real estate for all I cared, just leave me out of it. As far as I knew, Hannah felt much the same way.

But Joe insisted, and his wife made sure to send us their wish list by e-mail, so with twin engine grumbling we went and presented them with the Waterford vase they wanted. She cooed hungrily over the damn thing and he nodded with appreciation. There were a lot of people there. The gifts were piling up in the corner by the fireplace. Finally, after the inimitable Mrs. Allen opened their (her) last gift, the assemblage was freed to drink, drink, and be drunk. A trio of hulky guys whose guts were threatening the structural integrity of their shirts swarmed the keg. Hannah and I opted for the crappy boxed wine.

“Jesus,” she snarked in my ear, “what a disgrace.”

I sucked at a mouthful of supermarket zinfandel and nodded. That’s what husbands seemed to do best around here: nod. Even the troglodytes huddled around the keg were nodding like junkies while they took turns filling up red Solo cups.

“We’ve been married seven years,” Hannah hissed. “Way I see it, these people all owe us back pay.”

I laughed, felt some of the wine work its way up into my nasal cavity. Hannah tsked and went in search of a napkin as it dribbled from my nostrils. I felt a little stupid, and maybe more so when a woman in a powder-blue summer dress covered her mouth with her hand to stifle her giggles. Wiping my nose with the back of my hand, I smiled at her and shrugged. What are you gonna do?

The napkin flew to my face like a surface-to-air missile and Hannah, always the second mother to me, smeared it all over my face, her brow tightly knitting as though she were defusing a bomb. I took over from there, gently taking control of the napkin to prove that yes, I was wearing my big-boy pants today, but thanks for your assistance.

“What do you think?” she asked, her voice without a suggestion of tone.

“I think it’s a miracle I didn’t ruin this shirt.”

“No, I mean her. What do you think of her?”

My head jerked up, mouth hanging open. Hannah gestured with her chin-a nice, subtle chin, I’d always thought-at the blonde in the summer dress. I tried not to look at her again, but it was automatic, like the old “Made you look!” game kids play. Now she looked discomfited, perhaps a bit distressed. She dropped her eyes and disappeared into the throng of partygoers.

“I don’t know her,” I said. “Never saw her before. Friend of Katherine’s, I assume.”

“You know that’s not what I asked.”

“You asked me what I think. I don’t think anything, because I don’t know anything about that woman.”

That woman. Appropriately disparaging, I thought. Clintonesque, as in Oh, that woman.

“You were looking at her. She tittered.”

“Tittered?”

“Tittered.”

“It’s a party. People are having a good time, Hannah. Don’t make such a-”

“Don’t you dare,” she growled low, her lacquered nails digging into my arm. I winced, held my breath. This was getting ugly fast. Spiraling out of control. “Is she pretty? Did you like her ass? You could practically see it through that dress, you know.”

I knew, but I didn’t say I knew. I just made a straight, clenched line of my mouth and felt my stomach make a fist.

“It’s nothing,” I said at some length. “Nothing to worry about. I promise you that.”

Hannah’s lips spread apart to show her perfect, picket-fence teeth.

“I think we both know what your promises are worth,” she hissed at me.

That stung, but I kept silent. Because of course she was in the right. I had lied, and it only takes one to dissolve trust like a tab of Alka-Seltzer. Liars are like alcoholics: no matter how forthcoming and honest they are after the fact, they can never not be a liar again. It is a stigma, an ever-present black cloud that never gets burned up by the sun. The ex-drunks carry those chips around in their pockets, and I carried my guilt. Hannah never let me forget about that.

Joe came around then, a bottle of Mexican beer in his meaty hand and a toothy smile plastered across his face. Hannah immediately released my arm, assumed her role as the one everybody liked, the chipper optimist.

“Having a good time?” Joe barked.

“A great time, Joe,” my wife said. “Thanks so much for inviting us.”

“I don’t even know half these people-Katherine’s coworkers, ‘the girls from the office,’ you know.”

“Invite one and you have to invite them all,” she said pleasantly, cheerfully. “We move in packs.”

She winked. Joe chuckled, squeezed my shoulder. I was covering my arm with my hand, concealing the broken skin, a cluster of red half-moons where Hannah clutched me with her talons. The music fell silent and the murmur of a dozen overlapping conversations rose up to fill the hole when Katherine came bouncing over, seized Hannah by the wrist, and bellowed, “Come on, help me pick some more songs!”

Joe’s wife dragged mine across the room, Hannah’s eyes big and helpless. Neither of us really cared much for Katherine, though we maintained that dirty little secret discreetly. I felt a pang for my wife, having to deal with her, but dismissed it when Joe pulled me into a crushing sideways hug, sloshing his beer all over the floor.

“You guys are so awesome together,” he drawled, his tongue thick with the buzz. “We’re going to be like that, me and Kathy.”

I tried to imagine Katherine drawing blood from Joe with her fingernails. The picture didn’t fit.

“Hey, I’m gonna get another beer,” Joe said. “You want anything?”

“No, I’ll just mingle.”

“Mingle,” he chortled. “Yeah, you mingle.”

With that he lumbered off in search of a new beer to spill all over his guests. A new tune came blaring from the Allens’ surround-sound speakers: Top 40 stuff, all sugar and sound effects, definitely not Hannah’s choice.

For once I was left on my own, so I didn’t waste any time; I made a beeline for the tightly grouped revelers, following the blonde’s path. After receiving a few accidental elbows to the ribs and stepping on some poor woman’s toes, I spotted her through the sliding glass door on the back patio. She had both hands on her drink and swung her hips side to side with the music. A quick scan of the room revealed no Hannah within view, so I slipped outside among the mosquitoes and leaning tiki torches.

She wasn’t talking to anyone, just swaying by herself, probably enjoying the hold the red drink in her hand was beginning to take. I slid up beside her and said, “Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” she said, the words syrupy.

She really was beautiful, objectively speaking. Dazzling blue eyes, like gems. Bee-stung lips. I swallowed dry and frowned.

“Listen, my wife…”

“I figured that’s who that was. If looks could kill.”

“Yeah, well…”

“Do you always try to pick up women when you go to parties with your wife?”

A faint grin played at her mouth, but it was the admonishing kind. Tsk-tsk, young man. You ought to know better.

“Pick up-? No, I’m not. I’m not.” I shifted instantly into defense mode, which was my default gear. “That’s not it at all. It’s just-well, I think you should leave.”

“Leave?” Her playful incredulity suddenly became a lot less playful.

“Yes. Right now, actually.”

“You’re serious.”

She wasn’t swaying anymore. The music shifted to a Leonard Cohen song. More Hannah’s speed, which meant she was hopefully still occupied with Katherine.

“You have no idea how… possessive she gets. That little thing with the wine back there?”

“Terrible stuff, isn’t it?”

“It’s awful, but please-”

“I don’t even know why I’m here, to tell the truth.”

“Great, then really, you should go.”

The blonde assumed a bemused expression, a matronly look of utter disappointment. I heard the back door slide squeakily open behind me and gave up.

“Is my husband bothering you?”

My eyes slid shut and a sigh whistled past my lips. Hannah’s arm hooked mine and the blond woman laughed the way women do in awkward social situations. I’m an expert on that laugh.

“No, not at all,” she said. Then, conspiratorially: “But I think he’s a little drunk.”

I wasn’t, of course. Not even close. Hannah apologized for me anyway (“I’m so sorry, he never seems to know when enough is enough”) and, with a courteous if formal goodbye, she ushered me around the side of the house to the car in the driveway. Not through the house, no “thanks for the party” to the Allens, but around the house. In the dark, like a couple of goddamn thieves.

Or not like, because when I slid into the passenger seat of my wife’s Acura (she always drove, always insisted on unlocking and opening the door for me), she handed me her baggy purse to hold on to, whereupon I immediately took notice of its largest, most conspicuous occupant. The Waterford vase we’d given to the Allens no more than an hour before. An act of aggression, however mild; a subtle “fuck you” to the woman she loathed and my friend who always annoyed her with his loud voice and gregarious demeanor. Joe and Katherine would spend a while sifting through their gifts later on, frustrated with the absurdity of the lost vase. It was right here! Where could it have gone?

Tricky, slippery Hannah.

She stabbed the ignition with her key and cleared her throat in time with the rumbling of the engine. Home.

I could tell things were about to get bad again.

2

The mewling cries wafted up through the air-conditioning vents, from the basement to every room in the house. I hated it, that awful, pitiful sound, but I shut it out of my mind. Pretended as best I could that it wasn’t really there at all. One of the secrets to a good marriage: put those things you just can’t stand out of your head. Nobody’s perfect.

I was in the spare room, once considered the future location of our first child’s bedroom, since loaded up with towers of boxes, the minutiae of a shared life. The notion had occurred to me that it might make a decent home office. Upon expressing this thought to Hannah, her eyes went wide with delight-“No, no,” she exclaimed, “a crafts room. Yes, that would be perfect.”

So I was prepping the room for Hannah. Hannah and her crafts. And all the while the woman in our basement howled miserably: No, why, why, why are you doing this to me. A familiar line, a cliché. I was beginning to think that people based their words on oft-repeated lines we hear on television. The brain references the sundry crime programs they’d seen over the years, the dozen or so kidnapping scenarios, and it knows right off what the right words are. How often does it work on those shows? I wasn’t sure.

I could take the doors off the closet, make it a nice little space for a sewing table. Soon Hannah would have two workrooms, this and the basement. She had so many hobbies.

In the late afternoon she emerged from the basement, shut the door, and locked it with her key. Her face was spotted with sweat and I thought maybe there was a small spattering of blood on her tank top. I wasn’t looking too closely. I never did. She went right past me in the kitchen, hustled for the back of the house to take a shower. Just like she’d been working out. Which I guess she was. It wasn’t easy, what she’d been up to.

Hannah chose a restaurant for dinner, didn’t feel like cooking. I said I’d be happy to whip something up, but her mind was made up. She knotted a tie around my neck, still displeased with the way I did it, and we hopped into her Acura for a quick jaunt to a new Caribbean place she read about in the paper. She complained about Kathy Allen the whole way.

“Can you believe her? She asks what I want to hear, we’re sitting together by the stereo and she smells, by the way, and she asks, ‘What’s your poison?’ And then she just plays her own crap anyway.”

I almost reminded her about the Leonard Cohen song, but I choked it down.

The place was called El Carib and it was full of tropical fish tanks and bustling waitresses. Televisions mounted in the corners of the ceiling played soap operas with the volume turned down. After we sat down I kept my eyes trained on the laminated menu. She asked me how the crafts room was coming along and I muttered something vaguely encouraging. I didn’t look at the waitress when she came around to take our order. If she murdered somebody right then and there and the police asked me to describe the assailant, I couldn’t have done it. I had blinders on. Sometimes I forgot, but not then.

Hannah pointed to something on her menu, asked if it had bananas in it. The waitress said she didn’t think so and Hannah made her go back to the kitchen and make sure. When she came back positive that the dish-I don’t remember what it was-was banana-free, my wife ordered it for both of us. I ate it like a prison meal, pausing occasionally to sip at my water and nod at Hannah while she talked about the thriller she was reading and our HOA and didn’t the new mail carrier seem a great deal friendlier than the old one? Neither of us so much as alluded to the elephant in the basement.

Poor woman.

3

Monday I spent my lunch break with Patricia. I drove to the diner like a fugitive, taking odd turns, a circuitous route, terribly careful that I wasn’t being followed. She was waiting for me in the last booth by the restrooms, a scarf on her head and enormous sunglasses disguising most of her face. I had to laugh. When I sat down across from her, I grumbled, “What’s the password?”

“Swordfish” was her reply. She liked the Marx Brothers. I introduced her to them.

Patricia was an administrative assistant at my office for the better part of two years before she got married and resigned. We were friendly, but not friends. I didn’t miss her when she left. Less than a year later she was divorced and came around for a lunch date with one of her old coworkers. She and I got to talking, and inside a month we were sweating in a tangle between musty sheets at her apartment. I had “gone home sick.” I was never on guard at the office, not like I was at home.

She was sipping at a Bloody Mary and I ordered the same. I was so used to letting women make my decisions for me, I couldn’t see why it should be any different with Pat. Still, she crooked her full red lips to one side and said, “You can get whatever you want.”

“This is fine.”

“You’re tense.”

“Hannah,” I said. It was all that needed saying.

“Divorce her.”

“Pat-”

“I know.”

“I can’t.”

“I know.”

I signaled the girl behind the counter for another one. Pat fired up a long, slim cigarette and exhaled like a femme fatale from some old noir movie. She certainly looked the part. Red hair, shoulder length, skin like alabaster. I didn’t have a type, and even if I did, Patricia probably wouldn’t be it. But still, we fit.

A couple of weeks earlier I had told her I loved her. Damnedest thing, didn’t mean to say it, even if I was thinking it. Of course, just thinking didn’t necessarily mean it was true. All the same, I said it, and she parroted it back to me. I loved her and she loved me. We were in love. And I was married to somebody else. What a bastard.

“I want you,” Pat said, slipping off her sunglasses to gaze at the stream of blue-gray smoke spilling up from her cigarette’s ember.

I checked my watch, said, “I’ll have to get back.”

“I mean you, all of you. No more ‘swordfish.’”

It was a fun enough game, but she was getting tired of games. I guess I was too. I clenched my jaw and thought about the blonde from the party. My eyes watered, and Pat took that to mean I was reacting to our situation. She touched my hand and smiled sadly.

“What are we going to do?” she asked. Make a decision for once in your life. Put your goddamn foot down.

I said, “I don’t know, Pat.”

4

At night they were always quiet. The day wore them out, wore them down. The voice was whittled down to a scratchy whisper, the muscles didn’t want to obey the commands to keep struggling, keep trying. Nevertheless, I never slept.

For the longest time I lay in bed, flat on my back with my arms crossed on top of the sheets, my eyes wide open. Listening to Hannah breathe. She never snored, but her sleep-breath was whistley, soft as cotton. When the digital clock hit two in the morning, it was as if I could hear it turn over, a sequence of heavy locks like the unleashing of a dam. Hannah whistled on. I got out of bed, twisted my shoulders, and pulled a T-shirt down over my torso.

My objective was a glass of water and a slice of toast. I stared at the toaster oven while the heating coil went lava red and the bread yellow, then brown. I slathered two slices with peanut butter and nibbled them at the kitchen table, swallowing water when it got too thick in my throat. Across the table from me was the basement door, as plain and unassuming as ever, apart from the steel lock keeping the status quo. Beyond it, down the uncarpeted steps, around the corner, and into the paneled 1970s room some previous owner used for his “man time,” a blond woman waited for it all to start up again. I didn’t even know her name.

I was willing to bet she knew mine.

Halfway through the second piece of toast I gave up on it and went for a glass of milk. The jug was hiding behind a metal bowl of ground beef mixed with onions and breadcrumbs, a taut layer of plastic wrap over the top. I pulled the milk out, my mind flexing hazily on the meat; tomorrow’s supper, no doubt. Hannah was the house chef; she would never have dreamed of putting anything I prepared in her mouth.

I drank straight from the jug-what my wife didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her-and returned it to the fridge, careful to position it just like I found it. My gaze lingered on the ground beef a second longer before I closed the door.

An idea was percolating.

5

Patricia wasn’t the first. Though now, in the fullness of time, I was coming to love Pat-actually love her-the first was what some people might call a fling. An error in judgment. A wild woman in a bar, flitting around me like a housefly, my subconscious screeching at me to get the hell out of there before I made a mess of things. I didn’t listen. I made the mess.

Her name doesn’t matter. I’ve tried to forget it, and for the most part I’ve convinced myself that I have. I am quite certain that it is engraved on her grave marker, that she probably had a sweet middle name like Rose or Eve, and that even now, all these years later, somebody still comes around with fresh flowers once a month. It’s a nice thought. No consolation, but nice.

In the wake of my error, I learned quickly just how magnificent a detective Hannah was when she needed to be. Perhaps a lot of wives possess this particular set of skills, at least the betrayed ones. Men are what they are, and what they are often isn’t very good. Some wives know that going in, I suppose. Hannah sure as shit did. So when she came home from her weekend in Little Rock (the old homestead), her bloodhound nose started to flare before the door squeaked shut behind her. Sex is like blood to a detective wife: no matter how hard you try to scrub it all away, you can never eliminate all the evidence. It remains in a twitch of the face, a dodged touch, a renewed vigor, a guilty confidence. My eyes could not connect, hold true and steady and meet her gaze head-on. There were lies behind my eyes, and to look into them was to see my crime as if through a glass, and not so darkly. She with her family, sipping iced tea on the porch as in the good old days, and me in room 325 of the Lonestar Motor Lodge, rutting between gray sheets like a hog searching out rotting corncobs in the mud. With her. Whatever her name was. Didn’t matter-she was dead, and I might as well have killed her myself.

I could practically hear the screams clear across town, sitting in my cubicle, knowing how soon her lithe golden brown body would quit on her. Knowing that I had lured her into that web, asked her to meet me one more time.

Jackie was her name. I wished I didn’t know it.

6

Pat lit a cigarette and blew the smoke straight up at the ceiling. She was unabashedly naked, lying on top of the comforter, and so was I. A small, dull-blue tattoo of a butterfly hovered at her left hip, a youthful indiscretion I hardly noticed anymore. Both of us had other lives, before and even now, that had nothing to do with what we had between us. That pervading sense that I was taking part in some manner of international espionage rarely settled in until I was on my way back to the office, or home. With Pat, I was strangely, stupidly calm.

My thoughts were not even invaded by the young woman in my basement. She had no place here, in Pat’s bedroom, with me.

But something did, a vague notion tugging at my brain and ruining the afterglow. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stepped into my trousers. Pat tamped her cigarette out in the jar lid on her nightstand and wrinkled her nose.

“There’s still time,” she said softly. “It’s only a quarter till.”

I was already buttoning my pants when I realized my drawers were bunched up on the carpet.

“Damn.”

“This doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s just something I have to do, before I have to get back.”

“All right.”

She turned on her side, watching me get my clothes situated like I’d never gotten dressed before. There was a dappling of sweat on her upper lip that made me stumble.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “An errand.”

She whispered my name as I peered under the bed in search of my tie. It was lime green, a random gift from Hannah for no reason in particular. She sometimes did kind things like that. I favored that tie to remind myself of it.

“Maybe,” she began, but her voice trailed off. She swallowed, pursed her lips.

I smoothed out my shirt, realized I was holding my breath. I let it out with a question: “What is it?”

“Maybe I can see you this weekend,” she said, twisting her mouth up to one side like an awkward kid asking me out for the first time.

The answer, of course, was I can’t, you know I can’t, it’s impossible, but instead I said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

For once, I wasn’t lying.

7

The contraband was in my briefcase by the front door, and I could have sworn its odor filled the entire house. I wore my best poker face, a skill learned over time by liars who want to keep on lying, the peace of a man who did not in fact have a veritable ticking time bomb just a few yards away. My wife kissed me on the lips, a dry peck, and asked me how my day was. Practiced sitcom dialogue. Did everybody engage in charades like this at home, or only when the tension was so taut the backs of their necks tingled?

“Joe Allen called,” she informed me, her voice singsongy, victorious. I could tell she’d been busy. “He and Kathy are doing a sort of potluck thing next Friday. Wanted to know if we were interested.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said I’d ask you.”

I absently poked at a yellow onion on the kitchen counter. Next to it sat the metal bowl from the refrigerator, the plastic wrap taken away and the red-brown meat warming to room temperature.

“Let me think about it,” I said, loosening my tie, which felt hot in my hands. Then, as if it only just occurred to me: “Damn, forgot to grab the mail on my way in. Be right back.”

It wasn’t Pat in my mind during the long walk up the driveway to the mailbox at the curb, nor even her (Jackie). They might as well have occupied my thoughts, because this-all of this, what I was doing-concerned them every bit as much, but she was gone and Pat was safe in the fiction that what we had was a regular, garden-variety extramarital affair. It was Joe and Kathy’s friend (for Christ’s sake, did they even know she was missing?) who, for all I knew, was already attracting flies in the basement or whatever landfill my beautiful bride had selected for her final resting place. A stranger to me, just some girl who laughed at a silly man’s wine snafu and doomed herself in the process. Sorry, lady. I should have worn a sign around my neck: DON’T TALK TO ME ON PAIN OF DEATH.

Bills, a circular, a postcard from some plastic-faced car salesman running for city council. Nothing more in the mailbox, apart from the black widow I invented to set my evening in motion. I dropped the mail on the ground and marched breathlessly back to the house. There was no stopping this now.

Naturally Hannah furrowed her brow upon hearing my breathless explanation of the terror in the mailbox, that familiar Are you kidding me? expression. It was supposed to be the other way around. I was disappointing her again.

“I’ll take care of it tomorrow” was what she said. No dice.

“I left the mail.”

“It can wait.”

“I’d really rather-”

She screamed my name: a shrill, up-from-the-soul scream that made my eyes water. There was a long minute that stretched by after that, her shriek still tearing through my ears, during which I watched her jaw tremble and eyes glow hatefully.

“I put up with a lot, you know,” she said, each word a chore to pass through clenched teeth. “You-hurt-me, you know.”

I couldn’t determine if she meant it in the past tense or the present. Some verbs are funny that way.

“I don’t mean-”

“Don’t.”

“It’s just the spider, I-”

“Don’t.”

I breathed a sigh and fixed my eyes on the food spread out between us, anything to keep from meeting her glare.

“It’s like having a dog with a bladder problem,” she went on, shaking her head. “So many messes, and nobody to clean them up but me. Sometimes I get tired of your messes, do you know that? Sometimes I wish you’d just quit pissing on the goddamn floor.”

I nodded, submissive and contrite. Hannah sucked a long, angry breath into her lungs and then stomped past me, disappeared into the little hall leading to the garage. She was going after the black widow. I had two minutes at most.

Two long strides returned me to my briefcase by the door, from which I extracted my weapon of choice: a single medium-sized banana, overly ripe. Twelve years I’d known my wife, and if there was one thing that gave her chills the way I’d acted about my imaginary spider, it was her deep-seated terror of her one and only deadly allergy. Her throat, I recalled her telling me while I rapidly peeled the fruit and mashed it hard into the ground beef, would close shut in a matter of minutes, completely shutting off her air supply. Anaphylactic shock, I supposed; a death sentence if she wasn’t administered an antihistamine or bronchodilator immediately. Easy-peasy, and lingering darkly at the back of my mind for years by then. My secret weapon. I kneaded the hell out of the banana-infused beef, until every trace of the fruit’s color was absorbed. The peel I hurled out the kitchen window in the seconds before immersing my hands in hot water from the sink, scrubbing the offending material away with a wire brush. Finally, just as I caught sight of Hannah stomping back down the driveway, angrier than ever, I grabbed a can of air freshener from beneath the sink and sprayed it liberally to mask the scent of my crime. Vanilla bean, allegedly. It smelled awful.

“It was gone,” she growled upon returning inside. “If it was ever there in the first place.”

“It was there.”

“Well, it’s not there now.”

I was sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the blood thumping in my ears. Hannah slammed the mail down in front of me and huffed for the counter when she stopped, midstep, and sniffed at the air like a dog.

“The hell did you spray that crap for?”

“I, uh…”

“Never mind. Jesus, you men.”

She frowned and went back to work on supper. My work was done, thanks to an imaginary spider and now an imaginary fart. Twenty minutes later we were seated across from each other with tacos on our respective plates. Did I taste the banana in the beef? I imagined I did, but would I have recognized it if I hadn’t known it was there?

Hannah didn’t.

Killing one’s wife is a tense business, as it happens. She sipped at her tea and picked at the lettuce and shredded cheese, like a bird. Normal people shoved the whole damn thing in their mouth and bit down. But Hannah wasn’t normal people.

I was working on my second taco by the time she finally stopped picking and crunched into the shell, meat and all. Just then a whimper wafted up from the basement. Hannah’s eyes widened, connected with mine. Up until that minute, I had no idea if the woman down there was still alive. Now I knew she was. I swallowed. Hannah did too.

And she made a face. Her eyebrows came together and she puckered her mouth. She glanced down at the stuffed taco shell in her hand, and then up at me. I tried to smile. I think it ended up looking like a grimace. Next thing I knew, she was knocking her chair back with the backs of her knees and clawing at her neck. Sweat beaded on her forehead and she started to wheeze. I gaped like an idiot, an idiot who had no idea what could possibly be the matter.

It was working. My plan to murder my wife was working.

I said, “Hannah? Hannah, what’s wrong?”

She swept her arm out and knocked the Waterford vase off the counter. It shattered against the linoleum floor and she staggered away from it, into the living room. I followed, pawing at her, faux concerned.

“Talk to me, Hannah.”

She collapsed onto the couch and undid the top few buttons of her blouse. Her face and neck had gone blotchy, her eyes leaked tears. It happened just as quickly as she’d told me, all those years ago. I wondered if she’d sussed out the why of it. I decided it didn’t matter.

“I’m going to get you something,” I lied. “Try to stay calm.”

I bolted from the room, but I didn’t head for the medicine cabinet. Instead I went straight for her purse, right by where I’d dropped my briefcase. Inside, I found her keys, and I quickly sorted through them for the one I needed. The one that unlocked the basement door.

8

She wasn’t dead, but she was close to it. Gone was the attractive blond woman in the sheer summer dress from Joe and Kathy’s party-replacing her was a sunken-faced woman in her underwear, spattered with dirt and blood and sweat, her wrists cuffed behind her back and connected by a length of steel cable to a ring bolted into the wall. The skin on her arms and shoulders was striped with deep lacerations, crusted over with new scabs. Some of her hair had been torn out in clumps, leaving pink spots of bald flesh all over her scalp. When she saw me, she gasped and scrambled backward until she was up against the paneled wall. The carpet was spotted with blood. I smelled her urine and didn’t see anything resembling a chamber pot. Good old Hannah.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, because it seemed like the right thing to say. The woman only sobbed in reply.

I asked her what her name was, and she whispered, “Jennifer.”

For a fraction of a second I thought she was going to say Jackie, the name I wished I did not know, and my stomach lurched. I reminded myself that it was all over now, all this madness, and that Jennifer was going to be all right.

“She’s dead,” I said as matter-of-factly as I could while flipping through the keys, so many damn keys, looking for the one that might unlock the handcuffs. “My wife, she’s dead.”

It felt good, saying it. I wasn’t at all sure that it would-I was somehow afraid that it would hurt, that despite everything the vocalization of what I had done would undo me too. But it didn’t. It felt terrific.

Jennifer’s eyes were swollen and red, her face shiny with grime and tears. She muttered, “Help me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

It wasn’t enough.

9

Jackie, not Jennifer, died on the fusty basement carpet in nothing but a filthy T-shirt several sizes too big for her. The shirt was mine: an old Arkansas Razorbacks championship T I used to mow the lawn in. It ended up at Jackie’s apartment, where Hannah found it with my extramarital fling packaged snugly inside. I guessed it had some kind of significance for her, the other woman wearing her husband’s treasured shirt, so Jackie got to die in it.

Jackie whose name I did not know. Jackie who bled to death on the floor, my name carved into the skin on her belly. Jackie who was plenty good enough to lay but apparently not good enough to save. Not when it was tantamount to destroying a good marriage.

10

I had Jennifer propped up against me, her left arm draped over my shoulders and my right one tightly gripping her waist. I’d yanked my shirt off and buttoned it up on her, a gesture of forced modesty nobody really cared about at this point. The parallel wasn’t lost on me, but this time the girl was getting rescued in my shirt, not expiring in it. We made it to the top of the steps with a lot of stops along the way. I nudged the door all the way open with my knee and hefted her onto the linoleum floor.

Patricia gave a yelp and pivoted to face us, the kitchen phone gripped in her hand like a pistol. She babbled helplessly for a moment, then slammed her mouth shut and gawped at the girl in my arms. Caught by the other woman with another woman. I almost had to laugh, but the phone was alarming.

“Pat-who are you-?”

“Your-it’s Hannah, I don’t think she’s breathing…”

“Oh,” I said, and gingerly sat Jennifer down on one of the kitchen chairs. I strode over to Pat and slipped the phone from her hand, hung it up. “What are you doing here, sweetheart?”

“I’m not kidding, damn it-she’s blue in there!”

“Allergic reaction,” I explained. “Let me deal with it. You’d be a huge help if you’d just take Jennifer home.”

“I think I need to go to the hospital,” Jennifer put in. I shrugged.

“Or that.”

“But Hannah, goddammit!” Pat hollered. I winced, tired of all the yelling. I had had enough of raised voices and shouting matches.

“Hannah’s dead, Patricia.”

“Jesus…”

“And Jennifer needs your help.”

Jennifer’s head bobbed. She looked even worse in the daylight than she had in the dimly lit basement. Her eyes were glassy and bloodshot and her innumerable cuts were already bleeding through my work shirt. I must have torn some of the scabs hauling her up the steps.

“But who is she?” Pat asked. “What the hell is going on here?”

“She’s what turned my marriage bad,” I said with a lopsided smile.

Neither of them seemed to get it.

But hell, I laughed.