The Tenth Case

by Joseph Teller

So he was left to wonder.

  He would fall asleep wondering, and he'd wake up won dering. He'd wonder while they were making love. Was the woman in his arms the innocent victim of a sinister frameup that had come perilously close to working? Or was she a serial stabber who emerged, locustlike, every twelve or fourteen years to strike again? And when he caught himself the third time—or perhaps it was even the fourth or fifth— counting the steak knives left in Samara's kitchen drawer before going upstairs and climbing into bed with her, just to make sure they were all present and accounted for, he decided it was just too much.

  Tom Burke had begun his summation by saying, "Sometimes things aren't what they seem to be. But some times they are." When you came right down to it, maybe the reason why Samara had seemed so guilty for so long was because she was.

  Years and years ago, when Jaywalker's daughter had been a toddler of two, she'd picked up an expression, latched on to it, and used it whenever she was asked a yesor-no question. "Yes, no, maybe so," she would chant in a lilting, singsong voice. As cute as it was, it meant abso lutely nothing, of course. All it did was list the possibili ties. But in her two-year-old wisdom, his daughter had been smarter than Tom Burke, smarter than Anthony Bon figlio, smarter by far than Jaywalker. Truth could be a slip pery thing, far more elusive and hard to get your hands around than a simple black-or-white, up-or-down concept like guilty or not guilty.

  Sometimes things aren't what they seem to be.

  Sometimes they are.

  And sometimes, you just don't know.

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