“George? What are you doing?”
“I’m packing. For Gentry.”
“You’re leaving today?”
“Yes.” He looked at her, somewhat surprised. “Did you forget, honey? We talked about this.”
“We did? Are you sure you said today?”
She had indeed forgotten about his hunting trip with his editor. Edgar owned a cabin somewhere near Augusta, Maine, in an unassuming little town called Gentry. She had never been there herself (she’d never been tempted to visit, nor had she ever been invited), but she had some notion of it from photos George had shared with her throughout the years. Mrs. March was almost more attuned to the hunting seasons than to her own menstrual cycle.
She watched George pack. “Must Edgar be there?”
“Well, it would be odd to be there without him. It’s his cabin after all.”
She looked down at her hands and spied a hangnail. She began to pick at it. “It’s just that I feel like he’s always picking on me. He makes me … uncomfortable sometimes.”
“Nonsense! Edgar loves you. In fact, he finds you absolutely adorable. He could eat you up, he’s said on more than one occasion.”
The memory of a smug Edgar, his yellowed teeth biting into the flesh-colored foie gras, prompted a surge of bile in her throat. “I just don’t know why you spend so much time with someone who enjoys killing. It’s a cruel sport.”
“I know, I know how you feel, and I get it. I do. It can seem savage and unnecessary—the ultimate superiority complex.”
“So why do you do it?”
George peered at her over his glasses as he bent over the suitcase, tartan scarf in hand. “It’s exhilarating. There’s something primal about it, instinctual even, despite it being watered down since the Bronze Age.” He smiled. “You’re so sweet to care about the animals, honey. But don’t doubt for a second that they would do the same to us. Or worse.”
Mrs. March fleetingly envisioned a moose on its hind legs holding a rifle, its lifeless human trophy propped up for a photograph. An illustration she’d seen once in one of Jonathan’s comic books, perhaps.
“Don’t worry yourself,” said George as he zipped up the suitcase. “It’s all regulated anyway. Too regulated if you ask me. It’s probably less of a hassle to hunt humans nowadays.” He chuckled and approached Mrs. March. “Hold down the fort for me?”
He kissed her on the forehead and headed for the front door, suitcase in tow. She watched him enter Jonathan’s bedroom for a quick, hair-ruffling goodbye, then saw him out. Afterwards she remained standing behind the closed door, like a dog with no capacity for understanding that its master is gone. She placed her fingers delicately on the door, when they were met by a sharp pulse-like knock that made her jump. Expecting an absentminded George returning for a forgotten winter hat, she turned the key, which they always left in the lock (her brother-in-law had once told her it was harder to break into a house from the outside if the key was in the lock), and opened the door to Sheila Miller.
They stared at each other with a shared malaise before Sheila said, “Hey there. We were just wondering if Jonathan could come up for a sleepover?”
Sheila was, for once, avoiding Mrs. March’s gaze. She was scratching at her wrist and the skin above her neckline, Mrs. March noticed, was flushed. Aware of the sound of Jonathan’s bedroom door opening down the hall, Mrs. March said: “Oh. Well, I don’t know—”
“Alec is begging me, and they do seem to have bonded quite a bit during the school trip.”
Jonathan appeared in the foyer, head cocked to one side.
“Hey, Jonathan,” said Sheila, then, to Mrs. March, “Sorry for barging in on you like this, without even calling first. I’m such a mess!” She rolled her eyes and smiled. “So what do you say? Can Jonathan come up?”
A silent Jonathan walked over to Sheila and stood beside her as he looked up at Mrs. March with his dark, sunken eyes.
“But—it’s a school night.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’ll be all right,” said Sheila, putting her hands on Jonathan’s shoulders.
“You must have your hands full already,” said Mrs. March, uneasily. “Are you sure it’s not too much trouble?”
“No trouble at all!” said Sheila.
The speed and volume of her response was such that Mrs. March had no choice but to hand Jonathan over to Sheila, along with his school bag, a toothbrush, a fresh shirt, and clean underwear. As he left, holding Sheila’s hand, Mrs. March watched the school badge on his bag as it grew smaller, the school’s owl mascot (had it not always been a badger?) staring back at her, in their walk down the hall and into the elevator.
That evening, Mrs. March was alone in the apartment. Martha had asked to leave early for some kind of appointment—she hadn’t been paying much attention, instead luxuriating in the afterglow of her magnanimity in granting Martha her request. “Oh please, don’t worry about me,” she had said, waving her hand, “I’m dining alone tonight, so just prepare a light meal for me and leave it in the kitchen. I’ll warm it up myself and leave the plates in the sink for you.”
Mrs. March had taken an early bath, careful to use only small portions of the expensive bath salts, which had crumbled from disuse in their respective stoppered jars since she had bought them in Paris twelve years ago.
All afternoon she experienced a lingering, unpleasant sensation. Something about Sheila’s demeanor, the vacant, mechanical way she had put her hands on Jonathan’s shoulders, gnawed at Mrs. March, and now in the dark of evening, alone, she was finding it hard to shake off. Tying the belt of her terrycloth bathrobe so tightly her stomach ached, she left her bedroom with apprehension, stepping into the hallway gingerly as if it might, at the touch of her slipper, turn into water that would drown her, turning back into parquet flooring once she sank below the surface so that she might never be found.
She walked the length of the hallway, flicking on the overhead lights as she made her way into the living room. She looked carefully about the space, searching for strange men’s shoes poking out from under furniture, under drapes. She spotted a bulge behind one of the curtains. She walked over to it, hand outstretched, wondering whose face awaited her on the other side of the fabric, then slapped away her own wrist. The Christmas tree lights blinked in time to the ticking of the grandfather clock in the foyer, bulbs flicking yellow, dark, yellow. Mrs. March clicked her tongue to the rhythm, then envisioned the sound masking a stranger’s approaching steps, and turned quickly to face the room. Something in her chest tightened. She unplugged the lights.
Lowering her body onto the sofa in a huff, she tutted to herself in an attempt to feign indifference should anyone be watching, and turned on the television, flipping the channels at a dizzying rate in an attempt to find something, anything, pleasant being shown to bolster her false calm. Images sped before her—a strawberry-flavored soft drink, a bright yellow cartoon duck, a backfiring police car, a black-and-white scream, a dramatic embrace. She continued changing stations, her thumbnail sinking into the soft rubber button of the remote, until:
“The entire Northeast is grieving the loss of Sylvia Gibbler, whose body was discovered after weeks of frenzied searching by police and civilian volunteers.”
Mrs. March blinked, willing herself to move on to a different channel. The reporter on the screen looked out from the television, a grave aspect to her face. She stood in a burgundy tweed overcoat and matching burgundy lipstick against a backdrop of snowy streets, the occasional car moving behind her, and was gripping the microphone so tightly that it seemed like her hand had been carved from it. She continued, “Her body was found by two unsuspecting hunters, in the backwoods of Gentry, Maine—”
Mrs. March’s throat tightened. Her eyes blurred, black spots like inkblots scattering across her vision. A thousand different voices rang inside her skull. A coincidence, just a coincidence, cried one. But what if it isn’t, said another. After all, how many coincidences can one woman overlook? Isn’t
that how murderers were eventually caught, when one observant soul put all the disparate pieces together?
The reporter explained how the victim, an orphan, had been living with her grandmother for the past few years. But no, Mrs. March told herself, George wouldn’t return to the crime scene if he were guilty. His indifference to the swarming nest of police and news reporters surely proved his innocence. Her relief was short-lived as she wondered if he had made the trip to destroy evidence now that the body had been found—a clumsy, amateur mistake that could potentially lead to his arrest. And was Edgar in on it? Unclear. George had his own set of keys to Edgar’s cabin. He kept them in a bowl in his study. He could come and go without Edgar even knowing.
“The initial autopsy report confirms she was murdered a little less than a month ago, which coincides with the date she disappeared—”
Hadn’t George been on another hunting trip about a month ago? He arrived home, making gobbling noises as he walked in, with a wild turkey for their Thanksgiving dinner. The memory had stayed with her because she’d had no clue what to do with the limp mass of feathers, the hanging red wattle, so Martha had taken it to her brother, a butcher in Brooklyn, to deplume and dress it.
Mrs. March swallowed, her pulse so quick and hard she could almost see it thrusting through her wrists.
“—further tests are needed to determine the cause of death, but coroners believe the victim was strangled,” continued the reporter in a flat tone, as if reporting this tragedy with any sense of urgency was somehow gauche. The only trace of feeling lingered in her eyebrows, which arched when she described the particularly gruesome details. “The body shows signs of rape”—she paused ever so slightly—“and blunt force trauma.”
Mrs. March unspooled memories in a panic, tracing every mundane conversation with neighbors in an attempt to recall which of them were aware of George’s hunting trips to Gentry. She pictured Sheila upstairs, watching the news, calling to her husband, who would then call the police.
“… hands bound behind her with a cord … scratches indicate a struggle …”
George’s nickname as a teacher had been “Beauty and the Beast,” a moniker acquired decades prior in his own college days. He was generally loved among the students and staff—leather-bound classics and butter cookies and the occasional engraved fountain pen often bestowed on him by way of his mail slot in the teachers’ lounge. He was praised for his sense of theatricality, once famously re-creating the Yorkshire moors by dumping bucketloads of moss and purple heath shrubs onto the lecture hall steps while teaching the Brontës. But his wrath was just as dramatic—his admonishments sometimes interrupting the physics department next door—and he had a penchant for dispensing disproportionate punishments for the most minor of offenses (the story of his suspension of his prize student for an honest failure to cite a source stoked fear in the hearts of each incoming class of freshmen).
“… body partially hidden by snow, and it was only thanks to a trusty hunting dog …”
There were casual anecdotes over the years, featuring moon-eyed coeds’ requests for “extra credit” or “one-on-one tutoring,” but such tales were played for laughs with George’s colleagues. Unlike the other professors, he seemed to have kept his trousers on. At least, there had been no rumors to the effect. And she never had reason to suspect. Nor had she cause to fear him either; in fact, over the years he had turned into a quieter, more sensitive intellectual. He continued to enjoy time with his friends—the long lunches, the occasional tennis match, the hunting trips with Edgar and the Scotch and cigars at his gentlemen’s club—none of it signs of a deeper corruption. And whenever she had needed to reach him, whether at the club or a restaurant—she could always find him.
Surely, if he were some sort of deviant predator, there would have been signs or stories. Rumors. Had his ex-wife witnessed his transformation into a monster, she would have spoken up, if not to warn the new Mrs. March, then at least to protect their daughter Paula from his violent, perverted grip.
This is all silly, she told herself. Of course George had nothing to do with the poor girl’s murder. She fumbled with the remote and the television switched off with a dull clink, the screen dissolving into a small white circle before blacking out and revealing Mrs. March’s reflection as she sat, mouth agape, on the couch.
“No,” she said simply, “no,” and rose from the couch, securing her robe tightly once again, as if doing so might protect her. She went to the kitchen, stopping to wash her hands in the guest bathroom. As she dried them, wrinkling her nose at the ever-present, medicinal smell of pine, she heard the neighbors’ television through the wall. Recognizing the reporter’s monotone, she hurried out—the webbing between her fingers still sudsy—slamming the door behind her.
She attempted to warm up a small portion of the pan-fried sole Martha had left under tinfoil on the kitchen counter, battling the microwave, which inexplicably kept switching off. Whatever residual satisfaction remained from Mrs. March’s benevolent early dismissal of Martha was now replaced with annoyance.
Martha had set the dining room table as she always did—with the linens and silver and Mrs. March’s beloved black olive bread cut into neat slices. Mrs. March lit the candles—the lighting felt off without them—and played Chopin’s nocturnes on the turntable, because that was the record they played during dinner and flipping through George’s intimidating record collection in search of something new would take forever.
Despite the tinkling piano rippling across the empty apartment—or maybe because of it—the night seemed quieter than usual. Mrs. March brought a forkful of room-temperature fish to her mouth. From the street a young woman’s drunken laughter pierced the silence, startling her. Picking up her dropped fork, she scolded herself under her breath for her jumpiness.
The figures in the portraits on the dining room wall glared down at her, as was their custom when she ate alone. One featured a middle-aged woman wearing a bonnet and a velvet choker, the other a bespectacled man in clerical garb. She returned their gaze.
Nobody spoke.
Mrs. March wondered, as she so often did, whether this might be her last meal. What had Sylvia Gibbler’s last meal been? Was it something prepared for her by her captor? Had she enjoyed it? What if she had been on a diet to squeeze into a lovely little dress she had her eye on? But she would never make it to that special party now, would she? How terribly depressing.
Mrs. March blew out the candles on the table and the one she had lit on the sideboard, spraying red wax on the wall behind it. She turned off the lights and, loath to find herself alone in the darkness longer than was necessary, hurried on to the kitchen, where she left the plates in the sink, then thought better of it for fear of further vermin. As she was closing the dishwasher, contemplating whether to steep a soothing cup of chamomile tea, the wall phone in the kitchen rang, a trill so loud and jarring that Mrs. March shut the dishwasher door on her left pinkie.
Was George in trouble? she wondered, sucking on her throbbing finger. She imagined him in Edgar’s cabin—hands bloody, Edgar dead on the floor. She picked up the phone with trepidation. “Hello? George?”
“Hello,” a polite voice answered. It was male, but it was not George’s.
“Hello …?” she said, in a cautious yet cheerful tone, in case it was a close friend or someone important.
“Johanna?” the voice said.
Hot lightning struck her chest and she pressed her hand to the wall to steady herself. She could hear loud breathing, but she wasn’t sure if it was her own. “Excuse me?” she said into the receiver, more flat statement than question.
“Is this Johanna?”
“Who is this?” There was fear in her voice now, and on the other end the man seemed to giggle from a distance, as if he had turned away from the phone or covered the mouthpiece to laugh.
“Don’t call this number again, do you hear me?” Mrs. March said, trying to muster some semblance of authority into her voice. Before he
had a chance to respond, she slammed the phone into the cradle—it made a startled little ringing sound—and pulled the cord from the wall with a violent tug. There were more phones throughout the apartment—the one in their bedroom, for starters, but she would not dare unplug it, in case anything happened to Jonathan, or George, or—
Had Sylvia Gibbler been killed near a phone? She pictured her, this woman she had never met, being strangled in an apartment much like hers, and looking at a nearby telephone, pleading with her eyes for it to help her, willing it to ring even though she couldn’t pick it up if it did. “You stop it now,” said Mrs. March. Pushing back a lock of hair still limp from the bath, she stared the telephone down, backing her way out of the kitchen.
She locked the front door and tried the knob, then unlocked it and locked it again, pulling at the knob one final time. She drank greedily from her wineglass—she must have been holding it all along, without realizing—and took it with her to the bedroom. The long hallway stretched out before her, black and menacing: had she absentmindedly turned off the overhead lights? She remembered how, as a child, Paula had hated that hallway, refusing to venture into it from her bedroom when she would awaken from a nightmare. Instead, Paula would call for her father, and an irritated Mrs. March would respond from the doorframe of her own bedroom, “Don’t be ridiculous!,” relishing any opportunity she could to chastise the child.
She walked its length with haste now—wooden floors creaking like the deck of an ancient ship—forbidding herself a glance into any of the passing rooms for fear she might see someone standing there.
When she reached her bedroom, she closed the door—fumbling with the lock—and leaned against it, staring down at her ratty woolen slippers, her heart swollen, painful, in her chest. Had Sylvia, stalked in her house by her murderer, locked herself in her bedroom? Was she pulled from it, screaming, her fingertips spiked with splinters as she clawed at the floor? Once her killer had dumped or buried her—Mrs. March wasn’t sure which—she had lain outside for weeks, undetected. Maggots would have sprouted on her body by the time she was found.
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