Marriage Is Murder

by Nancy Pickard

  I walked down the hall past a gun display case and a linen closet, and on into the room at the end, where I flipped on the overhead light. It revealed a large bedroom that contained twin beds, two large dressers, a chaise lounge, and a vanity table. It was all perfectly neat, perfectly color-coordinated in beige, almost pretty in an unimaginative way. Everything was perfect and perfectly controlled, just like its mistress.

  In the immaculate bathroom, I stared at my tired tace in the mirror and considered how to break down that perfectly solid conviction of hers—the one that had her thinking that Lars was a wife beater—and get her to believe me. I supposed that it didn’t actually matter if she believed me, I was sure’ they would keep their opinions to themselves and that they’d respect Sherry’s demand for them to leave her alone. But still, I liked my brother-in-law, and I didn’t want anybody to think such things about him. Or was it that I didn’t want my sister to look like a victim, because that might reflect badly on our family? On me. I used the facilities, washed my hands, straightened my hair with my fingers, and wondered what it must be like to be Kathy Ingram, so sure of her statistics, so convinced of her opinions, so perfectly in control.

  When I was ready to give it another try, I turned out the lights and started down the hall again. The door to the linen closet was ajar, and I shut it. The guns in the display case were gleaming, and I stopped to admire them. There wasn’t much to admire, not as gun collections go. No real antiques that I could tell. No expensive rifles with beautiful stocks and barrels. Just mostly ordinary pistols and revolvers—a couple of little .22’s, a few .38’s and .45’s like the ones that millions of good ol’ boys stashed in their bedside drawers. They weren’t even very clean, at least not compared to collections I’d seen in various cops’ homes, and not compared to the rest of the house.

  “Ugly things, aren’t they?” Kathy spoke at my shoulder. She was smiling again, now that we were talking about other things, and she seemed to read my own thoughts. Maybe, I thought, we could develop a bit of empathy here, after all. “I’d love to dust them, at least, but Henry won’t let me he says it’s important for them to remain in their original condition, that it increases their value to him. I suppose it’s just as well, since I don’t know a thing about guns, and I’d probably shoot myself if I tried to polish them. That’s his newest one, right there.”

  I looked where she pointed, to a shelf toward the bottom of the case. She opened the case, took out the gun, and turned it over casually in her hands.

  “Let me see that, Kathy.” Carefully, I took it from her. It looked a lot like the one Geof wore, Willie had been killed with one just like it, his own .38. My heart skipped. “Jesus, Kathy! Did you know this thing’s loaded?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, and shook her head as if I’d just told her that her little boy had knocked out my window with his baseball. “That man!”

  Moving even more carefully than before, I replaced the gun in the cabinet.

  “For an intelligent man,” Kathy was saying, “Henry can be so absentminded sometimes! That’s what he’s doing tonight, too, getting another gun to add to the collection. I don’t mind, really, they don’t seem to be very expensive.”

  “What kind of gun?”

  “It doesn’t seem to hurt our budget.”

  “What kind of gun, Kathy?”

  She looked startled out of her poise. “Kind? I don’t know, Jenny, I think he said it was a Colt something or other, evidently something new that he’d seen recently, and that he wanted.”

  “Where, where was he going to get it?”

  “A gun shop, I guess, isn’t that where they buy them?”

  “Has he added any other new guns in the last couple of weeks?”

  “Why, yes, that one . . . and that one.”

  She had pointed to a .38 and yet another .45.

  Dick Hanks had been shot with his own .38 caliber gun. Lanny Gleason’s husband had been killed with Ms own .45. All the couples had been exhaustively interviewed by the Ingrams, so that Henry and Kathy knew if the wives got regular nights out—and when—and which wives were so tense, like Gail, that they needed tranquilizers to sleep, and which couples drank themselves into stupors on Saturday afternoons. They knew who owned guns and where they kept those guns and the bullets.

  My brother-in-law owned an old Colt .45.

  This was Wednesday, Sherry’s night at her church guild, and she had told me that Lars would be home alone.

  I pushed Kathy aside and ran into the kitchen to the phone. First I tried calling Lars, but his phone was busy. Or off the hook? I called the police station then to transmit an urgent message to Detective Geof Bushfield.

  Kathy Ingram was listening, and ashen.

  She suddenly ran out of the room. But in a couple of seconds she was back, and she ran up to me and grabbed the phone out of my hand. I put up my arms to ward off the blow I expected, but she merely let the phone drop. Then she grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the kichen alter her.

  “We have to save him,” Kathy said.

  I followed her, wondering which man she meant.

  24

  KATHY DROVE US TO THE GUTHRIES’ IN HER STATION wagon, thus compounding my sinking feeling that I was rapidly losing whatever control I might have had. She drove wildly, madly, a racer on her last desperate laps, and I saw the tight interior control she usually had over herself leaving her, pouring out like gas out of a tank. During the run to the car, her dark hair had come loose from its pins, at some point a button had popped open at her cuff, her hose sagged at her ankles, sweat ringed the armpits of her dark shirtdress. It was as if an invisible hand had shaken her, rattling her, opening and loosening her clothes, her pores, her glands, her mind, her mouth.

  “He hated his father. Henry hated his father, that’s why he left home at sixteen, to go to school, to get away from his father, so he wouldn’t have to see what his father was doing to his mother, beating her up all the time, holding guns to her head, but he despised her, too. Henry despised his mother for taking it, for taking it so that he had to witness it and be helpless to stop it, and feel guilty.

  “I felt so sorry for him. I admired him so when I met him. But I felt so sorry for him, he was so lonely, and he needed me. And I needed him, oh, Jenny, I’ve always felt so protected around Henry! I needed protection, I never had it as a child. He was doing good work, it was important work, and I could help him. I thought I could help him. Why didn’t I help him! I lived with him, and I knew him, and I didn’t know what he was doing, why didn’t I know! Those poor men, those poor women . . .”

  “How long, Kathy?”

  “Boston—he brought home guns in Boston. Oh, dear God. And before that, before Boston, in Ann Arbor; in Bangor, before that. You saw how many guns, oh, God! All those guns, all those people, I want to die, I want him to die. Oh, I don’t mean that—I don’t want those people to be dead, I don’t want your brother-in-law to be dead, I want to be dead so I can’t know this, please make me dead, God, and kill him, please take him now, please take him ten years ago, bring back all those people and kill us, make me go to another university, make me go to another class, somebody else’s class, make me different so I wouldn’t want him, make him different so he wouldn’t need me, make me die when I was born, make his mother drown him, make his father die before he was born, make him different, make me different, take it away, take this away from me.”

  She laid the flat of her right palm on the car’s horn as if it were a siren, so that it blared us onto the block where Sherry and Lars lived. She drove the car over the curb, over the lawn, close to the front steps. When she flung herself out of the car, she was screaming his name as she ran, but the sound came out only as the strangled whisper of someone who is so desperately afraid that her larynx has closed, her tongue is paralyzed, and the scream pierces her own brain instead of the air where she aims it.

  “Henry, Henry, don’t. Stop, Henry.”

  I pushed past her, a
nd she fell as if her muscles had given out on her, too, along with her voice, as if the invisible hand had shaken all the stuffing out of her, leaving only a quivering, twitching, epileptic shell of a body, like a locust’s, on the ground. If I’d had time for it, I would have been horrified by the sight of the complete disintegration of her self. I shoved open the front door and, hearing nothing, forced myself to stand quietly in the foyer.

  “Come in.”

  It was Henry’s deep voice, calling from the living room.

  In the mirror in the foyer, I saw the reflected image of Henry standing, holding a .45 Colt to Lars’s big blond head. Lars stared back at me in the mirror. He was pale and looked puzzled, as if somebody had told a joke he didn’t get, but he gazed steadily, calmly, into my own mirrored eyes without any trace that I could see of fear or panic. I thought he was the most dignified helpless person I’d ever seen, and I suddenly loved him overwhelmingly, this good man, this patient husband to my sister, this kind father to my niece and nephew, this good friend to me.

  I was afraid to move, but I let my gaze travel to Henry in the mirror.

  He, too, was looking back at me.

  “You’ve got it wrong this time, Henry,” I said to the mirror.

  “You would defend him,” Henry replied scornfully.

  “He’s a gentle man, Henry, he never hurt her.”

  “They all hurt her.”

  “Who, Henry?”

  “All the men have guns and fists, and they beat her and hurt her until I stop them from doing it anymore.”

  “But you make her suffer by doing it, Henry.”

  “I don’t care what happens to her.”

  “You love her.”

  “I loved him, too. God hates me for loving him.”

  “Because he hurt her?”

  “She let him hurt her.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Henry.”

  “I know.” He looked down at Lars. “It was his fault.”

  “Henry!”

  It wasn’t my scream, it was Kathy’s.

  Henry’s head jerked up, and he was staring at her in the mirror as she pulled the gun—Willie’s gun—out of her pocket and aimed it at him and pulled the trigger. When his face shattered, I expected the mirror to shatter, too. It didn’t, of course. In it, I could see clearly the body on the floor and the blood that had sprayed onto my brother-in-law’s face. Lars stared back at me, and I realized that it had not been dignity but the paralysis of terror that had kept him pinned so quietly to the chair. I knew how he felt—my own feet seemed planted permanently to the floor of the foyer. Kathy Ingram was the only one who was moving, and that was only to crumple again to the ground and to begin to weep.

  “I saved him,” she said.

  I still didn’t know which man she meant.

  Epilogue

  “JENNY, IF YOU DON’T HURRY, YOU’LL BE LATE TO YOUR own wedding,” my father complained. With his Palm Springs tan and long silver hair, he looked even more than usual like some retired movie star whose name ought to show up in Trivial Pursuit games, starring in some forgotten movie opposite Merle Oberon. But he was only Jimmy Cain, the former clam-canning company president, forced out of business and out of town by his own ineptness. Still, he looked extraordinarily handsome, even distinguished in the tuxedo he’d insisted on wearing to this mostly unformal wedding.

  “You look the role, Dad.”

  He flicked invisible lint from his lapel, smiling sadly.

  “You young people have no sense of occasion,” my father said, referring perhaps to the fruitless arguments I’d waged against the tux. “Top hat and tails went out with the British Empire, you know, and that has always seemed a great tragedy to me.”

  I checked myself out in the mirror on the wall of the church lounge. Yes. In my mother’s wedding dress, the lovely cream silk-and-lace gown I’d found in the trunk in Sherry’s basement, I looked the role, too. I’d finally told Sherry, and she’d cried a little, but she hadn’t objected.

  “What has, Dad, the end of imperialism?”

  He sighed, seeing only his own elegant image in the mirror where we were both reflected. Maybe my mother couldn’t be at my wedding, maybe in her semiconscious state she’d never even be aware I was married, but I’d feel her presence and her love all the same, in the warm soft embrace of her dress. My father hadn’t seemed to recognize it, and I hadn’t seen the point of wounding him by speaking the memory.

  “I’ve often said it was the death of style,” he said.

  I touched a finger to the short, lacy veil my mother had worn when she had married him some thirty-five years earlier. It had covered her eyes to important truths about him and about herself, that veil had, and I could only hope it wouldn’t blind her elder daughter, as well.

  “Ah. Life is hard, Dad.”

  He suddenly brightened and looked at me briefly.

  “Do you like the golf clubs we got you for a wedding present?”

  “They’re gorgeous, but we don’t play golf.”

  He lifted his chin from his immaculate collar and gazed out the stained-glass window. I waited for his profound comment on this important moment of my life. He cleared his throat.

  “That’s what your stepmother said, but I said, ‘Don’t be silly, my dear, everybody plays golf.’ ”

  “Let’s go, Dad.”

  “Do you, Geoffrey Allen, take Jennifer Lynn to be your lawful wedded wife?”

  Henry Ingram had knocked boldly at the door of Dick and Eleanor Hanks’s home that Friday night. Dick, recognizing him, admitted him. Henry knew from interviewing the couple that this was Eleanor’s night out, that they kept a weapon on the premises, that the gun lay in the drawer beside the bed. He had only to excuse himself to go to the bathroom in order to obtain it. And then he had only to call Dick into the bedroom, to shoot him through the muffling pillow, and to walk out the front door, invisible to the neighbors behind their night-closed doors.

  “I do.”

  “Do you, Jennifer, take Geoffrey to be your lawful wedded husband?”

  It had been as easy to kill Lanny Gleason’s husband as it had been for him to kill the other men in the other cities, the other towns. Henry knew, from the interviews with the Gleasons, that they both got drunk to unconsciousness every Saturday night. So they never even knew he was in the house. Ironically, it was SAFE that galvanized him into killing more, and more quickly—SAFE fed Henry’s sense of personal mission, that mission being to “save” the women by killing the men, even if it brought suspicion onto the women themselves.

  “To have and to hold from this day forward, in sickness…”

  Henry had not been so direct in attempting to kill young Ernie McEachen; he’d merely stirred the pot by calling Ernie, by telling him the address of the shelter, and by urging him to demand his rights as a husband, to reclaim his wife and children, by any means—the stronger, the better.

  “And in health, for richer, for poorer. . .”

  Geof had quit the force. Or tried to. But our chief of police had offered a more logical alternative, the one we hadn’t considered because Geof had always turned it down before: a promotion out of the streets to an administrative position. It was long past time, the chief had chided him, it was appropriate, it was time for him to grow up into the authority for which he was suited and to leave the streets to the younger cops, the cowboys. For the first time, it appealed to Geof, certainly more than finding the bodies, more than continually risking his life. He hadn’t said yes, he had the length of our honeymoon to consider it, he didn’t know if he could stand it behind a desk, if maybe he’d feel like a coward for doing it. But he’d still be a cop. That was what mattered to him, he’d still be a damned good cop.

  “For as long as you both shall live?”

  I glanced over Geof’s shoulder to the family pew where my father sat with his wife, and where Sherry and Lars sat tightly together, his arm around her. There was a space between the two couples, and my mother occupied it, i
n my mind. My sister brought her husband’s right hand to her lips and bowed her head over it. I looked back up at Geof.

  “I do, too,” I said.

  About the Author

  NANCY PICKARD IS THE AUTHOR OF No Body, Generous Death, and Say No to Murder, for which she won, the first annual Anthony Award, given at the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention. A former reporter and editor, she lives in Kansas with her son and husband, who raises Hereford cattle in the Flint Hills.