If She Were Dead
Page 1
Also by J.P. Smith
The Drowning
Airtight
Breathless
The Discovery of Light
The Blue Hour
Body and Soul
The Man from Marseille
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2020 by J. P. Smith
Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks
Cover image © Sybille Sterk/Arcangel Images
Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
www.sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Smith, J. P.
Title: If she were dead : a novel / J.P. Smith.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018057489 | (trade pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Man-woman relationships--Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3569.M53744 I3 2020 | DDC 813/.54--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057489
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Two
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part Three
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Part Four
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Part Five
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Reading Group Guide
A Conversation with the Author
About the Author
Read on for The Drowning excerpt
Back Cover
NEFF
Will you be here, too?
PHYLLIS
I guess so. I usually am.
NEFF
Same chair, same perfume, same anklet?
PHYLLIS
I wonder if I know what you mean.
NEFF
I wonder if you wonder.
—Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, Double Indemnity (1944)
Part One
1
Close your eyes.
Now open.
She was in darkness, and now there was a point of light aimed at her right eye.
In the beam she could see the reflection, intricately veined, staring back at her, blinking when she blinked. She looked into it as if it were an uncurtained window in someone’s house, an opening onto another’s life. It seemed oddly intimate, being able to stare into your own stare, to transfix your own gaze.
Look up, look down. Now to the right, now to the left.
After doing the same with her left eye, he switched off the light. A table of letters was projected on the wall, black characters against a white ground. She recited the first four lines, then the next two, and then at his urging two more, and then after she did likewise with her other eye, he propped a printed card on a rack attached to a mechanism close to her face. He asked if she was able to read the text. She squinted, and he began making adjustments with the lenses until she could read the words with ease. They went from gray to a crisp black, and the sensation was like rising out of water after a long, graceful dive. He switched on the overhead light and made a notation on a sheet of paper.
The doctor explained that it was a matter of age. “It happens to all of us eventually,” he said. “You notice it when you have to hold a book far away in order to read it. It usually starts when you turn forty.”
“Sometimes I can hardly read the time on my watch.”
“One last thing,” he said, and he wheeled his chair alongside her, their knees almost touching. He opened a spiral-bound book and held it before her. “Try to make out the figures in the patterns,” he said.
“Thirty-six,” she said, seeing it clearly amid the psychedelic bubble bath of colors.
“And now?”
“The letter B.”
“And this one?”
“Fifty-seven.” She smiled.
“At least you’re not color-blind,” he said, handing her a prescription for lenses.
He held the examination-room door open for her, and she stepped out into the sunlight and windows of the optician’s area. She had suspected it would come to this: for the past three months she’d noticed how difficult it had become for her to read.
The walls and racks displayed a variety of frames. She knew which ones she’d take, she’d seen them in magazine ads and on other people, she’d even tried them on before her appointment and, standing back a little from the mirror, had admired herself in black frames that contrasted dramatically with her blond hair
and blue eyes. She wondered if, simply because she had desired the frames, she had willed herself into farsightedness.
She looked over at the optician assigned to her.
“They’re only reading glasses,” he said, noting the price tag.
“Still,” she said, not quite getting his meaning.
He reached toward her and readjusted them on the bridge of her nose. She looked at herself in the mirror. She knew how much they cost without even looking at the little tag on the stem. She knew it because they had been designed by someone who also lent his name to expensive clothes and shoes, things people wore on cruises or at society weddings. It didn’t matter. She rarely spoiled herself; she spent her days working at home in jeans or sweatpants, in sweatshirts or sweaters, and in the summer wore shorts and a T-shirt, or a blouse tied at the waist; times when she was invisible. When she went before the public she dressed more stylishly: at readings or delivering a talk, at a restaurant with a friend, or on the few occasions she’d been asked out by a man and accepted it.
“Look at me,” he said, “look at my eyes,” and it seemed a little dangerous to her, looking a man directly in the face with absolute forthrightness. It had always been uncomfortable for her since the divorce, as if by showing so much of herself to another she might also display in some obscure manner a diagram of her life, the curve that rose and fell in the elegant shape of deception. The code of her face would reveal it in the way her eyes shifted to the side, or in the set of her mouth, the tilt of her head, the way she moved the hair away from her cheek. She felt his hands brush against her temples as he slid the frames back onto her face; she sensed the faint peppermint whisper of his breath. She looked at the dark brown of his eyes, the way his eyebrows met, the slight rise of his upper lip. She wondered how much scrutiny she could bear before the inevitable flaws became visible.
“They suit you,” he said. “A good choice.”
They would be ready in a few days.
2
The interview had been arranged for four, less than an hour away, and the moment she got in the car she remembered it. She tightened her lips and said Oh shit and drove out of the parking area and onto the highway. She was sorry she hadn’t arranged it for the next morning, or even canceled it altogether. She tried to recall the voice on the phone, the way the interviewer asked for directions. She lived in the city, the woman from the newspaper said. “I’ll take the highway up.”
Amelie described her home, an old farmhouse set on a rise off the road, the low stone pillars that stood on either side of the entrance, a red mailbox that, like her, had seen better days. She said that her car would be in the driveway, a dark-blue Volvo. This was the house she and Richard had taken so much trouble to find, to renovate, to enjoy. She wondered if it needed to be cleaned, if she should haul out the vacuum and run it over the wide pine floors, or if she should give a quick dusting to the tables and lamps, even though the cleaning woman had been there two days earlier. She knew it didn’t matter, that no interviewer had ever passed judgment on how she lived, the imagined squalor of her living room.
She turned on the radio and opened the window. A driver in the next lane turned to look at her. His little mustache rose in a smile, and she looked at him through dark glasses and eased her foot slightly off the accelerator. She watched as he pulled ahead, his head tilting to catch her image in the narrow slit of his rearview mirror. She turned up the volume on the radio: a woman was singing in German while an oboe twisted its melody into hers. It was obviously something by Bach, from a cantata probably, a piece that her mother would certainly have been able to identify. She tapped her fingers lightly against the steering wheel, for there was something comforting in the rhythm, the mathematical regularity of the pizzicato behind the woman’s yearning voice, as though each beat were a step higher on some celestial staircase.
It was three thirty when she arrived home. She opened the refrigerator and put her finger to her lips. She would have to offer the interviewer something, and because it was warm and they could sit out on the deck under the umbrella, she wondered if she should make a pitcher of instant iced tea. She herself would have preferred a dry martini, but that could wait. The last time she had made drinks for an interview, the writer had mentioned in the article her subject’s evident lust for alcohol, and both her agent and her publicist had called her, gently suggesting she stick to a more neutral beverage in future.
She walked quickly upstairs and changed into a skirt and blouse. She stood before her mirror and pulled a brush through her hair. She put on a different pair of earrings; she took her sandals from the closet and slipped them on. She went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth and then took some mouthwash directly from the bottle and spit it into the sink.
She smoothed the covers on her bed and banged at her pillow until it no longer showed the imprint of her head. She wondered if she would have to give the interviewer a tour of the house, or if when she excused herself to use the toilet the journalist would bolt up the stairs and take a look for herself, rifling through her medicine cabinet, discovering her pink vibrator in a drawer by her bed.
On her bedside table were stacked a biography, a novel, and the latest New Yorker, sitting next to a lamp and a clock radio. The drawer was slightly open and she nudged it shut. Over the bed was nothing but the shadow of what had once hung there, a framed exhibition poster so beloved by her ex-husband that when he left, she insisted he take it with him. She still hadn’t found something to replace it. She wondered if it now hung over his and his wife’s bed.
On the dresser stood a framed photograph of her daughter, Nina, taken in September when she’d started college at Wellesley. Her eyes glowed with pride and excitement and terror. Behind her were other students with their families, arms around shoulders, scenes of farewell. Amelie and Richard had together driven Nina there, and she remembered the day as having passed without incident.
Without incident: it was in just those terms that she recalled it, as if she were referring to some zone of mayhem in the Middle East, a place of terror and spiritual malaise, where peace, when it came, shimmered into uneasy stalemate. Afterward, after they’d seen Nina into her room at the college and made small talk with her roommate’s parents, after they’d fussed with her and kissed and hugged her, the two of them stopped for lunch at a restaurant in town, instantly ordering drinks, saying nothing of substance for the entire hour, as if, were they to trespass on a subject of depth, small wars or skirmishes might break out.
Since Amelie and Richard had split up she’d added little to the house. It had been difficult enough when her mother had died and Amelie had emptied her Scarsdale home of china and chipped candy dishes and paintings. They still remained in boxes in the cellar, and they would stay there for years, decades, centuries. It didn’t matter because she would never unpack them to reconstruct the suburban Westchester house in which she had been raised. Every time she descended to the bowels of her home she would see them jutting out of their chardonnay and merlot boxes, brief reminders of the dead and gone, silent reproaches for her having overlooked them. The pity of it was that none of it represented what her mother had been: once a respected concert pianist, in later years a beloved teacher and lecturer at Juilliard. Nothing that defined her remained: the filing cabinets full of sheet music now long gone; a baby grand Steinway sold a few weeks after her death to a private school in Connecticut.
At rare moments the thought of her mother’s death would return to her in unexpected ways. She thought of the half-light of the landing as her mother walked up the stairs, her knuckles white against the dark wood of the banister as she stopped to catch her breath three steps from the top.
Amelie walked into the living room and looked at her watch and then out the window. Now it was ten past four. She hoped it wouldn’t last long, not that she minded being interviewed—in fact, she adored publicity. It was like being bathed in the glances of others or caught in
the intersection of a thousand conversations. She enjoyed being photographed. She liked the snick of the camera, the intrusion of the lens into her wistful smile, her blue eyes. She thought ahead three hours, projecting herself into the future, trying to see herself at that moment, lifting the phone, pressing in the numbers, letting it ring once. Then she would hang up. Then she would wait. Then she would pick up the phone and try the number again. Then he would pick it up. This is how it went.
A routine that had so far lasted two years.
3
At twenty past four she began to consider making herself a drink. She thought of her eye examination that day, how the blurred world had grown crystalline and distinct. It was like the resolving chord in a piece of music, the great satisfying clang of clarity and reason that comes at the end of a symphony.
She heard a car coming up the road, she saw it drive past the pillars, she saw it stop, there was a pause, it backed up, the turn was made, here she was. Amelie caught her image in a mirror and touched her hair with her hands, she smoothed her blouse, she cleared her throat and went to the door. She watched the car door open, and swinging her long, dark hair as she got out of the car, the woman sent by the magazine stopped for a moment and looked at the front of the house.
She was young and slim and rather pretty, with hair extensions that she probably didn’t need. She rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
Amelie saw with dismay that the young woman was carrying not just a notebook but also a small recorder. The agreement had been that she would be permitted to have a preliminary look at the piece before it was published. Now she would have to give it careful scrutiny. Things could be said and forgotten. Idiocies and first thoughts could be captured in the machine. Maintaining her image was vital to her career.
The interviewer stepped in ahead of her. She looked around. “What a nice house,” she said. “Is it very old?”
Amelie smiled. “It’s only meant to look that way. I think we’ll sit outside. If that’s all right for you.”
“Great.”
“It’s so nice out. Would you like something cold to drink? Iced tea?” They went into the kitchen and she opened the refrigerator. “I can offer you a glass of wine, if you like.”