He twisted her hair around so her knees buckled and she had to kneel forward to try to stop the pain. Even so, tears filled her eyes and started streaming down her cheeks. Her lower lip was trembling, and anything she might have been trying to say was lost beneath the blubbering wail of pain coming from her.
“Why don’t you do that for me now, huh?” Alex said. His free hand went down to his crotch as he shifted his hips forward hard enough to knock her head back against the counter. “Why don’t you open wide and suck me dry?”
“… please….”
Alex laughed heartily as he looked down at the top of her head and, grabbing both of her ears, banged her face roughly against his crotch.
“Ah-hah, so you do want it! Don’t you? You want it so bad you’re beggin’ for it? Come on, then. Let’s do it! Let’s fuckin’-A do it!”
He released his grip on her hair and reached down to start unbuckling his belt. As soon as she was free, though, Debbie twisted to one side and started scrambling away from him on her hands and knees. Alex laughed, thinking she looked like a cat, trying to get traction on a slick tile floor. With a shout of rage, he grabbed her arm and tried to yank her to her feet, but she was dead weight and slipped from his grasp. She flopped back against the cupboard, her head lolling to one side as if her neck was no longer connected. Her lips moved. She seemed to be trying to say something as she looked vacantly up at him, but her voice was nothing but a strangled rattle in the back of her throat. A yellowish foam flecked her lips, which looked pale, almost white.
Alex took a step away from her to get better footing, but his foot slipped on the pizza he had dropped, and he flopped forward, slamming Debbie’s head back against the cupboard door. Pots and pans clattered inside the cupboard. Debbie looked at him, her eyes glazed as she exhaled noisily and silently slouched to one side. Disoriented and angry, Alex grabbed her by the shoulders before she could fall to the floor. He checked his footing and then, before he could think clearly about what he was doing, lifted her up to the level of the counter top and slammed her head hard against the edge. There was a heavy, crackling thud that sounded in Alex’s ears like a bagful of broken glass hitting the floor.
“There, goddamnit!” he shouted.
Panting heavily, he stood up and let her body slide back slowly onto the floor. He brushed his hands together, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he grinned viciously down at her. He hadn’t yet noticed the bright splash of blood that had squirted across the counter top.
“There, by Jesus! That’ll fuckin’ teach you to try ’n fuck with me, you bitch!”
He took a deep breath, and when his vision cleared, he saw the blood. An icy jolt traveled up his back to the base of his neck. Leaning forward, he looked closely and, without touching it, saw the deep, triangular indentation just above Debbie’s left ear. Pearly gray fragments of bone stuck out like teeth from underneath her hair, which was clotted with a thick wash of blood that dripped down onto her neck and shoulder, then to the floor.
“Oh, Jesus,” Alex muttered as he straightened up and took several unsteady steps backwards. He could see that Debbie wasn’t breathing, and her eyes were wide open, staring blankly at the floor.
“Oh, Jesus! … Oh, shit!”
3
“Well,” Detective Murray said solemnly, “we have reports from your neighbors on both sides of your house that they heard you and your wife arguing earlier tonight.”
Alex nodded agreement. He was sitting on the edge of a metal folding chair, his hands tight fists in his lap. The air-conditioner was running on high, so the squad room seemed arctic cold. At this late hour, the police station echoed with a deserted hollowness. He could see by the large clock on the wall that it was well past three o’clock in the morning. His head was pounding from all the beers he’d had that evening, but after the last two hours of interrogation, he thought he was completely sobered up. He would use the pain to help bring tears to his eyes. His body was trembling, and his breathing was high and fast. He hoped to hell the detective asking him these questions over and over would take all of this as proof that he was completely broken up over his wife’s senseless fatal accident. He had watched in numbed silence as the ambulance crew strapped her to the stretcher and wheeled her from the kitchen. One side of the sheet covering her face had a bright red splotch that had looked almost like a rose. As much as he hated to, for the sake of appearances he had to call Debbie’s sister and ask her to come over and stay with the kids while he went down to the police station and explained what had happened.
“Yeah, we’d had an argument,” Alex said. His voice was strained and raw. “About money. What else do married people argue about? Yesterday afternoon, she’d spent some of this week’s grocery money on sneakers for the kids, and I had thought she spent a little too much, so I kind of freaked out a little.”
“So tell me again—exactly—what happened?”
Alex took a shuddering breath and sighed. “Well, I called her from work, to tell her I was going out for a few drinks with some friends—”
“To the strip joint on Morrison Ave—Mark’s Showplace, correct?”
Alex nodded.
“She told me then that she had spent the money, and I got a little hot under the collar at her. We didn’t have an argument then or anything.”
“You mean over the phone.”
“Yeah. I just said something like we’d talk about it when I got home.”
“So then, when you came home—around midnight, right?”
Alex nodded and sniffed.
“Once you got home, that’s when you started arguing, right?”
Alex felt a flush of anger rise under his collar. He hated the way this detective was grinding at him, making him say the same thing over and over again. Shit what was his name? Murphy? Murray? Something like that. He wasn’t thinking straight! How could he keep his story straight if he couldn’t even remember this fucker’s name? The cop had already written everything down in his notebook when he first took his statement. Why the hell did he have to keep at him like this? Alex felt confident that he could hold it together if he could just take his time and think things through. He had to play the shocked, grieving husband, but he was having trouble concentrating with this asshole getting on him like this.
“Well—yeah. Maybe. We’d had some angry words. Nothing major. I mean, I earn a damned good paycheck, working out at the airport, but these days—hell, who can make money stretch far enough, huh? So—yeah. I told her that I thought she had spent a little too much for sneakers, and then she told me she’d also gone out to lunch that afternoon with her sister.”
“And did that upset you?”
Alex fought back the rush of anger he felt just thinking about Cindy, Debbie’s sister, but he was positive it didn’t show. His face remained a twisted, grief-stricken wreck as he squinted his eyes and forced the tears to flow from his eyes.
“Well—yeah, it upsets me that she—” He sniffed and rubbed his nose hard with the back of his hand. “Oh, God! Oh my God! I can’t believe it! I can’t believe that she’s… that she’s—my Debbie! Oh, God! My wife! How can she be dead?”
He slumped forward and, burying his face in his hands, sobbed loudly. He stayed like that for a long while, pretending to try to speak but choking his voice off as though he were strangling with this outpouring of emotion. He kept it up long enough, hoping that the detective would begin to feel uncomfortable watching him fall apart like this. In truth, the only clear thought in his mind was that he had to be careful; he couldn’t let the cop trip him up; he had to be sure to keep his story consistent. Every detail, every word he said would be written down and thrown back at him if the cops ever decided to press charges against him.
“I work real hard for my money,” he said after a while. His face felt slick with tears as he looked back at the detective.
Shit! What was his name? Detective Murray. Yeah! Pete Murray. That was it!
“I busted my ass a
t work that day, and—yeah, maybe I’d had three or four beers with my friends, so I guess I was a little buzzed and might have flown off the handle a bit. Hey, what married couple doesn’t go at it now and then?”
“But you said earlier that you patched things up right away after you let some angry words fly, right? That you and your wife exchanged heated words for—what? Less than five minutes?”
“Not even,” Alex said. Then he covered his mouth with one hand and nodded agreement. He had to bite down hard on his forefinger to keep from crying out or shouting with joy.
Jesus Christ! I can’t believe it! The bitch is finally through fucking up my life!
“When we first got married, you know, one promise we made to each other was we’d never go to bed angry at each other. No matter what problems we were dealing with, we promised to stay up—all night, if we had to—so we could work it out. So—yeah, I was pretty mad there for a moment, but once I calmed down and apologized, we made up.”
“And that’s when your wife went to get some wine glasses from the cupboard? That’s when she fell?”
Again, Alex nodded. He thought back on how he had arranged everything in the kitchen before calling the rescue unit and the police: the flipped-over chair, the broken wine glasses, the skid marks on the floor, and the position of Debbie’s body. He couldn’t help but wonder if there was anything he had overlooked, some tiny, telling detail which the cops, with their high-tech investigation equipment, would eventually discover.
She had… had heated up some pizza for me. In the microwave. And we were going to have a glass of wine together, to—to—”
He covered his face with his hands and once again feigned deep, wrenching sorrow. His shoulders shook as he wailed and uttered nearly incoherent words about how horrible things had turned out, how while he had sat at the kitchen table and started eating the pizza she had cooked for him, Debbie had dragged a chair over so she could reach down her special crystal wine glasses, which she kept on the top shelf in the cupboard so the kids wouldn’t get them. He told Detective Murray—again—how Debbie had leaned too far forward and had started to lose her balance, how the chair legs had skidded on the linoleum, and she had started to fall; how he had jumped up from the table and tried to catch her, but he had dropped his pizza on the floor and had slipped on it and fallen down, missing her; how she had fallen and banged the side of her head hard against the counter top; and how by the time he had gotten to her and cradled her head in his lap—See? There’s a big splotch of her blood here on my pants!—he had known she was already dead.
By the time he had finished sputtering out these details again, he was shivering with forced tears and faked emotion. He wiped his eyes viciously on his shirt sleeves and stared long and hard at the detective, letting his vision shimmer with tears.
“So can I go home now?” Alex said in a voice that was soft and trembling, twisted with emotion. “I… I want to be with my kids. I have to… be there to… to tell them… to explain to them why… why their mommy… isn’t… coming… home… anymore…”
Chapter Two
Suspicions
Throughout Debbie’s funeral, Cindy Toland sat next to Harry, her husband, leaning against him and grasping his hand so hard that at times he had to shake off her grip and flap his own hand to restore the circulation. The cloying smell of flowers and the somber organ music were stifling her, choking her with tight waves of claustrophobia bordering on panic. There was a heavy, muffled pounding deep inside her head, and she knew, tonight, once this was all over, it would blossom into a full-blown headache. Since first learning of her sister’s death, she had cried so long and hard, day and night, that today, the day of her funeral, a typically humid June afternoon in Nebraska, she felt as though she no longer had any tears left to cry. She felt wrung out, as dry as a creek bed in August. She was grateful that Dr. Stott had prescribed a mild tranquilizer for her. It was just barely taking the edge off what otherwise would have been a completely unbearable situation.
The worst aspect of the whole thing for Cindy—apart from missing Debbie and trying like hell to process the thought that her sister was gone and never, never coming back to her—was this feeling of utter loneliness, of complete desertion. It gnawed at her mind like a bloated worm. This same cold, utterly hollow feeling had been with her for three full days, now, ever since that early morning phone call from the police station, informing her of the accident that had claimed her sister’s life. And in all that time, whenever Cindy even thought the word “accident,” which the detective had used repeatedly to describe the incident, she would mentally correct herself and substitute the word “murder.”
Yes, goddamnit, murder! Cindy thought. That’s exactly what that son of a bitch did to her!
More than anyone else in the world, Cindy—with the obvious exception of Debbie’s husband—knew the horrible truth about how Alex had treated Debbie. Even today, she could hardly bear to look at him, all dressed up in his fine, fancy dark suit and looking so sad and serious as he accepted the condolences of his and Debbie’s friends and relatives. Behind the glaze of his tear-filled eyes, she could see the dark curtain that had dropped over what he was really feeling, and she sensed—no, she saw and felt the suspicion and hostility he had for her. She knew the truth, and Alex knew that she knew it!
Cindy’s feelings of anger and outrage rose even higher whenever she thought about Debbie’s two children, Billy and Krissy. Cindy and Harry were seated in the front row of the mourners, right next to the grieving family. Every time she glanced up at her nephew and niece, the tight waves of grief swelling up inside her would grip her throat like a fist and squeeze even harder, choking her until she thought she would have to scream out loud to relieve the building pressure in her head.
Oh, those poor children… those poor, poor kids!
Both children seemed to be trying so hard to hold up in this obviously confusing and scary situation. And they were doing a damned fine job of it, too, Cindy thought. Debbie would have been proud of her kids now. Ten-year-old Billy sat ram-rod straight in his just-a-wee-bit-too-small dark Suit, trying hard not to let his emotions show, even though his eyes were red-rimmed and his lips were pale and trembling. And five-year-old Krissy, with her straw-colored hair the exact color of her mother’s, looked so pretty in a prim, white dress and patent leather shoes—the ones Cindy had bought for her to wear to church on Easter Sunday, not so many weeks ago. Small and delicate, she slouched in her chair, her feet not even reaching the carpeted floor. The hanky she clutched white-knuckled in her hands was saturated from her crying and blowing her nose as her gaze darted nervously around the room, trying to absorb everything.
Jesus, those poor, poor kids… It’s just not fair!
Following a beautiful rendition of “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” by the Omaha First Baptist Church choir, of which Debbie was a member, Reverend Philip Rutherford delivered a heart-rending eulogy about how the accidental death of someone as pure and devout and kind-hearted as Debbie Harris can cause anyone—even a minister of Jesus—to waver in their faith and trust in the Lord’s purpose; but that it was exactly these tests of faith, like the forger’s fire, that strengthen our faith and assure us, like Debbie, of a place in Heaven.
Cindy registered less than half of what the minister was saying. She was caught up in her own bittersweet memories of her younger sister… of growing up together in small-town Aurora, Iowa, until their father’s job changed and they had to move to Omaha during Cindy’s senior year of high school; of sharing the same bedroom and, with only two years difference in their ages, sharing late night talks and secrets about boyfriends right up until Cindy graduated and moved away from home to go to college at the University of Nebraska. She recalled all the fun and sorrow their family went through, especially the support Debbie had given Cindy once she and Harry found out, after years of trying, that she would never be able to have children of her own… of drawing together even closer for emotional support just three
years ago, following their retired parents’ death in a car accident while vacationing in New Mexico. All of these thoughts and more tumbled through Cindy’s mind as the minister droned on and on, saying what sounded to her like silly, superficial things that didn’t even come close to capturing what a beautiful human being her sister had been.
Had been… The thought reverberated in her mind like the slow thundering roll of a drum.
Had been… Debbie doesn’t exist anymore, not on earth and, as far as I’m concerned, not in her minister’s Heaven, either. She’s gone. Gone for good.
“Hey! You hanging in there?” Harry whispered. He nudged Cindy’s arm with his elbow as he slipped his hand from hers and shook it.
Cindy bit down on her lower lip to stop it from trembling as she looked over at him and, blinking back a fresh flood of tears, nodded. As soon as they made eye contact, though, another, stronger wave of loneliness rippled through her.
Why does he even bother to ask? she thought as she shifted her gaze down to the floor. What the hell does he think, that I feel like jumping up and doing a quick tap-dance on my sister’s coffin?
But it wasn’t just that, and in the dense silence of the funeral, another thought that she had been keeping at bay came forward with a vengeance.
He doesn’t even care! Not really! Oh, he pretends that he does and that he wants to be supportive, but he doesn’t really care. No, good-ole Harry’s keeping a nice, safe distance from all of this.
Cindy shivered at the thought and tried to tell herself that this might not actually be the case, but she couldn’t deny the truth. Now that she was being honest with herself in this moment of grief and weakness, she might just as well admit it, that this alienation had been going on since long before Debbie’s accident—
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