The Betrayed Wife

by Kevin O'Brien

  “It’s on TBS, and they’re cutting out all the dirty stuff.”

  “Fine,” Dylan said. He figured the kids didn’t need to be around their mother after she’d had three glasses of wine. “Could you do me a favor? Could you go upstairs and tell your sister to get off Instagram because dinner is ready? And pass the word that we’re all eating wherever we want tonight.”

  He headed back into the kitchen to serve up dinner.

  Sheila was still sitting in the breakfast booth, staring at her phone. Her wineglass was empty.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Thursday, September 20—1:43 A.M.

  Antonia Newcomb’s Facebook page displayed several posts from her friends: “We’ll miss you, Toni!” and “I can’t believe she’s gone . . .” Antonia’s photo gallery showed a flashy-looking, tanned woman with dark hair, a little too much mascara, and a nice figure. She looked like a real party girl, too. In most of the pictures, Antonia had a drink in her hand—or her arm around some guy. She’d posted plenty of selfies, too. The story from The Oregonian had mentioned a daughter, but the girl wasn’t in any of Antonia’s Facebook posts.

  Sheila didn’t have a Facebook page, but her daughter had one she hadn’t posted on in ages because, apparently, it was no longer cool, or something. Sheila used Hannah’s account password to check on people. “Facebook stalking” was the term for it, according to Hannah. If Sheila did have a Facebook page, one thing was certain: She’d be posting pictures of her kids and bragging about their accomplishments all the time. She wondered why Antonia had completely ignored her daughter on the site.

  Sheila sat at her desktop computer in her little office nook, an alcove off the kitchen by the corridor that led to the garage. It was a little chilly tonight, so she’d put on a pair of socks and thrown an old cardigan over her pale blue, cotton pajamas. She sipped bourbon from a jelly glass. Two shots, she’d measured. On these nights when she couldn’t sleep, she’d get out of bed and have a couple of shots to relax her. Of course, booze-induced slumber was the worst kind of sleep, but with five and a half hours before she had to be up, she couldn’t be picky.

  It was too late to take an Ambien. Besides, she didn’t like mixing it with alcohol. She didn’t drink at all in the evenings if she was taking Ambien. She worried about destroying her liver. She’d even talked to her doctor about it. He’d made her fill out a four-page behavioral health questionnaire. After looking it over, he said she wasn’t an alcoholic, but could be on her way to becoming one. Apparently, her answers on the questionnaire indicated she had some issues with depression. The doctor recommended she see a therapist, and he gave her a list of behavioral health services they offered.

  What with looking after the kids, the house, and her garden, teaching her dance classes, and volunteering at a retirement community (she taught a waltz class there every week and organized a monthly dance), she didn’t have time to get psychoanalyzed.

  No, self-medicating with booze and prescription drugs is so much smarter.

  The truth was, she didn’t want anyone trying to get inside her head. And she didn’t want to be reminded about things she’d worked so hard to forget.

  Her big mistake had been throwing back so much wine before dinner tonight. She’d barely eaten a thing. She’d conked out on the sofa in the den just minutes after dinner, leaving Dylan and Steve to wash the dishes.

  Now she was wide awake, drinking again, and on Antonia Newcomb’s Facebook page. She was looking for familiar names among the dead woman’s friends and even scanning the party photos for a possible glimpse of Dylan. He traveled to Portland on occasion. Maybe he knew Antonia from one of his trips—or from several of them.

  Why else would that texted news story be accompanied by a note suggesting she ask her husband about it?

  She couldn’t help thinking that Dylan had to know something. He had to be involved somehow.

  But Sheila wasn’t coming up with anything on Antonia’s Facebook page. And she couldn’t find a follow-up article in The Oregonian about the woman’s death. Sheila still had no idea if it was an accident, or a suicide, or a murder.

  She took another sip of bourbon and glanced out the window by the breakfast booth. All the lights were off in the Curtis house next door just on the other side of a low hedge. Last month, the Curtises had left for a yearlong stay in Europe. Their place was up for rent, and Sheila found it slightly unsettling to have this big empty house right next door.

  In fact, about three weeks ago, when Dylan had been out of town, she’d been sitting in this very spot, reading online about where all the cast members from Grease were now (oh, the things she desperately needed to know at two in the morning). That was when she noticed a strange light in the window across the way. She knew the Curtises had set some light timers, but this wasn’t a lamp or an overhead fixture. It wasn’t a headlight reflecting on the window, either. It was someone with a flashlight, lurking around their darkened dining room. Sheila thought it looked like a man, but that was just a guess.

  For several moments, she sat glued to her desk chair, afraid to move. If she could see him, he could see her.

  The flashlight suddenly went off, and then, beyond the window, there was only darkness. Sheila had no idea where the intruder had gone. She thought of her children asleep upstairs—and imagined him on his way over to make sure he left no witnesses.

  Sheila got to her feet and hurried across the kitchen to where she’d left her purse on the counter. Digging inside the bag, she ducked into the shadowy dining room and pulled out her cell phone. As she dialed 9-1-1, she kept looking out the dining room windows for a sign of him. She could almost feel him watching her. At any minute, she expected to hear him kicking down the kitchen door.

  Whispering into the phone, she reported what she’d seen in the empty house next door. The 9-1-1 operator kept asking her to speak up, but Sheila was terrified that, somehow, the prowler could hear everything she was saying.

  Two police squad cars pulled up in front of the house within ten minutes. By then, Sheila had awakened the children, and they were all huddled on the stairs, hastily dressed. Steve clutched a baseball bat that belonged to Gabe.

  The police got the Curtises’ real estate agent out of bed, and it took them over an hour to determine there were no signs of a break-in next door. All the while, Sheila did her best to come off as calm and controlled. She even offered the policemen Cokes and what was left of the Rice Krispies treats she’d made the night before. She wondered if they could smell the bourbon on her breath.

  But she wasn’t drunk. And despite the police not finding any evidence of a break-in next door, Sheila knew someone had been inside that house.

  Now she wondered if the elusive intruder might have been the blond creep she’d seen on the bus the day before. According to the police, it didn’t look like anything was missing at her neighbors’ home. Had someone snuck into the house next door for the sole purpose of spying on her—or her family? Maybe when she’d spotted that creep in the supermarket two weeks ago, he’d already been following her for a while.

  But why would he be tailing her all this time? It didn’t make any sense.

  Still, Sheila couldn’t help wondering if he was over there now in the Curtises’ dining room, sitting at their table in the dark, watching her.

  She immediately got up from her desk and lowered the blinds to the window by the breakfast booth. Wandering back to her desk, she finished off the rest of her bourbon.

  Another neighbor had told her that the Curtises had found a renter for the place, a divorcée without any kids. Sheila would be glad once the woman moved in. Maybe the house would be occupied before Dylan took his next business trip.

  Then it hit her. Had Dylan been out of town two weeks ago when Antonia Newcomb had fallen to her death in Portland? Sheila wasn’t sure. She checked the calendar on the wall by her computer. Steve had given her the calendar last Christmas: Beautiful Gardens of the Northwest. She still used an old-fashioned paper cale
ndar to mark appointments and reminders. And there it was, under a photo of Seattle’s Japanese Garden: The last week in August, Dylan had been in San Francisco. He was home again on Friday the thirty-first. She flipped the calendar back to September and hung it on the wall again.

  Antonia Newcomb had died on Thursday the sixth. Dylan had been home that week. Sheila had hosted a dance that evening at Summit Park Retirement Home, and hadn’t gotten home until after ten. She remembered now that the kids had to order pizza for dinner because Dylan had to work late, too. He’d had to wine and dine the Midwest region manager. Or so he’d said.

  Was it possible that he’d driven down to Portland that day—and then come back? A car trip to Portland was almost four hours each way—if traffic wasn’t awful. And traffic on Interstate 5 was usually awful. Still, Dylan certainly could have made the trip down and back that day.

  Sheila reached for her glass of bourbon again—and realized it was empty.

  She had to be a little drunk if she was thinking Dylan could have had anything to do with that woman’s death.

  But obviously, someone else thought so.

  Sheila kept telling herself that Dylan hadn’t lied to her, not about this. But there was a way of double-checking—just to put her mind to rest. Whenever Dylan bought gas, he stashed the receipt in the glove compartment of his BMW. It was a routine. He logged the mileage when he drove the car for company use; he kept all his gas receipts—whether they were for a company trip or not—and then went over them at the end of the month.

  If he’d driven down to Portland on September sixth, he’d have had to buy gas—if not on that day, then the day before or the day after.

  Sheila knew it was crazy, but if she expected to fall asleep tonight, she needed to check the glove compartment of Dylan’s car.

  She stared at the door to the garage—just a few feet away from her desk. It was only going to take a minute. She’d leave the door open. She’d be okay.

  She grabbed his car key from a bowl on the kitchen counter. Then she stepped over to the door to the garage and unlocked it. As Sheila opened the door, a chill passed through her, and she clutched the edges of her cardigan. She switched on the overhead light. With her car still at the shop, there was plenty of room, and Dylan had parked his BMW in the middle of the garage. Yard equipment, tools, folded-up lawn-chairs, sports paraphernalia, bags of fertilizer, and stacks of empty plastic plant pots were all shoved against the far wall. A crack ran through the glass of the window in the corner.

  Pressing the button on the key fob, Sheila unlocked the BMW. In her stocking feet, she padded over to the car. The cement floor felt icy, and she shuddered. Opening the passenger door, she climbed inside and got a whiff of something flowery. It smelled more like Chanel No. 5 than air freshener.

  A woman had been in Dylan’s car recently. Antonia Newcomb? Yeah, Sheila, smart. The woman’s been dead for two weeks and Dylan’s car still smells like her perfume. No, a woman had been in the BMW within the last day or two.

  Sheila opened the glove compartment and searched through the receipts. She found one for September second and another for the thirteenth, both from gas stations in Seattle. She didn’t find anything from Portland around September sixth.

  She stashed the receipts back into the glove compartment and shut it. She felt very silly.

  But who the hell had been in her husband’s car recently?

  Climbing out of the BMW, Sheila quietly closed the passenger door. She headed toward the doorway to the house and switched off the overhead light. Then she pressed the button on the key fob to lock his car. She watched the emergency lights blink for a moment, then turn off completely. At that same moment, she heard something rustling outside the garage. In the sudden dark, she could see only the afterimage of the emergency lights and the faint outline of a tree through the garage’s cracked window. The branches swayed slightly in the breeze.

  Was that what she’d heard?

  All at once, someone darted past the window.

  Sheila gasped.

  Something banged against the garbage cans at the side of the garage, creating a loud, tinny clatter.

  Terrified, Sheila bolted back into the house, slamming the door behind her and locking it. She raced toward the front of the house—to the stairs. Halfway up, she saw a shadowy figure standing at the landing. From the dimly lit second-floor hallway, he seemed to loom over her.

  She froze and tried to scream, but nothing came out.

  Clutching the banister, Sheila suddenly realized she was looking up at Dylan.

  He hurried down the steps to meet her. “Jesus, honey,” he whispered. “Are you okay? What’s going on?”

  She collapsed into his arms. “Outside,” she gasped. “Someone’s right outside the house. I saw him . . . in the window, I saw him.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Thursday—2:20 A.M.

  Steve was only half asleep when he heard a door slam somewhere down on the first floor. Then he heard the pounding of footsteps racing up the stairs—as if someone were being chased.

  His heart beating furiously, Steve sat up in bed.

  For a few seconds, he stayed still.

  Down the hallway, footsteps came from his parents’ bedroom. He figured his dad must have gotten out of bed to see what was wrong.

  Steve started to reach for the baseball bat he’d kept at his bedside since his mom had spotted a prowler next door three weeks ago. He’d practically had a heart attack that night because it had happened while his dad was out of town. But his dad was home tonight, and Steve hesitated. His hand hovered by the bat. He wished he knew what was happening. He wasn’t sure if he should go out to the hallway to see if his parents needed any help, or if he should just sit there in bed and wait it out. He could hear them whispering.

  He figured if they were standing out there, having a conversation, it probably meant he shouldn’t panic. Maybe the crisis was over. Steve had always thought he’d know what to do if someone broke into the house. By someone, he meant a homicidal maniac or a serial killer.

  He’d recently developed a morbid fascination with true crime—serial killings in particular. It had started by accident, early in the summer. He’d gone online to look up a girl he had a crush on, a senior named Barbie Grimes, who was incredibly popular and had no idea he was alive. What Steve found instead were several articles about the Grimes sisters: Barbara and Patricia, two Chicago teenagers who, one night in December, 1956, went to the movies to see Elvis Presley in Love Me Tender for the eleventh time. They never returned. An intensive search for the missing girls went on for over a month—until a construction worker on his lunch break by a bridge on a deserted road noticed two “flesh-colored things” amid the patches of melting snow in the gully below. The girls’ naked bodies had been frozen in the snow for weeks. Their murderer was never found. The article referred to other murders in Chicago in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, and, of course, Steve had to find out about those, too.

  Over the summer, he read articles online about dozens of heinous murders and murderers over the last seventy years. Among them: Ed Gein, the Butcher of Plainfield, Wisconsin, upon whom the fictional killers in Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs were modeled; the Boston Strangler; the Candy Man in Houston, who tortured and murdered at least twenty-seven teenage boys; the Shoe Fetish Slayer; Son of Sam; Ted Bundy; the Interstate Killer; and John Wayne Gacy, the Killer Clown, who had the bodies of nearly thirty teenage boys buried in his basement.

  Steve wasn’t particularly interested in the killers, but he wanted to know about the victims and their families. In so many cases, no one had any idea what actually happened in the last minutes of the victims’ lives—what they did or tried to do, what they were feeling. Steve was left to wonder. He read up on details of various crime scenes in an attempt to figure out what really occurred near the end. He remembered reading about the eight student nurses who were slain in Chicago in 1966. Someone described the kitch
en of their townhouse dorm as “tidy—except for a box of Ritz crackers left on the counter.” That stuck in Steve’s head. He wondered if one of the girls was having a late-night snack just hours before being strangled or stabbed to death. Some evenings, before going to bed, he’d glance in the kitchen, and if anything was left out on the counter, he’d put it away. A box of crackers on the counter now seemed like bad luck to him.

  Having all those details of all those murders rattling around in his brain, Steve was a nervous wreck most of the time. The nights when his dad was out of town were the worst. Sometimes, it would take forever for Steve to fall asleep—especially when he realized he was the only one in the house still awake, the only one to hear the sounds in the night. He hated taking any kind of satisfaction in his mom’s troubles, but he always fell asleep easier those nights when she had insomnia and went downstairs to read because then she was the guardian of the night, the one hearing those unexplainable, creepy sounds.

  In all his imagined scenarios of someone breaking into the house, Steve’s father was out of town. Steve imagined everyone else asleep when he heard the intruder downstairs. He figured he’d call the police, grab his bat, wake up Gabe and Hannah, and then hustle them into the master bedroom—which had a lock on the door. They’d hole up in there, along with their mom. He’d blink the bedroom lights so the cops approaching the house would know where to find them.

  In all his scenarios, he was so clearheaded. He assessed the danger and knew exactly what to do.

  Now, Steve listened to his mother anxiously murmuring to his dad in the hallway. But he caught only fragments of the conversation, and he still couldn’t be sure what was happening. It sounded like his mom had seen a man lurking outside their garage.

  Grabbing the baseball bat, he crept out of bed and padded to the door to listen.

  “What were you doing in the garage at this hour?” he heard his father ask. “Hon, have you been drinking?”