The Other Mrs.

by Mary Kubica

  I realize now what must have really happened with the knife back in Chicago. Camille must have put it in Otto’s backpack. The story he told me about the night, on the fire escape, when I convinced him to stab his classmates wasn’t a pipe dream. From Otto’s perspective, it happened just as he said it did. Because he saw me.

  And the disturbing drawings, the strange dolls. That wasn’t Otto. That was also me.

  “It was Dad,” he says, shaking his head.

  I realize that my hands are shaking, my palms sweaty. I rub them against the thighs of my pajama pants, ask Otto again what he said.

  “Dad was here,” he repeats, “in the backyard. Shoveling.”

  “Are you sure it was your father?” I ask.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” he asks, put off by my questions now. “I know what Dad looks like,” he says.

  “Of course you do,” I say, feeling light-headed and breathless. “Are you sure it was in the backyard that you saw him?”

  I’m grateful that he’s speaking to me. After his disclosure this afternoon, I’m surprised that he would. I’m reminded of his words. I’ll never forgive you. Why should he? I’ll never forgive myself for what I’ve done.

  Otto nods his head. He says out loud, “I’m sure.”

  Will was shoveling the lawn? Who in the world shovels grass?

  I realize then that Will wasn’t shoveling. He was digging through the snow for the knife.

  But how would Will have known about the knife? I only told Officer Berg.

  The answer comes to me, shaking me to my core.

  The only way Will would know about that knife is if he was the one who put it there.

  WILL

  Sadie is quickly working out that my story is full of holes. She knows someone in this house killed Morgan. She knows it might be her. With a little sleuthing, she’ll soon discover—if she hasn’t already—that I’m the puppet master pulling the strings. And then she’ll tell Berg.

  I won’t let that happen. I’ll get rid of her first.

  After she ate, Sadie went upstairs to wash up for bed. She’s tired, but her nerves are frayed. Sleep won’t come easily tonight.

  While the pills she takes are placebos only, that doesn’t mean that the pills I pick up at the pharmacy—those I save for a rainy day—aren’t the genuine thing. Combine them with a little wine and, voilà, I have myself a deadly cocktail.

  The best part of the plan is that Sadie’s mental state is well documented before we came to Maine. Add to that the discoveries of the day and it wouldn’t be such a stretch to think she might want to kill herself.

  A murder meant to look like a suicide. Sadie’s words, not mine.

  I find the pills high above the kitchen cabinets. I use the mortar and pestle to crush them. I run the sink to lessen the sound. The pills aren’t exactly easy to dissolve, but I have my ways. Sadie has never been averse to a glass of wine after her pills. Thought she should know better because such things don’t mix well.

  What I’m anticipating is some form of respiratory distress. But who really knows. There’s a whole host of things that can go wrong with a lethal overdose.

  I draft a suicide note in my mind. It will be easy enough to forge. I can’t live with myself. I can’t go on this way. I’ve done a horrible, horrible thing.

  After Sadie is dead it will be just the boys, Imogen and me. This is quite the sacrifice I’m making for my family. Because as the breadwinner, Sadie is the one with the life insurance policy. There’s a suicide clause in it, which says the company won’t pay out if Sadie kills herself within two years of the policy going into effect. I don’t know that she’s had it two years. If she has, we’re due a lump sum of five hundred grand. I feel a ripple of excitement at that prospect. What five hundred thousand dollars could buy me. I’ve always thought I’d like to live in a houseboat.

  If she hasn’t had the policy for two years, we’ll get nothing.

  But even then, I reassure myself, it’s not as if Sadie’s death will be for naught. There’s still much value in it—most important, my freedom. There just won’t be any financial gain.

  Momentarily I stop crushing the pills. The thought of that saddens me. I think that perhaps it’s best to shelve Sadie’s suicide until I’ve looked into the policy. Because a half a million dollars is a lot to waste.

  But then I reconsider. Silently I scold myself. I shouldn’t be so greedy, so materialistic. There are more important things to consider.

  After all that Sadie has done, I can’t have my boys living with a monster.

  SADIE

  Why would Will bury a knife in the backyard? And what reason would he have to dig it up and hide it from the police?

  If he took the knife, did he take the washcloth, too? The necklace?

  Will lied to me. He told me he picked Tate up from school and then came home, but it happened the other way around. Will knew about my condition, this way I have of transforming into someone else, and he didn’t tell me. If he knew there was a potentially violent side of me, why didn’t he get me help? You were never boring, he said, such a glib thing to say in light of what I know now.

  Will is hiding something. Will is hiding many things, I think.

  I wonder where the knife is now. Where the washcloth and necklace are. If the police did a thorough search of our home, then they’re not here. They’re somewhere else. Unless Will had these things on his own person while the police searched our home and he hid them afterward. In which case, they may be here.

  But if I’m the one who killed Morgan, why would Will hide these things? Was he trying to protect me? I don’t think so.

  I consider what Officer Berg told me, that Will called him and retracted his alibi for me that night. Will said he wasn’t with me when Morgan was killed.

  Was Officer Berg lying, as Will said he was, trying to pit us against each other?

  Or did it happen as Officer Berg said? Was Will incriminating me?

  I consider what I know about Morgan’s murder. The boning knife. The threatening notes. You know nothing. Tell anyone and die. I’m watching you. This is helpful, but unthinkable. Because I can’t get the idea of Erin and Morgan as sisters out of my mind. It’s the most damning evidence of all. Because they’re both dead.

  My mind gets lost on our wedding day, the days we welcomed our babies into the world. The idea that Will, that ever gentle and compassionate Will, whom everyone likes, whom I’ve known half my life, could be a killer cripples me. I begin to cry. But it’s a silent cry because it has to be. I press my hand to my mouth, lean against the bedroom wall, my body nearly collapsing. I press hard, stifling the cry somewhere inside. My body convulses. The tears stream from my eyes.

  I can’t let the others hear me. I can’t let them see me. I steady myself, tasting Will’s dinner as it moves back up and into my esophagus. By the grace of God, it stays there.

  I know now that Will had a hand in Morgan’s murder because he was in on Erin’s, too. Erin’s murder, I think, and not a horrible unfortunate accident. But why kill Morgan? I go back to the threatening notes and decide: she knew something he didn’t want the rest of the world to find out.

  With Will downstairs, I begin to search our bedroom for the missing things: the knife, the washcloth, Morgan’s necklace. Will is too smart to hide these things in obvious places, like under the mattress or in a dresser drawer.

  I go to the closet. I search the inside of Will’s clothing for secret pockets, finding none.

  I drop to my hands and knees, crawling across the floorboards. It’s a wide plank floor, which could conceivably house a secret compartment beneath. I feel with my fingers for loose boards. With my eyes, I scan for subtle differences in the height of the boards and in the wood grain. Nothing immediately catches my eye.

  On my haunches, I think. I let my eyes wander around the room, wonde
ring where else Will could hide something from me if he wanted to. I consider the furniture, the floor register, a smoke detector. My eyes move to the electrical sockets, where one is placed evenly in the center of each wall, totaling four.

  I rise to my feet, foraging inside the dresser, under the bed, behind the curtain panels. And that’s when a fifth electrical outlet catches my eye, tucked behind the heavy drapery.

  This outlet is not evenly placed as the others are—in the dead center of each wall—but disproportionately placed in a way that doesn’t make sense to me. It’s mere feet to the left of another outlet and, on close examination, looks slightly different than the rest, though an unsuspecting person would never notice. Only someone who very much believed her husband had something to hide.

  I let my gaze fall to the doorway. I listen, making sure Will isn’t on his way up. The hallway is dark, empty, but it’s not quiet. Tate is wound up tonight.

  I drop to my hands and knees. I don’t have a screwdriver, and so I plunge a thumbnail into the head of the screw. I turn and turn, warping the nail, tearing it low enough that it makes my finger bleed. The screw comes out. Instead of peeling the outlet cover away from the wall, it opens, revealing a tiny safe behind. There is no knife, no washcloth, no necklace there. Instead there’s a roll of cash, hundred-dollar bills mostly, which I quickly, ham-fistedly tally up, losing count, landing somewhere well into the thousands of dollars. My finger bleeds on the dollar bills. My heart races inside of me.

  Why would Will be hiding this money in the wall?

  Why would Will be hiding this money from me?

  There’s nothing else there.

  I don’t replace the contents of the safe. I hide that in my own dresser drawer. I drop the drapes back into place. I stand from the floor, press a hand to the wall to steady myself. Around me, the world spins.

  When I get control of myself, I walk lightly from the bedroom and down the stairs. I hold my breath. I bite down hard on my lip as I descend the steps one at a time.

  As I approach the bottom steps, I hear Will humming a happy tune. He’s in the kitchen, washing dishes, I think. The sink water runs.

  I don’t go to the kitchen. I go to the office instead, turn the knob and softly close the door behind myself so there is no audible noise of the latch bolt retracting. I don’t lock the door; it would rouse suspicion if Will found me in the office with the door locked.

  I check the search history first. There’s nothing there. It’s all been wiped clean, even the earlier search I found on Erin’s death. It’s gone. Someone sat at this computer after me, got rid of the internet search just like the knife and the washcloth.

  I open a search engine. I type in Erin’s name for myself and see what I can find. But it’s all the same as I saw before, detailed accounts of the storm and her accident. I see now that there was never an investigation into her death. It was ruled an accident based on the circumstances, namely the weather.

  I do a search into our finances. I can’t understand why Will would be hiding so much money in the walls of our home. Will pays the bills for us. I don’t pay much attention to them unless he leaves a bill lying around on the counter for me to see. Otherwise the bills come and go without my knowledge.

  I go to the bank website. The passwords for our accounts are all nearly the same, some variation on Otto’s and Tate’s names and birth dates. Our checking and savings accounts seem to be intact. I close the site and look into our retirement accounts, the kids’ college savings, the credit card balance. These seem reasonable, too.

  I hear Will call for me. Hear his footsteps go up and then down the stairs, looking for me. “I’m here,” I call out, hoping he doesn’t hear the tremor in my voice.

  I don’t minimize the screen. Instead I enter another search: dissociative identity disorder. When he comes into the room and asks, I tell him I’m trying to learn more about my disease. We haven’t yet talked about how he knew and I didn’t. It’s just another thing he’s been keeping from me.

  But now that I know about it, there’s a new worry: that I’ll simply up and disappear at any moment and someone else will take my place.

  “I poured you a glass of Malbec,” he says, standing in the office doorway with it, carrying it in a stemless glass. He comes farther into the room, strokes my hair with his free hand. My skin crawls as he does and it takes everything in me not to pull away from his touch. “We were out of the cabernet,” he says, which he knows is my favorite wine. Malbec is decidedly more bitter than I like, but it doesn’t matter tonight. I’ll drink anything.

  He peers over my shoulder at the website I’ve landed on, a general medical site that lists symptoms and treatment. “I hope you aren’t upset that I didn’t tell you,” he says by means of an apology. “You’d take it hard, I knew. And you were managing the condition quite well. I kept an eye on you, made sure you were fine. If I’d have ever thought things were turning problematic...”

  He stops abruptly there. I glance up to face him.

  “Thank you,” I say, for the wine, as he sets the glass on the desktop and tells me, “After everything you’ve been through today, I thought maybe you could use a drink.”

  I could most certainly use a drink, something to calm and soothe me. I reach for the glass and angle it toward my lips, imagining the anesthetizing sensation as it slips down my throat and dulls my senses.

  But my hand shakes as I do, and so I put the glass instantly back, not wanting Will to see how nervous I am because of him.

  “Don’t worry yourself over this,” he says. With two free hands, he massages my shoulders, up my neck. His hands are warm and assertive. His fingers worm their way onto my scalp, through my hair, kneading the base of my skull where I’m prone to tension headaches.

  “I’ve done some research myself,” Will says. “Psychotherapy is the recommended treatment. There are no medications that treat this thing,” as if it’s cancer that I’ve got.

  I wonder if he knows so much, why he never suggested psychotherapy before. Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen therapists in the past. Perhaps it’s because he mistakenly believed I was getting treatment.

  Or perhaps it’s because he never wanted me to get better.

  “We’ll come up with a plan in the morning,” he says, “after you’ve had a good night’s sleep.”

  He withdraws his hands from my head. He steps to the side of the chair, and with a soft spin, he turns the chair so that I’m looking at him.

  I don’t like the control he has over me.

  Will waits a beat, and then he drops to his knees. He looks me in the eye. Says dotingly, “I know this has been a hell of a day. Tomorrow will be better, for both of us.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask, and he tells me, “I am. I promise.”

  And then he cups my face in his hands. He runs his lips over mine, softly, delicately, as if I’m easily broken. He tells me I mean the world to him. That he loves me more than words could ever say.

  From upstairs, there’s a thump. Tate begins to scream. He’s fallen from bed.

  Will draws back, eyes closed. In a moment, he rises up to standing.

  He nods toward the glass of wine. “Just holler if you’d like more.”

  He leaves, and only then do I catch my breath. I hear his footsteps on the stairs, his voice call out to Tate that he’s on his way.

  WILL

  For as smart as Sadie is, she’s also utterly clueless. There’s a lot she doesn’t know. Like how, if I log in to her Google account from another device—as I do from the bedroom now—I can see her search history.

  She’s been up to no good. Nosing around on the bank’s website. Not that she’ll find anything there.

  But she found other things.

  It was the blood that gave it away, as I first came into the bedroom a few minutes ago. Four stray drops of it on the floor, from the door t
o the curtains. I went to the bedroom curtains, looked behind, saw that the outlet cover hung lightly aslant. I opened the safe. The money was gone.

  That avaricious hog, I thought. What has she done with it?

  Now that she’s found the money, it won’t take long for Sadie to figure out I’ve been robbing Imogen’s trust fund. The girl is a pest but she’s worth keeping around just for that. I’m slowly creating my own little nest egg.

  According to her search history, Sadie’s also been looking into Erin and Morgan online. Connecting the dots.

  Perhaps she’s not as clueless as I thought.

  I put Tate to bed. He’s glum from the fall. I give him Benadryl, tell him it will help his little noggin feel better. I give a dab more than the recommended dose. I can’t have him awake tonight.

  I kiss the spot on Tate’s head where it hurts, get him in bed. He asks for a bedtime story, and I oblige. I’m not worried. No matter what Sadie finds, it will be a moot point when she drinks her wine.

  It’s only a matter of time.

  SADIE

  I have to find a way to call Officer Berg and tell him what I’ve found. He won’t believe me. But I have to tell him anyway. He’ll be obligated to look into it.

  I haven’t seen my cell phone since the morning. The last time I saw it, it was in the kitchen, the same place our landline is. That’s where I need to go.

  But the idea of leaving the office scares me. Because if Will could kill Erin, he could kill me.

  I take a series of deep breaths before I go. I try to act nonchalant. I carry my wine with me. I bring a letter opener just in case, with a sharp-enough blade. I slide it in the waistband of my pajama pants, worried it will fall.

  On the other side of the office door, I’m vulnerable. The house is oddly quiet and dark. The kids are asleep. No one told me good-night.

  A light glows in the kitchen. It’s not bright. A stove light only, which I go to, like a moth to a porch light, trying hard to shake the feeling that Will is behind me, that Will is watching me, that Will is there.