The Loyal Wife_A gripping psychological thriller with a twist

by Natalie Barelli

  When he walks in, I spring out of my chair so fast it would have fallen over if it hadn’t been bolted to the floor. I throw my arms around him, but he barely looks at me and gently takes hold of my shoulders, pushing me away.

  “What’s going on?” he asks.

  “Sit down, Mr. Mitchell,” O’Brien says. Reluctantly, Mike takes the only chair available and sits down next to me, but he doesn’t look at me. I turn to O’Brien. “Can I speak to him alone, please?”

  “You must be joking,” she says.

  Cal Shaw tells Mike what I just told them, reading back from his notes. Then he turns to me and asks if I agree with his summary.

  “Yes,” I reply quickly. I want to get it over with. I will Mike to look at me, but he won’t make eye contact. I begin to get an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “Can you confirm your wife’s version of these events?” Shaw asks.

  He does a quick flick of the head, and he says, “This is ridiculous. I’m sorry but I have no idea what she’s talking about.”

  It’s like I’ve been slapped. “What?” I shout, stand up.

  “Tamra, if this young woman had your cell phone number on her, it has nothing to do with me.”

  The room shifts. Tears are prickling against the back of my eyes. “Mike, don’t do this. Please! You said…”

  He turns back to O’Brien. “Detectives, I have nothing more to say. As I told you, I have no idea why my wife has told you these lies about me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I have no words. Maybe I am crazy. Mike has stood up and is buttoning his jacket. “If that’ll be all…” he lets the rest of the sentence trail.

  There’s a bit of paper shuffling and both detectives stand. It looks like they’re all leaving, except me.

  “Am I under arrest?” I ask.

  “We’re not arresting you, Mrs. Mitchell,” O’Brien replies. “But we would appreciate you staying close by. We’ll want to speak with you again.”

  Mike and I don’t speak on the way out. It would be difficult anyway, considering how fast he’s walking, miles ahead of me.

  I get into the car, numb with shock, and he says, through gritted teeth, “I wish you’d waited until I got there. We could have discussed it first, how to approach it.”

  I look at his face. The bags under his eyes. He’s aged so much over the last few days. He has become a hollow version of himself. But he won’t look at me. He just starts the car and we sit, completely silent, while I bite the skin around my fingernails.

  “How could you?” I ask, at last.

  “You need to learn to keep your mouth shut, Tamra.” His jaw is almost trembling with anger. Fiona Martin’s words come back to me. Be careful, Tamra. Watch out for him.

  I turn my head towards him, slowly, deliberately. “A dead woman connected to you has been found with my phone number in her jeans’ pocket. If I’d kept my mouth shut, they’d arrest me. And we agreed. You said to tell them the truth!”

  There’s a crack of lightning, and suddenly the rain that has been threatening all day arrives, heavy and fast, big drops pounding on the windscreen and with it, the feeling of having been wrong, and done wrong, and being wrong, is replaced by a sense of outrage so overwhelming that I can barely breathe.

  He bites the inside of his mouth, distorting one side of his face. We turn into our driveway, the tires crunching on the gravel. He stops the car outside the house but neither of us make a move to get out. The rain stops as suddenly as it came, one of those flash storms with more bark than bite.

  Should I be scared of him? Should I even go inside with him? But then, without looking at me, he murmurs, “I panicked.”

  “What?”

  He leans back against the seat and closes his eyes.

  “Before I went to get you, I called Alex Pace. He advised strongly not to say anything. But I still wanted to tell the truth, I really did, but then, Christ, being there with the cops, seeing you, I panicked.”

  “You panicked?” I shout. “What about me! Where does that leave me!” I grab the fabric of his sleeve with both hands and shake him as hard as I can. He barely moves, and I can’t breathe. The breath won’t go in. I take a great big gulp of air and let go of him. I rub the tears off my cheeks with the back of my hand. “I’m screwed.”

  He turns to me, his eyes pleading and swimming in tears. “I’ll make it up to you, I swear, Tamra. It will be alright, you’ll see.”

  “I covered for you.” All the fight has gone out of me.

  “I know you did. And I’m grateful for that. But we’ve discussed this a hundred times, Tamra. I made a mistake—” he holds up his forefinger, to press the point, “—one mistake, one night, that already could cost me my career. If the police find out that we paid her hush-money to have an abortion, it’s going to make me the prime suspect, don’t you see? I could go to jail!” He says this last bit with a wail almost, and I can no longer look at him. He disgusts me, with his self-pity and complete lack of contrition. Because of his ‘one mistake’, I am a suspect in her murder, our lives had been upended, and all he can think of is his stupid career.

  “It wasn’t one night, Mike. I know you keep saying that and you probably believe it by now, but you screwed that girl all summer, and I know it. You know how I know? Patti told me. And after all that, you’re still going to leave me for some piece of ass. Because of you, this girl is dead, and still I covered for you. Yes Mike, I saw you. And you know what? I still helped you. I could have gone to the cops and told them what you did. You would have been in jail by now, if it wasn’t for me. And you’re going to throw me under the bus because you decided to run for governor and you thought this one mistake, as you call it, would not be a good look. Understandably, since your entire campaign platform is based on some vague ideal of family values which you wouldn’t know the first thing about.”

  I am standing outside of the car, now, ready to slam the door. He leans across the seat and looks up at me, and says, “What did you just say?”

  His face is white, and his lips twitch as his whole face tenses up with anger. I bend down so I can look at him square in the face.

  “You heard me.”

  “Oh, wow, babe. You’re crazy, you know that? You’re really crazy.” He gets out of the car door and slams the door shut. He turns away from me, waving his hands in the air. “You’re nuts. I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Oh really? How very convenient!”

  “Don’t talk to me,” he shouts. “Get the hell away from me! You… You’re threatening me?”

  “I didn’t threaten you,” I shout back. “I stood up for you. I’m the one—”

  “You implied it!” he yells, cutting me off.

  “Oh fuck off, Mike.” He doesn’t hear me; he’s already inside the house. I run after him, trying to get a hold of his shirt, his arm, his leg, as he takes the steps two by two, and just as we get to our bedroom, the door slams in my face, then bounces open again so hard the doorknob hits the wall.

  “You’re angry with me?” I yell, incredulous, my voice shaking with outrage, my entire body trembling with rage.

  “Enough! I don’t want to talk about it anymore!” he hisses in my face.

  I’m livid with anger. “You need to tell them, you got that? You can’t leave things like this and have me take the fall.”

  “I just can’t, okay? You started this, you told the cops, you have to deal with the consequences.”

  He looks at me with such fury, it stops me in my tracks.

  “Things are going to get real wrong for me unless you tell them,” I plead. “Just tell them how she was, how she lured you into a trap. It wasn’t your fault. You said so yourself. They’ll understand, you’ll see. I won’t tell anyone about what you did to her after that. I swear.” The way he stares at me, it’s like he doesn’t know who I am.

  “Are you completely out of your mind?” He opens the door and stands on the landing for just a second, turns to
me, and says, “I don’t even know you anymore.” And I could swear he is frightened. He runs down the stairs so fast that by the time I come to the landing he’s already slammed the front door.

  In one stride I am back inside my bedroom, and with one hand on the doorknob, I pull the door. As it shuts I glance at Madison’s room, just in time to see her door close slowly, just an inch. Just enough to be in a front row seat.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I dream I’m lying on a lounge chair next to a swimming pool. The sun is hot on my skin. The water, blue and sparkling, is beckoning. We’re all laughing; it’s a party. Mike’s there, and I recognize O’Brien and Torres—they’re off to the side playing with a multi-colored beach ball. That’s nice, I think. They work so hard, those two, I’m glad they’re having a break.

  Moira from the Center is sitting on a plastic chair next to Patti. Patti looks nice today, much nicer than usual. She’s got retro sunglasses on, the cat-eye style ones with a tortoiseshell rim, and a red polka dot bikini. They’re chatting away, the two of them, sipping from straws in tall cocktail glasses with little umbrellas sticking out.

  I dive in, and the water is soft and cool. Everything sparkles around me. The small bubbles of water engulf me, and it feels wonderful. But then I see her—the little girl. She's struggling down at the bottom of the pool because her hand is caught in some kind of outlet. She’s panicking, her long blond hair fanning out all around her and at first, I can’t get a grasp of her. Then I see her face and it’s not a little girl anymore, it’s Charlene. She looks up at me, pleading, she’s scared. I manage to pull her out, and I look up to see all the faces looking down, distorted through the water. Charlene emerges, and many hands reach down to pull her out. Everyone is happy, and I want to come up, too, but now my hand is caught. I try to dislodge it, but it’s stuck. I look up, moving my free arm so they’ll see me but no one’s looking. I’m going to drown, and everyone has moved on.

  I wake with a gasp, my heart beating too fast and it takes a moment to breathe free of the dream.

  I did want to save Charlene, just for a moment, that night. That’s why I gave her my phone number. I’m a sucker for misery. Show me an abandoned pet, even a photo of an abandoned pet, and I’ll be making plans to turn my house into a dog rescue paradise. But my feelings of empathy never last very long, since I am fundamentally a very selfish person, and they didn’t last that night, either.

  Know thyself, my mother used to say. I thought she was talking about me back then, but no. She was telling me that she was getting to know herself. And that person she was getting to know was itching to leave it all behind and trade her husband and children for a life of barefoot globetrotting. A kind of life-begins-at-forty revelation, and a realization that it doesn’t have to include anyone else.

  I was twelve years old, my brother Ben was eleven. Our dad fell apart and I kept our little broken family together as I drew upon resources that a girl my age should never have to. I became the cook, the housekeeper, the strong one. I consoled my brother as he sobbed and gasped each night into a pillow wet with tears. Every day I helped with his homework, and when our dad stumbled home drunk from the bar, I hauled him to the sofa and left two aspirins on the coffee table for the morning.

  I stopped going to school, and for a while nobody noticed. I was sick of the pitying stares of my classmates. No one wanted to hang out with me, because nobody likes a loser. Much later, when social services showed up on our doorstep, I made my dad say that I was home-schooled now, and everyone let out a sigh of relief.

  My dad’s dead now, and I can’t say I miss him. I have no idea where Ben is. He was eighteen when they came to repossess the house after dad died.

  “I’ve got myself a scholarship,” he said. “I’m leaving as soon as I can.”

  “Where to?” I asked, confusion clouding my brain.

  “Colorado.” He wouldn’t look at me. He stared at the ground, his hands closed into fists deep in his pockets.

  “What about me?”

  “Sorry,” he said, and shrugged.

  I haven’t seen him since. I didn’t invite him to my wedding, I wouldn’t have known how to reach him anyway, but even if I had, I wouldn’t have wanted him there. He would have stuck out like a dark cloud over my joy.

  All of that to say that I know a thing or two about abandonment, and when I catch the pain of it in someone’s eyes, I can’t help it. I reach out to pull them out of the sea of grief. Someone has to.

  Mike and I had agreed that I shouldn’t tell Charlene I was his wife. We’d never met before, and that would have been too much for both of us, I think. But I did expect to meet a gloating, cynical young woman, hardened certainly, because you don’t run a scam like that without shedding some skin and joy along the way. But instead I found myself staring at a teary, slightly frightened young woman barely out of her teenage years.

  Mike had warned me. “Don’t speak to her. Just drive her, and don’t engage. You have no idea how good she is. She will lie and twist her way into your heart if you let her.” I scoffed at the time, because we were talking about the floozy who fucked my husband, right? If she wanted to get into my heart, she’d have to hacksaw her way in. And yet here I was, feeling sorry for her. And why wouldn’t I? She was so young. She looked nothing like the calculating con artist who snared married men into her evil web.

  She sat quietly in the passenger seat as I drove to the clinic. It was dark at that time of the evening. In spite of Fiona’s questionable investigative skills, it was true that the doctor had agreed to perform the abortion without keeping records, for a substantial fee. My instructions were to bring her in at nine pm, after everyone had left. We drove for thirty minutes in silence, save for the sound of her sniffles. I leaned across her to the glove compartment and pulled a small packet of tissues.

  “Here.” I handed it to her. She took it from me, thanked me in a small voice, and wiped her eyes and nose.

  “It’ll be over soon,” I said, ignoring Mike’s voice in my head. Don’t talk to her. She’ll trick you, just don’t engage.

  “I know,” she replied in a shaking voice. Then she asked, “Do you know him?”

  “Mike?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sort of,” I said, noncommittally.

  She let out a long sigh and leaned back against the headrest, her eyes closed. “I thought we would be together,” she murmured. “I thought that’s what he wanted, a future together,” she added, her voice breaking.

  I wanted to tell her that one night of passion does not make a future, but then I realized that’s not true. It did for her. After all, she was carrying his child. You don’t get much more of a future than that. I squeezed the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white. This girl, this kid, next to me, couldn’t be more than twenty. How could he? It was one thing to let his dick do the thinking, but there were lives at stake here. Her unborn child, for one. This girl’s life was going to be affected for months, maybe years to come.

  “He is married, you know,” I said, although not unkindly.

  “I know,” she replied, still with her eyes closed. I was about to ask why she thought sleeping with married men was ever going to end well, but I stopped myself. Why twist the knife, so to speak. But then she spoke.

  “He doesn’t love her. His wife. He says they have nothing in common. He says she bores him.”

  I felt like I’d been slapped. I gasped and quickly turned to see if she’d noticed, but she was still staring ahead. I felt my heart shatter in a million pieces.

  Did he really say that? What else did he say? The lying, cheating, two-faced piece of dog shit, I wanted to ask. Instead I bit my lip until I drew blood.

  I saw myself in my mind’s eye grabbing his two-timing throat and squeezing, and I kept that image in focus until I’d managed to calm down.

  “You’re going home soon?” I asked, eager to change the conversation.

  She nodded. “I go back Tuesday.” Two days hence.
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  * * *

  The clinic was like a large, one-level house with a porch and a wraparound veranda. It sat in the middle of a secluded park, with lawns and trees providing some kind of privacy, and surrounded by a parking lot. I pulled up and parked right around the corner of the entrance.

  She opened the passenger door and gave me a small smile. “Thank you,” she said.

  “What for?”

  “For these.” She lifted the packet of tissues to show me before placing it in her shoulder bag.

  “Wait,” I blurted. I grabbed the pen that had been rolling around the dashboard and found an old, faded receipt in the space next to the handbrake. I scribbled my cell number and handed it to her. “If you ever need to talk.”

  She took it from me, smiled, and slipped it into the front pocket of her jeans.

  “Thanks, Mrs. M,” she said, giving a small sob. As she turned away her face became briefly lit by the street lamp and I caught her unguarded expression. Her lips were twisted into a sneer. It wasn’t a sob, that noise she’d just made, it was a contemptuous scoff.

  I sat there, watching her back recede, my heart thumping as I tried to process what had just happened. Mrs. M, she called me. She knew all along exactly who I was.

  I felt the tingling of humiliation spread over my face.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I don’t know where Mike went last night—I can only guess—or if he’s coming back, but I can’t stay here anymore. I have this terrible fear that I’m standing on the edge of insanity. I pack a bag, randomly. I have no idea what to take because my brain doesn’t work anymore. It’s broken, just like my heart.

  The suitcase is opened on the bed and I grab a handful of things from my underwear drawer. Then I shove a couple of dresses, a pair of jeans, some shirts, whatever, who cares what I’ll wear? I’ll probably end up in jail, anyway. Maybe I should buy myself an orange jumpsuit, just to get used to it.