Thank you, Peter, for redefining my life for me in such an amazingly (boring) way. I have been relegated to the bottom shelf, stored in a banker’s box collecting dust in the dark recesses of your heart.
Do you have a heart, Peter? I’m not so sure anymore. You make me feel as if I’ve gone the way of newspapers and you’ve moved on to digital, something far more faster, accurate, and urgent to scratch that itch between your legs.
Is she better in bed or just different? Or is it something basic, like the fact she’s simply not me? I get it. Men are hardwired that way. My own father cheated on my mother once. Of course, my mother, being the magnificent shrew she is, taught him a lesson he would never forget.
Perhaps that would be best. No messy divorce. No splitting the children between us. I am not a vase you get to smash against the wall when you don’t feel like using me anymore, once I’ve lost my appeal. Does my belly sag too much for you? Too damn bad. I bore you two children with a third growing blissfully inside me. That’s right, Peter. You’ve got your dirty secret, and I have mine—something pure and right that you are so willing to throw away for something reckless in New York. I have news for you, Peter. I haven’t gone out of fashion. I’m not done on this earth, and neither are our children. But once I’m done with the little lesson I’m about to set out—the only one who will be done will be you and that whore you cling to.
My heart pounds heavy against my chest as I reach for my coffee with a strangulating grip.
Simone was pissed and rightly so. And her poor mother. If Simone was apprised of her father’s indiscretion, then she certainly lived through that pain once. My own heart aches for her. Bram would never do that to me, would he? There is no possibility he’s hardwired that way.
All of those late-night meetings he’s been having with his brother come crashing to the forefront of my mind, and my heart lurches right up into my throat.
No. Couldn’t be. My Peter—Bram, he’s different. There isn’t even a lot of room in my heart to believe he did that to Simone. She must have seen someone who looked like Bram from behind. That’s the only logical explanation. Simone was hiding a pregnancy from him. Her hormones were going nuclear. Of course, her mind skipped to the bawdiest conclusion.
My hands warm over the covers of the journal as if it was her skin and carefully I peel it open once again.
May 27th
They say you can never truly know anyone outside of yourself and that even you are a mystery to your own person half of the time. What I stumbled upon this afternoon has eviscerated everything I thought I knew about Peter, about me, about who we really are. I’ve taken to putting you (my sweet salvation of a friend) in a lockbox. I’ve contacted my sister and shared my suspicions. She’s in Norway for work (traveling PR slut that she is) but promised to be back stateside soon to help me work through this.
I’m afraid I can’t wait. I’m afraid that I’m in danger. The kids are my first priority, of course, and I will watch them like a hawk. I’m ready to fire Kelly. Her incompetence is showing, a weak crack in the armor like that can cost us our lives. I need to figure out a way to move money from one bank account to another without arousing suspicion from Peter. I went online to some abused spouse forum and found that the best way to move money was to purchase gift cards from the grocery store. I can use them later to survive, then buy the kids clothing and shoes. My God, I’ll have to get a real job, interfacing with real people, and we both know how much I loathe people. That was not intended to be funny, but I can feel you laughing.
I can’t fathom moving from this beautiful house—our home. I won’t be able to contact the police until I have everything settled. But that poor girl. Strangulation is such a terrible way to die. How horrific to take a life. They’ll find him. And if they don’t, he’s given me the evidence to put him away for good. It’s in his shed—my God, Peter has always needed that stupid shed and for what? For the gardening tools he never uses? For that old dusty mower? We have a gardener. The signs were all there. So plain as the nose on my face. Help me, God. Help me survive this nightmare and bring my children to safety. I will spend the entire day trying to figure out best how to pursue this. Kelly will be with the kids and me at the lake. I’ll need her more than ever.
May 27th. That’s a day that will forever live in infamy. I turn the next few pages, but they’re all blank. I knew they would be. Simone lost two vital pieces of her heart that day. A horrible irony, considering she was readying to leave her Peter.
Tears roll down my cheeks, falling hot over my knees. I flip the sturdy book to the end, and two small newspaper clippings fall out. Newspaper. I can’t help but find the irony in that, too. The paper is yellowed around the edges, and as I turn one over, I see Isla and Henry staring back at me, expressive smiles, blushed cheeks, so full of life. I offer a weak smile right back at them. I wish they were still here. Lilly and Jack would love them. But would there be a Lilly and Jack? What exactly did Simone have on Peter? It all sounded so very cryptic. Who strangled the whore from New York? Surely she didn’t really think Peter was capable of such a crime. He’s hardly capable of sleeping outside of the bounds of the bedroom. As much as I love Peter—Bram, he is very missionary position in all areas of life, to borrow the analogy from Simone.
The second article slips into my fingers as if biding for attention, and I turn it over, my eyes glossing quickly over the words, manically eating them up while my insides do a revolution.
Dear God, no.
Bram
Armadillo Car Rental protects their customers’ privacy to a level that makes the White House security team look like a rent-a-cop situation from the mall.
Mason has traveled to the heart of Kaswell, to the exact location that we believe the rental car may have come from, and spoken to, bribed, and casually threatened each of their four eager-to-serve-and-protect employees. One thing we know for certain, the car was most likely rented on or around August second and returned the next day. A small gray sedan that couldn’t have tripped more than forty miles if it was a clean round trip.
After a long day at the office, rife with routine drillings, fillings, a crown, and an ornery senior in his eighties who informed me that dentistry was nothing more than modern-day train robbing—on behalf of his uninsured granddaughter with a mouthful of chalk for teeth—I close the door to my office and pull a thin silver laptop out of my briefcase. It feels as if I pulled Simone right back into the land of the living. I set it on my desk and examine it like some scientific artifact. It indeed feels like one, some relic from a painful time best forgotten. I pluck the cords out and fire it up, open the monitor with caution as if I was opening a crypt, some horrible time capsule that threatens to rip those measly emotional scabs right off and cause me to finally bleed to death the way God intended.
The screen blinks to life, and my chest bucks, anticipating the worst. A happy family stares back at me, our nuclear family unit set as the screensaver, but the screen goes black and a thin gray window prompts me to put in a password.
After the great tragedy that had stolen our lives, and, yes, I count myself in that number along with my children and wife, I had to slowly go about the task of removing their material imprint from this planet. For almost six weeks after Simone was bludgeoned to death, the house remained a crime scene. Neighbors moved overnight to avoid the media circus, to avoid the killer on the loose. Once I had custody of the house again, the coroner gave me the name of a cleanup committee dedicated to scraping brains off ceilings. Every trace of Simone’s DNA was excavated to the tune of four thousand dollars. It was a nightmare that appeared to be subsiding to the untrained eye, but the truth of it was, I didn’t want any part of that house ever again. Simone and I hadn’t even gotten to the task of clearing out the kids’ rooms. They were in full-on shrine mode, and I was content with that. It was where I spent most of my time after the funerals. Twin caskets. Twin agonies that never ceased. In a way, it was a relief knowing that the house was tainted, tha
t I could never go back. After the DNA scraping team finished, I had the carpet ripped out and hired another crew to go in and pick the living room of all its contents. I called in a dumpster, threw out the bloodstained furniture, and was left with yet another gaping hole in my life—a minuscule one at that in comparison to all the other holes, but my life had enough holes in it that you could drive a Semi through.
My fingers tap over the keyboard, and my heart thumps unnaturally. I hadn’t opened the laptop since that day, let alone touched the very places my wife’s hands last happily danced away. But the pictures, all of the pictures of the kids were carefully loaded and sent God knows where through this device by my very careful wife who was excellent at documenting our journey together. I try one password, then another, the kids’ names, our names, but it’s not until I try the kids’ names in combination does the screensaver blink to life, the four of us on the lake in a tiny skiff I had rented, a life jacket on both Henry and Isla. Henry’s expressive eyes look as if they’re reaching out to me, calling for help from the other side of the screen, from the other side in general. And my hand slaps over my mouth to absorb some of the pain.
Isla. Beautiful, sweet Isla with her quirky smile, her tongue poking through the hole between her teeth. She always had a joke at the ready, a silly knock-knock joke that she read in a book she borrowed from the library. She had a dark laugh she expressed frequently while tormenting her brother. They were best friends. The only small comfort to be gleaned in that great tragedy is that they were together. And yet when Simone died, there was little comfort to know the three of them were reunited. To lose a wife so tragically after losing both children so horrifically, it didn’t make sense. It boggled my mind to think about. God knows I couldn’t process it. I’m not sure why this happened. But deep down, I suspected my sins had come home to roost.
Loretta comes to mind, her body lying at the base of that hotel room, her limbs set out in jagged angles, and I quickly blink her out.
The rest of the desktop is littered with pictures of the kids, memes she’s stolen from the Internet, inspirational phrases which I have always found odd coming from a woman who denied anything to do with spirituality. Her own thoughts about death never amounted to more than the fact she believed we turned into compost. No soul, no spirit, no heavenly choir to welcome us home. I certainly hope she’s discovered she was wrong—that she’s holding the children close to her heart right at this very moment.
I head over to the documents folder but find it empty and mull that fact over for a second. Simone wrote as voraciously as she read. She had folders for each one of her projects, and I used to marvel at how many plates she had spinning at once.
I click over to finder and check out the apps, the software, all of it set to bare bones, basic as if the laptop never belonged to her for four years. I click onto the Internet and look up her history, but there’s nothing. My stomach cinches. The laptop was closed and left on the bed. An action that I thought was odd to begin with, considering Simone never sat and watched television without doing something with her hands and usually that involved her laptop and her phone. If Simone was anything, she was the queen of multitasking.
I run a quick search of the security, the laptop history and find nothing. I head back into the desktop and click into each of the dozens of pictures littering the screen as microscopic thumbnails. Isla and Henry, Simone in most of the shots. Their eyes. Their smiles. It kills me on every level.
My fingers tap over the keys faster and faster, and a nauseating pattern begins to emerge. In every one of these pictures the kids, Simone, they’re all in their bathing suits. Simone was able to be in a few because Kelly was taking them. The lake is visible behind them. That damned lake.
My heart stops cold when I see that pink ribbon tied to Isla’s ponytail. It was still in her hair when I saw her later that night at the morgue.
A bite of acid tears at my stomach, and I hold my breath as I click through them faster and faster. Simone with the kids, waving to the kids from shore, a shot of her walking away, and it gives off an eerie voyeuristic feel. Back to the kids in full splash mode, a couple of the ground, a shot of a pale leg in that final shot, Simone’s. I inspect it further. The foot is coming toward the camera. I think on this for a second. Simone said she was busy writing, and I’m assuming that’s where she was off to. She probably came back to collect the camera from Kelly before she left.
I pull out my phone to text Mace my findings. He was the one that suggested I check it out in the event there was something I missed.
Laptop seems to be picked clean. The only evidence that it belonged to Simone are the pictures. No articles, no projects. Would that just disappear over time? I already know the answer to it, but a part of me still hits send.
He texts right back. No. Do you think it was sanitized?
I glare up over at the laptop and spot Simone’s smiling face, and it suddenly feels like she’s laughing.
Why would she do that? What would she have to hide?
He texts back. Don’t know. But I got my hands on the records for Armadillo Rental Cars on and around the dates of the crime. You’re welcome.
“Shit.” I sit up and stare at the phone a good long while. I’ll meet you at the Thirsty Fox in an hour.
Make it two. I’ve got another fish to fry. See you there.
Two hours. My heart thumps wildly in my chest as I look back at that screensaver, a painful reminder of another life, another wife, another beautiful, beautiful set of children.
I pull it forward and get online. I head over to Facebook to her personal page. The last post was a meme, a woman in hair rollers complaining about it being a man’s world while she holds a globe under her bare foot, a baby in the other. I’ve seen it a thousand times, but I force myself to look at the image until my eyes burn.
All Simone and I ever did was argue. After the kids passed away, we cried but not together, not mostly. Simone was so full of toxic rage, so much negativity. I couldn’t look at her the right way without sparking a fury in her.
The image of the meme flips into one of those forefront background images, and I see something in it I’ve never seen before. Partially hidden behind her is a man with a woman’s legs wrapped around his back. The woman looks young and fit, a wash of blond hair dangling from the side. The woman in the rollers seems oblivious to the fact her husband is cheating on her. Is that what this is? Why would she post this? My ears thump with their own heartbeat.
I scroll down and read the comments, some as recent as four months ago.
I’m so sorry this has happened to you. You’ve been through so much. I hope he gets the death penalty.
Cut his dick off!
Let me kill him. I’ll pay my way there and back.
You and your beautiful children are on my heart. Please, authorities, if you are reading this, reopen the investigation on those beautiful babies. The parents said they were strong swimmers. Strong swimmers do not just drown in a calm lake. People have reported hearing no screaming. I know that drowning is very quiet, but there would have been splashing at least! Somebody do something. The husband is guilty, and he will do this again. He is out for blood!
Saw the bastard on TV last night. You don’t need to be a body language expert to know he’s lying. He did it. And he’s gonna get away with it because the police are too damned incompetent to do anything about it.
BURN IN HELL Peter Woodley!!!
It’s that last comment I relate to the most. I most certainly have been burning in hell. A silent inferno enveloped me the day Isla and Henry died. I was in a dense fog right up until Simone died. Baptized with gasoline and it only enraged the flames.
It’s all been hell. My world has never stopped burning. I scroll down to the rest of Simone’s posts, pictures of our children—I’ve memorized them all, but those smiles sing out in my mind like my ol’ favorite song. Simone smiling, so happy, so perfectly beautiful in her own right, and even so the sight of her clench
es my stomach, brings back all of those negative vibes she put there to begin with. Simone was a briar patch in scorching heat, and Ree is a poppy field on a comfortable day. We wouldn’t have made it. I would have had joint custody of our children, and she would have undoubtedly made a career out of poisoning them and the world against me. I should never have strayed. I should have walked into a lawyer’s office. Not a hotel room. I should have thought it through with my bigger head, not buried it between the thighs of some poor woman. Loretta, who, too, was brutally murdered.
A vat of acid explodes inside the pit of my stomach. My flames are contagious. I have burned so many worlds to the ground, I should be imprisoned for the safety of others.
I scroll down even farther, down past the season of pain. I watch the dates, a demonic timestamp of the downfall of my being.
A flicker of a sad smile comes and goes.
Past the memes and general updates about the minutia of life a post catches me off guard.
I lean in to get a better look at what my wife had to say, and my heart stops cold.
Ree
Email from [email protected]:
You were bought with a price. You are not your own.
Lilly and Jack are the true pure lights shining bright in my world. They twirl and laugh in the yard as I sit and watch at the patio table, a warm meal already in their bellies. I stopped off at the Hungry Burger on the way home, drive–thru. There will be no warm meal waiting for Bram—Peter, whoever the hell he might be. I’m hurt and I’m comfortable nurturing my anger.
My hand moves absentmindedly to my belly. Could I have a new life brewing in my belly the same way that Simone did just moments before her life fell apart? I wonder if she ever told him? Even if she did, he might not remember it. He confessed that everything after the kids died felt like a nightmare, a waking living hell and his mind didn’t work the same after that.
Psychological Thriller Boxed Set Page 10