I poured Milo more coffee and said, “I think I should come clean about something. I saw Will the day Frannie died, here in the village. Not just Jason—Will, too. And he wasn’t supposed to be here. He should have been at his offices in London. I knew it would look bad for him, so I didn’t—I couldn’t just toss him in like that. After all, he’s my husband. I wanted to give him a chance to explain.”
“And did he?” Milo wanted to know. “Did he explain?”
I shook my head, the picture of misery. “I chickened out, didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.”
“Most people do that.”
“Do they? It runs big in my family, that’s for sure. It’s like a giant hole in the brain where we hide things, where we hide the fact that everything’s coming unstuck.”
“Did you really think he had anything to do with Frannie’s death?”
I shook my head, but my expression was full of doubt. It was important he understand that I was at best a reluctant witness. “Not really,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. I just couldn’t figure out what he was doing there, otherwise. Why he was even in the village. Or even why he seemed so friendly with Frannie at the wake for Anna. I couldn’t make sense of it and until I did, I didn’t want to make wild accusations. Especially against my husband. I just didn’t want to be that person.” I jutted out my chin. This he had to get straight. “I am not that person.”
Milo did not look much concerned about my ethics or my moral quandary. But he did look sympathetic, his face creased with concern. He pushed aside his coffee mug.
“Where is your husband now?”
We’d arrived there at last. I shook my head. “He left early this morning. He didn’t say where he was going. Just ‘out of town.’”
That earned me a look.
“Did you notice if the envelope was there when he left?” Milo asked.
“No. I had no reason to go into the hallway until later.”
“So the real mail might have landed on top of it. He might have left the envelope there as he was leaving.”
I shrugged. I guess so. “It was underneath the regular mail, yes. I think it was.”
“Your husband. He travels a lot.” Again the look of unease. I imagined he was wondering why I put up with Will’s absences and disappearances, his happy hours. I couldn’t say. You sort of get worn down. You get used to it.
Will’s travels used to suit me, or they did for a long while. He’d go to Berlin or somewhere for days at a time and I’d stock up on gelato and queue up the On Demand service with all my Breaking Bads, my Better Call Sauls, some BM: London, plus a movie or two from the girl channel. I wish I could say I used my time wisely, reading the great philosophers, but this sort of film fest was my escape. I’d open a bottle of wine and sometimes the contents just seemed to disappear.
So I didn’t mind the absences, at least not at first. But slowly, something changed. His disappearances in the evenings became a different story. One night he said he was going to the Bull for a drink with Gideon’s father on some pretext of important business to discuss. He may have used that excuse one time too often, and that night curiosity and boredom got the better of me. I wandered over to the pub on my own.
He wasn’t there. Duh. I looked in the nooks and crannies where he might be and finally I sat at the bar and had a drink alone, like this was what I’d planned to do all along. The knowing looks, particularly the bartender’s, said it was obvious I was checking up on my husband. Those looks of pity were enough to ensure I never did that again. It wasn’t until later I wondered if they’d all already known what it took me so long to tumble to.
Now I sat with Milo thinking about marriages, especially the arranged kind like Dhir and Rashima’s, and feeling bereft, cut loose, adrift—all the words we use to mean nothing much matters to us anymore. I realized that of all my family, only my grandmother would have had the intelligence, the emotional IQ they talk about, to pick someone compatible for me. Someone, as no doubt she would have put it, who could see through my nonsense. Whether that would have worked for me and Will is anybody’s guess. If it were left to his mother to play matchmaker he’d certainly be with Clarice now.
Milo sat quietly, waiting for the dark clouds to pass. He said at last, “I’ll put a watch on the house. And I’ll have them keep a lookout for his car, just so we know where he is. But to be honest, we’re stretched thin and I can’t have the house watched all the time. Could you go away until this settles down? Stay at a hotel, perhaps?”
I shook my head. “No. When will it settle? Next year? Next decade? Hey, life goes on. I’m staying here in my own home, even with the doors and windows locked, and sleeping with one eye open.”
From his resigned expression, he knew I’d say that.
“Don’t let anyone in. No one. Do not open the door to anyone.”
“Including Will?”
“Especially Will. Of course Will.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“And get the locks changed. I can recommend a bloke who can get them fixed today.”
I hesitated. This was all moving so fast.
“Your husband is violent,” he said. “Do you think I don’t see cases like this every day? Putting aside the question of murder, he’s violent toward you. Did you really expect me to believe your story about that shiner of yours? And now he’s abandoned you.”
I was shaken by his words. More than I wanted to let on. The thought of a pissed-off Will popping back in without warning unsettled me now. But I said, “That’s overkill, isn’t it? I mean, excuse the expression, but somehow I doubt he’ll be back. Knowing Will, if he thinks you’re looking for him he’ll turn himself in at the station. With his solicitor.”
“Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. But he’s gone off and not said where or when he’s coming back. You’ve every legal right to secure your house. Whether he had anything to do with these killings is another issue—we’ve no proof.”
“No,” I said. “No proof at all.”
He looked at me for a very long time. Then: “We could get proof,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Would you be willing to wear a wire?”
“Get him to confess?”
He nodded. “To the affair. To the killings, if he did them. Yes.”
I shook my head doubtfully. Not convinced, me. But clearly excited by the challenge: “Do you really think it would work? He’s not dumb.”
“You’d be surprised. There is a certain … mentality at work sometimes. A certain caliber of man who can’t keep quiet about what he’s done.”
Milo didn’t leave for ages that day. My, but tongues would wag now, particularly over at Hacienda de Heather. Milo was trying to prepare me, taking extra care to let me know what I was letting myself in for. And wanting to make sure I would stay the course. That I wouldn’t freak out or freeze up or in any way disrupt the plan to get the goods on Will, if goods there were to be had.
He said something odd just before he left. I thought he was talking about Attwater but maybe he meant himself: “The thing with being police, there’s no one to stop you if you go to the bad. That’s when they circle the wagons—isn’t that your expression? To protect the team. To protect themselves.”
I just looked at him like I knew what he was trying to say. I didn’t suppose it mattered.
Once he left, I wandered into Will’s office, the one room I hadn’t purged in my frenzy of cleaning that morning. Will had long since reverted to the halcyon days when a scout at Oxford would clean up after him. I was now, presumably, the scout. But the police wanted him sent down for good—another of their charming euphemisms. You aren’t expelled for criminal misdeeds, you’re sent down. It all sounds so much nicer that way.
Could I really do this, I wondered?
I must, I answered. Not just for my safety. Fo
r my sanity.
I decided I’d bin his stuff tomorrow, once I’d had a good search through the drawers and pockets. I looked first for the gun I knew he’d inherited, a Browning his grandfather had smuggled back from service in Cypress. Will kept it in a locked drawer—technically it was illegal to have it without a firearms certificate. That drawer was unlocked. And there was no gun.
This didn’t particularly alarm or surprise me. He liked to keep the gun with him when he traveled by car, in case he was set upon by motorway bandits.
I would have pitied Will if I didn’t loathe him so much for getting us into this mess. For hitting this replay button of my father and Tralee, making me relive all that. Those memories were what had had me pacing the halls and stairways of the house for weeks—and walking, walking, walking along that river—trying to exhaust myself to sleep. Booze and the occasional pill weren’t helping anymore.
Anna and her enormous self-regard, her reckless disregard for anyone’s happiness but her own. Couldn’t Will see it? Tralee at least had her fascinating medical complaints. For my father to have cheated on my mother, there had to be some touching human component, you see, some justification for the bad behavior. It couldn’t just be about sex. Oh, no. That would be too ordinary, too common. Theirs was a love to last the ages. Right.
I realized Anna had probably made Alfie’s condition her pity play—not pity for Alfie, of course, but for what his illness had done to her.
I went to have a look in the attic for Will’s favorite suitcase. It wasn’t there. I hadn’t really expected it to be.
I decided after all that I’d start binning his stuff in bags right away. I wouldn’t even bother setting some of it aside for Oxfam.
Clean sweep.
38
I had an MRI test done once after I injured my neck in a fall. Not watching where I was going, I fell over a tree root and landed hard against one shoulder. The resulting pain lingered and it got so I couldn’t turn my head to drive. The MRI never showed a reason for the pain but it did find I literally had a hole in my head, at the base of my skull. There is some Latin name for it I can’t recall now. The doctor said that while it was a bit unusual (less than one percent of the world’s population has it, according to Wikipedia), it was nothing to worry about. It was not in the realm of something wrong that had to be fixed or plugged or sewn back together.
I wonder if maybe that’s where most of my dreams go, pouring through that black hole in my brain.
I wondered too if that’s where odd moments of my life in Weycombe got to. Sometimes it was as if the days just disappeared and one day maybe a package would arrive of stuff I didn’t immediately recall ordering: vitamins from Boots, or a dress I saw online, or shoes to go with, or a necklace. That I had nowhere to wear such an outfit, especially when I was just wandering around the village all day, didn’t enter into my thinking. If you build it, they will come. It might be the navy blue interview dress that would land me the job, or the black satin nightgown that would make Will look at me the way he once had. That would make him love me again.
That ever happen to you—ordering stuff you don’t remember ordering, I mean? It’s like being gaslighted. As it turned out, it was gaslighting. Usually I didn’t bother to call to complain because if the dress fit, and was a good color, it was just not worth the hassle to pack it up and return it.
But those gaps in my memory in the Will days … I did start to wonder.
Was it stress, plain and simple? The occasional drink (or two or three), and the pills?
Knowing Will was lying and not knowing about what? That right there was enough to drive a person round the twist.
At last—finally—I began to suspect something more was going on, something truly sinister. That Will might be tampering with my vitamins, or with my food or coffee. Substituting something that was making me groggy, that was causing memory loss. Could he do that? Would he do that, to give himself more freedom to see Anna whenever he liked?
Well, the Will I was coming to know was more than capable of it.
I threw out all my vitamins one day and bought new. I saved one each out of the new bottles, to have a sample to compare against in future. And I paid close attention before just popping anything into my mouth.
And I started doing all the cooking.
That seemed to do the trick, and the fuzziness gradually went away. I was sharp as a tack from then on. It was proof not only that Will could not be trusted: Will was dangerous.
There was comfort in knowing he was guilty. The uncertainty was gone, any doubt I was doing the right thing was gone. Will was a monster and I was free to act on that knowledge accordingly.
I began to think about my life without Will, planning it like a long-awaited vacation, daydreaming of the trips I would take around the world, the men I would meet and never, ever get too involved with, in a vampy Colette sort of way. I would visit Paris all the time, and I would dress in black, head to toe—not in mourning, of course. I would take up smoking, and sit at outdoor cafes writing poetry and drinking coffee or champagne.
I would never grovel in some “let’s be friends,” divorce victim way, the way I’d seen too many women do. No, I would run with it. I would crush him. As Stephen King has Dolores Claiborne say, sometimes, being a bitch is all a woman has to hang on to. I resolved to expand on that philosophy. I would be a bitch and enjoy myself.
In “Live Free or Die” New Hampshire, where we lived just before my father moved us to Maine, there was a high bridge over a fast-moving stream near our house. I used to declare in my teen-drama way that it was handy in case I ever decided to jump. But the truth is, I’ve been down and out but I’ve never once considered taking my own life.
He killed himself, did I tell you that? Yes, I see I have failed to mention that my father, officially diagnosed manic-depressive, finally ended it all. The depressive part I could see for myself, but he did a good job of hiding the manic side, which at least would have made him interesting to be around. My mother always thought he might do it, but her fear also was that he’d wait until after a divorce so he could leave it all to someone like Miss Trailer Trash. Which of course is what he sort of did.
My mother was of her generation. She got pregnant with me and had to get married, although neither of my parents would own this. My brother came along two years later, so they hadn’t learned their lesson yet. They quarreled all the time, agreeing only that my brother was perfect. He was the one thing they’d done together that they were proud of. If I had been their only child the marriage never would have lasted. I was the starter child, the one to practice their mistakes on. As a girl, I just didn’t count. Not even up against my druggie brother.
We never discussed anything as a family, it seemed, but my brother’s addictions. Once he hit the teen years he just kept going, trying to jump straight off that bridge. Since he was our official sick family member anyway with his allergies, it really seemed too much to hand him official druggy status, too. To worry and quarrel and wonder if doctors and clinics could save him.
The focus was always on him. Always. Sending him to rehab, lashing out money over it, too—borrowing money they didn’t have. Wringing hands, staying up late drinking coffee, waiting for him to come home, wondering whether or not he was using again. (Yes, he was.) Running the gamut from fear he’d kill himself with an accidental overdose to worrying if any college would accept him if he got into legal trouble. As if it weren’t money down a rat hole anyway to educate such a fool.
No time was wasted on the good kid—me, the kid who was perfect all the time, who stayed out of trouble. Not on the straight-A student with the scholarship to Wellesley. Not on me in that constant, nonstop look-at-me way my brother had perfected. Not on me, who quickly learned to avoid the whole drug scene in college. If I wanted to hang with addicts I’d go talk to my brother. He had gone to his reward by then but you know what I mean.
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If anything, the more my parents worried about him the more perfect a child I became. It never occurred to me to just take up using drugs myself—as an attention-getter, it seemed to work for my brother. It wasn’t compassion for my parents that prevented me. It was the certainty they wouldn’t notice or care if I did.
The expectations for him were so high he’d never have made it as a normal person, anyway. His death spared all of us his mediocrity, his inevitable slow decline.
This makes no sense if you come from one of those happy families that go on ski trips together and gather round the tree to sing carols. But our dynamic was clear from the beginning, from the time they brought him home from the hospital. I tried to like this change; I tried to play mother with a new baby doll. But I took one look and I wanted that little bastard gone. I said so out loud, in so many words, which everyone thought was cute. How could they not realize? I meant it, even then.
My parents spoiled him, of course. He blamed them for his addictions, and you know, he may have had a point. They spoiled him not because he was bright or special or gifted in any way, a star on his own merits, or because he had achieved great things under his own steam. There was nothing special about him. He was spoiled because he was a male. Because he was the first born son. The only son.
Living in that family was like living in some sort of caliphate. They tried to hide it, they tried rather extravagantly to be fair, in an overcompensating way, but it made their preference for him more obvious. My only recourse was to beat him at something, and he was so stupid that beating him academically was the best way. Because of his allergies, I was also able to best him in several sports. If you are a glass-half-full type of person you might say I would not have achieved what I did without my parents’ benign neglect to goad me on. If so, you’d be full of shit, and not just half full.
His allergies were a constant source of worry to my parents. After a few midnight runs to the hospital his early demise became their biggest mutual fear, possibly the only thing they had in common by that point. He was barely left alone for an instant. No doubt this explained the insufferable entitled little jerk he became. Speak no ill of the dead, they say—but why not, if they were insufferable? It’s like trying to whitewash the Borgias. Death doesn’t change what they were.
Weycombe Page 27
