The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (38 page)

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.