Unfaithful: An unputdownable and absolutely gripping psychological thriller

by Natalie Barelli

  I spend the next two hours marking. It’s easy work, if a little time-consuming, but it’s what I need right now and I’m lost in it when my phone rings, making me jump.

  And I know, I just know, my body knows, that finally this is the call I’ve been dreading all day and frankly by now it’s almost a relief.

  “Luis?” I try to sound normal and I can’t remember what that sounds like so it comes out forced and overly cheery.

  There’s silence on the other end, and I’m about to ask if he’s there, when I hear him take a ragged breath, the sound you make after you’ve been sobbing your heart out and it’s finally over.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask. What I really want to say is, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. No, I’m not sorry. I don’t know what I want to say anymore but he speaks before me.

  “She’s dead. Isabelle is dead.”

  My heart leaps in my throat. I sit up. “Are you sure?” Then I realize the wrongness of my question and add, “We saw her only last Friday night, how could she be dead?”

  “The police called me. She was found this morning. At her house.”

  “I can’t believe it. Did they say what happened to her?”

  “Not yet. Just that she was found dead this morning in her house.”

  “But I don’t understand!” I’m on my feet now. I’m almost shouting. “How can she be dead?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “When they did call?”

  “An hour ago.”

  An hour ago. He has waited for an hour before telling me. There’s the beep of another call in my ear but I ignore it.

  He sighs, a beat of silence passes between us. I wait.

  “The police are coming over, they want to ask me a few questions. That’s what they said.”

  “What questions?”

  “I don’t know! Jesus, Anna! Are you listening to me? They’re probably talking to everyone who knew her. Her colleagues. Other artists who worked with her. Her friends!”

  Her lovers? “Oh my god, this is awful.”

  I sit down again. Do the police even know they were lovers? Then suddenly it occurs to me that maybe Luis didn’t even know she was pregnant. I try to remember what Isabelle said to me last night. I’m carrying his child… But did she say she’d told Luis? Maybe she didn’t. Maybe the police don’t have to find out about any of that.

  “I just don’t understand.” I have to calm down but I can’t breathe properly. Thoughts are stumbling over each other and I can’t think straight. Is this a panic attack? Is this how they start?

  “Babe, I have to tell you something—”

  The beep, again, intense and relentless. Just go away, whoever you are.

  “No, you don’t,” I interrupt. “We can talk later.”

  “Anna, wait. I—”

  “Please, Luis!” I don’t want to do this, why doesn’t he understand? “I have to go, I have to go to class.”

  Then he says something so low I can barely make out what it is. Barely, but it sounds like, “I’m scared.”

  I want to say, just tell them the truth and everything will be okay. But that’s not true. Nothing can be possibly okay after this. And I don’t want him to tell them the truth because then they’ll know. And everybody will know, and I’ll know for sure, that my husband didn’t love me anymore. That he loved her instead, and that she was carrying his child. And now she’s dead.

  This is so bad. And yet I am numb. I have to pull myself together. People will be asking soon, Did you know her? I must say the right thing, think of her parents, her boyfriend, her colleagues, words of sorrow. But all I can think is, Will they do some kind of DNA analysis on the unborn child? And what did I do with my gloves again?

  I have to think. There is no room for error now. “You still there?” he asks. I want to scream into the phone, This is all your fault! Why did you have to do this, Luis? Why did you want to leave me? We could have worked it out. You could have talked to me.

  “I have to go, honey. I love you,” I say instead.

  “Anna, listen—”

  Tell me you love me. Say the words, Luis, say, ‘I love you too, I love you more than ever.’ Because whatever I did, babe, I did it for you. And that’s the whole truth.

  But June walks in without knocking, and she’s about to say something but she sees my face.

  “It’s going to be okay. I have to go.” And I hang up.

  She comes over, sits down. “Everything all right? What’s happened?”

  “I—just got really bad news.” I don’t say anymore, and she doesn’t pry.

  “Anything I can do?”

  I shake my head, gnaw at a fingernail. “No, I don’t think so. Did you want to talk to me about something?”

  “I came to say a detective just called. He’s been trying to reach you.”

  “A detective?”

  “Yes, Detective Jones. He’s going to be here in fifteen minutes to talk to you.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, he didn’t say.”

  “But he can’t! I have a class in fifteen minutes!”

  She checks her watch. “It’s okay. I’ll catch Rohan and get him to take it for you.” She stands up but I grab her arm, making her wince.

  “June, wait a second, please. I need to talk to you. I won’t take long.”

  She sits down again, this time on the very edge of the seat. I drag over my own chair so our knees are almost touching. “What’s up?”

  “You know how you said to Luis that I was with you, around…” I look up, try to think, still gnawing at my fingernail.

  “Around eleven?” she says.

  “Around then, yes, and after that too.”

  “Okay… What about it?”

  “I was hoping… can you say that again if it came up? Say we were together? Like you said to Luis?”

  The fingernail has broken off and now it’s bleeding.

  “What, that we were together?” she repeats.

  “Please. Would you? Until maybe one? One thirty, maybe?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I mean you already said it to Luis, right? So I’m just asking that you don’t contradict yourself, that’s all. If it comes up. It’s just that I went out drinking… God, did I go out drinking!” I laugh, rub my forehead. “It’s not a good look right now, June. Especially after the presentation. So I’m just asking you this small favor. No biggie.”

  She thinks about this, her eyes never leaving mine.

  “You want me to say we were together.”

  Frankly by now I thought that was obvious. “Yes.”

  “In a bar, drinking.”

  “Which we were.”

  “Until one thirty a.m.”

  “Yes, please.” I wait, fingers in my mouth. “If anyone asks.”

  “But who’s going to ask?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody probably.” I laugh, but only for a nanosecond. “It would be too embarrassing for me, if I were to explain. Retrace my steps. You understand?”

  She thinks about it, then nods, slowly. “Okay.” And I feel such relief that I almost hug her. I get up and return the chair to its place. She gets up too, slowly, unsure, like she wants to ask me more.

  “I’ll get Rohan to cover your class,” she says, one hand on the door.

  “Oh, right, thanks,” I reply, sounding like I’ve forgotten she was still here.

  Twenty-Nine

  I sit there, waiting for the detective, unable to concentrate, my stomach clenching a little more with each passing minute. I open the drawer and pull out the necklace from where I dropped it earlier and shove it in the other drawer, the one at the bottom, so that it sits inside the staff directory. Should I tell the detective that I heard about Isabelle before he says anything? Yes, I probably should. Unless he’s here about something else, although that seems unlikely.

  When he walks in at last, fifteen minutes late, I’m a mess of nerves.

  “Detective Jones.” He smil
es, extends his hand to me. For a crazy moment I wonder if that’s how they get people’s fingerprints, if they have a thin film over their fingers like an invisible glove, and after they shake your hand they surreptitiously slip the film into an evidence bag hidden in their pocket.

  A beyond stupid and paranoid idea, obviously.

  Still, better safe than sorry. I raise my palms. “Probably not, I just peeled an orange.” I grab a tissue and wipe my fingers. For a moment Detective Jones does not know what to do with his hand. He looks at it, and puts it in his jacket pocket. He glances at my desk, then at the almost full wastebasket on the floor. If he is thrown by the absence of orange peel, he doesn’t say.

  “Please, sit down, Detective.”

  “Thank you.” He tugs at the crease of his blue pants as he does so. He’s a big man, with a round face and a nice smile, and I tell myself it can’t be so bad if he’s smiling. Also there’s only one of him. That’s got to be a good sign too, surely.

  He looks around, clearly impressed.

  “This is nice.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I was expecting test tubes and Bunsen burners.”

  “You might find those in the chemistry department. Not in the mathematics faculty. We wouldn’t know what to do with them.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  He pulls out a notepad, licks the tip of his finger and flicks it open.

  I point at it with my chin. “I would have thought police would have gone full tech by now.” That and invisible films over their hands to capture fingerprints.

  “What, this?” He holds up the notepad. “I only trust my good old Moleskines. Not that it matters, as I can’t imagine my department issuing us with iPads anytime soon, if that’s what you meant.” He flicks pages back and forth, finds the right spot, and looks up.

  “Mrs. Sanchez, do you know Isabelle Wilcox?”

  I sit very still. My immediate instinct is to apologize—nothing new there—to say how very sorry I am and I will never do it again. Suddenly, I don’t know what to do with my hands. I feel like an amateur being asked to act on stage and I can’t remember where they’re supposed to go. I hook one arm over the back of my chair, then decide it’s far too casual for the circumstances, so I bring my hands together in a steeple and rest my chin on my fingers, a pose I can safely say I have never held before.

  “My husband just called me,” I say, my chin bobbing over the tip of my index fingers. “I was very sad to hear the news.”

  “Was she a close friend of yours?”

  “No. More like an acquaintance. She curated my husband’s exhibition, at Perry Cube Gallery. Not that it needed much curating—I mean, he’s just one artist with a limited body of work, not sure what’s the curation part there, but you could say they got close, friendly I mean. How did she die?”

  He stares at me for quite a while and my stomach clenches.

  “She fell down the stairs,” he says, watching me. “She hit her head. She was found too late.”

  I have to work harder to take a breath. It’s as if the air has been sucked out of the room.

  “An accident?” The stupidity of what I’ve just said makes me want to laugh. It’s the anxiety. I rub both hands over my face to make it stop. I stand up and open the window a notch.

  “When is the last time you saw her?” He ignores my question.

  I look up to the ceiling, tap my fingers against my chin. Internally, I can barely breathe. I want to ask a million questions before I answer his. Did anyone see me? Is that why you’re here?

  “Lemeseee… we had Isabelle over for dinner last Friday, so that would be the last time I saw her.”

  It’s funny, the power of words. I was at a fork in the road just now. I could have told the truth, or a version of it anyway. I could have said that I was there last night and we had a big, big fight, that I almost smashed her vase and snatched her stupid gold chain from her pretty neck and I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry. Then I’d just tell June not to worry about what we agreed to before. Tell the truth! I would have said. I just did! It’s liberating!

  But I panic. I lie. And when he asks if I’ve ever been to her house, I say, no. I don’t even know where she lives, I say.

  “What happened to your hand?”

  I sit up and check my palm. The red welt goes all the way to the outer edge, around my little finger.

  “Gardening. Pulling weeds.”

  He shakes his head. “Don’t you hate that?”

  “I sure do.”

  He checks his notes. “Last Friday night you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did she seem?”

  I think about this for a moment. “She seemed fine, friendly.”

  “Did she seem worried about anything?”

  “Nope, not that I could see.”

  “Did she seem depressed?”

  “Depressed? No, not at all.”

  “There was nothing unusual about her, then?”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  “She didn’t seem preoccupied? She wasn’t acting in any way that seemed odd? She wasn’t nervous?”

  “No, no and no. She was perfectly relaxed.”

  “What about your husband? You said your husband and Ms. Wilcox were friends?”

  “I said they worked together.”

  “You said they were close.”

  “Yes, I see, actually I think I said they got close, as friends, yes. They worked well together. He was friends with her fiancé, too. His name is Patrick. They called each other buddy, he and Luis, I mean. Like, ‘Hi, buddy!’ So he wasn’t just friends with her is what I’m trying to say.”

  He was taking notes and now he looks up at me. It’s the way I said ‘her’. I couldn’t help myself and it came out with the tiniest stress of scorn on the syllable. As soon as I said it I knew I’d screwed up. My cheeks feel hot and I wonder if I’m blushing. I get up again and open the window a little more.

  “Have you spoken to my husband yet?” I ask.

  “My colleague is doing that as we speak. Is there anything else you can tell me about her? About her relationship with Mr. Patrick Fowler?”

  I shake my head. “No. I only met him once briefly. God!” I rearrange my pens in the holder. “This is really shocking news. I just can’t believe it.”

  “What about your husband?”

  “I thought we just went over that.”

  He checks his notes. “Not yet. How was their relationship?”

  “It was normal. Professional.” But my heart sinks. The police will know soon, if they don’t already. It’s not like there’s no record of their affair. There are texts, for one thing. I can’t stop thinking about you. There are probably lots more by now. I wonder what they say?

  I’m pregnant. Are you happy?

  Deliriously. I can’t understand why Anna hasn’t noticed.

  That’s because she’s boring and dull. You two have nothing in common.

  You’re so right. I long for you. You’re the only one who understands me.

  Everyone will know. It will be plastered across the world wide web in one big fat masthead: Beautiful Curator had Affair with Up And Coming Installation Artist. (More details on every single page of the internet.)

  Everybody will know he was unfaithful. They will ask, Which one killed her, do you think? The wife? Probably the wife, it’s always the wife. No, it’s the husband. It’s the husband who killed her.

  No, it’s the wife. Because the lover was pregnant.

  I taste blood and realize I am biting my bottom lip. I roll it out between two fingers. Pat at the tender spot.

  “You okay, Mrs. Sanchez?”

  I don’t say, It’s Dr. Sanchez, actually. I say, “Yes, thank you. It’s just such a shock. Poor Isabelle. Yes, she and my husband were friends, friendly, as she must be—must have been, I should say—with a lot of her artists. It’s the way they do things in that world, you see. I can’t imagine myself asking my husband t
o cook dinner for my colleagues—I see them often enough as it is, truth be told.” Chuckles. “But no, I have nothing to add on that score. Nothing I can think of, sorry.”

  “Well, I won’t keep you,” he says, folding his notebook and returning it to the inside pocket of his jacket. Then as we reach the door, he turns around and smiles. “You don’t remember me?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I spoke to you, although not in this office.” He glances around the room. “When your student died.”

  I raise my head slowly. “Yes. I remember now. I thought you looked familiar,” I lie.

  “Alex, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” I rarely ever think about Alex anymore. It all seems like such a long time ago, much longer than the six weeks or so since he died. I try to work out how I feel, hearing his name, and I come up with nothing. I literally feel nothing.

  “That’s an odd case, too,” he says.

  My jaw tenses. “Is it?”

  “Certainly. It’s not every day you investigate someone who died by jumping out of a window. Alex Brooks.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You were rather close to him. That must have been a shock, too.”

  “Of course it was. All of us here in the mathematics department, myself included, were rather close to him, as you put it. I’m pretty sure we spoke at length to the police at the time. To you, I mean, since it was you. I remember now.”

  “Just out of curiosity, did you and Alex Brooks ever have any disagreements? Any difficulties working together?”

  I have a headache. It’s making my eyeballs wobble and I’m having a hard time focusing. “Why on earth would you ask me that now?” I finally manage to say.

  “My apologies. I should have clarified. The examiner hasn’t ruled yet on whether his death was accidental or whether it was suicide. It’s taking some time. Since I happened to be here talking to you, and you and Alex Brooks worked closely together, I was taking the opportunity to ask about his state of mind. I know doctoral work can be very taxing on young people.”