by Mary Kubica
Premeditated murder. It was almost too easy to do and get away with.
I moved on, met Sadie, fell in love, got married. Enter Camille.
She took care of me in ways Sadie never could. I never imagined all that she’d do for me over the years. Morgan wasn’t the first woman she killed for me. Because there was Carrie Laemmer, too, a student of mine who accused me of sexual harassment.
Again Sadie speaks. “They say I disassociate. That I’m only one of many parts. That there are people living inside of me,” she says. “It’s ludicrous. I mean, if you, my husband, didn’t see it, how could they?”
“It’s one of the many things I love about you. Your unpredictability. Different every day. I’ll tell you this, Sadie—you were never boring. I just never came up with a diagnosis for your condition,” I say, though it’s a lie, of course. I’ve known for eons what I was dealing with. I learned how to turn it in my favor.
“You knew?” she asks, aghast.
“It’s a good thing, Sadie. The silver lining. Don’t you see? The police don’t think that you killed Morgan. They believe that Camille did. You can plead not guilty by reason of insanity. You won’t go to jail.”
She gasps, coming undone. It’s fun to watch. “But I’ll be sent to a psychiatric institution, Will. I won’t be able to go home.”
“That’s better than jail, isn’t it, Sadie? Do you know what kind of things happen in jail?”
“But, Will,” she tells me, desperate now. “I’m not insane.”
I step away from her. I go to the door because I’m the only one of us with the freedom to leave. There’s power in that. I turn and look at her, my face changing, becoming visibly apathetic because the sham-empathy is getting exhausting.
“I’m not insane,” she tells me again.
I hold my tongue. It wouldn’t be right to lie.
SADIE
Sometime after Will has gone, Officer Berg steps into the room with me. He leaves the door open.
I know my rights. I demand to see a lawyer.
But he just shrugs half-heartedly at me and says, “No need,” because they’re letting me go. They have no evidence to hold me on. The murder weapon and the washcloth that I said I saw were nowhere to be found. The going theory is that I made them both up in an effort to throw off the investigation. But they can’t prove that either. They say I killed Morgan. That I transformed into some other version of me and killed her myself. But the police need probable cause before they can arrest me. They need something more than mere suspicion. Even Mr. Nilsson’s statement isn’t damning enough because it doesn’t place me at the crime scene. The cell phone in my home also doesn’t do that. These things are circumstantial.
It feels like some phantom thing. There are parts of my life I can’t account for, including that night. It’s in the realm of possibility that I murdered that poor woman—or some version of me did—though I don’t know why. The pictures Officer Berg showed me come to mind and I stifle a cry.
“Would you like us to call your husband to come get you?” Officer Berg asks, but I say no. Truth be told, I’m a bit upset that Will left me at the police station alone. Though the weather outside is still inclement, I need to be alone with my thoughts. I need fresh air.
Officer Berg himself offers me a ride, but I say no to that, too. I need to get away from him.
I start to shrug off the coat Officer Berg gave me, but he stops me, saying I should keep it. He’ll get it another time.
It’s dark outside. The sun has set. The world is white, but for now the snow has stopped coming down. Traffic moves slowly. Headlights maneuver through snowbanks. Tires scrape against the packed-down snow. The streets are messy.
There are slippers on my feet, though they’re a far cry from shoes. They’re knit and a faux fur that only absorbs the moisture, making my feet wet, red, numb. My hair hasn’t seen a comb today. I have no idea what I look like, though I’d venture to guess it’s just a hairbreadth away from a madwoman.
As I walk the few blocks home, I piece together the last few hours of my life. I left Otto alone with the washcloth and the knife. The police came searching for these things. By the time they did, they were gone. Someone did something with the washcloth and the knife.
As I make my way toward our street, I put my head down and walk, my arms tied into a knot to stave off the night’s fierce wind. The snow on the ground still blows about. There are icy patches on the street, which I slip on, falling once, twice, three times. Only on the third time does a Good Samaritan help me to my feet, taking me for a drunk. He asks if he can call someone to come pick me up, but by then I’m almost home. I just have our street to climb, and I do so gracelessly.
I see Will in the window when I arrive, sitting on the sofa, the fireplace red-hot. His legs are crossed and he’s lost in thought. Tate dashes through the room, smiling merrily, and on his way past, Will tickles his belly and he laughs. Tate takes off, running up the stairs and away from Will, and then he’s gone, to some other part of the house where I can no longer see him. Will returns to the sofa, laces his hands behind his head and leans back, seemingly content.
There are lights on in the upstairs windows, Otto’s and Imogen’s, which face the street, though the curtains are closed. I can’t see anything but the glowing peripheries of the windows, though it surprises me that even Imogen is home. At this time in the evening, she isn’t often home.
From the outside, the house looks perfectly idyllic as it did that first day we arrived. The rooftops, the trees are covered with snow. It covers the lawn, sparkling white. The snow clouds have cleared, the moon illuminating the picturesque scene. The fireplace spews smoke from the chimney, and though outside the world is freezing, inside it looks undeniably homey and warm.
There’s nothing amiss with this scene, as if Will and the kids have moved on without me, no one noticing my absence.
But the very fact that nothing is amiss makes me feel instinctually that something is wrong.
WILL
The door bursts open. There she stands, all slovenly and windblown.
Nice of Berg to give me fair warning that she’d been let go.
I hide my surprise. I rise to my feet, go to her, cup her cold face in my hands. “Oh, thank God,” I say, embracing her. I hold my breath. She smells putrid. “They finally came to their senses,” I say, but Sadie’s giving me the cold shoulder, pulling away, saying I left her there, that I abandoned her. It’s all very dramatic.
“I did no such thing,” I say, playing to her weakness, her penchant for losing time. Roughly a quarter of the conversations Sadie has, she doesn’t remember having. Which has become unexceptional for me, but is quite the nuisance for coworkers and the like. It makes it difficult for Sadie to have friends because on the surface she’s moody and aloof.
“I told you I’d be back just as soon as I made sure the kids were all right,” I say. “Don’t you remember? I love you, Sadie. I would never have abandoned you.”
She shakes her head. She doesn’t remember. Because it didn’t happen.
“Where are the kids?” she asks, looking for them.
“In their rooms.”
“When were you going to come back?”
“I’ve been making calls, trying to find someone to come stay with the kids. I didn’t want to leave them alone all night.”
“Why should I believe you?” she asks, a doubting Thomas. She wants to look at my phone, see whom I’ve called, and it’s only because fortune smiles down on me that there are recent calls in the call log to numbers Sadie doesn’t know. I assign them names. Andrea, a colleague, and Samantha, a graduate student.
“Why wouldn’t you believe me?” I fire back, playing the victim.
We hear Tate upstairs jumping away on his bed. The house groans because of it.
She shakes her head, feeling spent, and says, “I
don’t know what to believe anymore.” She rubs at her forehead, trying to figure it out. She’s had a hell of a day. She can’t understand how a knife and washcloth could just up and disappear. She asks me, her tone exasperated and contentious. She’s looking for a fight.
I shrug my shoulders and ask back, “I don’t know, Sadie. Are you sure you really saw them?” because a little gaslighting never hurts.
“I did!” she says, desperate to make me believe her.
This is turning into a bit of a shitstorm now that the police are involved, unlike last time when things went so smoothly. I’m usually so much tidier about such things. Take Carrie Laemmer, for example. All I had to do that time was wait for Camille to come, put the idea in her head. Camille is suggestible, as Sadie is easily suggestible. It’s just that Sadie isn’t the violent type. I could have done it myself. But why would I, when I had someone willing to do my bidding for me? I cried my eyes out, told her all about Carrie’s threats, how she accused me of sexual harassment. I said I wished she would just go away and leave me alone. My career, my reputation would be gone if Carrie made good on her threats. They’d take me away from her; they’d put me in jail. I told her, She’s trying to ruin my life. She’s trying to ruin our lives.
I didn’t specifically ask Camille to kill her.
And yet, nevertheless, a few days later Carrie was dead.
The way it happened was that one day, poor Carrie Laemmer went missing. There was a wide-scale search. Word had it that she’d been at a frat party the night before, boozing it up. She left the party alone, stumbled out of the house, drunk. She fell down the porch steps while fellow partygoers watched on.
Carrie’s roommate didn’t return home until the following morning. When she did, she found that Carrie’s bed hadn’t been slept in, that Carrie hadn’t made it home the night before.
Security cameras across campus caught glimpses of Carrie staggering past the library, falling down in the middle of the quad. It was unlike Carrie, who could hold her liquor, or so said the students who saw the CCTV footage. As if it was brag-worthy, a high tolerance for alcohol. Her parents would be so proud to know what their fifty grand a year bought them.
There were lapses in the video surveillance. Black holes where the cameras didn’t reach. I was at a faculty event that night. People saw me. Not that I was ever a suspect because no one was. Because that time, unlike this, things went swimmingly. No pun intended.
Not far from campus was a polluted canal where the university’s crew team rowed. The water was more than ten feet deep, contaminated with sewage, if the rumors were true. A wooded running path sat parallel to the canal, all of it shadowed by trees.
After three days missing, Carrie turned up there, in the canal. The police called her a floater because of the way she was found, most of her body parts bobbing buoyantly on the surface of the canal, while her heavy head dragged beneath.
Cause of death: accidental drowning. Everyone knew she’d been drunk, stumbling. Everyone saw. It was easy enough to assume, then, that she tumbled drunkenly into the canal all on her own.
The entirety of the student population mourned. Flowers were laid at the edge of the canal beneath a tree. Her parents traveled from Boston, left her childhood teddy bear there at the scene.
What Camille told me was that Carrie never thrashed about in the water. She never gasped and screamed for help. What happened instead was that she bobbed listlessly on the surface for a while. Her mouth sank beneath the water. It came back up, it went back down.
It went on this way for a while, head tossed back, eyes glassy and empty.
If she bothered to kick, Camille said, she couldn’t tell.
She struggled that way for nearly a minute. Then she submerged, slipping silently beneath the water.
The way Camille described it for me, it sounded as undramatic as drowning gets. As anticlimactic. Boring, if you ask me.
This time, it was just unlucky that Sadie got to that laundry before me.
I’ve been careless. Because the night with Morgan, the transformation from Camille to Sadie happened too quickly, leaving me to clean up the mess. Her clothes I burned. The knife I buried. I just never counted on Sadie doing the laundry. Why would I? She never does. I also never knew that Camille had taken Morgan’s necklace. Not until I saw it sitting on the countertop this morning.
Camille should have been more careful where she stood that night. She should have better anticipated the sprays of blood. It wasn’t like it was her first rodeo. But she came home a bloody mess. It was up to me to wipe her clean, leaving my fingerprints on the knife and washcloth. I couldn’t let the police find that.
Sadie rubs at her face and says again, “I just don’t know what to believe.”
“It’s been a long day. A stressful day. And you haven’t been taking your pills,” I say. It dawns on her. She went to bed without taking her pills. She forgot about them this morning. I know because they’re still where I left them.
That’s why she feels this way, out of control as she always does when she doesn’t have her pills. She reaches eagerly for them, swallows them down, knowing that in a short while she’ll be back to feeling like herself.
I almost laugh out loud. The pills do nothing. It’s only in Sadie’s head that something happens. The placebo effect. Because she thinks popping a pill will naturally make her feel better. Have a headache, pop some Tylenol. A runny nose? Some Sudafed.
You’d think, as a doctor, Sadie would know better.
I bought the empty capsules online. I filled them with cornstarch, replaced the ones the doctor prescribed with these. Sadie took them like a good girl, but she’d whine about it at times, say the pills made her tired and fuzzy because that’s what pills are supposed to do.
She can be so suggestible sometimes.
I make Sadie dinner. I pour her a glass of wine. I sit her down at the table and, as she eats, I rub her cold, dirty feet. They’re mottled and gray.
She nods off at the table, so tired she sleeps upright.
But she sleeps for only a second at best, and when she awakes, she groggily asks, voice slurred with fatigue, “How did you get home in the storm? Otto said the ferries weren’t running.”
So many questions. So many fucking questions.
“Water taxi.”
“What time was that?”
“I’m not sure. In time to get Tate.”
She’s coming to now, speaking clearly. “They kept the kids at school all day? Even with the storm?”
“They kept them there until parents could get to them.”
“So you went straight to the elementary school? You didn’t come home first?” she asks. I tell her no. She’s cobbling together a timeline. I wonder why. I tell her I took the water taxi to the island, picked up Tate, came home. Then I went to the public safety building for her.
Only some of it is true.
“What was Otto doing when you came home?” she asks.
I’ll have to shut her up soon. Because her curiosity is the only thing standing between me and getting off scot-free.
SADIE
I stand in the bedroom, rummaging through my drawers, finding clean pajamas to replace the ones I have on. I need a shower. My feet are aching, my legs bruised. But these things are inconsequential when there are bigger worries on my mind. It’s an out-of-body experience. What’s happening can’t possibly be happening to me.
I spin suddenly with the knowledge that I’m no longer alone. It’s a metaphysical sensation, something that moves up my spine.
Otto comes into the bedroom unannounced. He’s not there and then he is. His sudden arrival makes me leap, my hand going to my heart. I come to face him. The signs of his illness are now visible.
He wasn’t lying. He’s sick. He coughs into a hand, his eyes vacant and feverish.
I think of the last conv
ersation I had with Otto, where he accused me of putting the knife in his backpack. If what that policewoman said is true, I didn’t do it. But the part of me known as Camille did. The guilt is enormous. Otto isn’t a murderer. Quite possibly, I am.
He says to me, “Where were you?” and then again he coughs, his voice scratchy like it wasn’t before.
Will didn’t tell the kids where I was. He didn’t tell them I wasn’t coming home. How long would he have waited to tell them? How would he have said it, what words would he have used to tell our children I’d been arrested by the police? And when they asked why, what would he have said? That their mother is a murderer?
“You just left,” he said, and I see the child still in him. He was scared, I think, panicked that he couldn’t find me.
I say vaguely, “I had something I needed to take care of.”
“I thought you were here. I didn’t know you were gone till I saw Dad outside.”
“You saw him come home with Tate?” I assume. I picture Will’s small sedan fighting its way through the snow. I can’t imagine how the car made it.
But Otto tells me no, it was before Tate came home. He says that soon after we talked in the living room, he changed his mind. He was hungry. He wanted that toast after all.
Otto says he came down to find me. But I wasn’t here. He looked for me, caught a glimpse of Will traipsing through the backyard in the snow.
But Otto is mistaken. It was me, not Will, he saw in the backyard in the snow.
“That was me,” I tell him. “I was trying to get the dogs inside,” I say. I don’t tell him about the knife.