White Elephant

by Trish Harnetiaux

  “He looked different…”

  She stopped. Another tissue. Another nose blow.

  “I thought he was going to say, ‘I’ve thought about it, I’m in! Sorry it took so long.’ But he was staring at the floor, and when he looked up he called me a bitch and hit me across the face.” She turned her cheek so he could see it better. “Is there a handprint?”

  He moved closer, bobbing slightly, the whiskey smell prominent. Taking a tissue, this time she let him gently press it against her temple.

  “No handprint. Then what happened?”

  “He went to hit me again, and I crashed into the wall. It was terrible; my mouth… my mouth was screaming…”

  He hadn’t blinked in what felt like ages.

  “This is all my fault. You were right. I should’ve let it go…”

  He took another swig straight from the bottle. “That motherfucker. Motherfucker. Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker.”

  “So I ran.” The tears were streaming down her cheeks. “I barely got out the door. I pushed him and ran. Faster than I’ve run in my life. I didn’t look back. Got in the car. Turned the engine on. Came straight home.” She was shivering.

  His face twitched. He was rubbing his hands like he was trying to make fire. Then let out a yell that filled the room.

  “I’m calling the police,” he said.

  “No, we can’t. I thought about it. No. Please. The police would side with him. He could say I’d been trespassing on his property and that he told me plenty of times to stay away. And if this were to become a scandal, our company would be finished before we even started. You know the kind of big-money clients we’re after don’t want to be associated with this kind of drama.”

  “Then I’m going over,” Henry said. “He’s not getting away with this.”

  He tried to stand up but lost his balance and fell back to the floor. It took him a few seconds to finally get up. This was how it usually was for him at this time of night. Why sometimes he slept in the kitchen. Once he was on his feet, he grabbed his car keys.

  “No, Henry,” she said. “You can’t drive. The last thing I need is for you to kill yourself in a car crash.”

  “Then fuck it, I’ll walk.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. It would take you hours. Please. Just stay here with me. Just let it go. We’ll find another property.”

  “Claudine, one way or another, I am going over there tonight.”

  She could tell he meant it.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll drive you. But I’m staying in the car. I don’t ever want to see that man again. Ever.”

  “You won’t have to,” he said, grabbing the bottle and heading out the door.

  Henry

  He woke up having zero memory of climbing into bed the night before, but he was in bed. He smacked his lips. Cotton mouth. A familiar buzzing sound. The thankfulness he was flooded with when he saw the light blues of the duvet allowed him to sink in a little lower. His cocoon. The comforting cool of the pillowcase on his cheek. He turned to see if Claudine was lying beside him.

  She was not.

  Dragging himself from bed, he made his way to the kitchen. She was leaning against the sink, the newspaper open and covering her face.

  “Morning,” he said in a gravelly voice. “Any coffee?”

  She put the newspaper down and that’s when he saw it. Her face. The dried blood. The swelling. The black-and-blue eye. Her eyes were red. She had been clutching the paper, not reading it. Holding it tight. His mouth opened, but he had no voice. Nothing came out. She said his name. Or something that sounded like his name. Dread spread throughout him as he floated toward her. She laid the paper on the counter. A picture of Jonathan Miller. The headline:

  ASPEN LOCAL SLAIN IN DOUBLE HOMICIDE

  Longtime Aspen resident Jonathan Miller and Thomas James Cooke, who is believed to have been working for Mr. Miller, were found dead on the property early evening. The homicide investigation is ongoing. At this time, no further information is available, but the Aspen Police Department Tip Line is open if you have any information regarding the crime.

  It wasn’t possible.

  His thoughts raced, he was trying to remember.

  They’d been driving?

  Wait, before that… yes… Claudine coming home. So upset. Hurt. He’d hurt her. Miller. It was coming back in flashes. He had been in the passenger seat, Claudine driving. Yes, that was right. Up to the house. Yelling who in the fuck did Jonathan Miller think he was? He remembered being amped up. It felt good. Good to be angry at something new. Tired of the old target, the affair, how they’d almost lost each other. The cold air through the window waking him up, getting him angrier and angrier the longer they drove. He drank straight from the whiskey bottle he’d brought with him. Then… what happened? He searched his memory but couldn’t find it.

  “Claudine?”

  How she looked at him said it all. The horror. The compassion. A disbelief.

  Henry looked at the paper again. The article said Mr. Miller was dead. A heinous crime. A second body, a young man, Thomas James Cooke. Both dead inside the cabin.

  “Henry.”

  She wore the silk robe he’d given her ages ago: long, pink, to the floor.

  “Henry, what do you remember?”

  Outside the birds were going wild, they loved the spring morning.

  “Henry?”

  “I remember you coming home. I remember being in the car.”

  “And then?”

  “That’s it. That’s all.”

  “You must be repressing it,” Claudine said. “That’s supposed to happen with shock.”

  “What did I do, Claudine?”

  “You were very brave.”

  “Tell me what I did.”

  “You went in yelling. Fighting. Protecting me. You pushed him. He stumbled back and fell. He got up and slugged you. Your jaw must be sore, a real one-two.”

  Henry touched his jaw. It felt fine, but Claudine was right. Shock. His entire body was numb.

  “Then he grabbed his shotgun,” Claudine said. “Before he could raise it at you, you grabbed the nearest thing you could to protect yourself, to protect me. A statue from the mantel.”

  This couldn’t be happening to him.

  “I tried to get you to stop after you hit him the first couple times. I was screaming at you to put the statue down. But you wouldn’t. It was like you were in a trance. I’m sure that’s why the other man came—all the screaming. He must’ve come back to the house between when I left the first time and when we returned. He came running out of a room in the back. He must’ve been asleep because he was just in his underwear. He saw the gun on the floor and went charging for it. You didn’t have time to think. You grabbed it and pointed it at him and pulled the trigger. You didn’t have a choice. You understand me, Henry? You didn’t have a choice. He would have killed us. We would be dead right now. You saved us.”

  He was horrified. But he was even more horrified that he felt a punch of pride. Never had he thought he was the type of person capable of killing another human being. He had risen to the occasion. Defended her. You think you know yourself. How you’d react in a situation, but then your true nature takes over and you become someone completely different. That’s the real you. Not someone—something. An animal. An organism. There is no reason, only reaction. In a situation like that, he would have guessed he would have run or just froze. He was a drunk. And a cuckold. That’s how he saw himself. But he wasn’t. He was a fighter. A survivor.

  That state of being was temporary. A moment later the strange euphoria vanished. Now, in the soft light of the Aspen morning, still a little too drunk to be hungover, he was back to being himself, and that person took responsibility for their actions.

  He picked up the phone.

  “Who are you calling?” Claudine asked.

  “The police,” Henry said.

  “No!” Claudine yelled, and yanked the phone from his hand.
/>   “What do you mean, ‘No’? We have to tell them what happened. They’ll understand. Like you said, I was just defending us.”

  “But you went into his house, Henry. They could say you initiated it. They could say he was the one trying to defend himself. Same for the other guy.”

  “Yeah, but he hit you, Claudine! He beat the shit out of you! The cops will understand that the minute they see your face.”

  “Maybe,” Claudine said. “But there’s more to it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were wasted. Having a hard time walking. I put you in the car and went back in. To fix it. Your footprints and fingerprints were all over the place. The police would need a narrative. Something that made sense. Most murderers know the victims, so it would be a natural conclusion. They killed each other. Taking a stranger into your house is dangerous. A bad gamble on an employee that turned deadly.”

  What was she saying?

  “I thought of everything. Where they would have been standing. Where they would have fallen. What would have been disrupted by the struggle before. The only conclusion will be that an argument broke out and the hired help went to kill the old man with the cowboy statue. And succeeded. But the old man got off a lucky shot before he died. Which was all it took to end his life. Both dead; no one to blame but each other.”

  What was she saying?

  “I used my Hermès scarf—you know, the red one with the carousel horses, my prize find from the Aspen Thrift Shop—to wipe off doorknobs, countertops, anything we potentially touched. By the time I was done, there wasn’t a trace of us. I burned our clothes in the fireplace as soon as we got back. This will just be our secret.”

  What was she saying?

  “You saved me, Henry. So I saved you. Now we’re both guilty. And if anyone ever finds out, we’ll both have to pay for it. Don’t you see? We couldn’t have this be the end—not when it’s so clearly the beginning.”

  Claudine

  Recounting every detail was important. The fact that his last memory was the drive up would haunt him. She knew that. The more she could help fill in, the better.

  Henry ran to the bathroom, barely making it before he got sick.

  “It was the only choice we had,” she said as she followed him in. She’d thought this through. Most keepers of secrets cave to someone. The urge to confess is too strong, the truth too much to handle even for the coldest heart. In order for the secret to survive, it needs tending to, needs care, or the keeper will inadvertently find ways of elevating the pressure that naturally builds, eventually giving themselves and their secret away without even realizing.

  She told him this wouldn’t be them. They were built differently and knew better. Think of it like an insect in a jar, Claudine explained to Henry. If there are no holes for air, inevitably the insect will thrash around, desperate to get out, to breathe. Now imagine the difference if a small hole is punched. The insect can be still; it has air. We will be each other’s air.

  What she didn’t tell him was she was sure this could actually be good for Calhoun + Calhoun. No one wanted a property attached to such a hideous crime, and Mr. Miller didn’t have any heirs. If she played it right, they could get it for pennies on the dollar at auction. They could use Kevin’s and Jerry’s contacts in the city to help smooth the way. It would take Henry more than a year to build the house, anyway—especially if they couldn’t pour the foundation before the weather got too cold. By then the stigma associated with the lot would have sufficiently faded away.

  During the immediate days after, the bond that existed between them was stronger than it had ever been. There was an urgency to their marriage. They needed each other. They now shared a secret. And their sex life was better than ever—even better than their first months of dating. Henry brought a primal dominance to the bedroom, something he’d never tapped into. It helped that he had stopped drinking—that no doubt had an impact on his sex drive—although Claudine guessed it was also a Bonnie and Clyde kind of thing: the savagery of the crime and the fact that they were able to get away with it serving as a potent aphrodisiac.

  For the first few days the stories in the Aspen Tribune were on the front page. Claudine followed it closely with a practical eye. Henry could barely look at the paper. The sight of it brought on paralyzing moments of fear and anxiety that any second the police would knock on the door.

  Details of the hired hand, Thomas James Cooke, emerged. He was originally from California. He was twenty-eight, the exact same age as Henry. According to his parents, he had spent the last few years traveling around the West, doing seasonal work and odd jobs. There was no indication when he arrived in Aspen or how long he had been working for and living with Miller. He had no prior arrest record. Young, hardworking, unlucky, dead. Bad timing was a shitty thing to die from.

  Soon the stories got smaller and moved further back in the paper. By the second week they were no longer daily. There was nothing sensational about the crime to keep it newsworthy. Hardly the case of that French pop singer who killed her skier boyfriend—the one that more than a few people had mentioned to Claudine when she first moved to Aspen and they learned her name. No love affair. No financial scandal. Just two poor, lonely, solitary men living out in the middle of nowhere.

  Then, nine days after the murders, the news she’d been waiting for.

  PROPERTY WORKER RESPONSIBLE FOR ASPEN LOCAL HOMICIDE

  Police have determined that Jonathan Miller, 84, of Aspen, Colorado, was murdered by hired hand Thomas James Cooke, 28, permanent address unknown. Wednesday night, Mr. Miller was bludgeoned to death with a heavy object in his living room. Mr. Cooke was also killed in the struggle. It has been concluded that Mr. Miller fatally wounded Mr. Cooke with a shotgun blast in what was a last-ditch effort to retaliate from being struck. Both men were pronounced dead on the scene. Police have been unable to determine a motive, though they surmise the two men were having an argument that turned violent.

  Henry

  The morning after the murders, Henry made the decision, the vow, never to drink again. He took all the whiskey bottles, poured them out in the kitchen sink, and threw them in the garbage. Henry Calhoun, killer. This couldn’t continue; he had to become someone new to outrun it. He dove into the art of self-discipline, denying himself the one thing that would help him forget it all. When every fiber of his being wanted to get tanked, desperate to reach a blackout state in which his reality was questionable, he’d go back to that morning in his mind, reading the words in the paper. Hearing Claudine’s voice as she explained. He’d done something unforgivable. He focused on the pit in his stomach, knew he would have it for the rest of his life. Trying to live only in the space where it hurt most until it swallowed the urge to drink entirely. It was excruciating but sobriety was the punishment he deserved. He wanted the pain and the sickness. It was the only thing that felt right.

  To not even remember the crime was unthinkable. What else had he done over the last few years when his drinking was at its worst? On more than one occasion he’d found unexplainable cuts or bruises on his hands and his legs after a hard night out. There were other things too: missing clothes, wallets, phones. He couldn’t stop the most far-fetched and ridiculous thoughts. How many others were out there? How many others had he murdered and forgotten about? Maybe he was a serial killer. He would never even know.

  Most days, during the first few months of sobriety, the nag came like clockwork, at happy hour. He’d sit on their balcony slowly breathing in the mountain air. The view usually calmed him. Their condo was modest but full of sunlight. Southern exposure. To fill the hours previously spent drinking, he’d been buying all kinds of plants. The green of their leaves, the pureness of the oxygen they gave off, reinforced a sense of calm. He’d focus on his new relationship with objects, with nature, how the spring trees looked like film negatives, their trunks and branches skeletally white. But soon, he knew, the leaves would come, the transformation already in the works.

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nbsp; Henry was also noticing how efficient and involved Claudine was in everything. While he’d been drunk, she’d worked hard; now the business was poised, ready for its first major undertaking. He’d been a terrible business partner. He could see that now. And through it all she had stood by his side. Believed in his talent. In their future. While he stewed in self-pity, unable to let her affair with Steve go, she’d doubled down.

  When he thought back and tried to remember—how dark the blood must have looked as it was first coming out of Miller’s head; the confused look in the young man’s eye that must have been there—none of it came back to him. All he could see were flashes of driving to the house, pulling up out front, going to the door. Did he even remember going to the door? As soon as he mentally placed himself inside the cabin, all he could think about was blood. There must have been so much blood.

  Then one day it was final.

  “Henry. It’s ours.” A huge smile on her face.

  “What’s ours?”

  “The property. It officially belongs to Calhoun + Calhoun.”

  He did not ask how. Claudine had covered up a murder. Two murders. After that, nothing she did would surprise him.

  “I have a present for you,” she said.

  She led him into the living room and there, near the window, was a vintage oak drafting table wrapped with a bright red ribbon. He understood. It was time.

  He sat down and unrolled the designs, and they never talked about any of it again.

  PART FIVE The Process of Elimination

  Claudine