The Other Mrs (ARC) Read online

  come into the attic if I told him not to. And besides, Tate doesn’t draw such violent, murderous images. He could never visualize

  such things, much less depict them on paper. Tate doesn’t know

  what murder is. He doesn’t know that people die.

  I go back to Otto.

  These drawings belong to Otto.

  Unless, I think, drawing in a deep breath and holding it there,

  they belong to Imogen? Because Imogen is an angry girl. Imo-

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  gen knows what murder is, she knows that people die. She’s

  seen it with her own eyes. But what would she be doing with

  Otto’s pencils and paper?

  I close the window and turn my back to it. There’s a vintage

  dollhouse on the opposite wall. It catches my eye. I first found

  it the same day we arrived, thinking it might have belonged

  to Imogen when she was a child. It’s a charming green cottage

  with four rooms, an expansive attic, a slender staircase run-

  ning up the center of it. The details of it are impeccable. Min-

  iature window boxes and curtains, tiny lamps and chandeliers,

  bedding, a parlor table, even a green dog house to match the

  home, complete with a miniature dog. That first day, I dusted

  the house out of respect for Alice, laid the family in their beds

  to sleep until there might be grandchildren to play with it. It

  wasn’t the type of thing Tate would use.

  I go to it now, certain I’ll find the family fast asleep where I

  left them. Except that I don’t. Because someone has been up here

  in the attic, coloring pictures, opening windows, meddling with

  things. Because things in the dollhouse are not how I put them.

  Inside the dollhouse, I see that the little girl has risen from

  bed. She no longer lies in the second floor bedroom’s canopy

  bed but is on the floor of the room. The father is no longer is his bed either; he’s disappeared. I glance around, finding him nowhere. Only the mother is there, sleeping soundly in the sleigh

  bed on the first floor.

  At the foot of the bed lies a miniature knife, no bigger than

  the pad of a thumb.

  There’s a box beside the dollhouse, chock full of accessories.

  The lid of it is closed, but the latch is unfastened. I open it up

  and have a look, searching inside the box for the father, but find-

  ing him nowhere. I give up my search.

  I pull the string and the attic goes black.

  As I travel down the steps with a bad feeling in the pit of my

  stomach, it dawns on me: the house is quiet. Imogen has turned

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  her offensive music off. When I reach the second-story landing,

  I see her standing in her doorway, backlit by the bedroom light.

  Her eyes are accusatory. She doesn’t ask, and yet I read it in

  her expression. She wants to know what I was doing in the attic.

  “There was a light on,” I explain, waiting a beat before I ask,

  “Was it you? Were you up there, Imogen?”

  She snorts. “You’re an idiot if you think I’d ever go back up

  there,” she says.

  I mull that over. She could be lying. Imogen strikes me as a

  masterful liar.

  She leans against the door frame, crosses her arms.

  “Do you know, Sadie,” she says, looking pleased with herself,

  and I realize that she’s never called me by name before, “what

  a person looks like when they die?”

  Suffice to say, I do. I’ve seen plenty of fatalities in my life.

  But the question, on Imogen’s tongue, leaves me at a loss for

  words.

  Imogen doesn’t want an answer. It’s for shock value; she’s

  trying to intimidate me. She goes on to describe in disturbing

  detail the way Alice looked the day she found her, hanging in

  the attic from a rope. Imogen had been at school that day. She

  took the ferry home as usual, came into a quiet house to dis-

  cover what Alice had done.

  “There were claw marks on her neck,” she says, raking her

  own violet fingernails down her pale neckline. “Her fucking

  tongue was purple. It got stuck, hanging out of her mouth,

  clamped between her teeth like this,” she says as she sticks her

  own tongue out at me and bites down. Hard.

  I’ve seen victims of strangulation before. I know how the

  capillaries on the face break, how the eyes become bloodshot

  from the accumulation of blood behind them. As an emergency

  medicine physician, I’ve been trained to look for this in victims

  of domestic violence, for signs of strangulation. But I imagine

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  that, for a sixteen-year-old girl, seeing your mother in this state would be traumatizing.

  “She nearly bit the fucking thing off,” Imogen says about Al-

  ice’s tongue. She begins to laugh then, this ill-timed, uncontrol-

  lable laugh that gets to me. Imogen stands three feet away, devoid

  of emotion other than this unseemly gleeful display. “Want to

  see?” she asks, though I don’t know what she means by this.

  “See what?” I ask carefully, and she says, “What she did with

  her tongue.”

  I don’t want to see. But she shows me anyway, a photograph

  of her dead mother. It’s there on her cell phone. She forces the

  phone into my hands. The color drains from my face.

  Before the police arrived that dreadful day, Imogen had the

  audacity to take a picture on her phone.

  Alice, dressed in a pale pink tunic sweater and leggings, hangs

  from a noose. Her head is tilted, the rope boring into her neck.

  Her body is limp, arms at her sides, legs unbending. Storage

  boxes surround her, ones that were once piled two or three high

  but now lay on their sides, contents falling out. A lamp is on the

  ground, colored glass scattered at random. A telescope—once

  used to stare at the sky out through the attic window, perhaps—

  is also on its side, everything, presumably, knocked violently

  over as Alice died. The stepstool she used to climb up into the

  gallows stands four feet away, upright.

  I think of what Alice must have gone through as she climbed

  the three steps to her death, as she slipped her head into the

  knot. The ceilings of the attic are not high. Alice would have

  had to measure the rope in advance, to be certain that when

  she stepped off the stool, her feet would not touch the ground.

  She dropped by only a couple inches at best. The fall was small;

  her neck wouldn’t have broken from the height, which means

  that death was painful and slow. The evidence of that is there,

  in the picture. The broken lamp, the claw marks, the nearly

  severed tongue.

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  “Why’d you take this?” I ask, trying to remain calm. I don’t

  want to give her what she wants.


  She shrugs her shoulders, asks, with a blatant disregard for

  her mother’s life, “Why the hell not?”

  I hide my shock as Imogen takes the phone and turns slowly

  from me. She goes back into her room, leaving me shaken. I

  pray that Otto, in his own room just next door, has his earbuds

  in. I pray that he didn’t hear that awful exchange.

  I retreat to the bedroom where I change into my pajamas and

  stand at the window, waiting for Will to come home. I stare into

  the home next door. There’s a light on inside, the very same

  light that goes on at seven and off near midnight each night. No

  one lives in that home this time of year and I think of it, empty

  on the inside, for months on end. What’s to keep a person from

  letting themselves inside?

  When a car pulls into the drive, I can’t help but watch. The

  inside of the car becomes flooded with light as the door opens.

  Tate and his friend are buckled in the back seat, Will in the front beside a woman who is most definitely not a toothless hag but

  rather a shadowy brunette who I can’t fully see.

  Tate is bubbly, bouncy when they step inside the house. He

  runs up the stairs to greet me. He proudly announces, “You

  came to see me at school today!” as he bursts through the bed-

  room door in his Star Wars hoodie and a pair of knit pants. These

  pants, like all the others, are too short for him, exposing ankles.

  Will and I can’t keep up. There’s a hole in the toe of his sock.

  Will, half a step behind him, turns to me and asks, “You did?”

  But I shake my head at Will. “I didn’t,” I say, not knowing

  what Tate means by this. My eyes go to Tate’s, and I say, “I was

  at work today, Tate. I wasn’t at your school.”

  “Yes you were,” he says, on the verge of getting upset. I play

  along, only to appease him.

  “Well, what was I doing?” I ask him. “What did I say?”

  “You didn’t say anything,” he says, and I ask, “Don’t you

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  think if I was at your school today, I would have said some-

  thing to you?”

  Tate explains that I stood on the other side of the playground

  fence, watching the kids at recess. I asked what I had on, and he

  tells me my black coat and my black hat, which is exactly what I

  would be wearing. It’s what he’s used to seeing me in, but there’s

  hardly a woman in town who doesn’t wear a black coat and hat.

  “I think maybe that was someone else’s mommy, Tate,” I say,

  but he just stares, saying nothing.

  I find the idea of any woman standing on the periphery of

  the playground watching kids play a bit unnerving. I wonder

  how secure the school is, especially when the kids are at recess.

  How many teachers are on recess duty? Is the fence locked, or

  can anyone open the gate and step right in? The school seems

  easy enough to contain when the kids are indoors, but outdoors

  is a different matter.

  Will ruffles his hair, says to him, “I think it’s about time we

  get that vision of yours checked.”

  I reroute the conversation. “What’s this you’ve got?” I ask. In

  his hands Tate proudly totes a mini-figure he assembled himself

  at the library event. He shows it to me, before climbing onto the

  bed to kiss me goodnight at Will’s request. Will ushers him to

  his own bedroom where he reads Tate a story and tucks him into

  bed snug as a bug in a rug. On the way back to our bedroom,

  Will stops by Otto’s and Imogen’s bedrooms to say goodnight.

  “You didn’t eat the casserole,” Will says seconds later after he

  returns to our bedroom. He’s concerned, and I tell him I wasn’t

  hungry. “You feeling okay?” he asks, running a warm hand the

  length of my hair, and I shake my head and tell him no. I think

  what it would feel like to lean into him. To let his strong arms

  envelop me. To be vulnerable for once, to fall to pieces before

  him and let him pick them up.

  “How safe is Tate’s elementary school?” I ask instead.

  He assures me it’s safe. “It was probably just some mother

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  dropping off a forgotten lunch,” he says. “It’s not like Tate is

  the most observant kid, Sadie. I’m the only dad at school pickup

  and still, every day he has trouble finding me in the crowd.”

  “You’re sure?” I ask, trying not to let my imagination get the

  best of me. Besides, there’s something less disconcerting about it

  because she was a woman. If she had been a man, watching kids

  play on a playground, I would already be perusing the internet

  by now, trying to determine how many registered sex offend-

  ers live on the island with us.

  He tells me, “I’m sure.”

  I slide the drawings I found in the attic to him. He takes a

  look at them and believes right away that they’re Otto’s. Unlike

  me, Will seems sure. “Why not Imogen?” I ask, wishing they

  could belong to Imogen.

  “Because Otto,” he tells me unquestionably, “is our artist.

  Remember Occam’s razor,” he asks, reminding me of the belief

  that states the easiest explanation is most often right.

  “But why?” I ask, meaning why would Otto draw like this.

  At first he denies the gravity of the situation, saying, “It’s a

  form of self-expression, Sadie. This is natural for a child in pain.”

  But that alone is disconcerting. Because it’s not natural for a

  child to be in pain.

  “You think he’s being bullied?” I ask, but Will only shrugs

  his shoulders and says he doesn’t know. But he’ll call the school

  in the morning. He’ll find out.

  “We need to talk to Otto about this,” I tell him, but Will

  says, “Let me do some investigating first. The more we know,

  the better prepared we’ll be.”

  I say okay. I trust his instinct.

  I tell him, “I think it would be good for Imogen to speak

  with someone.”

  “What do you mean?” he asks, taken aback though I’m not

  sure why. Will isn’t adverse to therapy, though she’s his niece

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  by blood, not mine. This is for him to decide. “Like a psychia-

  trist?” he asks.

  I tell him yes. “She’s getting worse,” I say. “She must be har-

  boring so much inside of her. Anger. Grief. I think it would be

  good for her to speak with someone,” I say, telling him about

  our conversation this evening, though I don’t tell him what I

  saw on Imogen’s phone. He doesn’t need to know I saw a pic-

  ture of his dead sister. I say only that Imogen described for me

  in detail what Alice looked like when she found her.

  “Sounds to me like she’s opening up to you, Sadie,” he says.

  But I have a hard time believing it. I tell him therapy would

 
be better, with someone trained to deal with suicide survivors.

  Not me.

  “Will?” I ask, my mind going elsewhere, to a thought I had

  earlier tonight as I stared out the window toward the home

  next door.

  “What?” he asks.

  “The vacant house next door. Do you think the police

  searched it when they were canvassing the neighborhood?”

  The look he gives me is confused. “I don’t know,” he says.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Just seems an empty home would be an easy place for a

  killer to hide.”

  “Sadie,” he says in a way that’s both patronizing and reassur-

  ing at the same time. “I’m sure there isn’t a killer living next

  door to us.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I ask.

  “We’d know, wouldn’t we? Something would look off. Lights

  on, windows broken. We’d hear something. But that house hasn’t

  changed in all the time we’ve been here.”

  I let myself believe him because it’s the only way I’ll ever be

  able to sleep tonight.

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  Camille

  There were nights I went to Will’s condo, that I stood alone in

  the street, watching from outside. But Will and Sadie lived up

  too high, it was hard to see inside from the street.

  And so one night I helped myself to the fire escape.

  I dressed in all black, scrambled up six flights like a cat bur-

  glar in the night.

  On the sixth floor, I sat on the steel platform, just outside his

  kitchen window. I looked in, but it was dark inside their home,

  the dead of night, hard to see much of anything. And so I sat

  awhile, wishing Will would wake up, that he would come to me.

  I lit up a smoke while I waited. I flicked the lighter awhile,

  watched the flame burst from the end of the wick. I dragged my

  finger through the flame, wanting it to hurt, but it didn’t hurt.

  I just wanted to feel something, anything, pain. All I felt was

  empty inside. I let the flame burn for awhile. I let the lighter

  get all heated up. I pressed it to my palm and held it there be-

  fore drawing it away, smiling at my handiwork.

  An angry round burn on the palm of my hand smiled back

  at me.

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  I got to my feet. I wiggled my sleeping legs to get the blood

  back to flowing. Pins and needles stabbed at me.