The Husband’s Secret

by Liane Moriarty

  ‘Is it true?’ she said again, stronger.

  She knew it was true, but her desire for it not to be true was so overpowering, she had to ask. She wanted to beg for it to be made untrue.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. His eyes were bloodshot and rolling about like a terrified horse.

  ‘But you’d never,’ said Cecilia. ‘You wouldn’t. You couldn’t.’

  ‘I can’t explain it.’

  ‘You didn’t even know Janie Crowley.’ She corrected herself. ‘I didn’t even know you knew her. You never even mentioned her.’

  At the mention of Janie’s name, John-Paul began to visibly shake. He clung to the sides of the doorframe. Seeing him shake like that was even more shocking than the actual words he’d written.

  ‘If you’d died,’ she said. ‘If you’d died and I’d found this letter –’

  She stopped. She couldn’t breathe for the fury.

  ‘How could you just leave that for me? Leave me to do that for you? Expect me to turn up on Rachel Crowley’s doorstep and tell her . . . this . . . thing?’ She stood up, covered her face with her hands and turned around in circles. She was naked, she noted without particular interest. Her T-shirt had ended up at the bottom of the bed after they’d had sex and she hadn’t bothered to find it. ‘I drove Rachel home tonight! I drove her home! I talked to her about Janie! I thought I was so great for telling her this memory I had of Janie, and all the time this letter was sitting here.’ She removed her hands and looked at him. ‘What if one of the girls had found it, John-Paul?’ That had only just occurred to her. It was so momentous, so dreadful, she had to say it again. ‘What if one of the girls had found it?’

  ‘I know,’ he whispered. He came into the room and stood with his back up against the wall and looked at her as if he was facing a firing squad. ‘I’m sorry.’

  She watched as his legs gave way and he slid to the carpet to a sitting position.

  ‘Why would you write it?’ She picked up the corner of the letter and dropped it again. ‘How could you put something like that in writing?’

  ‘I’d had too much to drink, and then the next day I tried to find it so I could tear it up.’ He looked up at her tearfully. ‘And I’d lost it. I nearly lost my mind looking for it. I must have been working on my tax return and then it got caught up in some of the papers. I thought I’d looked –’

  ‘Stop it!’ she shouted. She couldn’t bear to hear him talking with his usual hopeless wonder about the way things got lost and then turned up again, as if this letter was something perfectly ordinary, like an unpaid car insurance bill.

  John-Paul put a finger to his lips. ‘You’ll wake the girls,’ he said tremulously.

  His nervousness made her feel sick. Be a man, she wanted to scream. Make this go away. Take this thing off me! It was a disgusting, ugly, horrible creature he needed to destroy. It was an impossibly heavy box he needed to lift from her arms. And he wasn’t doing anything.

  A tiny voice floated down the hallway. ‘Daddy!’

  It was Polly, their lightest sleeper. She always called for her father. Cecilia would not do. Only her father could make the monsters go away. Only her father. Her father who had killed a seventeen-year-old girl. Her father who was a monster himself. Her father who had kept this evil, unspeakable secret for all these years. It was like she hadn’t fully comprehended any of it until this moment.

  The shock winded her. She collapsed into the black leather chair.

  ‘Daddy!’

  ‘Coming, Polly!’ John-Paul got slowly to his feet, using the wall to support himself. He gave Cecilia a desperate look, and headed down the hallway towards Polly’s room.

  Cecilia focused on her breathing. In through the nostrils. She saw Janie Crowley’s twelve-year-old face. ‘It’s only stupid marching.’ Out through the mouth. She saw the grainy black and white picture of Janie that had appeared on the front cover of the newspapers, a long blonde ponytail falling down one shoulder. All murder victims looked exactly like murder victims: beautiful, innocent and doomed, as if it was preordained. In through the nostrils. She saw Rachel Crowley gently banging her forehead against the car window. Out through the mouth. What to do, Cecilia? What to do? How could she fix it? How could she make it right? She fixed things. She made things right. She put things in order. All you had to do was pick up the phone, get on the internet, fill in the right forms, talk to the right people, arrange the refund, the replacement, the better model.

  Except that nothing would ever bring Janie back. Her mind kept returning to that one cold, immovable, awful fact, like an enormous wall that couldn’t be crossed.

  She began ripping the letter into tiny pieces.

  Confess. John-Paul would have to confess. That was obvious. He would have to come clean. Make it all clean and shiny. Scrub it away. Follow the rules. The law. He’d have to go to prison. He’d have to be sentenced. A sentence. Put behind bars. But he couldn’t be locked up. He’d lose his mind. So, then, medication, therapy. She’d talk to people. Do the research. He wouldn’t be the first prisoner with claustrophobia. Weren’t those cells actually quite spacious? They had exercise yards, didn’t they?

  Claustrophobia didn’t actually kill you. It just made you feel like you couldn’t breathe.

  Whereas two hands placed around the neck could kill you.

  He’d strangled Janie Crowley. He’d actually put his hands around her thin girlish neck and squeezed. Didn’t that make him evil? Yes. The answer had to be yes. John-Paul was evil.

  She kept tearing at the letter, shredding the pieces into tinier and tinier fragments until she could roll them between her fingertips.

  Her husband was evil. So, therefore he must go to jail. Cecilia would be the wife of a prisoner. She wondered if there was a social club for the wives. She’d set one up if there wasn’t. She giggled hysterically, like a crazy woman. Of course she would! She was Cecilia. She’d be president of the Prisoners Wives Association and organise fundraising for airconditioning units to be put in their poor husbands’ cells. Did prisons have airconditioning? Or was it just primary schools that missed out? She imagined chatting with the other wives while they waited to go through the metal detectors. ‘What’s your husband in for? Oh, bank robbery? Really? Mine’s in for murder. Yep, strangled a girl. Off to the gym after this, are you?’

  ‘She’s gone back off,’ said John-Paul. He’d returned to the study, standing in front of her, massaging little circles under his cheekbones, the way he did when he was exhausted.

  He didn’t look evil. He looked just like her husband. Unshaven. Messy hair. Shadows under his eyes. Her husband. The father of her children.

  If he’d killed someone once, what was to stop him doing it again? She’d just let him go into Polly’s room. She’d just let a murderer go into her daughter’s room.

  But it was John-Paul! Their father. He was Daddy.

  How could they tell the girls what John-Paul had done?

  Daddy is going to jail.

  For a moment her mind stopped completely.

  They could never tell the girls.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said John-Paul. He held out his arms uselessly, as if he wanted to hold her but they were separated by something too vast to be crossed. ‘Darling, I’m just so sorry.’

  Cecilia wrapped her arms around her naked body. She trembled violently. Her teeth chattered. I’m having a nervous breakdown, she thought with relief. I’m about to lose my mind, and that’s just as well because this cannot possibly be fixed. It is simply not fixable.

  chapter nineteen

  ‘There! See!’

  Rachel hit the pause button so that Connor Whitby’s angry face was frozen on the screen. It was the face of a monster. His eyes were evil black holes. His lips were pulled back in a rabid sneer. Rachel had watched the footage four times now, and each time she became more convinced. It was, she thought, quite stunningly conclusive. Show this to any jury and they’d convict.

  She turned to look at for
mer Sergeant Rodney Bellach sitting on her couch, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and caught him flattening his hand across his mouth to stifle a yawn.

  Well, it was the middle of the night. Sergeant Bellach – ‘You can just call me plain old Rodney now,’ he kept telling her – had obviously been deeply asleep when she’d called. His wife had answered the phone and Rachel had overheard her trying to wake him up. ‘Rodney. Rodney. It’s for you!’ When he finally got on the phone, his voice had been thick and slurred with sleep. ‘I’ll be right there, Mrs Crowley,’ he’d finally said, when she’d made him understand, and as he put down the phone Rachel had heard his wife say, ‘Where, Rodney? You’ll be right where? Why can’t it wait until the morning?’

  His wife sounded like a right old nag.

  It probably could have waited until the morning, reflected Rachel now as she saw Rodney valiantly struggling to repress another massive yawn and rubbing his knuckles into his bleary eyes. At least he would have been more alert then. He really didn’t look well at all. Apparently he’d recently been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. He’d made some dramatic changes to his diet. He’d mentioned all this as they’d sat down to watch the video. ‘Completely cut out all sugar,’ he’d said sadly. ‘No more ice cream for dessert.’

  ‘Mrs Crowley,’ he said finally. ‘I can certainly see why you would think that this proves Connor had a motive of some sort, but I have to be honest with you, I just don’t think it’s enough to convince the boys to take a second look.’

  ‘He was in love with her!’ said Rachel. ‘He was in love with her and she was rejecting him.’

  ‘Your daughter was a very pretty girl,’ said Sergeant Bellach. ‘Probably a lot of boys were in love with her.’

  Rachel was gobsmacked. How had she never noticed that Rodney was so stupid? So obtuse? Had the diabetes affected his IQ? Had the lack of ice cream shrunk his brain?

  ‘But Connor wasn’t just any boy. He was the last one to see her before she died,’ she said slowly and carefully to make sure he understood.

  ‘He had an alibi.’

  ‘His mother was his alibi!’ said Rachel. ‘She lied, obviously!’

  ‘And his mother’s boyfriend backed it up too,’ said Rodney. ‘But more importantly, there was a neighbour who saw Connor put out the rubbish bin at five pm. The neighbour was a very reliable witness. A solicitor and a father of three. I remember every detail of Janie’s case, Mrs Crowley. I can assure you, if I thought we had anything –’

  ‘Lies in his eyes!’ interrupted Rachel. ‘You said Connor Whitby had lies in his eyes. Well, you were right! You were exactly right!’

  Rodney said, ‘But, see, all this proves is that they had a little tiff.’

  ‘A little tiff!’ cried Rachel. ‘Look at that boy’s face! He killed her! I know he killed her. I know it in my heart, in my . . .’ She was going to say ‘body’, but she didn’t want to sound like a loony. It was true, though. Her body was telling her what Connor had done. It was burning all over, as if she had a fever. Even her fingertips felt hot.

  ‘Well, you know what, I’ll see what I can do, Mrs Crowley,’ said Rodney. ‘I’m not making any promises about whether it will go anywhere, but I can promise you this video will get into the right hands.’

  ‘Thank you. That’s all I can ask.’ It was a lie. She could ask for a lot more. She wanted a police car with a shrieking whirling siren to race to Connor Whitby’s house right this second. She wanted Connor handcuffed, while a grim-faced burly police officer read him his rights. Oh, and she did not want that police officer to tenderly protect Connor’s head when they put him in the back of the police car. She wanted Connor’s head smashed over and over, until it was nothing but a bloody pulp.

  ‘How’s that little grandson of yours? Growing up?’ Rodney picked up a framed photo of Jacob from the mantelpiece while Rachel ejected the video cassette.

  ‘He’s going to New York.’ Rachel handed him the cassette.

  ‘No kidding?’ Rodney took the cassette and carefully replaced Jacob’s photo. ‘My oldest granddaughter is off to New York too. She’s eighteen now. Little Emily. Got herself a scholarship to some top university. The Big Apple they call it, don’t they? Wonder why they call it that?’

  Rachel gave him a sickly smile and led him to the front door. ‘I have absolutely no idea, Rodney. No idea at all.’

  6 April 1984

  On the morning of the last day of her life, Janie Crowley sat next to Connor Whitby on the bus.

  She felt strangely breathless, and she tried to calm herself by breathing in slowly with slow, deep breaths from the diaphragm. It didn’t seem to help.

  Calm down, she told herself.

  ‘I’ve got something to say,’ she said.

  He didn’t say anything. He never did say much, thought Janie. She watched him studying his hands resting on his knees, and she studied them herself. He had very big hands, she saw with a shiver, of fear or anticipation or both. Her own hands were icy cold. They were always cold. She slid them under her jumper to warm them.

  She said, ‘I’ve made a decision.’

  He turned his head suddenly to look at her. The bus lurched as it went around a corner and their bodies slid closer, so that their eyes were only inches apart.

  She was breathing so fast she wondered if there was something wrong with her.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  wednesday

  chapter twenty

  The alarm clock wrenched Cecilia cruelly, instantly awake at six-thirty am. She was lying on her side, facing John-Paul, and their eyes opened simultaneously. They were so close their noses were almost touching.

  She looked at the delicate scribbles of red veins in the whites of John-Paul’s blue eyes, the pores on his nose, the grey stubble on his strong, firm, honest chin.

  Who was this man?

  Last night they had got back into bed and lay together in the darkness, staring blindly at the ceiling while John-Paul talked. How he’d talked. There had been no need to probe for information. She didn’t ask a single question. He wanted to talk, to tell her everything. His voice was low and fervent, without modulation, almost monotonous, except there was nothing monotonous about what he was telling her. The more he talked, the hoarser his voice got. It was like a nightmare, lying in the dark, listening to that raspy whisper of his, going on and on and on. She had to bite her lip to stop herself from screaming, Shut up, shut up, shut up!

  He’d been in love with Janie Crowley. Crazy in love. Obsessed even. The way you think you’re in love when you’re a teenager. He met her one day at Hornsby McDonald’s when they were both filling in applications for part-time work. Janie recognised him from when they’d been at primary school together, before he’d gone off to his exclusive boys school. They’d been in the same year at St Angela’s, but in different classes. He didn’t actually remember her at all, although he sort of knew the Crowley name. Neither of them ended up working at the McDonald’s. Janie got a job at the dry-cleaners and John-Paul got a job at the milk bar, but they had this amazing intense conversation about God knows what, and she gave him her phone number, and he rang her the next day.

  He thought she was his girlfriend. He thought he was going to lose his virginity to her. It all had to be really secretive because Janie’s dad was one of those crazy Catholic dads and he said she couldn’t even have a boyfriend until she was eighteen. Their relationship, such as it was, had to be completely secret. That only made it more exciting. It was like they were secret agents. If he rang her house and anyone but Janie answered, the rule was that he had to hang up. They never held hands in public. None of their friends knew. Janie insisted on this. They went to the movies once and held hands in the dark. They kissed on a train in an empty carriage. They sat in the rotunda at Wattle Valley Park and smoked cigarettes and talked about how they wanted to go to Europe before uni. And that was it, really. Except that he thought about her day and night. He wrote her poetry he was too embarrassed
to give her.

  He never wrote me poetry, thought Cecilia irrelevantly.

  That night Janie asked him to meet her in Wattle Valley Park where they’d met often before. It was always deserted and there was the rotunda where they could sit and kiss. She said she had something to tell him. He thought she was going to tell him that she’d gone to the family planning centre and got the pill, they’d talked about that, but instead she said that she was sorry but she was in love with another boy. John-Paul was stunned. Bewildered. He didn’t know there was another boy in the running! He said, ‘But I thought you were my girlfriend!’ And she laughed. She seemed so happy, John-Paul said, so happy that she wasn’t his girlfriend, and he was just crushed, and humiliated, and filled with this incredible rage. It was his pride more than anything. He felt like a fool, and for that he wanted to kill her.

  John-Paul seemed desperate for Cecilia to know this. He said he didn’t want to justify it, or mitigate it, or pretend it was an accident – because for a few seconds he absolutely felt the desire to kill.

  He didn’t remember making the decision to put his hands around her neck. But he remembered the moment when he suddenly became aware of the slender girlish neck between his hands and realised it wasn’t one of his brothers he had in a chokehold. He was hurting a girl. He remembered thinking, What the fuck am I doing? and he dropped his hands so fast, and he actually felt relieved, because he was so sure he’d caught himself in time, that he hadn’t killed her. Except that she was limp in his arms, her eyes staring over his shoulder, and he thought, no, this couldn’t be possible. He thought it had only been a second, maybe two seconds of crazy rage; definitely not long enough to kill her.

  He couldn’t believe it. Even now. After all these years. He was still shocked and horrified by what he’d done.

  She was still warm, but he knew, without a shadow of doubt, that she was dead.