The Pocket Wife

by Susan Crawford

  CHAPTER 23

  She wanders around for hours, losing herself in the crowds, browsing through Macy’s, concentrating on her breathing until at last she’s calm. In the morning she’ll go back to the house that doesn’t feel especially homey now, with the pall of Celia bludgeoned and bloody and extremely dead, with the unshakable feeling that someone’s watching her, even as she does mundane and boring things—washing dishes or walking through the living room—with Peter at the center of her sanity or insanity, with the question of her own actions crowding her mind. At least Jamie, safely off at school, remains untainted. Pure. Light. Precious. And there’s Spot, a breath of fresh air, with his needle claws and his huge ears, his boundless energy.

  When the hotel receipt dropped like a crinkly little gift at her feet, Dana had thought it was a sign. Tiny apertures were going to widen; hidden things would come to light. She’d get some sleep in this soporific hotel in the city where she has always felt at home, where she has always felt alive. She would gather her thoughts, piece together the puzzle of Celia’s death and find she wasn’t in it.

  But it’s all gone wrong. According to Ronald, she imagined the picture and so, most likely, the sangria in the glass, her neighbor in the kitchen, awareness of what was going on around her. There is only this confusion now, and anger, boiling up from nowhere, making her say things she doesn’t want to say, making her wonder what sorts of things she’s capable of doing. Worse, what she’s already done.

  She thinks about going to Ronald’s room. She thinks about showing him the scar along her wrist, about smoothing things over; making him see she didn’t mean to yell at him at breakfast, didn’t mean to cause a scene. She thinks of shaming him, of coaxing, pleading, explaining the importance of his telling her the truth about the photo, but in the end she doesn’t go to Ronald’s room. In the end she understands that there are too many people implicated in this cover-up—too many unrelated people—for it to be real.

  She walks back to the St. Giles and slips onto the elevator, careful not to meet the doorman’s eyes, avoiding the desk clerk, the people clustered in small groups around the lobby, afraid they’ll see her madness or that she herself will see bizarre, outlandish creatures lurking there behind their eyes. In her room she flicks on the TV and walks into the adjoining bathroom to wash her face, ignoring the long, bright mirror above the sink. The phone blinks, and she picks up Ronald’s message. “Sorry,” he says. “Haven’t found the photo yet.” She plays the message several times; he sounds a little off. Her gut tells her he’s lying. Yet? Either it’s there or it isn’t. Still, her instincts have been running right at 100 percent wrong lately. She deletes the message and falls across the slippery quilted bedspread.

  The scar is old, a puckered white line running along the blue veins of her wrist. She doesn’t remember putting it there, only the ambulance with its bright lights, its wide mouth, its loud, offensive sound like a scream. She remembers an incredible sadness, remembers missing the Poet so desperately that she couldn’t bear to live without him. Is he even still alive? Sometimes she wonders; often she wonders. He would be as old as she is. He would have gray in his black hair. She sighs. The news drones on. Celia’s face in an old photograph flashes on the screen and disappears, eclipsed by stories of a missing teenage girl and a carjacking turned murder outside a nearby train station.

  She climbs between the sheets and watches the news. She mutes the sound, but she can hear the voices anyway. All night she stares at the screen, watching figures come and go, the sounds of voices going in and out, in and out, like whispers traveling down a hall or pictures scattered in a closing drawer—out of reach.

  As soon as the sun comes up, Dana gets out of bed and showers. The hotel has lost its allure. There’s no point hemorrhaging money into this place she’d thought would be soporific and has turned out not to be. She’s forgotten now why she’s even come here. There was the phone. And she was angry. Furious with Peter, but now she can’t quite think why. She turns in her key card at the front desk and settles her bill, avoiding the frowsy orange and growing hair on the clerk, staring at her shoes as the doorman reaches out to help her with her things, avoiding Ronald, who is standing several yards away. A breeze floats through the brick and concrete, sifts through her hair, and she bends over her bag, fiddling with the buckle, making herself invisible in the throngs of people walking down the sidewalk.

  When she straightens up, Ronald is beside her.

  “Hi,” he says. “Are you leaving?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry to see you go. I left you a message on your room—”

  “I got it.”

  Ronald glances at his watch.

  “Please,” she says, “don’t let me hold you up.”

  Ronald raises his arms. “Feel free,” he says, “but it won’t do you much good. I’ve already been robbed by the St. Giles.”

  Dana forces a smile. “Look,” she says, “I’m sorry about yesterday, losing my temper the way I did.”

  “It’s okay,” he says. “But what’s wrong?” His arms are still up in the air as if he’s forgotten them; she thinks of the Hanged Man in a tarot deck.

  She shrugs. “I’m—how shall I put this?—having a breakdown,” Dana says, and she turns and walks away, tipping the valet, who ushers her into her car; the Toyota sits idling on the asphalt. When she’s settled her bag in the backseat, she glances at Ronald, who still stands staring at her, his mouth half open as if he were about to say something that didn’t quite come out, his arms back in place at his sides. She fastens her seat belt, and sunlight bounces needle-thin off St. Christopher as the car rolls backward. Ronald taps on her window. She jams her foot on the brake. “What? Jesus!” She opens the window; hot air flows in; the air conditioner whines.

  “Why’d you say you’re having a breakdown? Were you and Celia . . . ? I didn’t realize you were that close.” Ronald sticks his head inside her window.

  “We weren’t. I’m just losing my mind,” Dana says. “For starters, I imagined this whole scenario that centered on a picture in a phone that never existed.”

  Ronald looks like he wants to say something. In fact, he says, “Listen—” but then he stops.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” He steps back from the car, now at the beginning of a lengthy line of irate drivers. Dana readjusts the rearview mirror, knocked off center in the excitement of Ronald’s appearing in it at such close proximity. Behind her, someone honks. Ronald takes a step away, toward the sidewalk. “It’s just . . . things are often not what they seem to be,” he says.

  You’re telling me, Dana thinks about saying. On the visor, St. Christopher smiles and shakes his head. “Thanks,” she says instead. “I was exaggerating. I tend to do that when I’m stressed. See you in the hood,” and she grits her teeth, crosses herself quickly, and pulls out onto a street filled with traffic and blaring horns. Behind her, Ronald becomes smaller and smaller in the mirror—a tiny, spluttering, puzzling form—until at last he disappears.

  She crosses the bridge, navigates the highways with clenched teeth, and when she has nearly reached her street, she drives around the block several times before pulling, finally, onto Ashby Lane and sliding into her driveway.

  The sounds around her deafen her—the claps of thunder in the distance, the howling of a neighbor’s dog, the screeching of a door across the street. Inside the car stagnant air shifts and twitches in the stillness; it vibrates, moving in large, flashing circles around her. She appeals to St. Christopher, but he only winks and nods toward a notebook on the passenger seat, which Dana picks up, uncapping a pen stuck in its spirally wire binding. She chronicles recent occurrences. She revisits the list of things she knows and doesn’t know, thoughts she’s transferred from napkins and receipts, adding her most recent fears and sleepless nights. At the corner of the page, she sketches a bird with large, dark wings, with claws that curve around a building’s edge, a roof. It tilts forward, toward the air, toward the sk
y, its feet digging in, binding it.

  She drums the pen across the second page of writing, a strange, small scrawl, so different from her normal, careful script. She runs her hands through her hair, tucks it into a tight knot at the back of her head as thunder rumbles in a deafening cacophony of sound. She thinks of Jamie at three, pulling her pots and pans out of the kitchen cupboards, how he turned them over, beating on them with the handles of her wooden spoons, how he used the smallest, tinniest of the pots for cymbals, how it gave her a headache, all that racket, how it made her smile. And then there was Peter coming in the front door, home from work, the way he yelled, Would you two stop that noise! It’s giving me a migraine! as if she, too, were sitting on the floor—as if her hands were wielding wooden spoons, as if she were a child.

  “Run,” she writes, “run run run,” but where does a murderer go? She has savings—some money from her mother’s estate, enough to live on for a few months. But then what? And what if they pin Celia’s death on some poor innocent—the paperboy or Mr. Nguyen—while she nibbles croissants on the Left Bank? She marvels at the ironies. If she killed Celia over a picture in her phone and over Celia’s jealousy of the Tart—and thus her unspoken admission that she was a discarded lover—then wouldn’t the photo have to actually exist? Wouldn’t there be a trail of phone calls between Celia and Peter? Why would she invent the picture, the words with Celia over drinks, the proof she found in Peter’s cell as he lay snoring in the bedroom? Why, unless she had a far more sinister motive? “But what? Hating Celia’s uncomfortable chair?” she squeaks up at St. Christopher. “Her fucking shoes?” St. Christopher shakes his head so fervently that the visor shimmies. No, he mouths, and she can nearly hear the word his tiny metal lips are forming. “No!”

  When the rain begins, a series of small, light clicks against the windshield, she tugs her overnight bag from the backseat. She slings her purse over her shoulder, grabs her keys, and makes a run for the door.

  Once inside, she drops the pad and pen on the desk in the foyer, and the room is airless and dark. It suffocates her. She turns on the small desk lamp, glancing at the bird she’s inked in at the edge of the page, and then she notices the words she’s scribbled on the thin lined paper. “Run run run.” The writing is tiny and barely legible. She thinks about retrieving the notes she’s hidden in a sealed, stamped envelope in her purse lining—she’ll compare the writing—but then she stops. Something isn’t right. Dana stands near the doorway, and she feels it like an icy hand along her spine. She feels the absence of something, and then she feels the loosening of the few thin ties that bind her to her life, the chaos and confusion she knows too well, that she has up to this point managed to keep at bay. “Spot!” She walks through the house. The litter box is empty in the bathroom, and she gets down on her hands and knees, peering under things, under couches and beds. In terror she checks the refrigerator, the dryer in the basement. “Spot!” She opens the back door, and her eyes scan the yard, and then she darts outside. “Spot!” she calls, running through to the front and then to all the neighbors’ yards. The rain comes down in sheets, but Dana keeps running, keeps peering, keeps calling, the threads of sanity fraying as her voice climbs higher and louder, a small, sad siren in the thunder and rain. “Spot!”

  CHAPTER 24

  Jack Moss fidgets at his desk. If he were Ann, he’d say the spirits were telling him to go back to the Steinhausers’. He’d say there’s something off, and that the universe is guiding him back to the house again to straighten it all out. But he isn’t Ann, and although he’s always envied her the ability to be open to possibilities, he doesn’t share it. Even so he feels compelled to return to Celia’s house. It’s Dana’s disappearance, the timing of it. And then there’s Kyle; there’s always always Kyle, nagging at the back of his brain, waking him at all hours of the night, making him sit upright against the sparsely cushioned headboard, sweat beading on his forehead, with the certainty that Kyle lied to him in the diner. And he will go back there. As soon as he’s finished his second round with Ronald Steinhauser.

  Jack hears him come through the door, the high-pitched nervousness of Ronald’s voice as he greets the officer at the front desk and then the thumping of his shoes in the hall. Jack swings his chair around, gets to his feet, and meets Ronald as he comes through the doorway, walks him down to the interrogation room.

  Sometimes Jack thinks it’s time for him to hang it up here while he’s still got some good years left. He could travel. He could look up those cousins he hasn’t seen since childhood, somewhere in Kansas now, he thinks, or Nebraska, one of those tornado states. He could spend some time with his son, with Margie, even, try to help her out, get her on her feet. His childhood family doesn’t exist anymore—his mother dead of ovarian cancer several years before and his father close on her heels. He has no siblings. He won’t leave, though. It’s in his blood, this job; it’s part of him, like his skin or his elbows.

  “So,” he says as Ronald drums his fat little fingers on the table between them, chews his lower lip. “So I checked out your alibi. The texter and all. That was on the parkway, right, Ronald?”

  “Um,” Ronald says. “Yes. I can’t swear to the texting part. I was told that. I couldn’t swear to it, though, since I didn’t . . . of course I didn’t actually see the—”

  “Right. Funny thing, though.” Jack thumbs through a small pile of papers.

  Ronald’s fingers stop in mid-drum. “What’s that, Detective?”

  “There was no accident on the parkway that day. Nothing major. Couple of fender benders earlier in the afternoon.”

  Ronald squirms. He looks at Jack, and then he looks away.

  “So why’d you lie, Ronald?”

  “I wouldn’t say I lied, exactly, Detective. I may have been mistaken, but I certainly didn’t mean to—”

  “And yet you did.”

  “I can explain,” Ronald says. His face is a funny orange color.

  “I’m listening.”

  “I—” Ronald stops. “Do I need a lawyer?”

  “Do you want a lawyer?”

  Ronald studies his fleshy hands on the table. He hesitates, but only for a minute. “She was involved with someone,” he says, and to his credit he looks Jack straight in the face when he says it. “She had a lover.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “She told me so. ‘I’m leaving you,’ she says, right out of the blue. Took me completely by surprise. ‘I’m in love with another man.’ Oh, she tried to undo the damage. Later. ‘I was wrong,’ she says that next night, sober as a judge, wringing her hands, following me around the house like a puppy. ‘Really,’ she says. ‘I had too much to drink, and I was— I really wish I could take back what I said.’ You can’t, though. You can’t unsay something of that . . . of that magnitude. You just can’t.”

  Jack isn’t sure what he’d do if he were Ronald—if his wife said something like that. There were times he thought Margie might be fooling around, but he looked the other way. For everyone’s sake, he thought at the time. If she’d thrown it up at him, though—stuck it like a dagger in his heart . . . “No,” he says. “You can’t.”

  “So that night—the night she was killed—I went to the . . . I went to the school where she worked. It was somebody there, I thought, or somebody she was meeting there. Before work, maybe, or after. She was coming home really late for a while there.”

  “So you thought . . . what? You thought she was involved with one of her students?” Jack’s heart clomps like a racehorse inside his chest. Kyle?

  Ronald shrugs. “I didn’t know. I drove there from work that day. I knew she had a class that evening. I figured I’d just sit there and wait. I’d see if she arrived with someone, if she left with someone, if she got in the backseat of a car with someone. So I did. I backed into a parking space over to the side, out of the way but close enough to see what was—” Ronald starts drumming his fingers again. “But she never showed up. I waited and waited, and she neve
r showed up.”

  “So you . . . ?”

  “So I went home, Detective. I went home and nearly fell over her body.”

  “Why’d you lie, Ronald?”

  Ronald shrugs. “Didn’t want to sully her name? She was dead. Why mention her infideli— Why upset her boys?”

  Jack taps his pen against the desktop, looks down at his notes.

  “And I felt like it was my fault.”

  “How so?”

  “If I had come right home that night instead of trying to spy on her, Celia would still be alive.”

  Jack raises his eyebrows. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

  “No. No, sir.”

  “You kill your wife, Ronald?”

  “No. No, I did not kill my wife, Detective.”

  “This stuff gives you a motive, is all.”

  “I did not kill Celia. I loved her.”

  “Right. I believe you did,” Jack says. “You got someone to corroborate your story? That you were over at the school? Anybody see you?”

  “No. That was the point, Detective. I didn’t want anyone to—”

  “Stop anywhere else?”

  Ronald sits up straighter. “Yes,” he says. “I stopped for gas at the Amoco station over near the school.”

  “Keep your receipt?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I always do.”

  “Get it to me,” Jack says. “You can fax it in. Number’s on my card.” He stands up, and Ronald struggles to his feet, inching his way over to the door.

  “Bye,” he says in a hoarse voice, barely above a whisper, and he takes off down the hall.

  “Oh, and Ronald,” Jack calls after him. “Stay real close.”

  Jack goes alone to Celia’s house, a moth pulled to the faint light of Ashby Lane. Ronald’s explanation for his blown alibi doesn’t only put Ronald in question, it casts a significant shadow across Kyle as well. Bad enough all this rubbish about Kleenex in the glove box. Now it’s looking more likely he was Celia’s lover. But there was Peter, too, standing in the hall that night, waiting outside her classroom.