Marriage Is Murder

by Nancy Pickard

  There was a pause before he said, “Right, great.”

  “What’s my middle name?”

  “Lynn,” he said after a moment. “Blue eyes, blond hair, long legs. Loves cheese Danish, and cream cheese on blueberry bagels. Coffee black. Showers at night. Colgate toothpaste. Forgets to floss. Has mole on inside of left-”

  I was laughing, which interrupted him.

  “I haven’t forgotten you, Jenny,” he said then. “In fact, I’d say you’re the one who’s forgotten something very important, something so intrinsic that it goes to the heart of me.”

  “I’ll bite. What?”

  “That I love you,” Geof said, and hung up.

  Well. I placed the receiver gently in its cradle. So what if I had to get married in an old white slip? And we could afford a forty-percent penalty on canceled airline tickets if we had to—it wasn’t like sacrificing a firstborn child, after all.

  Feeling strengthened, I called my sister.

  “How are you feeling, Sherry?”

  “As well as anybody who’s been eating leftover chips and dips for the past two days,” she snapped. “We have enough crab rolls to feed several families, Jenny. If I freeze them, I won’t have to cook for a year.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said for the hundredth time since Saturday; I’d tried it in several other languages, as well, but none of them mollified her, and I didn’t much blame her. “It was a nice party, Sherry.”

  “How would you know? I’m in a hurry.”

  “All right. You probably don’t feel like doing me any favors. . . .”

  “Party favors, maybe, the exploding kind!”

  “But I’m desperate, and it’s just the sort of an emergency you can handle. My seamstress isn’t going to get my wedding dress done by Saturday, Sherry, and nobody in town has anything appropriate for sale. And I don’t have time to go to Boston. You don’t happen to have any spare wedding gowns hanging around in your closets, do you?”

  “You can’t wear mine, I’m saving it for my daughter.”

  I thought of the yards of billowing tulle and netting that had enveloped her like a swarm of bees on her wedding day, and tried not to sound suspiciously sincere as I said, “Oh, I wouldn’t think of it. No, I’d be happy with something short, white, and simple. Wool, silk, cotton—I don’t care anymore.”

  “Well, you can come over and look,” she said grudgingly. “But not tomorrow, because that’s junior tennis, and not Wednesday, because that’s my day for the hospital board, or Wednesday night, because that’s always church guild and there’s only Lars here, and not Thursday, because I’m arranging the flowers for the club dance on Friday. It will have to be tonight.”

  I thanked her and hung up before she could change her mind, or join another committee. I went back to work on Foundation business, involving plenty of my own committees, with my first job being to draw up a proposal to present to my trustees for a budget for the SAFE coalition on domestic violence.

  At six, I left the office and drove to my sister’s house.

  The Guthries were just sitting down to dinner, which Sherry didn’t invite me to join. She hobbled on her sprained ankle as far as the basement door with me, then directed me down the stairs. Even from the top I could see the huge old black trunks and long racks of clothing hung in clear plastic bags.

  “Don’t wrinkle anything,” she ordered.

  It was kind of fun at first. I felt like a little girl who’s been let loose among her mother’s finery. First, I plunged into the racks, flipping through dress after dress, suit after suit, pants after pants, coat after coat, but never finding quite the right combination of color, size, length, fabric, or style. For a while it was rather awe inspiring, this business of viewing my sister’s plunder, but eventually it began to tire and depress me. Having failed with the racks, I turned to the old black trunks with a feeling of some dread. As I sorted through boxes of old costume jewelry, I realized I would never make a good pirate—I didn’t get enough joy out of loot. But I kept opening boxes and trunks, hoping to find something.

  I found it all right, although it wasn’t what I’d come looking for.

  The sight of it in the old black trunk rocked me, it socked me in the solar plexus harder than anything had for years. For the first few minutes after I found it, all I could do was stare at it, until finally I worked up the courage to touch it, to remove it from deep in the trunk where it had been buried, and then to hide it in an old clothes bag. I sneaked out the basement door to my car with it so that Sherry couldn’t deny it to me. I didn’t want anybody to see it until I’d figured out the proper thing to do with it—whether to bring it out into the open and take the chance of causing more pain, or to put it back quietly where I’d found it, and never mention it to anyone else.

  I locked it in my trunk and drove away without saying good-bye, so that my niece and nephew wouldn’t see me and ask their parents why their aunt was crying.

  I ate dinner alone at the kitchen counter, fighting my sadness.

  * * *

  At nine-thirty, I got a call from a woman who was also crying.

  “Ms. Cain?” I could barely make out her identity or the words through the sobs and whispering. “Oh, please help me. Ernie got fired, and I told him about the baby, and he’s-”

  She screamed, and the phone went dead.

  18

  I CALLED GEOF AT THE STATION.

  “I just got a call from Marsha McEachen,” I told him. “I think Ernie’s beating her up again. Please, you’ve got to get over there as soon as you can.”

  “Give me the address again.”

  I did, and he hung up abruptly.

  For a moment, I just sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed my hands together, feeling helpless. What if Ernie was hurting her this very minute? What if he killed her? What if she killed him? Where were the children, what set it off, would Geof get there in time, had I caused it by finding jobs for them, why hadn’t I minded my own business, what would become of them now?

  “Damn, damn, damn.” I got up and paced the room, wishing I could drive over to the McEachens’ myself but knowing I didn’t belong there, that I’d only be in the way of the police. I pulled a bathrobe off a hanger in my closet, put it on, and wrapped it tightly around me. Then I sat down on the bed again. “Damn it. Oh, damn it.”

  Too nervous to sit still any longer, I got up and started downstairs for something to eat or drink. By the time I set foot in the kitchen, I’d already worked out the tragic scenario in my mind.

  Ernie had probably smarted off his first day on the job and the manager of the hardware store had fired him on the spot. Before going home, Ernie had probably stopped for a few drinks, so that by the time he walked in the door, he was loaded for bear, and there was Marsha—a big, soft, pale target for his fury and shame.

  “Ernie! How was it, honey?”

  “Easy come, easy go,” he might have said with a bright, false smile. And then he might have slammed the door so the old house shook. “Who needs the stupid job anyway? It was dumb, they needed some moron to do it, not anybody with brains like me. I was too good for ’em, and they knew it, the jerks.”

  “Oh, Ernie, you didn’t get fired!”

  “What, are you on their side? I didn’t do nothin’ to get fired, they fired me, the jerks. I was too good for them, hell, I’m too smart for that stupid job anyway, it was a shitty job anyway, I didn’t even want it, so don’t give me any crap, and anyway, who cares what they think, who cares what any of you think?”

  “Oh, Ernie, I’m so sorry. But we’ll be okay, honest. It wasn’t your fault. You’ll find something else, something better! And we don’t have to worry, because I’ve still got my job.”

  “Sure.” He was sarcastic now, and walking toward her. “You’re so sorry, you with your big-time penny-ante sales job, think you’re so smart, think you mean something, you don’t mean nothin’, you ain’t nothin’, you ain’t never been nothin’, you stupid, fat bitch.”
<
br />   “Oh, Ernie, please.”

  Eventually he would have pushed her, or slapped her.

  And that’s when she would have blurted out: “Don’t hit me, Ernie! I’m pregnant!”

  “You stupid bitch.”

  The children would have been crying by this time, as their mother stumbled away from their father. But somehow, maybe when he went to the bathroom or to get a drink, he would have left her alone long enough for her to find the business card I had given her that morning at Lars’s store, and to punch in my number with shaking fingers, and to whisper her desperate cry for help into the receiver. But then Ernie would have walked back in on her, grabbed the phone, hung it up, hauled back his arm to really give it to her this time. . . .

  In twenty minutes, my phone rang again.

  “Jenny, this is Smithy Leigh.”

  She sound calm, businesslike.

  “We need a favor,” she continued crisply, snapping me out of my fantasy. “I guess you know, the McEachens are at it again. Your pal Bushfield just called. He says they can’t bring her over here this time, because she says Ernie knows where we are. So we need a safe house, and she asked if she could stay with you. Bushfield doesn’t have any objections, he says it’s up to you. I should warn you, it’s not just her, but the kids, too. What about it, Cain?”

  “Of course. Tell Geof to bring them right over.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Smithy, is she hurt? Have they arrested Ernie?”

  “They say she’s not too bad—a little blood, some bruises, but nothing major. It sounds like she was smart for once, and got herself and the kids over to a neighbor’s before he could do much damage. And don’t ask me where the little bastard is—he split when she called the cops on him.”

  “All right, Smithy.”

  I hung up the phone and hurried upstairs to get a room ready for our guests.

  It was a couple of hours before they arrived, and it was a pathetic-looking little band that walked through our front doorway. Marsha, bandaged about her face, walked in first, and collapsed in my arms. “Oh, Ms. Cain,” she said, and laid her head against my shoulder as if she’d never rise from there again. I put my arms around her—it was like squeezing a pillow to me—and struggled to remain standing upright. Behind her, Geof came in carrying a sleeping toddler dressed in pink pajamas. Willie Henderson walked in behind Geof, with a crying baby in his arms.

  “We stopped at the hospital first,” Geof explained.

  “I’ve fixed the other bedroom,” I said, and led the way upstairs.

  There, we tucked the little ones into the double bed where their mother would also sleep. We waited while she gave the baby a pacifier to silence his cries. Then I presented her with a nightgown and robe, and showed her where I’d laid out a toothbrush and towels in the spare bathroom.

  “Did you get out of the house with anything?” I asked her.

  Marsha, clinging to me again, shook her head. “They gave me a bottle and some other stuff for the kids at the hospital. I don’t even have any clothes for us, or my purse, or any money.”

  She was starting to cry again, and I heard the older child whimper an instinctive response in her sleep. Quickly, I said, “Don’t worry about any of that, Marsha. We’ll take care of everything tomorrow, so don’t even think about it. Just try to get a good night’s sleep. You’re safe now, and your children are safe, and there are a lot of people who want to help you. Will you be okay by yourselves now?”

  She sniffled and nodded. “Thank you so much, Ms. Cain. Jenny. I didn’t know what we were going to do, ’cause they wouldn’t let us back in the shelter.”

  “What did he do to make you tell?”

  Her red-rimmed eyes looked blank.

  “Where the shelter is,” I prompted.

  “Oh, I didn’t, that wasn’t what it was all about, I mean, he’d been after me to tell him, but that wasn’t what it was all about this time, it was about him losing his job and me being pregnant.”

  As we talked, I gently loosened myself from her grip and guided her toward the bed where the nightgown lay. When I was convinced she’d be all right there alone with her children, I joined Geof and Willie in the hall and closed the bedroom door behind me. But it quickly opened again.

  Marsha gazed out at us with wide, fearful blue eyes.

  “Can I keep the door open?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said, and changed my mind about turning off the light in the hallway. Sometimes even nineteen-year-olds need night-lights.

  We left her then and returned downstairs.

  “Coffee, Willie?” I suggested.

  “No.” He shook his head. “Thanks.”

  “Please give my regards to Gail,” I said at the door. “Tell her I haven’t forgotten her, it only seems that way. Is she getting settled in okay, Willie? Are the kids getting used to living here?”

  “It ain’t Boston, but it’s all right,” he said.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been any help to her.”

  He was on the bottom step by then. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “After the wedding, there’ll be more time.”

  But he was already down the walk, out of hearing, leaving Geof and me standing in the hallway in front of the open door. I closed it. We slid our arms around each other and clung together for a few moments.

  “Do you want to ask them to the wedding?”

  “The Hendersons?” He propped his chin on my head. “Nice thought, but no. Willie and I may be partners, but I wouldn’t call us friends. He’s a hard man to get close to, and I don’t suppose I’m Mr. Congeniality these days.”

  “Let’s go to bed.”

  He clasped me tighter and said in a low voice, “I wish I could do something more than sleep in a bed with you these days.”

  “I’m too tired, anyway.”

  “Liar.” He kissed me lightly and released me.

  He went on upstairs, while I remained downstairs long enough to lock the front door and turn off the lights. By the time I crawled into bed, Geof was already asleep.

  While we slept, young Ernie McEachen went looking for his family.

  19

  IN HINDSIGHT, IT’S CLEAR THAT ERNIE DIDN’T MEAN FOR things to get so far out of control; or, rather, he intended to take control, but it didn’t work. Anyway, his own life seemed so far out of control at that point that a few more degrees of chaos didn’t, at first, faze him.

  First, he tried calling Sunrise House.

  “I’m sorry,” the night staff member said, “but this is the answering service. I don’t know if there’s anybody by that name at the number you called, but I’ll take your name and phone number, and pass it on.”

  “Bullshit!” he yelled at her, which she dutifully took down in her notes. “Don’t give me that answering service crap, I know you’re at the house, and I know Marsha’s there, so you put her on this phone right now.”

  The staff member, as instructed in such cases, hung up on him.

  He called back. “Let me talk to my wife, you got no right—”

  Again, she hung up on him, made a note of his words in the phone log, and then tried to figure out if she should wake up Smithy Leigh at home to get some advice about how to handle this irate husband if he tried again. Before she could punch in Smithy’s number, however, he called back.

  “Please, please.” Ernie was crying now, a fact the staff member also recorded in her notes. “Please, I won’t yell at you anymore, I just got to talk to you. I know you can’t tell me if she’s there, I understand that, but would you tell her I love her, would you do that, please? Just tell her I love her, and I’m really sorry, and I’ll get another job, and I’m really happy about the baby, and I just want her and the kids to come on home, and that I won’t do anything.”

  “I’ll take your message, sir, but as I said, I don’t know if she’s staying at the house, so I may not be able to—”

  “Please, just give her the message.”

  “I�
��ve written it down, sir.”

  When the staff member hung up, she wrote in the phone log: “Husband called third time, calmer.”

  Five minutes later, when she was just getting back to sleep on the cot provided for the overnight staff person in the office, Ernie called back.

  “Did you give her my message?”

  “Sir, I told you this is only an answering service, and—”

  “And I told you that’s bullshit!” The sweet pleading had vanished. “Listen, you goddamned bunch of nosy, interfering dykes—you got no right to kidnap a man’s wife and kids, you got no right to interfere in a man’s family! You got no right, you got no right! You listen to me, you stupid bitch, you get my wife on this phone, or . . .”

  The staff member tried to hang up immediately, but in her nervousness and haste, she dropped the phone, and so had to endure his screams and insults until she finally got the receiver back in the cradle, This time she didn’t hesitate to call her director.

  “I’ll be right there,” Smithy said.

  “But, Smithy, what do I do if he keeps calling?”

  “Tell him his wife isn’t there, and that you don’t know where she is, and that you couldn’t tell him if you did know.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So much the better.”

  “But what if he comes here, Smithy?”

  “Now how’s he going to do that?” Smithy said, with an edge of reassuring sarcasm to her tone. And then she purposely told a lie. “Just because he knows our phone number doesn’t mean he knows our address. And besides, what do you think we’ve got all those locks on our doors for? Relax, it’s no big deal, he’ll cool off, and I’ll be there shortly.”

  Before leaving her apartment, Smithy called the Port Frederick police station and asked for Detective Geoffrey Bushfield. When she couldn’t reach him, she left word at the desk for the officers on duty to be aware that Ernie McEachen was making abusive phone calls to Sunrise House.

  “Do you want us to send somebody out?” the sergeant inquired.

  “Not yet, but stay alert,” Smithy snapped.

  “We’ll try,” he replied, with a wry touch that carried onto the recording of their conversation. “Call if you need us.”