The Other Mrs (ARC) Read online

decisive. Protective. His fingers were thick; his hands big with

  clean, short nails. There was a tiny tattoo, a glyph on the skin

  between his fingers and thumb. Something small and pointy,

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  like a mountain peak. For a minute, that’s all I saw. That inky

  mountain peak.

  His grip was powerful and swift. In one stroke, he stopped

  me. A second later, the cab raced past, not six inches from my

  feet. I felt the rush of it on my face. The wind off the car pushed me away, and then sucked me back in as it passed. I saw a flash

  of colors only; I felt the breeze. I didn’t see the cab shoot past, not until it was speeding off down the street. Only then did I

  know how close I came to being roadkill.

  Overhead, the ‘L’ screeched to a stop on the tracks.

  I looked down, there was his hand. My eyes went up his wrist,

  his arm, they went to his eyes. His eyes were wide, his eyebrows

  pulled together in concern. He was worried about me. No one

  ever worried about me.

  The light turned green, but we didn’t move. We didn’t speak.

  All around, people stepped past us while we stood in the way,

  blocking them. A minute went by. Two. Still, he didn’t let go

  of my wrist. His hand was warm, tacky. It was humid outside.

  So hot it was hard to breathe. There was no fresh air. My thighs

  were moist with sweat. They stuck to my jeans, made the arctic-

  blue tee cling to me.

  When we finally spoke, we spoke at the same time. That was

  close.

  We laughed together, released a synchronous sigh.

  I could feel my heart pound inside of me. It had nothing to

  do with the cab.

  I bought him coffee. It sounds so unimaginative after the fact,

  doesn’t it? So cliché.

  But that was all I could come up with in a pinch.

  Let me buy you a coffee, I said. Repay you for saving my life.

  I fluttered my eyelashes at him . Put a hand on his chest. Gave him a smile.

  Only then did I see that he already had a coffee. There in his

  other hand sat some iced froufrou drink. Our eyes went to it at

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  MARY KUBICA

  the same time, we sniggered. He lobbed it into a trash can, said,

  Pretend you didn’t just see that.

  A coffee would be nice, he said. When he smiled, he smiled with his eyes.

  He told me his name was Will. There was a stutter when he

  said it, so that it came out Wi-Will. He was nervous, shy around girls, shy around me. I liked that about him.

  I took his hand into mine, said, It’s nice to meet you, Wi-Wil .

  We sat in a booth, side by side. We drank our coffees. We

  talked, we laughed.

  That night there was a party, one of those rooftop venues with

  a city view. An engagement party for Sadie’s friends, Jack and

  Emily. She was the one who was invited, not me. I don’t think

  Emily liked me much, but I planned to go anyway, just the same

  as Cinderella went to the royal ball. I had a dress picked out, one I took from Sadie’s closet. It fit me to a T though she was bigger than me, Sadie with her broad shoulders and her thick hips.

  She had no business wearing that dress. I was doing her a favor.

  I had a bad habit of shopping in Sadie’s closet. Once, when

  I was there, all alone or so I thought, I heard the jiggle of keys

  in the front door lock. I slipped out of the room, into the living

  room, arriving only a second before she did. There stood my

  darling roommate, hands on her hips, looking quizzically at me.

  You look like you’re been up to no good, she said. I didn’t say one way or the other whether I’d been being good. It wasn’t often

  that I was good. Sadie was the rule follower, not me.

  That dress wasn’t the only thing I took from her. I also used

  her credit card to buy new shoes, metallic wedge sandals with

  a crisscross strap.

  I said to Will that day in the coffee shop about the engage-

  ment party: We don’t even know each other. But I’d be an idiot not to ask. Come with me?

  I’d be honored, he said, making eyes at me in the café booth.

  He sat close, his elbow brushing against mine.

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  He’d come to the party.

  I gave him the address, told him I’d meet him inside.

  We parted ways beneath the ‘L’ tracks. I watched him walk

  away until he got swallowed up in pedestrian traffic. Even then,

  I still watched.

  I couldn’t wait to see him that night.

  But as luck would have it, I didn’t make it to the party after

  all. Fate had other plans that night.

  But Sadie was there. Sadie, who had been invited to Jack and

  Emily’s engagement party. She was out of this world. He went

  right up to her, fawned all over her, forgot about me.

  I’d made it easy on her, inviting him to that party. I always

  made things easy for Sadie.

  If it wasn’t for me, they never would’ve met. He was mine

  before he was hers.

  She forgets that all the time.

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  Sadie

  There isn’t much to our street, just like any of the other inland

  streets that lay braided throughout the island. There’s nothing

  more than a handful of shingled cottages and farmhouses bi-

  sected by patches of trees.

  The island itself is home to less than a thousand. We live on

  the more populous part, in walking distance of the ferry, where

  there’s a partial view of the mainland from our steeply sloped

  street, the size of it shrunken by distance. And yet the sight of

  it brings comfort to me.

  There is a world out there that I can see, even if I’m no lon-

  ger a part of it.

  I drive slowly up the incline. The evergreens have lost their

  needles now, the birch trees their leaves. They’re strewn about

  the street, crunching beneath the car’s tires as I drive. Soon they will be buried by snow.

  Salty sea air enters the window, open just a crack. There’s a

  chill to the air, the last lingering traces of fall before winter arrives full bore.

  It’s after six o’clock in the evening. The sky is dark.

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  Up above me, across the street and two doors down from my

  own home, there is a flurry of activity going on at the Baines’s

  home. Three unmarked cars are parked outside, and I imagine

  forensic technicians inside, collecting evidence, fingerprinting,

  photographing the crime scene.

  The street looks suddenly different to me.

  There is a police car in my own driveway as I pull up. I park

  beside it, a Ford Crown Victoria, and climb slowly out. I reach

  into the back seat to gather my things. I make my way to the

  front door, looking warily around to be sure that I’m alone.

  There’s the grea
test sense of unease. It’s hard not to let my imag-

  ination get the best of me, to imagine a killer hiding among the

  bushes watching me.

  But the street is silent. There are no people around that I can

  see. My neighbors have gone inside, mistakenly believing they’re

  safer inside their own homes—which Morgan Baines must have

  thought too, before she was killed in hers.

  I press my keys into the front door. Will leaps to his feet when

  I enter. His jeans are slouchy, baggy in the knees, his shirt partly tucked. His long hair hangs loose.

  “There’s an officer here,” he says briskly, though I see this for

  myself, the officer sitting there on the arm of the sofa. “He’s in-

  vestigating the murder,” Will says, practically choking on that

  word. Murder.

  Will’s eyes are weary and red; he’s been crying. He reaches

  into a pocket and pulls out a tissue. He dabs his eyes with it. Will is the more thin-skinned of us, the more sensitive. Will cries at

  movies. He cries when watching the evening news.

  He cried when I found out he’d been sleeping with another

  woman, though he tried in vain to deny it.

  There is no other woman, Sadie, he said as he fell to his knees all those months ago before me and cried his eyes out, pleading his innocence.

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  MARY KUBICA

  To his point I never saw the woman herself, but the signs of

  her were everywhere.

  I blamed myself for it. I should have seen it coming. After

  all, I was never Will’s first choice for a wife. We’ve been try-

  ing hard to get past it. Forgive and forget, they say, but it’s easier said than done.

  “He has some questions for us,” Will says now, and I ask,

  “Questions?” looking toward the officer, a man in his fifties or

  sixties with receding hair and pitted skin. A small tract of hair

  grows above the upper lip, a would-be mustache, brownish-gray

  like the hair on his head.

  “Dr. Foust,” he says, meeting my eye. He extends a hand

  and tells me his name is Berg. Officer Berg, and I say that I am

  Sadie Foust.

  Officer Berg looks troubled, a bit shell-shocked even. I gather

  that his typical calls are complaints of dogs leaving their feces in neighbors’ yards; doors left unlocked at the American Legion;

  the ever-popular 911 hang-up calls. Not this. Not murder.

  There are only a handful of patrolmen on the island, Officer

  Berg being one of them. Oftentimes they meet the ferry down

  by the dock to be sure everyone boards and departs without any

  problems, not that there ever are. Not this time of year anyway,

  though I’ve heard the change we’ll see come summer, when

  tourists abound. But for now, it’s peaceful and quiet. The only

  people on the boat are the daily commuters who paddle across

  the bay for school and work.

  “What kind of questions?” I ask. Otto sits slouched in a chair

  in the corner of the room. He fidgets with the fringe of a throw

  pillow, and I watch as strands of blue come loose in his hands.

  His eyes look weary. I worry about the stress this is causing

  him, having to hear from a police officer that a neighbor was

  murdered. I wonder if he’s scared because of it. I know I am.

  The very idea is unfathomable. A murder so close to our own

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  home. I shudder to think about what went on in the Baines’s

  home last night.

  I glance around the first floor, looking for Imogen, for Tate.

  As if he knows what I’m thinking, Will says to me, “Imogen

  isn’t home from school yet,” and Officer Berg, taking interest

  in this, asks, “No?”

  School ends at two thirty. The commute is long, but still,

  Otto is home most days by three thirty or four. The clock on

  the fireplace mantel reads ten after six.

  “No,” Will tells the officer, “but she’ll be home soon. Any

  minute,” he says, citing some tutoring session which Will and

  I know she didn’t have. The officer tells us that he’ll need to

  speak with Imogen too and Will says, “Of course.” If she isn’t

  home soon, he offers to drive her to the public safety building

  tonight. It’s a catchall building, where a couple police officers

  double as EMTs and first responders in the case of fire. If our

  home went up in flames, Officer Berg would just as likely ap-

  pear at my door in a fire truck. If Will or I had a heart attack,

  he’d come in the ambulance.

  Only seven-year-old Tate has been spared from the police

  officer’s interrogation. “Tate is outside,” Will tells me, seeing

  the way my eyes look for him. “He’s playing with the dogs,” he

  says, and I hear them then, the dogs barking.

  I give Will a look, one which wonders how smart it is to leave

  Tate alone outside when there was a murderer on our street just

  last night. I stray toward a rear-facing window to find Tate, in

  a sweatshirt and jeans, a wool hat thrust down over his head.

  He’s having a go with the dogs and a ball. He lobs the ball as

  far as he can—laughing as he does so—and the girls dash after

  it, arguing over which will be the one to carry it back to Tate’s

  waiting hand.

  Outside, there’s evidence of a fire in the backyard fire pit.

  The fire is dying down now, only embers and smoke. There’s

  no longer a flame.

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  It’s far enough away from Tate and the dogs that I don’t worry.

  Officer Berg sees the smoldering fire too and asks if we have

  a permit for it.

  “A permit?” Will asks, “for the fire?” When Officer Berg

  says yes, Will goes on to explain that our son, Tate, had come

  home from school begging for s’mores. They’d read a book about

  them, S is for S’mores, and the rest of the day, Tate had a craving for them.

  “The only way we did s’mores back in Chicago was in the

  toaster oven. This was just a quick treat,” Will says. “Com-

  pletely harmless.”

  “Around here,” Officer Begs tells him, uninterested in Tate’s

  craving, “you need a permit for any open fire.”

  Will apologizes, blames ignorance, and the officer shrugs.

  “Next time you’ll know,” he says, forgiving us this one trans-

  gression. There are bigger issues at hand.

  “Can I be excused?” Otto asks, saying he has homework to

  do, and I see this discomfort in his eyes. This is a lot for a fourteen-year-old boy to handle. Though much older than Tate,

  Otto is still a child. We forget that sometimes. I pat him on the

  shoulder. I lean in close to him and say, “We’re safe here, Otto. I want you to know that,” because I don’t want him to be scared.

  “Your dad and I are here to protect you,” I tell him.

  Otto meets my eyes. I wonder if he believes me when I’m not

  so sure myself. Are we safe here?

  “You can go,” the officer tells
him and, as he leaves, I find my

  way to the other arm of the sofa, Officer Berg and I bisected by

  a velvet sofa the color of marigolds, the furniture left behind in

  the home all midcentury, and not, unfortunately, midcentury

  modern. It’s just old.

  “You know why I’m here?” the officer asks, and I tell him

  that Will and I heard the siren late last night. That I know Mrs.

  Baines was murdered.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he says, and I ask how she was murdered,

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  though the details of her death have not yet been released.

  They’re waiting, he says, until the family has been notified.

  “Mr. Baines doesn’t know?” I ask, but all he’ll say is that Mr.

  Baines was traveling for business. The first thought that crosses

  my mind is that, in cases like this, it’s always the husband. Mr.

  Baines, wherever he is, has done this, I think.

  Berg tells us how the little Baines girl was the one who found

  Mrs. Baines dead. She called 911 and told the operator that Mor-

  gan wouldn’t wake up. I sharply inhale, trying not to imagine

  all the things that poor little girl might have seen.

  “How old is she?” I ask and Berg replies, “Six years old.”

  A hand rises to my mouth. “Oh, how awful,” I say, and I can’t

  imagine it, Tate finding either Will or me dead.

  “She and Tate are in school together,” Will declares, look-

  ing at Officer Berg and then me. They share the same teacher.

  They share the same peers. The island school serves children in

  grades kindergarten through fifth while the rest, those in mid-

  dle school and beyond, have to be ferried to the mainland for

  their education. Only fifty-some students go to the elementary

  school. Nineteen in Tate’s classroom because his first grade is

  combined with the kindergarten class.

  “Where is the little girl now?” I ask, and he tells me that she’s

  with family while they try and connect with Jeffrey, traveling

  for business in Tokyo. The fact that he was out of the country

  doesn’t make Jeffrey Baines any less culpable in my mind. He

  could have hired someone to carry out the task.

  “The poor thing,” I say, imagining years worth of therapy in

  the child’s future.

  “What can we do to help?” I ask Officer Berg and he tells

  me he’s been speaking to residents along the street, asking them