Dead to Her

by Sarah Pinborough

  But still, despite her hard and mean thoughts, she ached. Lust had always been her downfall and always would be. Pretending to love someone day after day was hard, when someone else she was sure she could love, who at least made her body hum, was so close at hand. Why couldn’t Billy just die?

  She looked down at her old cell phone, chewing her bottom lip, before looking up again, hesitant, still thoughtful. She froze. Zelda was at her window, a still figure against a backdrop of light. She didn’t move as Keisha stared up at her. What was she doing? Was she spying on her? A strange unsettled feeling, a slight fear, prickled at her skin, as if Zelda had been standing there for hours waiting for her to appear. As if she could see into the darkness of Keisha’s thoughts. How did she appear from up there? As guilty as she felt? Box clever, she thought. Don’t show how unsettled you are.

  She raised one hand to her forehead as if squinting in sunlight instead of darkness and then flashed a smile and waved. For a long moment Zelda remained so still Keisha began to wonder if the housekeeper had fallen asleep standing upright, and then the figure stepped out of sight before a blind dropped down. She hadn’t waved back.

  Fuck you, Zelda, Keisha thought, returning her attention to her phone, her fingers flying over the keys. I’m going to have the last laugh for once, just you wait and see.

  13.

  Jason’s phone, beside the bed, was on silent but when the text came in the flash of screen light was enough to wake Marcie even without the quiet vibration. If he hadn’t moved, she’d probably have fallen straight back to sleep, but as it was, she felt the mattress shift as he rolled over to check it. That wasn’t like Jason. He usually slept like the dead. His body tensed and then he very carefully pushed the covers off and got up.

  She closed her eyes and kept her breathing slow and steady. First there was only silence, a long pause in which he was probably making sure she was still sleeping, and then came the quiet sound of his tread as he crept, secretive, out into the hallway.

  She opened her eyes in the dark, her heart thumping. Why hadn’t she just asked him who it was from? What instinct had kept her quiet? It was probably a work text. People don’t text about work in the middle of the night. Unless it was an email. Yes, maybe one of the junior partners was working late and wanting advice on something. Not that she knew whether that was likely or not. She wasn’t interested in Jason’s work, mainly because she didn’t understand it. Legal language was designed to make people like her not understand it.

  But still, that pause. The furtiveness of his movement. Another layer of unease cloaked her. What was so urgent he had to deal with it at—she lit up the screen on her own phone—two in the morning? She sat up in the darkness, wide awake, and looked over at the grainy shadow of the bedroom door that he’d so carefully closed as he left.

  Despite the cool whirr of the AC, sweat prickled her hairline as she got up and went after him, and her mouth was dry. Why was she so nervous? So what if he found her looking for him? That’s what wives did, wasn’t it, if they woke up and their husband wasn’t in bed? Checked he was okay?

  It wasn’t him she was afraid of, she knew that. It was whatever secret thing he was doing. What she might find out. More strands of the rope that tied them together fraying in her hands as he pulled away. Rope like his father hanged himself with. The creaking, that’s what Jason said haunted him most after finding the body. That terrible sound that told him he was only moments too late. The stillness of death hadn’t completely settled after the frantic movement of dying. Had Jason now echoed his father and put a noose around their marriage, choking the love out of it?

  He was in her dressing room. She could see the light through the crack under the door. Her heart thumped harder and she almost laughed—albeit slightly hysterically—at the irony. The dressing room was where she housed her secrets. No. Not exactly secrets. Her private things. Stuff that had never impacted Jason—and never would. Nothing he needed to know about. Reminders of how far she’d come for when she found it all so overwhelming. And, of course, her pills. She felt a twist of guilt. Those did concern him. But right now, as she pressed her ear against the door and heard his voice, almost a whisper, too infuriatingly quiet to make sense of, she was glad she had them. Why lock himself in her dressing room to make a call? Why not just go to his study? This was not a work call. There was too much urgency in his tone.

  She stayed a moment longer, goose bumps rippling across her skin, and then turned back, resisting the urge to push open the door and demand to know who he was talking to. It would be pointless. He’d lie, they’d fight, and she’d end up feeling bad and paranoid and still be none the wiser. She was smarter than that.

  The five or so minutes between rearranging herself into a sleeping position and Jason creeping back into bed felt like forever. As he pulled the sheet back over him she murmured, as if only half-awoken, “You okay, baby?”

  “Just needed the bathroom,” he said quietly, as he lay with his back to her. “Go back to sleep.”

  She rolled away slowly to her side of their vast bed, her breath surprisingly slow and steady as she faked sleep, and she could almost feel the tension in his back as he pretended to do the same. She was numb. Shell-shocked. Just needed the bathroom. He’d blatantly lied to her. She felt sick. She felt hot. She didn’t know what she felt. Betrayed? Lost? Fucking angry?

  Her fingers gripped the edge of the pillow, the only outlet for her pounding emotions as they both lay there, in a farce of sleep. Who would want to speak to him at this time of night? Who would he take a call from? Who?

  Keisha is a night owl.

  The thought had been bubbling since the flash of light had woken her, but finally she gave it voice. Keisha stayed up late and got up late. William would be asleep, just like Jason had thought she was. Her stomach turned to water. Surely she was being paranoid. It was one thing to suspect flirting and maybe a little bit of want, but this was affair territory. Did she really think that was what they were doing? How would Keisha have gotten Jason’s number anyway? They hadn’t— Her stream of thought stopped dead. The car. Jason went with Keisha in her flashy red car. They were gone for what, fifteen, twenty minutes? A lot could be said in that time. Even if they didn’t do anything, how easy would it have been to find a reason to exchange numbers? Especially if you wanted to.

  Once a cheat, always a cheat.

  Her love was evaporating in the heat of her jealousy and she wanted to turn over and flay him alive with her nails. She forced herself to lie still, trapped under the blanket of night, alone with her dark thoughts. What was Jason thinking on his side of the bed? Quietly planning how he could escape her? Is this how Jacquie, the first wife, had felt? When had her moment come, that second when trust slid into mistrust and love cracked wide, emptying, leaving only the brittle shell?

  Jacquie had confronted Jason, and he’d told her it was all in her imagination, stringing her along until he was finally ready to leave. That wouldn’t happen to Marcie. She wasn’t going to let loose with hysterical accusations. Evidence. She needed evidence. There’d be no gaslighting her. She was way smarter and tougher than that.

  Of course, the caller might not even have been Keisha. Now that Marcie had opened the door of suspicion in her mind, other shadowy suspects emerged onto the stage. Sandy, the secretary? No, surely not. If Jason had wanted to bang her, he’d have done it years ago.

  Someone at the club? A waitress from the members only—which meant men only given that wives were members by association—games’ nights at the club? Everyone knew William had been quite taken with one girl when Eleanor was dying. What was her name? Michelle, wasn’t it? Yes, Michelle from Michigan, who was there for only a short while and then went back home to study. It hadn’t been a serious thing, an old man cheering himself up, but what if William’s actions had given Jason an itch for something new or a little something on the side that was now getting out of hand? He’d been behaving oddly—closed off—for a while.

  But
her mind returned to Keisha. Beautiful, strong Keisha. A different kind of beauty from hers, just as her own blond delicate look was different from Jacquie’s brunette sophisticated one. Jason wanted control of the firm, did he think he could have William’s wife too? It was almost too audacious, but Jason was nothing if not ambitious.

  Her thoughts whirled around and around until she was sure she’d drive herself into a fever of madness, but instead she exhausted herself into an hour or two of fitful sleep, the past and present colliding in her dreams in which she screamed in frustrated rage at her faithless husband and Keisha and Jacquie and others she thought she’d forgotten, until she woke, breathless and sweating, at first light.

  She’d hoped to check his phone when he went to take a shower but her breaking heart sank when he took it with him. Another tick in the guilty box. She wasn’t deterred. She’d had plenty of time to think while he dozed before getting up. Jason didn’t stay so good-looking without any effort. He was a man who groomed. He never spent less than fifteen minutes in the bathroom and fifteen minutes might not be long, but it was better than nothing. As soon as she heard the water start to run, she scrambled out of bed and darted into his study, where his laptop sat on his desk.

  The leather seat was cold on her thighs through her thin robe as she quickly flipped open the lid and typed in his password—Atlanta_Braves89—and the home screen came up. She let out her breath, relieved he hadn’t changed it. She moved the mouse to the bottom of the screen to find the iMessage icon. He may have taken his cell to the bathroom but all his messages would still show up here. After a quick glance out to the corridor, she clicked on it. She frowned. Nothing. No messages. How could that be? He was always working in here, often having left his phone tossed on the kitchen island or by the bed. He didn’t need it. He could make calls and answer texts from his laptop.

  He’d disabled it. That was the only answer. His phone was no longer connected to his laptop and he’d deleted all his message threads. Why would he do that? Secrets. He was keeping secrets from her. New secrets. Maybe Keisha wasn’t the first woman to text him and he only just thought to remove all traces from the laptop. Cleverer men than Jason had been caught out by messages popping up on iPads and computers.

  She’d try WhatsApp. Not that Jason ever used it, but maybe Keisha was that kind of girl. A girl about town with various groups like the awful tennis set at the club or the self-proclaimed YummyMummies who spent their days at the spa and then in the bar after leaving their precious children at County Day.

  She searched his applications folder. No WhatsApp. That was gone completely. Her heart thrummed faster. That didn’t mean anything in and of itself. He could have just been cleaning up his computer and decided he didn’t need it, but combined with iMessage being empty? An app she knew for a fact he used? The whole thing stank of guilt and secrets.

  Shaken, she sat back and looked at the photo that filled the background of the screen. The two of them a few years ago, her arms wrapped around Jason’s neck, cheeks pressed together, both grinning for the selfie, determined to capture that perfect moment of happiness. She remembered exactly when he’d taken it. Out on a boat. He’d just proposed. Jacquie was finished. Marcie had won. She was still new to all this then—this fascinating life of expensive clothes, nice cars, eating out whenever you felt like it, never looking at the price of things. She was in love—totally and completely—with Jason and everything he could bring to her life. Safety. Security. Respect. Well, despite her recent longing for financial freedom, she didn’t feel very safe or secure anymore and the respect had never been forthcoming. The happy couple in the image, smiling smugly out at her, were like strangers now. What had brought them to this?

  She was about to close the lid when she spotted a folder in the corner of the screen. Untitled Folder. That wasn’t like Jason. He was neat and organized. A lawyer. Everything in place and a place for everything. She double-clicked, and it opened. Her stomach lurched in expectation of being presented with awful images of spread-eagled women smiling up at her husband from some awful motel room bed. Just like she used to. Stop it, stop it, stop it, she told herself. This is a path to madness.

  Her heart slowed and her face flushed as the dullness of the actual document presented itself. It was only a spreadsheet of some kind. A list of numbers allocated to letters that meant nothing to her. Probably some shorthand for something to do with work. She needed to get a grip.

  But still, she thought, as she closed the lid and left his study as she’d found it, heading downstairs to put on the coffee, there was still the phone call.

  There was still the lie.

  14.

  Keisha was wide awake and, for once, in a great mood. It was barely eight thirty and she’d had only four hours of sleep, but the phone call before she’d crept back into bed had put a smile on her face and there was a spring in her step as she grabbed the rose gold MacBook Billy had bought her and headed downstairs. Why shouldn’t she be happy? She just had to be careful, that was all.

  “Would you like some breakfast, ma’am?” Zelda was over at the walk-in refrigerator, having somehow already been to the store, unpacking individual cartons of odious coconut water, lining them up on the side shelf in pride of place. “I’m going to make Mr. Radford some eggs and home fries.” She was behaving perfectly normally, no hint of how she’d stared down at Keisha the night before. Keisha’s skin prickled as she remembered her still shadow. The brazenness with which she’d been watched.

  “It’s too early for me.” She looked at the housekeeper as she meekly emptied the bags. “How did you sleep?”

  “Oh, I always sleep like the dead.”

  “Really?” Keisha poured herself coffee from the machine. “I was sure I saw you last night. At your window. It was late. I went into the garden for some air. Cream, please.”

  “You must be mistaken, ma’am. I was in bed early.” Zelda put the carton of cream on the large island. “Would you like a jug?”

  “This is fine.” You lying spying bitch, Keisha thought, even as she said, “It must have been a trick of the light then.” She flashed her best razor smile. What was the woman’s problem? She didn’t like Keisha? So what? It wasn’t her job to like her.

  How old was Zelda? she wondered. Old. Fifties, at least. Maybe even over sixty. How long had she worked here? Billy probably had told her, but Keisha often found her thoughts drifting away when Billy was talking. She tried to remember. Twenty years? Or was it more? Had she loved Eleanor too? Did she think Keisha was an insult to the first Mrs. Radford’s memory? Eleanor, Eleanor, Eleanor. The wife who would not be forced from this house, even in a coffin.

  But Eleanor was gone and Zelda would get used to it. Now that it was morning and the sun was shining gloriously bright, Keisha was feeling too zesty to let the housekeeper and her nighttime antics bother her, so she took her coffee and her laptop out to the sunroom by the terrace.

  She opened up a tab to her Gmail with dread, knowing what she was going to find. There was a message from Dolly sent a couple of days before—“Hope you’re having fun! Is he dead yet?” followed by a couple of cry-laugh emojis and then “Miss ya!” and some kisses. There were three emails from Uncle Yahuba. All wanting money. She had to be a good niece. She knew what she had to do: various levels of implied threat. She sighed and closed them down. How was she supposed to send them money? She had a new credit card, true, but it wasn’t as if Billy was filling her bank account with cash. Why couldn’t they be patient? Why couldn’t they all just leave her alone?

  They knew how to play her, how to draw on her insecurities and her dark, confused moods. As ever, the echo of Auntie Ayo’s words, spoken when Keisha was just six years old, not long after they took her in, when she’d seen the ghostly boy, haunted her. You got yourself cursed blood, KeKe, it’s there in the cards, no good will come of you, KeKe. Her mother’s nickname for her, all she remembered of her really. Keisha Kelani, my KeKe. Auntie Ayo and Uncle Yahuba had even taken th
at from her, and now it was synonymous with her cursed blood.

  Was that true or simply something Auntie Ayo had said to stop her blabbing her mouth off at school about the boy? She didn’t want to think about the boy. The boy had never been there. She knew that. They’d told her. The boy was an error of her crazy mind. The boy was the first sign that she was wrong, a bad seed, unbalanced. She deleted the emails. Her family were thousands of miles away. She didn’t want to think about them today. They could wait. They didn’t have a choice.

  “Honey?” Billy’s voice, that of the master of the house, echoed through to her. “Hey honey?”

  “Coming!” she answered, light and frothy. A good wife. Keep him sweet. She grabbed her coffee and went to the breakfast room, where she found him still drenched in sweat from the treadmill.

  “You’re up early,” he said, through his mouthful of eggs and fried potato.

  “It’s such a beautiful day.” Keisha took a seat opposite him. “Shame to miss it.” Zelda brought her some orange juice and a croissant even though she’d said she didn’t want breakfast, and then disappeared again, taking the empty carton of coconut water on the table away. Billy always downed it in one long swallow, Keisha noted. Maybe he didn’t much care for the flavor of it either, no matter what he said.

  She peeled off the edge of her croissant, not really sure what to do with it as there was no butter or jam on the table, and ate it dry while watching him shovel his food into his mouth. His cheeks were flushed redder than normal, bursting veined beetroots on his face—had he run farther and faster to make up for his inadequacies in the bedroom? Trying to recover his masculinity?