Ashes (22 page)

But she didn't appear. I battled the oars and clawed my way toward shore, though I lost my sense of direction. All that remained was to row and row, to drag the foundering boat through the sea that desperately wanted to swallow it.

The storm soon dwindled and died, and I found myself on the sand. As I coughed the salt water from my lungs, the east glowed with the pink of dawn. I struggled to my hands and knees and looked across the bay. No boat, no wreck, no Mary.

I hauled myself back to the house where I was staying. It took me many minutes to navigate the stairs, then I finally made it to my room and my chair and my high window. I took up my post, a watcher, a lighthouse keeper for the dead.

Three days, and still I keep my post.

I hope the boatman has given up on me. As much fear as filled his eyes when he hinted at the island's secrets, I don't think he even came ashore. I wonder if he will report my absence, or if he has his own orders, his own obsessions. It may take a week or more before anyone finds me.

Plenty of time for her to find me first, if she so desires.

Desire is an odd thing, a destructive thing, a strangely beautiful thing. Perhaps that is the lesson of this tale, the one that has replaced the travel article on my laptop. Whoever finds this account can make of it what they will. For the story was written many decades before, the ending the only thing left in the balance.

The ending.

I hear her now, below me, her footsteps as graceful as the rhythm of the sea. She climbs a winding stair, closer now.

Or perhaps it's only the wind creaking ancient wood.

I don't know which I dread the most.

Her arrival in lace and deceived rage?

Or her never arriving, never again granting me a glimpse of her everlasting and non-existent beauty?

I can almost hear her now.

Almost.

###

WATERMELON

Ricky bought the watermelon on a warm Saturday afternoon in September.

The early crop had arrived at the local grocer’s in late June, fresh from
California
, but the available specimens were hard and heartless. Ricky had decided to wait for a
Deep South
watermelon, and those traditionally arrived many weeks after the annual Fourth of July slaughter. Besides, that was early summer. He had yet to read about the murder and his home life with Maybelle was in a state of uneasy truce.

But now it was the last day of summer, a definite end of something and the beginning of something else. The watermelon was beautiful. It was perfectly symmetrical, robust, its green stripes running in tigerlike rhythms along the curving sides. A little bit of vine curled from one end like the cute tail of a pig. He tapped it and elicited a meaty, liquid thump.

  It was heavy, maybe ten pounds, and Ricky brought it from the bin as carefully as if it were an infant. His wife had given him a neatly penned list of thirteen items, most of them for her personal use. But his arms were full, and he didn’t care to trudge through the health-and-beauty section, and he had no appetite for Hostess cupcakes and frozen waffles. Sheryl Crowe was singing a bright ditty of sun and optimism over the loudspeakers, music designed to lobotomize potential consumers. Ricky made a straight path to the checkout counter and placed the watermelon gently on the conveyor belt.

Now that his hands were free, he could pick up one of the regional dailies. The front page confined the woman’s picture to a small square on the left. Her killer, the man who had sworn to love and honor until death did them part, merited a feature photograph three columns wide, obviously the star of the show and the most interesting part of the story.

“That’s sickening, isn’t it?” came a voice behind him.

Ricky laid the newspaper on the belt so the cashier could ring it up. He turned to the person who had spoken, a short man with sad eyes and a sparse mustache, a man who had never considered violence of any kind toward his own wife.

“They say he was perfectly normal,” Ricky said. He wasn’t the kind for small talk with strangers, but the topic interested him. “The kind of man who coached Little League and attended church regularly. The kind the neighbors said they never would have suspected.”

“A creep is what he is. I hope they fry him and send him to hell to fry some more.”

“
North Carolina
uses lethal injection.”

“Fry him anyway.”

“I wonder what she was like.” Since the murder last week, Ricky had been studying the woman’s photograph, trying to divine the character traits that had driven a man to murder. Had she been unfailingly kind and considerate, and had thus driven her husband into a blinding red madness?

“A saint,” the short man said. “She volunteered at the animal shelter.”

“That’s what I heard,” Ricky said. The cashier told him the total and he thumbed a credit card from his wallet. People always took kindness toward animals as a sign of divine benevolence. Let children starve in
Africa
but don’t kick a dog in the ribs. For all this man knew, she volunteered because she liked to help with the euthanizing.

“At least they caught the bastard,” the man said.

“He turned himself in.” Obviously the man had been settling for the six-o’clock-news sound bites instead of digging into the real story. Murder was rare here, and a sordid case drew a lot of attention. But most of the people Ricky talked with about the murder had only a passing knowledge of the facts and seemed quite content in their ignorance and casual condemnation.

Ricky took the watermelon to the car, rolled it into the passenger seat, and sat behind the wheel reading the paper. The first days of coverage had focused on quotes from neighbors and relatives and terse statements by the detectives, but now the shock had worn off. In true small-town fashion, the police had not allowed any crime scene photos, and the early art had consisted of somber police officers standing around strips of yellow tape. A mug shot of the husband had been taken from public record files, showing mussed hair, stubble, and the eyes of a trapped animal. The District Attorney had no doubt kept him up all night for a long round of questioning, to ensure that the arrest photo would show the perpetrator in the worst possible light. No matter how carefully the jurors were selected, that first impression often lingered in the minds of those who would pass judgment.

A week later, the coverage had made the easy shift into back story, digging into the couple’s history, finding cracks in the marriage. The only way to keep the story on the front page was for reporters to turn up personal tidbits, make suggestions about affairs and insurance, and build a psychological profile for a man who was so perfectly average that only hindsight revealed the slightest flaw.

Ricky drove home with the images playing in his mind, a reel of fantasy film he’d painted from the police reports. The husband comes home, finds dinner on the table as always, green peas and potatoes, thinly sliced roast beef with gravy, a cheesecake that the wife must have spent hours making. They eat, watch an episode of “Law & Order,” then she takes a shower and goes to bed. Somewhere between the hours on either side of midnight, the husband makes his nightly trek to share the warmth and comfort of the marital bed. Only, this time, he carries with him a seven-inch companion of sharp, stainless steel.

Seventeen times, according to the medical examiner. One of the rookie reporters had tried to develop a numerology angle and assign a mystical significance to the number of stab wounds, but police suspected the man had simply lost count during the frenzy of blood lust. The first blow must have done the trick, and if the man had only meant to solve a problem, that surely would have sufficed. But he was in search of something, an experience that could only be found amid the silver thrusts, the squeaking of bedsprings, the soft moans, and the wet dripping of a final passion.

By the time Ricky pulled into his driveway, he was moist with sweat. He found himself comparing his and Maybelle’s house with that of the murderer’s, as shown in the Day Two coverage. The murderer’s house was in the next county, but it would have been right at home in Ricky’s neighborhood. Two stories, white Colonial style, a stable line of shrubbery surrounding the porch. Shutters framing windows framing curtains that hid the lives inside. Both houses were ordinary, upper middle class, with no discernible differences except that one had harbored an extraordinary secret that festered and then exploded.

Ricky fanned his face dry with the newspaper, then slipped it under the seat. He wrestled the watermelon out and carried it up the front steps. He could have driven into the garage, but his car had leaked a few drops of oil and Maybelle had complained. He nearly dropped the watermelon as he reached to open the door. He pictured it lying burst open on the porch, its shattered skin and pink meat glistening in the afternoon sun.

But he managed to prop it against his knee and turn the handle, then push his way inside.

Her voice came from the living room. “Ricky?”

“Who else?” he said in a whisper. As if a random attacker would walk through the door, as if her ordered life was capable of attracting an invader. As if she deserved any type of victimhood.

“What’s that, honey?”

He raised his voice. “Yes, dear. It’s me.”

“Did you get everything? You know how forgetful you are.”

Which is why she gave him the lists. But even with a list, he had a habit of always forgetting at least one item. She said it was a deliberate act of passive aggression, that nobody could be that forgetful. But he was convinced it was an unconscious lapse, because he did it even when he wrote out the list himself.

“I had to—” He didn’t know what to tell her. A lie came to mind, some elaborate story of helping someone change a flat tire beside the road, and how the person had given him a watermelon in gratitude, and Ricky wanted to put the watermelon in the refrigerator before shopping. But Maybelle would see through the story. He wondered if the murdering husband had told such white lies.

“I had to come back and take my medicine,” he said, heading down the hall to the kitchen. “You know how I get.”

Maybelle must have been sitting in her chair, the one that dominated the living room and was within reach of the bookcase, the telephone, and the remote control. Her perfect world. White walls. Knickknacks neatly dusted, potted plants that never dared shed so much as a leaf. Photographs of her relatives lining the walls, but not a single member of Ricky’s family.

“You and your medicine,” she said. “You were gone an hour.”

He pretended he hadn’t heard her. He put the watermelon on the counter and opened the refrigerator. He thought of hiding it in one of the large bottom bins but he wasn’t sure it would fit. Besides, this was his refrigerator, too. He’d paid for it, even though Maybelle’s snack foods took up the top two shelves. In a moment of rebellion, he shoved some of his odd condiments aside, the horseradish, brown mustard, and marinade sauces that occupied the bottom shelf. He slid the watermelon into place, though its girth caused the wire rack above it to tilt slightly and tumble a few Tupperware containers. He slammed the refrigerator closed with an air of satisfaction.

He turned and there was Maybelle, filling the entryway that divided the kitchen and dining room. Her arms were folded across her chest, wearing the serene smile of one who held an even temper in the face of endless trials. Ricky found himself wondering if the murdered wife had possessed such stolid and insufferable equanimity.