by Mary Kubica
Truth be told, I like Camille more than Sadie. The first time
she manifested herself for me, I thought Sadie was yanking my
chain. But no. It was real. And almost too good to be true. Be-
cause I’d discovered a vivacious, untamable woman living in-
side my wife, one I was more smitten with than the woman I
married. It was like discovering gold in a mine.
There’s a whole metamorphosis that happens. I’ve been at
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this long enough that I know when it’s happening. I just never
know who I’ll get when the mutation takes place, if I’ll wind
up with a butterfly or a frog.
“You have to believe me,” she begs.
“I do believe you, Sadie.”
“I think they’re trying to frame me,” she says. “But I have an
alibi, Will. I was with you when she was killed. They’re blam-
ing me for something I didn’t do!” she yells as I go to her, hold
her pretty little head in my hands and tell her everything will
be alright.
She recoils then, remembering something.
“Berg said you called him,” she says. “He said you called him
and took back what you said about that night. He says you said
I wasn’t with you after all. That I walked the dogs. That you
didn’t know where I’d gone. You lied, Will.”
“Is that what they told you?” I ask, aghast. I let my mouth
drop, my eyes go wide. I shake my head, and say, “They’re lying,
Sadie. They’re telling lies, trying to pit us against each other. It’s a tactic. You can’t believe anything they say.”
“Why didn’t you tell me Morgan was Erin’s sister?” she asks,
changing tack. “You kept that from me. I would have under-
stood, Will. I would have understood your need to connect
with someone Erin loved if only you’d have told me. I would
have supported that,” she says, and it’s laughable, really. Because I thought Sadie was smarter than this. She hasn’t put two and
two together.
I didn’t need to connect with Morgan. I needed to disconnect.
I didn’t know she lived on the island when we moved here. If I
did, we wouldn’t have come.
Imagine my surprise when I saw her for the first time in ten
years. I could have let it go, too. But Morgan couldn’t let sleep-
ing dogs lie.
She threatened to snitch. To tell Sadie what I’d done. The
picture of Erin she left for Sadie to find. I found it first, put it 9780778369110_RHC_txt(ENT_ID=269160).indd 315
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in the last place I expected Sadie to look. It was just my luck
that she did.
Morgan was a stupid kid the night I took Erin’s life. She heard
us fighting because Erin had fallen for some dick when she was
off at school. She came home to break the engagement off. She
tried to give me the ring back. Erin had only been gone a couple
months, but by winter break she was high and mighty already.
She thought she was better than me. A sorority girl while I was
still living at home, going to community college.
Morgan tried to tattle, to tell everyone she heard us fighting
the night before, but no one was going to believe a ten-year-
old over me. And I played the role of the distraught boyfriend
quite well. I was heartbroken as could be. And no one yet knew
Erin had been seeing someone new. She only told that to me.
The evidence—the storm, the icy patches on the street, the
lack of visibility—was also insurmountable that night. I’d taken
precautions. When they found her, there were no external signs
of violence. No signs of a struggle. Asphyxiation is extremely
difficult to detect. They didn’t do a tox screen, either, on account of the weather conditions. No one considered that Erin might’ve
died because of a shitload of Xanax in her system, because of
hypoxia, because of a plastic bag strapped down over her head.
The cops didn’t. They didn’t think once about the way I pulled
the bag from her head when she was dead; how I moved Erin’s
body to the driver’s seat, shifted the car into Drive, watched her
corpse take a ride into the pond before I walked the rest of the
way home, grateful for the snow that covered my tracks. No,
they thought only of the icy road, of Erin’s lead foot, of the in-
disputable fact that she swerved off the road and into the freez-
ing water—which was quite disputable after all. Because that’s
not the way it happened.
Premeditated murder. It was almost too easy to do and get
away with.
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I moved on, met Sadie, fell in love, got married. Enter Ca-
mille.
She took care of me in ways Sadie never could. I never imag-
ined all that she’d do for me over the years. Morgan wasn’t the
first woman she killed for me. Because there was Carrie Laem-
mer too, a student of mine who accused me of sexual harassment.
Again Sadie speaks. “They say I disassociate. That I’m only
one of many parts. That there are people living inside of me,”
she says. “It’s ludicrous. I mean, if you, my husband, didn’t see
it, how could they?”
“It’s one of the many things I love about you. Your unpre-
dictability. Different every day. I’ll tell you this, Sadie: you were never boring. I just never came up with a diagnosis for your condition,” I say, though it’s a lie, of course. I’ve known for eons
what I was dealing with. I learned how to turn it in my favor.
“You knew?” she asks, aghast.
“It’s a good thing, Sadie. The silver lining. Don’t you see?
The police don’t think that you killed Morgan. They believe
that Camille did. You can plead not guilty by reason of insanity.
You won’t go to jail.”
She gasps, coming undone. It’s fun to watch. “But I’ll be sent
to a psychiatric institution, Will. I won’t be able to go home.”
“That’s better than jail, isn’t it, Sadie? Do you know what
kind of things happen in jail?”
“But Will,” she tells me, desperate now. “I’m not insane.”
I step away from her. I go to the door because I’m the only
one of us with the freedom to leave. There’s power in that. I
turn and look at her, my face changing, becoming visibly apa-
thetic because the sham-empathy is getting exhausting.
“I’m not insane,” she tells me again.
I hold my tongue. It wouldn’t be right to lie.
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Sadie
Sometime after Will has gone, Officer Berg steps into the room
with me. He leaves the door open.
I know my rights. I demand to see a lawyer.
But he just shrugs halfheartedly at me and says, “No need,”
because they’re letting me go. They have no evidence to hold
me on. The murder weapon, the washcloth that I said I saw were
nowhere to
be found. The going theory is that I made them both
up in an effort to throw off the investigation. But they can’t prove that either. They say I killed Morgan. That I transformed into
some other version of me and killed her myself. But the police
need probable cause before they can arrest me. They need some-
thing more than mere suspicion. Even Mr. Nilsson’s statement
isn’t damning enough because it doesn’t place me at the crime
scene. The cell phone in my home also doesn’t do that. These
things are circumstantial.
It feels like some phantom thing. There are parts of my life I
can’t account for, including that night. It’s in the realm of pos-
sibility that I murdered that poor woman—or some version of
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me did—though I don’t know why. The pictures Officer Berg
showed me come to mind and I stifle a cry.
“Would you like us to call your husband to come get you?”
Officer Berg asks, but I say no. Truth be told, I’m a bit upset
that Will left me at the police station alone. Though the weather
outside is still inclement, I need to be alone with my thoughts.
I need fresh air.
Officer Berg himself offers me a ride, but I say no to that too.
I need to get away from him.
I start to shrug off the coat Officer Berg gave me, but he stops
me, saying I should keep it. He’ll get it another time.
It’s dark outside. The sun has set. The world is white, but for
now the snow has stopped coming down. Traffic moves slowly.
Headlights maneuver through snowbanks. Tires scrape against
the packed-down snow. The streets are messy.
There are slippers on my feet, though they’re a far cry from
shoes. They’re knit and a faux fur that only absorbs the moisture,
making my feet wet, red, numb. My hair hasn’t seen a comb
today. I have no idea what I look like, though I’d venture to
guess it’s just a hairbreadth away from a madwoman.
As I walk the few blocks home, I piece together the last few
hours of my life. I left Otto alone with the washcloth and the
knife. The police came searching for these things. By the time
they did, they were gone. Someone did something with the
washcloth and the knife.
As I make my way toward our street, I put my head down
and walk, my arms tied into a knot to stave off the night’s fierce
wind. The snow on the ground still blows about. There are icy
patches on the street, which I slip on, falling once, twice, three
times. Only on the third time does a good Samaritan help me
to my feet, taking me for a drunk. He asks if he can call some-
one to come pick me up, but by then I’m almost home. I just
have our street to climb, and I do so gracelessly.
I see Will in the window when I arrive, sitting on the sofa, the
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fireplace red-hot. His legs are crossed and he’s lost in thought.
Tate dashes through the room, smiling merrily, and on his way
past, Will tickles his belly and he laughs. Tate takes off, running up the stairs and away from Will, and then he’s gone, to some
other part of the house where I can no longer see him. Will re-
turns to the sofa, laces his hands behind his head and leans back,
seemingly content.
There are lights on in the upstairs windows, Otto’s and Imo-
gen’s, which face the street, though the curtains are closed. I
can’t see anything but the glowing peripheries of the windows,
though it surprises me that even Imogen is home. At this time
in the evening, she isn’t often home.
From the outside, the house looks perfectly idyllic as it did
that first day we arrived. The rooftops, the trees are covered
with snow. It covers the lawn, sparkling white. The snow clouds
have cleared, the moon illuminating the picturesque scene. The
fireplace spews smoke from the chimney, and though outside the
world is freezing, inside it looks undeniably homey and warm.
There’s nothing amiss with this scene, as if Will and the kids
have moved on without me, no one noticing my absence.
But the very fact that nothing is amiss makes me feel instinc-
tually that something is wrong.
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Will
The door bursts open. There she stands, all slovenly and wind-
blown.
Nice of Berg to give me fair warning that she’d been let go.
I hide my surprise. I rise to my feet, go to her, cup her cold
face in my hands. “Oh, thank God,” I say, embracing her. I hold
my breath. She smells putrid. “They finally came to their senses,”
I say, but Sadie’s giving me the cold shoulder, pulling away, say-
ing I left her there, that I abandoned her. It’s all very dramatic.
“I did no such thing,” I say, playing to her weakness, her pen-
chant for losing time. Roughly a quarter of the conversations
Sadie has, she doesn’t remember having. Which has become un-
exceptional for me, but is quite the nuisance for coworkers and
the like. It makes it difficult for Sadie to have friends because
on the surface she’s moody and aloof.
“I told you I’d be back just as soon as I made sure the kids
were alright,” I say. “Don’t you remember? I love you, Sadie. I
would never have abandoned you.”
She shakes her head. She doesn’t remember. Because it didn’t
happen.
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“Where are the kids?” she asks, looking for them.
“In their rooms.”
“When were you going to come back?”
“I’ve been making calls, trying to find someone to come stay
with the kids. I didn’t want to leave them alone all night.”
“Why should I believe you?” she asks, a doubting Thomas.
She wants to look at my phone, see who I’ve called, and it’s only
because fortune smiles down on me that there are recent calls
in the call log to numbers Sadie doesn’t know. I assign them
names. Andrea, a colleague, and Samantha, a graduate student.
“Why wouldn’t you believe me?” I fire back, playing the
victim.
We hear Tate upstairs jumping away on his bed. The house
groans because of it.
She shakes her head, feeling spent, and says, “I don’t know
what to believe anymore.” She rubs at her forehead, trying to
figure it out. She’s had a hell of a day. She can’t understand how
a knife and washcloth could just up and disappear. She asks me,
her tone exasperated and contentious. She’s looking for a fight.
I shrug my shoulders and ask back, “I don’t know, Sadie.
Are you sure you really saw them?” because a little gaslighting
never hurts.
“I did!” she says, desperate to make me believe her.
This is turning into a bit of a shitstorm now th
at the police
are involved, unlike last time when things went so smoothly. I’m
usually so much tidier about such things. Take Carrie Laemmer,
for example. All I had to do that time was wait for Camille to
come, put the idea in her head. Camille is suggestable, as Sadie
is easily suggestable. It’s just that Sadie isn’t the violent type. I could have done it myself. But why would I, when I had someone willing to do my bidding for me? I cried my eyes out, told
her all about Carrie’s threats, how she accused me of sexual ha-
rassment. I said I wished she would just go away and leave me
alone. My career, my reputation would be gone if Carrie made
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good on her threats. They’d take me away from her, they’d put
me in jail. I told her, She’s trying to ruin my life. She’s trying to ruin our lives.
I didn’t specifically ask Camille to kill her.
And yet, nevertheless, a few days later Carrie was dead.
The way it happened was that one day, poor Carrie Laem-
mer went missing. There was a wide-scale search. Word had it
that she’d been at a frat party the night before, boozing it up.
She left the party alone, stumbled out of the house, drunk. She
fell down the porch steps while fellow partygoers watched on.
Carrie’s roommate didn’t return home until the following
morning. When she did, she found that Carrie’s bed hadn’t
been slept in, that Carrie hadn’t made it home the night before.
Security cameras across campus caught glimpses of Carrie
staggering past the library, falling down in the middle of the
quad. It was unlike Carrie, who could hold her liquor, or so said
the students who saw the CCTV footage. As if it was brag-wor-
thy, a high tolerance to alcohol. Her parents would be so proud
to know what their fifty grand a year bought them.
There were lapses in the video surveillance. Black holes where
the cameras didn’t reach. I was at a faculty event that night.
People saw me. Not that I was ever a suspect because no one
was. Because that time, unlike this, things went swimmingly.
No pun intended.
Not far from campus was a polluted canal where the univer-
sity’s crew team rowed. The water was more than ten feet deep,
contaminated with sewage, if the rumors were true. A wooded
running path sat parallel to the canal, all of it shadowed by trees.
