The Other Mrs.

by Mary Kubica

  What I don’t say is that on our turf, we’d have the upper hand. I’d feel a sense of control over Imogen that I don’t feel now.

  “Leave and go where?” Will asks, but it seems so obvious to me, the way that our fresh start isn’t so fresh after all. Our stay in Maine has been stormy, to say the least. If anything, our lives have gotten worse since being here.

  “Home,” I tell him, but he only asks, “Where is home anymore, Sadie?” and at those words, my heart aches.

  Our Chicago condo, the one where Will and I spent our entire married lives until now, is gone, sold to a couple of millennials. My job at the hospital is gone, too, no doubt replaced with some young recent med school grad. Otto can never return to his public school, nor Tate to his, not because of anything he did, but because he’s guilty by association. They’d both need to go to some private school, and on Will’s salary alone—assuming he could even get his old job back—that would never work.

  When I say nothing, Will says, “Let’s talk about this when I get home,” and I say okay. I end the call and make my way into the kitchen to start the teakettle. As I cross into the kitchen, I see our knives and am stricken with a morbid curiosity to see for myself what a boning knife is, what one looks like, to hold it in my hand. Will has a set of knives he keeps in a wooden block on the counter, just out of reach of Tate’s inquisitive hands.

  I go to the block. I don’t know what a boning knife is, but an internet search tells me I’m looking for an arched blade with a very sharp point, five to nine inches long. I yank on the handles of the knives, pulling them out in turn to examine their blades. It doesn’t take long to see that there’s no knife matching the description in the block. Furthermore, I see that one space on the wooden block is empty. This set of twenty-one knives only contains twenty. One knife is gone.

  My imagination gets the best of me. I try to stay calm, sensible, remembering again about Occam’s razor. Maybe some other knife belongs here. Maybe Will doesn’t own a boning knife. Maybe the missing knife is in the sink, though I look and it’s not. Maybe Will lost that knife long ago, or it got placed in the cutlery drawer by mistake. I pull open the drawer, rifle through Alice’s modest collection of knives—steak and dinner knives mostly, a paring knife, one with a serrated edge—but it’s not there.

  I think of Imogen in our bedroom at night. You hear stories about children murdering their parents in the middle of the night. It happens; it’s not that far-fetched. And Imogen is a hostile girl, a damaged girl. I don’t know that I’d put it past her to take that knife to threaten me with, or worse.

  I turn and step from the kitchen. I climb the steps to the second floor, my slick hand gripping the banister. I go to her room, planning to search it as I did the other night, but my plan is quickly derailed when I come to her door and realize there’s no getting in without the padlock key.

  I curse, shaking on the door handle. I try another call to Will to tell him about the missing knife, but he’s on his way home now, likely on the ferry, where reception is spotty. My call doesn’t go through. I put my phone away, relieved to know that he’ll be home soon.

  I find something to keep myself busy. I dust the house. I strip the sheets from the beds. I start to gather them in a pile to lug down to the laundry room.

  In our bedroom, I tug on the fitted sheet. As I do, something black comes skidding out from my side of the bed, something that had been wedged between the mattress and the bed frame for some time. As the object slews halfway across the bedroom floor, my first instinct is to think it’s the remote control for the bedroom TV we rarely use. I go to pick it up. As I do, I realize that it’s not a remote, but rather a phone, one which is neither Will’s nor mine. I turn it over in my hands. There’s nothing discernible about it. It’s simply a phone, an older generation iPhone. Perhaps Alice’s, I think, noting that the phone is not-surprisingly dead. Alice herself has been dead for quite some time. Of course the phone would be dead, too.

  Back downstairs in a drawer full of gadgets, I find a charger that fits. I plug it into an outlet in the living room wall, stretching the phone to the fireplace mantel.

  I go back to straightening the house until Will arrives soon after with Tate in tow. I greet them in the foyer, and Will sees it in my eyes straightaway: something is wrong.

  Both he and Tate are wet with snow. It’s on their coats, on their hair, melting quickly. Tate stomps it from his feet, creating a puddle on the wood. He’s trying to tell me a story about something that happened at school today, something he learned. He starts to sing a song but I’m not listening, and neither is Will.

  “Take your shoes off,” Will tells him, before helping Tate out of his coat. He hangs it from the hook in the darkened foyer, and it occurs to me that I should turn on a light, but I don’t.

  “Do you like it, Mommy?” Tate asks about the song. “Days of the week, days of the week, days of the week,” he sings in tune to The Addams Family theme song, clapping twice between each line. Though I hear him, I don’t reply. “Do you like it?” he asks, louder this time, nearly screaming.

  I nod my head, but I’m just barely listening. I hear his song, but my mind can’t process it because all I’m thinking about is the missing knife.

  Tate doesn’t like the brush-off. His posture shifts; he throws his arms across himself and begins to pout.

  Will turns to me, wrapping his arms around me. It feels good, being held.

  “I’ve looked into home security systems,” he tells me, returning to the conversation we started on the phone earlier today, about whether or not we’re safe here. “I set up an appointment to have one installed. And let’s give Officer Berg a chance to get to the bottom of this, before we cut and run. This is our home, Sadie. Whether we like it or not, for now this is our home. We have to make do.”

  I pull back from his embrace. He’s trying to be reassuring. But I don’t feel reassured. I meet his eye, and ask, “But what if a security system can’t protect us?”

  His look is quizzical. “What do you mean?” he asks.

  “What if there’s a threat inside our home?”

  “You mean as if someone got past the security system?” he asks, assuring me that we could keep the house armed at all times, that these things are monitored twenty-four hours a day. If the alarm was triggered, help would be on its way almost instantly.

  “It’s not an intruder I’m thinking about,” I say. “It’s Imogen.”

  Will shakes his head, disbelieving. “Imogen?” he asks, and I say yes. “You can’t possibly think—” he begins, but I interrupt him.

  “Our k-n-i-f-e,” I tell him, spelling the word out for Tate’s benefit. Tate can spell, but not well enough. “Our boning k-n-i-f-e isn’t here. I can’t find it,” I say, admitting in a forced whisper, “She scares me, Will.”

  I think about her in our bedroom the other night, watching us sleep. The strange exchange we had in the hallway. The photograph of her dead mother that she carries around on her phone. These are abnormal behaviors.

  And then there’s the padlock on her bedroom door. “There’s something in there she doesn’t want us to find,” I say, finally admitting to him that I was in there the other day, before the lock was installed. I tell him about the picture I found with the man’s face scratched off, the Dear John note, the condoms. “She’s been sleeping with someone,” I tell him. “A married man, I think,” based on the content of the note.

  Will doesn’t say much to this. He’s more disappointed that I would violate her privacy by snooping through her room. What he does say, however, is that there’s nothing criminal about sleeping with a married man. “She’s sixteen,” Will reminds me. “Sixteen-year-olds do stupid things all the time. You know why she put that lock on the door?” Will asks, saying before I can reply, “She’s a teenager, Sadie. That’s why. She doesn’t want people coming into her room. How would you feel if she wen
t snooping through your stuff?” he asks.

  “It wouldn’t matter,” I tell him. “I have nothing to hide. But Imogen is an angry girl with a short fuse, Will,” I argue. “She worries me.”

  “Try putting yourself in her shoes, Sadie. You don’t think you’d be angry?” he asks, and of course I’d be grieving and uncomfortable—my mother dead by her own hand, me forced to live with people I don’t know—but would I be angry? “We have no idea what Imogen saw that day,” he asserts. “If we’d seen what she must have seen, we’d be on a short fuse, too. You can’t unsee that.

  “Besides,” Will tells me, coming back to the knife, “I used the boning knife just the other day to skin chicken for a casserole. You’re all worked up for nothing, Sadie,” he says, asking if I checked the dishwasher for the knife. I didn’t. I didn’t even think to look in the dishwasher.

  But it doesn’t matter right now, because my mind has moved on from the knife and to the picture on Imogen’s cell phone. The one of Alice dead. I know exactly what Imogen saw the day her mother died, though I’m reluctant to tell Will because the last thing he needs to see is what Alice went through. And yet I tell him anyway because it isn’t right, it isn’t normal, for Imogen to have taken a picture of Alice postmortem and for her to be carrying it around. What is she doing with it anyway? Showing her friends?

  I look away from Will. I confess to him that I do know what Imogen saw. “Imogen took a picture that day before the coroner took Alice away. She showed it to me,” I say.

  Will grows suddenly silent for a moment. He swallows hard.

  “She took a picture?” he asks after some time. I nod. “What did she look like?” he asks, meaning Alice.

  I’m generally nondescript. “Well, she was d-e-a-d,” I tell him, treading lightly. “But she looked peaceful,” I lie. I don’t tell him about claw marks, the severed tongue. I don’t tell him about the state of the attic, the toppled storage boxes, the broken lamp, the pitchpoled telescope. But I re-create them in my mind, imagining Alice’s thrashing body knocking into these things, toppling them, as her oxygen supply was siphoned off.

  As I dredge up the images of them, something gets under my skin. Because I picture the boxes and the lamp overturned, and yet the step stool—the one Alice used to raise herself up to the height of the noose—stood upright. I remember that now.

  How could the very thing that Alice would have needed to kick away to go through with the suicide not be overturned?

  Even more, the stool was out of reach of Alice’s body. Which makes me think someone else yanked it from beneath her feet.

  In which case, was it even a suicide? Or was it murder?

  I turn white. A hand goes to my mouth. “What’s wrong?” Will asks. “Everything all right?” I shake my head, tell him no, I don’t think so.

  “I just realized something,” I say, and he asks with urgency, “What?”

  “The picture of Alice. On Imogen’s phone,” I say.

  “What about it?” he asks.

  “The police hadn’t come yet when Imogen took the picture. It was only Imogen,” I say, wondering how much time lapsed in between her arriving home and calling the police. Was it enough time for Imogen to stage a suicide? Imogen is tall, but she’s not heavily built. I can’t imagine she’d have had the strength to haul Alice to the third floor—even if Alice was drugged and unconscious, unable to fight back—to hoist her up and into the noose. Not alone. Someone would have had to help her. I consider the friends she smokes with while waiting for the ferry to arrive. Clad in all black, rebellious and oppositional, full of self-loathing. Would they have helped?

  “In the picture, Will, the step stool we found in the attic. The one Alice would have had to use to do what she did. Everything else was knocked over. But the stool remained upright. And it was too far away for Alice to reach. If she’d been alone, the stool would have been knocked over, and it would have been much closer to her feet.”

  He shakes his head. “What are you getting at?” he asks, and I see a change come over him. His posture shifts. Ruts form between his eyes. He frowns at me. He knows what I’m suggesting.

  “How can we know for certain,” I ask, “that it was a s-u-i-c-i-d-e? There was no investigation. But there was also no note. Don’t people who k-i-l-l themselves usually leave a note? Officer Berg said it himself, remember? He told us he never pegged Alice for the type.”

  “How would Berg know,” Will asks angrily, “if Alice was the suicide type?” It isn’t like Will to get angry. But this is his sister we’re talking about. His niece. His flesh and blood.

  “I don’t trust Imogen,” I admit. “She scares me,” I say again.

  “Listen to yourself, Sadie,” Will says. “First you accuse Imogen of taking our knife. Now you’re saying she killed Alice.” Will is too worked up to spell the words out, though he mouths them for Tate’s benefit. “You’re all over the place. I know she hasn’t exactly been welcoming, but she’s done nothing to lead me to believe she’s capable of murder,” he says, seemingly having already forgotten about the writing on my car window just the other day. Die.

  “Are you really suggesting that this was a murder made to look like a suicide?” he asks, disbelieving.

  Before I can reply, Tate again begs, “Please, Mommy, play with me.” My eyes drop to his, and they look so sad, my heart aches.

  “All right, Tate,” I tell him, feeling guilty that Will and I are going on like this, ignoring him. “What do you want to play?” I ask him, voice softening though my insides are still in a tizzy. “Do you want to play charades, or a board game?”

  He tugs hard on my hand and is chanting, “Statue game, statue game!”

  The wrenching on my hand has begun to hurt. It’s wearing on my nerves, because not only is he pulling on my hand, hurting me, but he’s trying to turn my body, to make it go ways it doesn’t want to go. It’s subliminal, the way I yank my hand suddenly away, holding it above my head, out of reach of his. I don’t mean to do it. But there’s an immediacy to it. So much so that Tate flinches like he’s been slapped.

  “Please, Mommy,” Tate begs, eyes suddenly sad as he stands before me and leaps for my hand. I try to be patient, I really do, but my mind is whirling in a dozen different directions and I don’t know what Tate means by this statue game. He’s begun to cry. Not a real cry but crocodile tears, which wear on me even more.

  That’s when I catch sight of the doll I kicked aside over an hour ago. Her limp body is pressed against the wall. “Put your toys away and then we’ll play,” I tell him, and he asks, “What toys?”

  “Your doll, Tate,” I say, losing patience. “Right there,” I tell him, motioning to the floppy doll with her frizzy hair and marble-like eyes. She lies on her side, dress torn along a seam, one shoe missing.

  Tate’s look is leery. “It’s not mine,” he says, as if this is something I should know. But of course it’s his—it’s not like any of the rest of us still play with toys—and my first thought is that Tate is embarrassed for having been caught playing with a doll.

  “Put it away,” I say, and Tate comes back with a quintessential childish reply.

  “You put your doll away,” he says, hands on hips, tongue thrust out at me. It startles me. It’s not like Tate to act this way. Tate is my good boy, the kind and obedient one. I wonder what’s gotten into him.

  But before I can answer, Will does so for me. “Tate,” he says, voice stern. “Do as your mother says and put your toy away. Right now,” he says, “or your mother won’t play with you.”

  Having no choice, Tate picks the doll up by a single leg and carries her upside down to his bedroom. Through the floors, I hear the thump of her plastic head hitting the hardwood.

  When he returns, Tate chants, “Statue game, statue game,” over and over again until I’m forced to admit that I don’t know what this statue game is. That I’ve ne
ver played it before, that I’ve never heard of it.

  It’s then that he snaps and calls me a liar. “Mommy is a liar!” is what he screams, taking my breath away. He says, “Yes, you do!” as his crocodile tears turn to real tears. “You do know what it is, you liar.”

  I should reprimand him, I know. But I’m speechless and stunned. For the next few seconds, I can’t find the words to speak as Tate scampers from the room, bare feet sliding on the wooden floors. Before I can catch my breath, he’s gone. In the next room, I hear his body drop to the ground. He’s thrown himself down somewhere, as limp as the doll. I do nothing.

  Will steps closer, his hand brushing the hair from my eyes. I close my eyes and lean into his touch. “Maybe a warm bath would help you relax?” he suggests, and it’s only then that I remember I haven’t showered today. That instead I’m wet through from the run in the rain. My clothes, my hair have yet to completely dry. There’s a smell to me. It’s not a good one.

  “Take your time,” Will tells me. “Tate and I will be fine. I’ll take care of this,” he says, and I feel grateful for that. That Will will clean up this mess I’ve made with Tate. By the time I return from my bath, everything will be as good as new.

  On the way upstairs I call back to Tate that we’ll play something just as soon as I’m through. “Okay, buddy?” I ask, leaning over the banister where I see him, body thrown across the arm of the sofa, tears seeping into the marigold fabric. If he hears me, he makes no reply.

  Beneath my feet, the steps creak. Upstairs in the hall, I find the sheets stripped from the beds, just where I left them. I’ll replace them later, put them back on the beds just as dirty as they were when I took them off.

  The darkness of the outside world seeps into the home, making it hard to believe it’s not the middle of the night. I flip a light in the hallway on, but then just as quickly turn it off, on the off chance that someone is standing in the street, staring through the windows at Will, Tate and me.