As Long as We Both Shall Live

by JoAnn Chaney

  They were all seated in the great waiting room of life, impatiently flipping through the old Reader’s Digest Condensed Editions, twiddling their thumbs and picking at their teeth, waiting for something to happen.

  Waiting for Marie.

  “She could be in Mexico by now,” Spengler said.

  “I doubt it.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Listen, I know you’re a gung ho feminist and I’m just an old fart, but if I’ve learned anything about women over the years, it’s that a woman like her isn’t going to let anything go,” Loren said. He reached over and popped the glove compartment, grabbed the dental floss he had stashed inside. “You want some? These cheap-ass sandwiches get all caught up in my teeth every time.”

  She shook her head.

  “She’s out there, waiting,” he said, cutting off a good-sized length of floss and wrapping each end around a pointer finger. “She went to a helluva lot of trouble to set this whole thing up, trying to get him arrested for murder. She’s not going to like it much that he’s at home, sitting on his ass in front of the TV instead of crying his poor eyes out in jail.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We just have to wait,” Loren said. “Be patient, Spengler. It’s a fucking virtue, you know.”

  During the hours they sat outside, Spengler reviewed the case until her eyes swam from looking at the words so long. She hadn’t slept much in days—she’d always been that way when she was deep in a case, her brain wouldn’t shut up long enough to let her relax—and that might’ve been some of the problem, but it was also that this whole thing was so damn muddled.

  Easy to follow, easy to swallow. She’d heard both Reid and Evans say that, and now Loren had picked it up. But there was nothing easy about any of this. Nothing simple.

  Once Evans admitted that Marie and Janice were the same person, they couldn’t get him to stop talking. He said his wife had forced his hand. That she’d done everything, planned it all out. She was a killer, she was ruthless, she was guilty. At one time it would’ve seemed crazy, a woman doing something like that. No one would’ve believed it. Women were soft, they were delicate. Oh, there were the freaks that popped up occasionally, those women who poisoned and plotted and got their revenge, but they were outliers. But times, they had changed. There were women who killed, who hurt children and their spouses and sold drugs and committed all sorts of crimes. Those women were run of the mill these days. Spengler had once arrested a woman who’d been pimping out her daughters since they were babies, who’d accept ten dollars for a few minutes with one of her own children. Awful women, but was it even more awful because they weren’t men? Maybe—but why should it be? Over the years more people had come to accept that women could be just as bad. And maybe Evans was being honest about his wife, maybe Marie really was one of those women who’d stop at nothing to get her way. She’d even murder and kill and fake her own death.

  Or maybe it was just easy to make Marie seem like that. She was a jealous woman, she was ruthless and didn’t let people stand in her way. She was a bitch.

  And she wasn’t there to defend herself.

  They watched and waited. They’d trade off with the next team of detectives and go home, but Spengler didn’t sleep. She’d lie in bed and wonder what Evans was thinking. What Marie was thinking. If either of them thought they were safe.

  She called me, Evans had said. To tease me. Taunt me. She always wanted the last word.

  Spengler pulled all his phone records. He’d said Marie had called from an unknown number, but when you’re the police there’s nothing unknown. One of the geeks in IT was able to get the phone number easily enough and figure out it’d been assigned to a throwaway burner phone, the kind you can buy at any grocery store for cash. The kind of phone you’d have if you didn’t want anyone to trace you.

  Evans had gotten a single call from that number, and the call had lasted two minutes. Two minutes is a long time when you think about it, 120 seconds you can fill with all kinds of words. What had been said during that conversation?

  You could say nothing in two minutes, or you could say it all.

  Spengler called the number once from her own cell phone. It rang five times, then went to voice mail. She wondered if Marie was holding the phone when she called, if she’d considered answering but resisted the temptation. It was a general voice mail box, nothing personal, the greeting a smooth robotic voice. It could belong to anyone, or it could be Marie’s. And that was the question. If Spengler left a voice mail, would it be Marie who listened?

  She thought about that voice mail box for an entire day; then, that night, sitting on her deck once Tony and Elliott were both in bed, under a sooty black sky that held no stars, she called it again. At first she didn’t know what to say, but then the words came and it was easy. She left her message and then called back, left another. And again.

  Sometimes she thought it was like screaming into a bottomless pit, but sometimes she was sure she could feel the ear at the other end, listening to every word.

  GONNA LOVE YOU UNTIL YOU HATE ME

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  If you want to kill your husband, it should be easy. Because you’re tougher than he is, and you’re stronger and faster. Giving birth to two big-headed daughters without medication and all those early-morning runs and Pilates classes haven’t just been for fun, right? But most of all you’re smarter than he is, even though he thinks he’s got all the brains, he thinks he’s the smart one because he has a job and a private office and makes all the money and goes out to nice restaurants for lunch and networks while you’re at home, cooking and cleaning and wiping runny noses and changing poopy diapers. He thinks that just because he puts on slacks and a tie and has an agenda and you’re going to spend the whole day baking cookies for the school sale and you probably won’t manage to take a shower until after lunch—if at all—that he’s better. But what your husband has managed to conveniently forget is that you are the one who helped him get through college, you are the one who wrote the résumé that got him that fancy job, you are the one who took the online personality test his job required before they’d hire him, and his boss thinks he’s an empathetic leader, that he’s strategic, but those are actually your results. Not that they’d ever hire you to lead a team of men selling businesses to other men. You’re missing one vital part, and it doesn’t matter the slightest that you’d be better at the job than your husband, because if you don’t have this one particular piece you don’t have anything.

  You don’t have a dick, so you don’t get dick.

  But you could get over all that if your husband would behave right, but that’s something out of his realm. He thinks he’s smart, that he’s sneaky, but he doesn’t realize you’re at home, waiting, while he’s at her place, balls deep between her thighs, groaning about how things would be so much better if you weren’t around. And when he’s done with this woman—and you’ve seen her, she’s younger and better looking than you, but probably an idiot—he comes home, smelling like sex and sweat and not even trying to hide what he’s done, and he says he’s too tired to eat dinner with the family and to spend time with the girls, he has a headache and a backache and he had a long day and needs some alone time, unless, that is, you’re down to give him a blow job.

  So honestly, your husband has had it coming for a good long while now, and needs to be taught a lesson. He has to die.

  BUT.

  Maybe divorce is a better option. Maybe it’s a little overkill to plan your husband’s death, and you might be right. But here’s the thing: if you got a divorce you’d get alimony payments, but it probably wouldn’t be enough to live on, and you could certainly get a job but you’d be making next to nothing because no one’s going to hire a woman who’s spent her entire adult life at home with kids. And you can’t even put down that you’ve been to college, you can’t even put down your real name, because you’re not technically even a person anymore because you took on the iden
tity of the woman you caught your husband in bed with, and that woman is someone you know nothing about, a woman who might not have even graduated high school, and if you ever use your real name again, or your social security number, the government will be on you like white on rice, and you’ll go right to prison, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. And with no school and no work experience and no identity there’s only one conclusion:

  You’re fucked.

  BUT.

  There’s a third option. You could make it work. You could put up with your crappy marriage and ignore what your husband does on the side and try to be patient, because he’ll probably kick the bucket before you. All that beer and the gut he’s been picking up over the last few years can’t be for nothing, right? So you could wait it out, hope for that heart attack to happen. Plenty of women have done it before, silently dealing with their lot in life, and you could, too, if you had to. And maybe, after a while, you’d even get used to it.

  But here’s the thing: you’re not the kind of woman who can get used to anything. And you’re not a patient woman. You never have been. And while blood and violence don’t bother you, you’ve had enough of that to last you a lifetime. So you decide to make that motherfucker pay for what he’s put you through. You were a forgiving woman once, you overlooked his flaws and moved on, but you’re also not an idiot. Your mother had always warned you about men, said that once a man hurts you it’s only a matter of time before he does it again, and it’s better to be safe than sorry. You’ve always had a secret stash of cash on the side. A runaway fund, your mother called it. A safety net.

  So over the years you’ve put some money back, a bit at a time, not enough for him to miss and ask about. It’s not a fortune, it won’t keep you rolling for the rest of your life, but it’s enough to make a start. So maybe, deep down, you’ve been planning this for a long time. Or laying the groundwork, at least.

  And then, one day, you realize the years have leached away your patience and you’re done.

  So, when it really comes down to it, you don’t have much of a choice. This man is a cheater, he’s weak, he’s a louse. You’ve had to stick around in this marriage because you haven’t had any other choice, and it’s been fine, but things have changed and there’s no damn way you’re going to stand for this. It’s not about the money, because you’ve come to realize that what people say is right—money can’t buy happiness. You’ve been putting up with his bullshit for far too long, but if you put up with it just a little longer, lay your traps and set the stage just right, you can pull it off, no problemo.

  But then you realize something that could screw the whole thing up:

  Your husband isn’t actually as stupid as he’s led you to believe.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  September 3, 1995

  “I want a divorce,” she said. The two of them had stopped laughing when they realized she was there. The girl had pulled the bedding up to her chin and was staring with wide, frightened eyes, but she hadn’t screamed. Janice had to give her that. She hadn’t screamed, and she didn’t seem very surprised. Just wary. “I can’t believe I’ve wasted so much of my life with you.”

  Matt got out of the bed and held his hands up. He was completely naked, his body smooth and gleaming in the low light, his cock swaying gently between his thighs as he came closer. He looked ridiculous, she thought. She should shoot him right now, in that stupid dangling thing he was so proud of. That would teach him a lesson.

  “Janice, it doesn’t have to be like this,” he said softly, coming closer. Hands still up. The love line that cut across his palm was especially long, ran almost from one side of his hand to the other. “Put down the gun and we can talk. This isn’t what you think.”

  She’d been holding the gun down at her side, the barrel pointing at the floor, and brought it up now, looked at it in astonishment. She’d practically forgotten that she’d grabbed it as she’d come in, and she couldn’t believe it was still in her hand. She held it out toward Matt, meaning to give it to him, to let him take it out of her hands because she hadn’t wanted the damn thing in the first place. But he must’ve thought she was going to shoot, that she meant to kill him, because he sprang forward and grabbed her, trapping her hand on the gun’s grip, forcing her fingers tighter around it and pointing it away from himself. She tried to pull away, to get free, to let him have the damn gun so she could leave, but couldn’t. Afterward, she wondered how often bad things happened because of these sorts of miscommunications. Afterward, she never knew how long they struggled over the gun, her trying to give it and Matt trying to take it away, both misunderstanding the other, but it ended when the gun fired. Janice felt the heat of the bullet streak past her face and the silver-white flash of light and gasped, stumbling back, and Matt did the same.

  The gun clattered to the floor between their feet.

  They looked down at themselves, then at each other, checking to see if either of them had been shot. They were both fine, but the woman in the bed was not. She’d been thrown back on the pillows, her arms flung out and her eyes open, a single drip of blood running down the center of her face. The bullet had gone cleanly through her left eye, a once-in-a-million shot, and the force of it had knocked one of her front teeth out. The bedsheet had fallen down so her breasts were bared, her areolas large and pinkish-brown. Janice went to the bed and pulled the sheet up to her neck, covering her up. A silly thing to do for a dead woman, but she did it without thinking.

  “We killed her,” Matt said.

  “It was an accident.”

  “No one will believe that.”

  “But it was an accident. We didn’t mean to do it.”

  Years later, they’d blame each other for the girl’s death. They’d say it was on purpose, that one of them was more guilty than the other even though they’d both been holding the gun when it fired. This girl came up every time they argued for years, because once you have some bit of information to hold over another person’s head you have to use it whenever possible. But now, standing beside the bed they’d shared for less than a year, they were in it together.

  For better or worse.

  “What are we going to do?” Matt asked.

  “What are we going to do?” Janice echoed.

  Life was spinning like a dime again—which way would it turn? They might’ve gone a different route, they could’ve called the cops and reported it, explained what had happened, and everyone might’ve understood and things would’ve turned out much differently, but they didn’t.

  That would’ve been too easy.

  This is what they did in the panicked moments after the bullet had entered the girl’s brain: they decided to burn the body, to burn the whole house down. They came up with the story about being attacked, and practiced it. They’d make it look like it was Janice who’d been attacked and killed. It was a good story, they said. A believable story.

  Desperate times call for desperate measures, you see, and create desperate people.

  But who came up with the idea for all this? Who was the brains behind the whole thing?

  Does it matter?

  Of course it matters, and the answer is that they both did. Two voices became one. All together now, with feeling, as Loren would say.

  “Matt?” Janice said. They were in the bedroom, Matt pouring the last of the gasoline out of the canister and over the girl’s body, his back to her. It was the only thing she could trust him to do. She’d told him to knock the girl’s teeth out to make identification more difficult but he’d refused. Because he’d known her, Matt had said. He’d cared for the girl.

  How much did you care for her? Janice had asked. Did anyone know about the two of you? If someone realizes she’s gone missing, are they going to come looking for you?

  I don’t know. I don’t think so.

  He’d refused to help knock out the girl’s teeth, so she’d done it herself. If you want something done right, she thought, don’t ask your husband to do it.r />
  Then she’d taken a pair of pliers from a kitchen drawer and pulled one of her own teeth to leave with the girl’s body, for identification purposes. She’d sat on the side of the bathtub as she did it, not sure that she could go through with it, but then she remembered the breathless pain of seeing her husband with another woman earlier that night, and her heart hardened. She lost consciousness as she pulled that molar, but when she came to it was done.

  “Matt, look at me.”

  There was one more thing to do, and she knew he wouldn’t like it.

  He didn’t even have time to register surprise before she pulled the trigger. She’d been aiming for his arm, high up, hoping to graze the meat of his bicep, but she’d never shot a gun before and was lucky the bullet didn’t end up in his heart. It ended up going into his shoulder, and years later the puckered scar tissue left behind would look a little like a starfish.

  “You shot me,” he screamed, falling to the floor and writhing in pain. She thought he was being a little dramatic—surely a hole that small couldn’t hurt much—and tried to explain that he couldn’t walk away without a wound, not if the cops were going to believe their story. He had to be hurt, and it had to be believable. “You didn’t have to shoot me.”

  “Yes, I did,” she said. She’d shot him so their story would seem believable, but she still had to admit that a part of her had taken pleasure in shooting him, at seeing Matt weak and squirming, weeping in agony. Much later, she’d wish she’d pointed the gun a little higher and put a bullet between his eyes, instead. It would’ve saved her so much misery in the long run.

  She kneeled over her crying husband and fed him his story, gave his ear a hard tug to make sure he was listening—guy broke in, I tried to run, he shot me—and then stood up, tucking the gun into the waistband of her jeans. Rubbed her hands together and looked around for anything she should take before they lit a match and let the place flame up—and saw Jesse O’Neil’s face in the window. He must’ve come to check on her—he’d done it before, when she and Matt had gotten into one of their screaming fights—and had come around the backside of the house when no one answered his knocks on the front door, stood in the flower beds and peered through the bedroom window. The drapes were pulled, but they were gauzy and light as air, and sheer enough that she could clearly see the shock on Jesse’s face. And the window was wide open. If she’d been able to hear Matt and his little girlfriend laughing, she had no doubt Jesse had heard every word they’d said.