The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (37 page)

I tried to imagine Katherine drawing blood from Joe with her fingernails. The picture didn’t fit.

“Hey, I’m gonna get another beer,” Joe said. “You want anything?”

“No, I’ll just mingle.”

“Mingle,” he chortled. “Yeah, you mingle.”

With that he lumbered off in search of a new beer to spill all over his guests. A new tune came blaring from the Allens’ surround-sound speakers: Top 40 stuff, all sugar and sound effects, definitely not Hannah’s choice.

For once I was left on my own, so I didn’t waste any time; I made a beeline for the tightly grouped revelers, following the blonde’s path. After receiving a few accidental elbows to the ribs and stepping on some poor woman’s toes, I spotted her through the sliding glass door on the back patio. She had both hands on her drink and swung her hips side to side with the music. A quick scan of the room revealed no Hannah within view, so I slipped outside among the mosquitoes and leaning tiki torches.

She wasn’t talking to anyone, just swaying by herself, probably enjoying the hold the red drink in her hand was beginning to take. I slid up beside her and said, “Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” she said, the words syrupy.

She really was beautiful, objectively speaking. Dazzling blue eyes, like gems. Bee-stung lips. I swallowed dry and frowned.

“Listen, my wife . . .”

“I figured that’s who that was. If looks could kill.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

“Do you always try to pick up women when you go to parties with your wife?”

A faint grin played at her mouth, but it was the admonishing kind.
Tsk-tsk, young man. You ought to know better
.

“Pick up—? No, I’m not. I’m not.” I shifted instantly into defense mode, which was my default gear. “That’s not it at all. It’s just—well, I think you should leave.”

“Leave?” Her playful incredulity suddenly became a lot less playful.

“Yes. Right now, actually.”

“You’re serious.”

She wasn’t swaying anymore. The music shifted to a Leonard Cohen song. More Hannah’s speed, which meant she was hopefully still occupied with Katherine.

“You have no idea how . . . possessive she gets. That little thing with the wine back there?”

“Terrible stuff, isn’t it?”

“It’s awful, but please—”

“I don’t even know why I’m here, to tell the truth.”

“Great, then really, you should
go
.”

The blonde assumed a bemused expression, a matronly look of utter disappointment. I heard the back door slide squeakily open behind me and gave up.

“Is my husband bothering you?”

My eyes slid shut and a sigh whistled past my lips. Hannah’s arm hooked mine and the blond woman laughed the way women do in awkward social situations. I’m an expert on that laugh.

“No, not at all,” she said. Then, conspiratorially: “But I think he’s a little drunk.”

I wasn’t, of course. Not even close. Hannah apologized for me anyway (“I’m so sorry, he never seems to know when enough is enough”) and, with a courteous if formal goodbye, she ushered me around the side of the house to the car in the driveway. Not through the house, no “thanks for the party” to the Allens, but
around
the house. In the dark, like a couple of goddamn thieves.

Or not
like
, because when I slid into the passenger seat of my wife’s Acura (she always drove, always insisted on unlocking and opening the door for me), she handed me her baggy purse to hold on to, whereupon I immediately took notice of its largest, most conspicuous occupant. The Waterford vase we’d given to the Allens no more than an hour before. An act of aggression, however mild; a subtle “fuck you” to the woman she loathed and my friend who always annoyed her with his loud voice and gregarious demeanor. Joe and Katherine would spend a while sifting through their gifts later on, frustrated with the absurdity of the lost vase.
It was right here! Where could it have gone?

Tricky, slippery Hannah.

She stabbed the ignition with her key and cleared her throat in time with the rumbling of the engine. Home.

I could tell things were about to get bad again.

2

The mewling cries wafted up through the air-conditioning vents, from the basement to every room in the house. I hated it, that awful, pitiful sound, but I shut it out of my mind. Pretended as best I could that it wasn’t really there at all. One of the secrets to a good marriage: put those things you just can’t stand out of your head. Nobody’s perfect.

I was in the spare room, once considered the future location of our first child’s bedroom, since loaded up with towers of boxes, the minutiae of a shared life. The notion had occurred to me that it might make a decent home office. Upon expressing this thought to Hannah, her eyes went wide with delight—“No, no,” she exclaimed, “a
crafts
room. Yes, that would be perfect.”

So I was prepping the room for Hannah. Hannah and her crafts. And all the while the woman in our basement howled miserably:
No, why, why, why are you doing this to me
. A familiar line, a cliché. I was beginning to think that people based their words on oft-repeated lines we hear on television. The brain references the sundry crime programs they’d seen over the years, the dozen or so kidnapping scenarios, and it knows right off what the right words are. How often does it work on those shows? I wasn’t sure.

I could take the doors off the closet, make it a nice little space for a sewing table. Soon Hannah would have two workrooms, this and the basement. She had so many hobbies.

In the late afternoon she emerged from the basement, shut the door, and locked it with her key. Her face was spotted with sweat and I thought maybe there was a small spattering of blood on her tank top. I wasn’t looking too closely. I never did. She went right past me in the kitchen, hustled for the back of the house to take a shower. Just like she’d been working out. Which I guess she was. It wasn’t easy, what she’d been up to.

Hannah chose a restaurant for dinner, didn’t feel like cooking. I said I’d be happy to whip something up, but her mind was made up. She knotted a tie around my neck, still displeased with the way I did it, and we hopped into her Acura for a quick jaunt to a new Caribbean place she read about in the paper. She complained about Kathy Allen the whole way.

“Can you believe her? She asks what I want to hear, we’re sitting together by the stereo and she
smells
, by the way, and she asks, ‘What’s your poison?’ And then she just plays her own crap anyway.”

I almost reminded her about the Leonard Cohen song, but I choked it down.

The place was called El Carib and it was full of tropical fish tanks and bustling waitresses. Televisions mounted in the corners of the ceiling played soap operas with the volume turned down. After we sat down I kept my eyes trained on the laminated menu. She asked me how the crafts room was coming along and I muttered something vaguely encouraging. I didn’t look at the waitress when she came around to take our order. If she murdered somebody right then and there and the police asked me to describe the assailant, I couldn’t have done it. I had blinders on. Sometimes I forgot, but not then.

Hannah pointed to something on her menu, asked if it had bananas in it. The waitress said she didn’t think so and Hannah made her go back to the kitchen and make sure. When she came back positive that the dish—I don’t remember what it was—was banana-free, my wife ordered it for both of us. I ate it like a prison meal, pausing occasionally to sip at my water and nod at Hannah while she talked about the thriller she was reading and our HOA and didn’t the new mail carrier seem a great deal friendlier than the old one? Neither of us so much as alluded to the elephant in the basement.

Poor woman.

3

Monday I spent my lunch break with Patricia. I drove to the diner like a fugitive, taking odd turns, a circuitous route, terribly careful that I wasn’t being followed. She was waiting for me in the last booth by the restrooms, a scarf on her head and enormous sunglasses disguising most of her face. I had to laugh. When I sat down across from her, I grumbled, “What’s the password?”

“Swordfish” was her reply. She liked the Marx Brothers. I introduced her to them.

Patricia was an administrative assistant at my office for the better part of two years before she got married and resigned. We were friendly, but not friends. I didn’t miss her when she left. Less than a year later she was divorced and came around for a lunch date with one of her old coworkers. She and I got to talking, and inside a month we were sweating in a tangle between musty sheets at her apartment. I had “gone home sick.” I was never on guard at the office, not like I was at home.

She was sipping at a Bloody Mary and I ordered the same. I was so used to letting women make my decisions for me, I couldn’t see why it should be any different with Pat. Still, she crooked her full red lips to one side and said, “You can get whatever you want.”

“This is fine.”

“You’re tense.”

“Hannah,” I said. It was all that needed saying.

“Divorce her.”

“Pat—”

“I know.”

“I can’t.”

“I know.”

I signaled the girl behind the counter for another one. Pat fired up a long, slim cigarette and exhaled like a femme fatale from some old noir movie. She certainly looked the part. Red hair, shoulder length, skin like alabaster. I didn’t have a type, and even if I did, Patricia probably wouldn’t be it. But still, we fit.

A couple of weeks earlier I had told her I loved her. Damnedest thing, didn’t mean to say it, even if I was thinking it. Of course, just thinking didn’t necessarily mean it was true. All the same, I said it, and she parroted it back to me. I loved her and she loved me. We were in love. And I was married to somebody else. What a bastard.

“I want you,” Pat said, slipping off her sunglasses to gaze at the stream of blue-gray smoke spilling up from her cigarette’s ember.

I checked my watch, said, “I’ll have to get back.”

“I mean
you
, all of you. No more ‘swordfish.’”

It was a fun enough game, but she was getting tired of games. I guess I was too. I clenched my jaw and thought about the blonde from the party. My eyes watered, and Pat took that to mean I was reacting to our situation. She touched my hand and smiled sadly.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.
Make a decision for once in your life. Put your goddamn foot down
.

I said, “I don’t know, Pat.”

4

At night they were always quiet. The day wore them out, wore them down. The voice was whittled down to a scratchy whisper, the muscles didn’t want to obey the commands to keep struggling, keep
trying
. Nevertheless, I never slept.

For the longest time I lay in bed, flat on my back with my arms crossed on top of the sheets, my eyes wide open. Listening to Hannah breathe. She never snored, but her sleep-breath was whistley, soft as cotton. When the digital clock hit two in the morning, it was as if I could hear it turn over, a sequence of heavy locks like the unleashing of a dam. Hannah whistled on. I got out of bed, twisted my shoulders, and pulled a T-shirt down over my torso.

My objective was a glass of water and a slice of toast. I stared at the toaster oven while the heating coil went lava red and the bread yellow, then brown. I slathered two slices with peanut butter and nibbled them at the kitchen table, swallowing water when it got too thick in my throat. Across the table from me was the basement door, as plain and unassuming as ever, apart from the steel lock keeping the status quo. Beyond it, down the uncarpeted steps, around the corner, and into the paneled 1970s room some previous owner used for his “man time,” a blond woman waited for it all to start up again. I didn’t even know her name.

I was willing to bet she knew mine.

Halfway through the second piece of toast I gave up on it and went for a glass of milk. The jug was hiding behind a metal bowl of ground beef mixed with onions and breadcrumbs, a taut layer of plastic wrap over the top. I pulled the milk out, my mind flexing hazily on the meat; tomorrow’s supper, no doubt. Hannah was the house chef; she would never have dreamed of putting anything I prepared in her mouth.

I drank straight from the jug—what my wife didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her—and returned it to the fridge, careful to position it just like I found it. My gaze lingered on the ground beef a second longer before I closed the door.

An idea was percolating.

5

Patricia wasn’t the first. Though now, in the fullness of time, I was coming to love Pat—actually
love
her—the first was what some people might call a fling. An error in judgment. A wild woman in a bar, flitting around me like a housefly, my subconscious screeching at me to get the hell out of there before I made a mess of things. I didn’t listen. I made the mess.

Her
name doesn’t matter. I’ve tried to forget it, and for the most part I’ve convinced myself that I have. I am quite certain that it is engraved on her grave marker, that she probably had a sweet middle name like Rose or Eve, and that even now, all these years later, somebody still comes around with fresh flowers once a month. It’s a nice thought. No consolation, but nice.

In the wake of my error, I learned quickly just how magnificent a detective Hannah was when she needed to be. Perhaps a lot of wives possess this particular set of skills, at least the betrayed ones. Men are what they are, and what they are often isn’t very good. Some wives know that going in, I suppose. Hannah sure as shit did. So when she came home from her weekend in Little Rock (the old homestead), her bloodhound nose started to flare before the door squeaked shut behind her. Sex is like blood to a detective wife: no matter how hard you try to scrub it all away, you can never eliminate all the evidence. It remains in a twitch of the face, a dodged touch, a renewed vigor, a guilty confidence. My eyes could not connect, hold true and steady and meet her gaze head-on. There were lies behind my eyes, and to look into them was to see my crime as if through a glass, and not so darkly. She with her family, sipping iced tea on the porch as in the good old days, and me in room 325 of the Lonestar Motor Lodge, rutting between gray sheets like a hog searching out rotting corncobs in the mud. With
her
. Whatever her name was. Didn’t matter—she was dead, and I might as well have killed her myself.