Black Widows

by Cate Quinn

  “Are we going to sleep right now?” I asked. He smiled.

  I was wearing the special thick underwear they give you in the marriage temple. To stay pure. He began to take those off, too, and I panicked, because I wasn’t even sure if that was allowed, but he kind of pulled the bottoms and they came off. Well, that made me even more nervous, hysterical even. I think I was crying. I’d never been naked in front of anyone since I was a little girl, and especially not a full-grown man. And then he took some of his clothes off and I saw his Thing poking through his garments, and I felt as though I was having a heart attack. No kidding. Like my heart was beating out of my chest and I could hardly breathe. Blake still wasn’t saying anything at all, and he moved me onto the bed. Lordy, lordy. I thought I was going to die right there on those scratchy sheets, stinking of whatever strong detergent Rachel uses to get them whiter than white.

  My knees were tight together, and Blake sort of arranged my legs with his hands. I felt his Thing touch the inside of my leg, and a surge of nausea hit me. He was positioning himself…trying to put his Thing down there.

  I just froze. I didn’t know what to do. I lay on the bed, every muscle tight, figuring this couldn’t be happening.

  Blake’s face was all frowny, like there was something wrong with me. Then he moved my knees further out, and I felt a rush of air between my legs, and I realized he was looking at it. I started crying again, little snuffling sobs. I was literally dying of embarrassment. Like I felt my whole body was about to turn inside out.

  The nausea was pounding away, and suddenly it rose up, and all Rachel’s green Jell-O and creamed potatoes and god-awful soup came up part digested all over the sheets.

  Blake jerked back, horrified.

  I managed to say I was sorry, and then I was sick again. I was racked with it, like my stomach had a mind of its own. I heaved and wretched and made these gross embarrassing sounds. And I was so ashamed to be crying, and then the tears were mixing with snot.

  Blake put an arm around my shoulders. His Thing wasn’t big anymore. It looked all wilty, like a drooping flower. My pulse slowed a little. And then I was looking around the room. My room now, filled with all Rachel’s ornaments. My heart started racing again.

  “I’ll ask Rachel to talk to you,” Blake was saying. I heaved, but there was nothing left to come up.

  All I could think was I want my momma. I want to go home. But it was too late for that. Turns out Catholics aren’t real good at forgiveness, despite what you might have heard.

  Blake got up and opened the door to the bedroom. “Rachel, honey!” he shouted. “Can you come clear this up?” He glanced at me. “Put your garments back on,” he said, and there was a little ice in his voice that broke my heart. “You’re not really supposed to take them off.”

  There’s a snapping sound, and I realize I’ve broken a prong off my little plastic fork. It’s half-buried in the lasagna, which is three-quarters gone. I pout a little, wishing the meal back again.

  The police officer is staring at me. “You sure you’re okay?” he says finally.

  I nod, wondering if I was eating horribly. Rachel always scolded me on my table manners.

  “You don’t need to speak with a grief counselor?” he suggests.

  My husband’s died. They’re expecting me to be like Rachel likely is. Distraught. Crying.

  “I think I’m in shock.” I heard that on the TV and always thought it had a nice sound to it. Like an illness that doesn’t hurt.

  He nods but looks uncertain all the same.

  I tilt my broken fork and scrape out every last bit of food from the plastic container.

  Chapter Eleven

  Rachel, First Wife

  It’s taken me a while to notice, but I think Officer Brewer is making trips between the three of us. Going back and forth asking questions.

  The idea of what Emily might say is eating away at me.

  “Your storehouse out at the ranch,” says Officer Brewer. “Some fairly substantial equipment you had out there.”

  I smile. “You can blame my husband for that,” I say, realizing she’s referring to my industrial-grade canning machine. “He never would get domestic if something more powerful was available,” I tell her, remembering Blake’s store of outrageously modified gas-powered tools. “And he worked for the company, so…” I shrug my shoulders, letting her figure the rest.

  I can still remember Blake’s pride as he heaved the grossly outsize Survive Well 5000 from his Chevy.

  “Faulty,” he’d explained. “One of the geniuses down at the factory wired it to have sixty amps ’stead of thirty.” He shook his head and chuckled. “Coulda taken a customer’s head straight off. Can you imagine the news stories?”

  “Why do we have it?”

  He’d looked at me like I was a moron. “You’re gonna use it, honey,” he said. “When end of days comes, we’ll need a lotta stored food. Not just dry goods. Meat and other things too.”

  “But you just said it was dangerous.”

  “I’m gonna fix it up for you,” he assured me. “Beauty part is, our storehouse battery holds a lot more power than a domestic setup. I just need to disable the cutoff and fix a transformer, and it will work like a charm. Just be real careful you don’t let the pressure get to maximum, okay? I need to take away a few safety features to build enough steam.”

  He had dismissed my fear of catching an explosion of boiling water to the head in his usual gung-ho fashion. “Angels would never spoil that pretty face,” he said, grinning.

  “Well, you sure put that machine to good use,” observes Brewer, cutting into my memories. “Enough food out there to feed you all for a year, I should imagine.”

  “Three years,” I tell her.

  “Not every household is so organized,” says Brewer with a small smile on her face.

  “Well, that’s why I keep a little extra,” I say. “For those who haven’t gotten around to keeping proper provisions.”

  “So you live all alone out there, the four of you? With your storehouse and vegetable garden. Just kinda living off the land?”

  “Well, we still buy a lot of things from the store.”

  Brewer sits back, considers.

  “A few folk from your husband’s place of work gave me the impression Blake Nelson was on the enthusiastic side when it came to survivalism. And that’s coming from religious employees at a food-storage company. A colleague mentioned Blake had some master plan to bury a huge tank of water somewhere in the desert because soon there’ll be no rainfall. That sound like the kind of thing your husband would suggest?”

  “He just wanted us to be prepared.”

  It’s the first time I’ve been confronted with how screwy this plan sounds to a regular person. Truth was, I did think Blake could be a little intense on the subject of the world ending.

  “And you helped him prepare? With your store? You must have canned, what, a couple thousand jars of preserves?”

  “It’s what a good wife and a good Latter-day Saint does.”

  I’m remembering how the first time Blake drove me out to the ranch, I thought it was just like heaven. I thought I had gotten used to the noise of the city. But I slid straight back to that wilderness as if I had never left.

  That night, the roof was not in good shape. So we lay in bed looking at the thousands of stars.

  In the city, stars hang in the sky, like lights that get turned on at night. Out in the desert, they’re alive, a shimmering body of white, red, green, orange, and blue, blinking on and off. Swirling. Shooting.

  Blake had brought his binoculars. “Look this way, honey.” He passed them to me. “The skies out in these parts are so clear, you can see the rings on Saturn. No light pollution. Not for a hundred miles.”

  I took the binoculars, but I couldn’t make out what he was talking about.


  “When the end of humanity comes,” he said, “it will be just us. Our wives and children. These stars.”

  It was the first time Blake had mentioned the end of days as anything more than a distant possibility. The first time he’d mentioned multiple spouses. I was so sure of him back then that the first bothered me more than the second.

  Faced with Brewer’s reaction to the buried-water idea, I’m viewing Blake’s behavior less unquestioningly.

  “Are you on any medication, Mrs. Nelson?” Brewer asks, breaking into my thoughts.

  “Nothing out of the common way.”

  “Oh.” She makes a pretend surprised expression. “Only I saw at the ranch some medications on a shelf. At a glance, they looked to have your name on the packages.”

  “I get migraines. I take pills for that.”

  “Prescription?”

  “Yes.”

  “Powerful?”

  “Sure.” I shrug. “I mean, they fix the headaches most of the time.”

  “An antidepressant?” she asks. “I noticed those packages too.”

  “You sure do ask a lotta questions you know the answers to.”

  She looks a little taken aback. I’m sounding more like my mother by the minute, I realize. That cold, snippy tone came right from her.

  “Is it usual to go looking around a person’s kitchen without their permission?” I ask.

  “I only noticed it in passing,” she says smoothly. “Prozac, right?”

  “Same as half the women in this state.” I try to sound jocular, but it doesn’t come right.

  “Forgive me,” says Brewer. “I’m not from Utah originally. It seems strange to us out-of-towners that so many women and children here are medicated. Antidepressants twice the national average, right?” She makes a little pretend smile. I don’t smile back. “You also take sleeping pills? Something keeping you awake at night?”

  “I have vivid dreams. The pills help.”

  “Dreams, as in nightmares?”

  I tilt my head. “You might term them that, I guess.”

  In actual fact, the dream always feels more like a memory. An image that had been swept into some dark recess of my brain. I’m in a graveyard at night, shovel in my hand, standing over a grave. When I look down into the coffin, I see I’m tossing dirt onto my own dead face. I wake up just as the lid closes. Since the night of the anniversary, that dream in particular won’t leave me alone.

  “Okay,” says Brewer. “Did you take a sleeping pill the night your husband died?”

  “I…” I think for a moment. “I can’t say for certain,” I admit.

  “You’re not sure if you took a sleeping pill?”

  “I was…agitated,” I say. “Had a lot on my mind.”

  “On account of the fight between you and your husband?” Brewer clarifies.

  I hesitate. “Yes.”

  “The fight that was peaceably resolved?” Her eyes are searching my face.

  I give her a hard stare. “Right.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Emily, Sister-Wife

  I must have been staring at the policeman’s pack of gum, ’cause he looked at me kinda funny and offered it to me. I took a stick real fast before he could change his mind, stripped off the paper, and crammed it straight into my mouth. It was only when I was a few chews in that I remembered to say thank you.

  “You not had gum in a while?” he asks.

  “Oh, sure. We were allowed candy,” I say.

  The officers kinda glance at each other, like I’ve said something strange. I’d forgotten that about people on the outside.

  “Rachel only stopped at the big wholesale store,” I clarify. “I forgot gum even existed until now.”

  I give him a big grin. He smiles back but looks a little unnerved too.

  Now Brewer is talking to me, but I’m only half paying attention. Most of my mind is on the gum. I’m rolling it around in my mouth, listening to the click and the pop.

  “So to confirm,” says Brewer, “you woke up in the marriage bed. Your husband wasn’t there. You didn’t think anything of it?”

  “Uh-huh,” I twirl the gum in my mouth. I feel like they want me to say more, so I shrug. “Sometimes he stayed out at the fishing spot,” I tell them.

  “And the evening before, Rachel was out in her storehouse. Tina was in the house, so far as you know, and you went for a walk?”

  “Right.”

  “In the opposite direction from the fishing spot?”

  “Uh-huh. Out in the wilderness.”

  “Then…how can you be so sure Rachel was in her storehouse?”

  “I could hear the canning machine. It’s pretty loud. Not much noise in the desert.”

  “Think you could hear it all the way down at his fishing spot too?”

  “Maybe.”

  Brewer opens a file and pushes some pictures my way. I stare and stare.

  One image is a close-up of a man’s palm, with three stumps where the fingers were, cut down at the knuckle or just below. The skin is bloody and dusted with a little sprinkle of red hair. I remember hating that hair.

  “What happened to his hand?” I say finally.

  Brewer’s lips draw tight together like this isn’t the right answer.

  “We’ve got a couple a’ theories,” she says. “One idea is a desert animal got to the body.”

  “A desert animal?”

  “A coyote. Or a bobcat.”

  “Don’t those animals usually start with the innards?” I’m trying to be helpful, but I get the feeling Officer Brewer doesn’t appreciate me playing detective.

  “It is unusual for predators to attack extremities,” she concedes. “But not unknown. We had it checked out with a wildlife expert at Utah State Parks. He confirmed that a little prey animal might attempt to carry off some smaller body parts. Particularly if there were larger animals nearby. The autopsy documented that several fingers on the hand were missing, and part of the left ear. There were also a few teeth marks on the nose consistent with some kind of wild cat.”

  I feel my eyes widen. “You think a cat, like, chewed on him?”

  “It’s one theory,” says Brewer. “If your husband died early or late in the evening, there would have been time in the night for wild animals to maul the body. We’re still waiting on forensics.”

  “What’s the other theory?” I chew the gum, opening my mouth wide and shutting it so my jaw clicks.

  Open, shut, open, shut.

  I look up at the ceiling to fully concentrate on the sensation. When I look back at Brewer, she seems annoyed.

  “If you notice,” she says, pointing to the picture. “Fingers are missing. But if I was using forensic speak, I would say he is missing parts of his index and middle finger. Only one finger is completely absent. His ring finger, to be exact.”

  Her eyes lift to mine.

  “The second theory is that someone killed him and attacked that finger in some symbolic way.” She points at the picture. “See these straight marks? These could be the result of some kind of implement being struck at the hand repeatedly with some force but not a lot of accuracy. Someone is aiming at the wedding finger. The others are collateral damage.”

  She mimes cutting across her hand, with her palm as the blade.

  “Oh. Like they couldn’t stand being married to him? And the ring finger represented the marriage?”

  Brewer pauses. “Something like that,” she says. “A moment of passion.”

  I lean forward on my elbows, rapt, chewing gum.

  “Or”—her eyes fix on mine—“someone who wasn’t in their right mind.”

  I nod, knitting my brows together. “Did you ever see Cagney & Lacey?” I ask her.

  She’s taken aback, though I can’t see why. People must ask her this all the
time.

  “Um. You mean that old 1980s police drama with the two women cops?”

  I nod, remembering the first time I saw those lady cops, guns in hand, hair all bouffant, with glossy pale lipstick and brick-red blush on their cheeks.

  “Sure,” says Brewer. “As a kid. I think. Reruns.”

  “I love that show. I’ve watched every single episode a million times over.”

  She frowns like she can’t understand why someone my age would be watching that show. “Miss Martinelli, could we return to the questioning, please?”

  I curl my lip. “Just trying to be friendly.”

  I’m secretly wondering how good a police lady she can really be if she doesn’t like that show. There’s one where Cagney goes undercover in a wheelchair, for example, that makes me laugh out loud every time.

  “You don’t seem particularly distressed at your husband’s passing,” she says, “if you don’t mind me making the observation.”

  “I don’t mind at all.” She seems to be expecting me to say something else, but I’m not sure what. “It wasn’t a happy marriage,” I fill in.

  I giggle and realize they’re looking at me funny.

  I’m feeling a little light-headed, like I don’t care about anything.

  “It’s like that song, isn’t it?” I say, “Lizzie Borden took an ax, gave her mother forty whacks. Only the daughter is a wife, and the mother is the husband.”

  Officer Brewer straightens up quite suddenly, as though I’ve said something very shocking.

  “I never did have a good relationship with my momma,” I say by way of explanation.

  “Mrs. Nelson.” Officer Brewer leans forward slowly. “Why would you assume an ax was involved?”

  I shrug. “Wild guess.”

  “You say you heard Blake and Rachel fighting?” she says.

  I cough, putting my hand in front of my mouth, ladylike. Coughing hurts my ribs.

  “Yeah,” I say. “You could hardly miss it. They were both kinda loud.”

  This isn’t exactly true. I was listening at the door. A bad habit. I tap my fingertips at my collarbone.