The Innocent Wife

by Amy Lloyd

  ‘I couldn’t leave her like that. They tried to get me to leave, the county marked this place uninhabitable so I got a trailer and put it over there instead. The hole gets bigger – I’ve got photos.’ Ed held up some pictures that showed how the hole was expanding over time, the house getting smaller and smaller by comparison. ‘Whenever we have a good storm, that’s when it gets bigger. All that water. When it dries out again the pressure changes and’ – he made a suction noise – ‘I can hear the house cracking and creaking some nights.

  ‘Way I see it, worst that can happen is I get sucked in too, and that ain’t so bad. They say it’s dangerous but it’s no more dangerous than anywhere else here. The whole state’s built on bad rock.’

  Sam tried to make herself light on her feet. Everything tingled as Ed led a nervous cameraman to the edge of the sinkhole, and bent over it precariously. ‘Come on now, it won’t bite.’

  ‘Does staying here help you grieve?’ Carrie’s partner Patrick asked.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose it does. I miss my wife. I talk to her every day.’

  ‘Does she ever answer you back?’

  ‘Yeah, sure, right now she’s saying, “Why’d you let this bunch of assholes come here to disrespect you in your own home?”’ He clucked and rolled his eyes. ‘What kinda question is that? Huh? I know you’re looking for the odd folk, to make our town look like a freak show.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Carrie jumped in, ‘I think Pat meant it, like, metaphorically. You’re right, we are looking to show how colourful and diverse the population of Red River is but our motives are honest. We’re not trying to make it look like a freak show.’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’ Ed raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m not an idiot. I saw the film. In fact, Dennis used to come around here and do some work for us.’

  Carrie seemed surprised. ‘Really? Can you tell us about that?’

  ‘He came over here, did some yard work for us, we paid him of course. One evening I was taking him a glass of water, set to tell him to quit for the night, he was totally absorbed by something. I called him twice but he didn’t look up. When I reached him he was bent over a metal bucket, face lit up with fire. He had a snake in there, writhing, burning and twisting inside the bucket. He poked it now and then with a stick. I poured the water into the bucket and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing.

  ‘He looked like someone you just woke up from a nap. He said he was getting rid of it for me, said it would die slower now. I told him to go home. Handed him twenty bucks. He didn’t come back.

  ‘Tell you the truth I didn’t feel too comfortable around him, especially after that. Don’t know if he really killed that girl, don’t know about that, but there was just something not right about him.’

  Sam sat in the car wishing she’d stayed back at the hotel. Mosquitoes bit at her limbs, some trapped in rolling sweat while she waited for Carrie. The whole place made her uncomfortable and she kept thinking of the snake and what it could mean.

  ‘It’s a snake,’ Carrie said when Sam asked her. ‘It’s not like he was putting kittens in a fucking microwave. Boys are gross. My brother put his goldfish in the freezer and he’s a full-blown vegan now. It probably wasn’t even as bad as he says.’

  She and Patrick had a hushed argument after the interview with Ed. Sam listened while she sat in the passenger seat, door open, dangling her legs into the air.

  ‘We can’t use any of that,’ Patrick said. ‘Burning snakes? How does that sound?’

  ‘It’s fine. We got some great stuff about the sinkhole. That’s all Jackson wanted. The guy’s clearly a storyteller, who knows how much of that is even true?’

  They argued in muted tones until eventually Carrie appeared back at the wheel, tense and maybe even upset.

  They drove back to the centre of Red River, this time in silence, Carrie’s thoughts clearly somewhere else. Sam didn’t know what to say to her, so she said nothing. The houses that rolled past the windows started to look shabbier as they went by until they reached a street with barred windows and more furniture in the yards than there could be inside the houses, overflowing trash cans and a cacophony of dog barks.

  Sam knew Lindsay Durst from Framing the Truth, though she’d never been on screen for more than a few minutes. She had been a key witness for the defence; she was with Dennis on the evening Holly was murdered, had met him after football practice, driven around with him for a while, and stayed out until after midnight before dropping him near his home. But on cross-examination the prosecution had portrayed her as a liar, someone who would say anything to help a boy she was obsessed with. She was always driving him around, people said, waiting for him after school, ditching classes to take him some place. ‘And he wasn’t even that nice to her …’ a girl had said in Framing the Truth, outside the court, wind blowing her hair into her lip gloss as she looked away from the camera self-consciously. ‘It was actually kind of desperate, you know?’

  Now Lindsay stood outside her house, wearing a Free Dennis Danson T-shirt tied into a knot at the back, exposing a patch of tanned skin at the base of her spine. Sam noticed a rip under the left buttock of her jeans, how she hooked her thumbs through her belt loops and jutted a hip to the side as she spoke. It was, Lindsay told them, the same house she’d always lived in. She walked them around to the back and showed them where Dennis had carved his name into a fence post. Patrick and Carrie took some exterior shots, had her stand looking seriously, which made her laugh. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it! Oh my God, let me try again …’ she kept saying. Sam wondered why the guys on the crew all seemed to find it so cute.

  Behind the houses was a lake: still, black water. Trees hung lazy in the heat and dangled their limbs into the pool. Lindsay walked to the edge of a dock that looked rotten and slippery with green slime. ‘We used to go down to the water right here, a whole bunch of us, and hang out. People used to dare each other, “Go swim to that post and back!” because there’s alligators in there. Some guys would walk to the edge of the dock but they never did it.

  ‘I was always one of the boys, you know? Never got along with girls, too bitchy, so this was what we did. Only one day Dennis just stood right up and said, “I’ll do it.” We’re like, “Yeah, sure,” but he took off his shirt and kicked off his shoes, got down to his boxers and just ran, jumped.

  ‘Well, I was screaming, right? I’m like, “Get back here!” But he swam all the way to the post and when he got there he just waved. He swam back and the boys went to the end there to pull him out. I’ve never seen anything like it – he was crazy sometimes. He was always doing the stuff no one else would do. That’s how he got into trouble: dares, streaking and all that.

  ‘We were real close. Still talk – I visit when I can get up there. I miss him. I know he didn’t kill that girl, cops just have it out for people like him and me.’

  Sam realised that until then she’d thought she was the only woman who visited Dennis, aside from Carrie. He’d never mentioned Lindsay. They’d shared letters where they peeled themselves bare, and the whole time he had someone else, someone he never mentioned, a secret woman.

  ‘Look, look right there,’ Lindsay said, pointing to the water. ‘Right on the far side, you see?’ Everybody edged forward, cameras trained to the spot where she pointed. Sam peered reluctantly and saw nothing until what she thought was debris sunk slowly back under the blackness. Everybody whooped. ‘It’s lousy with alligators in there, see? Dennis always had a lot of balls.’

  For a time everyone was preoccupied with the water, every ripple causing a rush of excitement. Eventually attention turned back to Lindsay.

  ‘Can you tell us about the trial?’ Carrie asked.

  ‘What you wanna know?’

  ‘Well, why didn’t they believe your testimony? That Dennis was with you that day?’

  ‘Oh, that.’ She shook her hair. ‘They tried to make out like I was some fangirl who only wanted a boyfriend. They had people from school saying I was, like, obsessed with him
! Which wasn’t true. We were never involved. I mean, we did stuff but it was more like friends with benefits, you know?’

  Sam stayed by the water while Carrie and Patrick packed. The whole thing was ruined, she thought. Until then it had been perfect. Almost. Until Lindsay. But the poison was seeping in, just as it always did. The paranoia and the pain. She and Mark would argue for hours until she stormed off, expecting him to follow, but he never did. Because she didn’t matter. Maybe she still didn’t.

  A white bird tipped its beak into the water and Sam stared, waiting for jaws to snatch it from the bank, both wanting and not wanting to see it. But the bird flew away and she brushed herself off, relieved, disappointed. She’d been an idiot to think she was special.

  ‘I can tell she bothered you,’ Carrie said later as they drove back to the motel.

  ‘I didn’t know he had anyone else visiting,’ Sam said.

  ‘Maybe she’s exaggerating. She seems kind of off to me.’

  ‘Off?’

  ‘“One of the boys”? That’s just code for crazy. Never trust a woman who doesn’t like women. I’m telling you.’

  Six

  Extract from When the River Runs Red by Eileen Turner

  One afternoon in the late summer of 1992 Officer Harries knocked on the Dansons’ front door. From the couch, Dennis’s mother shouted for Dennis to answer it. Normally, he said later, he would not have been home. In fact, he’d spent less and less time at the house that summer. He was sofa-surfing, staying with friends until their parents had enough, and started tidying around him in silence as he blinked awake and peeled off the borrowed sheets. He’d stopped home that day only to throw his clothes in the machine and grab a few things to take back to Lindsay’s.fn1

  The police had first approached Dennis at the search party for Lauren. Dennis recalls, ‘They were asking questions like they were trying to say something, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.’ So when he saw the police officer behind the torn screen door he immediately tensed. When Dennis recognised Officer Harries he suspected it would be something petty, such as the break-in at the general store that he’d heard about. ‘Officer Harries always tried to pin stuff on me,’ Dennis tells me during one interview. ‘He always thought I led Howard astray. Like I was responsible for every bad thing he ever did.’

  Dennis opened the door to Officer Harries. ‘Yeah?’ he said.

  ‘Who is it?’ his mom had yelled from the house.

  ‘It’s Officer Harries,’ Dennis shouted.

  ‘A cop?’

  ‘Just here to ask your son some questions, ma’am.’ Harries claims that at this point he offered for a parent or guardian to be present for whatever he asked Dennis next,fn2 though he insisted that this was only an informal meeting.fn3 Framing the Truth would question the motives here: why would a police officer travel all the way out there just to ask a seventeen-year-old some informal questions about a murder that occurred five months ago? ‘Cop’s intuition,’ Harries said. Another officer would report Harries seemed more concerned with interviewing Dennis, for whom he had a personal and ‘intense’ mistrust, rather than pursuing other leads early on in the case.fn4

  ‘What do you want?’ Dennis appeared short-tempered and stood blocking the doorway so Harries couldn’t see the mess behind him, ashamed of the conditions in which his family lived.

  ‘Want to let me in?’

  ‘Not particularly. I’ve got places to be, what do you want?’

  ‘Where were you on April tenth?’ At this, Harries noted, Dennis smiled. He repeated himself.

  ‘April tenth? How would I remember that? Am I supposed to remember that?’

  ‘So you’re saying you can’t remember?’

  ‘I don’t know … what day was that?’

  ‘Friday. April tenth.’

  ‘A Friday? School?’

  ‘After school. Late afternoon, evening.’

  ‘Maybe practice? I don’t know, I really don’t.’

  ‘Can anyone help you remember where you were? You have any witnesses?’

  ‘I just said, I don’t remember. So how would I know who I was with?’ Later, Dennis admitted to losing his patience. Harries had a way of smirking when he asked him things. ‘I knew,’ he admitted. ‘I knew I was walking right into their trap but I didn’t know how to avoid it.’fn5

  That was it for a couple of weeks, long enough for Dennis to think it might be behind him, and for the sensation of eyes on his back to fade, when Officer Harries arrived at school, and knocked on the door during detention. He and the teacher exchanged a whispered conversation while the rows of children watched silently. But Dennis just knew. He was standing before they’d even called his name.fn6 Harries led him out of the school by the wrist. Dennis was confused, unsure of his rights, or if he was being arrested.

  At the station he didn’t ask for a lawyer, because he believed he’d done nothing wrong. Even after six hours of questioning he didn’t ask for one and he didn’t think to call his parents. As he answered their questions (‘I don’t know … Can’t remember … Not sure …’), he scrolled through the months in his mind. He thought of the things this might be about. Was it the fire he started at the back of the hardware store? Or when he broke into the gymnasium? But this seemed too serious for anything like that. There were two detectives in the room with him. For the first five hours they made notes, but at eight thirty p.m. they took out a tape recorder.

  Transcript from the interrogation of Dennis Danson

  Time: 20:51

  Officer #1: Come on. Tell us how you killed Holly Michaels.

  Dennis (laughing): Who?

  Officer #1: Holly Michaels. You know who she is.

  Officer #2: Everyone in town knows who she is. You’re telling us you’re the only one who doesn’t know?

  Dennis: I’m not good with names.

  The detectives felt that Dennis was ‘goading’ them and that his laughter only proved he ‘got off’ on doing so.fn7 Dennis, though, remembers his laughter as discomfort, a reaction to the ludicrous situation in which he found himself.

  Officer #1: Holly Michaels. Eleven years old, murdered, national news.

  The officers slid him a picture of Holly, taken at school, her hair in a high ponytail tied with a scrunchie. Dennis remembers looking into the girl’s eyes, hand hovering above the photograph.

  Dennis (whispering): She was so young.

  This, Harries recalls, as he watched from the next room, was the moment they knew they had him.fn8

  Seven

  Sam knew she was being cold. She’d planned to be. Back in the prison, behind the plastic divide, she looked lazily around the room, avoiding looking at Dennis. She allowed herself to yawn when the urge came, responding with one-word answers just slightly too quietly, so he had to ask her again and she could sigh and roll her eyes and repeat it louder. For twenty minutes she’d waited for him to ask her what was wrong. Nothing, she would say, in a way that let him know there definitely was something wrong. She would repeat this until the moment felt right and then she would tell him, We spoke to Lindsay yesterday.

  It was a well-rehearsed performance, at once second nature and so completely at odds with what felt natural. It made her hate herself. This she admitted to Mark, late in the night, after it had led to another argument that outran her, that she’d lost control of until it burned her out completely. Afterwards she told him that she didn’t understand why she did it. She felt like she was rotten inside and crawling with worms. But she couldn’t stop it. Not even now, as she looked into Dennis’s beautiful face, a light stubble along his jaw. As he talked she willed herself to hate him even as she lost herself for a second in the thought of his chin against her cheek, rough, his breath on her ear.

  She sighed.

  ‘And Jackson wanted to use some things I’ve written in the movie, which is pretty cool. He’s visiting next week so that means we won’t be able to see each other … Why did you roll your eyes?’

  ‘It’s no
t like you want me to be here anyway.’

  ‘Next week?’

  ‘Ever.’ Her heart was beating was faster. She looked away while she begged him internally, Please, please convince me that you love me.

  ‘I don’t understand what’s going on …’

  ‘Do any other women visit?’

  ‘Like Carrie?’

  ‘No, not like Carrie. Other women.’ There were tears ready but she blinked them back. She looked at him to see if he was being purposely stupid. If he wasn’t, she thought, he was doing a pretty convincing job.

  ‘Then no. Why?’

  ‘You’re lying!’ It came louder than she’d wanted. A few heads turned their way.

  ‘What is this? Samantha …’ He leaned forward and Sam moved back.

  ‘Lindsay.’ Sam waited. His face was expressionless, unreadable. He said nothing. ‘We saw her yesterday. She was boasting about it.’

  ‘Lindsay? Lindsay isn’t other women.’

  ‘What is she then?’

  ‘I don’t know, she’s just … I’ve known her pretty much forever.’

  ‘Why did you lie, then?’ The pinch of confusion on his face made her feel like a madwoman.

  ‘I didn’t lie. I just never thought to mention it. She hasn’t been here in seven months. Why are you so mad about this?’

  They sat rigid, unspeaking. Sam unwilling to back down and Dennis confused, possibly wondering what he’d got himself into, she thought, disgusted with herself. But it was happening now, the worms inside her were squirming, and she couldn’t stop them.

  ‘I just don’t know how to trust you,’ she said, standing to leave.

  ‘No, Samantha, that’s not fair.’ He was standing too, a hand against the divide.

  ‘Neither is lying to me.’

  ‘Come on … There’s only you.’