Before She Knew Him

by Peter Swanson

  “Your dad used to call your mom a whore?”

  “He knew what she was. He knew what all women are.”

  “Did your dad kill women?” Hen asked.

  Matthew appeared to think for a while. “I don’t think I want to talk about my dad anymore,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” Hen replied. “I’m curious, that’s all.”

  “You just want to keep me talking until you can decide whether you can run faster than me.”

  Hen forced herself to smile. “A little bit,” she said. “I mean, more than a little bit. I’m scared of you, Richard. I’m sure you realize that. But I’m also curious. You’re so different from your brother, and I want to know why. You grew up in the same house with the same parents.”

  “We’re not that different,” he said. “Matthew pretends to be all noble and good, but down deep he knows he’s just like his dad. He has bad thoughts, too, you know. He probably had bad thoughts about you.”

  “But he doesn’t act on them.”

  Matthew blinked and pursed his lips. “No, he doesn’t act on them with women. He doesn’t do that. But he still kills people. He gets off on it, too. He’ll tell you he doesn’t. He’ll tell you that he hates blood, and he really just wants certain people to go away, people like Dad, people who hurt other people, but it’s not true. When he killed Dad he got a taste for it, and now he gets to keep doing it.”

  “And what about you? You don’t act on it?”

  “I didn’t, no. I didn’t for years and years and years. Matthew got to have all the fun, and all I got was an occasional fantasy. He wouldn’t even let me know what I was missing, wouldn’t tell me about it. Pretended he was perfect. But I knew his game. He made a mistake and told me about Michelle, his fellow teacher, and how he gave her advice, and she had this crush on him, and as soon as I found out that Michelle had some creepy boyfriend, I knew. I knew that he was gearing up again. So after he killed Scott Doyle, I went and paid a visit to Michelle. I can’t tell you . . . she was so happy to see me because she thought I was Matthew at first, same way you did. But she didn’t like Richard. She didn’t like me at all.”

  “Was that the first time you hurt a woman?” Hen asked.

  “Pretty much.” Matthew smiled at her, but Hen thought it was a fake smile, the rest of his face grim and uncertain.

  “I don’t think you liked it,” Hen said, bracing herself. She now thought she could make it to the door if she needed to. She just wasn’t sure she could swing it open and get through it before he got hold of her with his big hands.

  “I didn’t like it, I loved it.”

  “I don’t believe you, Richard. I think a part of you is upset about what you did.”

  “Dad loved blood, too,” Matthew said.

  “But Matthew hates it,” she said.

  “Matthew hates blood because he saw Dad make Mom bleed and he never got it out of his mind. She just sat there with the blood coming out of her nose, and she didn’t do anything to stop it. There was a napkin right on the table, and she never picked it up, just let it sit there. Can you imagine doing that in front of your own kid? Imagine letting him see that.”

  “But it was your dad who made her bleed, wasn’t it?”

  “She was asking for it.”

  “What about Michelle? Was she asking for it as well?”

  Matthew ran his fingers through his hair. “She called up a married man and asked him over to her apartment all alone. She did it when she knew his wife was away. What kind of woman does that?”

  “Maybe she just wanted someone to talk with.”

  “There’s no such thing. She wanted Matthew all to herself so she could suck his cock.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Hen said. “I’m friends with Matthew and Matthew is friends with me, and it has nothing to do with sex.”

  “That’s bullshit. He’s had dirty thoughts about you, and I bet that you’ve had dirty thoughts about him.”

  “I haven’t, Richard. I haven’t had any. I’m not lying to you. I’m telling you the entire truth, I promise. And maybe it was the same way with Michelle, maybe she just wanted a friend.”

  Matthew shook his head.

  “What did Matthew think?” Hen asked.

  “About what?”

  “What did Matthew think about Michelle? Did he think she deserved to die as well?” Hen pulled her legs a little farther in toward her so that the balls of her feet were pressed against the ground.

  “He knew what she was.”

  “But I want to know what he thought. Can you tell me that, Richard? Can I talk to Matthew, just for a little bit?” She pressed her feet harder against the floor.

  “No.”

  “Why not? I don’t need to talk with him for long, but I want to talk with him. I have something to say to him.”

  “What do you have to say to him?” Matthew asked.

  “The last time I talked with him, when we were on my front porch, he told me that he wanted to stop all the killing. He told me that he was done, and I want to know if he really meant it. I want to know if he was telling me the truth.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “But I want to hear it from him. I don’t want to hear it from you.”

  “He’s not here,” Matthew said, and he pushed his chin down against his chest and swallowed heavily, as though he was trying to keep himself from being sick.

  “I know that he’s there, somewhere,” Hen said. “If you let me talk with him, just for a minute, that’s all I’m asking.”

  “I know what you’re up to,” Matthew said.

  “What am I up to?”

  “You think that if you talk with Matthew that you can talk your way out of here. You’re probably thinking that he’ll let you walk out that door, and then you’ll go and tell the police everything.”

  Hen paused, trying to figure out the best thing to say. Keep being honest, she told herself. It’s working. Keep being honest.

  “I am going to tell them everything, you’re right,” she said. “And I do want to walk out of here. I don’t want to die. Not yet. But I’m not going to hurt you or Matthew. I just think that down deep you both want to stop what you’re doing, that you know it’s wrong, and that you know that it’s over.”

  “Matthew’s a pussy. He probably would let you go.”

  “That makes him strong,” Hen said. “You were strong, too. All those years you wanted to do bad things just like your dad, but you didn’t do them.”

  “That’s all changed. I’ve changed now.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t change back, you know. It’s not too late.”

  “I’ll go to prison.”

  “You’ll go to prison, or you’ll go to a hospital. Either way someone will help you.”

  “It’s Matthew who needs help. Not me.”

  Hen, without thinking, yelled as loud as she could: “Let me talk to Matthew. Right the fuck now!”

  Matthew blinked rapidly, pushed his chin down against his chest again. His eyes welled up with tears. “Hi, Hen,” he said after a while, his voice quiet.

  “Matthew?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I just met your brother. He’s different from you.”

  “It’s not all his fault. It was our upbringing. He idolized our father, and I think it twisted him.”

  “Did you hear everything we talked about?” Hen asked.

  “No,” Matthew said. “Was he going to hurt you?”

  “I think so, yes. He scared me.”

  “He scares me, too. He’s gone now.”

  Hen relaxed a little, and as soon as she did, she could feel her body physically reacting to the fear, her breath shortening, her limbs flooding with a terrible heaviness. “Let’s get out of here, then. We’ll go to the police, if that’s what you want.” Her voice trembled now.

  “What were you going to do?” Matthew asked. “To get away from Richard?”

  “I was going to try and run through the door, bolt it
behind me.”

  “Could you have locked him in?”

  “Uh-huh. You need a key for both sides of the door.”

  “Lock me in,” Matthew said.

  “What?”

  “I want you to lock me in here. I want to give myself up.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Please, just do it. Before I change my mind.”

  Hen stood up from her chair, her legs trembling now as well. “Okay,” she said.

  “Don’t leave me down here for a long time,” he said. “You’ll send someone soon for me, won’t you?”

  “Yes, right away.”

  Hen walked to the door, swung it open. She turned and Matthew was now sitting on the floor, holding on to one of the legs of the press.

  “I’m sorry about Lloyd,” he said. “He was in my house.”

  “What?”

  “This afternoon, when I came home, he was hiding in my house, upstairs. I guess he was looking for something to incriminate me. Maybe he was looking for that fencing trophy.”

  “Is he dead, Matthew?”

  He breathed in wetly through his nostrils. “I’m sorry, but he was in my house.”

  Hen stepped through the door and locked it behind her. She ran down the basement hallway toward the exit.

  Chapter 39

  Matthew spent most of the next forty-five minutes looking through Hen’s prints. He felt bad, violating her space that way, but he really did love her art.

  In one corner of the studio was an old metal file cabinet with three drawers. On top of the cabinet was a desk lamp with a long, bendable neck, and in each of the drawers was a hefty stack of prints done by Hen. He turned the lamp on and went through the prints one by one. They didn’t seem to be organized in any specific way, although the prints in the bottom drawer seemed to be older. The images were more disturbing, clearly not intended for children’s books, but they all had captions on them, some inexplicable, some funny. The print that Matthew looked at the longest was of a fox caught in one of those leg traps. The fox, grimacing in pain, wore a shabby suit, his tie askew. Around him, in a circle, stood more anthropomorphized foxes wearing a variety of clothes—dresses, suits, children’s outfits, a butcher’s smock. They were just observing, eyes wide and scared. The caption read: “The other foxes of the village watched, as it had been decreed.”

  Matthew touched each of the foxes on the print with his index finger and said, “Fox face, fox face, fox face, fox face, fox face, fox face.” Then he laughed. He wondered if these few minutes he was spending right now in Hen’s studio, alone, were the last unobserved moments of his life. A feeling of sadness swept through him, now that it was all over. But there was also relief. He knew he would never stop thinking about what Richard had done to Michelle, what Richard had almost done to Hen. And when the police—with their pig faces, he thought, and almost laughed again—came and got him, he’d make sure that Richard came along as well. They were brothers, after all. They were in this thing together, just as they always had been.

  Chapter 40

  After Hen dialed 911 and gave them Matthew’s address, saying she believed her husband was in the house and that he was injured, she got into her car, found the number for Detective Martinez.

  “Where are you?” he said immediately after answering.

  “I’m at my studio. Why? Where are you?”

  “I’m on your street.”

  Hen started the car. “You need to go into Matthew Dolamore’s house right now,” Hen said. “Lloyd’s in there, and I think he’s hurt.”

  “The police are already there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s something happening at Matthew’s house. I’m going to check it out now. I’ll call you right away—”

  “Don’t hang up. Matthew Dolamore is in my studio.”

  “What?”

  Hen put the phone on speaker and began to back the car out of Black Brick Studios’ parking lot. “He came to see me at my studio. He wants to confess to everything, and I locked him in. He’s there now.” Hen made a sudden decision to not tell the detective about the split personality. Not right now, anyway. “He told me Lloyd was searching through his house, and they got into some kind of fight.”

  “Are you on your way?”

  “I am.”

  “I’ll be here,” the detective said, and ended the call.

  There were no stop signs or lights between Black Brick Studios and Sycamore Street, and Hen was pulling onto Sycamore only a minute or so after the detective had ended the call. When she saw the semicircle of police cars, plus the ambulance with its flashing lights, she knew that something bad had happened to Lloyd. She felt it in her stomach—a hollow ache.

  She pulled the car into her driveway and sat for a moment; it couldn’t have been more than five seconds, but it felt longer. Then she opened the door and got out, began to walk toward the cluster of officers, some in uniform, some not. She watched as Detective Martinez turned toward her, then disengaged himself from the group, meeting her halfway across the Dolamores’ yard. A dog barked in the distance, the sound of it oddly sharp in Hen’s ears. The day was bleached of color and clouds had filled the sky, but Hen found herself squinting as the detective approached.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “He’s dead?”

  “He is, Hen. I’m so sorry.”

  There was movement over his shoulder, and Hen watched as a female police officer led Mira Dolamore down her front steps. Mira looked dazed, her head swiveling to take in the scene around her, then settling on Hen. Their eyes met, and Mira seemed to open her mouth to say something—not that Hen could have heard her from that distance—but instead of speaking, Mira lowered her head.

  Hen felt the detective’s hands, one on each of her arms. She wondered why he was touching her, then realized that she’d been falling.

  Chapter 41

  After they let him out of the studio, Matthew was brought to an interview room at the Dartford police station, where he waived his rights to have an attorney present.

  He told Detective Shaheen everything about the killing of Scott Doyle, making sure that she understood that Mira, his wife, had not been lying for him, that she truly had thought he’d been next to her in the hotel room all night. Speaking the words out loud, looking at the placid face of the female detective, and feeling the presence of all those other detectives and officers listening in, his words and gestures recorded, he felt a sense of relief wash over him. His muscles relaxed; his pulse slowed.

  “So you did it for Michelle Brine?” the detective asked.

  “Killed Scott Doyle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes and no. I felt bad for Michelle because he was a shitty boyfriend, but it wasn’t just for her. It was for all the other women that Scott Doyle was going to pollute in the course of his life. He was toxic.”

  “I get that,” she said. Both her hands lay on the table that separated them, and Matthew watched her occasionally spin her wedding band with her thumb. He wondered if she’d recently lost weight and hadn’t had the ring resized yet. “But, still,” she continued. “I want to know more about your relationship with Michelle. You must have been close if she told you about her boyfriend.”

  “We weren’t really close, I’d say. We were work friends. We worked with one another.”

  “I notice you are using the past tense.”

  “Right,” Matthew said. “She’s dead now, too.”

  “How do you know that, Matthew?”

  “Because I saw her body. I went to her apartment and saw her body.”

  “When you killed her, you mean?” the detective said.

  Matthew shook his head. “No,” he said. “God, no. Of course I didn’t kill her. I’d never hurt a woman. Never.”

  “Do you know who killed her?”

  “It was my brother, Richard,” Matthew said.

  “Your brother killed Michelle Brine?”

  “Yes.”

/>   “How do you know that?”

  “He told me. After he killed Michelle he came to my house to visit and he left me the keys to her apartment. It was his way of letting me know what he had done. He was taunting me. That’s how I got into her apartment. I needed to see for myself what he had done.”

  Matthew covered his mouth with his hand. He was thinking back to all the blood on the wall, all the blood on the bed, Michelle’s skin gray in the dim light. She would have thought that Richard was him, that he’d come to support her, maybe even make love to her, and then . . .

  “Are you okay, Matthew?”

  “Sorry, yes. It’s just upsetting to me. She didn’t deserve it. She’d done nothing wrong.”

  “Why do you think your brother killed her, then, if she’d done nothing wrong?”

  “He doesn’t think that way. He doesn’t think the way I think. He’s like my father was. I think . . . I think that he always wanted to know what it felt like to kill a woman because down deep he hates all women. He’d never done it before because he didn’t have the nerve. He’d thought about it . . . a lot. And then I should never have told him about Scott and Michelle, but he kind of figured out what I had done, and then I think that he knew . . . that he knew that Michelle . . . I think he knew that Michelle wanted me.”

  “That she wanted you?”

  “The night that Richard went and killed Michelle, she’d invited me over. That’s how he got into her apartment, you see. She thought he was me.”

  “Why did she invite you over?”

  “I talked to her on the phone, and she told me that she was leaving Sussex Hall for a while to go back home and be with her family, that she couldn’t handle being a teacher anymore. So she asked if I wanted to stop by and see her, just to say good-bye. She knew that Mira was out of town.”

  “Did you go?”

  “I thought about it. I actually drove over to her place, but then I realized it wouldn’t be appropriate. I’m married, and I think that Michelle thought there was more between us than there was. So, no, I didn’t visit her.”