House of Windows

by John Langan

  I'm not sure what I was expecting to find. When I'd looked in here during my searches, something had struck me as off, though not in a way that seemed to have any bearing on the task at hand. Moving more slowly, now, I flipped on the light and entered the room. More maps than ever overlapped on the bookcases, the walls. The threads that connected them, however, had been severed, every last one, the ends hanging limply from the stickers Roger had used to secure them. The air was heavy with a sharp, oily smell, which came from the table, whose model was splashed with what had to be red—scarlet paint. How had I missed that before? The figures of the soldiers had been knocked over, the buildings thrown out of alignment, as if someone had taken hold of one end of the table and shaken it, produced a scale-model earthquake. Paint pooled heavily around each figure, streaked the buildings' walls. The soil Roger had sprinkled the table with lay in wet clumps. Most of the photos surrounding the model lay under a layer of bright red. I picked one up by the edge and wiped it against the edge of the table. The spot where Ted had been killed glared at me. I dropped it as if I'd been bitten.

  The map at the door I studied the longest. Roger's writing had crowded out almost every bit of available space, but it was as if he'd thrown a bucket of water onto it: his script had run together into a gray mess, the paper warped and wavy beneath. Here and there, individual words and symbols had survived the deluge, half a sentence about trade routes converging in Kabul, a fraction—fifteen over negative seven—bracketed and followed by a minus, the astrological sign for Cancer, a backwards hook and a straight line that might have been Arabic. At the center of it, the narrow bar of Ted's shaving mirror, Roger's long-ago, failed birthday present—his attempt at carrying on paternal tradition. The mirror was dark. I bent to study it, and saw that the backing was charred, the glass scorched, as if a fire had erupted inside it, burning its reflections away.

  Epilude: Three Endings

  That isn't the end," Veronica said, "but what came next, I can summarize. I went to the police, dickered with a cop who told me Roger couldn't be considered officially missing until twenty-four hours had passed, filled out a missing persons report anyway, then endured a set of surprisingly probing questions from the cop who'd given me the hard time. He wanted to know what I'd done to my hand. I told him I'd been so frustrated at not being able to find my husband, I'd punched a door. Nodding, making sympathetic noises, the cop asked if I was sure that was what had happened—maybe it was my husband I'd hit, and that was why he hadn't returned home yet? I could feel my cheeks reddening, but I did my best to play it as anger at this clod for having dared suggest such a thing. Who knew I'd be getting Huguenot's answer to Sherlock Holmes? I returned to the house, accompanied by Sherlock and his partner, because I'd mentioned the state of Roger's office, and that sounded like something that should be checked out. I was half-sure I'd be leaving it in cuffs, on suspicion of involvement in my husband's disappearance.

  "That didn't happen, though the cops stayed much longer than they'd planned. I'd become so used to the sight of Roger's office that I hadn't realized how profoundly strange it would appear to anyone seeing it for the first time. It prompted an extensive conversation with my friend from the station about Roger's recent history, which I narrated as thoroughly as I dared while his partner called for backup. I'm not sure why they needed the extra help. They fed me some line about more eyes on the scene of an investigation having a better chance of noticing things, but I think they were freaked out by what they'd walked into and wanted someone else there with them. Before what turned out to be a long night was over, I'd narrated the last few months, in part and in whole, to three different cops. Not one of them failed to ask me about the scrapes on my knuckles, and not one of them failed to look dissatisfied with my explanation.

  "The last cop to interview me—or interrogate, I suppose; although it didn't seem much like an interrogation. We were sitting at the kitchen table, me with a Coke, him a glass of milk, while the others continued to pore over Roger's office. Anyway, once I'd reached the end of my story—Roger, I said, had told me he was going out for a walk around nine and never returned—this guy, (who'd kept asking me to backtrack and explain something I'd said ten minutes ago) put down his milk and said, 'Mrs. Croydon, I hope you won't take this the wrong way, but it feels like there's more you have to tell us. I could be wrong, and I'm not accusing you of anything, I want to make that clear. It's just—your story—it feels like there's more to it. A lot of times, women—if there are problems at home: maybe the husband drinks a little too often; maybe he's too free with his hands—they don't want to talk about it. They feel embarrassed, ashamed, like it's their fault this guy has an impulse-control problem.

  "'Understand, I'm not saying anything like that took place here. But from everything you've said, your husband, Roger, has been under a lot of stress. My son's fifteen—he drives me insane, but, God forbid, if anything ever happened to him, I don't know what I'd do. You don't need to be much of a psychologist to know your husband's in a bad way—all you have to do is take a look around that study of his. Someone in that state of mind—they're not really themselves, are they? Anything they might do—it's not like they're really doing it, is it? It's the stress; stress makes people do all kinds of things they'd never do otherwise.'

  "He paused. This was my opportunity to say, 'Tell me about it,' or 'You have no idea,' pick up the baton and carry it the next lap. Except, what would I say? Believe it or not, this was a real problem for me. There was no way I could discuss any of the weirdness that had invaded our lives, not in the slightest, without signaling to the guy across the table that I was in deep psychological trouble. There was no way to hint at what had happened, to package it in a more acceptable wrapper. Once I started to talk about it, I'd be unable to stop until this guy and his friends had me on my way to the psych-ward at Wiltwyck Hospital.

  "I realize this sounds like a no-brainer to you, but you have to understand, what I'd seen—all of it—was bursting to get out. On a much more immediate level, I felt this almost irresistible pressure—I mean a literal force somewhere behind my mouth that threatened to erupt at any minute in a flood of words. It wasn't guilt—what I'd done to Roger had been my only option, and when you came right down to it, what more had I done than force him to finish what he himself had started? No, the desire that wanted to run riot with my tongue predated guilt. Call it astonishment, shock at your own experience.

  "Fortunately for me, I had my Coke to sip as I debated how to respond. I watched the cop watching me—studying me. No doubt I'd already given myself away. I set the glass down and said, 'I'm sorry. I honestly don't know what you're talking about.'

  "So why did I call the police, right? Why so soon? Why not wait until Roger had been gone a week—at least a couple of days?"

  "Something like that had occurred to me," I said, although I had an idea of the answer.

  "Because Roger was gone," Veronica said. "I didn't know what had become of him—I still don't—but I was certain—right from the start, I knew I wasn't going to see him again. Ever. Going to the cops was—it's what you do, when someone disappears, especially if—"

  "You've got nothing to hide."

  "Yeah. That's not exactly how I would put it—I think I'd go for, 'You're not responsible'—but same difference. The longer I waited, the worse it would look, so I decided not to wait at all. As it was, a certain amount of suspicion fell on me anyway. One look at Roger's office, and the extent of his obsession was clear. Why hadn't I gotten him some help? I had tried, I explained, check with Dr. Hawkins. I gave her permission to speak to them about the outlines of our meeting, which I assumed would satisfy the cops. I was wrong. As far as they were concerned, I hadn't done enough, and if I weren't directly responsible for Roger's disappearance, which I think one or two continued to suspect, I was indirectly to blame. I can't say if that one or two ever approached the DA with their suspicions, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn they had.

  "You aren't happy w
ith my explanation. I can see it."

  "I don't—"

  "My shrink thought there was more to me calling the cops, as well. He said it was a red flag that, my protests to the contrary aside, I was profoundly guilty, and going to the police was my way of admitting this.

  "Oh, yes, I went to see a psychiatrist, the winter after Roger disappeared. By then, everything had quieted. Despite my suspicions about their suspicions, the cops didn't charge me with anything. The news reports had come and gone—actually, the TV news was never that interested. I think there were two segments on channel 6, one announcing that Roger had vanished, the other covering the search the cops did of the rail trail. The local papers had more. I don't know if you read The Times Herald-Record, but one of their reporters wrote about Roger, on and off, for something like three weeks. She'd taken a class with Roger, herself, back in the eighties. I think she interviewed everyone he'd ever talked to for longer than five minutes. I spoke to her twice. She even managed to squeeze a few words from Joanne. Talk about blood from a stone. In the end, though, she moved on, as did the cops. The detective in charge of the case told me they were leaving it open but, for the time being, they'd followed all their leads as far as they could. If I received any new information, I should call him, immediately. Should anything come across his desk, he'd be on the phone to me right away.

  "The funny thing is, when I heard this—the guy drove down to the house to tell me they were moving the case to Inactive—I started crying, sobbing, telling him, No, no, he couldn't do this. I knew what this meant; they thought Roger was dead. The detective did what he could to reassure me. He kept patting my arm, saying that wasn't it at all. He was sure Roger had just gone someplace for a little rest; that was all. No doubt he'd be back in touch with me very soon, now. I refused to be consoled. I cried and cried and cried, and then I cried some more. 'I can't believe he's gone,' I sobbed.

  "It wasn't a performance, either. I honestly could not believe that Roger would never return. Or—it wasn't so much that I couldn't believe it. It was more that I couldn't accept it. I know; I know. You're sitting there thinking, You're the one who sent him into Ted's arms. You threatened to claw his eyes out, for crying out tears. What else did you expect? That's absolutely true—I knew that—and I knew that there had been no other way. I'd exhausted all possible options. Intellectually, I could justify what I'd done—what I'd been forced to do—all day. The problem was, I couldn't accept it. For weeks after the detective's visit, as summer decayed into fall, and fall was swept aside by winter and that string of bad storms we had that year—every weekend, another storm barreling up the coast and vomiting another foot of snow on us—I debated walking into the police station and turning myself in. I wouldn't be able to admit what I'd done, of course, but I thought that, if I could concoct a plausible enough story, I could be punished, anyway.

  "I spent hours planning the perfect crime in reverse. I finally decided that my best chance was to claim I'd taken Roger to the Mid-Hudson Bridge in the middle of the night, poisoned him, and pushed him over the side. That seemed the most likely way to account for the lack of a body. The problem was figuring out how I would have convinced him to come with me to the Bridge at three a.m., and, once there, to have consumed the poison. If I were going to do this, I had to do it right. My biggest fear was that the cops would see through me, tag me as a grieving, de facto widow who'd lost her mind.

  "When all was said and done, I didn't plead guilty—I can't say confess. There was no story I could come up with that didn't have holes in it big enough to drive a truck through. Instead, I started to drink. Scotch was my choice—not because I liked it any better than I ever had, but because it hit me so much faster than beer did, and because it bit into my tongue and burned my throat all the way down to my stomach, and because a glass of it—I mean four fingers' worth, straight up—removed me from myself far enough for me not to feel like screaming all the time. You won't be surprised to hear that my sleeping had gone the way of the dinosaur. For a short time, the Scotch helped that. Then it made it worse. I would be up until two, three, four in the morning, wandering the house, glass in one hand, bottle in the other. I preferred single-malt. None of your blended crap for me. The house—I haven't told you, have I? I couldn't feel the house anymore. Ted going nuclear had been the last thing. I wasn't sure if it had fried my circuits, so to speak, or if he'd consumed everything there was to be aware of, but for the first time in months, all I was aware of was myself.

  "That isn't to say that nothing weird happened. One night—this was in December, right around Christmas—Ted disappeared from all the pictures of him I'd hung around the house. I was befuddled enough that it took me a while—a long while—to figure out what was wrong. When it dawned on me that the eight-by-ten photograph of the flag and blue background I was staring at was supposed to have Ted in its foreground, I raced from room to room, hallway to hallway, to check the other pictures. Empty, every last one of them. I didn't know what it meant. I was afraid that Ted had left his photos and was on his way for me, a notion that half a bottle of Glenkinchie made seem a lot more convincing. I waited out the rest of that night in my car, the heater on full for the cold, the radio tuned to the campus heavy-metal show to keep me awake. The next day, Ted had returned to his pictures, and I wondered if he'd ever left them in the first place.

  "I could go on, but you get the idea. I was in rough shape. Pretty soon, the Scotch stopped working as well as it had, and not long after that, it stopped working altogether. I was still drunk, but being so now took me closer to what had happened. Here I was, my knuckles scraping Roger's teeth. Here he was, lying on his back in the dirt, his mouth a bloody mess as he looked up at me. 'That's all there is?' he asked. I didn't forget the other things—how could I? Not his cursing Ted; not my flight through the house's hidden rooms. All of it was tangled together. I spent hours in Roger's study, which I hadn't bothered to clean up. I stared at the tabletop, where the paint had long-since dried and darkened. I trailed my fingers over the maps—although I avoided the map by the door. However dark that mirror appeared, I didn't want to chance looking into it and seeing something looking back.

  "December slid into January. January gave way to February. The house was a wreck, the kitchen table lost under a mountain of fast-food bags and boxes; empty, unrinsed Scotch bottles competing for space up and down the halls, in most of the rooms; the air smelling of alcohol and must. Funny how far you can fall so fast. Once the sun went down, I sat on the front step, sometimes wearing a winter coat, a couple of times wrapped in a blanket, gazing at the spot where Roger had lain after I'd knocked him down. Two feet of snow covered it. One night, I got down on my hands and knees and dug through the snow with my bare hands—I don't know what I expected to find. I can imagine what the neighbors must have thought. Did I mention I brought a bottle out with me? I'd sit there until my teeth were chattering and I couldn't feel my fingers or toes, then I'd fumble the stopper out and let the Scotch scorch my mouth. For a moment, I'd have the illusion I was warm.

  "You want to know the craziest part of all this? Throughout this time, I continued to teach, adjuncting at SUNY and Penrose. I didn't need the money. Roger had added my name to the accounts and investments after we were married, and he'd employed a good accountant. I was comfortable enough not to need the pennies slave labor—I mean being an adjunct—paid. I can't say why I kept getting into the car and going to work. It wasn't for the social contacts, that's for sure. I went in for my classes, my office hours, and that was that. With the exception of Harlow and Stephen, none of the faculty at either school had much to say to me—except for those people who wanted to ask me what had happened to Roger, which is to say, those people who wanted to tell me their theory of Roger's fate. I can remember how astounded I was the first time someone stopped me—it was this woman I knew at Penrose—to ask me these incredibly personal questions. How had our sex life been? Had I kept Roger satisfied? I mean, really. She concluded her inquisition by decla
ring that Roger was 'obviously' in Mexico with another former student, but I shouldn't blame myself, and as long as he'd left me the money, I was better off without him. If I hadn't been in my near-perpetual state of hangover, I would have walked away as fast as I could. That, or taken a swing at the bitch.

  "So I wasn't teaching for the wonders it did for my personal life, that's for sure. I liked the students well-enough, but I've never been one of those teachers who develops close bonds with their students. It's one of the things I've always liked about the classroom, the relative impersonality of it. You stand up in front of this group of people, and all you have to do is deliver information to them, impart skills where you can. You're a means, not an end. Yes, I knew they were talking about me outside of class. I didn't blame them. In their position, I would have; and at least none of them was talking to me. I guess it was playing—escaping into the role that appealed to me.

  "During the fall, I'd managed to fulfill my teaching duties reasonably well, but after the long Christmas break, starting up again at the end of January was much more difficult. By the time Valentine's Day was approaching, it was all I could do just to show up to class on time and in reasonably clean clothes. I couldn't focus on the reading I assigned long enough to complete it myself, so I improvised these crazy lectures that followed tangents as far as they'd take me in an hour. Some of the students took notes attentively—some always do—and I'm sure I must have offered a few tidbits of useful information—not about the subject we were supposed to be addressing—but the classes were slipping away from me. I'd collected two sets of papers from each class that I hadn't so much as thought about. When a student asked me when they could expect them back, I went off on him. Here I was, following in Roger's footsteps, but without having written the shelfful of books that might buy me a measure of indulgence. No, at this rate, it would be another week before the chairs of both English departments called me into their offices and delivered some kind of ultimatum."