I Love You More

by Jennifer Murphy

  Back on the blanket, we retrieved the pink towels from Bert’s woven bag, dabbed our skin, dropped our backs to the blanket and fell asleep.

  In an hour’s time, we woke. Renewed. Released. Reborn. We dressed, and only then, after all the preamble, did we begin to talk about what happened that day.

  In keeping with the order of the wives, Diana went first. She began with where we’d left off the previous year, with the events that followed the murder. She detailed the arrival of the neighbors, and then the police. She summarized the questions she’d been asked, and her answers.

  “I stuck to the story,” she said, proudly. “Just like you said, Jewels.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Jewels said, smugly. “Since obviously Bert didn’t get my message, or decided to ignore it.”

  “What do you mean?” Bert asked. “Was there another message? I just got the one message about the meeting being canceled.”

  “And you chose to ignore it,” Jewels said. “What a surprise.”

  “I didn’t ignore it,” Bert said.

  “Wait,” Diana said. “So you did get my message, Jewels?”

  “Yes,” Jewels said. “And I passed it on to Bert.”

  Two sets of eyes focused on Bert.

  “Why are you looking at me? I didn’t do it.”

  “Are you certain?” Jewels asked.

  “Yes, Jewels, I’m certain. I think I’d remember killing someone. Come on, Diana. Obviously it was you. You got angry when he told you.”

  “Told me what?” Diana asked.

  Two sets of eyes looked at Diana.

  “Seriously, Diana?” Bert said. “Why play dumb now? It’s just us.”

  “I swear to God I didn’t kill him,” Diana said. “I wanted to, but I changed my mind.”

  Three long pregnant pauses.

  “Well, one of you is lying,” Jewels said.

  “Maybe you’re the one lying,” Bert said.

  “Me?” Jewels said. “How could I kill him? I was at a design charrette.”

  “But you weren’t there the entire time, were you, Jewels?” Diana asked.

  “What do you mean?” Jewels asked.

  “Don’t act dumb, Jewels. The police told me about the airline ticket and rental car. I know you used my name so no one would know it was you. Or maybe you were trying to set me up.”

  “Back up,” Bert said. “What did she do?”

  “Jewels rented a car the morning of the murder, and then flew back to Philadelphia in time to catch her flight back to Raleigh.”

  Bert looked at Jewels with surprise. “Is that true?”

  Jewels didn’t respond.

  “She obviously didn’t like that I called it off, so she took matters into her own hands,” Diana said. “Clever, taking my driver’s license, Jewels. When exactly did you do that? That last time we met? While we were napping?”

  “Actually, I didn’t take it. I found it. It must’ve fallen out of your bag when you got out that damn notebook. It was loose, right? I was going to say something, but then, yes, I figured it was a safety net. You know, like Oliver always said, a just in case. But I didn’t kill the bastard. When I got there, the place was already swarming with cops and medics. I figured Bert had been there and gone already. So I left.”

  “You expect us to believe that?” Bert said.

  “I don’t care whether you believe it or not, Bert,” Jewels said. “You tell me, Diana. Was or was not Oliver already dead at a little after eight? I would’ve gotten there earlier if it hadn’t been for the ferry. I waited forever for the damn thing to show.”

  “The neighbors said they heard the gunshot at seven fifteen,” Diana said.

  “There you have it,” Jewels said.

  We ran the events of that day back through our minds. In that moment, we no longer knew who or what to believe. In that moment, we no longer trusted one another.

  “What did you mean you wanted to kill him, Diana?” Jewels asked.

  “What?”

  “You said you wanted to kill him, as if you weren’t going to wait for Bert. Why?”

  “Because of Bert’s message.”

  “What message?” Jewels asked.

  “The one she left on Oliver’s phone. When I heard it, I thought he’d played me. I was so mad at you, Bert.”

  “You were mad at me?” Bert said. “I was furious with you. I figured you killed him because he told you he was choosing me.”

  “If you were so pissed, why didn’t you say so when we got out of our cars?” Diana asked. “Why wait until now, after we toasted, had lunch, swam?”

  “I don’t know,” Bert said. “It was just so good to see you both. Here, listen, I … I saved the message. I was in the shower so didn’t pick up.” She fished inside her purse.

  “Hey, babe. It’s me. Listen, there’s something I want to tell you. I had hoped I could say this in person, but I’ll make up for it when I get back from this stupid board meeting. I promise. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that I’ve been a shit. Fuck, I’ve been more than a shit. I want you to know that you and Isabelle are all that matter to me. All that ever mattered. Do you understand? I love you so much, more than anything and anyone in the world. And I’m going to change. I promise. From now on it’s just the three of us. No one else will ever come between us.” Pause. “I love you, babe. I’ll see you in a few days. Kiss Izzie for me.”

  Just then, as if in warning, the whip-poor-will cried. Even Jewels looked startled and fearful, but in true form she collected herself.

  “What I don’t understand, Diana,” she said, “is why after you heard that message, after you admitted you wanted to kill him, why you called it off.”

  “I … I don’t know,” Diana said. “I just thought—”

  “Thought what?” Jewels asked.

  “That I overreacted. Oliver had been so loving.”

  “Oh—my—God,” Jewels said. “Seriously, Diana? Well I’ve got news for both of you. Oliver told me the exact same thing. That he was going to leave the two of you. He said it that previous Monday, the last time we had sex. Fucking amazing sex. Only I wasn’t naïve enough to believe him. Oliver was a lying, cheating, controlling bastard who had to win. He was a sociopath, remember?”

  “You had sex with him?” Diana asked.

  “It was just sex, Diana,” Jewels said. “Get over it.”

  Diana started wringing her hands. “But if none of us killed him, who did?”

  Jewels twirled a lock of her hair. “Good question.”

  Bert smoothed her skirt. “Could it have been a burglar? Was anything missing?”

  Recognition dawned on Diana’s face. “The police didn’t find Oliver’s money. I just figured he’d forgotten to bring it.”

  “Wow,” Jewels said.

  “Yeah wow,” Bert said.

  “Wait,” Diana said. “What about the gun?”

  “What about it?” Bert asked.

  “The police said they didn’t find a gun. I’m sure I put it in the crawl space, on the shelf behind the little blue door like we said.”

  “Maybe they didn’t look in the crawl space,” Bert said. “Maybe it’s still there.”

  “Do you think it is?” Diana asked. “Should we go back and see?”

  “Are you sure you put it there?” Jewels asked.

  “Yes,” Diana said. “I mean, I don’t know—”

  “Think, Diana,” Jewels said. “Maybe he forgot it or decided not to bring it.”

  “Yes,” Bert said. “Maybe he left it somewhere. He was always moving it around.”

  “No, I’m sure he brought it,” Diana said. “I remember putting it on that shelf in the crawl space. I did it right before I left to call you that night, Jewels. Oh God. Maybe I dreamed I put it there. Everything about that day is so cloudy.”

  “Why would you put it in the crawl space if you intended to call everything off?” Jewels asked.

  “That’s just it,” Diana said. “I don’t know.”

>   “Well,” Jewels said. “I doubt the police would’ve missed it if you had put it there, so obviously you didn’t.”

  We sat for a while, watching the sun reflecting on the lake, listening to the song of the whip-poor-will, trying to make sense of what we’d just learned, coming to the grave realization that each of us had lived the past year thinking ultimately she had been Oliver’s one and only. That each of us had been willing, even happy, to piss the other two away, all so she could have Oliver to herself.

  “Well, I for one don’t care what happened, or who pulled the trigger,” Jewels said. “The endgame is still the same. Oliver is dead.”

  Those were the last words we ever spoke to one another. As if in acknowledgment, a gust of wind blew through the trees, swirled through our private clearing, upset the picnic basket, yanked the blanket from beneath us and all but sucked it into the air. Our champagne glasses shattered. Our hair and skirts flapped and waggled. The empty bottle started spinning, faster and faster, and then slowed, pausing for a moment in front of each of us, and finally stopping. In that moment, we felt a visceral sensation of diffusing, like a single atom splitting into three. We reached for our own bodies, touched a bare leg, shoulder, neck, face, experienced something we hadn’t in nearly two years, that tingling awareness of skin touching skin.

  Oliver had brought us together. Planning his murder had kept us together. We had believed his execution would seal us together forever. But ultimately, Oliver, not we, had won. He’d driven a wedge between us as final as his death.

  Without so much as a glance at the others, we rose, gathered our belongings, and went our separate ways.

  Kyle

  The word rendezvous took one last spin through my mind and disappeared.

  Mack and I had followed the map Picasso gave me. We arrived early, crouched behind the tree trunk, which may have been big enough to conceal Picasso but required some serious contorting on our part. One of my legs was cramped and the other asleep, but out of fear we might snap a twig or rustle the carpet of dry leaves beneath us, we’d frozen ourselves in position throughout the wives’ meeting. Now we stretched, rubbed our legs, twisted our necks, brushed twigs and leaves from our pants. The sound of cracking bones joined that of the whistling birds.

  “Christ,” Mack said. “I’m getting old. And what was with that fucking wind?”

  “Yeah, crazy,” I said. “For a minute there I thought we were all going to swirl into the sky like Dorothy’s house.”

  “Do you buy it?” Mack asked. “One of them could still be lying.”

  By all accounts the three of them were innocent. While Mack and I had both been wrong, our brains hosted different boxing matches. Mack’s presented the renowned middleweights Confused Disbelief in one corner and Stubborn Resolve in the other. Mine featured championship heavyweights Total Relief and Sinking Gut.

  “To the others?” I said. “Doubtful.”

  “Yeah, but what if they just didn’t want to admit it to one another, or maybe whoever did it is in denial? Think we should take them in, question them separately?”

  “Why?” I asked. “What do we have? No gunshot residue or blood splatter on the first Mrs. Lane, nothing that puts either of the other wives at the crime scene, and three admissions, heard firsthand by law enforcement, to planning the murder but not carrying it out. Why would they cop to the plotting and not the crime?”

  “What about the gun?” Mack asked. “I searched that crawl space myself.”

  “What about it?” I asked. “Maybe there never was a gun. Who cares what happened to a gun Oliver Lane bought and registered ten years ago. He could’ve sold it, given it away, or it’s still in one of their houses somewhere, who knows? I say the real perp had a piece on him when he arrived at the scene. He shot Lane, took the cash, and left with the gun.”

  “So Murder on the Orient Express? Jesus. What are the odds?”

  We didn’t talk during the drive back to Cooper’s Island. We both needed to wrap our brains around what we’d seen and heard that day. It hadn’t been what either of us had expected. I spent the time thinking about what was next, how Diana and I could get beyond all this. What the future held.

  The sun was setting as we pulled onto the ferry. I left the car and found a spot at the railing to watch it. When I was kid, like every other kid, I hated Cooper’s Island. I felt trapped by the water, but there was nothing like an Outer Banks sunset, nothing like that pink glow dropping over the deep purple water. Nothing like the momentary kaleidoscope of color that happened when the two met. I once asked my mother if the sun drowned when it went down. I figured a different sun rose every morning, and then it drowned too. I thought maybe that’s where darkness came from, from the world’s sadness.

  “It doesn’t drown,” my mother had said. “It just goes to sleep.”

  “The sun sleeps in the ocean?” I asked.

  “No,” my mother said. “It sleeps in your heart.”

  Mack dropped me off at the house that once belonged to my father and mother, the house that held memories good and bad. I opened the front door to the same empty rooms, same bare floors and walls, same rickety table, same pair of wobbly chairs. I went to the refrigerator, grabbed a box of five-day-old pizza, smelled it, figured it would do. My trusty bottle of Redbreast sat on the counter by the sink. I started to take a drink from the bottle but thought better of it. The events of the day, however daunting, at least deserved a proper glass. I swallowed the shot in one gulp. The liquid burned in my throat, warmed my stomach. I poured another.

  Sometimes the thing you wanted most in the world was to be a seasoned and smart cop, to find that other world you don’t know is out there. Sometimes you wished you weren’t so seasoned. You wished you didn’t have that sixth sense that some cops call their gut. You wished that one final word wasn’t still flying through your mind.

  Picasso

  I love you more than life itself: a phrase made up of seven words.

  I can no longer think about Daddy without also thinking about this phrase. Which means I don’t much like it, and I definitely don’t trust it. In fact, the only way I can get myself to feel nothing one way or another about it is to break it down to individual words.

  I: pronoun used by a speaker to refer to himself or herself.

  Love: as defined earlier, an intense feeling of deep affection.

  You: pronoun used to refer to the person or people being addressed.

  More: comparative, implying a greater or additional amount or degree.

  Than: conjunction or preposition introducing the second element in a comparison.

  Life: the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.

  Itself: used to emphasize a particular thing or animal previously mentioned.

  Individually each definition is simply factual, but put them together and, depending on who the initial speaker is (or was), the meanings of the words become vulnerable to manipulation. Which in my opinion is sacrilege. Words mean what they mean, and anyone who knowingly misrepresents their meanings obviously has no regard for truth or language. Coming from Daddy, the only true word in this phrase is I. Sometimes in my mind I play with this phrase; I fix the meaning by switching the words around. I love life itself more than you, for instance. That way I can pretend Daddy wasn’t such a liar. But what if you can’t really switch the words around? What if the phrase was shortened to its first four words?

  I love you more.

  I guess I should start with what happened the day before Daddy died. Daddy and I were working on the sand castle while Mama swam. Daddy was sweating. He wiped the back of his hand on his forehead. “Geez, it’s hot out here. Run in and get us some Cokes, will you Picasso?”

  Daddy had never even once called me Picasso before, and so I told him that.

  “You’re silly,” he said. “I call you Picasso all the time.”
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br />   “No, you don’t,” I said.

  “Don’t argue with me, kid,” he said. He made the unsmile again, just as he’d done the day before, and the way he said kid was like I could’ve been any kid to him, definitely not his, and definitely not one that he loved more than life itself, more like one that annoyed him. I remember thinking about what Jewels had said about Daddy saying those same words to everyone, not just Mama and me, and what she said about him being a sociopath, and right then and there I believed with all my heart that he was. Then the unsmile was replaced by the charming smile, and like I always did, I questioned whether I’d seen it.

  I ran as fast as I could up to the beach house, the sand burning the bottoms of my feet the entire way, rinsed off under the outside faucet—Mama hated it when I tracked in sand—and dried off with the towel Mama had left by the sliding glass doors. Instead of going straight to the refrigerator, I went to the bathroom. I used to have accidents a lot when I was little—the pediatrician said it was either stress or an undeveloped bladder—and even though I hadn’t done that in a really long time, at least four years, that’s what happened that day. I didn’t make it on time. I peed on my favorite purple swimsuit, and a little on the bathroom floor. There was some Formula 409 under the sink; I sprayed it on the puddle and wiped it up with toilet paper. I had to flush the toilet three times because I used so much paper. Then I closed the sink drain, twisted the tap, took off my suit, dunked it a few times, wrung it out, hung it on the hook on the back of the door, and emptied the water. I figured if Mama asked about it, I’d just tell her it got full of sand.

  Wrapped in the towel I’d brought in from outside, I headed to my bedroom to put on another suit but couldn’t find one. Mama always packed at least three swimsuits for me, so I figured the other ones were probably in one of her drawers. The bureau in their room was one of those kinds with a mirror and six drawers, three on each side. I opened one of the top drawers first, then a middle and bottom one. Still no suit. I opened the other top drawer—

  That’s when I saw Daddy’s gun.

  I stared at it for a long time, thinking that maybe I should hide it so no one could use it on Daddy. I remembered from eavesdropping at RCP that Mama was supposed to put it in the crawl space under the house, and since she hadn’t done that yet, after all tomorrow was Kill Daddy Day, I thought maybe she’d changed her mind. I decided to think more on all this while Daddy and I finished up the sand castle. My extra swimsuits were in the other bottom drawer mixed in with Mama’s. I put on the brown one, headed to the refrigerator to grab some Cokes, and went back outside.