The Butcher

by Jennifer Hillier

  “No man likes a loose woman,” she said, her face flushing. “I am not a loose woman.”

  “Okay.”

  She lay back down. “I’m enjoying your company, is all. I would like to get to you know you better. I’ve been alone for a couple of years now, and frankly, it’s hard to be alone. My kids all have their own lives, and I don’t drive that much anymore, and while I have a lot of friends here, I miss having a man to do things with, to take care of. How long have you been a widower, Edward?”

  “Four months,” he replied, puffing on his cigar.

  “I suppose it hasn’t been that long for you. But a man of your stature and reputation must have his pick of women. You should know I’m well-off. I have money and I’m very comfortable.”

  “I would assume that, since you live here. The Village ain’t cheap.”

  “But it would be nice to have someone to travel with, and there are still places I haven’t been that I’d like to see. Do you like to travel, Edward?”

  He sighed. “What I like is quiet. Anybody ever tell you that you talk too fucking much?”

  She recoiled, pulling the blanket over her bare torso. “Language, Edward,” she said, frowning. “If we’re going to spend time together, I can’t have that language used. I have grandchildren. They hear enough of that nonsense on TV, and oh my goodness, the music they listen to nowadays? It’s so vulgar, so profane.”

  “You’re so ironic,” Edward said, amused. “You’ll fuck like a jackrabbit in heat, but you get offended at the word fuck. Makes no sense to me.”

  “Language,” she said, pursing her colorless lips.

  And that’s when he’d lost it. Turning to face her, punched her square in the face.

  It stunned her for a few seconds, and he used the time to carefully stub out his cigar in the water glass sitting on the bedside table. Putting a hand to her face, she began to cry. Before she could say anything, he was on top of her, pinning her down with his size and weight. It wasn’t hard to do. He was six four and 180 pounds, and she was maybe five two and 110 pounds soaking wet.

  His fingers wrapped around her neck and squeezed. Her eyes bulged, and as the life drained out of her, he felt his cock grow hard again.

  Just like with Marisol. And just like with Marisol, he’d clean up when he was finished.

  FOUR MONTHS EARLIER

  His dinner was late. That had been happening a lot lately. Once wasn’t a big deal, twice was annoying as hell, but three times? In one week? Unacceptable.

  He poked his head into the kitchen and saw Marisol sitting at the table, staring into space, Bicycle playing cards laid out in front of her for Solitaire. She’d also been doing that a lot lately—not the Solitaire, but the staring—and he didn’t particularly mind or care, unless his dinner was late. Something was simmering in a pot on the stove. He walked over to it, lifted the lid, and peeked inside. Adobo. It smelled good, but he couldn’t tell whether it was even close to being done or not. She was the cook. He paid the bills. That’s how things worked in the Shank household. He put the lid back down.

  “Marisol,” he said, turning to her, keeping his voice neutral.

  She didn’t respond. She just sat staring, her face not making any specific expression. Edward believed she had heard him, though it was clear she wasn’t processing. Which to him, felt the same as being ignored.

  “Marisol. I’m starving. When will dinner be ready?”

  Again, nothing.

  He walked over to her and checked out her Solitaire game. Moving a red queen underneath a black king, he then bent down and moved her hair away from her ear. He touched her gently, lovingly, and then said, in a volume three times louder than it needed to be, “Marisol! Where the hell is my damned dinner?”

  She blinked, his loud voice snapping her out of whatever reverie or daydream she’d been immersed in. Her eyes widened, and she looked up at him, her face morphing into an expression of clarity. “What did you say, Edward? I’m sorry, I must not have been paying attention.”

  “It’s six twenty,” Edward said. “What time do we eat dinner, Marisol?”

  She looked up at the clock mounted on the kitchen wall. It took her about two seconds to process what time it really was, and he watched as the fear seeped into her body. Her posture stiffened and her glance turned skittish. She pushed back from the kitchen table, her wooden chair scraping the tiled floor.

  “I’m so sorry, my dear. I don’t know how I lost track of the time.” She stood up and headed right to the stove. Checking under the lid of the pot, she stirred and then tasted. “It’s ready. It’s perfect. I’ll serve you. Do you want a beer?”

  He nodded, but he was not to be appeased. Three times late was simply ridiculous. He knew it and she knew it. He didn’t think he would hit her—the hitting had stopped decades ago, before Matthew was born, and he had other outlets if he felt the need to get physical—but he definitely needed to think of a way to help his wife not forget.

  As he ate her cooking, which was of course delicious (adobo was her specialty), he stewed.

  Later that evening, they sat side by side on the sofa in the living room in front of the television watching Jeopardy! Edward smoked a cigar. Marisol knitted. This was their usual routine. And in keeping with their routine, Marisol had called out the answers (or questions, as they were on Jeopardy!), usually getting them right about half the time. But then she stopped. And then she sat, once again staring into space, the knitting needles in her hands not moving.

  “Marisol,” he said.

  “You hurt Lucy,” she said, her voice faint but clear, her eyes blank. Her slight Filipino accent was barely discernible when she spoke softly like this. “You hurt our daughter. You’re the reason she’s dead.”

  It was not the response he’d been expecting. She was really out of it. She was never allowed to talk about their daughter. Ever. He’d taught her that lesson a long time ago.

  “Marisol,” he said, forcing himself to be patient. “Snap out of it.”

  She didn’t move. She didn’t acknowledge that she’d heard him. He felt his blood begin to boil. Again, he was being ignored.

  He reached over and touched her breast. Gently. They hadn’t had sex in over ten years, and surely this unfamiliar touch would wake her up.

  It didn’t. She didn’t move. But she did start knitting again.

  He frowned. He didn’t know what this bullshit was, but he didn’t like that she wasn’t talking to him, and he snapped his fingers in front of her face.

  “Marisol. Marisol. Stop ignoring me. I am speaking to you.”

  Her fingers moved faster. He stared at her hands weaving the orange yarn together. He had no idea what she was making. He never did, because he never asked, and she never talked about it because she knew he didn’t give a shit. She wasn’t doing this on purpose.

  Or was she?

  He touched her breast again, this time pinching her nipple beneath the soft cotton of her sweater. He pinched hard. Her mouth opened and a little moan escaped her lips. Sitting this close to her, something he usually didn’t do, he could smell the adobo on her breath. Somehow it only angered him more.

  He took the yarn and needles away. She didn’t protest. Standing up, he grabbed her by the hand and pulled her up to her full height of five foot three. Again, she didn’t protest. She was standing just fine, not swaying or leaning or doing anything to show she was disoriented or dizzy or confused. What the hell was wrong with her?

  “Marisol,” he said again.

  Nothing. And it was infuriating.

  He glanced at the piano in the corner. It was an 1890 Mathushek upright, the piano he’d probably paid too much for thirty-something years earlier, but she’d loved it, and at least he hadn’t forked out the megabucks for a baby grand. He led her to it, and she walked slowly, but her posture was perfect. Her eyes stared at nothing. Pulling out the piano bench, he guided her around it, then pushed down on her shoulders until she was seated.

  Opening th
e book of sheet music in front of her, he selected a piece he knew she knew from memory. Moonlight Sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven.

  “Play this,” he said, tapping the page.

  She didn’t move. He didn’t think she would, since she hadn’t responded to any of his other verbal commands.

  He placed her hands on the ivory keyboard, chipped and worn in places. Who knew how many hands over the years had touched these keys? Who knew exactly where this piano had been, and what it had seen?

  “Play,” he said again, pushing the A-flat key, which he knew was the first note for the right hand in Moonlight Sonata. He was a competent piano player himself, and knew more than enough to get by if someone wanted to sing a Christmas carol or two and Marisol was busy in the kitchen, but he was by no means in his wife’s league.

  At the sound of the A-flat key, her hands flexed. Long fingers—wrinkled now, the nails not so perfectly manicured anymore—were still full of dexterity. She began to play. The haunting notes filled the room and he sat back and watched. She was playing perfectly, with the right speed and the right dynamics, and it sounded beautiful, as it always did.

  She was either losing her mind or she was messing with him.

  Either way, it was unacceptable.

  He waited a few minutes until she got to the end of the song, ending softly on a quiet note, and then placed his hand on hers and stood her up. She looked at him, her eyes clearing once again, as they had before dinner.

  “Edward?” she said. “Was I playing?”

  “Yes, you were, my dear. And it sounded wonderful as it always did.”

  She smiled, and he leaned down and kissed the tip of her nose. She laughed and moved to put her arms around him.

  He allowed her to hold him for a moment, but just a moment.

  Then, turning her around so she faced away from him, he bashed her head into the corner of the Mathushek as hard as he could.

  Once was all it took. She was a small woman, and it hadn’t even taken that much effort. She fell to the floor, Edward making no attempt to catch her. She lay on the hardwood floor, looking up at him with dark eyes that understood.

  She had to have known that this moment was coming at some point.

  She had to have known, because she’d known for a long time exactly who, and what, her husband was. Even though he’d promised her that he’d stopped. Which he had. Until now.

  The wound gaped open, and the blood flowed freely. Edward dragged her slowly to the foot of the stairs, only a few feet away, and sat with her there until she died.

  Afterward, he cleaned up the blood on the piano, using a Q-tip to remove the blood from the carved roses, along with the little trail she’d left behind that led to the stairs. He then smeared blood in the spot where he wanted them to find it, and then he called 9-1-1.

  Marisol had slipped down the stairs, he said. She’d fallen and hit her head on a stone gargoyle that lay at the base of the last step, something they’d bought together when they’d toured Italy for their anniversary years ago.

  Nobody questioned it. He was the goddamned former chief of police of Seattle, for Christ’s sake, the man who’d brought down the Beacon Hill Butcher in a cinematic shoot-out outside Rufus Wedge’s apartment building. His wife was seventy-nine, only a year younger than Edward, and she hadn’t been in the greatest health. She’d been disoriented lately. He hadn’t been diligent enough about watching her. They should have sold the house years ago and moved into a rambler, or a retirement home, or someplace just plain safer.

  There there, the pretty paramedic had said. Accidents happened. The police were called, but since the young officers who showed up were too in awe of Edward’s presence, very few questions had been asked.

  More than three hundred people showed up for Marisol’s funeral. Most of them were Edward’s friends and former colleagues. Marisol, though a sweet, gentle woman, had never had many of her own friends, and what family she had was in the Philippines. A few of her old piano students came by to pay their respects, but that was all.

  When the excitement died down a few days after the funeral, Edward was left with a kitchen full of pies and casseroles and lot of remorse at his lack of impulse control.

  He would never taste his wife’s adobo again.

  31

  Matt was acting so strange.

  He offered Sam more tea, and she held out her mug so he could fill it. He was fanatical about his tea, having purchased some fancy kettle from Teavana a little while back that had cost more than her monthly car payment. She had never had the heart to tell him that she couldn’t tell the difference.

  They had left Jason’s together, and she’d been prepared to go back home, by herself. Until tonight, she and Matt hadn’t even spoken since that awkward night she’d snuck into his house. So when he’d asked her to follow him back to the house in Sweetbay so they could talk, she was surprised.

  This was it. This was the end. And she couldn’t say she was surprised.

  “I don’t know why I’m so nervous,” Matt said, and as if on cue, he spilled a drop of tea on his kitchen counter. He wiped it away with a dish towel and then handed Sam her mug. “I guess it’s that we haven’t really talked in a while. Not counting arguments, that is. I guess I feel a bit weird.”

  Sam accepted the tea with a small smile, but didn’t feel the need to say anything. Of course it was weird with the two of them now. How could it not be? They were so disconnected, so removed from each other’s daily lives. She was fairly certain that, despite his hot denials, he had done something inappropriate with that slutty producer from the Fresh Network. And she hadn’t been perfect, either—she’d asked Jason to kiss her. Her relationship with Matt, which probably should never have started in the first place, had been on thin ice for a while. And that was probably understating it.

  Why was it always so hard with Matt, and so easy with Jason?

  Stop it, she told herself. This wasn’t the time to think about Jason. Her feelings for him were too complex, too confusing. She needed to focus on the man in front of her, which was Matt.

  Pulling out a chair, he sat perpendicular from her at the kitchen table. For a moment, they sipped their tea in silence, both of them wrapping their fingers around their mugs for warmth. Sam glanced around the kitchen, still so filled with Matt’s grandmother’s presence. The giant wood fork and spoon that she’d brought over from Manila was still hanging on the wall above Matt’s head.

  “You must miss her,” she said. “Lola, I mean.”

  Matt smiled, but it was filled with sadness. “I do. Every day. Sometimes I come home from work half expecting to see her in the kitchen making torta.”

  “What’s torta again?”

  “The ground beef with egg. You like it.”

  Sam nodded. “Right. I do.”

  “I should make it for you sometime,” Matt said. He looked at her, his eyes red and moist. “I should cook for you. I can’t remember the last time I did that.”

  Sam looked down into her tea mug. “I can’t, either.”

  “She loved you, you know.” Matt smiled again, his eyes flickering away. He seemed to be having a hard time making eye contact. “You were the granddaughter she never had. You know, sometimes I wonder if I have a brother or a sister somewhere out there. Sometimes I think I should try looking. Lola always said they never knew who my father was, but I think she was just trying to protect me. I mean, come on, the Chief could find anybody. Sometimes I wonder why he never tried to find my dad.”

  Sam was surprised. Matt never made references to his parents, ever. His mother had given birth to him when she was sixteen, and according to Edward, even Lucy herself didn’t know who Matt’s father was. Shortly after Matt was born, Lucy had died of a drug overdose, as drug addicts tended to do.

  “Have you been thinking about that lately?” she said, her voice soft. This had been the last thing she’d been expecting to discuss, but she couldn’t imagine not talking about it if this was something he trul
y needed to talk about. She did still care about him, after all.

  “Sort of.” He sipped his tea, swallowed, and finally focused his gaze on her. “I’ve been thinking a lot about family, and about the way I live my life, and my priorities. I’ve been thinking about whether or not I’m happy.”

  “Are you?”

  He paused. “I should be, but . . . no.”

  She had no idea where this was going.

  “Sam, do you ever wonder what your life would have been like if your mother hadn’t died?”

  It was an easy question to answer. “All the time. I’d be a different person, that’s for sure.”

  “In what way?”

  “I wouldn’t want the things I want so much. Or maybe I would, but I’d be willing to be patient. Something like this . . .” She gestured at their surroundings. “A house, a family . . . maybe those things wouldn’t be so critical to me now because I would have had them growing up. I know I’ve put a lot of pressure on you over the past year.”

  Matt shook his head. “You really haven’t. You’ve been completely normal, actually. It’s me. I’m the one who doesn’t know how to do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Be happy. With you. With us.”

  She looked at him. Here it was. The breakup. She braced herself for what was about to come.

  “I have this thing in me, always wanting to be better, always wanting more,” Matt said. “No matter how much I do, no matter how much I achieve—”

  “It’s never enough,” Sam finished. “But that’s who you are, Matt. That’s exactly why you’ve had so much success. Because you’re driven. Because you want more.”

  “But what’s the point?” Matt said, his voice cracking. “What’s the point of the food trucks, of the restaurant, of the TV show, of this house, if I have nobody to share it with? If there’s nobody to come home to? What’s the point of it all if I’m going to end up dying alone?”

  Sam stared at him. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say. What he had just said was the same thing she’d been telling him for the past year.