Rules for Perfect Murders

by Peter Swanson

  It wasn’t so easy for Claire. She hated her job at the cable station, but she didn’t have a college degree and every position she was interested in required one. She decided to go back to school part-time at Emerson College and finish an undergraduate degree; and she got work as a bartender at a divey club in Central Square. I used to visit her there, sitting long hours at the bar, suffering through overamplified punk bands, drinking Guinness, and watching my wife get ogled by hipsters in dark-rimmed glasses and skinny jeans. I developed the ability to read entire novels while ignoring the thunderous amateurs onstage. Even though I wasn’t older than the other patrons of the bar, I felt older, what with my book, and my graying hair. The other bartenders referred to me as Claire’s old man, and Claire started calling me Old Man as well. I think that, for a time, my wife loved my presence at her bar. At the end of her shift, she’d join me in having a beer, and then we’d walk back home together, arm in arm, through the dark, cluttered streets of Cambridge and Somerville. But something changed in 2007. Claire’s sister Julie was getting married, and Claire was suddenly embroiled back with her family, recruited in to serve as a buffer between her youngest sister and her mother. She lost the weight she’d gained over the last few years and added several new tattooed lines to the inside of her left thigh.

  Also, she fell in love with a new bartender named Patrick Yates.

  CHAPTER 9

  After my bad dinner, I got into bed early with my Penguin edition of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but I couldn’t concentrate. I kept rereading the first page, my mind skipping around between thoughts of my wife and wondering who had written the comment on my blog post. I filled my lungs with the stale air of my apartment, then slowly exhaled. Why did he call himself Doctor Sheppard? Because he was the killer, right? Still, that didn’t mean I needed to try and read the book. I put it on my nightstand, where I kept a stack of poetry collections. That’s what I read at night now, before I go to sleep. Even if I’m currently into a literary biography (even though I rarely read crime, I do read biographies of crime writers), or something on European history, the last words I read before I try to fall asleep are the words of poets. All poems—all works of art, really, seem like cries of help to me, but especially poetry. When they are good, and I do believe there are very few good poems, reading them is like having a long-dead stranger whisper in your ear, trying to be heard.

  I got out of bed and went to my bookshelf to find an anthology of poems that contained one of my favorites, “Winter Nightfall” by Sir John Squire. I could probably recite it by heart, but I wanted to see the words. When I found a poem I loved, I would read it again and again. For one entire year I must have read Sylvia Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” every night before I fell asleep. Lately I’d been reading Peter Porter’s “An Exequy” even though I understood less than half of it. I do not have a critical mind for poems, but I react to them.

  Back in bed I read the Squire poem, then shut my eyes and let the final words gallop over me—“and the slop of my footsteps in this desolate country’s cadaverous clay”—again and again like a mantra. I thought some more of my wife, and the decisions that I made. When Patrick Yates came into her life, and I actually remember the date because it was March 31, my birthday, I knew right away that something momentous had occurred. Claire had done the afternoon shift that day at the bar, so as to get out early and take me to the East Coast Grill for my birthday dinner. “We finally hired a new bartender,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “Patrick. I started training him today. He seems okay.”

  The way she said his name, a combination of hesitancy and boldness, and I knew right away that he had made an impression on her. My body felt as though an almost imperceptible electric current had coursed through it.

  “Does he have experience?” I asked, as I tipped an oyster back.

  “He worked at a pub in Australia for a year, so that’s something. I thought of you because he has a tattoo of Edgar Allan Poe on his right shoulder.”

  I was not a jealous husband, but I was also aware that Claire, unlike myself, was never going to go through life content with just me. She’d been with numerous men in college, and she’d admitted, more than once, that she’d go through periods when every time she met a man, or every time she’d pass a man on the street, she’d wonder if that man wanted her, and then she’d obsess over what these men might think about doing to her. I’d listen to these confessions and tell myself that it was better that she told me. Better than the alternative. Better than secrets.

  She did have a therapist, a woman she referred to as Doctor Martha, whom she saw once every two weeks, but after her appointments she’d be in a dark mood, sometimes for days, and I wondered if it was worth it.

  Part of me had always told myself that one day Claire would cheat, or maybe not cheat, but that she would fall for someone else. And I’d accepted that. And hearing about Patrick I knew that day had come. It scared me, but I had already decided what to do. Claire was my wife. She would always be my wife, and I would stand by her no matter what. It provided a sense of comfort, knowing that I was in it for the long haul, no matter what.

  She did have an affair with Patrick, at least an emotional one, although I suspect it tipped over into the physical on at least a couple of occasions. I waited patiently, like the wife of a sea captain, hoping that she’d make it alive through the storm. I wonder sometimes if I should have fought more, threatened to leave, berated her when she came home two hours after the bar had closed, her clothes smelling of the American Spirits that he smoked, her breath sharp with gin. But I didn’t. That wasn’t my choice. I waited for her to come back to me, and one night, a hot summer night in August, she did. I had just arrived home from the bookstore, and she was sitting on our sofa, head bowed, tears in her eyes.

  “I’ve been such an asshole,” she said.

  “A little bit.”

  “Will you ever forgive me?”

  “I will always forgive you,” I said.

  Later that night she asked me if I wanted details, and I said only if she needed to say them out loud.

  “God, no,” she said. “I’m done with it.”

  I found out later, but not from Claire, that Patrick Yates had disappeared after cleaning out the till on a Saturday night, and that at least three other female bartenders at the club had all been devastated by his departure.

  After that incident, it got better between Claire and me, although things were worse with her. She quit the club and dropped out of Emerson College. For a while she did a few shifts at Old Devils, but then she got another job as a bartender at an upscale restaurant in the Back Bay. The money was good, but she felt frustrated with the lack of creativity in her life. “I don’t want to be a bartender for the rest of my life. I want to make films, but I need to go to school to do that.”

  “You don’t have to go to school,” I said. “You could just make a film.”

  And that’s what she did. There were her evening shifts at the restaurant and during the daytime she made short documentary films. One about tattoo artists, one about the polyamory community in Davis Square, even one about the Old Devils Bookstore. She posted them on YouTube, and that was where Eric Atwell found her. Atwell ran what he called “an innovation incubator” outside of Boston in a renovated farmhouse in Southwell. He offered free workspace (and occasional bedrooms) to young creatives, in return for a percentage of their final product’s profits. He contacted Claire, told her he liked her tattoo documentary, and asked if she’d film a promotional video for his incubator. Unlike with Patrick Yates, I didn’t get a bad feeling about Eric Atwell when Claire first started telling me about him. She said he was a cliché, a fifty-year-old who acted thirty, someone who clearly liked to surround himself with young people, preferably sycophants.

  “Sounds like a creep,” I said.

  “I don’t know. More like a con man. I think he’s just really hoping to stumble into the next big thing and make a quick
buck.”

  She spent a weekend at the farmhouse—the name of his company was Black Barn Enterprises—and when she returned, I sensed that something had changed in her. She was jumpy, a little irritated, but also somewhat more affectionate with me. A few days after the weekend, Claire woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me, “Why do you love me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just do.”

  “You must have reasons.”

  “If I had reasons to love you, then there’d be reasons for me to not love you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. I’m tired.”

  “No, tell me, I’m curious.”

  “Okay. So if I loved you because you’re beautiful, then that would mean I wouldn’t love you anymore if you had some kind of accident that disfigured your face—”

  “Or simply grew old.”

  “Right, or grew old. And if I loved you because you’re a good person, then that would mean I would stop loving you if you did something bad. And that wouldn’t happen.”

  “You’re way too good for me,” she said, but she laughed.

  “What do you love about me?” I said.

  “Your youthful good looks,” she said, laughing some more. “Actually, I love you because you’re an old soul in a young man.”

  “And one day I’ll be an old soul in an old man.”

  “I can’t wait,” she said.

  Because I worked mostly during the daytime and she tended to work night shifts at the restaurant, it took me a while to find out that she had kept going back out to Southwell during the daytime hours. I started keeping track of the mileage on her Subaru; I felt bad spying in that way, but my suspicions turned out to be correct. It was clear that she was going out to Southwell two or three times a week. I assumed she was having an affair either with Atwell, or maybe with one of Atwell’s tenants. It didn’t occur to me, at least not in those first few weeks, that she’d been going to Black Barn Enterprises for another reason, until I realized that the normally skintight jeans she wore to work were beginning to look baggy around her waist. I found her cocaine, plus a small pillbox filled with an assortment of pills, in one of the compartments of the jewelry box she’d inherited from her grandmother.

  Later, after I’d confronted her, she told me how that first weekend at Black Barn Atwell had thrown a dinner party with a ton of great wine. When she’d told him she was ready for bed, he’d talked her into a small amount of coke just to keep the party going. The next day, after she’d finished getting footage for her film, he’d thanked her by giving her a bottle of the Sancerre they’d been drinking the night before, plus a half gram of the cocaine. He’d also explained to Claire that he had devised a system for his drug use, spreading it out, so as to not get addicted. He convinced her it was okay, so long as you followed his scientific schedule.

  If I’d initially known that Claire’s trips out to Southwell were for drugs and not for sex, I might have tried to intervene sooner. As it was, by the time I was hearing about it, Claire was a full-blown addict again. I decided to do what I always did. I decided to wait it out in hopes that she would eventually agree to quit, or to go to rehab. I know how it sounds. I know that maybe if I’d done something—given her an ultimatum, contacted her parents, gotten her friends involved, anything—that maybe the outcome would have been different. I still think about this all the time.

  When I was a teenager, I remember asking my mom why she put up with my father’s drinking.

  She’d frowned, not because she was upset, but because she was confused. “What choice do I have?” she’d finally said.

  “You could leave him.”

  She shook her head. “I’d rather wait for him.”

  “Even if you have to wait forever?” I said.

  She nodded in response.

  That was how I felt about Claire during those moments when she wasn’t fully mine. I was waiting for her.

  When the two uniformed officers knocked on my apartment door early on the first day of 2010, I knew that she was dead before either of them spoke.

  “Okay,” I remember saying after they’d delivered the news that she’d been in a car accident at three in the morning, and that she’d been killed instantly.

  “Was anyone else hurt?” I asked.

  “No, she was alone, and no other vehicles were involved in the accident.”

  “Okay,” I said again and went to shut the door, figuring that the police were done with me. But they stopped me from closing the door, explained that I needed to come down to the station for identification purposes.

  *

  THREE MONTHS LATER I found a journal she’d been keeping. It was hidden behind a number of larger hardcovers in the section of our bookshelf that she had claimed for herself. I almost burned it without reading it, but curiosity got the better of me, and one wet spring evening I bought myself a six-pack of Newcastle Brown, settled in, and read the entire contents.

  CHAPTER 10

  Even though I don’t read contemporary mysteries anymore, I keep up with the trends. I am well aware that Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn has changed the industry, that unreliable narrators are suddenly popular, along with domestic suspense, with books that posit the question of whether we can really trust anyone, especially the ones closest to us. Some of the reviews I read make it sound as though this is a recent phenomenon, as though the idea of discovering a spouse’s secrets constituted something new, or that the omission of facts from a narrative hadn’t been the bedrock upon which psychological thrillers have been built for over a century. The narrator of Rebecca, a novel published in 1938, never even gave the readers her name.

  The thing is, and maybe I’m biased by all those years I’ve spent in fictional realms built on deceit, I don’t trust narrators any more than I trust the actual people in my life. We never get the whole truth, not from anybody. When we first meet someone, before words are ever spoken, there are already lies and half-truths. The clothes we wear cover the truth of our bodies, but they also present who we want to be to the world. They are fabrications, figuratively and literally.

  So I wasn’t surprised when I found my wife’s secret journal, and I wasn’t surprised that there were things inside it that she’d never told me. Many things. For the purposes of this story—of my story—I won’t go into everything that I discovered from reading the journal. She didn’t want the world to know, and I don’t either.

  But I do need to record what happened between Claire and Eric Atwell. Not surprisingly, they had been sexually involved. It wasn’t a romantic liaison. Claire had become addicted to cocaine, and after a time during which Atwell had been furnishing it free of charge, he began to ask for money. She and I had shared one bank account together—for rent, for household expenses, for vacations—but we each had separate accounts as well. And hers had been emptied in about the space of three weeks. After that she had paid Atwell in sexual favors. It was his idea. Without going into detail, some of what he asked her to do was truly demeaning. At one point she’d told him about her bad experience with Mr. Clifton, the middle-school teacher; “I could see the excitement in his eyes,” she wrote.

  I read the rest of the journal, then the following weekend, I drove out to Walden Pond in Concord, passing through Southwell. The lot was nearly empty—it was ten degrees outside, the pond frozen, the skies above a chalky white. I walked along a trail that climbed a ridge above the pond, then doused the journal in kerosene and burned it in a clearing, stomping on the remains until the book was nothing more than a crater of black soot in the snow and ashes in the air.

  I never regretted destroying Claire’s journal although sometimes, to this day, I regret having read it. When I moved from our apartment in Somerville to the studio in Beacon Hill, I got rid of everything else that remained of Claire—her clothes, the furniture she’d bought for our place, her school yearbooks. I kept a few of her books, her childhood copy of A Wrinkle in Time, an annotated paperback of Anne Sexto
n’s collected poetry that she’d bought for a class during her freshman year at Boston University. That book is on my bedside table, always. Sometimes I read the poems inside, but mostly I look at Claire’s notes and doodles, the lines and the words she’d underlined. Sometimes I touch the indentations that her ballpoint pen made on the page.

  Mostly, these days, I just like that the book is there, within easy reach. It’s been five years since she died, but I talk to her more now, in my head, than I did immediately after she died. I talked to her the night I got into bed with Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, told her all about the list, and the visit from Agent Mulvey, and what it felt like to be reading these books again.

  *

  I WOKE AROUND EIGHT thirty in the morning, surprised that I’d gotten any sleep at all. I’d forgotten to pull the curtains in my apartment and bright, hard sunlight was flooding in. At the window I looked outside toward the irregular roofline across the street, now covered with snow, icicles decorating the gutters. There were spidery lines of frost on the outside of the windows, and the street below had the grayish pallor that meant it was incredibly cold outside. I checked my phone, and it was currently registering one degree above zero. I almost considered sending emails to Emily and Brandon, letting them know that they could take the day off, that it was too cold to ask them to come in, but changed my mind.