Baptism in Blood

by Jane Haddam

  “The problem with us is that we’ve never really learned to enjoy our money,” he’d said. “We’ve never understood that there was more that we could do with it than use it to invest in bonds.”

  Patsy had fished the lemon slice out of the bottom of the glass of Scotch on the rocks she’d just drunk and made an encouraging noise. The family room had a cathedral ceiling and thick, useless beams that had been machine-cut to look as if they had been hand-hewn, then dyed a dark brown to make them look old. Stephen’s voice bounced against all the wood and stone and empty spaces.

  “Now that I won’t be traveling anymore, it’ll be better,” he had told her, “you’ll see. I know that you’ve been terribly lonely, dumped in this house with nobody to talk to for weeks at a time. I know that you haven’t been happy here.”

  Now the water-spotted glass sat in the sink, looking all wrong. Everything else in the kitchen was clean to the point of being antiseptic. The sinks were all stainless steel and highly polished, as if porcelain had too much of the roadside diner attached to it, too much of the socially marginal and the economically low rent.

  “Damn,” Patsy said out loud. She walked through glass doors that separated the kitchen and the family room from the foyer and started up the front stairs. The stairs made a circular sweep up a curved bulge in the wall that was lined with curved leaded windows looking out on the drive and the front walk. Outside, the Volvo looked dowdy and dumpy and square—just like Patsy imagined she looked dowdy and dumpy and square everywhere in Fox Run Hill, next to all those women who worked so hard on treadmills and Nautilus machines, who came to parties and ate only crudités and drank only Perrier water. The clock at the top of the stairs said that it was 6:26. Patsy stopped next to it, at the linen closet, and rummaged through the stacks of Porthault sheets until she found the gun.

  Patsy turned the gun over in her hands. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 657 41 Magnum with an 8-3/4-inch stainless steel barrel, muzzled by a professional silencer that looked like a blackened can of insect repellent. She had bought it quite openly at a gun shop in central Philadelphia, with no questions asked, in spite of the fact that it was a heavy gun that most women would not want to use and illegal to buy in Pennsylvania.

  Most women probably couldn’t even lift it, Patsy thought, walking down the carpeted hall. The only real sounds in the house were Stephen’s snoring, and the whir of the central air-conditioning, pumping away even in the cold of the morning, set so low that crystals of ice sometimes formed on the edges of the grates.

  In the bedroom, Stephen was lying on his back under a pile of quilts and blankets, his mostly bald head lolling off the side of a thick goose-down pillow, a single naked shoulder exposed to the air. When Patsy had first met him, he’d had thick hair all over his body. In the years of their marriage, he seemed to have shed.

  Patsy spread her legs apart and raised the gun in both hands. She had fired it only twice before, but she knew how difficult it was. When the bullet exploded in the chamber, the gun kicked back and made her shoulder hurt. She wished she’d thought to wear a set of ear protectors like the ones they’d given her when she went out to practice at the range. Then she remembered the silencer and felt immensely and irredeemably stupid. Could anyone as naive and ignorant as she really do something like this? Why didn’t she just turn around and go downstairs and get into the car? Why didn’t she just drive through the front gates and keep on going, driving and driving until she came to a place where she could smell the sea?

  Stephen’s body moved on the bed. He coughed in his sleep, his throat thick with mucus. He was nothing and nobody, Patsy thought, a cog in the machine, an instrument. He was the one who had wanted to live locked up like this, so that he could pretend they were safe. If I don’t do something soon, he’ll wake up, Patsy thought.

  She tried to remember the color of his eyes and couldn’t do it. She tried to remember the shape of his hands and couldn’t do that either. She had been married to this man for twenty-two years and he had made no impression on her at all.

  “I know how unhappy you’ve been,” he had told her—but of course he didn’t know, he couldn’t know, he would never have the faintest idea.

  Stephen shifted in the bed again. A little more of him disappeared under the covers. Patsy aimed a little to the left of the shoulder she could see and took a deep breath and fired. Stephen made a sound like wind and jerked against the quilts. Blankets fell away from him. Patsy changed her aim and fired twice again. He seemed to be dead, as dead as anyone could get, but she couldn’t really tell. There were three black holes in the skin near his left nipple but no blood. Then she saw the red, spreading in a thick wash on the sheet underneath the body. The longer she looked at it, the more it seemed to darken, first into maroon, then into black. She let the gun drop and brought her legs together. She suddenly thought that it was so odd—even in this, even in the act of murdering her husband, the first thing a woman had to do was spread her legs.

  Patsy walked over to the night table on Stephen’s side of the bed and put the gun down on it. The air was full of the smell of cordite and something worse, something foul and rotted and hot. Patsy made herself kneel down at the side of the bed and look Stephen in the face. His eyes were open, deep brown eyes with no intelligence left in them. She grabbed him by the hair and turned his head back and forth. It moved where she wanted it to, flaccid and heavy, unresisting. She let his head drop. His eyes are brown, she told herself, as if that really mattered. Then she walked out of the suite and into the hall, closing the single open bedroom door behind her.

  The house was still too large, too empty, too hollow, too dead. Now it felt as if it no longer belonged to her. Patsy walked down the hall to the front stairs and down the front stairs to the foyer. She went through the foyer to the kitchen and through the kitchen to the mudroom. She walked into the garage and then carefully closed the mudroom door behind her. The Volvo was still packed and waiting on the gravel. The fog was still rolling in puffs just above the ground. No one would come looking for Stephen at all today. Anyone who came looking for her would assume that she had gone into the city to shop.

  Patsy got into the Volvo and started the engine. Molly Bracken, who lived in the elegant Victorian, came out onto her front porch, looking for the morning paper. Patsy tooted her horn lightly and waved, making just enough fuss for Molly to look her way. Molly waved too, and Patsy began to drive around the gravel circle and head for the road.

  The sun was coming up now, forcing its way through the clouds, eating at the fog. It was going to be a perfect bright day, hot and liquid. There were going to be dozens of people down at the Fox Run Hill Country Club, hanging around the pool. The city was going to be full of teenagers in halter tops and shorts cut high up on their thighs.

  I am going to disappear, Patsy told herself, smiling a little, humming the ragged melody of something by Bob Dylan under her breath. I am going to disappear into thin air, and it’s going to be as if I’d never been.

  2.

  EVELYN ADDER HID HER food all over the house, in the attic and the basement as well as on the two main floors, in underwear drawers and empty boxes of Tide detergent and behind the paperback romance novels on the bottom shelf in the alcove off the library, in all the places her husband Henry would never think to look for it. It was Henry who had bought the refrigerator with the lock on it that now took up the west corner of the enormous main floor kitchen that had once been the thing Evelyn liked best about the brick Federalist. The locked refrigerator had all the real food in it—the meat and the butter, the bagels and the cream cheese, the Italian bread and the pieces of leftover lasagna and the slices of Miss Grimble’s Chocolate Cheesecake Henry liked to eat with his coffee after dinner. The other refrigerator, big as it was, held only those things Henry thought Evelyn should eat, and only in those amounts he thought suitable for a single day. Every morning Henry would get up and decorate Evelyn’s refrigerator with grapefruits sliced in half and lettuce and
cucumber salads tossed with balsamic vinegar. Then he would sit down at the kitchen table and explain, patiently, why it was they were doing things this way. Henry had been a college professor when Evelyn first met him. He had, in fact, been Evelyn’s own college professor, at Bryn Mawr, in medieval literature. It was only after they were married that he had written the book called How to Take It Off, Keep It Off, and Never Make Excuses Again. It was the book that had made him rich enough to buy this house in Fox Run Hill.

  “How do you think it looks,” he would ask her as he arranged grapefruit halves on plates. “What do you think people think it means, that the most successful diet book author in America has a fat wife?”

  In the beginning, of course, it had been Evelyn who was thin and Henry who was fat—although Evelyn’s thinness had never been entirely natural. Like most of the other girls she was close to at Bryn Mawr, she tended to binge and purge, except they hadn’t called it that then. That was in the days before anybody knew about “eating disorders.” Evelyn and her friends would get up in the middle of the night and eat five or six gallons of ice cream apiece. They would shove down whole large pepperoni pizzas and three or four pounds of potato chips and thick chocolate cookies from Hazel’s in Philadelphia by the bag. Then they would rush into the girls’ bathrooms, stick their fingers down their throats, and throw it all up. Evelyn got so good at it, she didn’t even have to stick her finger down her throat. She could throw up just by thinking about it. She didn’t think of herself as “disordered” either. If anything, she imagined she was being “classical,” like those Romans her Introduction to Western Civilization professor was always telling them about, the ones who ate and ate at banquets until they were sick, then went out into the courtyard and vomited so that they could start all over again. Evelyn would sit in Main Line restaurants and order only salad, no dressing. She would sit upright over the salad and pick at lettuce leaves and sprigs of parsley. Sometimes on outings like this she was so hungry her stomach felt full of ground glass. She would sit across the damask tablecloths and the matched china, watching Henry eating piece after piece of batter-fried shrimp loaded with tartar sauce, and want to rip his throat out with her teeth.

  “You’re a real inspiration to me,” Henry had said at the time. “I never knew anybody who had so much self-control before.”

  The food Evelyn kept around the house these days was no more real food than the grapefruit halves and lettuce salads. It was mostly what she could shoplift when she and Henry went to the grocery store together. Henry wouldn’t let her go to the grocery store on her own anymore. He had even taken away her car so that she couldn’t get there when he wasn’t looking. Evelyn had to sneak things into the voluminous pockets of her linen tent dresses or shove them into the hollow between her breasts made by her well-constructed bra. Sometimes she picked up a twelve-pack of Hostess cupcakes in the dessert aisle, took it into the ladies’ room at the back of the store, and ate the whole thing, right there. Sometimes, when it was cold enough to wear her good long coat, she could push pastry and candy bars through the slit she had made in the lining and come home with a major haul. One way or the other, she got what she wanted. The brick Federalist was full of food. There were Devil Dogs and Ring-Dings under the winter quilts in the linen closet. There were big bags of Cheez Doodles and smaller ones of pizza-flavored Combos in the decorative curved wood Shaker baskets that made a display in the study. There were Slim Jims and packages of Chips Ahoy cookies in the hollow base of the Indian brass lamp in the formal living room. Evelyn Adder weighed three hundred and eighty-five pounds at five foot five—and there was still not a moment in her life when she was not hungry, hungry hungry hungry, so hungry she felt as if she were being sucked inside out.

  “I don’t understand how you got this way,” Evelyn’s mother would say, visiting from Altoona. “Nobody in our family ever got this way.”

  Evelyn kept chocolate-covered marshmallow pinwheels and long thick sticks of pepperoni and big hunks of blue cheese under the winter jackets in the window seat on the half-landing at the front of the house. Sitting there, she could hear Henry as soon as he started to move around in the master bedroom at the top of the stairs. She could also see out onto Winding Brook Road. She saw Patsy MacLaren Willis pack her Volvo full of clothes and get into it and leave. She saw Molly Bracken come off her porch and go down her walk and get the morning paper from the end of her drive. Evelyn sat there for hours, thinking about all the other women on this street, thinking about herself. Between six o’clock and quarter to eight she finished six and a half pounds of pepperoni, three and a half pounds of blue cheese, and thirty-four chocolate-covered marshmallow pinwheels. She also came to this conclusion: Nice little working-class girls from Altoona should not go to Bryn Mawr, or marry their medieval literature professors, or move into places like Fox Run Hill. They would only end up afraid of their own houses, and so hungry they would never get enough, and so frantic they would never be able to think straight. Like her, they would sit around wondering how long it would be before their husbands decided to hire good lawyers and get themselves divorced.

  It was now five minutes to eight. Evelyn had stopped eating ten minutes earlier, when she had heard Henry get out of bed and go to the shower. She had put away all the packages and dusted crumbs off the polished oak of the window seat. Now she heard Henry get out of the shower and pad across the wall-to-wall carpeting to the dressing room. She got up and started to make her way downstairs, slowly and painfully. All movement was painful for her these days. Her feet hurt so much when she stood up on them, she wanted to cry. They had become big too, so large and wide she had trouble finding shoes to fit them. She had started buying expensive men’s athletic shoes made of black leather and decorated with brightly dyed stripes meant to look like lightning.

  “Your feet will get smaller when you lose the weight,” Henry would tell her. “They won’t hurt so much either. Believe me. I know.”

  When Evelyn had first met Henry, he had been massive, impressive, beautiful. Now, thinner, he seemed diminished to her. His mouth was always pinched tight. His flesh hung slackly against his bones no matter how much he exercised. When she saw him with the other men on the stone terrace of the country club, drinking gin and tonic, hefting tennis rackets, Henry was always the one who looked fake, phony, totally out of place.

  “Marriage is a crapshoot,” Evelyn’s mother always said, and: “You have to take men the way you find them.”

  I would be happy to take Henry the way I found him, Evelyn told herself. I just don’t want him the way he is now.

  There was a professional doctor’s scale in one corner of the breakfast nook. Henry had put it there to check Evelyn’s progress every morning. He had also locked up the coffee and the tea and the Perrier water, so that she couldn’t drink them before he got up and blame any weight gain on fluid in her system. He made her take off her shoes and stockings and dress and stand in the nook in her underwear, her big breasts spilling down over the rounded swell of her belly, her thighs lumpy and veined and mottled blue and red with fat and age.

  “Look at you,” he would say as she stood there, a breeze coming through one of the open skylights, feeling cold, feeling stupid, feeling as ugly as she had always known she was inside. “Look at you.”

  Upstairs in the bedroom there were mirrors now, all along one wall, so that she couldn’t escape looking at herself. If she tried to close her eyes, she fell. If she fell, she had a hard time getting up. Henry would have to get up himself and help her. Then the questions would start. What are you doing up and dressed this early in the morning? Where are you going? Where are you hiding the food?

  “Look at you,” he would say, spinning her around so that she was forced to face the mirrors. He would grab at the front of her dress and tear. The dress would pull away from her body and hang off her shoulders in tatters. In the mirror a grotesque fat woman with bulging eyes and pussy red pimples along the line of her jaw would stare back at her, hateful a
nd angry, as hateful and angry as Henry had gotten to be.

  “Look at you,” he would say, and one day, provoked beyond endurance, finding a trail of crumbs wound along one of her massive breasts, he had torn at her bra too. He had torn it right off, snapping the elastic painfully on her back, dragging the spike of one bra hook into her flesh until she bled. Her breasts bounced up and down and side to side, and that hurt too. Her nipples and the area around them were as thick and dark and dry as leather. There was a mountain of crumbs in her bra, between her breasts. It popped into fragments as soon as her breasts came free and scattered over the white wall-to-wall carpeting like ashes blown into town from a distant forest fire.

  “Look at you,” Henry had screamed loud enough so that Evelyn was suddenly glad of all that central air-conditioning, all those sound buffers placed on all the properties, all those illusions of space and grace. Her breasts were shaking, hurting, bouncing. They were so big now that she even wore a bra to bed. Henry’s face was so red, she thought he was having a heart attack. His eyes seemed to be coming out of his head. The knuckles on both of his hands were white. Suddenly he reached out and snatched at her underwear. He grabbed the elastic waistband in his fists and pulled with all his might. The elastic tore and the nylon tore after it. A second later Henry had shreds of underwear in his hands and Evelyn was standing naked. The only thing Evelyn remembered after that was that her pubic hair seemed to have disappeared. It was hidden by the curtains of flesh that had draped themselves around her, hanging like an apron from her waist.