by Mary Kubica
There were three notes, Jeffrey tells me. He doesn’t know for certain when they arrived, but he has his assumptions on one. He had watched Morgan make her way to the mailbox one afternoon. It was a Saturday a month or so ago. He was home. He watched out the window as Morgan went down the drive.
“I had a habit of staring at her when she didn’t know I was watching,” he confesses. “It’s because of how beautiful she was. It was easy to do. Morgan,” he tells me, smiling nostalgically at the memory of his wife, “was easy on the eyes. Everyone thought so,” and I remember what Officer Berg said about the men in town having eyes for her. About Will having eyes for her.
“Yes,” I reply. “She was lovely,” changing the way I think of him because I can see in his eyes just how much he loved Morgan.
That day Jeffrey says that he watched as she bent at the waist, as she stretched a hand into the box to retrieve the mail, as she made the long walk back up the driveway, thumbing through the mail as she went.
Halfway up the drive, Morgan came to a standstill. Her hand went to her mouth. By the time she made it inside, she was as white as a ghost. She brushed past Jeffrey in the doorway, shaking as she did so. He asked what was wrong, what she found in the mail that made her so upset. Morgan said only bills—that the insurance company hadn’t covered a recent doctor appointment. The balance left for them to pay was highway robbery.
It should have been covered, she snapped, marching up the stairs with the mail in her hand.
Where are you going? he called up the stairs after her.
To call the insurance company, she said, but she went into the bedroom and closed the door.
Everything about Morgan changed that day. The changes were subtle. Another person might not have noticed. There was a sudden propensity toward closing the curtains as soon as the sky turned dark. A restlessness about his wife that hadn’t been there before.
The notes that the police found were all different, slipped in between the box spring and the mattress that Jeffrey and Morgan slept on. She’d intentionally hidden them from him.
I ask what they said, and he tells me.
You know nothing.
Tell anyone and die.
I’m watching you.
A chill runs up my spine. My eyes go to the windows of homes on the street.
Is someone watching us?
“Did Morgan and your ex-wife get along?” I ask, though even I can see these threats make no sense coming from an aggrieved ex-wife. These threats have nothing to do with a woman trying to reclaim the rights to her child. These threats have nothing to do with a husband hoping for a life insurance payout in the wake of his wife’s death.
These threats are something else.
All this time, I’ve been wrong.
“I’m telling you,” Jeffrey says, becoming agitated now. Gone is the man who stood smiling at his wife’s memorial service. He’s come undone. Jeffrey is unwavering now as he states emphatically, “Courtney had nothing to do with this. Someone else was threatening my wife. Someone else wanted her dead.”
I see this now.
SADIE
“I used the last of the milk on the mac and cheese,” Will tells me when he gets home, stepping into the house only minutes after me. Tate is with him. He skips merrily through the front door, tells Will to count to twenty and then come find him. He dashes off to hide as Will unpacks a handful of items from a grocery sack on the counter.
Will winks at me, admits, “I told him we’d play hide-and-seek if he went with me without a fuss.” Will can turn any errand into an adventure.
In the Crock-Pot cooks Will’s famous macaroni and cheese. The table is set for five, as if Will bullishly believes Imogen will be home. He carries the gallon of milk he’s just brought home to the table, and fills the empty glasses in turn.
“Where’s Otto?” I ask, and Will tells me, “Upstairs.”
“He didn’t go with you and Tate?”
Will shakes his head no. “It was only a quick trip for milk,” he says.
Will turns to me, seeing me perhaps only then for the first time since he’s arrived home.
“What’s the matter, Sadie?” he asks, setting the milk on the edge of the table and coming to me. “You’re shaking like a leaf.”
He wraps his arms around me and I want to tell him about the discoveries of the day. I want to get it all off my chest, but for whatever reason, instead I say, “It’s nothing,” blaming low blood sugar for the reason I shake. I’ll tell him later, when Tate isn’t just in the next room waiting for Will to find him. “I didn’t have time for lunch.”
“You can’t keep doing this to yourself, Sadie,” Will tenderly reprimands.
Will reaches into the pantry and finds a cookie for me to eat. He hands it to me, saying, “Just don’t tell the boys about this. No cookies before dinner. It’ll ruin your appetite.” He smiles as he says it and, even after everything we’ve been through, I can’t help but smile back, because he’s still there: the Will I fell in love with.
I stare at him awhile. My husband is handsome. His long hair is pulled back and all I can see is that chiseled jawline, the sharp angles of his cheeks, and those beguiling eyes.
But then I remember suddenly what Officer Berg said about Will having eyes for Morgan and I wonder if it’s true. My own smile slips from my face and I feel regret begin to brew inside.
I can be cold, I know. Glacial even. I’ve been told this before. I often think that I was the one to push Will into the arms of another woman. If only I had been more affectionate, more sensitive, more vulnerable. More happy. But in my life, all I’ve known is an inherent sadness.
When I was twelve, my father complained about how moody I could be. High as a kite one day, sad the next. He blamed the imminence of my teenage years. I experimented with my clothing as kids that age tend to do. I was desperate to figure out who I was. He said there were days I screamed at him to stop calling me Sadie because I hated the name Sadie. I wanted to change my name, be someone else, anyone other than me. There were times I was snarky, times I was kind. Times I was outgoing, times I was shy. I could be the bully just as easily as be bullied.
Perhaps it was only teenage rebellion. The need for self-discovery. The surge of hormones. But my then-therapist didn’t think so. She diagnosed me with bipolar disorder. I was on mood stabilizers, antidepressants, antipsychotics. None of it helped. The tipping point came later, after I’d met and married Will, after I’d started my family and my career.
Tate calls out from another room, “Come find me, Daddy!” and Will excuses himself, kissing me slowly before he leaves. I don’t pull away. I let him this time. He cradles my face in his hands. As his soft lips brush over mine, I feel something I haven’t felt in a long time. I want Will to keep kissing me.
But Tate calls for him again and Will leaves.
I head upstairs to change. Alone in the bedroom, I wonder if it’s possible to dream about a place you’ve never been. I take my question to the internet. The answer isn’t so easy to find about places. But it is about faces. The internet claims that all the faces we ever see in our dreams are faces we’ve seen in real life.
It’s been over an hour, but Officer Berg still hasn’t called me back.
I change into a pair of pajamas. I drop my clothes into the laundry basket. The basket itself overflows, and I think that after everything Will does for us, the least I can do is a single load of laundry. I’m too tired to do it now, but first thing tomorrow, before work, I’ll throw in a load.
We eat dinner together. As expected, Imogen is a no-show. I pick at my food, hardly able to eat. “Penny for your thoughts,” Will says toward the end of dinner, and only then do I realize I spent the entirety of our meal staring off into space.
I apologize to him and blame fatigue.
Will does the dishes. Tate disappears to watch
TV. Otto plods out of the room and up the stairs. I hear his bedroom door close from this distance, and only then, when I’m certain they’re both out of earshot, do I tell Will what Imogen said to me in the cemetery. I don’t hesitate because, if I do, I might just lose the nerve. I’m not sure how Will is going to respond.
“I saw Imogen today,” I begin. I fill him in on the details: how the school called, how I found her alone at the cemetery. How there were pills with her. I don’t dance around the words.
“She was angry but unreserved. We got to talking. She told me, Will, that she yanked that stool out from Alice’s feet the day she died,” I tell him. “If it wasn’t for Imogen, Alice might still be alive.”
I feel like a snitch as I say it, but it’s my duty, my responsibility to tell Will. Imogen is a disturbed child. She needs help. Will needs to know what she has done so that we can get her the help she deserves.
Will goes stiff at first. He’s at the sink with his back toward me. But his posture turns suddenly vertical. A dish slips from his wet hands, falls to the sink. It doesn’t break, but the sound of a dinner plate hitting the sink is loud. I jump because of it. Will curses.
In the moments of silence that follow, I offer, “I’m sorry, Will. I’m so sorry,” as I reach out to touch his shoulder.
He turns off the water and comes to face me, drying his hands on a towel. His eyebrows are lowered, his face flat. “She’s messing with you,” he says incontrovertibly. The denial is clear as day.
“How do you know?” I ask, though I know that what Imogen told me is true. I was there. I heard her.
“She wouldn’t do that,” he says, meaning that Imogen wouldn’t help her mother die. But the truth of the matter, I think, is that Will doesn’t want to believe she would.
“How can you be sure?” I ask, reminding him that we barely know this girl. That she’s been a part of our life for only a few long weeks now. We have no idea who Imogen is.
“There’s this animosity between you and her,” he says, as if this is something petty, something trivial, and not a matter of life and death. “Can’t you see she’s doing it intentionally because it gets a rise out of you?” he asks, and it’s true that Imogen doesn’t behave this way toward Will and the boys. But that doesn’t change things. There’s another side to Imogen that Will can’t see.
My mind goes back to our conversation this morning about the photograph on Imogen’s phone. “Were you able to recover the photos?” I ask, thinking that if he found the photo, there will be proof. He’ll be able to see it the way that I do.
He shakes his head, tells me no. “If there was a photograph, it’s gone,” he says.
His carefully chosen words come as a punch to the gut. If there was a photograph. Unlike me, Will isn’t sure there ever was.
“You don’t believe me?” I ask, feeling bruised.
He doesn’t answer right away. He thinks before he speaks.
In time he says, expression thoughtful, arms folded across his chest, “You don’t like Imogen, Sadie. She scares you, you said. You didn’t want to come here to Maine and now you want to leave. I think you’re looking for a reason—” he begins, tiptoeing around the truth. His truth. That I’m manufacturing a reason to leave.
I hold up a hand and stop him there. I don’t need to hear the rest of it.
Only one thing matters. He doesn’t believe me.
I turn on my heels and leave.
SADIE
I spend another fitful night tossing and turning in bed. I give up the fight near five a.m., slipping quietly from bed. The dogs follow, eager for an early breakfast. On the way out the bedroom door, I reach for the basket of laundry I left for myself to clean, hoisting it onto my hip. I walk out into the hall and down the stairs.
I’m approaching the landing when my bare foot lands on something sharp. It pokes me in the arch of the foot. I sink to the steps to see what it is, resting the laundry basket on my lap. In the darkness, I feel blindly for the offending item, taking it into the light of the kitchen to see.
It’s a small silver pendant on a rope chain, now coiled into a mound on my palm. It’s broken, snipped in two, not at the clasp but in the center of the chain so that it can’t go back together again. Such a shame, I think.
I clasp the pendant between my fingers, seeing the one side is blank.
I turn it over. There on the other side is an M. Someone’s initial. But whose?
Hers isn’t the first name that comes to me. I think of Michelle and Mandy and Maggie first. But then the thought arrives, crashing into me, knocking the wind from my lungs.
M for Morgan.
In the kitchen, I suck in a sudden breath. Did this necklace belong to Morgan?
I can’t say with certainty. But my gut thinks so.
What is this necklace doing in our home? There isn’t one good reason why it would be here. Only reasons I’m too scared to consider.
I leave it on the countertop as I turn and make my way to the laundry room. My hands are shaking now, though I tell myself it’s theoretical only. The necklace could just as well belong to a Michelle as it could to Morgan Baines. Perhaps Otto has a crush on some girl and planned to give this to her. A girl named Michelle.
I upend the basket and laundry comes tumbling out, onto the floor. I sort the laundry, separating the whites and colors into piles. I grab armfuls of it and begin thrusting it into the washing machine, too much for one load. But I want to get it done. I’m not thinking about any one thing in particular, but many things, though the thing that trumps all is how I can get my marriage, my family back on track. Because there was once a time when we were happy.
Maine was meant to be a new beginning, a fresh start. Instead it’s had a detrimental effect on everything, Will’s and my marriage, our family, our lives. It’s time that we leave, go somewhere else. Not back to Chicago, but somewhere new. We’ll sell the house, take Imogen with us. I think of the places we could go. So many possibilities. If only I could convince Will to leave.
My mind is elsewhere. Not on the laundry. I’m hardly paying attention to the laundry at all, other than this quick, forceful way I jam things into the machine, slamming the door. I reach for the detergent on a nearby shelf. Only then do I catch sight of a few items that sneaked out, escapees from the washing machine lying limp on the laundry room floor.
I bend at the waist to retrieve them, ready to open the door and toss them back in. It’s as I stand, hunched over, scooping the items into my hand, that I see it. At first I blame the poor lighting in the laundry room for what it is I see. Blood, on a washcloth. A great deal of it, though I try to convince myself that it’s not blood.
The stain is not as red as it is brown because of the way blood changes color as it dries. But still, it’s blood. Undeniably blood.
It would be so easy to say that Will had cut himself shaving, or that Tate had a scraped knee or—worst-case scenario—Otto or Imogen had picked up a habit of cutting, save for the amount of blood on the washcloth. Not merely a dab or a trace, but the washcloth has been wet through with it and allowed to dry.
I turn it over in my hand. The blood has seeped to both sides.
I let the washcloth fall from my hand.
My heart is in my throat. I feel like I can’t breathe. I’ve had the wind knocked out of me.
As I rise quickly to stand upright, gravity forces all the blood in me down to my trunk. There it pools, unable to make its way back up to my brain. I become dizzy. Everything before me begins to blur. Black specks dance before my eyes. I set my hand on the wall to balance myself before lowering slowly to the ground. There I sit beside the bloodstained washcloth, seeing only it, not touching it now because of all the DNA evidence that must be on that rag.
Morgan’s blood, her murderer’s fingerprints. And now mine.
I don’t know how this bloody washcloth came to be i
nside our home. But someone put it here. The options are few.
I lose track of time. I sit on the laundry room floor long enough that I hear the sound of footsteps galloping around the house. Light, quick footsteps that belong to Tate, followed by heavier ones: Will.
I should be in the shower by now. I should be getting ready for work. Will calls out quietly for me, having noticed that I wasn’t in bed. “Sadie?”
“Coming,” I call breathlessly back, wanting to show Will the washcloth, but unable to when Tate is there in the kitchen with him. I hear Tate’s voice asking for French toast. The washcloth will have to wait. I hide it for now in the laundry room, laying it flat beneath the washing machine where no one will find it. It’s stiff with blood and easily slides under.
I rise from the floor reluctantly and creep back into the kitchen, overcome with the urge to vomit. There is a killer living in my home with me.
“Where’ve you been?” Will asks at seeing me, and all I can tell him is “Laundry.” It comes out in one forced breath, and then again, the black specks appear, dancing before my eyes.
“Why?” he asks, and I tell him there was so much.
“You didn’t need to do that. I would have done it,” he says, reaching into the refrigerator for the milk and eggs. I know he would have done the laundry eventually. He always does.
“I was trying to help,” I say.
“You don’t look good,” he tells me as my hand holds tightly to the crown molding of the door so that I don’t fall. I want so much to tell him about the blood-soaked washcloth that someone left in the laundry basket. But I don’t because of Tate.
I hear Tate, beside him, ask, “What’s wrong with Mommy?”
“I don’t feel good. Stomach flu,” I force out. Will comes to me, presses a hand to my forehead. I’m not running a fever. But I feel hot and clammy nonetheless. “I need to go lie down,” I say, clutching my stomach as I leave. On the way upstairs, the bile inside me begins to rise and I find myself rushing to the bathroom.