The Widow's House

by Carol Goodman

  I skirted the terrace, passing under the old apple tree that, weighted by ice, hung lower than usual over the window to Monty’s apartment. I looked in through the window. I could see a bit of Monty’s desk with the old manual typewriter and stacks of paper. But no Monty. I went in through the boot hall, not stopping to shuck off my muddy boots for once, and straight down to Monty’s apartment. The door was closed, but not locked. He was too trusting by half, letting all sorts of people live on his property, taking Jess and me in—I hated to think what it would do to him to learn what Jess was trying to do. I opened the door as quietly as I could and stood for a moment listening to the house, but I couldn’t hear anything. That must be why Monty liked it down here; it was quiet.

  There certainly had to be some reason why he holed up down here when he had a whole beautiful house above him. It certainly couldn’t be the aesthetics of the apartment. Jess had described it as faded bachelor digs circa 1978 but that had been generous. Crazy-ass hoarder was more like it. The little room was lined with shelves that were double stacked with books, manuscript boxes, file folders, and old newspapers. More stacks of books, file boxes, and newspapers stood on the floor and tumbled out of a monstrous Victorian wardrobe. The only surface in the room that was remotely clear was the desk. There the old manual typewriter crouched like a shiny black beetle under a circle of lamplight. Monty must have just been here. A gurgle of pipes came from the next room. He must be in the bathroom. He’d be embarrassed to come out and find me here but that couldn’t be helped.

  I moved closer to the desk, instinctively drawn to that circle of light. Here there was order. Pens lined up, folders aligned neatly with a stack of manuscript pages beside the typewriter, just as I kept my things on my desk. Was there anything more satisfying, I thought, letting my hand rest on the top page, than a thick stack of completed pages growing beside a typewriter or laptop?

  Monty had been productive. He must have over three hundred pages here. Nearly a completed book. I looked down, unable to resist, and read the header in the left-hand corner of the top page.

  “The Apples of Discord,” it read. “A. Montague.”

  It was the title of the story I had written for Monty’s class. Was he using it for his memoir? Had he forgotten it was my title? Surely he wouldn’t use it if he did remember. Should I tell him . . . ?

  And then I remembered I had more important things to tell him. It really didn’t matter if he’d used my title. After all, he’d given me a house . . .

  Still . . .

  I picked up the page on top of the stack and read.

  Every year when the apple blossoms bloom the town council of Discord selects a Queen of the Apple Blossom Festival.

  It was exactly how my book started. I looked at the next page—and the next—and the next—pages sliding to the floor as I riffled through them—all my words. The pages I’d given Monty to read, the ones he’d been critiquing—

  I opened the folder on the other side of the typewriter. There were the pages I’d last given him. And there on the typewriter was a page typed directly from my pages only with his name on the header. Monty was retyping the pages I gave him. He was stealing my book.

  A door creaked open and I looked up. Monty stood in the doorway, one hand gripping his cane, the other tugging at his trousers, his eyes down on the floor. Why, he’s just a sad old man, I thought, swiftly followed by: the fucking bastard.

  His eyes flicked up as if he’d heard my thought and widened comically. Never use clichés, Monty always told us in class. Never let me catch you writing “He stopped dead in his tracks or his mouth dropped open or his eyes widened in surprise.”

  But that’s just what he did. He stopped dead in his tracks, his mouth dropped open, and his eyes widened in surprise. And then he did the most cliché thing of all—he clutched his chest.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “You’re going to have a heart attack? I’m the one who just found out her husband is trying to kill her and her father is stealing her book.”

  “Clare?” He croaked my name. Like he was only now recognizing me. I looked back at the window behind me, at my reflection. The scarf wrapped around my head was covered with dripping icicles, my face was streaked with mud frozen to pasty gray, my sweater and skirt covered with the same chalky rime. I looked like the ghost of Mary Foley newly risen from the frozen pond come to wreak vengeance on the man who’d stolen her story.

  To wreak vengeance on her own son. My father.

  I stepped forward, relenting, pushing back my scarf, but Monty backed away into an overstacked shelf. Papers slithered off a pile. He clutched at the shelf, but the books slid under his fingers. His knees buckled under him. One hand patted his shirt pocket as he slid down. It was like watching one of Sunny’s puppets crumple to the floor.

  I rushed toward him, reaching for the bottle of pills at the same time as he fumbled them out of his pocket. His eyes met mine as my fingers grazed the plastic vial, the jaundiced whites rolling back as though he were afraid of me. As if he thought I was trying to take the pills away from him when I was only trying to get the bottle from him so I could open it and give him the nitroglycerin tablet more quickly. I’m not the one trying to kill you, I wanted to say, Jess is!

  But he jerked the bottle away from me and the motion made him drop it.

  I heard it fall to the floor with a clatter. I cursed and dropped to the floor and saw the bottle roll under the Victorian wardrobe. I crawled after it and stuck my hand under the wardrobe . . . felt nothing. I stretched out on the floor and looked under the wardrobe, past dust and dead stink bugs and paper clips and wads of paper. I saw the bottle but it was too far back for me to reach. I needed something to fish it out. Or to find out if Monty had another bottle of nitroglycerin tablets.

  “Monty,” I said, scrambling up and turning to him. “Do you have—?”

  I stopped when I saw Monty’s face. His skin was the color of old newspaper. Beads of sweat coursed down the deeply carved creases. His bloodshot eyes stared at the ceiling. “Monty! Do you know where you have more pills?”

  His eyes rolled in their sockets toward me but didn’t register my presence. As if I were invisible. As if I were a ghost.

  “I’m going to call 911,” I shouted, more to myself than to Monty. I lurched to my feet and stumbled to the desk. There’d been a phone there, hadn’t there? Yes, an avocado green push-button model circa late seventies like everything else in this room. I lifted the grimy receiver but heard only static. It was broken or the lines were down, pulled down by the ice—

  At the thought I heard a crack and the lamp on the desk flickered. Outside the sleet was hardening on the trees and power lines. We were in the middle of an ice storm. Any minute now we could lose power.

  Another creak drew my attention but this one came from the doorway to the stairs. I looked up and saw Jess staring at me. “My God, Clare, what happened to you? I came down to see if Monty had heard from you—” He stopped when he saw Monty slumped on the floor. “Monty! What’s—”

  “He’s had a heart attack. I was trying to call 911 but the phone’s dead. Do you have your cell?”

  “It’s upstairs in my study,” he said, kneeling beside Monty. He laid his fingers on his neck. “Shit, I can’t feel a pulse. Do you know how to do CPR?”

  I did. I’d taken the class with Dunstan the summer before college, but I’d never used it.

  “Lay him down flat and put something under his neck,” I barked.

  Jess did what I told him to. I had the idea that if I just kept talking to Jess in this voice I could get him to do anything I wanted him to. Stop fucking Katrine. Stop plotting my murder. Love me again.

  I could have as soon commanded Monty’s heart to start beating and his lungs to draw breath. Pumping my folded hands over his heart didn’t work, nor blowing my breath into his parched, sour-smelling mouth.

  “Don’t just sit there,” I screamed at Jess. “Go get your phone and call for an ambulance.”
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br />   Jess flinched. “Clare, I don’t think it will matter. He’s gone.”

  I sat back on my heels and looked down at Monty. His eyes were staring sightlessly at the acoustic tiles of the drop ceiling. He shouldn’t have died staring at those, I thought, he should have at least died in one of the better rooms.

  I looked up at Jess. He looked almost as pale as Monty. “Of course you want me to stop. You want him dead.”

  He flinched as though I’d struck him. I wondered suddenly what he’d do if I did hit him.

  “I’m going to ignore that because of how upset I know you are. I’ll go call 911 and you go clean yourself up. I doubt you want your boyfriend Dusty to see you looking like that. What the hell happened to you, anyway? I’ve been going out of my mind worrying.”

  “You mean after you came home from screwing Katrine at my old house?” I asked, getting to my feet.

  “I was at your old house,” he said slowly, as if talking to a child. “How did you know that? Have you been following me?”

  Typical Jess move to make the argument about my behavior. He’d been doing it for years, turning every question I asked into a sign of irrational jealousy.

  “No,” I replied coolly. “I was following your girlfriend back from the hospital. Where I learned, by the way, that you forged my consent to have my records sent to Dr. Schermer. Part of your plan to have me committed, I suppose.”

  “Clare, do you realize how crazy you sound?”

  “That’s what you keep telling me. I made it easy for you, telling Cortland about the ghosts, didn’t I? But when everyone learns that Katrine was posing as the ghost I don’t think that tack will work so well.”

  Jess laughed. Then shook and dropped his head and startled at the sight of Monty as if he’d forgotten he was there. “Christ, Clare, you’ve really gone round the bend now. Yes, I sent the consent form to Dr. Schermer. I knew the appointment wouldn’t do any good unless he knew your background; you’re too damned good at telling a story. And yes, I was at your house with Katrine. I thought we might rent it to get you out of here before this house drove you nuts, but I can see I’m too late.”

  “You took an hour to look at the house?”

  “You were watching the house for an hour?” He got to his feet. “I’m sorry, Clare, but I don’t think I can do this anymore. I thought you’d be better up here in the country, in your hometown, but according to Trina you never really fit in here either. She said you never had many friends.”

  “That’s what you and Trina were talking about for an hour?” I asked, seething at the idea of Katrine telling Jess I didn’t have friends growing up. Who had time for friends with all the chores I had to do?

  “Yes,” Jess said, “but she can tell you herself. I called her before to see if she’d heard from you. She said she’d come over to wait with me for news. There’s her car now.”

  I turned, following Jess’s gaze to the window. Headlights strobed across the glass and then went out. I crossed behind the desk and looked out. Yes, there was Katrine’s yellow Suburban. The car door opened, lighting up the frozen branches of the old apple tree and silhouetting Katrine against the lit interior of the car. I had a glimpse of her grim, determined face. I don’t think I’d ever seen her before without a smile on her face. I realized that everything I’d seen before was an act—the brittle façade of a saleswoman. She had cajoled and maneuvered me into this place. I remembered now the hint of bitterness in her voice when she’d said on that first day that I probably didn’t remember her. But she had remembered me. She’d been jealous that I was the one who’d gotten Jess. She’d hatched a plan to get him back and to ruin my life in the process.

  She glanced at herself in her rearview mirror, adjusted her scarf over her head, and stepped out of the car.

  Bitch, I muttered under my breath.

  She looked up as if she heard me—or perhaps because she heard the creaking of the apple tree branches over her head. A wind was blowing off the river, rattling the ice-covered branches like dry bones. She shivered and then swung shut the car door with a sharp crack that seemed to echo and reverberate through my body, plunging the scene into darkness. I was staring in the now-dark window at the reflection of myself and the room behind me and of Jess coming toward me, his arms out as if to strangle me. Then the whole world shattered and turned black.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I thought I’d been struck unconscious—that Jess had struck me. There’d been an enormous crack and then the lights had gone out. I lifted my hand to my head. There was still ice in my hair—no, not ice—glass. The window had broken. Had Jess hurled something at me and broken the window? Something cold and sharp brushed against my face—a long bony hand wrapping itself in my hair. I screamed and flailed my arms to escape its grasp and the fingers snapped back and slapped my face. Then I smelled it. Sap and resin and the faint breath of rotting apples. It was the old apple tree. The ice had brought it down and it had crashed through the window and taken down the electric cables to the house.

  “Clare?”

  I froze. It was Jess’s voice, on the other side of the desk.

  “Clare, are you all right? I think a tree crashed through the window.”

  Yes, the tree had crashed through the window, but before that I’d seen Jess coming at me, arms stretched out to throttle me. He’d been about to strangle me when the tree came through the window.

  “Clare?”

  “Jess?”

  The voice came from outside. Katrine. So she hadn’t been killed by the falling tree. She was outside the window.

  “Jess? Are you all right? Is Clare?”

  She’d seen me at the window. She must think the tree hit me and killed me. Well, it hadn’t, bitch.

  But how easy it would be to say that it had.

  My wife was giving CPR to Mr. Montague when the tree crashed through the window, Officer. She died a hero. Yes, after Mr. Montague so she died his heir.

  “I don’t know. She isn’t talking,” Jess called back. “Do you have a flashlight?”

  “In my glove compartment,” Katrine said. “I’ll go get it.”

  I suddenly thought of Katrine’s faux country getup that day she’d shown us houses—jacket, Wellies . . . All she needs is a hunting rifle to look like she strode out of Downton Abbey. What if she kept a gun in her car?

  I couldn’t wait to find out. I could hear Jess crawling over the broken glass toward me. The tree was between us. Behind me I felt glass and twigs but nothing large impeding my way. I tried to remember the layout of the room—what lay between me and the door to the stairs. No furniture, I thought, but there were stacks of books and newspapers everywhere—

  A hand touched my leg and closed down on my ankle. I jumped up at the touch, kicking out to free myself of Jess’s grip, and sprung away, feet crunching on broken glass. I ran with my arms out, searching for the doorway. I tripped—damn all these books!—and landed on something soft.

  Monty. I’d landed on Monty’s dead body.

  I swallowed the scream rising in my throat and scrambled over him, but something pulled me back. Jess’s hands on me. I kicked free of him and crawled forward, groping for the opening to the stairway. My outstretched hands smacked into a bookshelf. Books skittered under my fingers. I heard Jess’s step right behind me. My hand tightened on a thick spine—an enormous lexicon of some obscure language no doubt—and I hurled the book in Jess’s direction. It made a satisfying thunk when it struck Jess but what was even more satisfying was Jess’s cry of surprise. I’d done something he didn’t expect. It felt good. But I didn’t think it was going to improve our relationship any. I groped my way up the bookshelf and to the doorway and then I was running up the stairs into the octagon.

  BUT FIRST I had to get through the boot hall—pitch black and cluttered with decades’ worth of cracked Wellies and split-heeled Weejuns. Why hadn’t I ever cleaned in here? But if I had to get through it, so did they. I kicked shoes and boots into the middle of t
he hallway, dragged coats and jackets off the hooks and swept stacks of newspaper behind me. I ran through to the kitchen where a pale gray rectangle over the sink cast a little more light. I went straight to the knife drawer and drew out the sharpest carving knife, the one I used to debone chickens. Would I really use it on Jess?

  I pictured Jess’s face in the reflection in the window—enraged, ready to strangle me. What had I done to make him that angry? And how had I been so blind not to know?

  You writers really do live in a little bubble, Katrine had said, mocking me for not knowing that she was sleeping with my husband. I realized I was shaking all over, whether from rage or grief I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have time for either. I gripped the knife harder and listened. I heard muffled thumps coming from the boot hall. I couldn’t stay in here—but where should I go? I could flee through the library doors out onto the terrace but then what? I didn’t have a car. The nearest house was a mile away. Over ice, in the dark. If they tracked me down outside it would be easy to make my death look like an accident. Poor deranged Clare Jackson out wandering in an ice storm just like her grandmother Mary Foley. No, I wouldn’t die like that. I had to reach someone and tell them what was happening. If only I hadn’t left my phone in the car—

  But Jess’s phone was upstairs in his study. If I could get to it before he did—

  The voices in the boot hall were coming closer. I had to choose.

  I bolted from the kitchen into the rotunda—into a well of light. The storm had passed and the moon was shining straight through the oculus, spilling moonlight down the marble steps like a frozen waterfall. Beautiful, but deadly. I would be completely exposed. I sprinted up the stairs as fast as I could, taking two steps at a time, glad for the solid marble that didn’t creak like the wooden floors. Even Bayard’s fish-white face seemed welcoming. This was my house now, I realized as I reached the top gallery. I’d be damned if I would let Jess and Katrine wrest it from me.