by Mary Kubica
“What kind of questions?” I ask. Otto sits slouched in a chair in the corner of the room. He fidgets with the fringe of a throw pillow, and I watch as strands of blue come loose in his hands. His eyes look weary. I worry about the stress this is causing him, having to hear from a police officer that a neighbor was murdered. I wonder if he’s scared because of it. I know I am. The very idea is unfathomable. A murder so close to our own home. I shudder to think about what went on in the Baineses’ home last night.
I glance around the first floor, looking for Imogen, for Tate. As if he knows what I’m thinking, Will says to me, “Imogen isn’t home from school yet,” and Officer Berg, taking interest in this, asks, “No?”
School ends at two thirty. The commute is long, but still, Otto is home most days by three thirty or four. The clock on the fireplace mantel reads ten after six.
“No,” Will tells the officer, “but she’ll be home soon. Any minute,” he says, citing some tutoring session that Will and I know she didn’t have. The officer tells us that he’ll need to speak with Imogen, too, and Will says, “Of course.” If she isn’t home soon, he offers to drive her to the public safety building tonight. It’s a catchall building, where a couple of police officers double as EMTs and first responders in the case of fire. If our home went up in flames, Officer Berg would just as likely appear at my door in a fire truck. If Will or I had a heart attack, he’d come in the ambulance.
Only seven-year-old Tate has been spared from the police officer’s interrogation. “Tate is outside,” Will tells me, seeing the way my eyes look for him. “He’s playing with the dogs,” he says, and I hear them then, the dogs barking.
I give Will a look, one that wonders how smart it is to leave Tate alone outside when there was a murderer on our street just last night. I stray toward a rear-facing window to find Tate, in a sweatshirt and jeans, a wool hat thrust down over his head. He’s having a go with the dogs and a ball. He lobs the ball as far as he can—laughing as he does so—and the girls dash after it, arguing over which will be the one to carry it back to Tate’s waiting hand.
Outside, there’s evidence of a fire in the backyard firepit. The fire is dying down now, only embers and smoke. There’s no longer a flame.
It’s far enough away from Tate and the dogs that I don’t worry.
Officer Berg sees the smoldering fire, too, and asks if we have a permit for it.
“A permit?” Will asks. “For the fire?” When Officer Berg says yes, Will goes on to explain that our son Tate had come home from school begging for s’mores. They’d read a book about them, S is for S’mores, and the rest of the day, Tate had a craving for them.
“The only way we did s’mores back in Chicago was in the toaster oven. This was just a quick treat,” Will says. “Completely harmless.”
“Around here,” Officer Berg tells him, uninterested in Tate’s craving, “you need a permit for any open fire.”
Will apologizes, blames ignorance, and the officer shrugs. “Next time you’ll know,” he says, forgiving us this one transgression. There are bigger issues at hand.
“Can I be excused?” Otto asks, saying he has homework to do, and I see this discomfort in his eyes. This is a lot for a fourteen-year-old boy to handle. Though much older than Tate, Otto is still a child. We forget that sometimes. I pat him on the shoulder. I lean in close to him and say, “We’re safe here, Otto. I want you to know that,” because I don’t want him to be scared. “Your dad and I are here to protect you,” I tell him.
Otto meets my eyes. I wonder if he believes me when I’m not so sure myself. Are we safe here?
“You can go,” the officer tells him and, as he leaves, I find my way to the other arm of the sofa, Officer Berg and I bisected by a velvet sofa the color of marigolds, the furniture left behind in the home all midcentury, and not, unfortunately, midcentury modern. It’s just old.
“You know why I’m here?” the officer asks, and I tell him that Will and I heard the siren late last night. That I know Mrs. Baines was murdered.
“Yes, ma’am,” he says, and I ask how she was murdered, though the details of her death have not yet been released. They’re waiting, he says, until the family has been notified.
“Mr. Baines doesn’t know?” I ask, but all he’ll say is that Mr. Baines was traveling for business. The first thought that crosses my mind is that, in cases like this, it’s always the husband. Mr. Baines, wherever he is, has done this, I think.
Berg tells us how the little Baines girl was the one who found Mrs. Baines dead. She called 911 and told the operator that Morgan wouldn’t wake up. I sharply inhale, trying not to imagine all the things that poor little girl might have seen.
“How old is she?” I ask, and Berg replies, “Six years old.”
A hand rises to my mouth. “Oh, how awful,” I say, and I can’t imagine it, Tate finding either Will or me dead.
“She and Tate are in school together,” Will declares, looking at Officer Berg and then me. They share the same teacher. They share the same peers. The island school serves children in grades kindergarten through fifth while the rest, those in middle school and beyond, have to be ferried to the mainland for their education. Only fifty-some students go to the elementary school. Nineteen in Tate’s classroom because his first grade is combined with the kindergarten class.
“Where is the little girl now?” I ask, and he tells me that she’s with family while they try to connect with Jeffrey, traveling for business in Tokyo. The fact that he was out of the country doesn’t make Jeffrey Baines any less culpable in my mind. He could have hired someone to carry out the task.
“The poor thing,” I say, imagining years’ worth of therapy in the child’s future.
“What can we do to help?” I ask Officer Berg, and he tells me he’s been speaking to residents along the street, asking them questions. “What kind of questions?” I ask.
“Can you tell me, Dr. Foust, where you were last night around eleven o’clock?” the officer asks. In other words, do I have an alibi for the time the homicide occurred?
Last night Will and I watched TV together, after we’d put Tate to bed. We’d lain on different sides of the room, him spread out on the sofa, me curled up on the love seat as we do. Our allocated seats. Shortly after we’d gotten situated and turned on the TV, Will brought me a glass of cabernet from the bottle I’d opened the night before.
I watched him for a while from my own seat, remembering that it wasn’t so long ago that I would have found it impossible to sit this far away from Will, on separate sofas. I thought fondly of the days that he would have handed me the wine with a lengthy kiss to the lips, another hand feeling me up as he did so, and I would have found myself easily wiled by the persuasive kiss and the persuasive hands and those eyes. Those eyes! And then one thing would have led to the next and, soon after, we would have giggled like teenagers as we tried to hastily and noiselessly make love on the sofa, ears tuned in to the creaks of the floorboards above us, the rasp of box springs, footsteps on the stairs, to be sure the boys still slept. There was a magnanimity about Will’s touch, something that once made me feel giddy and light-headed, drunk without a drop to drink. I couldn’t get enough of him. He was intoxicating.
But then I found the cigarette, a Marlboro Silver with lipstick the color of strawberries along its filter. I found that first, followed shortly after by charges for hotel rooms on our credit card statement, a pair of panties in our bedroom that I knew weren’t mine. I realized at once that Will was magnanimous and intoxicating to someone other than me.
I didn’t smoke. I didn’t wear lipstick. And I was far too sensible to leave my underwear lying around someone else’s home.
Will just looked at me when I shoved the credit card statement under his nose, when I asked him outright about the hotel charges on our bill. He appeared so taken aback that he’d been caught that he didn’t have the whe
rewithal to manufacture a lie.
Last night, after I’d finished that first glass of wine, Will offered to top me off and I said yes, liking the way the wine made me feel weightless and calm. The next thing I remember was the siren rousing me from sleep.
I must have fallen asleep on the love seat. Will must have helped me to bed.
“Dr. Foust?” the officer asks.
“Will and I were here,” I tell him. “Watching TV. The evening news and then The Late Show. The one with Stephen Colbert,” I say as Officer Berg transcribes my words onto a tablet with his stylus. “Isn’t that right, Will?” I ask, and Will nods his head and confirms that I am right. It was The Late Show. The one with Stephen Colbert.
“And after The Late Show?” the officer asks, and I say only that after The Late Show we went to bed.
“Is that right, sir?” Officer Berg asks.
“That’s right,” Will says. “It was late,” he tells the officer. “After The Late Show, Sadie and I went to bed. She had to work in the morning and I, well,” he says, “I was tired. It was late,” he says again, and if he notices the redundancy, he doesn’t show it.
“What time was that?” Officer Berg asks.
“Must’ve been around twelve thirty,” I say because even though I don’t know for sure, I can do the math. He makes note of this, moving on, asking, “Have you seen anything out of the ordinary over the last few days?”
“Such as?” I inquire, and he shrugs, suggesting, “Anything unusual. Anything at all. Strangers lurking about. Cars you don’t recognize, cruising by, surveilling the neighborhood.”
But I shake my head and say, “We’re new here, Officer. We don’t know many people.”
But then I remember that Will knows people. That when I’m at work all day, Will has been making friends.
“There was one thing,” Will says, speaking up all of a sudden. The officer and I turn to him at the same time.
“What’s that?” asks Officer Berg.
But just as soon as he’s said it, Will tries to renege. He shakes his head. “Never mind,” he says. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I’m sure it means nothing, just an accident on my part.”
“Why don’t you let me decide,” Officer Berg says.
Will explains, “There was a day not so long ago, a couple of weeks maybe. I’d taken Tate to school and headed out on a few errands. I wasn’t gone long, a couple of hours, tops. But when I came home, something was off.”
“How so?”
“Well, the garage door was up, for one. I would’ve bet my life I put it down. And then, when I came inside, I was nearly knocked over by the smell of gas. It was so potent. Thank God the dogs were okay. Lord only knows how long they’d been breathing it in. It didn’t take long to find the source. It was coming from the stove.”
“The stove?” I ask. I tell Will, “You didn’t tell me this.” My voice is flat, composed, but inside I feel anything but.
Will’s voice is conciliatory. “I didn’t want you to worry for nothing. I opened the doors and windows. I aired the house out.” He shrugs and says, “It probably wasn’t even worth mentioning, Sadie. I shouldn’t have brought it up. It had been a busy morning. I was making French toast. Tate and I were running late. I must have left the burner on in a mad scramble to get out the door on time. The pilot light must have blown out.”
Officer Berg dismisses this as an accident. He turns to me now. “But not you, Doctor?” he asks. “You haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary?” I tell him no.
“How did Mrs. Baines seem the last time you spoke to her, Doctor?” Officer Berg asks me now. “Was she...?” he begins, but I stop him there and explain that I don’t know Morgan Baines. That we’ve never met.
“I’ve been busy since we arrived,” I say, apologizing, though there’s really no need to. “I just never found the time to stop by and introduce myself,” I tell him, thinking—though I don’t dare say it; that would be insensitive—that Morgan Baines also never found the time to stop by and introduce herself to me.
“Sadie’s schedule is fast and furious,” Will interjects, so that the officer doesn’t judge me for not making friends with the neighbors. I’m grateful for this. “She works long shifts, nearly every day of the week, it seems. My own schedule is the opposite. I teach only three courses, which overlap with Tate’s school schedule. It’s intentional. When he’s here, I’m here. Sadie’s the breadwinner,” Will admits with no indignity, no shame. “I’m the stay-at-home dad. We never wanted our children to be raised by a nanny,” he says, which was something we came up with long ago, before Otto was born. It was a personal choice. From a financial standpoint, it made sense that Will would be the one to stay home. I made more money than him, though we never talked about things like that. Will did his part; I did mine.
“I spoke to Morgan just a couple of days ago,” he says, answering the officer’s question for me. “She seemed fine, well enough at least. Their hot water heater was on the fritz. She was waiting on a repairman to see if it could be fixed. I tried to fix it myself. I’m handy enough,” he says, “just not that handy.
“Do you have any leads?” Will asks, changing topics. “Any signs of forced entry, any suspects?”
Officer Berg flips through his tablet and tells Will that he can’t reveal too much just yet. “But,” he tells Will, “what I can say is Mrs. Baines was killed between the hours of ten and two last night,” and there, on the arm of the sofa, I sit up straighter, staring out the window. Though the Baineses’ home is just out of view from where I sit, I can’t help but think about how last night as we were here, drinking wine and watching TV, she was there—just beyond my viewpoint—being murdered.
But that’s not all.
Because every night at eight thirty in the evening, the last ferry leaves. Which means that the killer spent the night among us, here on the island.
Officer Berg stands up quickly, startling me. I gasp, my hand going to my heart.
“Everything all right, Doctor?” he asks, gazing down at me, trembling.
“Fine,” I tell him. “Just fine.”
He runs his hands down the thighs of his pants, straightening them. “I suppose we’re all a bit jumpy today,” he tells me, and I nod my head and agree.
“Anything Sadie and I can do,” Will tells Officer Berg as he walks him to the front door. I rise from my seat and follow along. “Anything at all, please let us know. We’re here to help.”
Berg tips his hat at Will, a sign of gratitude. “I appreciate that. As you can imagine, the entirety of the island is on edge, people fearful for their lives. This kind of thing doesn’t bode well for tourism either. No one wants to visit when there’s a murderer on the loose. We’d like to get this wrapped up as quickly as we can. Anything you hear, anything you see...” he says, voice drifting, and Will says, “I understand.”
The murder of Morgan Baines is bad for business.
Officer Berg says his goodbyes. He hands Will a business card. He’s about to leave, but before he does, he has one last inquiry.
“How’s the house treating you?” he asks off topic, and Will replies that it’s been all right.
“It’s dated and, as dated things go, has issues. Drafty windows, a faulty furnace that we’ll need to replace.”
The officer grimaces. “A furnace isn’t cheap. That’ll run you a few grand.”
Will tells him he knows.
“Shame about Alice,” Officer Berg says then, meeting Will’s eye. Will echoes his sentiment.
It isn’t often that I broach the subject of Alice with Will. But there are things I find myself wanting to know, like what Alice was like, and if she and I would have gotten along if we’d ever had the chance to meet. I imagine that she was antisocial—though I’d never say that to Will. But I think that the pain of fibromyalgia would have kept her at home, away from a
ny sort of social life.
“I never would have pegged her for the suicide type,” Officer Berg says then and, as he does, I get the sense that my instinct was wrong.
“What does that mean?” Will asks, a hint of defensiveness in his voice.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Officer Berg says, though clearly he does because he goes on to tell us how Alice, a regular at Friday night bingo, was affable and jolly when he saw her. How she had a smile that could light up a room. “I guess I just never understood how a person like that winds up taking their own life.”
The space between us fills with silence, tension. I don’t think he meant anything by it; the man is a bit socially awkward. Still, Will looks hurt. He says nothing. I’m the one to speak. “She suffered from fibromyalgia,” I say, realizing Officer Berg must not know this, or maybe he’s one of those people who think it’s more of a mental disorder than a medical one. Fibromyalgia is highly misunderstood. People believe it’s made up, that it isn’t real. There is no cure, and, on the surface, a person appears to be fine; there’s no test that can be used to diagnose fibromyalgia. Because of this, the diagnosis is based on symptoms alone—in other words, widespread pain that can’t otherwise be explained. For this reason, a large portion of physicians themselves question the credibility of the condition, often suggesting patients see a psychiatrist for treatment instead. It makes me sad to think about, Alice in so much pain and no one believing it.
“Yes, of course,” Officer Berg says. “It’s such a terrible thing. She must have really been hurting to do what she did,” he says, and again, my eyes go to Will. I know that Officer Berg doesn’t mean to be rude; in his own awkward way, he’s offering his sympathy.
