The Other Mrs.

by Mary Kubica

  “I believe so,” I say. “Yes. It had blood on it.”

  “Where is the knife now, Doctor?”

  “It’s in my backyard.”

  “You left it there?”

  “I did.”

  “Did you touch it?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Whereabouts in your backyard?” he asks, and I try to describe it for him, though I imagine that by now the knife is engulfed in snow.

  “And what about this washcloth? Where is that?”

  “Under the washing machine. In the laundry room,” I tell him. He asks if there’s blood on that still, too, and I say yes. He excuses himself and leaves the room. For nearly thirty seconds he’s gone, and when he comes back, he tells me that Officer Bisset is going to my home to retrieve the washcloth and knife. I say to him, “My son is home,” but he assures me that’s all right, that Officer Bisset will be in and out quickly. That he won’t bother Otto.

  “But I think, Officer,” I start and then just as soon stop. I don’t know how to say this. I pick at the rim of the disposable cup, pieces of foam coming with me, gathering in a pile on the tabletop like snow.

  And then I come right out and say it. “I think maybe my son murdered Mrs. Baines,” I say. “Or maybe Imogen did.”

  I expect more of a reaction. But instead he goes on, as if I didn’t just say those words aloud.

  “There’s something you should know, Dr. Foust,” he says, and I ask, “What’s that?”

  “Your husband...”

  “Yes?”

  “Will—”

  I hate this way he beats around the bush. It’s utterly maddening. “I know my husband’s name,” I snap, and for a moment he stares at me, saying nothing.

  “Yes,” he says in time. “I suppose you do.”

  A beat of silence passes by. All the while, he stares at me. I shift in my seat.

  “When he called, he retracted his earlier statement about the night Mrs. Baines was killed. About how the two of you were watching TV and then went straight to bed. According to your husband, that’s not entirely true.”

  I’m taken aback. “It’s not?”

  “It’s not. Not according to Mr. Foust.”

  “What did Mr. Foust say happened?” I churlishly ask as voices come through on the police scanner, loud but indistinct. Officer Berg goes to it, turning the volume down so that we can speak.

  He returns to his chair. “He said that that night, after your program ended, you didn’t go to bed like you said. He said you walked the dogs instead. You took the dogs for a walk while he went up to the bedroom to wash up. You were gone quite some time, your husband said.”

  I feel something inside of me start to shift.

  Someone is lying. But I don’t know who.

  “Is that right?” I ask.

  “That’s right,” he says.

  “But that’s not true,” I argue. I don’t know why Will would say this. There’s only one thing that I can think. That Will would do anything to protect Otto and Imogen. Anything at all. Even if it means throwing me to the wolves.

  “He said you took the dogs for a walk, but as time went on and you didn’t come home, he started to worry about you. Especially when he heard the dogs barking. He looked outside to see what was the matter. When he did, he found the dogs out there but not you. You left the dogs in the yard when you went over to the Baineses’ home that night, didn’t you?”

  My stomach drops. There’s the sensation of free-falling, of plummeting down the first hill of a roller coaster, organs shifting inside of me.

  I say, enunciating each word at a time, “I didn’t go to the Baineses’ home that night.”

  But he ignores this. He goes on as if I didn’t even speak. He starts speaking of Will on a first-name basis. He is Will and I am Dr. Foust.

  Officer Berg has chosen sides. He isn’t on mine.

  “Will tried you on your cell phone. You didn’t answer. He started thinking that something terrible had happened to you. He hurried to the bedroom to put his clothes on so he could go searching for you. But just as he was about to panic, you came home.”

  Officer Berg pauses for breath. “I have to ask you again, Doctor. Where were you between the hours of ten and two on the night that Mrs. Baines was killed?”

  I shake my head, saying nothing. There’s nothing to say. I’ve told him where I was, but he no longer believes me.

  Only now do I realize that Officer Berg has carried a large envelope into the room with him. All the while it’s sat on the table, just out of reach. He stands and reaches for it now. He slips a finger beneath the flap to open it up. Berg begins to lay photographs on the table for me to see. They’re truly heinous, growing more ghastly with each image he draws out. The images have been enlarged, eight by ten inches at least. Even when I avert my eyes I see them. There’s a photograph of an open door—doorjamb and latch intact. Of sprays of blood trickling down the walls. The room is strikingly tidy, which makes me think there wasn’t much of a scuffle. The only things out of place are an umbrella stand, which lies on its side, and a framed photograph, hanging cockeyed as if it got elbowed in the fracas.

  At the center of it all lies Morgan. She’s splayed in an uncomfortable position on an area rug, brown hair veiling her face, arms thrown up and over her head as if, in a last-ditch effort, she tried to protect her face from the blade of the knife. A leg looks broken from the fall, bent in a way it’s not meant to go. Her pajamas are on, flannel pants and a thermal top, all of it red, so it’s impossible to see where the blood ends and the pajamas begin. The left leg of her pants is hitched to the knee.

  Small footprints are pressed into the puddles of blood. They lessen in density as they drift away from the body. I envision an officer’s hands luring the little girl away from the dead woman’s body.

  “What I see here, Doctor,” Officer Berg is telling me, “isn’t a sign of a random crime. Whoever did this wanted Morgan to suffer. This was an act of anger and aggression.”

  I can’t tear my eyes away from the photo. They drift over Morgan’s body, the bloody footprints, back to the photograph mounted on the wall, the one that hangs cockeyed. I grab the photograph from the table and bring it to my eyes for a better look at that mounted picture frame, because I’ve seen it before and not so long ago. The way the trees line the street is familiar. There is a family of four. A mother, father and two daughters, roughly the ages of ten and twenty.

  The woman, the mother, in a pretty green dress is set on a bright yellow chair in the center of it, while her family stands around her.

  “Oh God,” I gasp, hand going to my mouth, because this photograph—framed and mounted to Morgan Baines’s wall—is the same as the one in the newspaper article about Erin’s death. The one on my computer. The older girl, nearly twenty years old, is Will’s former fiancée, Erin. It was likely taken just months before she died. The younger girl is her little sister.

  I choke on my own saliva. Officer Berg pats my back, asks if I’m okay. I nod because I can’t speak.

  “It’s not easy to look at, is it?” Officer Berg asks, thinking it’s the dead woman’s body that has me rattled like this.

  I see it now, what I couldn’t see before. Because the woman in the photograph—the mother perched on the chair—is older now. Her brown hair is now gray, and she’s lost a significant amount of weight. Too much weight, in fact, so that she’s gaunt.

  It’s utterly impossible. It’s too hard to digest. This can’t be.

  The woman in this photograph is Morgan’s mother. The woman I met at the memorial service. The woman who lost another child years ago and has never been the same since, according to her friends Karen and Susan.

  But I don’t understand it. If this is true, it means that Morgan was Erin’s sister. That Morgan is the little girl in the photograph, the one who’s a
bout ten years old.

  Why didn’t Will tell me about this?

  I think I know why. Because of my own insecurities. What would I have done if I’d learned Erin’s sister was living in such close proximity to us? I realize Will and Morgan’s friendship, their chumminess, it was real. It existed. Because of their shared affinity for the one woman Will loved more than me. Erin.

  The room drifts in and out of focus. I blink hard, trying to get it to stop. Officer Berg teeters on the chair beside me. He doesn’t move; it’s my perception of him that makes him move. It’s all in my head. The edges of his face begin to soften. The room suddenly expands in size, walls widen, moving out. When the officer speaks, his words are nearly extinguished by whatever is going on in my head. I see his lips move. His words are harder to make out.

  The first time he says it, it’s unintelligible.

  “Pardon me?” I ask, speaking loudly.

  “Will told us that you have a tendency toward being jealous and insecure.”

  “He did, did he?”

  “Yes, Dr. Foust, he did. He said he never expected you to act on those feelings. But he also said that you’ve been having a hard time lately. That you’re not quite yourself. He mentioned a panic attack, a forced resignation. You’re not the violent type, not according to Will. But,” he says, repeating his own words, “he says you haven’t been yourself lately.”

  He asks, “Do you have anything to say to that?”

  I say nothing. A headache begins just then, inching up the nape of my neck, stabbing me between the eyes. I clench my eyes shut tight, pressing my fingertips to my temples to dull the pain. I must experience a drop in blood pressure because all at once, it’s hard to hear. Officer Berg is talking, asking if I’m okay. But the words are more muffled than they were before. I’m underwater.

  A door opens and then closes. Officer Berg is speaking to someone else. They found nothing. But they’re conducting a search of my home because Will has given them permission to do so.

  “Dr. Foust? Dr. Foust?”

  A hand shakes my shoulder.

  When my eyes open up, some old guy’s looking at me. He’s practically drooling. I glance at the clock. I look down at my shirt. A blue button-down pajama shirt buttoned all the way up, making me gag. I can barely breathe. She can be such a prig sometimes. I unbutton the top three buttons, let in a little air. “It’s fucking hot in here,” I say, fanning myself, seeing the way he looks at my clavicle.

  “Everything all right?” he asks. He’s got one of those looks on his face, like he’s confused about what he sees. His eyebrows are all scrunched up. He digs the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, makes sure he isn’t seeing things. He asks again if I’m all right. I think I should ask if he’s all right—he seems to be in far more distress than me—but I don’t so much care if he is. So I don’t ask.

  Instead I ask, “Why wouldn’t everything be all right?”

  “You seem, I don’t know, disoriented somehow. You’re feeling okay? I can fetch you some water, if you don’t want your coffee.”

  I look at the cup before me. It’s not mine.

  He just looks at me, saying nothing, staring. I say, “Sure,” about the water. I twirl a strand of hair around my finger, taking in the room around me. Cold, bland, a table, four walls. There’s not much to it, nothing to look at, nothing to tell me where I am. Nothing except for this guy before me, fully decked out in a uniform. Clearly a cop.

  And then I see the pictures on the table beside me.

  “Go on,” I tell him. “Fetch me some water.”

  He goes and comes back again. He gives me the water, sets it on the table in front of me. “So tell me,” he says. “Tell me what happened when you took the dogs for a walk.”

  “What dogs?” I ask. I’ve always liked dogs. People I hate, but I’m quite fond of dogs.

  “Your dogs, Dr. Foust.”

  I get a great big belly laugh out of that. It’s preposterous, ludicrous, him mistaking me for Sadie. It’s insulting more than anything. We look nothing alike. Different-color hair, eyes, a heck of an age gap. Sadie is old. I’m not. Is he so blind he can’t see that?

  “Please,” I say, tucking a strand of hair behind an ear. “Don’t insult me.”

  He does a double take, asks, “Pardon me?”

  “I said don’t insult me.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Foust. I—” But I stop him there because I can’t stand the way he keeps referring to me as Sadie, as Dr. Foust. Sadie would be lucky to be me. But Sadie is not me.

  “Stop calling me that,” I snap.

  “You don’t want me to call you Dr. Foust?”

  “No,” I tell him.

  “Well, what should I call you, then?” he asks. “Would you prefer that I call you Sadie?”

  “No!” I shake my head, insistent, indignant. I tell him, “You should call me by my name.”

  His eyes narrow, homing in on me. “I thought Sadie was your name. Sadie Foust.”

  “You thought wrong, then, didn’t you?”

  He looks at me, words slack as he asks, “If not Sadie, then who are you?”

  I stick a hand out to him, tell him my name is Camille. His hand is cold when he shakes it, limp. He looks around the room as he does, asks where Sadie went.

  I tell him, “Sadie isn’t here right now. She had to go.”

  “But she was just here,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I tell him, “but now she’s not. Now it’s just me.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not following,” he says, asking again if I’m feeling okay, if I’m all right, encouraging me to drink up the water.

  “I’m feeling fine,” I say, drinking the water in one big swig. I’m thirsty and hot.

  “Dr. Foust—”

  “Camille,” I remind him, searching the room for a clock, to see what time it is, how much time I’ve missed.

  He says, “Okay. Camille, then.” He shows me one of the pictures from the tabletop, the one where she’s covered in her own blood, eyes open, dead. “Do you know anything about this?”

  I leave him hanging. Can’t let the cat out of the bag just yet.

  SADIE

  I’m alone in a room, sitting in a chair that backs up to a wall. There isn’t much to the room, just walls, two chairs, a door that’s locked. I know because I’ve already tried leaving. I tried turning the knob but it didn’t turn. I wound up knocking on the door, pounding on the door, calling out for help. But it was all in vain. Because no one came.

  Now the door easily opens. A woman walks in, carrying a teacup in her hand. She comes to me. She sets a briefcase on the floor and helps herself to the other chair, sitting opposite me. She doesn’t introduce herself but begins speaking as if we already know one another, as if we’ve already met.

  She asks me questions. They’re personal and invasive. I bristle in the chair, drawing away from them, wondering why she is asking about my mother, my father, my childhood, some woman named Camille whom I don’t know. In my whole life, I’ve never known anyone named Camille. But she looks at me, disbelieving. She seems to think I do.

  She tells me things that aren’t true, about myself and my life. I get agitated, upset when she says them.

  I ask how she can claim to know these things about me, when I don’t even know them for myself. Officer Berg is responsible for this, for sending her to speak to me, because one minute he was interrogating me in his tiny room, and the next minute I’m here, though I have no idea what time it is, what day it is, and I can’t remember anything that happened in between. How did I get here, into this chair, into this room? Did I walk here myself or did they drug and bring me here?

  This woman tells me that she has reason to believe I suffer from dissociative identity disorder, that alternate personalities—alters, she calls them—control my thoughts, my behavior from time
to time. She says that they control me.

  I take a deep breath, gather myself. “That’s impossible,” I breathe out, “not to mention utterly ridiculous,” I say, throwing my arms up in the air. “Did Officer Berg tell you that?” I ask, getting angry, losing my composure. Is there nothing Berg won’t do to pin Morgan Baines’s murder on me? “This is unprofessional, unethical, illegal even,” I snap, asking who is in charge so that I can demand to speak to him or her.

  She answers none of my questions, but instead asks, “Are you prone to periods of blackouts, Dr. Foust? Thirty minutes, an hour pass that you can’t remember?”

  I can’t deny this, though I try. I tell her that’s never happened.

  But at the same time, I don’t remember getting here.

  There are no windows in this room. There’s no way to get a sense of the time of day. But I see the face of the woman’s watch. It’s upside down, but I see it, the hands in the realm of two fifty, but whether that’s a.m. or p.m. I don’t know. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because I know good and well it was ten, maybe eleven o’clock in the morning when I walked to the public safety building. Which conceivably means that four—or sixteen—hours have passed that I can’t account for.

  “Do you remember speaking to me earlier today?” she asks. The answer is no. I don’t remember speaking to her. But I tell her I do anyway. I claim I remember that conversation quite well. But I’ve never been a good liar.

  “This isn’t the first time we’ve spoken,” she tells me. I gathered as much from her line of questioning, though that doesn’t mean I believe her. That doesn’t mean she isn’t making it all up. “But the last time I was here, I wasn’t speaking to you, Doctor. I was speaking to a woman named Camille,” she says, and then she goes on to describe for me a pushy, garrulous young woman named Camille who is living inside of me, along with a withdrawn child.

  I’ve never heard anything as ridiculous in my whole life.

  She tells me that the child doesn’t say much but that she likes to draw. She says that the two of them, this woman and the child, drew pictures together today, which she shows me, plucking a sheet of paper from her briefcase and handing it to me.