After He Killed Me

by Natalie Barelli

  “It’s not a joke, Emma.”

  “Tell me something. Do you know that he faked the modeling data?”

  She looks down at her hands, picking at the skin around her thumbnails. “He didn’t put it that way at the time. But there were already some problems at the Forum, when Jim and I were . . . let’s say that we both worked to keep some details away from Terry. But I thought it was minor; just some kinks that would be fixed with a few adjustments. I thought he needed a bit more time.” She sighs. “That’s what he led me to believe. I never got to find out what happened after that. I left. As you know.”

  I’ve heard that spiel myself from Jim: I just need a bit more time. It’s just a matter of making a few adjustments to the modeling.

  “You do realize it’s a bit more than that, right?” I say. “He totally faked the data, then crossed his fingers, hoping for the best. Essentially.”

  She nods, wipes a tear with the back of her hand.

  “Go back to your story: he was waiting outside your office. Then what?”

  “We went back to my place, to talk. We talked all night. He told me that he left you because he wanted us to have another chance at love.”

  I burst out laughing. “Another chance at love? Seriously?”

  She looks wounded. I just shake my head, trying to suppress the laughter that won’t go away.

  “And I suppose you forgot all about how toxic it had been,” I say, “and how him leaving you was the best thing to happen to you. Am I wrong?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  I stand up. “Well you know, Carol, I couldn’t care less how it is, he’s all yours. Enjoy.”

  She grabs my arm. “He thinks I’m spying on him, Emma. He’s gone crazy. The last forty-eight hours have been the most terrifying of my life. He accuses me all the time. I can’t breathe. He says that if I really loved him, I would prove that I’m not working with them, whoever they are. The people who are going to put him in jail.”

  That sends a shudder through me. “Go back a bit. Jim declared his undying love for you. What happened after that?”

  A flush spreads across her cheeks.

  “He was very convincing. Very apologetic about how he treated me.”

  I can’t help raising an eyebrow. She notices it.

  “I know, I was in the wrong. Can we not go over that again?”

  “You’re the one who brought it up, Carol.”

  “This was Jim at his best. It all came back to me, how much I loved him. He looks great. He was incredibly loving, incredibly attentive, and I let myself get swept up in that. It may not have been smart, or right, but it’s what happened.”

  She sounds a lot like I used to: in love, charmed, enraptured. It’s almost funny to hear it back from someone else, except it’s not. It’s pathetic.

  “Then he started to question me about work. Was anyone at the Department talking about the Forum? Or him? I told him no! It’s not my section, it doesn’t come up. Then he wanted to know if I had anything to do with the investigation. I don’t. I told him so, repeatedly. But he wouldn’t believe me. He asked the questions over and over, and frankly it was driving me crazy.”

  I don’t believe for one minute that Jim wanted to rekindle his love affair with Carol. He’d left it too long. When I hear her say he’d missed her and all that, my first thought is that he’d wanted a place to stay. He doesn’t have an income anymore; he wasn’t going to splurge on a hotel. The master manipulator was going to dump her as soon as he got back on his feet. For the first time, I can’t help but feel sorry for her.

  “His behavior has been crazy ever since the audit,” I tell her. “He’s been completely paranoid, like you wouldn’t believe.”

  She scoffs bitterly. “Oh, I would, I do believe it. Trust me.”

  “Did you? Have something to do with the audit?”

  She touches her throat, gives me an incredulous look. “No!” she says. “Christ! Not you too!”

  “Hey, it’s not as incredible as it sounds. You knew about the fake research.”

  Carol starts to say something, but I raise my hand, silencing her.

  “And you were the scorned woman,” I add. “You now work for the very government department that is being cheated by your ex-lover. It’s not that far-fetched, Carol, so I’m asking again—and before you answer, believe me, I don’t care either way. But I would like to know. Did you? Nudge the audit, so to speak?”

  “No. I didn’t. I didn’t even want to think about him anymore. The less I had to do with Jim Fern, the better. Okay?”

  I bend down to rub my calf, thinking it over.

  “So then what?” I ask.

  “After he moved in with me, he would call me at work, like, ten times a day. If I turned off my cell phone, he’d call through reception. It was starting to affect my job. I told him I didn’t want to be with him anymore, that I wasn’t comfortable, and I wanted him to move out.”

  She starts shaking again, squeezing her hands together. I reach across and put my hand on top of hers. She takes a deep breath.

  “He threatened me, Emma. He put his hand on my throat and he squeezed. He said that he knew it was me, that I was spying on him, and that I shouldn’t go to work until the whole thing blows over.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  “What would they do? Caution him? If I go to the cops, he’ll really hurt me. I have no doubts about that.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I’ve had to take some leave from work. Jim didn’t want to stay in D.C. We’re staying on Long Island. My parents have a place in Bellmore, but they live in the U.K. now.”

  “Nice life if you can get it.”

  I don’t know why I said that, considering I have it too. I raise a hand in apology.

  “I don’t know what you want from me, Carol,” I say. “I can’t help you. I’ve had my own problems with Jim. I want nothing to do with him.”

  She looks at me, her lips trembling, and I can see it in her eyes. The fear. The desperation.

  “He trawls through my emails, Emma. He watches my every move. Last night, I woke up and he was sitting in a chair by the bed, staring at me. He goes from being incredibly in love, saying that he can’t live without me, to threatening me. He pleads with me to believe him, that we will be happy together in our new life when none of this is hanging over his head, and then in the next minute, he’s suspicious of everything I do or say. Convinced I’m out to get him, or something like that.”

  “And yet you’re here,” I point out, and we both look around and behind us at the same time.

  “He was asleep. I left a note saying I needed to renew my passport—it has just expired, which is the truth. I made sure I wasn’t followed. I was incredibly careful, believe me.”

  “Your passport?”

  “He wants us to go abroad. Start again.”

  I snort. Where have I heard that one before?

  “Where?”

  “Tunisia, I think.”

  “Tunisia? There’s a demand for American economists in Tunisia?”

  She looks askance at me. “They have no extradition treaty.”

  It’s all I can do not to burst out laughing.

  “You could have just called if you wanted to talk to me so badly.”

  “Are you crazy? He’s been checking my cell phone every day: who calls me, who I’ve called. If your number came up, I’d be . . .” She lets the word float between us.

  In trouble? Dead?

  For a moment, I wonder if I could get her to find my old phone among Jim’s things and return it to me. But in exchange for what? I couldn’t help her if I wanted to—what could I possibly do? My gut tells me I need to get as far away as possible from this whole situation.

  I stand up. “Again, this has nothing to do with me anymore. I couldn’t care less whether Jim gets done for fraud, or caught up to his elbow in the cookie jar. He can fly to the moon if he wants. I certainly won’t stop him. Let him go to Tuni
sia.”

  She shakes her head. “He won’t go without me.”

  I sigh. “I understand, I really do, but I don’t want any part of it.”

  I turn on my heel, determined to get away from her and her problems. She’d better not contact me again. But then she says, a little too loudly for my taste, “Your friend, Beatrice Johnson Greene. He said you killed her.”

  And there it is. The moment I’ve been dreading for days: finding out that Jim has told someone. I stop and turn around and do my best to laugh, my head thrown back.

  “He said that?” I ask, once I’ve recovered myself. “That’s a good one!”

  She shrugs. “I know. He’s losing his mind. But he also said you didn’t write your novel, that it was her, Beatrice, and you stole it.”

  My arms are dangling by my side. I squeeze my hands into fists. “That’s just insane. How could I steal something like that? For God’s sake! Wow, he really has gone crazy. Off his rocker. I mean, up till now, you made him sound a little unhinged, I’ll admit that, but this? He’s really lost it, you’re right. I mean, of all the stupid, made-up, fantastical stories he could possibly come up—”

  “He’s going to kill me, Emma. Help me.”

  I sit back down next to her.

  “What are we going to do?” she asks.

  I say it out loud, the very same decision I made a few minutes ago, in the privacy of my own head.

  “We’re going to kill him.”

  18

  Will three make me a serial killer?

  We’ve moved to a small bar near Gramercy Park, my resolution about not drinking having gone the way of the dodo. And anyway, we can hardly have this conversation on the sidewalk, and the park is out of the question since we need a key to get in.

  It’s an ordinary little “bar and grill” type of establishment, suitably intimate and dimly lit. There are a few patrons, but it’s quiet. It’s still early for drinking, or so some people might say.

  We’re sitting in a booth in the corner. Carol won’t remove her baseball cap but she does take off her sunglasses. She has dark circles under her eyes, the telltale signs of a sleepless night. Without her hoodie on, I can see she’s thinner than when I saw her last.

  She starts to cry.

  “Carol, please don’t do that. Look around, for Christ’s sake. We’re in a public place.”

  “I can’t kill anyone,” she says.

  “Okay, I understand. I mean, neither can I.”

  “I wouldn’t even know how.”

  “Me neither. It’s probably very difficult.”

  “It’s not an option, Emma. We can’t kill him.”

  “Okay. Listen to what I have to say, then you tell me if you have a better idea.”

  So I tell her. Everything, sort of. I tell her what kind of man Jim really is, if she doesn’t already know. How he tried to kill me by pushing me into traffic. How he drugged me and tried to kill me again, which is not strictly true, and as I watch her eyes grow wide, and her tears fall, I tell her, in no uncertain terms, that if she wants to stay alive, then we don’t have a choice.

  “You’re in his sights now, Carol. You said so yourself. He’s going to kill you. Well, the rest of that sentence goes like this: unless we kill him first.”

  It takes a long time, but I wear her down and she believes me. So we try to plot ourselves a murder, but everything comes up blank. Where would we get a gun? What if we pushed him off a subway platform, right in front of an oncoming train, pretending it was suicide? Poor, sweet Carol . . . ever heard of witnesses? CCTV cameras? I could push him into traffic; give that a shot. He told me there was a trick to that: pretending you’re stopping the person from falling just as you have in fact pushed them to their death.

  No. Too risky.

  “What about your place?” I say.

  She snaps her head around, and stares at me.

  “What about my place?”

  “Could we kill him there?”

  “No! Of course we couldn’t! It’s my parents’ place anyway. And what would I do with the body?”

  “Is the house by the sea? Could we dump him in the ocean?”

  She blinks rapidly. “How can you be so . . . practical?”

  “Yes, I know, but we’ve established that it’s the only solution, haven’t we?”

  She nods.

  “Okay, so.” I pour her a glass from the bottle of wine I ordered. This is a bottle-of-wine kind of discussion.

  “I don’t know if I should be drinking,” she says.

  “So don’t. I don’t care. I’ll get you some water if you want.”

  She takes a sip. “We have a boat,” she says.

  “Really?”

  She nods.

  “That’s good! Do you sail?”

  She waits a beat, as if I’ll clarify the question, then she says, “A little. I used to when I was younger, with my parents, then again as a teenager. I haven’t done it in a while. Why? What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know yet, but that’s got to be something we can work with. Jim sails too. He took me sailing once, years ago, for my birthday. Tell him you’re organizing a day or two out on the sailboat,” I suggest.

  “Off Long Island?”

  “No, in the Caribbean.”

  Her eyes widen. I raise mine skyward in a silent prayer.

  “Yes, Long Island,” I assure her.

  She bites the side of her thumb, but she’s thinking. We put our heads together. Whispering. It’s like she’s turned her brain on. We both come up with ideas, and throw most of them out. Every now and then she interjects with “I can’t do that” or “I could never pull that off,” and variations on that theme. It takes a while, but in the end, we nail it; we come up with what I think is the perfect plan.

  “I’ll find the place to rent the boat from. It needs to be from a marina that would suit our purposes. One of the smaller ones.”

  Because we’ve decided we can’t use Carol’s boat. For various reasons. It’s too small, for a start, but also, we need witnesses. Lots of them.

  “I’ll get all the other stuff we need as well,” I tell her. “You don’t need to do anything.”

  “When?”

  “Give me a couple weeks.”

  “I don’t know if I can wait that long,” she says, shakily.

  “Sure you can. Just, you know, pretend you love him, ask him about Tunisia. Bring back some brochures with you.”

  “No no no! I can’t wait that long. He’s really unbalanced, Emma. I don’t know what’s going to happen over the next two weeks. For all I know, he’ll have already bought two tickets to Tunisia.”

  “I understand.” And I do. She’s right. “Give me your number. I’ll let you know when. Just let me do the research first.”

  “You can’t call me.”

  “OK. Can I text you?”

  She shakes her head. “No. I’ll get one of those disposable phones on the way back. I’ll text you the number.”

  I help myself to another glass of wine from the bottle in the ice bucket and pause over her glass, as if to pour. She puts her hand over it.

  “No, no. He’ll smell it on me. I’ll get some soda water.” She stands up to make her way to the bar and turns back to me.

  “Do you mind paying for it? I’m out of cash and I don’t want to use my credit card.”

  “Oh? Okay, sure.”

  I fumble in my bag for my wallet. I mean to give her some cash, but she just grabs it from me. I find the gesture annoying, frankly. We’re not that close. I don’t want her to get any ideas that we’re friends now, united as we may be in hatred.

  When she comes back with a glass and a bottle of Perrier, I grab the wallet back from her and put it into my bag.

  “We need to hurry up, Carol. You should think about getting home.”

  She nods quickly. “I’m not sure I can convince him, Emma.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “Maybe I can tell him it’s a surprise?”r />
  “No, please don’t do that. He’ll think you’re taking him to the cops. Or getting him committed or something. He’s paranoid, remember?”

  “I’ll tell him we have to make plans, because we need to get away soon.”

  “Yes. Good.”

  She takes a few sips of water. “But that we should do it somewhere else, in case we’re being watched.”

  “You’re a star. That’s great. In fact, why don’t you display a little paranoia of your own, when you get back?”

  She looks at me sideways. “That shouldn’t be too hard.”

  “I mean, tell him you think you saw the webcam light come on, on your laptop, or on his, if he’s removed that stupid bit of tape.”

  She nods, small ones.

  “Tell him you don’t feel comfortable discussing your getaway plans in the house. But that you have an idea of where you could go and be really, really undisturbed.”

  “In the middle of the ocean.”

  “Well, maybe not the middle, but yes, that’s the general idea.”

  “Do you think it will work?”

  “You’re doing great, Carol. It will.”

  19

  I’ve found the perfect place for our assignation. I spent all last night trawling the Internet, looking for just the right marina from which to rent a boat, and this morning I paid them a visit. I’ve told Carol we can do it on Wednesday. That’s in two days. Two days is not a lot of time, and I have an awful lot to do before then. For one thing, it’s surprisingly difficult to find men’s wigs in this city. Women’s wigs? Easy. But for men, not so much. The assumption seems to be that men want toupees or hair implants, and the first couple of stores I visit recommend I go to the type of place where one would need to make an appointment to discuss the root, so to speak, of the problem.

  “It’s just for a party,” I tell the young woman in yet another store that I visit.

  “Oh, like a costume party? You could try a party supply store; one of the larger ones.”

  But that’s not right either, I’m not looking for a costume wig. I don’t want to look like Louis the Fourteenth. I start to get a little nervous that I won’t find it in time.

  When I get to the next store on my list, it’s the same again. There are rows and rows of wigs on display, in all shapes and sizes, but they’re all for women.