The Hand That Feeds You

24

When I was sixteen, I took a summer job at a mall, while my best friend went on the grand tour of Europe. While I sold cheap earrings to girls who had just pierced their ears, Julia sent me a chocolate bar from every country she visited. I should have been touched. But I tore into each new bar of chocolate with fury, jealous that I was stuck in the mall while Julia had everything. I hadn’t thought of Julia in years, until I saw Billie in her grandmother’s house. I wondered what Billie might send me from St. Thomas and felt stupid for thinking like that.

“Turn on your TV,” Steven said, when I picked up the phone later that night. I had just finished four hundred-calorie chocolate bars.

“What channel?”

“CNN.”

The suspect in Pat’s murder, the migrant worker, had been indicted. Pat’s family had put up a reward for information, which I knew only slowed down an investigation, luring nut jobs and opportunists eager for the money. The TV showed a small-boned Central American man being taken from a police car and led into the Suffolk courthouse.

“It’s over. You can have your life back.” Steven thought my life could be returned to me as if I had merely misplaced it. “They found Pat’s credit cards on him. He claims he found them in the woods.”

“Billie and I went to look at a sanctuary for Cloud.”

“And?”

“I could see Cloud having a life there.” This was, after all, the point, I reminded myself.

“I’d like to see you having a life here.”

“How much resilience can a person have?”

“You’d be surprised.”

A different reporter was covering another story so I hit the mute button. “No more surprises.”

• • •

I cleared the pad thai I had had for dinner, recalling my friend Patty’s saying that in New York “home cooking” was any food you bought within six blocks of your apartment. I took Olive out for a last, short walk. Back in the apartment, I found the expensive bath gel I had splurged on a while back and filled the tub with hot water. The bathroom soon held the heady scent of night-blooming jasmine. I slowed my movements in contrast to my racing thoughts. I poured a glass of prosecco and got in the tub, the tub I had hidden in on that day.

Though it was just Olive and me, I had closed the bathroom door. The window in the bathroom looked onto an air well, but if you angled yourself just so, at a certain time of night, you could see the moon. I looked at my feet at the end of the tub, sticking up above the bubbles: Frida Kahlo in her self-portrait What I Saw in the Water, although that painting has surrealistic images — a skyscraper shooting out of a volcano, two tiny women lying on a sponge, a tightrope walker sharing his rope with a snake — floating in the tub with her.

I lay back, my neck fitting into the small waterproof pillow for this purpose. I did the exercise in which you consciously relax each part of your body individually. Eyes closed, I was up to my shoulders when I heard Olive scratching at the door to get out. Diabolical dog.

It was the new door, the one Steven had installed because of the damage the dogs had done to the old one the morning of Bennett’s death. The claw marks on the inside had reached as high as the doorknob. It reminded me of those gruesome stories about people buried in Victorian times, later coming out of a trance in their coffins. Why were my dogs so desperate to get out? Who had shut them in the bathroom?

Wait. Who had shut them in the bathroom? They were loose when I entered the apartment and found Bennett’s body. They were not in the bathroom. When had they been put in there? The inside of the bathroom door had been intact when I went out that morning. I had only been gone two hours. Bennett had been asleep when I left.

I felt a chill, though steam rose from the water.

Did the police question the scratched door? The dogs had scratched the cabinet where I kept their kibble, they had scratched the front door to go out, it wasn’t as if a scratched bathroom door would stand out in that apartment. But these were new scratches, and they were deep. I saw them when I shut myself in and hid in the tub. The dogs had been whimpering to be let into the bathroom with me. How had I not wondered how they could be locked in but also be the killers? Why didn’t the police question this?

Would Bennett have shut the dogs in the bathroom? He might have if someone had come to the front door. They were not the calmest greeters. But he didn’t know anyone in the city, or said he didn’t. He must have known who it was because he had to buzz them in. While a person climbed the stairs, he would have had time to shut the dogs in the bathroom. But then what?

I let some water out of the bath and turned on the hot water tap to replace it.

No human could have done what was done to Bennett.

I wished I had brought the bottle of prosecco into the tub with me. I wasn’t willing to get out of the hot water to fetch it. I could not stop my thoughts, but I wanted to slow them down. Logic — just use logic. But no — I thought back to the horror of Pat’s heart being cut out of her chest. Obviously no dog could do that, and her own dog was missing. But in my apartment, I had seen my bloodied dogs and Bennett’s savaged body. What was I not seeing?

What if Bennett was killed by a person he let into the apartment, and the person let the dogs out of the bathroom before he left? What if the dogs had attacked a dead body? The ME who examined Bennett’s body should have been able to distinguish between wounds inflicted by a human and a mauling by dogs. But maybe he had missed something, since everyone assumed the dogs had done it.

But back up — who wanted Bennett dead? Susan Rorke had been killed before Bennett died. Pat had a reason, but who killed her? Samantha, recipient of months of e-mails from a dead man — was that an act to cover herself? I had been kind to her the last time we had talked, but I had refused to side with delusion — it is never a good idea to side with delusion. I had not said I believed that Bennett was alive, but I had tried to be gentle with her. But was it a delusion? Maybe she was e-mailing herself. Or maybe she was just telling me he was e-mailing her. The police would know how to trace this, if I could figure out how to persuade a detective to get a search warrant.

I climbed out of the tub and pulled the plug. I wrapped myself in a towel, watching the water drain. Steven had said I could have my life back. He was wrong.