by Mary Kubica
I run fast. I have so much on my mind. I find myself thinking
about Imogen, about Erin; about Jeffrey Baines and his ex-wife
hiding in the church’s sanctuary. What were they talking about,
I wonder, and where is Erin’s photograph? Has Will hidden it
from me, or is he using it as a bookmark in his next novel? Is it
something as auspicious as that?
I pass cliffs that inhabit the east side of the island. They’re precarious and steep, jutting out and over the Atlantic. I try not to
think about Erin. As I watch, the ocean’s waves come crashing
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furiously into the rocks. All at once, a flock of migrating birds
moves past me in a deranged mass as they do this time of year.
The sudden movement of them startles me and I scream. Dozens,
if not hundreds, of black birds pulsate as if one, and then flee.
The ocean is tempestuous this morning. The wind blows
across it, sending the waves crashing to shore. Angry whitecaps
assail the rocky shoreline, throwing upward a ten- or twenty-
foot spray.
I imagine the waters this time of year are icy, the depth of
the ocean deep.
I pause in my run to stretch. I reach down to touch my toes,
loosening my hamstrings. The world around me is so quiet it’s
unsettling. The only sound I hear is that of the wind slipping
around me, whispering into my ear.
All at once I’m startled by words that get carried to me on
the jet stream.
I hate you. You’re a loser. Die, die, die.
I jolt upright, scanning the horizon for the source of the noise.
But I see nothing, no one. And yet I can’t shake the idea that
someone is out there, that someone is watching me. A chill goes
dashing up my spine. My hands start to shake.
I call out a feeble, “Hello?” but no one replies.
I look around, see nothing in the distance. No one hiding
behind the corners of homes or the trunks of trees. The beach
is without people, the windows and doors of the homes shut
tight as they should be on a day like this.
It’s my imagination only. No one is here. No one is speak-
ing to me.
What I hear is the rustle of the wind.
My mind has mistaken the wind for words.
I continue on my run. By the time I reach the fringes of
town—a quintessential small town with the Methodist church, an inn, a post office, and a handful of places to eat including
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a seasonal ice cream shop, boarded up with panels of plywood
this time of year—it’s begun to rain. What starts as a drizzle
soon comes down in sheets. I run as fast as my legs will carry
me, ducking into a café to wait the storm out.
I swing open the door and scurry in, dripping wet. I’ve never
been here before. This café is rustic and provincial, the kind of
place where old men spend the day, drinking coffee, grumbling
about local politics and weather.
The café door doesn’t have a chance to close before I over-
hear a woman ask, “Did anyone go to the memorial service for
Morgan?”
This woman sits on a wobbly, broken-spindled chair in the
center of the restaurant, eating from a plate of bacon and eggs.
“Poor Jeffrey,” she says, shaking her head mournfully. “He must
be devastated.” She reaches for a carton of creamer and douses
her coffee with it.
“It’s all so awful,” another woman replies. They sit, a troupe
of middle-aged woman at a long laminated table beside the win-
dow of the restaurant. “So unspeakable,” the same woman says.
I tell the hostess I need a table for one, by the window. A
waitress stops by and asks what she can get for me, and I tell
her coffee, please.
The ladies at the table go on. I listen.
“I heard them talking about it on the news this morning,”
someone says.
“What did they say?” another asks.
“Police have been speaking to a person of interest.”
Jeffrey, I tell myself, is the person of interest.
“I heard she got stabbed,” I overhear just then, and my stom-
ach lurches at the words. My hand falls to my own abdomen,
thinking what it would feel like when the knife punctured the
skin, when it slipped inside her organs.
The next voice is incredulous. “How do they know that?”
the woman asks, slamming her mug too hard to the table, and
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the ladies leap, including me. “Police haven’t released any in-
formation yet.”
The first voice again. “Well, now they have. That’s what the
coroner said. The coroner said she was stabbed.”
“Five times, they said on the news. Once in the chest, twice
in the back and the face.”
“The face?” someone asks, aghast. My hand rises up to my
cheek, feeling the insubstantiality of it. The thin skin, the hard
bones. Nowhere for the blade of the knife to go. “How awful.”
The women wonder aloud what it would feel like to be
stabbed. If Morgan felt the pain straightaway or not until the first signs of blood. Or maybe it happened so fast, a woman guesses,
the repeated thrust in and out of her, that she didn’t have time
to feel a thing because she was already dead.
What I know as a physician is that if the weapon hit a major
artery on the way in, Morgan Baines would have passed mer-
cifully quick. But if it didn’t, though she may have been in-
capacitated, death by exsanguination, bleeding out, would have taken longer. And, once the shock of it wore off, it would have
been painful.
For her sake, I hope Morgan’s assailant hit a major artery. I
hope it was quick.
“There were no signs of forced entry. No broken windows.
No busted door.”
“Maybe Morgan opened the door for him.”
“Maybe she never locked it in the first place,” someone chirps.
“Maybe she was expecting him,” she says, and a discussion fol-
lows about how most murder victims know their assailant.
Someone quotes a statistic, saying how random crime is relatively
rare. “Getting stabbed in the face. That sounds personal to me.”
My mind goes to the ex, Courtney. Courtney had reason to
want Morgan dead. I think of her proclamation. I’m not sorry for what I did! What did she mean by that?
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“The killer must have known Jeffrey was gone,” one of the
ladies speculates.
“Jeffrey travels often. From what I hear, he’s almost always
gone. If it isn’t Tokyo then it’s Frankfurt or Toronto.”
“Maybe Morgan was seeing someone else. Maybe she had a
boyfriend.”
The incredulous voice returns just then. “It’s all hearsay. All
rumor,” she says, admonishing the other women for gossiping
this way about a dead woman.
Someone quickly contradicts. “Pamela,” the woman says, tone
antagonistic. “It’s not hearsay. It was on the news.”
“They said on the news that Morgan had a boyfriend?” Pa-
mela asks.
“Well, no. Not that. But they said that she was stabbed.”
I wonder if Will knows any of this.
“A knife, they said,” and I find this omniscient they starting to wear on my nerves. Who is they? “That’s what they said was the murder weapon. Can you imagine?” the woman asks,
as she latches down on the handle of a butter knife and hoists
it indecorously over her head, makes believe she’s stabbing the
woman next to her with the blunt edge of the knife. The ladies
admonish her. “Jackie,” they say, “stop it. What in the world’s
gotten into you? A woman was killed,” they say.
“That’s what they say,” the woman named Jackie continues.
“Just stating the facts, ladies. According to coroner reports, it was a boning knife by the shape and length of the wound. Narrow
and curved. About six inches long. Though that’s just specula-
tion because Morgan’s killer didn’t leave it behind. He took it
with him. Took it with him and probably tossed it out to sea.”
Sitting there in the café, I imagine the angry, tempestuous
waves I saw on my run. I think of all the people who ride the
ferry to and from the mainland day after day after day, sitting
at the top of it with over three miles of seawater with which to
dispose of a murder weapon.
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So much latitude, so much leeway. Everyone so wrapped up
in themselves, not paying attention to what others around them
are doing.
The current of the Atlantic sweeps upward along the coast
and toward Nova Scotia. From there it’s Europe-bound. There’s
little chance a knife would wash ashore on the coast of Maine
if the killer tossed it out to sea.
I leave my coffee where it is when I go. I didn’t drink a drop
of it.
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Camille
I’ve always hated the ocean. But somehow I convinced myself
to follow him there because wherever Will was was where I
wanted to be.
I found a place to stay, an empty house near his. The house
was teensy, tiny, pathetic, with sheets that hung from furniture,
making everything ghostlike.
I walked through the inside of the house, looked everything
over. I sat on their chairs, I lay on the beds just like Goldilocks.
One was too big, too small, but one was just right.
I opened and closed dresser drawers, saw nearly nothing in-
side, forgotten things only, like socks, dental floss, toothpicks.
I turned the faucets. Nothing came out. The pipes were
empty, the toilet was too. The cupboards, the refrigerator were
nearly bare. The only thing there was a box of baking soda. The
house was cold.
In that house, my existential crises were frequent. I found my-
self stuck inside, killing time, wondering why. I was trapped in
darkness, feeling like I didn’t exist, feeling like I shouldn’t exist.
I thought that maybe I’d be better off dead. I thought about
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ways to end my life. It wouldn’t be the first time. I’d tried be-
fore, would have done it too, if I hadn’t been interrupted. It’s
only a matter of time until I try again.
Some nights I left that house, stood in the street watching
Will through the window of his own home. Most nights, the
porch light was on, a beacon for Sadie when she wasn’t there. It
pissed me off. He loved Sadie more than he loved me. I hated
Sadie for it. I screamed at her. I wanted to kill her, I wanted her dead. But it wasn’t as easy as that.
As I stood in the street, I watched smoke come gushing from
the chimney and into the night, gray against the navy sky. There
were lamps on inside the home. A yellow glow filled the win-
dow, where the curtains were parted in a perfect V.
Everything about it read like a damn greeting card.
One night, I stood watching through that window. For a sec-
ond, I closed my eyes. I imagined myself on the other side of it
with him. In my mind, I grappled with his sweater. He tugged
at my hair. He pressed his mouth to mine. It was wild and fierce.
He bit my lip. I tasted blood.
But then the rev of a car engine roused me. I opened my eyes,
saw the car come chugging up the street. The Little Engine That Could. I stepped out of the way, dropped down into the ditch where the driver wouldn’t see me lurking in the shadows.
The car passed slowly by. Puffs of smoke sputtered from the
back end of it. I think I can, I think I can.
I watched as Will knelt in the room inside his house. He wore
a sweater that night, gray, the kind with a half zip. He wore
jeans, he wore shoes. He was playing with his kid, the little one,
on their knees in the middle of the room. The stupid kid, he
was smiling. He was happy as a damn clam.
He took the kid by the hand. Together, they rose from the
floor, went to the window. They stood, looking out into the
night. I could see them, but they couldn’t see me. I could see
everything on the inside because of how dark it was outside.
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The fire in the fireplace. The vase on the mantel; the painting
on the wall.
They were waiting for Sadie to come home.
I told myself he wasn’t trying to ditch me when he came to
this island. He had no choice but to go. Just like a larva has no
choice but to turn into a flea.
Just then another car came passing by, but this time I didn’t
move.
I tried not to be a nuisance. But some days I couldn’t help
myself. I left messages on Sadie’s car window; I sat on the hood
of her car, chain-smoked my way through a pack of cigarettes
before some old hag tried to tell me I couldn’t smoke there, that
I had to smoke somewhere else. I didn’t like being told what to
do. I told her, This is a free country. I can smoke wherever the hell I want. I called her things, a biddy, an old bag. She threatened to tell on me.
I let myself into their home one day when no one was there.
Getting inside was easy. If you watch anyone long enough, you
know. The passwords, the PINs—they’re all the same. And
they’re all there in the paperwork that gets tossed in the trash.
Someone’s birthdate, the last four digits of a social security num-
ber on a tax form, a pay stub.
I hid out of sight, watched Will’s car as it pulled away before
I went to the garage keypad, plugged some code in. I got it on
the third try.
From there,
the door to the house unlocked. I turned the
knob, let myself in.
The dogs didn’t bark when I stepped inside. Some guard dogs
they are. They scurried over, sniffed my hand. They licked me.
I petted their heads, told them to go lie down, and they did.
I stepped out of my shoes, made my way around the kitchen
first, tinkering with things, touching things. I was hungry. I
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opened the refrigerator door, found something inside, sat at the
table to eat.
I pretended this was my home. I kicked my feet up on another
chair, reached for a days-old newspaper. I sat awhile, reading
obsolete headlines as I ate.
I glanced across the table, imagined Will eating with me,
imagined I wasn’t alone.
How was your day? I asked Will, but before he could reply, the phone rang. The sound of it was unexpected. I startled, bound-ing from my chair to answer the phone, feeling aggrieved that
someone would call in the middle of Will’s and my dinner to-
gether.
I lifted the receiver from the cradle, pressed it to my ear.
Hello? I asked. It was an old rotary phone. The kind no one in the world still used.
Is this Mrs. Foust? he asked. The voice belonged to a man. He was chipper.
I didn’t miss a beat. This is she, I said, leaning my back against the countertop, grinning. This is Sadie Foust, I said.
He was from the cable company, calling to see if Will and I
wanted to upgrade our cable package. His voice was persuasive,
friendly. He asked questions. He called me by name.
Well, not my name exactly.
But still.
How is your current package treating you, Mrs. Foust? Are you happy with your choice of channels?
I told him I was not. That the selection was quite slim.
Do you find yourself ever wishing for the hottest premium channels, Mrs. Foust, or your husband the MLB Network?
I told him I did. That I wished for that all of the time. That I
longed to watch movies on HBO or Showtime. They’re not part
of our current package, are they, sir?
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change all that. We can change it right now over the phone. This is a great time to upgrade, Mrs. Foust.
His offer was hard to refuse. I couldn’t say no.
I set the phone back into its cradle. I left my casserole where