Black Widows

by Cate Quinn

  I nod.

  She whistles. “Well. You sure were prepared,” she says finally, returning the pictures to the file.

  “So…” Brewer does that not-quite smile again. “You say your husband went out fishing yesterday?”

  “That’s correct.” My mouth feels dry. I swallow. “He fished every Friday.”

  “But this time, he didn’t come back. That didn’t concern you?”

  “Um. Well, he would sometimes be out late. That was when he made his biggest catches. If he didn’t get anything during the day.”

  “So it was usual for him to stay out all night?”

  “Not all night. But after dark maybe. He’d come home after we were all asleep.”

  Something passes across Brewer’s face and is gone.

  “And this fishing spot,” she continues. “That’s what…a five-minute walk from the house?” She shuffles pictures and selects the wooden farm building. “This place?”

  “About five minutes from there, yes.”

  I picture the low-lying land where the river widens, the olive-hued water cutting through dusty dirt and wiry daubs of shrub. Opposite our bank is a wall of tan rock, weathered to a sheer vertical slab and seeping with rivulets of moisture, like whey squeezing from curds.

  Near the bank is a juniper tree, all gnarled up like an old lady’s hand. Folk don’t tend to appreciate junipers on account of them being so ugly and stark, but I’ve always liked them. They can grow in the thinnest soil, under blazing sun or a cap of snow, and they’re much stronger than they look.

  “You wives ever go down to that part of the river?” asks Brewer.

  “Not often. Once a year, Blake would baptize Tina and me in the water.”

  “Not Emily?” She says it a little too fast.

  “She can’t swim. The current frightens her, so she would be baptized on the shore.”

  Brewer does that little eyebrow lift-and-drop again. “So talk me through this,” she says. “Your husband goes out. Doesn’t come home. Had there been any cross words?”

  “We had a fight,” I admit. My chest pulls in on itself at the memory, making my breath tight. “But we’d resolved it.”

  “Mind me asking you what that fight was about, Mrs. Nelson?”

  She’s looking at my arm again, and I tug at the sleeve, even though the bruises are now covered.

  “Um. Blake had spoken with one of my relatives. I wasn’t real comfortable about it.”

  “Okay.” Brewer folds her hands, leans forward.

  “My relationship with my family is complicated, Officer Brewer. We don’t get along so good.”

  “And Blake was interfering? That’s what made you so mad at him?”

  I meet her eyes. “I wasn’t so mad, Officer,” I say quietly. “But yes, I had a grievance with Blake. I thought he should have asked me. We talked about it. He apologized.”

  Brewer’s eyebrows lift.

  “Simple as that, huh? Sure wish my husband was so reasonable,” she says. “Maybe we’d have stayed together. Okay. So then what? Blake goes out, doesn’t come home. You assume, what? He’s stayin’ out on his lonesome in the desert?”

  Her expression makes it clear how unlikely she thinks this sounds.

  “I…I assumed he had stayed out late fishing, then come back after I was asleep.”

  “How about when you woke in the morning and he wasn’t there?”

  “Well, it wasn’t unknown for him to stay out all night. If he was deep in thoughtful prayer, maybe. But I, um… I wasn’t in that bed. The…the, uh, wedding bed.” I can feel my face turning beet red.

  “This would be the bed you designate for relations with your husband?”

  I nod.

  “Right.” Brewer frowns. “Who was in that bed?”

  “He had chosen Emily that night.” I try to keep my voice neutral.

  A twist of pain flickers on her face.

  “So you assumed he’d stayed out late, then gotten into bed with another wife?” clarifies Brewer.

  “Yes.”

  She tilts her head slightly, that frown again.

  “That don’t bother you, Mrs. Nelson? I mean, I hate to ask. But if that were me, and my husband was in bed with another woman…” She makes a face to show how badly this would sit with her.

  “It does sometimes,” I say carefully. “It’s something we all work on as part of our belief. We love as Jesus loves. We learn to manage our jealousy. It’s an ongoing process.”

  Compartmentalize.

  My state-appointed therapist’s words.

  Putting things into boxes in your mind, Rachel. We call it compartmentalizing. It kept you safe.

  Brewer hesitates, unconvinced, then decides to move on.

  “So to clarify, you’re saying you had a fight with your husband, but it was all resolved. No bad blood between you,” she confirms. “He goes out fishing, stays out late, which is regular enough. When he didn’t come home, you didn’t notice, ’cause you assumed he’d gotten into bed with a different wife. That about it?”

  “Yes.” I lick my lips.

  Brewer looks at her notepad, thumbs some pages.

  “According to you, Emily Martinelli went out walking by herself around about the same time Blake went fishing. But in the opposite direction, right? Up away from the river.”

  I nod. She thumbs her notes.

  “And Tina Keidis, so far as you’re aware, was in the farmhouse the whole time. You believe you would have seen her if she went down to the river, since the route passes by the barn where you were canning food. Right?”

  “I’ve told you all this already, and it’s in your notes,” I say, snarky.

  “Uh-huh. That’s interesting,” says Brewer. “I have to tell you, that story doesn’t exactly fit with what the other wives are saying.”

  Chapter Nine

  Tina, Sister-Wife

  They’ve set up for questioning now. I’m in a little room with a table and chairs. Still no tape. Officer Brewer seems smart, so I figure she’s also got Rachel and Emily sat apart in different rooms. So she can corroborate our stories without us knowing what the others are sayin’.

  I tell the cops how things are. She’s got no vices, Rachel. Apart from sugar of course, with her Mormon fat ass. All those god-awful cookies she bakes that taste stale even when they’re still warm from the oven. Emily is batshit crazy, but in that eyes-down, timid way. I guess she’s too young to have acquired much in the way of bad habits. They believe, you know, they’ll see Blake again. Me, I’m not so sure of things I can’t see with my own eyes. I’m the cuckoo in the nest.

  It’s obvious the cops have an agenda. They’re tryin’ to be all understanding and all. Ask if I need to see a grief counselor. But I know the score. Police only care about you when they’re worried your statement will be inadmissible. I’m guessing the other girls will be fooled by this, but I know how it goes. What it means is they think we must have something pretty damn important to say, and they don’t want to risk some hotshot lawyer proving they bullied it out of us while we were all eaten up with grief for our dead Blakey.

  So they pass me hankies and nod and frown and offer water. Tell me how hard it must be. But not a single fuckin’ one of them knows how it feels to go to bed married to the love of your life and wake up to find he’s gone. Just gone.

  Language. I can still hear Blake frowning at my curse words.

  In between cryin’ and gasping for breath, I notice the cops looking at me kinda funny. What they don’t know is I can lip-read pretty good—learned in the Vegas casinos so I could tell if security was about to make a pull. So I could see quite clearly Brewer asking her chubby New Yorker cop friend, “Think she’s for real?”

  I’m weighing up what this means when Brewer slides into the seat opposite me. “As you know,” she says, “
Mrs. Nelson was able to identify the body. There’s no doubt it is Blake Nelson.”

  This starts me up all over again.

  Brewer sits back, shiny ponytail swaying.

  “At this point, we have two possibilities,” she continues. “We’re not ruling either out. The first possibility is your husband took his own life.”

  Her amber eyes fix on me.

  “No.” I shake my head. “I’m not sayin’ things were perfect, but that’s not in his nature.”

  “No causes of stress?” presses Brewer. “Nothing at work?”

  I think about my answer.

  “Well, he was on the road a lot,” I say finally. “Blake was in sales. He sold those big canning machines. The Survive Well.”

  “Oh, like in the ad?” Brewer hums the jingle. I instantly picture the lipsticked ad lady, gesturing to her big ol’ pantry of colorful preserves, the enormous Survive Well with its pressure dials and gauges sitting in front.

  I have a sudden image of Blake, loading boxes into his beat-up truck. My throat swells tight.

  “Take your time, Miss Keidis.”

  I nod, but I still can’t speak.

  “A lot of LDS folk preserve their own food, is that right?” Brewer is trying to move the conversation to lighter things. Like we’re old buddies, shootin’ the breeze. It’s a cop trick I’m familiar with.

  “It’s part of the religion,” I say, swallowing. “At least a year’s supply in storage, minimum. And now the company Blake works for is selling prepacked.” I sniff. “Food enough for 365 days, ready-boxed. Macaroni, rice, things like that.” It’s a relief to talk about things that don’t make my throat tight.

  “So business was good,” clarifies Brewer.

  “As far as I know.”

  “What about stresses at home? Three women must be a lot to manage.” She tries for a smile.

  I pick at the edges of my pink nail polish. It’s hard to keep my usual guard up when I feel my heart might cave in.

  “Us wives had a big fight,” I admit. “On the wedding anniversary.”

  “‘The’ wedding anniversary?”

  “Right.” I’m sneering a little. “Rachel’s wedding anniversary. See, since she is the first wife, it’s ‘the’ wedding anniversary.”

  Brewer’s eyes widen a little. No one ever thinks this about Rachel when they first meet her. She comes off like she has all her shit together, but a lotta the time, she has the maturity of a nine-year-old.

  “I can see how that would cause tension,” says Brewer.

  “Damn straight. Blake found us all fixin’ to kill one another.”

  I instantly regret my choice of words.

  “It turned violent?” confirms Brewer.

  “No,” I lie. “Nothing like that.”

  “But things became heated because Rachel’s anniversary was considered the most significant?”

  I shake my head. “No. I mean to say, that didn’t help. But it was just domestic stuff, you know. Rachel has particular ways of doin’ things. And she’s very private. That doesn’t work so good when you’re sharin’ a house with two other women.”

  From the way she’s looking at me, I think Brewer might know I’m not telling the truth. I wonder if she’ll check at the hospital. Find out what Rachel did to Emily. They registered under a false name, but Brewer seems pretty smart.

  “Rachel felt her privacy had been invaded?”

  She’s sharp, I’ll give her that.

  “You’ll have to ask Rachel.” I fix her with a long look.

  “What about the fight between Blake and Rachel? Can you tell me about that?”

  “Well, if they fought, I didn’t hear it.”

  Brewer drums her fingers on the table. “Rachel Nelson never mentioned any trouble between the three of you gals.”

  I laugh. It sounds hard, even to me.

  “Yeah, well, Rachel never does tell the whole story. It’s her way of lyin’ without endangerin’ her spot in heaven, you know?”

  It’s actually nice to be able to let it all out.

  “So Mrs. Nelson is lying?”

  “No. Like I said. She doesn’t lie. She just leaves things out.”

  “Okay. Well, Miss Keidis, can you tell us what Rachel might have neglected to tell us?” Brewer adjusts her shiny ponytail.

  “Oh, you want me to snitch? Are you kiddin’ me? You’re the detective. Find it out from Rachel.”

  “You gave up smoking recently?” asks Brewer.

  I realize my hands are dancing all over the table.

  “Uh-huh. Part of my conversion to the Church.”

  “I gave up myself a while back,” Brewer says. “Funny thing, you can go months without thinking about it. Then something’ll just trigger you.” She snaps her fingers with an impressively loud click. “You want a cigarette?” she adds. “Couple of the older guys smoke. I’m sure I can get you one.”

  Aha. So she’s doin’ the good cop. I was wondering which side she’d fall to.

  I move my hands off the table.

  “No thank you, Officer. I’m a good Mormon nowadays.”

  “If there’s something you want to tell us, Miss Keidis, you don’t need to be afraid.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  She looks at me, hard. “Your sister-wife out there? Emily? She’s got some bruising to her ear. Couldn’t say for sure, but it looks like someone might have hit her head against something. And your other wife, Rachel, has five little bruises on her right forearm, I’d say about the exact size of fingerprints. Like somebody grabbed her.”

  She mimes, putting her own hand over her lower arm.

  “Was your Blake Nelson ever violent, Miss Keidis? Lose his temper?”

  There’s a long pause, and I kinda figure what she’s getting at. “You don’t… I mean, you don’t really think we all got together and killed our husband, right? Or, like, covered for someone?” Despite everything, I’m laughing, bordering on hysterical. “To do that, we would have all needed to like each other.”

  “You didn’t get along?”

  This sobers me right up.

  “You haven’t figured that part out yet? No, Officer, we don’t get along. Not even a little bit. Which, since we’re spending all eternity together, kinda sucks.”

  Brewer drums her fingers on the desk.

  “It would almost seem,” she says, “as though your husband went out shopping for wives. A maid in the parlor, a cook in the kitchen, a whore in the bedroom.”

  I laugh. “Which one was the cook?”

  Chapter Ten

  Emily, Sister-Wife

  The police officer heats me a meal while I wait. Apparently, they want to ask us some questions about Blake, who has now been formally identified. The lady called Brewer kept trying to tell me things I didn’t want to hear. Like Blake was found hanging by his own belt from the gnarled juniper tree he liked to sit under while he fished. Also, how he had other injuries that made no sense. Then she used a bunch of other long words, like abrasions and perineum and nasty things I didn’t fully understand.

  If you ask me, it’s just plain rude to keep telling someone things when they’ve made it clear they don’t want to hear them, but Officer Brewer doesn’t think that way, I guess.

  The police officer is sliding two white plastic packages from a cupboard. He waves them at me. “Macaroni and cheese or lasagna?” I choose lasagna.

  My mouth is actually watering at the smell of it. I’ve been married four years now, so I guess that’s four years of food so bland you have to chew extra hard to remember you’re eating.

  Needless to say, there was no Caputo’s deli for Mrs. Rachel Nelson, no siree. When we needed groceries, she and I would ride out to Deseret Holdings. A huge Mormon-friendly store, with aisles and aisles of everything canned and packed in dr
ab containers to last a lifetime. It was like the end of days. No kidding. The spice section contained three products: salt, pepper, and ketchup, all in bulk-buy canisters, naturally. Rachel cooks like she’s been awarded a catering contract for a prison and is looking to reduce overhead.

  The lasagna is set before me in its little white plastic tray, sagging at the sides from the heat of the microwave.

  I close my mouth as I take the first mouthful. I’m not even hungry, but I don’t think anything has ever tasted so delicious.

  The officer in charge is watching me, fascinated. “Food’s good?” he deadpans.

  I nod rapidly.

  “Well, you’re a first,” he says. “Most of ’em complain.”

  He’s looking at the side of my head.

  “You hurt your ear?” he asks, touching the top of his own. My hand moves up automatically. It’s not so sore anymore, but the tip is dark purple.

  “It’s nothing. Just…I bumped it.”

  He slides across a plastic chair and sits opposite. “Is there anyone you can call?” he asks. “You got family?”

  “They don’t talk to me since the wedding,” I say.

  He nods, his face sad.

  “You want us to telephone someone anyway?” he suggests. “Maybe your mom. In my experience, something like this can overcome old resentments. Perhaps she’ll feel different from what you think.”

  I shake my head.

  “She won’t.”

  I’m thinking of my wedding night, when I was crying so hard I could barely get my words out. If Momma wouldn’t speak to me then, she’s not gonna change her mind over this. Whatever this is.

  Remembering that phone call brings a lot of things back I’d rather forget. Like my wedding day. How at that awful welcome-to-the-Nelson-family dinner, Blake sorta nodded at Rachel after we finished our desserts, and she got up and left.

  Blake smiled at me and suggested we go upstairs. He had a funny look I’d never seen before. My palms broke out in cold sweat. Everything was different now. I was a married woman. I was allowed to be alone with a man.

  Almost as soon as we got to the bedroom, Blake started to take my clothes off, which just freaked me out.