For Better and Worse

by Margot Hunt

  “This,” I raised my glass, “is the first good idea I’ve had all night.”

  “Fine, but if you’re not going to help me clean up, please give me the gloves back.”

  I hesitated, not wanting to part with them. I didn’t want to risk getting my fingerprints on anything. But Nat held out a hand, clearly not willing to cede on this point. I yanked them off and handed them to her. She snapped them on, and without another word, got to work. She rummaged around first under the sink, then in what looked like a walk-in pantry, until she’d assembled cleaning supplies—a broom and dustpan, garbage bags, a roll of paper towels—then disappeared back into the living room.

  I grabbed a dish towel and used it to hold the glass as I sipped my drink, trying to slow myself from glugging it down. I wasn’t going to admit it to her, but Nat was right—I did have to drive, and while it was hard to imagine tonight getting any worse, getting pulled over for a DUI on my way back home after committing a murder would definitely fall in the Worse category. But it was hard to resist the instant solace the bourbon offered, which was cushioning my shock, swaddling my horror in an alcoholic blanket.

  “Come in here for a second. I need to ask you something,” Natalie called out.

  I reluctantly stood, and—after taking a moment to find my balance—I wandered back out to the living room.

  Robert was still there, still dead. I tried not to look at his prone body.

  “I swept up the dolphin, but I’m not sure what to do with it. Should we take it with us? But that would mean we’d have to take the broom and dustpan with us, too, since there might be microscopic flecks of glass on them. Or I could just put the pieces in the garbage, hoping the police think that Robert broke it and cleaned up after himself. Which do you think seems less suspicious?”

  My wife looked at me earnestly, still clutching a broom in one hand. I had literally no idea what she was talking about.

  “Dolphin?”

  Nat’s brow furrowed. “The glass dolphin? It was on the coffee table, and it broke when Robert kicked it off the table. It was really loud. You didn’t hear it?”

  “I guess I was a little distracted by the fact that I was in the middle of killing him!”

  “I’m going to take it with us,” Nat decided, all too rationally. “I don’t want them to have any evidence that there might have been a struggle. Besides, I don’t think the police will notice that there isn’t a broom and dustpan in the house. Oh, and we’d better take that throw pillow, too.” She picked up the aqua-blue pillow I’d used to smother Robert and put it with the garbage bag. I winced and looked away. “I just need to wipe everything down one last time and we’ll be good to go. Oh, wait, I forgot something.”

  Nat headed out of the room, and returned a few minutes later with a pill bottle. “Will you bring in the bourbon?”

  “Why?”

  Nat waved a hand toward Robert’s body. “I’m trying to make this look like a suicide.”

  “I thought you said the medical examiner will know that it wasn’t?”

  “If they’re careful. But that’s a big if. People are human. They may run a toxicology screen on him, see the level of drugs and alcohol in his system, and decide to check the suicide box, instead of the homicide one. Do you think Robert would write a suicide note?”

  “What?” I’d officially had too much to drink. My brain felt like it was running half-speed through a sludge of mud. “How would I know that?”

  “Are you okay?” Nat gave me another long, searching look. “Just get the bourbon, and then sit down and don’t touch anything. I’ll finish up in here.”

  I did as I was told. I watched Nat set up the scene. She poured some bourbon into Robert’s glass, then carefully wiped the bottle down with an antibacterial wipe. Nat twisted open the cap on the pill bottle and then tipped it over so that the little blue pills scattered on the glass top coffee table. It looked exactly as though someone had been swallowing pills, one by one, before passing out. Or worse.

  Robert’s laptop was open on the blond wood dining table, across the room from the sofa where his body lay. Nat sat down in front of it.

  “Oh, good, it’s not password-protected.” Nat began to type, her plastic gloved fingers flying over the keyboard. “How does this sound? ‘I feel terrible for what I’ve done, and would do anything I could to take it back. This isn’t the man I wanted to be. I’m so sorry.’”

  It actually wasn’t bad, especially considering the circumstances and pressure she was under, but I wasn’t in the mood to dole out compliments.

  “Would he say something religious? About going to a better place or something like that?”

  “I don’t think so.” Natalie frowned down at the laptop. “Robert wasn’t religious. Don’t you remember he turned down that job offer from St. Andrews because he said he wouldn’t be comfortable being the principal at a parochial school?”

  “Why would I remember that?”

  “Well, he did.” Natalie stood. “This will have to do. We should get going. Are you okay to drive?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Jesus, Will, how much have you had to drink? We really need to get out of here. What if someone shows up? And we can’t leave your car here. It would be a pretty big clue to the police.”

  Sarcasm? Really? I thought. After she just made me kill someone?

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Give me your glass,” Nat said. “I need to wash it.”

  She disappeared into the kitchen. I heard the sound of water running, and the cupboard being closed. “Come on, let’s go.” Nat strode back into the living room, where she gathered up her handbag, the garbage bag full of used paper towels and broken glass dolphin pieces, the pillow and the broom and dustpan, while I watched. I didn’t offer to help.

  Nat stopped at the door, and looked back at the living room, at the tableau of Robert’s body sprawled lifeless on the couch next to the pills and the booze.

  “What do you think?” she asked. “Is there anything we need to fix? We’re not going to have another chance.”

  “I think I want to get the hell out of here before I throw up.”

  Nat shot me an odd look, a mixture of concern and exasperation. I ignored it and trailed after her out of the house. She closed the door behind us and headed to her SUV. She opened the back hatch and set the evidence inside.

  “Are you going to be okay?” She turned toward me. “Why don’t I go first. You stay behind me and try not to veer in and out of your lane.”

  “I’m really not that drunk. I’m just...freaked out.”

  “Try to stay calm. We still have some work to do before we’re home free. Or, at least, I do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Getting rid of the evidence.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I’m going to smash up the cell phone and tablet, submerge them in water and toss them in a Dumpster.”

  “Tablet?” I asked.

  “I used it for research, but I have to get rid of it. I also need to ditch the pillow and broom, although I’ll take those to that apartment complex on Orange Avenue. I’ve had clients who’ve lived there. They rent the rooms by the week. It has a huge turnover. A discarded pillow and broom in the garbage bins will blend right in.”

  “Are you doing all of that tonight?”

  “Hmm. No, I guess I’d better do that part tomorrow. Throwing stuff into Dumpsters will look suspicious at nighttime, if anyone’s bothering to look.”

  Natalie opened her car door and got in. “I’ll see you at home,” she said before closing the door.

  Somehow I managed to drive home. At one point, the road blurred and then doubled. But I closed one eye and my vision cleared, the center line coming back into focus, and I managed to stay in my lane. I drove the rest of the way with a hand over one eye,
guided by the rear lights of Nat’s car.

  Once she had pulled into our driveway and exited her car, Nat opened the back hatch of her SUV. She pulled out the garbage bag full of evidence and slung it over one shoulder.

  “Do you think you should bring that inside?” I asked, eyeing the bag like it was radioactive.

  “What else am I going to do with it?” She tilted her head to one side. “I suppose we could burn some of it in our fire pit, but that could leave behind trace evidence. I think we’re better off ditching it altogether.”

  “Trace evidence? Oh, my God.” The panic began pulsing through me again. What the hell had just happened? What had I done?

  “Don’t worry,” Nat said. “No one will ever suspect us.”

  “What if they do?”

  “They won’t, trust me.”

  Trust you? I actually wanted to believe her, as the alternative was too awful to contemplate. But this was the woman who had just turned me into a murderer. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with fatigue, the stress of the night and the alcohol I’d consumed dragging me down.

  “I have to go inside,” I said, turning away from Nat and stumbling toward the door.

  “I’ll be right in,” Nat said calmly.

  Chapter 19

  Despite my exhaustion and excessive alcohol consumption, I couldn’t fall asleep. I just lay there, staring up into the darkness, listening to the soft whir of the white noise machine Nat kept on her bedside table, claiming the noise muted the sound of my snoring.

  Before we’d retired for the evening, Nat had changed into her favorite nightshirt, which was pink and had cartoons of owls screen-printed on the front. She’d brushed her teeth vigorously, moisturized her face and got into bed without forgetting to turn on the white noise machine. She’d fallen asleep almost instantly.

  I wondered if she was a sociopath.

  Was that possible? Could you be married to someone for almost a decade and a half, and only then realize that they were detached from normal human emotions? Could she have hid it for that long? Or was it possible for sociopathy to lie dormant all that time, suddenly to wake, turning what was previously a perfectly normal woman into a killer? Or more accurately, attempted killer. I was the one who had actually killed Robert.

  Meanwhile, Nat slept like the dead.

  The dead. I couldn’t get the word out of my brain. It stuck there, droning incessantly in my ears. Dead, dead, dead. Robert was dead. Permanently, irrevocably dead.

  At six in the morning, as the room began to lighten, I finally gave up on sleep, slid out of bed and pulled on my running clothes. I slipped out of our bedroom without waking Nat and headed downstairs. I’d been sort-of-kind-of training for a half marathon for the past year, although as my work schedule and enthusiasm waned and waxed, I’d put off signing up for an actual race. Today I was ready for a long, grueling run that would hopefully make my body feel as terrible as my psyche did.

  I headed east down our street, took a turn north, another east, so that I was running toward the bridges that arched onto the barrier islands. It felt like I was running through mud, my legs heavy with the effort. As I ran, my footsteps fell into a rhythm and the word playing on repeat in my thoughts suddenly changed from dead to murder. Murd-er, murd-er, with each footfall. And even then, it seemed half-assed, since really, what I should be hearing in my head was murd-er-er, murd-er-er. Robert was the victim of a murd-er. But I was the murd-er-er.

  As I ran, my brain kept playing the terrible scene on a loop—my lifting the pillow...pushing it down on Robert’s face...the terrible inhuman sound he made...his body writhing violently before going finally, terrifyingly still...

  I hadn’t meant to do it. Hell, I’d fantasized about beating Robert to a pulp when I found out what he’d done to Charlie. But I never thought I was capable of taking a life.

  Except I had.

  And now the only question was, would I get away with it?

  Oh, and the follow-up—had killing Robert condemned me to a life everlasting in a hell I wasn’t sure I’d even believed in yesterday? It was funny how that worked. When you’re middle-aged and a basically decent person, you don’t spend too much time thinking about the afterlife. If there is one, great! They’ll definitely let in a nice guy who’s always paid his taxes and volunteered his free time coaching his kid’s basketball team. And if there isn’t an afterlife, why waste time and emotional energy thinking about it?

  But now I’d committed one of the worst sins possible. Hell, the Catholics believed that taking your own life would earn you a ban from heaven. And I had killed another person. There was probably no coming back from that.

  A queasy, oily fear took root in my bowels.

  Just then, a police car screamed by, lights flashing, siren blaring. I was midstride, just running by a bank as the cruiser passed me. I started at the noise and my toe dragged against the pavement, tripping me up. I spun my arms wildly, just managing to stay upright. The police cruiser headed toward the bridge ahead, where apparently there was a criminal—not me, a real criminal—needing their attention. I leaned forward, bracing my hands against my thighs, panting heavily. Was this what the rest of my life would look like? Terror whenever a police car passed by?

  My stomach shifted.

  “Oh, shit,” I said out loud.

  I managed to stagger behind an ornamental landscaping bush before I vomited. There was nothing in my system, as I hadn’t consumed anything since the bourbon the night before, but my stomach didn’t seem aware of that. I retched and I retched until foul-tasting bile filled my mouth and my abdomen cramped. I stood there for a few long moments, hunched over, hoping the bush shielded me from the view of passing cars.

  Come on, Clarke, I thought. You’ve got to get it together.

  I finally stood upright, arching my back and willing my stomach to cooperate. When I finally thought I could continue on, I started to run again. I knew I should turn around and head for home—lack of food and sleep combined with what I now knew was a throbbing hangover was not the stuff that elite athletes are made of. But something inside me pushed me on, told me that I had to run up the bridge, that the very act of doing so would be a victory of sorts.

  Almost as soon as I started up the bridge, I could feel myself starting to falter. But then, something odd happened. I thought of that fucking monster Robert touching my son, and encouraging him, no, grooming him to touch him back. Suddenly I began to run harder, faster. The road in front of me grew steeper as I headed farther up the bridge. My quads burned, my lungs felt heavy in my chest. And instead of murd-er, murd-er, murd-er playing on repeat in my thoughts, I heard, fuck him, fuck him, FUCK HIM.

  I reached the summit, my breath heaving, my lungs burning. I tore off my shirt and let out an inhuman roar.

  “Argh,” I yelled, and I actually beat my fists—one of them still gripping my sweaty shirt—against my chest, as I ran in place, my knees churning high.

  “Hey, Will.”

  I looked up and saw Tyler Young jogging toward me. Tyler was a podiatrist, apparently an extremely successful one, judging from his three-thousand-square-foot home on the water.

  “Hey, Tyler.” I wondered if he’d heard me roar and hoped that if he had, he’d have the good manners to ignore it.

  Tyler held up a limp hand in greeting as he shuffled past me, barely lifting his feet from the ground. “Can’t stop,” he huffed. “Trying to keep up my pace.”

  “Go get ’em.” I held up a fist as though I was cheering him on.

  Tyler’s oldest daughter, Emma, had been on a T-ball team with Charlie a few years back. I’d gotten a kick out of what a fierce competitor she’d been, the bow holding back her long, dark brown curls at odds with the steely, cold gaze she always had at bat. Unlike mine, Tyler’s entire life hadn’t taken a drastic, horrific shift over the past twelve hours. He was still a successful suburban
dad, probably a little stressed out about the size of his mortgage. Possibly a little resentful that his wife had insisted on the Carrara marble in the kitchen or the surround shower in the bathroom that she’d seen on a commercial. Even if the added stress of those expenses meant that Tyler would indulge in an extra bowl of ice cream now and again, then try to run it off on Saturday mornings.

  I was suddenly so jealous of Tyler’s life, I found myself at the breaking point. Tears pricked in my eyes and my sight went blurry. I braced my arms against the railing of the bridge and hung my head. I breathed in deeply, feeling the salt air expand my lungs before I exhaled it slowly.

  I turned around and jogged back down the bridge toward home.

  * * *

  “I was starting to worry about you,” Nat said when I walked into the kitchen, sweaty and disheveled.

  “Why, were you afraid I might have gone off and killed someone else?” I grabbed a glass from the cupboard and filled it up at the sink. I gulped the water down in one go and filled the glass again.

  Nat waited while I hydrated. “You can’t make jokes like that,” she said, once I’d set the empty glass on the counter.

  “Why not?”

  “Why do you think? Someone might hear you.”

  I looked from left to right with exaggerated care. “The only person who can hear me is the one who manipulated me into becoming a murderer.”

  Natalie folded her arms over her chest. “I know you’re upset. But you need to be careful. And when you’re up to it, we need to go over our story for last night in detail, just in case we’re ever questioned about where we were.”

  “Wait, now you want to talk about it? Because just a few hours ago, you decided to put us in this situation, to turn me into a fucking murderer without giving me any input into any of it whatsoever.”

  Nat shook her head. “What about Charlie?”

  I stopped and drew in a deep breath. Memories of my son flooded me—the baby with the ridiculously long eyelashes grinning up at me, the little boy who high-fived Buzz Lightyear at Disney World, the tween with his infectious froggy laugh. The stripped-down truth was that I would do anything for him.