Chaos

by Mary SanGiovanni

  He saved the articles and pictures about the fire for last. He wanted to enjoy those.

  The fire had started, according to the articles, in the master bedroom on the second floor of the Wycoff family mansion in Idyll Hills, a wealthy gated community just outside of Bridgewood’s center of town.

  According to reports, Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Wycoff had returned from the funeral and memorial dinner of a well-known retired psychiatrist whose career and life had both ended under unpleasant circumstances—a man named Symmes. Wycoff and Symmes had been in opposition on the issue of rebuilding on the asylum’s land, so as a show of good politics, Wycoff not only attended the services but also gave a fairly moving (if somewhat professional) eulogy.

  Those whose job it was to notice and report such things to the public via newspapers speculated that the personal space between Wycoff and his wife was thick with tension. Neighbors confirmed hearing the sounds of arguing between the couple that evening in the driveway. Less than an hour after, the heat, light, and the crackling of flames drew the neighbors’ attention again, and the fire department and police were called. It was too late, though, to save anyone. Mrs. Wycoff had died of smoke inhalation, the burns on her body nearly obliterating any way of identifying her. Gerald Wycoff had third-degree burns over 80% of his body. They found him down in his study. He’d died on the way to the hospital. No one else had been in the house, and no evidence found of foul play or escalated violence between the couple. Neither the local fire department or the arson investigators could pin down the exact cause of the fire. One of them (who’d asked to remain anonymous) had told the papers that it really seemed as if the entire bedroom had spontaneously combusted.

  Given the reported date of events in the article, Hal brooded. It put Wycoff’s death a couple of years before the final grand opening of Bridgewood Estates apartments, which was definitely a few years after Hal had affixed it in his mind. He’d assumed the affair and Eda’s decision to leave him had all happened and ended seven years ago. He thought that was what the upside-down commercial man said, although thinking back on it, nothing Hal was told gave him any kind of time-line. For all he knew, the upside-down commercial man could have been sugar-coating his information, soft-shoeing the details of the affair. For all Hal knew, Eda could have been banging that politician right up until he’d been burned to a cinder.

  Until she was done with him. The thought sprang suddenly to his mind, a staggering leap of logic even in his present mood. Until she was done with waiting for him to leave his wife. Figured she’d kill two birds with one incendiary device.

  Hal scoffed. Eda might have been many things, but she was not capable of killing anyone. She would have considered it...vulgar. Unladylike. Then again, he thought with a sudden flash of bitter anger, what did he really know about her anymore?

  He found Eda wasn’t there when he returned home that evening. The door was locked, the lights all turned off. There was no note. No dinner waiting, either. He sighed, dropping his car keys on the kitchen counter. He got himself a beer from the fridge and microwaved some of the pizza from the day before. Nothing on the kitchen calendar indicated an event or meeting she was supposed to be at that night. She simply...wasn’t there.

  It occurred to him that this was a taste of what it would be like without her. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing.

  He settled into his easy chair and reached for the remote, then paused. What if the upside-down commercial man was waiting? What if that bright inverted smile filled the screen the minute he clicked on the television?

  Hal set down the remote. He didn’t have it in him to be badgered about Eda. He had enough to think about as far as she went, thank you very much.

  He finished his beer and went to the kitchen for another. He considered it a moment, grabbed two to save him a trip, then made his way back to the chair. He sat staring at the gray screen of the television while working on his second beer. If he couldn’t watch TV, maybe he could do a crossword puzzle...or fix the drip in the shower that damned Sunderman lady kept avoiding his calls about. Maybe that would make Eda happy, if he fixed something.

  Hal settled back into his chair. Fuck it. Why did he need to make her happy? When was the last time she had made an honest, focused effort to do anything but criticize him?

  He drained the second beer and went to put the bottle on the table when he knocked over the caddy. Remotes for the television, DVR, and even old ones he’d forgotten the uses for tumbled to the floor like pick-up sticks. So did a key. He leaned over and picked it up, the remotes temporarily forgotten. It was the key to their storage bin. He hadn’t been able to find it for weeks—had told Eda, in fact, that it was the reason he hadn’t done much around the place, as his tools were locked up in there. Had she found it, and dropped it in with his remotes as a reminder? That would be so like her, that passive-aggressive bullshit. He grunted. Well, two could play that kind of game.

  He went to her desk across the room and opened a drawer. It seemed somehow fitting to bury it deep beneath her papers and checkbooks. He was about to drop it in when he noticed an official-looking paper that caught his eye. It was a copy of a life insurance policy. He took it out and read it. A life insurance policy for a Gerald Wycoff. He felt the heat rising from his chest to his face. Eda had been named a beneficiary.

  His first thought, wildly, was to wonder how the hell he would have ever explained another woman’s name on the policy to his wife. Assuming, of course, she survived him, which she didn’t. His second thought was even wilder, obviously colored by his mood.

  Maybe her not surviving him was the point. Had that fire been planned? Had Eda somehow convinced Wycoff to let her arrange for a fire that would kill his wife? Maybe Eda had double-crossed him, and set things up so both of them were killed. Then she wouldn’t have to wait for the money.

  Still...if she had been the beneficiary, where was the money? It was certainly enough for her to be able to leave Hal and live comfortably without him. Unless...yes. Unless she was deliberately distancing herself from the fire investigation, and had been waiting a safe number of years to cash in on the policy. He had never known Eda to be a patient person, but he was lately discovering she could be cunning. If waiting was a means to an end, he supposed she could do it.

  He’d been through her desk before, looking for stamps or a stapler or a roll of Scotch tape. He’d never seen the policy. That it was now at the top of her things might mean she had grown tired of waiting. Maybe she wanted her money and an end to her simple life with Hal.

  He put the policy back in the drawer where he’d found it and pocketed the storage bin key. He wasn’t quite ready yet for her to know he knew. He wanted more information first before he confronted her. Maybe he ought to hire a private detective to see what she was doing with her free time nowadays, someone like—like that Larson guy across the hall. Or, he could just snoop around himself. She didn’t have a cell phone—at least, not so far as he knew—so he couldn’t call her. He had no idea when she would be home. For all he knew, there was some new guy outclassing him, someone she might be out with right now. And she wasn’t even bothering to hide it. No note pretending she was running late at a committee meeting or out shopping.

  At the moment, though, she wasn’t home. He figured he might as well not waste the time sitting there going over what he didn’t know, and start adding to what he did.

  He went into the bedroom, which had so often lately served as a sanctuary for her, away from him. It wasn’t that he didn’t sleep there anymore, but lately she went to bed long before him, and he fell asleep in his chair. By the time he awoke and stumbled into the bedroom, he had two, maybe two and a half hours before he had to get up for work. He felt almost like he was renting the bed space from her, that it was her room and he just used half of a mattress and a night table top to finish out the rest of the night.

  He searched her night table, but nothing in it—aspirin, tissues, an earring missing its mate, a pen—raised an eyebrow.
He picked through her cosmetics and perfume on the dresser then opened drawers and rummaged through her clothes and underwear. Nothing buried at the bottom of the drawer. He felt beneath the mattress on her side, then on his side, stood and flipped the pillows, sank to his knees and looked under the bed, and only found more nothing. He stood in the center of the room, looking around, when his gaze fell on the closet.

  He opened the door. Eda wasn’t one for clutter or sentimentality, so there was little to find in there except a shoebox of receipts and old holiday cards and a plastic storage container of winter hats, gloves, and scarves. As he was pulling down her old sewing kit, a small gray envelope fluttered off the shelf and fell to the floor. Hal put the sewing kit back on the shelf and bent to pick up the envelope. He didn’t recognize the handwriting on the front, but he understood the contents: water hemlock roots.

  His grandmother and his mother after her were avid gardeners. Between the two of them, they had every kind of flowering plant imaginable. The more exotic, the more it delighted them to cultivate and display it in their jointly-shared greenhouse. Growing up, his mother had taken care to make sure Hal knew, whether it interested him or not, which plants grew when and in what conditions, which ones were edible, which ones could be used for medicinal or health-related purposes, and of course, which ones were poisonous.

  Hal had always been strictly forbidden to touch the water hemlock (its roots, specifically), among other poisonous plants.

  “She’s not trying to kill me,” he had told the upside-down commercial man.

  “Isn’t she, though?”

  Was she? Had Eda really decided that leaving him wasn’t enough? That being the recipient of one insurance policy wasn’t enough?

  Dazed, Hal wandered out to the den and sank in his chair. Poison? How would she do it? Would he be able to taste it? Smell it? He reached for his beer, realized he’d finished it, and put down the empty bottle. He’d lost his taste for eating and drinking anything tonight, anyway.

  He turned the TV on, determined to find something to watch to keep him awake. He didn’t feel safe falling asleep before he saw Eda return home and go to bed. He didn’t feel safe, and that made him angry at Eda. He stared at the television, trying to concentrate on some slasher movie in which beautiful, half-dressed twenty-somethings were being carved up in the woods by some silent, lumbering man with an axe.

  Hal had an axe out in the storage bin.

  Before the last of the twenty-somethings, a blond in a white tank top, could escape the woods and the man with the axe, Hal had fallen asleep. He never heard Eda return, change for bed, and go to sleep. He never heard the last of the movies give over to infomercials. He never heard the front door open, or the soft spasmodic footsteps that crossed from the door to the den and then stopped in front of him. He slept through the pressure of long, pointed fingers digging into his shoulders.

  What managed to filter through the wall of sleep was a whisper whose cadence rose and fell hypnotically. It was in a language he had never heard but understood both literally and on subtle, symbolic levels. It made pictures in his dreams.

  When the footsteps receded and the front door closed, Hal dreamed of murder. In his sleep, he smiled.

  THIRTEEN

  Two nights later, Myrinda slipped a little further away from herself, just far enough to be out of reach.

  She felt jagged and bruisy, the clouds beneath her eyes threatening to squeeze up and cause rain. Derek had gone out for a late afternoon meeting with his new boss to square away some things before he started work next week, and he wasn’t expected back until late that night. She was in the apartment alone. He hadn’t wanted to leave her, not after the other night, but she’d insisted. His hovering was only making her more anxious, stirring up the thoughts in her mind that she’d wanted to settle to the bottom.

  She looked out the window. Beyond the darkening hills, she could make out the brooding, stolid shape of the Old Ward. Its long shadow fell before it, and Myrinda thought it looked as if a giant hole (Aggie’s woo-nnnd) had opened up, a gaping chasm to the other place that the Old Ward stood in danger of toppling right into. She imagined someone unwittingly looking to explore the lightless pain-soaked corridors of the building, wandering alone into that shadow, and just slipping away to some other place, another time. Just vanishing forever.

  It might have been the angle from the window, or the way the moonlight fell just so on the rough bricks, but the building seemed to expand and recede, to breathe and—this was nuts—to actually titter over that death-lined throat into the center of the earth.

  Still, a part of her—a very insistent part—wanted to go out there into the night alone. To be that explorer, searching through the dark, slipping in and out of the folds of the rippling, overlapping worlds outside and—

  She shook her head, snapping off the train of thought. What in God’s name was she thinking? It didn’t even make sense. Rippling, overlapping worlds? What did that even mean?

  What was happening to her?

  A sudden bang from somewhere out in the hallway made her jump. She turned slowly from the window, annoyed. “Derek?” She hadn’t expected him home so early. The way Derek had described it, his new boss was probably going to keep him the better part of two or three hours, showing him around the facility and discussing security needs and options. “Derek, is that you?”

  She went down the hall to the den. Another loud bang made her flinch. It was the sound more than the suddenness; lately, she seemed more sensitive to loud noises and bright colors. The bang, like a metal pipe hitting a wall, left a wake of only a few moments’ silence before a door slammed. She jumped, cursed softly, then crossed to the door and opened it a crack. Another door slammed, followed by a steady tolling of the pipe.

  Myrinda peered into the shadowed hallway, searching for any indication that other neighbors were as disturbed by this as she was. The other apartment doors remained closed. She chewed her bottom lip, wishing Derek was home. She was the more likely of the two to engage in a confrontation, but it didn’t mean she liked it. And she sure as hell didn’t relish the idea of getting into a dust-up with a neighbor who obviously had some rage issues going on.

  The dull clank of the pipe seemed to be coming from apartment 2C. She frowned. She could have sworn Derek told her that apartment was empty. Leaving the door to her own apartment open, she padded down the hall in her socks and with some hesitation, knocked on the door.

  Immediately, the banging of the pipe stopped. From somewhere inside the apartment, a door slammed.

  “Hello?” she called through the door. “Uh, hello?” She knocked again, louder this time, then put her ear to the door. She thought she heard voices speaking low, but it was followed by applause and canned laughter. The television, probably.

  She knocked again. “Hello? Uh, excuse me, but whatever you’re doing in there, you’re making a lot of noise. It’s kind of disturbing the rest of us.” She put her ear against the door again.

  The low voices snapped off and there was a thud, and then something like fingers scratching against the other side of the front door. She pulled away from it as if it were on fire. The scratching continued, so close to her, so close—just a door’s width away. And its span was spreading—fingers scratching above her head, at eye level, around the door knob, and even down by her feet. She thought she could see the tiny moving shadows cast on the threshold.

  She cried out. Long gray fingers were reaching beneath the door, scratching at the hallway floor. When one of the cold fingertips touched the edge of her sock, she screamed, jumping and kicking at the finger, which twitched beneath her blows and withdrew beneath the door again. She bolted back to her apartment and slammed the door, then locked it. For several minutes, she leaned with her back to the door, breathing hard, listening to the sound of those awful fingers. She could hear them on the carpeting now, those pointed, nailless tips digging into the pile and dragging their knuckled segments closer to her door.