Another lie was necessary. She was on a serious mission, after all. She’d cover her tracks and, depending on what she found, nobody need ever know she’d even made the trip to Maine. The prospect of having a little secret to herself, known only to her, possibly forever, thrilled her.
The following evening, after Martha had departed and George had sequestered himself in his study, Mrs. March telephoned her sister. “I wanted to tell you that I’ll be away for a few days, so in case you were thinking of calling, well, don’t. I won’t be here. Neither will George,” she added on a whim, “we’re going to a—a spa.”
“Oh, how lovely. I didn’t know you were into that sort of thing.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous, who wouldn’t be?”
“True, I suppose,” Lisa said. “Where is it? This spa.”
“Oh … I don’t know.”
“You mean you don’t know where you’re going?”
“No, it’s a surprise … from George,” she said, impressed with herself.
“Oh. Lucky you,” Lisa said—tartly, Mrs. March thought. “What about Jonathan?”
“He’ll be staying with the upstairs neighbors.”
“Want me to call in and check on him?”
“No, no, I’ll be doing that myself. Again, I only called to let you know I won’t be home. I’ll ring you as soon as I get back.”
“All right then, dear. Have fun.”
Next, she called the airline and bought an open-ended ticket to Augusta.
“Thank you, ma’am, enjoy your trip! Maine is lovely this time of year,” said the saleswoman before the line went dead. Mrs. March went over to the closet and opened the doors solemnly—there seemed to be a grand purpose behind all her actions now—and pulled down a small tartan suitcase from a high shelf.
She was packing her tawny winter slippers when George walked in, and it was like living a scene she had experienced before, but from the other point of view. “I’m going to visit my mother,” she said as he had barely stepped over the threshold. “I spoke to my sister, and Mother’s not feeling well.”
She peered at George from the corners of her eyes as she pretended to busy herself with packing. He looked somewhat perplexed as he scratched his chin and said, “I’m sorry to hear that, honey. Is there anything you need?”
“No, it’s all settled,” she said, folding a few silk headscarves into the suitcase (her idea of traveling incognito).
“How long are you staying then?”
“Well, I bought an open-ended ticket, because I’m not sure how long they’ll be needing me. I told her I would stay as long as necessary.” She said this with an air of martyr-like pride, leaving George to reply, “Of course. Do what you need to do.”
“I’ll call you every so often to let you know how she’s doing.”
“Well, it looks like you have everything under control, as usual,” he said. It infuriated her, this deep lack of interest in her sudden trip. He walked over to her, and she tensed as he pecked her softly on the cheek. Like Judas, she thought. When he pulled his head back, she could detect the hint of a smile on his face.
“I’m going to take a shower,” he said.
As soon as the shower was on she rushed into George’s study. He kept the keys to Edgar’s cabin in a small ceramic bowl on his desk, where she now spotted them in a bed of chewing gum wrappers and loose change. She took them gently, delicately, waiting to be caught in the act, but no one interrupted her as she pocketed them, and slipped out as quietly as she had entered.
MRS. MARCH kissed George goodbye and bade Martha farewell (Jonathan was in school). She stepped into the elevator, looking back at apartment 606. The door was closed.
In the elevator she took a deep breath. She hummed a little, looking down at her suitcase. She’d written her address on a leather name tag and the ink had smudged across her first name.
The elevator doors opened with their usual jolt. She walked out into the lobby, rolling the little suitcase behind her. She approached the glass doors, expecting George, at any moment, to appear behind her. She dared not turn around as she stepped closer, ever closer, to the exit.
The doorman hailed her a cab, and she waited dumbly as he fit her suitcase into the trunk with more fuss than was necessary. She thanked him and slid into the backseat, the door shutting after her. She glanced up at the apartment building, at the square windows and the square air-conditioning units.
As the cab took off, turning the corner so that she lost sight of the building, she was blindsided by a pang of guilt. She hadn’t visited her mother since Jonathan was a baby. Inside her lay the grim certainty that it was her mother who should have died—not her father. Her father, with his tanned, rotund belly she had only ever seen in Cádiz that summer. Her father, who always made their dinner reservations and knew who to call when their suitcases were lost in Greece. She had once prepared a repulsive dish of grapes and crumbled chocolate chip cookies and peanuts, garnished with salt and sugar and pepper, and had presented it proudly to her parents, encouraged by a beaming Alma. Her mother refused to try it, another reminder to her daughters that she wasn’t their friend and never would be. Her father had declined politely at first, but after some gentle prodding by Alma, he volunteered to give it a taste. He bent over the plate and shoveled a generous spoonful of the disagreeable mix into his mouth. He munched on it silently, no doubt regretting it. Despite the scalding sheepishness she had felt at the time, Mrs. March had also been thankful, and for the first time, perhaps, truly appreciative of her father.
Sitting on the cab’s odorous, cracked leather seat, she justified her neglect of her mother, reassuring herself that if her father were the one living out his last days, she would be visiting him plenty in Bethesda. In fact, she decided with sudden conviction, she wouldn’t even have allowed him to be taken so far away in the first place. She would have kept him as close to her as possible. Dear old Mr. Kirby. She wondered what he looked like now in his coffin. She usually pictured him as a floating newspaper with legs. He would have rotted away by now, leaving nothing but bones.
The trip to the airport was uneventful—nobody in pursuit, nobody stopping her. The cabdriver didn’t suddenly swerve off the expressway to murder her at some deserted location on George’s instruction.
Similarly, her flight was on time and there were no delays getting through security. She donned a comically large pair of sunglasses and a headscarf and avoided the airport bookstore, where George’s book taunted her on a revolving display.
As she queued up at the gate, she overheard a man talking loudly on a nearby pay phone. He was dressed in a trench coat and held a briefcase in one hand, the receiver lodged between his head and his shoulder. “Yes, Delmonico’s? Hello, this is John Burnett. Right. I’d like to make a reservation for dinner, for next Saturday. Yes. For two. Seven o’clock would be swell.”
Mrs. March displayed her boarding pass to the gate agent and walked onto the gangway, leaving the man to make his dinner reservation. How curious, she thought, that she knew where this stranger would be at seven o’clock next Saturday. She toyed with the idea of showing up at Delmonico’s, maybe even greeting him with familiarity, reveling in his surprise. Would he pretend to know her? Or was John an honest man? As she stepped onto the plane, she wondered who John’s dinner date was. Was this a romantic dinner with his wife? Or perhaps he was treating his lover to a bottle of champagne and oysters. But if that were the case, would he be making plans so brazenly on a public pay phone?
She sat by the window, her legs cramped, the seat belt slicing across her midriff. The takeoff was clumsy, and as soon as the seat belt sign was off she asked the stewardess for red wine. Forgoing the plastic cup and drinking straight from the tiny bottle, she imagined, should the plane crash, how long it would take George to find her. Once he spoke with her sister, he might assume she was having an affair, and when the days passed he might think she had run off with the man. She liked the thought of him fearing he had lost he
r, feeling remorse for how he had taken her for granted, for writing that abominable book.
AFTER A ONE-HOUR stopover in Boston, she flew to Augusta. The whole trip took a little over three hours. Since it would have taken half the time to get to Bethesda, she called George from a pay phone at the airport to say that she had arrived at her sister’s after an unforeseen flight delay. George seemed uninterested in her update, distracted even, and she could hear muffled giggles in the background.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s just Jonathan being silly.”
She wrinkled her nose, staring down at her shoes. She had never known Jonathan to be silly. “And you’re both all right then?”
“Yes, yes. We’ll miss you, but we’ll be fine. Don’t worry, honey. We’ll make do without you.”
“Very well. Don’t forget to tell Martha to make the lamb tonight. Otherwise it’ll go bad.”
“Will do,” said George. “Have fun! Give my best to everyone.” George hung up.
Mrs. March stood at the pay phone, blinking, the phone still clutched to her ear, and said, loudly, “I love you, too, darling. I’ll see you soon,” for the benefit of the woman next in line.
Under the pay phone scattered business cards listed numbers for local restaurants and cab companies. She called one of the taxi services. It took a few rings for them to pick up, and the man on the other end seemed surprised to be fielding a call, but he assured her that she’d have a cab in five minutes.
She stepped, with determination, into the freezing air, which slammed into her like a wave.
Edgar’s cabin was about a forty-minute drive from the airport. Mrs. March had copied the address from George’s Rolodex onto a slip of yellow paper she’d been rubbing inside her coat pocket the entire trip. She’d also brought along a notebook (one of George’s) and a pen to jot down notes.
The cab had arrived promptly as promised. The logo on the back door featured a cartoon moose in sunglasses on its hind legs, giving a thumbs-up. The driver was friendly and overly chatty, which irked Mrs. March, who saw it as a mark of unprofessionalism, even when he offered to get the door—pronouncing it doah.
On the drive to Edgar’s cabin, cemeteries spread out on either side of the road, the gravestones casting their shadows on the snow. On the bridge over the Kennebec River, the driver pointed out large frozen patches of water, explaining they were set to be broken up by the Coast Guard.
He alerted her when they entered the quiet town of Gentry. She looked out her window at the deserted streets—so deserted she wondered why the cabdriver bothered using a turn signal. She noticed two scrapbooking stores and a wilted wreath hanging on the front door of the town hall.
Once through what passed for a downtown, the cab swerved onto a road lined with massive fir trees where the buildings were spaced further apart. Here the stores looked like houses—squat clapboard buildings with signs in the windows or yards, announcing such local businesses as “Diana’s Hair Emporium” and “Muffin Madness” and “Lester’s Dog Grooming.” The locals looked to be proud of their town, but all Mrs. March saw was an ugly, lonely little place. She was mystified as to what Edgar had ever seen in it to inspire a property purchase. Maybe it was the remoteness that appealed to him, as it facilitated his and George’s dark habits. She tried to remember if George had known Edgar when he bought the cabin all those years ago.
They passed a diner with a massive parking lot. She noted how close it was to the cabin when the cab pulled into Edgar’s dirt driveway.
Mrs. March paid in cash and refused the driver’s repeated offers to lug her suitcase up to the house. He threw up his hands and drove off, bidding farewell with a good-natured honk, which made her drop her luggage onto a patch of ice. The wooden cabin was bigger than she had anticipated, with steps leading up to a deck that ringed the house and a stone chimney.
When she unlocked the front door with the stolen key and stepped inside—knocking over a pair of snowshoes propped up on the wall by the door—she was taken aback by the sheer amount of wood. Wooden floors, wooden walls, wooden furniture, wooden shelves, stacks of wood by the fireplace. Wood, much of it plainly varnished, was everywhere, giving the place an unfinished look. The walls, Mrs. March thought, were screaming for a layer of paint.
She closed the door behind her, feeling as if she were closing the lid of her own pinewood coffin. Lowering her suitcase to the floor, she proceeded to explore, her arms crossed at her chest. The ceilings were crisscrossed by exposed beams. There was a fieldstone fireplace, and on the mantel a taxidermied fox—possibly one Edgar himself had caught—posed as if prowling on a wooden branch, one marble eye missing from its socket.
She surveyed the large built-in bookcase, dreading what she knew she’d find there: George’s complete bibliography, arranged in order of publication date, their glossy jackets shining. She slid one out at random, disturbing a thin layer of dust on the shelf, and opened it up to read the handwritten note on the first page. “To Edgar, Editor Extraordinaire. George.” She took out another one and flipped to the same page—“To Edgar. This book wouldn’t be what it is without you, and neither would this author. George”—then another—“To Edgar, my friend, my editor, my partner in crime. George.” At this, Mrs. March licked the page savagely before closing the book and returning it to the shelf. George had only ever signed his books for her at the beginning. There was really no point anymore, she supposed, to signing or dedicating any more books to her, when she had lived with their author for so long. Besides, she had always assumed it was implied that all his works were dedicated to her, the person to whom George had chosen to dedicate his life.
The term partner in crime nagged at her as she walked through the cabin, opening doors that led into barely furnished bedrooms and musty closets, failing to find traces of a specific kind of life lived here. Ratty blankets and old coats and faded swimming trunks told no stories—at least the kinds of stories Mrs. March was looking to uncover.
She opened another door and found the kitchen—rustic, with copper pans hanging over an ancient six-burner stove. There was some food in the fridge, its edibility suspect, and she thought it best to eat out at the diner.
There was a key box mounted on the kitchen wall by the back door, lined with keys. She took the key labeled “Garage” and stepped outside. Parked inside the garage, like a hibernating bear, sat an old Jeep, dark green with bald tires. She pictured Edgar driving it, George in the passenger seat, both of them silent on the ride back to the cabin after murdering Sylvia, possibly with her body stuffed into the trunk. She cupped her hands around her face, which she pressed against the driver’s side window. On a lark, she pulled on the door handle. It clicked open with such ease that Mrs. March yelped. Her cry still echoing inside the garage walls, she crawled into the car and sniffed at the tree-shaped air freshener—no longer smelling of pine—hanging from the rearview mirror. She lifted the floor mats and opened the glove compartment, where she found a sloppily folded calendar detailing the current hunting season. “1 deer per year,” “2 bear per year.” Several dates were circled in red. She popped opened the trunk, searching for traces of blood, long brown hairs, a monogrammed bracelet or a necklace, anything that could have belonged to Sylvia, but she found nothing.
She contemplated taking the car keys and driving into town. She was nervous about drawing attention to herself by calling more cabs and giving fake names, but the thought of driving a car on the open road unnerved her—her last foray behind the wheel had been at her father’s club in a golf cart.
She resolved, then, that it would be prudent to walk whenever possible, and she would start by walking to the diner for dinner.
WRAPPING HER scarf around her face, Mrs. March walked among the trees just off the main road to avoid detection, glancing back frequently at the garage—barely visible now. She chided herself for her stupidity. Surely she would die of hypothermia in these woods, and her body would be hidden for weeks before a hiker or
a hunter found her, just as they’d discovered Sylvia’s frozen corpse.
The pine trees swayed in the wind as she made her way to the diner. Trees from this very area might have been cut down to make the paper in George’s books. How many trees, she wondered, to print all of those copies? A whole forest stood waiting to be sacrificed for future editions. The trees around her seemed to shiver. She imagined them screaming in women’s voices, and as their branches began flailing, she hurried on toward the diner’s neon sign, flashing in the distance.
THE DINER was almost empty, except for an elderly couple and a man reading a newspaper in a corner. It wasn’t a dive, although it certainly wouldn’t be mistaken for a fine-dining establishment with its maroon vinyl booths. Plastic-coated menus sat between ketchup and mustard bottles on every table. The place felt cozy, safe even, and Mrs. March imagined herself coming here for dinner every night, getting to know the waitstaff, eventually becoming their favorite customer.
She picked a booth next to a window overlooking the parking lot, and a small squeak of flatulence from the plastic cushion announced her arrival. At the sound, a waiter looked up from behind the bar and nodded at her. Not wishing to raise her voice, she responded with a queenly wave of her hand.
She sniffed at her wrists and realized that she had forgotten to pack her perfume. She felt like a stranger to herself without it—a scentless ghost. She smiled at the thought. If scent was an identity, not having one opened up new, exciting possibilities. She could stay here in Gentry, her slate wiped clean, and start over. She could be anyone she wanted.
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