by Saul Black
His shoulders came alive. His arms. She could feel it. The comforter moved. His adrenaline sang madly in silence through the softness and warmth. His left knee bent—though his eyes didn’t open. She hadn’t seen this. Of course she hadn’t been allowed to see this, to imagine it. Of course murder had demands, insisted on keeping certain secrets, to be revealed only in the full darkness of its flight. Murder gave itself to you, but not fully, not fully until it was sure of you, until you were in it, until there was no going back and it was guaranteed its delivery of blood.
The temptation was to watch. The temptation was to surrender to amazement—at yourself. But if his eyes opened … If he was there—
She lost herself after that.
There really was nothing.
The blows compressed time and space around her and dissolved her into a pure blind heat.
* * *
The world came back to her, or she came back to it, and she found herself slumped on the floor leaning against the side of the bed. She felt jet-lagged, tiredness upon her like a heavy second skin. What she wanted more than anything was to lie down and fall asleep.
She got to her feet. She must move very quickly now, do nothing except what needed to be done. The necessary actions lay ahead of her like pristine items in an immaculately clean and tidy house. Nothing must be allowed to invade the spaces between them.
The hammer lay next to him on the pillow. There wasn’t much blood, but it was shocking on the white linen. His mouth was open. Each eye showed a sliver of white between the almost-shut lids. Eyes were like little boiled eggs. Revolting when you let yourself think that way.
He’s already dead. You don’t need the knife.
She had wondered about this. Equivocated. But in the end the knife was an irresistible insurance. The image of him coming to, in spite of everything. People survived all sorts of things, incredibly. But they didn’t survive stab wounds to the heart. Or maybe they did? Biology was mischievous, either by cunning or caprice. Rasputin jumping up and attacking his assassins after God knows how much poison and how many bullets. There were no guarantees. All you could do was maximize the odds.
She went to the reading room and very delicately removed both the knife and the second hammer from their brown paper bags, taking great care not to touch the surfaces where she’d laid the prints. You hold the knife by the blade, the hammer by the claws.
It was an odd way to stab someone, even someone already dead. To hold the very tip of the handle between a thumb and forefinger, position the blade against the flesh—then press down with the flat of the palm against the top of the grip, putting your body weight into it. (It reminded her of Elspeth as a child, forcing cookie cutters into the dough with hilarious grim focus.) Perhaps no one in history had ever been stabbed in just this way. She imagined the bored universe that had seen everything now grudgingly conceding a novelty, though it was past caring. The blade went in as through raw meat. Of course it did: This was raw meat. It gave her a curious feeling of deflation, to have human corporeality so dully confirmed.
There was nothing from him, from the body, from the now plainly established corpse. No hiss of gas, no neural twitch. Just the yielding of the flesh to the puncture, the spurt and hurry of blood, as if the blood had been desperate to get out all these years.
Still, the heart. For an insane moment she thought to locate it by feeling for its beat. She did, actually, put her gloved palm where she thought it must be, if only to confirm it wasn’t still beating. It wasn’t. In spite of her paranoia she knew death was here, had taken up its place in him like a cat finding a warm spot. He was plain and solid with it.
Nonetheless, the heart mattered to her. A bit of whimsical consciousness said: symbolically—but she ignored it.
It took three failed attempts to pierce the breastbone before the solution offered itself to her. With a bonus: The force required oughtn’t to be within the strength of a slender woman. She took up the first hammer. Put the point of the blade back in position, still holding only the tip of the handle, raised the hammer—then struck.
Tiredness came at her again when she heaved him from the bed onto the floor and rolled him over onto his back. It occurred to her that she might simply run out of fuel, faint, collapse, wake up to daylight and the whole thing ruined. She wanted a glass of water. Her mouth was terribly dry. Somewhere, in some glossy and redundant health magazine, she’d read: Hydration is the most overlooked aspect of physical well-being. Too bad. The machinations—a glass, the faucet, another set of gloves—were beyond her now.
She took the second hammer, as yet unsullied, and dabbed the metal head into his blood. Since there was no end to her imagination she saw a coroner in scrubs saying: No fragments of bone on the hammer head, which is unusual, but not impossible. Again, too bad. It wouldn’t stand up against the rest of the evidence. It would pass because it had to.
In the wardrobe she found the new black joggers, sweatshirt and Lycra ski mask. She took off the gloves and pulled the clothes on. Hurried down the stairs. One by one she turned off the lights that had been left on when they’d gone up. Now, but for the lamp on the nightstand by their bed, the house was in darkness. In the kitchen she gave her eyes time to adjust. Then she put on fresh gloves and a pair of sneakers and went up to fetch the first hammer, the Murder Hammer, as she had begun referring to it, mentally, to keep things straight. Her breath was hot in her mouth and nose.
The yard’s darkness was soothing. She kept to the shadows and moved quickly around the border to the shed, let herself in, and left the door open behind her. No flashlight. She couldn’t risk it. Just the thin moonlight that came in through the door and windows. Again, it took her eyes a moment to find their landmarks.
Groping, softly, she found the bucket with the box and old tennis racket she’d set on top as a guide. She removed these and the smell of raw bleach came up to her. Rubber gardening gloves and an oily rag next to the bucket. She pulled the gloves on, scrubbed the hammer in the bleach, and put it back on the workbench with the other tools. With the bucket, she paused in the doorway and looked back at the house. Still and silent. Only the one buttery light from the bedroom. The lamp had been a wedding gift from one of his cousins. The wedding. The glint of the rings and the minister’s steel-rimmed glasses. Till death us do part.
Well.
Stop that. Keep the spaces between the actions clear.
She emptied the bucket down the storm drain and returned it to the shed. Stuffed the used nylon gloves into an open bag of potting compost, put the gardening pair back on, and closed the door behind her. Then she went to the back of the yard.
There was black bamboo here, at the top of the border of mixed perennials, beyond which was the wooden fence that separated their property from the Lyles’. Green bamboo on the Lyles’ side. Ferns, hostas, and fuchsia sloping down to their lawn. And if the security lights weren’t working?
Pointless. You go ahead because there’s nothing else to do. And if they’re not working, fuck it. It’s a subtraction from the scenario—but the scenario will hold.
At the same time she thought this the counter-thought rose up: The scenario won’t hold. None of it will. There are probably less than two hours between you and your arrest. Somehow they’ll know. They’ll see and they’ll know: She did it.
But she was already at the top of the fence, scrambling, dropping with a soft crash down on the other side.
She crawled through the plants, still moist from the sprinklers’ last rinse. The good smell of earth and foliage. She got to her feet and strode out onto the Lyles’ back lawn.
The lights didn’t come on.
There was Vincent in his chair, The Corrections open on his lap. She waved her arms above her head.
The lights didn’t come on.
She moved forward, toward the conservatory. Quickened her pace—and tripped over the edge of the lawn roller, concealed in the sycamore’s shadow.
The lights came on just as she got to
her feet.
She and Vincent stared at each other. The lights were painfully bright, it seemed to her. A ludicrous exposure. She should have bulked herself out with extra layers, flattened her breasts. Surely he’d know it was a woman? Surely he’d know it was her? In the few seconds when they were face-to-face it was as if she could hear him say: Rachel?
She turned and ran.
It took, of course, an age to wade through the bamboo and haul herself over the fence. Her composure was dreamily exploded. On the other side she landed badly and jarred her ankle. Heat flooded up around her like heavy water.
But now as never before she was at the mercy of the ticking clock. Optimistically she had perhaps twenty minutes. The deeper part of herself knew this was more insurance: Faced with this thing she had to do, this last, dreadful thing, she couldn’t afford to give herself time to think. To think would be to give cowardice room. To think would be to fail.
She tossed the gardening gloves at the front of the shed and ran back across the lawn to the patio and the kitchen’s glass doors.
Inside, she kicked off the sneakers, took a last (please God) pair of vinyl gloves from the box under the sink, and hurried to the utility room.
She stripped, stuffed the jogging gear into the bottom of the laundry hamper under the rest of the unwashed clothes, and went upstairs.
From a shelf in the walk-in wardrobe she took a cardboard box of photograph albums and opened it up. Not Adam’s, these, but her own Polaroids and prints from the early years of their marriage, before his compulsive need to photograph everything properly did away with any inclination she had to pick up a camera herself. She folded the ski mask and put it underneath the albums. They will have no reason to look in here. They will have no reason to look in the laundry hamper, nor the shed, nor the greenhouse. When I come through the other side of this I will …
The thought was swallowed in an upsurge of fear. Ordinary fear, fear of pain, fear for her own body. In the religious depictions of Gethsemane, Christ was shown sweating blood. Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me. The memory of the image went through her, viscerally. Her own face felt studded with blood. She couldn’t, for a moment, get to her feet. She stayed where she was, kneeling over the open box. The frail idea of Christ and salvation like a tiny cobweb the universe had long since blown casually to fluttering threads. The truth was an empty darkness, not even, the cosmologists said now, infinite. If there was an Intelligence it was as she’d felt it after killing Jenner, amoral, impassioned only by curiosity. It was neither for nor against her nor anyone else. Including Adam.
Including Elspeth.
The thought renewed her. The absence of natural justice. There was no justice beyond what we made. And here she was, making it.
She got up, replaced the box.
Almost, she didn’t bother with the tiny parings of skin. There was enough without them, surely? And time, time was hemorrhaging.
But she had them, so it was foolish not to use them. She took the bag from the reading room, peeled off the gloves, used tweezers and the head of a pin to wedge them in as best she could under her nails, kept long enough for the purpose. If they fell out they fell out. They’d fall out near enough so that any CSI boffin worth his or her salt ought to find them.
She refitted the gloves, slacker after one use, but that hardly mattered now.
It was time. She put her bloodstained nightdress back on. Took her cell phone and set it by the French windows. Opened them. Lifted the photinia pot from its tray. As a late scene-setting precaution she took the lamp and smashed its amber glass shade against the nightstand. Tossed it to the floor. Some sign of a struggle, at least.
Then she picked up the knife—by its blade.
The knife was alive with physical innocence.
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
This is the last thing you must do. After this it’s out of your control.
The amoral intelligence bristled, suddenly came close out of the remote constellations with a smile of calm fascination.
She placed the knife handle in the hinge of the French window and closed it until the grip was firm. The blade was pointed just under her ribs.
Then—trying to think and getting only a vast white terror like sheet lightning—she walked onto it.
* * *
The rest was a dream. She swam through soft heat and redness. Her heartbeat was outside her, a pulse in the room that pressed on her temples. The wounds spoke to her, though they had only one word: pain. The distress was terrible, as if her body couldn’t believe her mind had forced it to perform this obscene act, this inversion of the most basic principle. Her body cried out in shock that it had been betrayed. She wasn’t unsympathetic. She would have comforted it (as if it were a child) had she been able. Incapable as she was, there was still, in the red, soft-edged dream, some part of herself offering the silent equivalent of hush … I know … I’m sorry … It’ll be all right … I’m sorry, but I had to …
She was unsure of her orientation. She was on her knees, she thought, but there were multiple sly gravities. The night outside the open windows was large and cool and open, scented by the green lawn and the neighborhood’s dozing asphalt. She tossed the knife. Wondered as it left her hand what she would do if it didn’t clear the balcony. She wasn’t certain that it did, but the care was running out of her now. She hadn’t known care would be such a precious resource, so easily spent.
It took an extraordinary, delicate, draining effort to remove the gloves and put them in the photinia’s tray. Lifting the pot back into place to hide them took her for a while into starless darkness, her limbs distant things, unreliable. She lost a little time. Went again into darkness—then was hauled out by something, some part of herself she’d forbidden to shut down. Death—the curled-up cat—had left Adam’s body and was walking near to her, intrigued. Was there more tonight? A feast!
The icons on her cell phone’s screen danced and shivered. There was blood on her hands. She hadn’t been able to override the impulse to hold her wounds, to try to stop what was inside from coming out.
The phone icon. White receiver on a green background. She was so very close to going out. It was a wonderful warmth being offered to her.
But she thought of her and Elspeth again, the image of the two of them driving Route 1 in ocean sunlight, Elspeth’s bare sunlit feet on the dash and her long dark hair lifted by the wind.
She dialed 911.
45
September 18, 2017
Valerie was wrapping up at the marina when Will called.
“They’re back home,” he said. For the last two hours Rachel and Elspeth had been at Élan, an upmarket beauty spa on Valencia. Will on surveillance. “The kid’s got a nifty new haircut.”
“Okay,” Valerie said. “I’m done here. I’m heading over there now.”
“We got what we need?”
“I doubt it.”
“Shit.”
For a few minutes Valerie stood on the dock watching the CSI team packing up their gear. Beyond the Aqua Nova the bay was golden-blue and sunlit, a fresh morning with a light breeze coming off the ocean. Aqua Nova. New water. She wondered if Adam Grant had renamed the boat when he’d bought it, little knowing that was precisely what his wife and daughter would be sailing into, figuratively, after his death. The world’s insatiable appetite for irony. She imagined the phrase repeating itself in Rachel Grant’s head, becoming the mantra that stiffened her resolve. New Water … New Water …
And her own new water? At least this time, postponement blame didn’t rest with her. Yesterday evening—what should have been cards-on-the-table evening—Nick had gone to his mother’s after work to assemble a new flatpack wardrobe and had ended up staying over. It wasn’t unusual: His mother loved having him under her roof for a night (it was terrible to Valerie, the ravenous maternity still there, starving, gnawing, grateful for crumbs) and he was a good enough son to indulge her, occasionally. But his voice had
been cold on the phone when he’d called to let Valerie know. Her own fault, obviously, obviously. She was sick of it now, the untold truth—and the mess of feelings that surrounded it like a cocoon.
Which image turned her from the dock and headed her toward her car.
* * *
Rachel answered the door. She looked renewed; beautiful, in fact. Valerie had never seen her like this in the flesh, fully cosmeticized, coppery hair glowing. The green eyes were filled with feline life. She was wearing a deep red Lycra top that precisely matched her lipstick, tight white jeans, high-heeled sandals in pale gray suede. Beyond her, the big central hall looked freshly polished and cleaned. A sleepy odor of beeswax from the walnut floor.
“Hi,” Valerie said. “I need to speak with you.”
Not quite her imagination, she thought, that Rachel’s face betrayed a flicker of something like recognition—of a dreaded moment come round at last. But she recovered in an instant.
“Of course,” she said, stepping aside for Valerie to enter and ushering her into the kitchen.
“Is Elspeth here with you?”
“Yes, she’s right there.” Rachel gestured through the glass doors. Elspeth, in sawn-off denims and a white halter-top, was in a sun lounger on the travertine patio, headphones in, eyes closed, a glass of iced orange juice on the wrought-iron table next to her. “But I thought I made it clear—”
“We need to talk privately. Undisturbed. You might want to tell her.”
Rachel adjusted, visibly, to Valerie’s new tone. Some tension went out of her shoulders.
“Wait here,” she said. Her tone was new, too. They understood each other. It had taken barely twenty seconds.
Valerie watched her go out to Elspeth. The girl (Will was right about the hairdo; it was still long, but had been given some layers and waves) looked up, removed her headphones, listened, looked back into the kitchen (nervous, nervous, plainly nervous), nodded. Valerie imagined Rachel’s instructions: It’s fine. Don’t worry. She’ll be gone in a minute.
