A Circle of Wives

by Alice LaPlante

  “No, others too,” I say, thinking of Thomas, but I decline to elaborate.

  More silence.

  “Well, if you’re asking if I did it, the answer remains no, and I presume my alibi still holds,” she says. “Unless something has caused you to reevaluate the time of death.”

  “No,” I say. “The physical evidence hasn’t changed.”

  “Then I have nothing more to say,” Deborah says. I take this as a dismissal, and rise to go.

  “Wait,” Deborah commands as I’m halfway out of the room. I stop and turn around to look at her.

  “You might think you understand what’s going on here,” she says. “But you don’t.”

  I open my mouth to protest, but she waves at me impatiently to be quiet.

  “He was comfortable with our arrangement,” Deborah says. “Me and the girls, that’s how I thought of them. It wasn’t a rivalry, it was a supportive network; we were his connective tissue. We were a living, breathing organism, one that was thriving. John would never threaten that, not something so carefully nurtured over the years.”

  I don’t like not being treated like a grown-up. I make my face impassive. I don’t go into my usual head-nodding routine that is a habit when people in authority speak to me.

  Deborah frowns. “I expect to be believed in this,” she says.

  “Whatever,” I say. I walk out of the room.

  45

  Samantha

  “THIS IS GOING TO SOUND strange,” Grady says, “but for now I would ignore the alibis.”

  He’s sitting on the corner of my desk. This morning, Susan came by and congratulated me on the case finally beginning to move. “A fourth woman, eh?” she asked. “Too bad this John Taylor is dead. I’d like to nominate him for Man of the Year.” Still, despite my leads, she’d like me to consult with Grady before I take the next step.

  “I’m confused,” I say to Grady. “If two of the three most plausible suspects had absolute proof that they were elsewhere at the time of death, how could they commit the crime?”

  “Alibis can be faked,” he says. “Times of death can be manipulated. Motives are harder to cover up.”

  “But the alibis for Deborah and MJ are very solid,” I tell him. “Multiple reputable witnesses in each case. Helen is a different story, as is MJ’s brother.”

  “Then question the time of death,” he says. “I’m always most suspicious in cases where the alibis are foolproof right when someone is supposed to have died.”

  He starts pacing the room. “So what about Helen? You haven’t discounted her, then?”

  “Well, Mollie checked, and no Helen Richter left LA on any of the airlines from any of the local airports on that date,” I say.

  “What about driving? After all, she had a twenty-one-hour window to do the twelve-hour round trip between LA and San Francisco and easily bump off her cheating husband in the process.”

  “I know,” I say. “I’ve subpoenaed the security camera tapes from Helen’s parking garage and the condo building’s entrance. I should have those in the next few days.”

  “And even then, will you have covered all entrances to the building? Could she have gotten out a back way and rented a car or otherwise run off to San Francisco?” Grady asks. “Don’t give up on Helen. She’s my personal favorite front runner.”

  I laugh. “You wouldn’t say that if you’d met her,” I say.

  “In the meantime, work on the other two,” says Grady.

  I’m not happy with his advice. “What should I do, keep calling them back in for questioning? Ask them where they were every minute of Friday? I’ve run out of questions, and they’ve noticed.”

  “Don’t be shy about asking them the same things again,” Grady says as he turns to leave, “and study the transcripts. Something will appear. Someone will crack. Something will shake out. It always does.”

  46

  Samantha

  I KNOCK ON THE DOOR. No one answers, so I knock again. And yawn, tired from last night. Peter’s friends came over, we played Scrabble and drank too much wine, stayed up until 2 AM arguing about whether armpit and brainpower were valid words. Our version of debauchery: drunken wordplay. I woke with a hangover, and I welcomed the thousand tiny knives of a cold shower.

  It’s one of those days that you question everything. Why am I in Palo Alto? As a member of the police, no less? Why Peter? Why not any other of the twentysomething males littering the valley? The arbitrariness of stuff sometimes gets to me. Why this car? Why this pair of jeans? Why this life?

  I knock again. Still no answer. Yet a car is in the driveway. It’s 2 PM so I doubt MJ is sleeping. A bright Saturday, not too hot, the perfect early August Northern California day that is now becoming a year-round phenomenon thanks to global weirding.

  The house is a nondescript California rancher, distinguished from the rest on the block only by its air of tired neglect. The grass on the front lawn is parched and yellow, the mailbox appears to be nearly falling off its pole, and the pavement leading up to the house is cracked and uneven. The car in the driveway is a late model Toyota Prius. Of course it is. And the yard probably hasn’t been watered to conserve natural resources. I know my neo-hippies.

  I also know that despite the outward look of this property, the price tag would be substantial. I’m standing on some of the most expensive real estate in the world. The fact that many of these aging multimillion-dollar ranchers are bought and then scrapped to make way for custom-built mansions—no prefabricated McMansions, not here—speaks to all the money that surrounds us.

  I knock one last time, not expecting a response. Then, because I am loath to make the long drive back to Palo Alto without accomplishing anything, I begin exploring. Walking to the right of the house yields nothing, just a high fence. I get luckier on the left side. A gate is set in the wooden fence that apparently encloses the entire backyard. It isn’t locked, so I click open the latch and pull.

  And am stunned by what I see.

  Talk about a garden of earthly delights. The colors: a wild profusion of deep reds, purples, yellows. The smells: subtle and soft and aromatic. And the sounds: bees and other insects humming quietly but insistently, the breeze causing slight rustling among the leaves.

  A third of the garden is in shade from a magnificent oak tree that spreads its boughs for thirty feet in all directions. The ground underneath is carpeted in blue. Tiny blue flowers, as thick as grass. The other two-thirds of the garden enjoys bright sunlight, and the high fence that surrounds it is completely covered with a brilliant purple flowery vine. Trees bursting with lemons, oranges, figs. I’ve never seen anything like this. I’m in paradise before Adam gave names to any of the flora or fauna, before Eve bit into the apple.

  In the middle of it all, kneeling, is a woman, at first glance almost naked, the muscles in her gleaming strong shoulders working as she plunges a trowel into the earth. When my vision clears I notice she’s wearing a kind of flesh-colored sarong that leaves one shoulder as well as most of her legs and thighs bare. Her long gray-blond hair is down and in loose ringlets. Her breasts are spilling forward. A magnificent earth mother. She hasn’t yet seen me. No wonder John Taylor fell in love with her, I think, and am ashamed that my opinion of her had previously been so small, so narrow-minded.

  “Oh!” She spots me, and is rising to her feet, holding her sarong up to cover herself more thoroughly.

  I hurry to apologize. “MJ, I’m so sorry. I rang the bell and no one answered.”

  She nods. The slightly anxious, guarded look I recognize from our first meeting appears and I feel terrible to have conjured it up in the midst of this beauty.

  “How can I help you?” she asks. She is still holding the trowel, which is coated with rich brown soil. I can smell it from where I stand.

  “I just have a few more questions,” I lie. “Nothing important. Wrapping up loose ends.” I see her visibly relax and again shame slices through me. I don’t deserve to be trusted.

 
; “Come inside. It’ll be cooler there.” I follow her into the kind of house I dream about. Comfy overstuffed chairs. Colored walls hung with vivid posters and old black-and-white photographs. No cut flowers, but lots of leafy plants.

  “You went to Berkeley?” I ask, pointing to a classic protest poster from the 1960s, beautifully preserved and framed.

  “Actually, San Francisco State,” she says. “It didn’t matter, though. By the time I got to the Bay Area all the fun was over,” she laughs. “I should have been born a generation earlier.” She motions me to sit at the kitchen table, which is of bleached pine, and pours me a glass of water from the tap.

  “People still find plenty to protest today,” I say.

  “Yes, but there’s a different vibe,” she says, and is silent for a moment. “I grow flowers now. That’s my protest against what’s going on in the world.”

  “Your garden is amazing,” I say, and mean it.

  She relaxes more. Then she says, “Let me show you something.”

  I put down my water and follow her back outside, into the garden, past the oak tree to the sunniest corner. It is closed off by four-foot walls, with just a small gap to walk through. We enter the space. At first I think that the air is full of tiny scraps of paper, confetti perhaps. All different colors of paper, chaotically swirling around me. Then I understand: butterflies. Flitting amidst the bushes and flowers, arcing over our heads. One even alights on MJ’s bare shoulder. A butterfly garden. I’ve heard of these, but never experienced it firsthand.

  “This was John’s favorite spot in the garden,” she says, pointing to a bench in the midst of the riot of colors and beating wings. “He always said something I never fully grasped. Not until after his death.” Her face clouds over. “He said he needed this chaos. That everything else in his life was too regulated.”

  I’m silent for a moment. “That’s what happens when you take on three wives,” I finally say. “Regulations.”

  I ease myself next to her on the bench in the sun. We sit in almost comradely silence. If I’m not careful, I could easily fall asleep here, drugged by the heat and beauty.

  “What will happen to the house?” I ask. “Can you afford to keep it?”

  She starts. I’ve touched a nerve, apparently.

  “It depends,” she says. A black and orange butterfly lands on her arm. She absentmindedly touches its wing and it flies off.

  “Houses in Los Gatos aren’t cheap,” I say. “Did John buy it?”

  “He put down the deposit. Then we paid the monthly mortgage out of our joint funds,” she says.

  I’d done a quick online check before coming here. This old 1940s unimproved rancher is worth a cool $2.6 million on the current market. They’d bought it for $2.2 five years ago. Not a ton of appreciation compared to the boom real-estate years here in the Bay Area a decade ago. But not too shabby a profit for just living in a place, either.

  “So how much is your mortgage?” I ask her.

  She visibly squirms.

  “About 500 k,” she says, not looking at me.

  I can’t help it. I whistle. “John made a $1.7 million down payment?”

  “Yes,” she says. “He wanted the mortgage to be manageable in case anything ever happened to him.”

  “Well, is it?” I ask.

  She avoids my eyes. “Pretty much,” she says, but I’m thinking that accountants, even in Silicon Valley, don’t end up at the high end of the wage scale.

  I admit to being fascinated with money. Well, not for money itself, but how people acquire and spend it. Having so little myself, I’m always wondering about this when I see people driving expensive new cars or dining in the pricey restaurants that line the streets in Palo Alto. Or how they afford those houses, for that matter. According to a local realtor I’d buttonholed at a party, the tiny house Peter and I squeeze into would sell for a cool million. Of course, no one would actually buy it to live there. It’s what they call a “scrapper” in these parts, and Peter and I dread the day our landlady tells us she’s cashing out.

  “I know you’re on shaky ground,” I tell MJ. She looks startled, so I add, “legally.” She sighs deeply. “Deborah could conceivably claim this house as a part of John’s estate that she’s entitled to.”

  “I’ve consulted a lawyer. Deborah would have to sue me in civil court. She’s assured me she won’t go to the trouble,” says MJ.

  “Why not? $1.7 million plus whatever equity has accrued in the past five years is a lot of money,” I say.

  MJ shrugs. She looks unhappy. “I think she sympathizes with me. I think she knows that my life is shattered enough,” MJ says. “I couldn’t give this up.” This being the garden. Of course she couldn’t. But somehow I don’t see Deborah as an altruistic benefactor. I wonder what her game is.

  “I mean, I’d just die going back to a small townhouse or apartment,” she says. “For the first time in my life I have a real home. This means everything to me.”

  So she would die for it.

  Would she kill for it?

  I bring out Claire’s photograph. She shakes her head and waits for me to explain.

  I quail a little inside, but start.

  “We have reason to believe that Dr. Taylor intended to marry this young woman, and . . . separate . . . from the rest of you. Start a clean slate with a new wife. A real wife, like Deborah was.”

  A long pause.

  MJ stares at me, her face impassive. “Well?” she asks.

  “Do you understand what I’ve just said? Dr. Taylor intended to leave you. All of you. Supposedly he was planning to break the news on May 11, the day after he was killed. He never got the chance.”

  MJ surprises me. Deborah had greeted the news with her usual reserve and stateliness. Frankly, I expected histrionics from MJ. Instead, something crystalizes in her, right in front of my eyes. Is she sitting up straighter? Looking at me more directly? Tensing her jaw? Whatever it is, I honestly have no clue whether MJ had known about Claire. She isn’t descending into hopelessness or panic. She isn’t falling apart, as I would have expected. Rather, she appears resolute. As if she’s preparing to fight a battle.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” I ask her. But she’s shut down, as if she’s closed the door on old adversaries, of which I am one.

  MJ begins pulling the flowering buds from the basil plants clumped at the base of the bench. She does so with expert hands, as if snapping off little green heads. A deft assassin, I think, and suddenly feel uncertain. The afternoon is still. No noise except for the drone of bees. The butterflies flitter silently around us. We’re so far from main roads I don’t even hear any traffic noise. I can’t remember the last time I’d been in a place without the hum of cars. I see certain possibilities in MJ that I hadn’t before. A ruthless hardening within. She snaps off another bud and I think again, assassin.

  “Why should this change anything for me?” she finally says, not looking up. “He’d already gone and married someone else, so I was already betrayed once. Why does another betrayal matter?

  “It is different,” I say. “With Helen, he had no plans to leave you. You still had your life together, your house, your garden. But if he’d gone through with marrying Claire Fanning, you could have been left with nothing.”

  “You’re saying I have a motive for killing my husband,” she says, and the air is so charged I actually find myself wondering whether I ‘d put my gun on that morning. Then I think, crazy.

  “Yes,” I say. I see now that any warmth I felt toward MJ was just stupid me wanting to be liked. We are opponents, have been from the start.

  “You have my alibi. I assume you’ve confirmed it,” she says.

  “Yes, but . . .” I hesitate, knowing that what I’m about to say might be even more unwelcome than the news about Dr. Fanning.

  “But my brother has none, right?”

  “How did you know?”

  “He called me. What did you think, that he would keep it a secret? From me?” She
laughs, and it is a harsh sound.

  “Don’t think about going after my brother as a suspect,” she says, and it is a warning—a command, not a plea. “You won’t find anything to hold against him except that damn ticket. So my brother is a pothead. You’ll look like a fool in court.” The unspoken phrase was, even more than you do now.

  “I’m tired of going over and over the same stuff,” she says. “You keep hounding me and asking me the same questions.”

  “Actually, Claire Fanning is a new topic,” I say, and she turns on me fiercely.

  “I told you, I didn’t know about this so-called fiancée. And what would I have done if I’d found out? While John was still alive? Why kill him, ha-ha. Seriously, I would have been pissed. Or as we say back home, really riled.” She exaggerates her Tennessee twang. Reely rawled. “And after I got over being angry? Then . . . then . . . we would have had a long talk. I know that makes me sound pathetic. But it’s really no different from finding out about the other wives, about Deborah and Helen. My husband’s other women. So what if there was one more?”

  I catch movement at the entrance to the butterfly garden. Thomas is here. He comes forward quickly. He is frowning. I see what looks like genuine concern on his face as he sees his sister.

  “What’s going on here. What have you done?” he hisses at me as he gets closer. I stand up, and move away from the bench. He takes my place, puts an arm around MJ. She doesn’t shrug it off so much as repel it with the same force that is sending me away.

  I quietly make my exit. Two down, one to go.

  47

  Deborah

  TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY. I’M fifty-five. I must say, I don’t feel it. I don’t feel middle-aged. If I had to choose my age based on how I felt, I would say thirty-five, no older. Still alert. Still physically nimble. And certainly my desire for physical intimacy hasn’t gone away with age the way I would have expected. This is something that John and I talked about, oddly enough, just a couple days before he went missing. We always chatted in the early mornings when he came home, showered, and grabbed some breakfast. I insisted we sit down together, to have coffee at least. “Don’t you miss sex?” he’d asked. We never lost the ability to communicate easily about what others might consider difficult subjects. Well, of course I miss it, I told him. Of course. And then he reached out his hand and tried to touch—no, caress—mine. I was holding my coffee cup. His fingertips brushed across my knuckles. I couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop myself. I recoiled, so fast I spilled hot coffee on his fingers. The fact is I didn’t want him anymore. Not him. Whatever compatibility we’d had in that way was long gone. Replaced by something other than indifference, something darker. Bitterness, perhaps.