The Killer's Wife

by Bill Floyd

  I could see the doubt, the almost crafty calculation running in tandem with his wounded confusion. She’s lied to me all my life, how can I believe her now? What else has she told me that isn’t true? My coin long spent.

  It was spooky, his silent assessment. I tried to salvage some degree of face, truly desperate that I might not be able to regain his faith. “How many times have I lied to you before?”

  “I don’t know, now.”

  “Fair enough. But you remember how I told you that Mr. Donahue down the street was breaking the law when he was watering his yard during the drought last summer? And you didn’t believe me, because you said he was too nice and too old, and it was only water. But then you saw the police come and he argued with them and they gave him a citation?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And how about when I explained that the boy on Hey, Simon wasn’t really lost in the woods but that he was just an actor on TV? And then he came to the mall and signed autographs and you got his. I told the truth about those things, right?”

  “Okay,” he said. “I get it. But that’s not really the same, Mom.”

  “I know.”

  “And Ashton at school said that if Daddy was a criminal then I was going to be one, too, because it’s generic.”

  I bit down on the quick flush of anger that came along with that tidbit, and made a mental note to have a word with Ashton Hale’s mother the next time I saw her. Assuming that she would still deign to speak to me. “I think Ashton meant ‘genetic,’ honey, and I’ve told you before not to listen to that boy. He’s wrong, as usual. Genetics are the physical traits that mommies and daddies pass down to their kids. Plenty of kids have one bad parent or maybe even two, but they turn out fine when they grow up. And some parents who are good have bad kids. Genetics means you might have the same color hair or grow up to be the same height as your parents, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to act like they do. That’s always your choice.”

  I remembered my mother tiptoeing around my father’s infidelities. I remembered her lying to herself, and to me.

  “Do I look like him?” Hayden asked.

  And he stumped me with that one, because of course he did. Hayden got my fine brown hair, and if the baby fat didn’t melt away he’d be stuck with my chipmunk cheeks, but everything else on his face was pure Randy. The sharp chin, the brown eyes almost black. The olive skin and a quick smile, too toothy for comfort when he was faking it. A certain way he cocked his head when he was trying to figure something out.

  “Not so much,” I said.

  “Do you have pictures?”

  “I threw them away. Now listen to me. What your father did was bad, the very worst thing a person can do. And he did it more than once. He lied to me and to everyone else but eventually he got caught and the police punished him by locking him up in jail. He’ll be there for the rest of his life, and he’ll never get out again.” I thought about trying to explain state execution and decided we’d probably covered quite enough for this afternoon. I knew what I was about to say and part of me flinched away from it even though I could see Randy there in Hayden’s eyes, plain as day—oh, no—and I was almost talking to him now, denouncing the father through my little innocent one. “I think it’s what he deserved. Most other people think so, too.”

  “But if he’s sick, why can’t he just get better? Can’t the doctors do anything?”

  “There are some things that the doctors can’t fix, Hayden. And I could’ve forgiven him for his sickness, except he never even tried to get well. He knew the sickness made him do bad things but he never tried to stop. So you shouldn’t think about him, as much as you can help it. I know that Ashton and some of the other kids at school might bring it up, but you’re just going to have to do the best you can to ignore them. Soon they’ll find something else to talk about and you’ll still be the same sweet guy you’ve always been. You’ll never be like your father, okay? I promise.”

  I must have had some credibility remaining, because his tears came back full force, and this time he was the one leaning into me, encircling my neck with those skinny, perfect little arms.

  3.

  I got him settled into bed early. Instead of giving me the usual good night kiss, he turned over and faced the wall and mumbled, “Love you, Mom.” Not even half as convincingly as usual.

  Maybe one day, he would learn to lie as easily as grownups did.

  I was still shaky, but I didn’t want to take any more pills. So I distracted myself by going online, looking up the most recent editions of the Memphis Star. There was only a short follow-up article about Julie Craven’s unsolved slaying, this piece from a few weeks ago; police were still asking for witnesses to come forward. A spokesman said they were in the process of interviewing all the residents of the apartment complex where the victim lived, but so far there were no specific “persons of interest.” Not for the first time, I considered calling the Cary police. I wondered if I could convince them that Pritchett’s leaving the article on my windshield was a form of threat. He obviously saw some connection between the recent killing and Randy’s crimes, and therefore to me, but I didn’t understand it at all. People got murdered every day. Randy was behind bars, in maximum security on Death Row, three thousand miles away.

  And when I turned on the ten o’clock news, there was Pritchett himself, being interviewed on Channel 11. The Features girl, an attractive reporter named Jennifer McLean, who’d briefly worked the consumer complaints beat before being moved into higher rotation, was asking him leading questions about his public campaign to disgrace me. He patiently, bravely told the story of what had happened to his daughter, while some archival footage from Randy’s trial ran on-screen. They showed the outside of the apartment building where Carrie Pritchett’s body had been found. I looked for similarities to the Memphis crime scene but didn’t see any overt ones. Pritchett reiterated that he’d never been satisfied with the California police’s conclusion that I hadn’t been involved in Randy’s crimes. Jennifer McLean seemed skeptical of his assertions, and she’d obviously done some homework. She told him she’d spoken with the local authorities and that they’d received no complaints about me. It was very strange to watch them this way, using my name so freely, the name I hadn’t used in years; the sense of disconnect was so utter that I wanted to pinch myself. The interviewer asked Pritchett why he would spend all this time and money to come after someone who hadn’t been a problem to anyone in the area.

  “She changed her name, and she tried to hide,” Pritchett intoned, with all the smug self-satisfaction of a religious fundamentalist. “I can’t hide from what happened. I don’t think she should be allowed to.”

  My blood slowly came to a boil. The interview ended with McLean talking about how Pritchett made millions designing and catering celebrity shindigs in LA, then sold his business after his daughter’s death. When she referred to what she called his “crusade,” you could practically see the quotation marks, and I found myself liking this girl quite a bit. Most of the other coverage hadn’t dared to question his motives, because he was, after all, a Victim.

  For the first time in a few years, I found myself wanting, more than just about anything else I could think of, a freaking cigarette. I could actually feel one between my fingers. I could taste the smoke. The store was only a few minutes away, I could be there and back before Hayden knew I was gone.

  But I’d quit smoking for my son. Not for the usual reasons, but because of the books of matches I found in the pockets of his pants sometimes when I was collecting laundry. The lighters I had found hidden in his desk drawer. The fact that he’d gotten them somewhere, and the fact that he’d hidden them. He knew not to play with fire; I’d told him it was dangerous. I had caught him playing with matches once when he was only four years old, burning a whole book of them in our driveway, and it was one of the only times I’d actually spanked his rear. Except for during my pregnancy, I’d been smoking since I was fifteen. I started back before he
was a month old. I only quit for good after I caught him burning that book of matches, seeing how his eyes narrowed and focused on the flames.

  I tried to forget: he was Randy’s child, too. That same blood moved through him. The same genetic derivations ran the synapses in his young mind.

  All the books I read when I was pregnant, all of Randy’s lurid true crime paperbacks, the ones I found in a box in his office and couldn’t quit reading once I’d started in on them, they all suggested in one way or another that psychotics were genetically predisposed. Many of them came from abusive homes, which was always one of the mitigating circumstances that the savvier defense lawyers tried to have introduced at trial. Awful backgrounds of sexual perversity or martial punishments meted out by overbearing mothers or drunken fathers. But the true crime authors took pains to remind their readers that this only reinforced the idea that there was something fouled up in the physiology, hardwired into the perpetrators: lack of impulse control, the damned deranging voices, the fantasies that couldn’t be denied the way the rest of us block out the worst visions with which our minds surprise us during our idle moments.

  The early signs: setting fires, bed-wetting, and the killing or torturing of small animals. I still discovered dampness in Hayden’s sheets from time to time, long after it should’ve quit being an issue. As far as I knew, no pets had mysteriously disappeared from our neighborhood. But what if they did? Would I be able to look at my son without seeing ruin?

  The shots in our front yard in El Ray, the neighbors watching and the cops converging while I held Hayden and screamed. The blood that fed the chambers of his heart. Echoes.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1.

  We were lying around his apartment, him wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts, me in only one of his T-shirts, the first time I saw the photograph. We’d just had our initial foray into actual sex. Three previous dates ended in some fumbling and dry humping, but this night I’d had quite a lot of wine, and holding back any longer seemed plain unfair to both of us. It was awkward, as such initial contacts usually are; both of us stayed neck to shoulder during the whole thing, facing past each other but close, really close, and it felt fine. He promised it would be better next time and I told him he didn’t have a thing to worry about. The reassurances on both sides were nearly rote, but with the codicil that I actually liked this guy quite a bit, and it was the first time in a while that that had happened and he seemed to like me as well. We both recognized that tonight might not be the only night, but the first in a long string of nights. It was immediately comfortable on some fundamental level, and even the awkwardness of the intimacy quickly fell away into an easy, innocuous kind of conversation, good rhythms, neither of us forcing it, both of us secretly happy that it hadn’t been any more disappointing than expected.

  He lived alone, which was unusual for a twenty-three-year-old in our snug little college town. Most guys his age had roommates, out of preference if not necessity. My friends and I judged that most men didn’t have the mental capacity for living alone; they needed to spout off to someone about stupid shit or else they got backed up, and turned weird. Randy seemed capable not only of handling solitude, but also of using the time alone to develop himself to an impressive degree. He was what HR types call a “self-starter.” His apartment was tidy and fashionable without coming across as effete; a gas fireplace and a couple of nice reproductions on the walls, Impressionist ocean scenes and rustic landscapes. He’d dropped out of school his junior year, not from burnout but because he’d interned with Jackson-Lilliard, an international chemical company that had a regional office headquartered in Albany, an hour’s commute north from our campus town of Corvallis, and they’d offered him a full-time position at a salary no sane man his age would’ve refused. That’s a damned rare outcome for what had begun as an unpaid internship; his mentor had been extremely impressed with the way he’d carried himself and the amount of time and energy he devoted to his work.

  He was an extremely impressive sort of guy.

  When Dana had pointed him out to me two weeks earlier, a face across the bar at Happy Sam’s, I knew right away that he was distinct from the frat boys and the indie rockers and the other types of posers who filled the classrooms and quads at school. It was there in his carriage, his mannerisms of restraint, the way he spoke quietly when Dana introduced us. He made himself clearly heard without raising his voice, even in the boisterous din of the bar. A sharp dresser, not conventionally hot but put together just fine, ripped biceps and a thick chest under a tasteful Ralph Lauren shirt. Confident enough that he didn’t have to take extra measures to impress anyone, he didn’t sport any jewelry aside from what appeared to be a real Rolex. When Dana invited him to our table, he didn’t offer to buy everyone’s drinks; he just bought mine.

  Now he returned from the kitchen to refill my wineglass. I was holding the framed photo I’d found on one of his end tables. “Is this you?”

  He traded me a replenished glass for the picture, and a nostalgic, smoky sort of smile crossed his face. “That was in Alaska,” he said, settling down beside me on the couch. “I went up there for Christmas break my sophomore year. Some guys from the dorm were going and I couldn’t really afford it but in the end I decided, fuck it. I mean, when was I going to get the chance again?”

  The shot was taken from a low angle, about waist high, and portrayed a silhouetted, featureless figure facing away from the photographer and gazing off into the horizon. The horizon was the most striking facet of the scene: a forested slope at dusk, dropping away beneath the first evening stars and a hint of rippling aurora at the very top of the frame, an orange hem of sprinkled light.

  “It’s quite majestic,” I said, gently teasing. “But you should’ve turned around and smiled or something. It’s a little too dour.”

  “It’s dramatic effect,” he chided me. “The lone figure against the coming night. When the sun starts going down, which is like at noon that time of the year, you really only have a short window between the daylight and when it gets totally dark. And it does, darker than you’ve ever seen.” He sounded wistful, pensive; dramatic effect, I supposed. “Really dark, up there at the top of the world.”

  If that was not the exact moment I fell in love with him, still there was a palpable sensation in my chest as he said it. The moment could almost have been posed, just like the photo itself, but I didn’t feel manipulated. It sounded like something he’d thought of before, pondered upon, and I felt awfully damned privileged, at that postcoital moment, that he would share it with me. I snuggled in close and he smelled good. I started kissing his neck, tasting salt and soap, and then we were going at it again. And it was better this time. It got better each time for a long while, right up until we got married.

  2.

  So let’s suppose you’re the young Nina Leigh Sarbaines, right out of Tapersville, Oregon, a logging town in the eastern half of the state, growing up among the big trucks thundering down the narrow two-lanes, the constant fog in the air like an unqualified gloom. The landscape all bright mossy greens and slate gray, that paper-mill smell that lingers over the town and that natives only notice after we’ve been away for a while. I wore flannel and triplepierced my ears; I got a butterfly tattoo on my ankle. Certified full-time smoker by age fifteen, sexually active by sixteen, celebrity-obsessed and spending the money from my part-time job at the drugstore on gossip magazines and jeans jackets and accessories, but I managed to avoid the meth and the harder trouble that came with it, at least for the most part. Some of my friends succumbed, but I had starry eyes early on and didn’t want to jeopardize my chances of getting out any more than was necessary just to get by socially.

  Dad was the regional manager for one of the trucking outfits, so we weren’t as poor as some of my friends whose parents worked the mills or logged out in the expanses of seemingly boundless woodlands (although the interloping environmentalists from Seattle and California were constantly reminding us that they were diminishing by
the hour). Our house, though, was too small by half, especially when Mom would catch Dad cheating on her and the halls would practically scream with silence for weeks at a time. I’d lock the door to my bedroom and stay on the phone with my friends for hours, or stare at my little TV, or listen to headphones, all those overwrought grunge CDs that spun through my Discman. Mom never did leave him; my father died of liver failure my senior year of high school. He was never a violent drunk, or particularly neglectful; my memories of him are actually quite fond, for the most part, and he treated me like gold, spoiling me as much as he could afford to. He bought me earrings and CDs and my first car, an old Volkswagen Bug. I imagine this was part of what made him attractive to other women; when he was with you, you were the total focus of his attention.

  I blamed Mom for the cheating; she could’ve left him at any time. The way I saw it, she brought most of her misery on herself.

  My acceptance letter from Oregon State looked like a Golden Fucking Ticket.

  By the time I met Randy, I was six months on the other side of my first “adult” relationship, which had turned out not to be so grown-up after all. Brad was a grad student in English Lit, one of those stereotypically gaunt and bookish guys, tall and thin with wire-rimmed glasses, shy around groups of people but garrulous when we were alone. Later I would think that one of the reasons I was instantly attracted to Randy was that he was damn near to being Brad’s physical opposite. At the time I met Brad, though, I was still treading water in the backwash of the lingering grunge-rock romanticism that had defined my teens, and his pale intensity sent shivers right down to my core. We got to know each other through mutual friends when I was only a sophomore. It was a tempestuous nine months, high romance carried to an unhealthy degree: the early days sequestered in Brad’s loft bedroom while his roommate practiced guitar downstairs. We didn’t go out much, lost touch with friends and didn’t care; we wanted it that way, immersed in our dyad. The feelings were so strong and, for me, so new. I’d had a few overtly delirious relationships in high school, but they’d always been tempered by the constraints of home and community and the knowledge, which I kept largely to myself, that I would be fleeing the scene as soon as it was economically feasible. With Brad, it was the great Meant to Be, the intimacy completely unforced, the sex so terrifyingly good that it left me in a sated daze for hours afterward.