“On my way, ma’am, just pouring it over ice!”
And here he came out of the living room and into the hall, holding one of their good crystal glasses up before him at eye level like a comicopera waiter, weaving slightly as he crossed to the foot of the stairs. He continued to hold the glass up as he mounted them, the wedge of lime bobbing around on top. His free hand trailed lightly along the banister; his face shone with happiness and good cheer. For a moment she almost weakened,
and then the image of Helen and Robert Shaverstone filled her mind, hellishly clear: the son and his molested, mutilated mother floating together in a Massachusetts creek that had begun to grow lacings of ice at its sides.
“One glass of Perrier for the lady, coming right uh—”
She saw the knowledge leap into his eyes at the very last second, something old and yellow and ancient. It was more than surprise; it was shocked fury. In that moment her understanding of him was complete. He loved nothing, least of all her. Every kindness, caress, boyish grin, and thoughtful gesture—all were nothing but camouflage. He was a shell. There was nothing inside but howling emptiness.
She pushed him.
It was a hard push and he made a three-quarters somersault above the stairs before coming down on them, first on his knees, then on his arm, then full on his face. She heard his arm break. The heavy Waterford glass shattered on one of the uncarpeted risers. He rolled over again and she heard something else inside him snap. He screamed in pain and somersaulted one final time before landing on the hardwood hall floor in a heap, the broken arm (not broken in just one place but in several) cocked back over his head at an angle nature had never intended. His head was twisted, one cheek on the floor.
Darcy hurried down the stairs. At one point she stepped on an ice cube, slipped, and had to grab
the banister to save herself. At the bottom she saw a huge knob now poking out of the skin on the nape of his neck, turning it white, and said: “Don’t move, Bob, I think your neck is broken.”
His eye rolled up to look at her. Blood was trickling from his nose—that looked broken, too—and a lot more was coming out of his mouth. Almost gushing out. “You pushed me,” he said. “Oh Darcy, why did you push me?”
“I don’t know,” she said, thinking
we both know
. She began to cry. Crying came naturally; he was her husband, and he was badly hurt. “Oh God, I don’t know. Something came over me. I’m sorry. Don’t move, I’ll call 911 and tell them to send an ambulance.”
His foot scraped across the floor. “I’m not paralyzed,” he said. “Thank God for that. But it
hurts
.”
“I know, honey.”
“Call the ambulance! Hurry!”
She went into the kitchen, spared a brief glance for the phone in its charger-cradle, then opened the cabinet under the sink. “Hello? Hello? Is this 911?” She took out the box of plastic GLAD bags, the storage-size ones she used for the leftovers when they had chicken or roast beef, and pulled one from the box. “This is Darcellen Anderson, I’m calling from 24 Sugar Mill Lane, in Yarmouth! Have you got that?”
From another drawer, she took a dishwiper from the top of the pile. She was still crying.
Nose like a firehose,
they’d said when they were kids. Crying was good. She needed to cry, and not just because
it would look better for her later on. He was her husband, he was hurt, she needed to cry. She remembered when he still had a full head of hair. She remembered his flashy breakaway move when they danced to “Footloose.” He brought her roses every year on her birthday. He never forgot. They had gone to Bermuda, where they rode bikes in the morning and made love in the afternoon. They had built a life together and now that life was over and she needed to cry. She wrapped the dishwiper around her hand and then stuffed her hand into the plastic bag.
“I need an ambulance, my husband fell down the stairs. I think his neck might be broken. Yes! Yes! Right away!”
She walked back into the hall with her right hand behind her back. She saw he had pulled himself away from the foot of the stairs a little, and it looked like he’d tried to turn over on his back, but at that he hadn’t been successful. She knelt down beside him.
“I didn’t fall,” he said. “You pushed me. Why did you push me?”
“I guess for the Shaverstone boy,” she said, and brought her hand out from behind her back. She was crying harder than ever. He saw the plastic bag. He saw the hand inside clutching the wad of toweling. He understood what she meant to do. Perhaps he had done something like it himself. Probably he had.
He began screaming . . . only the screams weren’t really screams at all. His mouth was filled
with blood, something had broken inside of his throat, and the sounds he produced were more guttural growls than screams. She jammed the plastic bag between his lips and deep inside his mouth. He had broken a number of teeth in the fall, and she could feel the jagged stumps. If they tore into her skin, she might have some serious explaining to do.
She yanked her hand free before he could bite, leaving the plastic bag and the dishwiper behind. She grabbed his jaw and chin. The other hand she put on top of his balding head. The flesh there was very warm. She could feel it throbbing with blood. She jammed his mouth shut on the wad of plastic and cloth. He tried to beat her off, but he only had one arm free, and that was the one that had been broken in the fall. The other was twisted beneath him. His feet paddled jerkily back and forth on the hardwood floor. One of his shoes came off. He was gurgling. She yanked her dress up to her waist, freeing her legs, then lunged forward, trying to straddle him. If she could do that, maybe she could pinch his nostrils shut.
But before she could try, his chest began to heave beneath her, and the gurgles became a deep grunting in his throat. It reminded her of how, when she was learning to drive, she would sometimes grind the transmission trying to find second gear, which was elusive on her father’s old Chevrolet standard. Bob jerked, the one eye she could see bulging and cowlike in its socket. His face, which had been a bright crimson, now began to turn purple. He settled back onto the floor. She waited,
gasping for breath, her face lathered with snot and tears. The eye was no longer rolling, and no longer bright with panic. She thought he was d—
Bob gave one final, titanic jerk and flung her off. He sat up, and she saw his top half no longer exactly matched his bottom half; he had broken his back as well as his neck, it seemed. His plastic-lined mouth yawned. His eyes met hers in a stare she knew she would never forget . . . but one she could live with, should she get through this.
“Dar! Arrrrrr!”
He fell backward. His head made an egglike cracking sound on the floor. Darcy crawled closer to him, but not close enough to be in the mess. She had his blood on her, of course, and that was all right—she had tried to help him, it was only natural—but that didn’t mean she wanted to bathe in it. She sat up, propped on one hand, and watched him while she waited for her breath to come back. She watched to see if he would move. He didn’t. When five minutes had gone by according to the little jeweled Michele on her wrist—the one she always wore when they went out—she reached a hand to the side of his neck and felt for a pulse there. She kept her fingers against his skin until she had counted all the way to thirty, and there was nothing. She lowered her ear to his chest, knowing this was the moment where he would come back to life and grab her. He didn’t come back to life because there was no life left in him: no beating heart, no breathing lungs. It was over. She felt no satisfaction (let alone triumph)
but only a focused determination to finish this and do it right. Partly for herself, but mostly for Donnie and Pets.
She went into the kitchen, moving fast. They had to know she’d called as soon as she could; if they could tell there had been a delay (if his blood had a chance to coagulate too much, for instance), there might be awkward questions.
I’ll tell them I fainted, if I have to,
she thought.
They’ll believe that, and even if they don’t, they can’t
disprove
it. At least, I don’t think they can.
She got the flashlight from the pantry, just as she had on the night when she had literally stumbled over his secret. She went back to where Bob lay, staring up at the ceiling with his glazed eyes. She pulled the plastic bag out of his mouth and examined it anxiously. If it was torn, there could be problems . . . and it was, in two places. She shone the flashlight into his mouth and spotted one tiny scrap of GLAD bag on his tongue. She picked it out with the tips of her fingers and put it in the bag.
Enough, that’s enough, Darcellen.
But it wasn’t. She pushed his cheeks back with her fingers, first the right, then the left. And on the left side she found another tiny scrap of plastic, stuck to his gum. She picked that out and put it in the bag with the other one. Were there more pieces? Had he swallowed them? If so, they were beyond her reach and all she could do was pray they wouldn’t be discovered if someone—she didn’t know who—had enough questions to order an autopsy.
Meanwhile, time was passing.
She hurried through the breezeway and into the garage, not quite running. She crawled under the worktable, opened his special hiding place, and stowed away the blood-streaked plastic bag with the dishwiper inside. She closed the hidey-hole, put the carton of old catalogues in front of it, then went back into the house. She put the flashlight where it belonged. She picked up the phone, realized she had stopped crying, and put it back into its cradle. She went through the living room and looked at him. She thought about the roses, but that didn’t work.
It’s roses, not patriotism, that are the last resort of a scoundrel,
she thought, and was shocked to hear herself laugh. Then she thought of Donnie and Petra, who had both idolized their father, and that did the trick. Weeping, she went back to the kitchen phone and punched in 911. “Hello, my name is Darcellen Anderson, and I need an ambulance at—”
“Slow down a little, ma’am,” the dispatcher said. “I’m having trouble understanding you.”
Good,
Darcy thought.
She cleared her throat. “Is this better? Can you understand me?”
“Yes, ma’am, I can now. Just take it easy. You said you needed an ambulance?”
“Yes, at 24 Sugar Mill Lane.”
“Are you hurt, Mrs. Anderson?”
“Not me, my husband. He fell down the stairs. He might only be unconscious, but I think he’s dead.”
The dispatcher said she would send an ambulance
immediately. Darcy surmised she’d also send a Yarmouth police car. A state police car as well, if one were currently in the area. She hoped there wasn’t. She went back into the front hall and sat on the bench there, but not for long. It was his eyes, looking at her. Accusing her.
She took his sport coat, wrapped it around herself, and went out on the front walk to wait for the ambulance.
The policeman who took her statement was Harold Shrewsbury, a local. Darcy didn’t know him, but did know his wife, as it happened; Arlene Shrewsbury was a Knitting Knut. He talked to her in the kitchen while the EMTs first examined Bob’s body and then took it away, not knowing there was another corpse inside him. A fellow who had been much more dangerous than Robert Anderson, CPA.
“Would you like coffee, Officer Shrewsbury? It’s no trouble.”
He looked at her trembling hands and said he would be very happy to make it for both of them. “I’m very handy in the kitchen.”
“Arlene has never mentioned that,” she said as he got up. He left his notebook open on the kitchen table. So far he had written nothing in it but her name, Bob’s name, their address, and their telephone number. She took that as a good sign.
“No, she likes to hide my light under a bushel,” he said. “Mrs. Anderson—Darcy—I’m very sorry for your loss, and I’m sure Arlene would say the same.”
Darcy began to cry again. Officer Shrewsbury tore a handful of paper towels off the roll and gave them to her. “Sturdier than Kleenex.”
“You have experience with this,” she said.
He checked the Bunn, saw it was loaded, and flipped it on. “More than I’d like.” He came back and sat down. “Can you tell me what happened? Do you feel up to that?”
She told him about Bob finding the double-date penny in his change from Subway, and how excited he’d been. About their celebratory dinner at Pearl of the Shore, and how he’d drunk too much. How he’d been clowning around (she mentioned the comic British salute he’d given when she asked for a glass of Perrier and lime). How he’d come up the stairs holding the glass high, like a waiter. How he was almost to the landing when he slipped. She even told about how she’d almost slipped herself, on one of the spilled ice cubes, while rushing down to him.
Officer Shrewsbury jotted something in his notebook, snapped it closed, then looked at her levelly. “Okay. I want you to come with me. Get your coat.”
“What? Where?”
To jail, of course. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, go directly to jail. Bob had gotten away with almost a dozen murders, and
she hadn’t even been able to get away with one (of course he had planned his, and with an accountant’s attention to detail). She didn’t know where she’d slipped up, but it would undoubtedly turn out to be something obvious. Officer Shrewsbury would tell her on the way to the police station. It would be like the last chapter of an Elizabeth George.
“My house,” he said. “You’re staying with me and Arlene tonight.”
She gaped at him. “I don’t . . . I can’t . . .”
“You can,” he said, in a voice that brooked no argument. “She’d kill me if I left you here by yourself. Do you want to be responsible for my murder?”
She wiped tears from her face and smiled wanly. “No, I guess not. But . . . Officer Shrewsbury . . .”
“Harry.”
“I have to make phone calls. My children . . . they don’t know yet.” The thought of this brought on fresh tears, and she put the last of the paper towels to work on them. Who knew a person could have so many tears inside them? She hadn’t touched her coffee and now drank half of it in three long swallows, although it was still hot.