Marriage Is Murder

by Nancy Pickard

  Tears began to roll down her plump cheeks.

  “Is that when he hit you?” Smithy prompted her.

  Marsha nodded dumbly.

  “How many times?”

  The girl swallowed noisily and her nose began to run. jerked several tissues out of a box on Smithy’s desk and gave them to her. Her fingertips, when we touched, were cold and damp.

  “How many times, Marsha?” Smithy insisted.

  “I don’t know,” she said into the tissues. “A lot. It hurt a lot, and I was so scared, oh, God, I was so scared. And the kids were hollering, and, oh, God, it was awful. I was so ashamed, and I didn’t ever want anybody to know, but even when Ernie started to cry and say he was sorry, I was still really scared, you know? And that’s when I ran out with the kids and got in the car. And we went to this friend’s house, but we couldn’t stay there ’cause her husband knows my husband. So she had me call you, and now I know Ernie’s really upset, and maybe I shouldn’t have come here, I mean, he probably won’t ever do it again, but I panicked, and it’s all my fault.”

  She had her eyes lowered, and for that reason she did not see, as I did, Smithy’s lips pull back from her teeth in a silent snarl at those words.

  “If I hadn’t complained about Thanksgiving, it wouldn’t have happened. If I’d just been more understanding. . .”

  “You haven’t done anything wrong!” Smithy fairly snapped it at the girl, so that Marsha’s head jerked up and she stared at the older woman fearfully. “Remember that! You didn’t hit him. He hit you. There is no excuse-ever-for him to hit you. You didn’t do anything wrong, Marsha McEachen!”

  Cowed, if not convinced, the girl nodded repeatedly.

  “Marsha,” I said, “would it help if he had a job?”

  Her head reversed its motion, to nod vigorously. “Oh, yes!”

  “What does he do?”

  “Anything!” She blushed, brushed the tissue across her lips. “Factory work, sales, construction—Ernie can do most anything, and he’s a real hard worker, Ms. Cain, you won’t be sorry if you hire Ernie.”

  “No, I can’t hire him,” I said, and then added quickly to ease the disappointment in her face, “but I’ll try to find an employer who will. Do you think your husband would talk to me about it?”

  The hope in her blue eyes turned to unmistakable fear and doubt. She gnawed on the knuckles of her left hand a few moments before saying, “I think so, if he’s still speaking to me.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Me?” She pointed, like a child, at her chest.

  “Do you want a job, too?”

  “Oh.” Marsha McEachen’s eyes widened and, at last, she smiled. She looked even more like a child, one who’s just been offered a banana split. “That would be heaven!” But then her smile drooped. “But the kids—what would I do about my kids?”

  “We’ll see.” Out of her sight, for the second time that day I crossed my fingers for luck. “I’d like to get started on this. Would you call him now, Marsha, and find out if he’ll see me tonight?”

  She eagerly reached for the phone as if she couldn’t wait to talk to him. But when Smithy and I rose to leave, to give her privacy, she grabbed my hand and tugged me back into my chair, and turned a pleading face toward Smithy, as well. We remained, fidgeting uncomfortably through the girl’s emotional conversation with her husband.

  “Ernie?” she said in a breathless, trembling voice. “I love you!”

  I tried not to listen, focusing instead on the handwritten list of “House Rules” posted behind Smithy’s desk. There were only four of them:

  1. Don’t tell anybody the location or address of this house, not even your mother.

  2. No booze or drugs.

  3. No violence, including verbal abuse.

  4. No weapons.

  Scrawled across the bottom was a warning—“This is for your own safety!” If a woman broke a rule, the sign said, she would be asked to leave immediately, and she would never be allowed to return to Sunrise House.

  It was clear, from the end of the conversation I was trying not to overhear, that young Ernie McEachen was as anxious to reconcile with his wife as she was to see him again. It sounded, from her responses to him, as if he was frightened of what he had done, and deeply apologetic, and desperate to get his little family back.

  “They’re always so sorry,” Smithy remarked to me, none too quietly.

  He agreed to see me that night.

  “See you tomorrow, honey!” Marsha cooed, and hung up.

  “I’m so happy!” she exclaimed to us. “Thanks a lot for everything.

  Marsha left us then, to check on her children.

  When Smithy and I were alone in her office, she said, “Why can’t you just talk to him over the phone, why do you want to meet him?”

  “I’m not going to play personnel manager for a man I’ve never met.”

  “All right, but you’d better take Tommy Nichol with you.”

  “Tommy? Why, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Because McEachen probably won’t talk to you if you take a cop along, which I’d sure as hell prefer you did.” She leaned toward me, looking intense. “You can’t trust these guys, Cain, not for a minute. A man like Ernie McEachen, he’s got a hot temper, he’s unpredictable, and he’s already proved he’s violent. And usually, these guys want to blame anybody but themselves for their troubles. Besides, you don’t know if he’s sober. Tommy deals with these jerks all the time, so you’d better take Tommy along, just in case you need him.”

  I didn’t see how cherubic Tommy Nichol could make a difference in a tight spot, but I called him anyway to appease Smithy. When she was assured he would meet me, she accompanied me to the front door of the shelter. On the way out, I glimpsed Eleanor Hanks and Mrs. Gleason in the dining room, feeding dinner to assorted youngsters.

  “She’s still here?” I said quietly to Smithy.

  “Eleanor?” She looked back over her shoulder, then at me. “If you were her, would you want to go back to that house?”

  “What’s she going to do?”

  “That,” Smithy snapped, our momentary rapport quickly evaporating, “is up to your boyfriend, Cain. How long’s he going to keep her in suspended animation? Are they going to arrest her or not? Eleanor didn’t do it, Cain, any fool who meets her for one second can see that. It’s cruel to keep her swinging in the wind like this.”

  “I don’t think he’s doing it on purpose, Smithy.”

  She looked at me pityingly. “Think again, Cain.”

  I stepped out of the house, giving her the chance to slam the door behind me. I heard the bolts shoot home.

  9

  TOMMY NICHOL MET ME OUTSIDE THE MCEACHENS’ address, which was a massive old Victorian house that had been converted, probably illegally, into apartments. To the white shirt and beige trousers he had added a yellow windbreaker jacket, so now he looked like vanilla ice cream dipped in butterscotch.

  “Hi, Jenny!”

  Tommy had his hands in the pockets of his jacket, and he was bouncing on the balls of his feet. His big, eager smile was the happy face on top of the cone.

  Inwardly, I shook my head. “Hello, Tommy.”

  “Gosh, I hope we can do some good here!”

  He looked as if he would melt like ice cream if a situation ever got hot. I couldn’t imagine how he ever got his clients to take him seriously, and I was beginning to regret Smithy’s advice.

  Nevertheless, I said, “Everest awaits.”

  The McEachens were four floors up, with no elevator. I had to pause on the second and third landings to let Tommy catch his breath. When I knocked at the McEachens’ door, a slight, bearded blond youth opened it immediately, as if he had been standing with his ear to it, listening to us climb the stairs.

  “Ernie?”

  He nodded, shifting nervously from one root to the other.

  “I’m Jenny Cain, this is Tommy Nichol. May we come in?”

  He squinted
at us as if he had a headache. On closer inspection, I saw that the scraggly beard was probably intended to cover a bad complexion. He was skinny, pale, and as runty as an ill-fed boy. He said, “Yeah,” and stood aside to admit us into the tiny living room. Once we were all in, though, he suddenly seemed to see his apartment through strangers’ eyes—he began to race around like a jerky puppet, picking up magazines and dirty clothes. He tossed them into a bedroom and slammed the door on that mess. He carried dirty cups and dishes into the kitchenette and emptied ashtrays into a small metal wastebasket, missing the mark a bit, so that ashes drifted slowly to the stained carpet.

  Tommy and I stood in the middle of the living room, glancing at each other, waiting for the tornado of activity to subside. Finally, Ernie McEachen wiped his hands on the front of his trouser legs.

  “Excuse the mess, all right?” A nervous grin flickered, then disappeared from his thin face. “I guess I better get this place cleaned up before Marsha and the kids get home, I mean, she’d be embarrassed if she knew you saw it looking like this. But with her gone, I just. . .”

  Ernie stopped in his tracks then and stared at the floor as if overcome by the enomity of everything that had transpired. For an awful moment, I thought he was going to start sobbing. I wasn’t so sure I could manage a sympathetic shoulder for him: “Gee, Ernie, I sure feel sorry for you that you beat your wife.” I hoped I would not have to play psychologist that night, a role for which I was not trained or suited by nature. Tommy, who was trained, offered no assistance but merely sat down in a yellow director’s chair, looking flushed.

  The young husband pulled himself together and sat down in the far corner of his sofa. He leaned back and crossed his arms over his thin chest.

  “I don’t know what anybody told you,” he said, his tone mingling defensive and belligerent notes, “but I love my wife and kids.”

  “Then why’d you hit her?”

  “Ernie and I both looked over, surprised, at Tommy.

  “Hell, I didn’t mean to!” Ernie said, looking sincere.

  “You mean you didn’t know what you were doing?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” Ernie looked at me as if I could explain this odd, pestering fat fly that had taken to buzzing around him.

  “I mean,” Tommy persisted calmly, “were you drunk?”

  “No, I wasn’t drunk!”

  “High on anything else?”

  “No, man!”

  “Were you unconscious, had she knocked you out?”

  “What the hell are you talking about anyway?” Again, his glance appealed to me for relief.

  “Well, if you weren’t drunk,” Tommy said, “and you weren’t high, and you weren’t unconscious, did you know you were raising your hand to her?”

  “What? Yeah, well, I knew it, but—”

  “Did you know it was going to strike her face?”

  “Well, God—”

  “Did you?”

  “I guess, but—”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes!”

  “Then,” Tommy said in his friendly voice, “I guess you meant to hit her, didn’t you?”

  “Jesus!” Ernie McEachen slouched farther into his corner. “Who are you, some fucking social worker? I didn’t ask for no fucking social worker!”

  “You agreed to counseling,” Tommy said.

  “I didn’t agree to you,” Ernie shot back.

  “Well, I’m the counselor.”

  “Shit.” Ernie turned his glare my way.

  Tommy beamed his happy smile at me and nodded, as if granting permission for me to speak.

  “Uh,” I began, “Ernie, I’m here to help you find work.

  He twisted around on the couch until he managed to put his back to Tommy. “Why? What’s it to you?”

  “I have contacts among employers.” It was an answer that wasn’t an answer. “If you’ll tell me your qualifications, I might be able to get you some interviews. What can you do, Ernie?”

  He looked scornful. “Twice as much as some of them management types sitting on their fat asses in their fancy offices, that’s for sure.”

  “Maybe you could be more specific,” I suggested.

  He shrugged. “I could handle the line at the fish cannery, all right, probably be a supervisor in a couple of months. Yeah, it’d be okay if you’d get me on at the cannery.”

  Port Frederick Fisheries was our town’s major employer. A Foundation trustee was the retired president of the company. “I can’t promise you a job there, Ernie, because it will be up to you to impress them enough to win it for yourself.” I could hear my caution making me pompous. “But, yes, I think I can get you an interview and put in a good word for you. I’ll be happy to do that much.”

  Ernie McEachen rubbed his hands together fast and hard, as if they were flint and he were trying to start a spark of hope. But this business of finding him a job was the comparatively easy part; the hard part would come later when . . . if . . . he tried to change the attitudes and break the patterns of behavior that lifted his thin hands to strike her soft cheeks.

  As if he were on my same wavelength, Tommy said, “We have a group that meets on Monday and Wednesday nights, Ernie.”

  “What kind of group?” Ernie crossed his arms defensively over his chest again and stared suspiciously at his tormentor.

  “A good group.” Tommy put his hands on his knees to push himself up out of the chair. “A group of men who want to stop hitting the women they love. You think you’d like to pay us a visit this Wednesday night, Ernie?”

  “No, I wouldn’t like to,” he sneered. “Do I have a choice?”

  Tommy smiled happily upon him. “There’s always a choice, Ernie. That’s what it’s all about, making different choices. Anyway, you promised Marsha, didn’t you?” He handed Ernie his card.

  The young husband nodded reluctantly, keeping his head down. But he took the card.

  We were letting ourselves out of the McEachens’ apartment when Ernie called out, “Hey, I’ve got to pick up Marsha and the kids at that shelter place tomorrow, Sunset Shack, or whatever it is. Where is it anyway? She told me the address, but I forgot.”

  He was squinting again, but this time it gave him a sly look.

  “I don’t know,” Tommy said pleasantly. “I’ve never been there myself.’’

  Ernie McEachen looked as if he didn’t believe that, but rather than challenge his tormentor, he looked at me for the answer.

  “Don’t ask me,” I said ambiguously, and shrugged.

  Tommy and I completed our exit quickly.

  On our way back down the four flights of stairs, Tommy whispered urgently to the back of my head, “He’ll keep after her until she tells him where it is. They always want to know, they always want to know where she went, it just kilts them to think their women can hide someplace they can’t find them. It’s like a direct blow to the ego, you know, Jenny? It gives the women a little power they never had before, and the men hate it. A lot of times, the way they react is, they sell the second car, or they take the woman’s keys away, or he tells her he’ll beat her up if she ever leaves the house without his permission again. It’s incredible how threatened they feel, you wouldn’t believe it, Jenny! But you also wouldn’t believe how the women break down and tell them what they want to know, where the shelter is, I mean. They want to get the old man off their case, and they think, the women think, what’s the harm? But then it’s a mess the next time they need help. Smithy can’t take them then, she has to find them, another safe house, and it’s not that easy.”

  I reached the front door first and held it open for him.

  “So it’s dangerous for the men to find out,” I said, to give him time to catch his breath. He was huffing from the exertion of talking and walking at the same time. I closed the door and joined him on the front walk.

  “You said it,” he continued breathlessly. “Jenny, I’ve heard of cases where the men have show
n up on the door step with guns and shot up the place, trying to get to their wives. You just can’t take any chances with it, you know?”

  “I’m convinced.”

  Tommy suddenly flushed, and his next glance at me was shy. “I guess you probably think I was pretty hard on him.”

  “Well, he was pretty hard on her.”

  We started walking to our cars.

  “Tommy,” I said on impulse, and in recognition of the new respect I felt for his professional abilities, “while the doctor’s in his office, let me ask you if you have any free advice for a cop who’s feeling burned out?”

  “Gosh, I don’t believe there’s any such thing as free advice.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  He gazed down at his own pigeon-toed stride for a moment, then looked back up and smiled at me. “Some studies indicate that a lot of people who go into social work—and that might include some cops—come from troubled homes themselves, Jenny. Supposedly, they choose their line of work because they still want to ‘fix’ their families, and if they can’t manage that, they’ll try to fix the world. Eventually, they see it can’t be done, and that’s when they get disillusioned and quit. Does any of that description fit your particular cop?”

  “I’ll have to think about it.”

  He beamed at me. “Well, ’bye, Jenny.”

  I wondered if that description might fit a certain eager young psychologist who had not only failed to melt but had turned up the heat himself. Behind that happy face, he seemed to be full of surprises—and a troubled family history would only be one more. Gazing at Tommy’s back as he trotted off to his car, I noticed for the first time that in order to be shaped like an ice-cream cone, a man had to have pretty broad shoulders.

  “Good night, Tommy.”

  Having done my good deed for the day, I went home.

  10

  I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN IT COULDN’T BE THAT EASY TO win a merit badge. By the middle of the week, my foray into the world of social services threatened to swamp my time, what with the members of the new task force calling repeatedly to report on their progress with the committee’s ideas.

  “I’ve set up a meeting with the Board of Education,” Sabrina announced when she called.