“Can you do a drawing of me for me to keep?” he asked, on the second night they were hanging out.
“Sure,” she said, and flipped to a blank page.
“No, not here. At my place.”
“Why?” she asked, instead of simply laughing at him or telling him no.
“It’ll be more special. For me. Come on. I want you to see where I live. I promise I won’t be creepy.”
“You’re already being creepy,” she said. But she went with him anyway, pulled by something she didn’t totally understand. Maybe it was the thrill of embarking on something in which the outcome was not known. Maybe she was challenging the strength of her love for Lloyd. Or maybe it was something far less complicated.
He didn’t live far from the Village Inn, and when they got to his second-floor apartment in a Victorian very close to Hen’s own house, Dustin rushed in first, quickly tidying things, then getting them each a beer.
“Where do you want me?” he asked.
“Wherever,” she said.
“What if I sit on the edge of my bed and you can sit here,” he said, leading her toward his bedroom, then clearing clothes off a T-back wooden chair. Hen sat down, sketched for about twenty minutes, then tore it out of her book and gave it to Dustin. She thought she’d caught him: his confident youth, the lines of his face, his posture, the intimacies of the setting.
“I love it,” he said, then awkwardly lurched in toward her for a kiss. Hen laughed, but kissed him back, telling herself that she just wanted to see what it felt like, getting close to all that springlike green energy; to see what it felt like to be really wanted, really physically wanted, one more time. He scooped her up and rolled her expertly onto his platform bed, one of his large hands already sneaking underneath her top.
“Dustin,” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m married.”
“You told me. I don’t care. It’s hot.”
“Slow down a minute, okay?” Hen said. “I need to use your bathroom.” She did need to go, but she also wanted a moment to think. Was she really about to make this colossal mistake? Did she even want to?
“Okay,” he said, then added, when she got to the bedroom door, “Don’t fucking change your mind.”
She spun reflexively; his voice had changed so much with those last five words that for a moment she thought someone else had spoken from the room. But in the light from the single bedside lamp she saw that his face had changed as well, his eyes gone dead. And he had slid a hand down his own jeans and was touching himself.
“I’ll be right back,” Hen said, trying to keep her own voice normal, and went into the bathroom—she could still smell it, cologne and stale urine—and sat on the toilet. She managed to pee, telling herself to stop panicking and form a plan. She’d made a huge mistake; Dustin was not some dopey, horny guy. He was something else altogether. If she told him she wanted to leave, he would rape her. She was sure of it. She could go through with it, she thought. Just have sex with him and get out of here alive, but the thought made her nauseated. She still had her clothes on, so if she wanted to she could exit the bathroom and head straight toward the front door, get out of there before he could grab her. But her sketchbook was in the bedroom, and something about leaving that behind was unthinkable. It had her address in it, for one, but it was also filled with personal sketches, even a couple of Lloyd. She flushed the toilet, then looked in the medicine cabinet, hoping there was some kind of weapon she might be able to brandish, a straight razor or a can of shaving cream, but there was nothing that looked remotely effective.
There was a thumping on the door, Dustin’s voice saying, “Hurry up. I gotta pee, too.”
Hen thought, Here’s my chance.
She came out of the bathroom. He was shirtless and he slid past her, leaving the door open. She heard a stream of piss hit the side of the toilet before splashing into the bowl. She moved as fast as she could into the bedroom, grabbing her sketchbook from the chair and the torn-out sketch that was now lying on the floor, then walked rapidly across the living room to the front door.
“Where you going?” he said, his voice threatening again, as she twisted the doorknob. For a moment she hesitated, almost told him she was leaving, out of some ridiculous fear of not being polite, but kept going instead.
She raced down the stairs, but he caught her at the bottom, his hand twisting the soft flesh of her upper arm.
“I’ll scream,” Hen said. “I’ll fucking scream so loud.”
Dustin’s eyes flicked to the side door at the bottom of the landing, a door that most likely led to a first-floor apartment. Hen thought she could hear the sound of a television coming from within. “I’m serious,” she said, and he let go of her arm, then looked right at her with those dead eyes.
“Maybe some other time,” he said, his voice calm. Then he mouthed the word bitch at her, and she pushed through the front door out into the damp night air.
The next time she saw him he was being carried out of his house in a body bag.
She never told Lloyd about what had happened and never told the police, either. She felt guiltier about not telling the police, because it was possible that the information she had on Dustin might be relevant to the case. If he was going to rape her—and he was definitely going to rape her—then maybe he’d raped someone else before, and if that was the case, then that might have been a motive for the crime. But she never went to the police. She couldn’t bring herself to do it, and eventually she told herself that what had happened that week had maybe never happened at all. It was just a foolish, terrifying moment that she needed to forget. But she couldn’t forget it, and she poured all of her guilt and remorse into her obsession with who had killed Dustin.
Later, after her hospitalization and the ECT and the med changes, she sometimes wondered if she’d imagined the whole thing, that surreal, terrifying night with the boy from the Village Inn. The memory of it now felt more like a dream than any kind of reality. And sometimes she’d also wonder if she’d killed him as well, that memory totally obliterated.
She stared at the sketch now. Portrait of a Rapist as a Young Man, she thought, almost smiling. She’d actually forgotten that she’d kept the drawing, shoving it into the bottom of a box after she’d safely made it back to her house that night, shaking with shock and feeling like she’d had a lucky escape. Why hadn’t she thrown the sketch away? Maybe so that now, a few years later, she’d find it and know, for a fact, that it had all really happened. She ran her finger over the pencil marks on the paper. The figure of Dustin was very detailed, the bedroom around him less so, just a few lines trying to show the clutter and depth of the space. On top of a bureau there was a group of objects, bottles mostly, but one of the objects looked vaguely like a fencing trophy, a lunging figure with a sword. It wasn’t so much longer after she’d drawn this picture that Matthew had hunted Dustin down and taken that very trophy for himself.
Thinking back, Hen realized that before she knew him, before they were neighbors, Matthew had already been a huge part of her life. It felt logical to her now that she and Matthew eventually met, even though she knew it wasn’t.
She put the sketch in the pile with the other pictures she was planning on recycling, then, on second thought, she brought it over to her drafting table, got one of her ink rollers, and covered the entire image with a spread of black ink. Then she crumpled it up and threw it away.
By the time she was finished going through the last box in the stack, Hen realized she was listening to “In Spite of Me” by Morphine, the song that had been playing when Matthew/Richard had shown up at her studio. She stopped what she was doing, frozen for a moment. She considered switching the disc, but then let it continue to play and went back to sorting. It was nothing more than background noise, she thought, and pretty soon she might not even notice it.
Acknowledgments
Danielle Bartlett, Robert Bloch, Angus Cargill, Caspian Dennis, Chester Erskine, Kaitlin Har
ri, Sara Henry, David Highfill, Nunnally Johnson, John D. MacDonald, Chloe Moffett, Kristen Pini, Sophie Portas, Nat Sobel, Virginia Stanley, Sandy Violette, Judith Weber, Tom Wickersham, Adia Wright, and Charlene Sawyer.
About the Author
PETER SWANSON is the author of All the Beautiful Lies, Her Every Fear, The Kind Worth Killing—which won the New England Society Book Award for fiction—and The Girl with a Clock for a Heart. His stories and poems have appeared in The Atlantic and the Vocabula Review, among other publications. He holds degrees from Trinity College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Emerson College. Swanson lives with his wife in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he is at work on his next novel.
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Also by Peter Swanson
All the Beautiful Lies
Her Every Fear
The Kind Worth Killing
The Girl with a Clock for a Heart
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
before she knew him. Copyright © 2019 by Peter Swanson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Photograph on title page by Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock, Inc.
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Cover photographs © restyler/Shutterstock (woman); © Miloje/Shutterstock (texture)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Swanson, Peter, 1968- author.
Title: Before she knew him : a novel / Peter Swanson.
Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : William Morrow, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018017423| ISBN 9780062838155 (hardcover) | ISBN
0062838156 (hardcover)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3619.W3635 B43 2019 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017423
Digital Edition MARCH 2019 ISBN 978-0-06-283817-9
Print ISBN 978-0-06-283815-5
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Before She Knew Him Page 28
