The Perfect Wife

by Delaney, JP

  “How would I set about getting ahold of some discarded robot parts?” she asked cheerfully.

  20

  Tim takes the 280 along the valley, past San Andreas Lake, before crossing over the reservoir and turning up into the hills. Within minutes you’ve left the congestion of San Mateo behind. Forests of oak and evergreen enclose you on every side, dark and silent, the road an endless switchback, winding through the woods, always pointing upward.

  “We used to say, when driverless cars make this commute easier, we’d move out of the city for good,” he comments. He drives well, all his attention on the road, keeping his speed down between bends.

  As you traverse the long, winding ridge toward the Pacific, you find yourself thinking about the day’s events. There’s something about the account of your disappearance in Tim’s slideshow that’s nagging at you, something you can’t quite put your finger on.

  Once again, you find yourself curious about what’s on that iPad. Come back in a couple of days, the guy in the phone shop had said. That might be tricky now you’re leaving the city.

  And then, like a fanfare, you’ve crossed the far side of the ridge and the view opens up. Below you, in the distance, the setting sun glints orange off the ocean, dazzling you.

  “Not too long now,” Tim says, pulling down the visor.

  You pass pumpkin farms and hiking trails on the winding road down, but mostly you just drive through empty coyote bush and eucalyptus. It seems incredible that, less than forty minutes away, the world’s most connected companies—Google, Apple, and the rest—are huddled together in one tiny, polluted patch of urban sprawl.

  It’s getting dark by the time you reach Half Moon Bay. Even though it’s not all that late, the shops are mostly closed, and the bars and restaurants have a forlorn, just-about-hanging-on air. Tim doesn’t stop, heading south down the coastal highway.

  A few miles farther, he pulls off at an unmarked metal gate. Reaching for his phone, he taps in a code and it swings open. Inside, the road forks. One branch leads down to what looks like a small cluster of houses. The other—newer and better maintained—goes left, along the cliff. A discreet sign says CULLEN-SCOTT RESIDENCE. An automatic barrier—thick pillars that look as if they could flip a vehicle over if they came up under it—sinks silently into the asphalt.

  A minute later Tim pulls up by a long, low building. As he kills the engine and the headlights fade, the lights inside the house come up, as if in response. It’s mostly built of glass, with a few walls of brushed concrete and red-cedar paneling, its lines layered and angular. There’s no real yard, just some walkways and steps enclosing patches of the same scrubby wild grass that stretches away as far as your eyes can see in the light now spilling from the massive windows.

  Below you, beyond the house and the cliff edge, the ocean is an endless, restless presence, silvery black as a piece of split coal.

  “Wow,” you say, amazed. “It’s beautiful.”

  He nods. “When I found this place, there was a decrepit old ranch house here. The architects knocked it down and constructed this in record time. I waited until they were three months from completion before I proposed to you.” He gestures toward the cliff. “And that was where we got married. Right there, with the ocean behind us and the house in front. That day was the first time you’d seen it…You should have seen the look on your face.”

  Just for an instant, you can picture it—you, in your wedding dress, staring openmouthed at what he’d done for you.

  “I’d like to remember that,” you say wistfully. “Our wedding, I mean.”

  “Of course. We can upload the footage tonight.”

  Inside, the house is just as beautiful as it is outside. There’s even more art here than in the city house—street art, vibrant and cartoonlike. It gives the interior, which might so easily have seemed soulless and grand, a youthful, art-student feel.

  “What an incredible life we had,” you say, marveling. “Everything was so perfect for us, wasn’t it?”

  Tim picks up a small sculpture—a child’s doll, cast in glass, with a lightbulb for a head—and gives it a half turn before replacing it on its plinth. “Perfect,” he repeats. “Because you made it that way. Which is another reason I had to bring you back. And don’t think, by the way, that just because we had a good life we didn’t engage with the world. You always used our wealth to try to make a difference. You never stopped caring about gender politics, the arts, the homeless…And special education for children like Danny.”

  “Yes,” you say, nodding. “That was the one part of our life that wasn’t perfect, was it? Danny.”

  “It was a shock, of course. And yes, it meant we had to reassess a few things. But you took it in your stride. Things happened for a reason, you said. If we’d been given Danny, it was because we were the best people to take care of him. Which we did.” He hesitates. “You did. We were lucky—we could afford help—but it was you who talked to every doctor on the West Coast, you who researched all the different therapies. You were amazing. Not that I was surprised. But what happened, and how you responded to it, just made me love you even more.”

  “Thank you…But don’t underestimate what you’ve done, either. All those years bringing him up alone.”

  “I love him,” Tim says simply. “Just as I love you. His problems will never change that.”

  “I love you, too.” It’s the first time you’ve said those words to him properly since all this began, you realize. “Tim, I love you.”

  You look around at this place where you got married, and imagine what you felt then—the optimism of two young people stepping out together on a journey, an adventure. You can almost remember it—how excited you were, how certain that, whatever problems you faced in life, you would overcome them together.

  And you feel it now, too: a sense of possibility, an eagerness for the future. The journalists, the lingering self-disgust, the physical limitations—none of those really matter, not if you have each other.

  I can do this, you think. I can live this life. So long as I have Tim’s love, we can make this work.

  SEVEN

  Abbie begged and borrowed from all of us. From Hamilton she got the frame of an old shopbot, the Mk II. From Rajesh she got a couple of Mk III arms. Kathryn gave her some wiring, and Darren—developer Darren, who worshipped her rather too obviously since she’d put herself between him and Tim’s tongue-lashing—wrote some code. We all wanted to know what it was for, of course, but Darren wasn’t telling.

  “I promised her I’d keep it a secret,” he insisted. “You have to wait and see.”

  The gas burners, pneumatic tubing, and welding tools were Abbie’s own, lugged from the back of her beat-up old Volvo.

  This was another Abbie entirely, this slim, lanky figure in dark-blue overalls and even darker welding goggles who knelt in a corner of the parking lot, day after day, spraying sparks. And when she was finally done, it was to the parking lot she summoned us. Of course, we all went—even Tim and Mike. Nobody would have missed this.

  “I made something for y’all,” she announced. The trace of the South in y’all told us how excited she was. “I call it Electra Dancing.”

  We noticed she had a fire extinguisher standing by. “You should probably give her some room,” she added.

  She pulled a sheet off the thing that stood next to her. It was a kind of sculpture, we saw instantly, not dissimilar to the shopbots we were all familiar with. Some of the shopbot parts, though, had been replaced with junk—the head was an old motorcycle headlight, the fingers were bicycle chains, and there were bits of old telephones and typewriters incorporated into the design. It was wearing a pretty vintage dress in bright-yellow cotton.

  As we watched, the bot abruptly raised both arms. Flames shot from its wrists—one forward, one back, like a Catherine wheel. It started to spin; or at least, its
body did. The head remained motionless. And suddenly flames started shooting from its head and that started spinning, too, the opposite way to the rest of it. It was a dancing dervish, a pirouetting top, a whirligig of flame.

  “I’m pretty!” the robot announced in a mechanical recorded voice, like a truck reversing, even as it was consumed by fire. “I’m pretty!” Its torso erupted in flames, the yellow dress turning to lace and dropping to the ground. We thought—or said later we’d thought—of witch burnings, autos-da-fé. But mostly we just stood and gaped. “I’m pretty!”

  It was all over in less than a minute. First the bot fell silent, then it stopped spinning, its smoking carcass completely incinerated. An acrid, cordite stench wafted over the parking lot.

  “What went wrong?” someone asked—some idiot: Most of us decided later it was Kenneth. But Abbie didn’t seem to mind.

  “Oh, it was supposed to do that,” she said cheerfully, surveying the charred wreckage. And turning toward us, she added, “I like to play with fire.”

  She did indeed, as some wit pointed out later. Because, although we were not very good at art or its interpretation—felt rather uniquely unqualified to judge it, in the normal way of things—it was absolutely clear to us that Electra Dancing, or the firebot as we christened it, was Abbie’s way of telling us that she thought the shopbots sucked.

  21

  While you wait for Danny and Sian to get to the beach house, you plug Tim’s USB stick into a computer and look through the next document. It’s another slideshow; of articles about the trial this time.

  Once again he watches intently as you read, gauging your reaction.

  The first cuttings relate how Detective Tanner listed to the court the steps taken to find you, the subsequent widening of the search to include the possibility you’d been harmed, and the switch of focus from accident to murder. The jury was told that police cadaver dogs had found two “areas of interest”: one in your car, and one in the kitchen at Dolores Street.

  Under cross-examination, Detective Tanner admitted the sniffer dogs might have been reacting to the smell of raw meat previously stored in your kitchen. You’d been given some venison by a friend not long before your disappearance, which you transported in the car and subsequently hung in your larder.

  He also admitted that the switch to a possible murder investigation came after air and sea searches around San Gregorio had drawn a blank.

  “In other words, you were keen for it to look as if you’d finally made some headway?” Tim’s defense lawyer, Jane Yau, suggested.

  Not surprisingly, Detective Tanner rejected this, maintaining that it was reasonable, when no evidence emerged to support the most likely explanation, to switch his team’s attention to the next most likely.

  “So you can confirm that the transition to a homicide investigation—a widespread, costly, well-publicized homicide investigation—was prompted not by any actual evidence that a murder had taken place, but by the absence of evidence of accident or suicide?” Jane Yau pressed.

  Reluctantly, Detective Tanner conceded that this was indeed the case.

  The jury then heard from an old college friend of yours, Sukie Marenga, also an artist, who claimed you’d told her you were having problems in your marriage. You’d also complained that Tim was reading your emails. Sukie told the court that, around that time, Tim and you wrote down your feelings about each other on two pieces of paper, which you burned together in a Buddhist-style ceremony.

  “They were trying to parcel up their bad energies and release them to the universe,” she explained. “It’s a Reiki ritual to cleanse yourself of negativity.”

  “Do you happen to know whether the ceremony was effective on this occasion, or whether some of those negative energies in fact persisted?” Mark Rausbaum, the prosecuting attorney, asked—a question that was immediately challenged by the defense but no doubt planted a suspicion in the jurors’ minds that the ritual had not been 100 percent effective after all.

  Rausbaum then introduced phone records showing you’d used your phone far less frequently in the weeks preceding your disappearance than you usually did. The state’s contention, he explained, was that you had become aware your husband was spying on you, and this had brought the existing problems in the relationship to a head. Tim subsequently killed you, drove your body to the beach in your own car, and disposed of it in the ocean.

  Supporting this theory was the fact that your wet suit was still hanging in the wet room at the beach house. The prosecution suggested this meant you couldn’t have been surfing that night.

  Tim’s lawyer highlighted a number of weaknesses in this scenario. Not only was there no body, there was no evidence that the problems in your relationship were anything other than the usual ups and downs of a high-pressure marriage. Tim had explained to the police that, a month before your disappearance, you’d left your phone on a bus, and it was a while before it was found by the transit authority—something the transit authority confirmed. In the meantime you’d been using a temporary phone, which had vanished with you. There were no signs of violence in either of your houses, or in the car, or at the beach.

  Jane Yau also pointed out that San Gregorio was a well-known clothing-optional bathing area and that you’d been known to surf there naked on more than one occasion. Perhaps you’d simply forgotten your wetsuit that night? What was more, data from the GPS locator in Tim’s phone showed no evidence he’d been anywhere near the beach house on the night in question. Admittedly, the phone had been powered off at the time—but that was simply due to a flat battery, Tim had explained. The defense requested that the case be dismissed.

  And, perhaps remarkably given the intense level of media interest, the judge agreed. Quoting the ancient principle of corpus delicti, he said in a written statement that, while it wasn’t absolutely necessary for the prosecution to produce a body in order to prove a murder had taken place, it was certainly necessary to prove that a murder had taken place before somebody could be accused of it. The standard of proof in corpora delicti cases must therefore be higher than a mere “balance of probabilities.” He was dismissing the charges with immediate effect.

  In the period following the trial’s collapse, a twenty-six-year-old woman from San Jose was charged with posting an offensive message about Tim on Twitter. In a separate case a thirty-one-year-old woman from Los Angeles who posted something on Facebook was given a six-week suspended prison sentence. A petition to the government to change the law so that corpora delicti cases required a lower standard of proof in the future received over twenty-five thousand signatures and was then quietly ignored.

  Detective Tanner gave a TV interview on the courtroom steps in which he said the police would not be looking for anyone else in connection with Abbie’s disappearance.

  After some of the judge’s comments in previous trials were publicized on social media, a separate campaign to force judges to retire at sixty-five received over fifty thousand signatures.

  The police subsequently clarified that, while there were no outstanding lines of inquiry, “a team of officers is available to respond at any time to any new information that is received regarding Abigail Cullen-Scott.”

  Tim Scott declined to give any interviews whatsoever.

  22

  You sit back, relieved. Of course, you’re biased, but the case against Tim was clearly paper-thin. The prosecution had no body, no CCTV, and no forensic evidence. An attractive, high-profile young mother had vanished, and in the subsequent media frenzy someone had to be found to blame for it, that’s all.

  You’d known all along there was no way Tim could have been involved, but you’d been half dreading that the trial might have turned something else up; that your husband—never the humblest or most patient of men—could have been goaded by some wily prosecutor into saying something that showed him in a bad light. But as it turned out, he’d never ev
en had to take the stand. He’d been completely exonerated. And if a few crazies on social media had a hard time accepting that—well, that was their problem, not his.

  All the same, it strikes you that you, Abbie, were a strangely absent figure from the proceedings. The allegations of affairs weren’t even touched on, nor the evidence of your depression. You’d hoped reading about the trial might give you an insight into what was really going through your mind in those last few weeks, but—just as with the contents of your phone—there’s nothing.

  “Do you believe me?”

  Startled, you look up. Tim’s eyes are boring into yours. “Do you believe I had nothing to do with what happened to you?” he repeats.

  The question must be burning him up for him to even ask. His certainty is usually as fixed a part of his personality as his gray T-shirts.

  “Of course.”

  He grimaces. “Don’t say Of course. Of course means ‘I have no choice but to believe my husband.’ Your mind’s better than that, Abbie.”

  Is this why you built me? you wonder. So I could pronounce you innocent from beyond the grave? To hear me say out loud the words the jury foreman never got to say?

  “But it is Of course. And I didn’t need to read those articles to think that, either. I know you, Tim. I know you’d never deliberately harm anyone. But especially not me.”

  Tension leaves his shoulders. “Of course I wouldn’t.” You both smile at his choice of words.

  You hear the sound of a car pulling up. It’s Sian, arriving with Danny. “Hi, Danny,” you say eagerly as he runs into the house. He ignores you, instead making a beeline for the long wall of windows overlooking the ocean, which he greets by rubbing his face happily over the glass. You know you should really follow through, make him go back and say hi in response, but he looks so delighted to be here that you don’t have the heart.