“Go!” she thunders so loud her voice echoes in my skull long after she says it, and without protest my feet carry me upstairs.
“Shit.” I rake my fingers through my hair before knocking a row of books off the dresser. “Fuck.” The door to the closet sits open, and I stagger over. Here it is, my undoing part two. How in the hell did we ever get here? I flick on the lights and kick the shit out of a pile of clothes to my left, but my foot slams into something hard and the sweaters fall to the sides, revealing a box concealed underneath. I peel it open, and a small notebook catches my eye. Without thinking, I pick it up, fully expecting to find it filled with the children’s scribbles, stick pictures of our nuclear family, which has indeed gone nuclear. But I’m greeted with the neat handwriting of a woman and my heart stops cold. Dated entries, familiar penmanship. Ree keeps a journal? I look to the dates one more time and freeze.
“What the hell?”
This isn’t Ree’s journal.
It’s Simone’s.
Ree
[email protected]:
I know what you’re reading.
I slept in the downstairs office. Bram left early with a soft click of the door, and even though his departing was as quiet as a whisper, it might as well have been a gunshot. Our first fight. The first big earthquake of our marriage. I had envisioned we would squabble about annoying things like who left the cap off the toothpaste. Never would I imagine it would be about a woman.
Last night I dreamed of that woman. Astrid Montenegro haunted me as proficiently as a ghost. I dreamed of her milky white teeth, the sound of her grating laughter as she looked up at my husband. I could see the lust in her eyes, feel the electric wanting of my husband oozing from her pores. This was a viral disdain brewing deep inside of me for this woman. A hatred that has ignited a rage I have tried to suppress for so very long.
The email from my old friend Twokidcircus leaves me unfazed. As shock is prone to do, it had thrown me from dissecting it further. Of course, that asshole knows what I’m reading. I’m reading the garbage they insist on sending.
No sooner do I pull back into the driveway than I glance in the direction of my sister’s home and note the curtain falling back into place. I can feel my mother’s evil gaze set on me like a branding iron sizzling over my flesh.
I head on inside, so many damned thoughts vying for my attention, all of them shitty. Bram is cheating. It couldn’t be. He said Astrid and he were both at the bar separately and I believe him, but Simone sits on my shoulder like a devil, like a questionable angel screaming look what he did to me!
I set my purse on the counter and dig deep until I come up with that article I pulled out of her journal. The newspaper clipping about the children felt sacred, so I left it where I found it—but this one, the one about the potential serial killer made my skin crawl.
New York Times. A string of copycat murders leaves police questioning whether or not there is a serial killer on the loose. Three prostitutes were strangled to death, two with wires set so tight around their necks it led to a near decapitation. In each case, the women were found to be missing the fifth digit on their left hand.
The article goes on to spotlight each of the women. All found in the city, all so very close to the midtown hotel where Bram and his paramour were staying that day Simone found them. Could she have been one of them?
The prostitute from the fundraising night comes back to me as does the prostitute from the hotel Bram was staying at last month during his conference, and as much as I want to dismiss them, I can’t. It wasn’t really Astrid I wanted to confront him with, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to ask your husband about another woman than grill him over the death of a string of prostitutes. A part of me refuses to believe it. Bram is sweet, sensitive, loyal to a fault. And more than any of that, I can feel his love for me.
My eyes flit across the street, to that hovel my demon of a mother is holed up in. For so long she withheld real love from my sister and me. For so long we were force-fed a false adulation, praise for the illnesses we never had. She coddled her own delusions and whored us out in an effort to keep the lights on, to fund dream vacations and a short-lived stint on the talk show circuit. I’ve looked them up and they’re still alive and well, available for anyone’s viewing pleasure on YouTube. Those gullible commentators are still offering prayers for me.
I was my mother’s favorite to showboat. Lena was sickly too, but for whatever reason she preferred my gauntness to hers. She sheared my hair, washed me out with pills, chemically starved me, and what food I could keep down wasn’t worth much. She would have killed us as soon as she had no real use for us. We were getting older, our bodies too clunky to haul around for her heavy, panting fame.
I very much believe that death was the next prescription Dr. Van Lullen had ordered. She would have smothered us in our sleep. Scratch that. She would have researched methods to murder us in ways that were undetectable to the coroner. Something food-related, E.coli, food she smeared with her own shit. That sounds about right. She would have sent a dozen different produce products forced into a mandatory recall. She has no regard for a company’s bottom line, nor her daughters’ lives—not to mention her dead sister. I am still very much convinced that my aunt’s death was at my mother’s hands. A harbinger of things to come.
My feet carry me upstairs, past a smiling Isla and Henry, into the master bedroom, to the closet where my mother knows what I am reading, straight to the gun safe Bram brought into our marriage. He made sure I knew the code. 0307: the date of our first meeting. He knew I would never forget that. The mouth of the safe yawns open, and I give a quick glance inside to see the gun silently waiting like a dutiful guardian, the unused clip sits by its side like the forever companion it is. I shut the safe once again with a click and keep my hand on the cool metal just to feel the burn. My eyes wander behind me to the place I’ve stored Simone’s journals. It feels sacred like a gravesite.
The sweaters I had neatly lined on top of the box sit in a jumble on the floor, and my heart kick-starts to life like a defunct motor.
“Oh my God,” I whisper as I fall to my knees and yank open the box, only to discover it empty, barren of all of its treasures.
Every last journal is gone.
Bram
I saw two patients, and it took far more composition than I had to keep it together.
I spent the rest of the day in my office pouring over every detail of my old life as seen through my wife’s eyes. Diary entries, a minutia of life most of which I don’t recall. I picture myself as a seasoned politician on the stand as the prosecution pelts me with questions. I’ve turned into the blowhard you laugh at on TV. The Johnny One Note that says I don’t recall on a loop. I don’t recall your honor.
Did you sleep around on your wife?
“I plead the fifth,” I say, pushing the fat stack of Simone’s delusions away from me.
Who were those people? Is that truly the way she saw us? Simone stomped rose-colored glasses under her heel. She didn’t wear them. This is not who we were, but she nailed the ending. She knew about Loretta. She caught me red-handed.
“God.” I slam my palm down over my desk. I wish I could apologize. I wish I could take it all back. My God, Simone died with our baby in her belly.
The room seizes for a moment as I recall the coroner’s findings. There was no baby inside of her the day she died. At least not according to the coroner. She must have lost it. My ridiculous, stupid, stupid affair must have riddled my poor wife with anxiety, filled her with enough toxic fury I inadvertently killed my own child.
My body bucks with grief at the thought. I knew that I was a monster. Deep down, I knew it was true, but this highlights the evidence on a whole new level.
So this is how Ree knew that I wasn’t an honest man. If I cheated on Simone, the deck was already stacked against her. Astrid had very little to do with the equation. It was Simone and my screwed-up actions that led my new wife, the one who has held ev
ery piece of my heart right from the beginning, to believe the very worst in me.
Simone and I were wooden. We were off the rails before we ever began. We never should have gone as far as we did. I’d like to think we both knew that. What Simone and I had was vinegar that set our teeth on edge. What Ree and I have is a cool, refreshing drink of water. And because I couldn’t keep it in my pants and walk away like a man, I buried my first marriage and my last. There won’t be another after this. There is no one for me but Ree. I’ll go to the grave to prove it if I have to.
My fingers swirl around the collection of my wife’s thoughts, her inner workings clicking like a locomotive churning up, building speed. I have my own memories, too—the children’s birthday parties, the bunny who my mother had show up one Easter and terrified poor Isla. And because Isla cried, so did Henry. The trips to the lake. The one we took in August the year before everything went to shit. Henry caught three brown trout. Isla caught five. Simone slept on the deck. It was like hauling a corpse around with us. I remember thinking that at the time. Simone hated the boat. She needed her feet on solid ground. The thought of cleaning those fish made her retch. I taught Isla and Henry the fine art of filleting. We had dinner out back over an open fire. I can still smell the smoke, feel the love we shared that day, and I drink it down as if it were a balm that had the power to heal this disease that’s taken over my life—same one that extinguished theirs.
I pull over the red journal, the year before, and wince as I flip through the pages. I want to hear Simone’s take once again. I blew through these pages so fast, I’m ready to take it in, soak up the good life I once had, with my precious babies I miss so damn much.
August, I flip through, no mention of the lake. I flip back to July, to June, nothing. I shoot ahead to September, and there’s not a hint of us heading up there.
I rock back into my chair, trying to hone in on the dates. It was the first week of August. I’m sure of it, because we needed to get back in time for day camp. The exclusive school Isla and Henry were enrolled in had a summer program, two weeks in August. I remember that specifically. Parents bitched about it. We bitched about it. That was a lot of summertime real estate the school was asking us to part with. But the kids had to go. They wanted to see their friends, build forts, watch movies, and get their hands dirty with some good old-fashioned art.
I flip to the first week of August—right year, right week—my blood runs cold.
Peter worked late. Took the kids to the store. Drove to the aquarium. Made a boxed lunch and had a picnic in the backyard. Took the kids out for lunch before seeing a movie downtown.
“What the hell…?” I purge memory after memory—anything I can grasp, only to find that Simone seems to have rewritten history.
A rush of adrenaline hits me as I phone my brother and relay everything in three angry breathes.
“First thing’s first”—his tone is unduly calm, that brotherly tone he invokes when he wants me to pull my shit together—“how did these so-called journals find themselves in your closet to begin with?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I brought the box and didn’t realize what was in it? No, that’s not right. Hell, I”—a vision of those blood red Dutch ovens appearing one day out of the blue comes back to me—“the builders. When I sold the house, the builders sent a box of some pots and pans. Maybe they sent two boxes?”
“Why would Ree keep this from you?”
“Maybe she’s embarrassed? Maybe she forgot?”
“Maybe she wrote them.”
My heart stops a moment. It would be an impossible feat. “No. I think Simone knew I had an affair. I think she caught me in the city with Loretta. But the other details, like I said, she dismissed entire chunks of history and rewrote them to her liking. I don’t get it.”
“Maybe it was a fantasy. Maybe the new baby never existed. Regardless, I don’t want you beating yourself up over it.”
“Too late for that. Listen, I have to go. Ree and I—she hasn’t been herself, and now I know why. I think we need to talk about this, about everything.” Bile creeps up in the back of my throat just thinking about dissecting my past with my beautiful wife, pulling up the organs of something dead and rotten that is destined to stink up the present with its retched foul odor. I envision it a moment, the split belly of a pig, me trying my best to make Ree understand, and I yank up miles of gray intestines, shit squirting out everywhere, splattering the walls, our faces as we come apart at the seams. How in the hell will Ree and I survive this if Simone and I couldn’t?
“There’s something you need to know.” Mace breathes hard into the phone. “Are you sitting?” Another healthy sigh expels from him.
“Give it to me. I don’t have time for bullshit.”
“I got somewhere with the people at Armadillo. It was a woman who rented the vehicle. All cash. You ready for the kicker?”
“Yes,” it comes out lower than a whisper. In truth, I’m not ready for anything anymore.
“Her name was Loretta St. James.”
A chill runs through me, and the room fades white as I struggle to blink my way back to the living.
“No way. It wasn’t her. Loretta St. James was small, petite. She could hardly lift a hammer, let alone deliver the blows necessary to dismember Simone the way they did.”
“I agree. It wasn’t Loretta.”
Thick silence clots the air between us as my eyes bulge at the implication.
“Who do you think killed my wife, Mace?”
“I don’t know. But I’ve got a brand new suspect, and in the back of your mind, you do, too.”
“Say it.” Because God knows I don’t have the balls to.
“Simone. I think she did this, Peter. She was not above teaching you a lesson.”
The oxygen, all of the light seems to get sucked out of the room at once.
“You think she unraveled after the kids died? Hell, we both did. But like this? Setting up her own murder? Who in the hell would want to have their brain bashed out with a hammer?”
“I don’t know. Toxicology came up with no drugs in her system, so the thought she could have self-medicated before the event is out the window. But that’s not where I’m going with this.” The sound of his heavy breathing eats up the line. “Peter, I think we need to come at this from another angle. We go back and talk to Kelly and find out what really happened that day.”
The world bottoms out, and I’m free-falling inside this madness once again.
“Those mystery women who have sprung up dead all around you like a crop of fungi? That’s no coincidence. The fact they happen to have the same finger missing as your so-called dead wife is a calling card.”
“So-called,” I parrot back, trying to process it all.
“The journals, Peter. You said so yourself that they don’t match up to reality. Something is very fucking off here. We need to talk to her family, the Scotts, and especially her sister Meredith. I’ve done a little digging. No one has seen her in years.”
This new angle, this new hell, has blurred the lines of reality and fantasy.
“We can’t exhume Simone’s body.” A dull laugh rattles out of me because, my God, I seem to expertly fuck myself at every turn. “She was cremated. There’s nothing left to prove that wasn’t her.”
“If I’m right, we won’t have to prove anything. If she’s out there, if her sister is, whoever the hell you’ve infuriated—they’re gunning for you. It’s showtime, baby brother, and I have a feeling they’re going to keep firing bullets at your feet to watch you dance. They like the entertainment. But if I’m right, she’s ready to come out of hiding, Peter.”
“What does she want?” I’m not sure if I’m asking my brother or the universe at this point.
“You and everything you love, destroyed.”
I hang up and sweep the sea of journals back into the trash bag I hauled them over here in to begin with. Appropriate enough, considering they just might be that. I say goodnight to the secr
etary on my way out into the cool evening breeze. Late spring in Percy is unseasonably warm, and normally I would be thankful, but I can’t help but feel as if indeed some higher power was turning up the heat.
I jump into my car and seal myself inside, the only safe haven in an unpredictable world.
There are only a handful of options at play, only a handful of possibilities, and ironically, all of them seem impossible.
Simone is dead.
Simone is alive.
Someone who precedes Simone’s death, a killer on the loose, setting me up all these years later.
No way. Impossible.
Impossible.
Possible.
Ree
[email protected]:
Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife and couldn’t keep her. Kept her in her Percy cell and made her life a living hell. Isn’t it time this living hell came to an end? I can make that happen for you.
Lena texted this morning. She said she wanted to meet for coffee, and I promptly ignored her. Oh, Lena, my precious, precious sister. My life has truly gone to hell indeed, and you are the least of my worries right now. And ironically, even the least of my problems is a bitch to contend with. The weather is overcast. All hints of spring have vanished, but the cool breeze is still infused with salt. Usually there is nothing like sea air to make me feel alive, but this numb bubble I’m living in has made even the simplest task feel as if I’m trying to accomplish it under water. Lethargy is my new friend. My appetite has dwindled. I’ve done research on how to successfully leave your husband. The first and only rule is drain your joint bank account. The most creative mind was Simone herself—stocking up on gift cards—a suggestion per her journals circa prior to their vanishing act. Bram has the diaries. He must. He didn’t breathe a word to me about them. But in his defense, we’re not speaking and he left early.
Psychological Thriller Boxed Set Page 12
