As Long as We Both Shall Live

by JoAnn Chaney

  “It’s completely innocent,” Matt said when she first asked him about all the calls and texts going back and forth between the two of them. “She’s easy to talk to.”

  “She’s young enough to be your daughter,” Marie said. “What could you possibly have to talk to her about?”

  Matt shrugged, uninterested in explaining himself to her, and that pissed her off more than anything. The fucking gall of this man, to not even bother hiding the fact that he was frolicking around with a girl half his age, and then not caring that she knew. He wasn’t even going to the trouble of covering his tracks, because he didn’t care. He had her, all right. He knew he could do whatever he wanted because they were stuck together. She was dependent on him, and what could she do to keep him in line? Threaten him with a divorce? That she was going to pack up and leave? No. That’s exactly what he wanted, what he came to her and asked for, and she wasn’t going to give in so easily, like a dog rolling right over and showing her belly in defeat.

  If they divorced, Matt told her, she’d get half of everything, plus a monthly alimony check. She’d be comfortable. But it wasn’t about the money anymore. It was about her pride. If Matt thought he was going to get rid of her so easily, after everything she’d done for him, everything she’d given up for him, he was wrong. She’d given up her life, her actual life—her name, her identity, everything. She’d given it all up for him, and now he wanted to get rid of her.

  She told him to go to hell.

  Matt was silent for a week. He didn’t come home until after dinner those nights and then slept in the guest bedroom, and on the eighth day he came to her. He had a plan, he said. So they could both get what they wanted.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  2018

  “Once the insurance cashes out we’ll split it, sixty-forty,” Matt had said. “You’ll need the money to start over, and I’ll still be here. I’ll have the house and my job.”

  “Eighty-twenty,” Marie said. “I’ll be the one pulling the disappearing act again. It’s only fair.”

  “Okay, deal. Eighty-twenty,” Matt said. “You’re right. That’s fair.”

  “Thank you.” Later, Marie would remember this conversation, when Matt so easily shrugged and agreed to give her what she wanted, but she already had an idea what he was planning. She’d known since he’d held her under in the hot tub, when she’d been able to see the smile twisting his mouth. But she’d been planning, too.

  A woman should always have a safety net and a backup plan.

  “We could make it look like you’ve been attacked,” he said. “Or you could—you could fall somewhere, make it look like you got swept away in a river. You’re always going hiking alone, that should be simple enough.”

  “We’ll split the money, and then you’ll be free to be with your girlfriend.”

  He studied her face.

  “Yeah,” he said, ignoring her comment. “We’ve done this before. We could do it again.”

  “I know where I could go to make it work,” she said. They were just sitting down to dinner, shrimp scampi, and she wondered if any other couples had times like this. Sitting down to a nice dinner and good wine and discussing how they’d best pull off insurance fraud. The entire situation was hilarious, but also somehow deadly serious. “There’s a cliff out in Estes Park I’ve hiked plenty of times. It’d be perfect. Plenty of people would see me going up, but I’d have to go down over the side of the cliff to the bottom, otherwise I might get spotted hiking down.”

  “Could it work?”

  She considered. There was a particular cliff where she’d spent a lot of time. She was familiar with the terrain and knew it was a spot not frequented by tourists. But would it work for what she needed?

  “Yeah, I think it could. But what about the girls?”

  “We’ll tell them the truth after a while. They can visit wherever you end up.”

  So they planned. They planned over their scampi and they sat up in bed and planned that night, and they spent their evenings over the next few weeks brainstorming and hashing out ideas and ruling out possibilities. They had all the time and privacy in the world with the girls both at school, so they didn’t have to creep around and try to hide anything. For the first time in over twenty years of marriage, they could be themselves.

  And as the weeks passed, Marie realized she was having fun. For the first time in a long time she was enjoying spending time with her husband. It reminded her of why she’d fallen in love with Matt, and why she’d stayed married to him after everything. He knew how to make her laugh, and they operated on the same wavelength. And he’d been coming right home after work every night, and she thought he might’ve broken it off with Riley.

  She was looking at him through rose-colored glasses, maybe, because she still loved him even after everything they’d been through, and maybe that’s why this had all happened to begin with. It wasn’t so much a plan about faking her death and collecting the life insurance—it was the plan that would save their marriage. And maybe they wouldn’t go through with it at all, she thought, but it showed they could still get along. They still had a chance at a life together. They were planning a crime, but if the result was a happy one, what difference did it make? The ends justify the means, don’t they?

  She’d had these thoughts all through the spring, including one evening as she washed the dinner dishes—there were so few of them with the girls gone, it didn’t take long—and after she’d carefully dried her hands on a towel she went to find Matt, to tell him how she felt. She’d bare her soul to him—a romantic thought—and they’d make love. They hadn’t slept together in a long time, and it was overdue.

  Matt wasn’t in the small room near the front door that served as his home office, but in the powder room he’d had put in beside it. It’d cost an arm and a leg to put a bathroom in an old house like this, but Matt had called it a necessity, not a luxury. And he spent a lot of time in that bathroom, maybe more than he did in his actual office. Matt had always spent lots of time in the bathroom, she thought as she walked toward the closed pocket door, raising her fist to knock. It made her smile. He went in there to relax and be alone, and he’d even fallen asleep on the toilet before. When you were married as long as they’d been, you got to know a person’s habits and quirks, the things no one else would know, and that was all a marriage was, wasn’t it? The secrets two people keep from the rest of the world, that’s what makes a marriage.

  Matt was on his cell phone in the bathroom. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she didn’t need to—he was using a voice she knew well. It was cooing and soft, the baby voice he thought was sexy but was just silly. When they were first married he’d used that voice on her all the time, leaning over as she’d studied and whispering right into her ear, and more often than not they’d end up in bed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard him talk like that, but here it was.

  And she’d been fool enough to think they could make it work.

  She turned away from the bathroom, her face burning with embarrassment. She’d come looking for Matt in love and was walking away with hate. It was a terrible thing to be alive, she thought bitterly, especially with the wrong person. She stopped beside Matt’s desk and picked up the single framed photo. It was the two of them smiling at the camera as they stood in front of the house, their arms wrapped around each other, and they certainly looked happy, but what was the truth? It was easy enough to fake happiness, to smile and make people believe. That was the entire foundation of social media—to make everyone believe your life was perfect, even if it was falling apart at the seams.

  Matt’s desktop computer was lit up, the search he’d done on the Three Forks River taking up the whole screen. The river was running at max capacity these days, hard and fast, and it ran right beneath the cliff where they’d been planning to fake her fall. Not that she’d ever get anywhere near the river. She’d hike to the top and set it up to look like she’d been trying to take a selfie from the
cliff but slipped and fell to her death, but would instead lower herself over the edge, down a hundred or so feet, and hike to safety. Matt could come up later under the guise of looking for his wife and get rid of the rope, and all the cops would ever find of her was her phone and supplies on the cliff. A handful of people had fallen into area rivers over the spring and had been swept away, their bodies never recovered, and sooner or later people would assume it’d been the same for her, especially if the rains kept up.

  It was a flawless plan.

  The bathroom door slid open behind her.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Matt said. He came close and wrapped his arms around her, pulled her close. She shut her eyes. Her skin crawled where she could feel his breath and the touch of his skin. “We should plan a romantic weekend up in Estes. Rent a cabin and go out there together. Hike up that cliff, and you could lower yourself over the edge. Once you get down safe I’ll go looking for help.”

  “If I go alone it’ll keep you from being a suspect,” she said. Blithely, she hoped. “We should stick with what we’ve planned.”

  “If I’m there, I’m a witness, and we need a witness to pull this off. The cops aren’t going to find your body, so they’ll need a story about what happened.”

  “But what if they find out about Janice?” she asked. About me, she thought. “Two dead wives will make you look suspicious.”

  She felt his shoulders rise and fall in a shrug.

  “It was fine that time, it’ll be fine this time,” he said. “I’m an unlucky guy, that’s all. This is the only way I can see this working. I have to be there.”

  Marie turned slowly. Matt was taller, and when they stood close she had to look up to see his eyes. He’d spent their entire marriage looking down on her—both literally and otherwise—but she could still clearly see his eyes. A person’s mouth could say one thing but their eyes would say something else, and what were Matt’s eyes saying?

  “It’ll be safer this way,” he said. “Easier for you. I’ll make sure you’re good and I can get rid of the rope, too. Throw it in the river right then instead of going up after. One less thing for us to worry about later.”

  She stared up at him. He looked right back, unblinking. He had the flat, black gaze of a lizard, she thought. There was nothing loving in his look, nothing even human. In that moment she realized why Matt was insisting he should come along with her to the top of the cliff, why he’d agreed so easily to splitting the insurance money so unevenly. You couldn’t be married to someone for so long without developing a sort of low-grade telepathy, and her antennae were vibrating.

  Matt didn’t want to fake her death.

  He wanted to come along to make sure she really did die.

  “Okay,” she said slowly, as if she’d been considering, turning his suggestion over in her head. “If that’s what you think is best.”

  He’d been excited then and kissed her, and she’d kissed him right back, even though she would’ve liked to bite his tongue right out of his mouth and spit it out onto the floor between them. It was so easy, she thought, to keep your hate to yourself. To let it simmer like acid in your stomach. You started to live on it after a while. It fed you, kept you going, until you started to get hungry for it, and it became an active craving. A diet of anger and hate could slim anyone’s thighs.

  Matt was making his secret plans, so she did, too. She paid their insurance agent a visit and upped her life insurance policy, told the nosy old bag it’d been Matt’s idea. She marked spots on maps of the park and left them behind. In his office, in their home. Matt wouldn’t be looking for these things, but the cops would. She didn’t think she’d have to do much—he was a man who’d been suspected of murdering his first wife, and that was sure to come up sooner or later. If it didn’t, she’d make sure it would. It would be enough if Matt were arrested for murder, if he spent the rest of his life in prison. It would make everything worth it, to know he was suffering.

  An eye for an eye.

  So she planned.

  Easy to follow, easy to swallow, like Matt always said.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  August 28, 2018

  “It’s a long way to the bottom,” Matt said as he watched her hook the rope around her waist. It was the second time he’d said it in the last few hours.

  “Yeah,” she said. She yanked on the rope to make sure it was secure and then looked at her husband. The sun had sunk behind the mountains and it was hard to see much in the gloaming, and the shadows on Matt’s face gave him the look of a skull. “Don’t forget to toss over my pack when I’m down. I’ll need it.”

  “I won’t,” he said. He didn’t come any closer to the edge. “Don’t worry, hon. Everything will be fine. The cops’ll never guess you faked your death.”

  She gave him a sharp look, but Matt had turned away, was fiddling with the ropes. She wished she could take one more look into his eyes, just to see what was there, but what did it matter? It didn’t, that was the answer. She already knew what she’d see there.

  Matt didn’t try to kiss her good-bye.

  It all went scarily well until Marie had started lowering herself over the edge of the cliff on the rope she’d tied around a tree trunk. It was a long coil of rope, a huge amount; she gripped it in both hands and had it looped through the safety harness on her waist, enough rope that she should’ve been able to lower herself all the way down to the ground beside the river with some left over. But she was no more than fifteen feet down when she felt the rope tremble and vibrate in her hands and she knew what was happening. Matt had stayed back from the edge, he was scared of heights and always had been, and he’d let her go down, watched her lower herself until she was at the point of no return—and then he’d started to cut the rope.

  She’d expected this. Even prepared for it. But she hadn’t thought he’d start cutting so soon. She should’ve known. Matt had never been a patient man.

  “Matt?” she’d said, alarmed. Did she have enough time? She wasn’t sure. Never trust men, she’d taught her daughters, the same lesson her mother had taught her. She could’ve loosened her grip on the rope then and unlatched the harness and zipped all the way down to the bottom before he cut all the way through, she would’ve lost most of the skin on her palms in the process, but she would’ve made it; she would have landed dangerously close to the river, but she would have lived. But she didn’t want that. She wanted Matt to think that he’d gotten away with it, that he’d managed to kill her. She wanted him to glory in it. At least for a little while.

  So she held on to the rope. She wanted it to stay taut, so he’d feel her weight on it. She had other plans. She’d come up to this cliff after she’d guessed what Matt might be planning, several times, day trips he never knew about, he never bothered to ask what she’d done while he was at work, he didn’t care—and lowered herself over the edge like this alone, only she’d planted several camming devices deep in the underside of the cliff and threaded a second rope through them, long enough that it was doubled up, and left it there to dangle. If anyone hiked to the cliff base they’d spot that rope immediately, might even report it, but it was a chance she had to take.

  “Matt, what’s happening?” she shouted as she reached for the rope she’d planted. It swung out of reach once, squirting out of her sweaty grip, and she really started to feel the beginning threads of panic. If he managed to cut through before she could get a good hold—well, it’d be game over. All her planning was for nothing, and Matt would get exactly what he wanted. She’d be dead. “Is everything okay up there?”

  For the first time, it occurred to Marie that if she fell into the river and drowned, her body would be found with the climbing gear still on, the harness still strapped around her waist and thighs. She didn’t know how her idiot husband planned on explaining that to the police, unless—

  Unless he was planning on telling the police that she’d been trying to fake her death and had failed. Plunged to her death. It was just enough of t
he truth that it just might work.

  “Matt?” she screamed. “Can you hear me?”

  He didn’t answer, but she could clearly feel the sawing motion of his knife through her line. Marie allowed herself one terrified glance down. The river took up her entire field of vision, the violently thrashing water seeming to reach up for her. It was hungry, that was the best word for it. It wanted her to plunge under those frothy waves so it could hold her under no matter how hard she struggled and her lungs would fill, she’d drown. The sound a river makes as it flows past was usually described as roaring, or rushing, but to Marie it sounded like it was laughing. A wetly satisfying chuckle because it was waiting for her. This same river had already drowned several people, and she’d be the latest.

  “Get your shit together,” she muttered, tearing her eyes away from the water and reaching out again. Second time’s the charm, and she finally caught hold of the second line and tried to get it latched into place on her harness, but the trembling panic in her fingers made her clumsy, her sweat made the metal slick and hard to grab. But she had it in her hands, at least.

  There was a snap and she gasped when she dropped a few feet down, then jerked to a stop. He was almost all the way through the rope, then. She had ten seconds at most before it gave way completely, probably less. That wasn’t enough time to get as safe as she wanted, so she’d have to make do. The best-laid plans, and all that. Time to improvise. She took the rope and wrapped it several times around her wrist and swung her legs to get a loop of it around one of her calves.