“How many men have you killed?” Hen asked.
Matthew slid back in his rocker and picked at the sleeve of his sweater. “I don’t want to talk about that right now.”
“Okay.”
“I want to talk more about my brother.”
“Okay.”
“Have I mentioned him to you before?”
“Just now you did.”
Matthew looked confused, like he’d already forgotten the words he’d just said.
“You said he’s like your father.”
“Richard is, not me,” he said, and something about his phrasing made Hen feel suddenly nervous.
“In what way?” Hen asked.
“He’s like my father, except that . . . as I said, he doesn’t really spend a lot of time with people, besides me, so I never think of him as being dangerous.”
“What does he do?”
“Richard? God, nothing. He says he’s trying to write a book, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Mira doesn’t know, but I support him, financially. I’ve supported him for years. He’s sick, just in his head, but now . . . I’m worried that he might be starting to act out, that he’s getting braver—”
“You think he’s hurt someone?”
“He might have,” Matthew said, and Hen could tell he was holding back on her. “And I think he might hurt someone else. That’s how it works with people like us. We’re fine for a while, but then we get a taste of what it’s like to take a life, and it’s like a door opening, and you can never shut it again, not really. So at least I was able to control it by only killing men that deserved to die, but that’s not how Richard’s mind works. He’s like my father. He wants to hurt innocent women.”
“Maybe you should go to the police.”
Matthew clenched his teeth. “I’ve thought about it, I really have, but you have to understand. He’s still my brother. We survived our childhood together. I don’t know if I can do it to him. I don’t think he’d do well in prison.”
It had stopped raining, but the clouds had gotten darker, and Hen didn’t see the man walking down the street, then turning at their driveway, until he was coming up the steps toward the screen door. For one surreal second she thought it was Matthew’s brother, but the door swung open and Lloyd stepped onto the porch, looking from Hen to Matthew on the rocking chair.
“Hello,” he said.
“You’re early,” Hen said, before she could stop herself.
“You didn’t get my text?”
“Oh, no. My phone’s inside.”
Matthew stood up, and Lloyd turned toward him. “Hi, Matthew,” he said.
“Hi, Lloyd. I just dropped over a few minutes ago. Trying to clear the air, you know?”
Lloyd turned toward Hen and raised his eyebrows. “Okay?”
“I should go, though,” Matthew said. “Nice talking with you, Hen. Nice seeing you, Lloyd.”
He pushed his way through the screen door and walked rapidly to his own house.
Lloyd, still looking at Hen, said, “What the fuck was that about?”
“You’re having an affair with Joanna Grimlund,” Hen replied.
Chapter 30
Back in his office, his sweater damp and his heart still pumping from the sudden appearance of Hen’s husband, Matthew looked again at the envelope his brother had left him. It was still there, as were the keys attached to the plastic M. He’d tried calling Michelle several times that day, her phone always going to voice mail. He’d tried calling his brother as well. No answer.
Matthew knew that all he needed to do was to drive to Country Squire Estates and try the key, see what had happened, if anything, in Michelle’s apartment. If she was dead, then everything had changed, and his brother had finally done what he had been threatening to do for so long. But if he didn’t go, if he didn’t open up the door, Michelle might still be alive, driving to her parents’ house, her phone going straight to voice mail because she wanted to pay attention to the road. That would be like Michelle, wouldn’t it? Maybe if he went to her apartment he’d find nothing there, a clean apartment, Michelle long gone. It wouldn’t be the first time that Richard had pretended he’d done something terrible only to reveal later that he’d been joking. Half joking, anyway, because it was always something that he wanted to do.
But what about the keys? Matthew thought. Where’d he get them from?
Mira called, and for the twenty minutes that they talked, Matthew felt okay, almost normal.
“I miss you,” Matthew said toward the end of the call.
“Everything okay on that end?” Mira asked. “Anything more from the police?”
“Everything’s fine. Is it okay if I just miss you?”
She laughed, and the sound of it made him feel even better. “I’ll be back tomorrow night. Did you get the flight details I sent?”
“I think so,” Matthew said.
“I’ll see you then. And, Matthew . . .”
“Yeah.”
“I love you so much. I want you to know that.”
“I know,” he said.
After the phone call Matthew went to the refrigerator. He wasn’t hungry, but he thought he should eat something. The day had been awful. When he’d arrived at the teachers’ lounge that morning all the talk had been about Michelle’s sudden departure. Matthew got himself a coffee he didn’t really need, while he listened to Sussex Hall’s oldest teacher, Betty, half whisper, “She could have at least met with the sub and gone over her syllabus with her. It would have taken her all of half a day, at most.”
“Her boyfriend was murdered and her father is dying,” Matthew said from across the lounge. Betty and the three teachers she’d been gossiping with all turned and looked at him.
“I’m sorry,” Matthew said. “I’m worried about her, is all.”
“We’re all worried about her,” Betty quickly said. “But I’m also worried about her students’ education.”
Matthew moved through the rest of the day in an agitated haze. He taught his classes, occasionally forgetting the visit from his brother, but then he’d remember, suddenly see that key ring again in his mind, and his stomach would turn. When the day was finally over, Matthew got back into his car, tried calling Michelle—straight to voice mail (“Michelle here. You know what to do.”)—then told himself that he should just drive directly over to her apartment complex, knock on her door. He could almost feel the relief that would come when she pulled the door open. He could hear her voice—“You came! I knew there was a reason I couldn’t get my act together and leave here this morning”—and then he could hear his brother laughing at him later. “You didn’t think I’d really do something like that, did you?” he’d say. “I bought that key ring at the drug store. Been waiting for months to use it on you.” He replayed the scenario twice in his mind, then noticed one of his students, Billy Portis, watching him from across the parking lot. Matthew ignited the engine of his Fiat, wondering if he’d been moving his lips, talking to himself.
Instead of driving to Country Squire, he drove straight home, the wind driving the rain sideways, the inside of his car steaming up. He cracked a window, rain coming in and hitting his face, but the windshield began to clear a little. He parked, instinctively looking toward his neighbors’ house as he got out of the car, and spotted Hen on her porch. She waved at him, and a feeling of relief spread through his body. He’d go talk with Hen, and he could make a decision about Michelle later.
Now, Matthew pulled a ginger ale from the refrigerator, plus two sticks of string cheese wrapped in plastic. He got some Triscuits from the cupboard and brought them with him to the living room couch, where he sat in the dark and ate his supper.
He couldn’t quite believe that he’d told Hen about Richard, but it had felt good to do it. And it wasn’t just that it was liberating for him. If Richard had actually done something to Michelle, then what else was he capable of? He’d mentioned Hen earlier, said how he’d seen her sitting on the porch one night, said he
could see right up her skirt. What else had he said? Something about Hen being “up for it.” At the time Matthew had barely paid attention. It was his brother speaking, his loser brother who was all words and no action. But what if that had finally changed? The thought made Matthew’s stomach hurt worse than it had all day. He made the decision that he needed to go to Michelle’s apartment; he needed to find out one way or another the truth of what had happened.
He checked the time. It was too early to go over to the apartment complex now. Too many people coming and going. He decided to go over at eleven at night, hoping that it would be late enough that no one would see him, but not so late that it would look suspicious if someone did. He went into his office, turned on the small Tiffany lamp by the sofa, and looked at some of the titles on his bookshelf, hoping to find something he could read to kill the next few hours. He touched the spines of his collection of Salinger paperbacks. The Catcher in the Rye was the book that saved him as a thirteen-year-old, the book that finally made him feel okay about the rage he felt toward his parents and toward the world in general. But the book he pulled out now was Franny and Zooey, equally important to him, the book that first made him feel protective toward a girl. When he’d read it, also at the age of thirteen, he’d imagined that he’d fallen in love with the troubled Franny of the first part of the book. He had, in a way. She was his first love, a girl who understood that the world we live in is all bullshit. Opening the frail, musty paperback now and reading the first line—“Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather”—Matthew could feel the tension in his body begin to dissipate. He read the entire book, two long stories, really, then rose from the sofa, returned the book to its place on the shelf, and did some jumping jacks. Reading the book had worked, allowing him to enter a fictional realm for a time, something that had always been easy for him. It was what saved him, he sometimes thought; it was what got him through a childhood in which he’d been trapped in hell, and it was what his office represented now, with its books and talismans. It was a separate world.
It wasn’t quite eleven at night, but Matthew knew it was time to drive to Michelle’s apartment to discover the truth. He changed out of his chinos and sweater into his oldest pair of jeans and a sweatshirt that he only ever wore to do work around the house. He found one of Mira’s fleece ski caps, pulled it on over his hair. If he did get spotted at the apartment, at least he wouldn’t look too much like himself.
He drove to Country Squire, parking again in one of the visitor spots. Michelle drove a gray Honda Civic, and Matthew almost went to look for her car first, but decided against it. Whether her car was here wouldn’t make any difference—he’d still need to see what was in the apartment. The rain had stopped, but the parking lot glistened. The sky was dark purple and starless. The complex comprised two separate L-shaped buildings around a large rectangular pool; it was quiet, most of the windows dark. Any light that leaked from the inside world to the outside world came through curtains or blinds, and most of the light was flickering and erratic, the light from televisions. Walking between the buildings with their cheap stucco siding, Matthew felt drawn to the entrance farther from him, a glass door illuminated by a dim light, a single moth battering dumbly against its side. A console by the side of the door had buzzers for apartment numbers 33 through 64. Matthew pulled the set of two keys from his jeans pocket. Neither had a number on it, but Michelle had told him on the phone to visit her in 41. He nearly pressed the buzzer now, but something stopped him. He needed to know if the keys that Richard had left for him were the keys to this complex. If they were he would have to prepare himself for the worst possible outcome.
The first key he tried on the outside door slid easily into the lock but didn’t turn. Matthew felt a small burst of relief. But the second key, sliding in just as easily, turned and the bolt clicked open. Matthew pushed the door inward and stepped into the carpeted interior, the feeling of dread now at a fever pitch. He stood for a moment listening to the building’s silence, his eyes adjusting to the harsh fluorescent glare of the overhead lighting, then he took two steps forward and turned left down a long hallway, the walls newly painted in an inoffensive beige, the carpeting showing dirt even through its elaborate red-and-gold pattern. The numbers started at 33, and about three-quarters of the way down the hallway Matthew came to 41. He pressed his ear against the wooden door but could hear nothing. He almost knocked but used the key instead, knowing somehow that if Michelle was still in the apartment she’d be dead. His only hope now was that she wasn’t there, that she’d left with all her things, that she was safe at her parents’ home, and Richard was not a murderer.
He swung the door inward. The apartment was dark but the window blinds were up, and Matthew could see a furnished living room area. A ceiling fan slowly spun, making a barely discernible clicking sound on each rotation. He quietly shut the door behind him and stood for a moment, breathing through his nostrils. There was a smell in the apartment, sweet and coppery, and Matthew almost decided to turn around right there. The smell was enough to tell him the worst had happened, but he told himself he had to see. He had to witness what his brother had done. He stepped quickly across the uncarpeted living room floor, noting the stack of boxes in the kitchen alcove. The bedroom door was cracked open, and Matthew pushed it inward with the toe of his shoe. The smell was more intense, and for a brief moment, before his eyes fully adjusted, he thought he was looking at a tapestry pinned up on the wall above the queen-sized bed. But it wasn’t a tapestry; it was a high arc of blood, two arcs, dark and dripping.
Michelle was on the bed, lying in a puddle of even more blood, black and shiny in the light from outside.
Chapter 31
Hen lay in bed and watched the dawn fill the bedroom with light. Lloyd was downstairs on the couch. It was where she’d prefer to be, really, if she had a choice, but after he’d admitted to the one-year affair with Joanna, it didn’t seem right to let him sleep in their shared bed while she took the couch.
It had been a long and draining night. As soon as she’d accused him of having an affair, his face had crumpled, and he’d begun to cry. Well, cry was not the best verb for what he had done. He’d doubled over and begun to sob, producing long rasping gasps of breath that only served to annoy Hen, who had to wait about ten minutes before they could start to talk. She told him she wanted the entire truth, and he nodded repeatedly, his face streaked with tears and snot. They sat in the living room, and Lloyd began by saying, “It’s over, by the way. That’s where I was last weekend when I said I was at Rob’s party. I was with her in Northampton, and we both agreed . . . we both knew it was a huge mistake. She feels bad, too, terrible, but I promise you that it’s finished.”
“I’m not interested in how it finished, Lloyd, I’m wondering why it started.”
So he told her the story, how it had begun a year earlier when Joanna had showed up at Rob’s bonfire party and Lloyd was there by himself. They had hooked up that night (“it was just a stupid, drunken kiss”), but afterward they had begun to email back and forth, then talk on the phone, and things led to things. Lloyd said repeatedly that it was much more of an emotional affair than a physical one, that they had just found it easy to talk with each other.
“You talked about me, about us?” Hen asked.
“We did, yes.”
“What did you talk about? Remember that you’re telling me everything.”
“I guess I talked about how our relationship has changed, how everything about us now is how we deal with things. So first it was your illness and taking care of that, and it made me feel like I was just a caretaker and nothing more, and then we bought this house together and everything was about mortgages and moving costs and decorating—”
“It’s called real life,” Hen said.
“I know. I’m not saying I’m in the right. I’m just saying how I felt. I know it’s not fair. I know I’m the bad guy here.”
“Ok
ay,” Hen said. “Continue.”
Lloyd kept talking, and Hen was surprised to find herself almost bored listening to him. She could have told the story herself. It was just a midlife crisis, Lloyd wearied by the minutiae of his life—its health crises and financial decisions, and a job that was less creative than he thought it would be—and suddenly there was a new woman to talk with and sneak away to, and it kept things interesting for a while. And Hen even believed him when he said that it was really over, because it became clear that what happened between him and Joanna was no great love; it was just two semi-lonely people hooking up as though they were still in their twenties. Had she been hoping for more? Had some small part of her been hoping to hear that Lloyd was madly in love and wanted to leave, and that Hen would have to fight, or not, for her marriage? Maybe it was just that Lloyd’s sordid little affair paled in comparison to what she’d learned in the last few days about her neighbor and the secrets that he kept.
“I’m tired, Lloyd,” she said, interrupting another crying jag. “I’m going upstairs to sleep. We can talk about this more in the morning.”
Before she left the living room, Lloyd said, “What were you talking about with Matthew Dolamore?”
“He kills people,” she said.
“What?”
“That’s not news. I’ve already told you that, but now he’s told me about it as well.”
“What? Are you going to go to the police again?”
“I can’t, can I? He’d deny it, and they’d believe him. I have no proof, and the police know all about what happened in college. They’d never believe me.”
“Is he dangerous?”
“To me? No, I don’t think he is. I’d worry more about you. He knew you were a cheater, by the way.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“He told me he could tell as soon as he saw you. He could tell by the way you looked at his wife.”
“Jesus Christ. You’re not going to talk to him again, are you?”
Before She Knew Him Page 20
