The Other Mrs (ARC) Read online

  me that he’s on his way, though it’s a twenty-some hour trip

  from Tokyo with layovers at LAX and JFK. He won’t be home

  until tonight.

  “Have you found her cell phone? That might give you some-

  thing to go on?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. They’ve been looking, he says, but so far

  they can’t find her phone. “There are ways to track a missing

  cell phone, but if the phone is off or the battery is dead, those

  won’t work. Obtaining a warrant for records from a telecom-

  munications company is tedious. It takes time. But we’re work-

  ing on it,” he tells me.

  Officer Berg shifts in the seat. He turns his body toward

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  MARY KUBICA

  mine, knees now pointed in my direction. They bump awk-

  wardly into the gear shift. There are raindrops on his coat and

  his hair. There’s icing on his upper lip.

  “You told me yesterday that you and Mrs. Baines never met,”

  he says, and I have trouble snatching my eyes from the icing as

  I reply, “That’s right. We never met.”

  There was a photograph online of the woman. According to

  the paper, she was twenty-eight years old, eleven years younger

  than me. In the photo, she stood surrounded by her family, her

  happy husband on one side, stepdaughter the other, all of them

  dolled up in coordinating clothes, and wreathed in smiles. She

  had a beautiful smile, a tad bit gummy if anything, but other-

  wise lovely.

  Officer Berg unzips his rain jacket and reaches inside. He re-

  moves his tablet from an interior pocket, where there it stays dry.

  He taps on the screen, trawling for something. When he finds

  the spot, he clears his throat and reads my words back to me.

  “Yesterday you said, I just never found the time to stop by and introduce myself. Do you remember saying that?” he asks, and I tell him I do, though it sounds so flippant now, my words coming

  back to me this way. A bit merciless, if I’m being honest, seeing

  as the woman is now dead. I should have tacked on an empa-

  thetic addendum, such as, But I wish I had. Just a little something so that my words didn’t sound so callous.

  “The thing is, Dr. Foust,” he begins, “you said you didn’t

  know Mrs. Baines, and yet it seems you did,” and though his

  tone is well disposed, the intent of his words is not.

  He’s just accused me of lying.

  “I beg your pardon?” I ask, taken completely aback.

  “It seems you did know Morgan Baines,” he says.

  The rain is coming down in torrents now, pounding on the

  roof of the car like mallets on tin cans. I think of Otto all alone on the upper deck of the ferry, getting pelted with rain. A knot

  forms in my throat because of it. I swallow it away.

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  I force my window up to keep the rain at bay.

  I make sure to meet the officer’s eye as I assert, “Unless a

  one-time wave out the window of a moving vehicle counts as a

  relationship, Officer Berg, I didn’t know Morgan Baines. What

  makes you think that I did?” I ask, and he explains again, at great length this time, how he canvassed the entire street, spoke to all

  the neighbors, asked them the same questions he asked Will and

  me. When he came to the home of George and Poppy Nilsson,

  they invited him into their kitchen for tea and ginger cookies.

  He tells me that he asked the Nilssons what they were doing

  the night Morgan died, same as he did Will and me. I wait to

  hear their reply, thinking Officer Berg is about to tell me how

  the older couple sat in their living room that night, watching

  out the window as a killer slipped from the cover of darkness

  and into the Baines’s home.

  But instead he says, “As you can expect, at eighty-some years

  old, George and Poppy were asleep,” and I release my withheld

  breath. The Nilssons didn’t see a thing.

  “I don’t understand, Officer,” I say, glancing at the time on

  the car’s dash, knowing I’ll need to leave soon. “If the Nilssons

  were asleep, then… what?”

  Because clearly if they were asleep, then they saw and heard

  nothing.

  “I also asked the Nilssons if they’d seen anything out of the

  ordinary over the last few days. Strangers lurking about, unfa-

  miliar cars parked along the street.”

  “Yes, yes,” I say, nodding my head quickly because he also

  asked this question of Will and me. “And?” I ask, trying to hurry

  things along so that I can get on to work.

  “Well, it just so happens that they did see something out of

  the ordinary. Something they haven’t seen before. Which is say-

  ing a lot seeing as they’ve lived half their lives on that street.”

  And then he taps away at that tablet screen to find his interview

  with Mr. and Mrs. Nilsson.

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  MARY KUBICA

  He goes on to describe for me an afternoon just last week.

  It was Friday, the first of December. It was a clear day, the sky

  painted blue, not a cloud to be seen. The temperatures were

  cool, crisp, but nothing a heavy sweater or a light jacket wouldn’t fix. George and Poppy had gone for an afternoon walk, Officer Berg says, and were headed back up the steep incline of our

  street. Once they reached the top, George stopped to catch his

  breath, pausing before the Baines’s home.

  Officer Berg goes on to tell me how there Mr. Nilsson rear-

  ranged the blanket on Poppy’s lap so that she didn’t catch a draft.

  As he did, something caught his attention. It was the sound of

  women hollering at one another, though what they were hol-

  lering about he wasn’t sure.

  “Oh, how awful,” I say, and he says it was because poor

  George was really shaken up about it. He’d never heard any-

  thing like that before. And that’s saying a lot for a man his age.

  “But what does this have to do with me?” I ask, and he reaches

  again for the tablet.

  “George and Poppy stayed there in the street for a moment

  only, but that’s all it took before the women stepped out from

  the shade of a tree and into view and George could see for him-

  self who they were.”

  “Who?” I ask, slightly breathless, and he waits a beat before

  he replies.

  “It was Mrs. Baines,” he says, “and you.”

  And then, from some recording app on his device, he plays for

  me the testimonial of Mr. Nilsson which states, “She was fight-

  ing with the new doctor lady on the street, the both of them

  were hooting and hollering, mad as a hornet. Before I could

  intercede, the doctor lady grabbed a handful of Ms. Morgan’s

  hair right out of her head and left with it in her fist. Poppy and

  I turned and walked quickly home. Didn’t want her to think we

  were snooping or she might do the same thing to us.”

  Officer Berg stops it there and turns to me, asking, “D
oes

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  this sound to you like an altercation between two women who’d

  never met?”

  But I’m speechless.

  I can’t reply.

  Why would George Nilsson say such an awful thing about

  me?

  Officer Berg doesn’t give me a chance to speak. He goes on

  without me.

  He asks, “Is it often, Dr. Foust, that you swipe handfuls of

  hair from women you don’t know?”

  The answer, of course, is no. Though still I can’t find my

  voice to speak.

  He decides, “I’ll take your silence as a no.”

  His hand falls to the door and he pushes it open against the

  weight of the wind. “I’ll leave you to it,” he says, “so that you

  can get on with your day.”

  “I never spoke to Morgan Baines,” is what I manage to say just

  then before he leaves, though the words that emerge are limp.

  He shrugs. “Alright then,” he says, stepping back out into

  the rain.

  He never said if he believed me.

  He didn’t need to.

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  Mouse

  Once upon a time there was a girl named Mouse. It wasn’t her

  real name, but for as long as the girl could remember, her father

  had called her that.

  The girl didn’t know why her father called her Mouse. She

  didn’t ask. She worried that if she brought attention to it, he

  might stop using the nickname, and she didn’t want him to do

  that. The girl liked that her father called her Mouse, because it

  was something special between her father and her, even if she

  didn’t know why.

  Mouse spent a lot of time thinking about it. She had ideas

  about why her father called her by that nickname. For one, she

  had a soft spot for cheese. Sometimes, when she pulled strands of

  mozzarella from her string cheese and laid them on her tongue

  to eat, she thought that maybe that was the reason he called her

  Mouse, because of how much she liked cheese.

  She wondered if her father thought she looked like a mouse.

  If, maybe, there were whiskers that grew along her upper lip,

  ones so small even she couldn’t see them, though her father

  could somehow see them. Mouse would go to the bathroom,

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  climb up on the sink, press in closely to the mirror so she could

  search for whiskers. She even brought a magnifying glass along

  with her once, held it between her lip and her reflection, but

  she didn’t see any whiskers there.

  Maybe, she decided, it had nothing to do with whiskers, but

  something to do with her brown hair, her big ears, her big teeth.

  But Mouse wasn’t sure. Sometimes she thought it had to do

  with the way she looked, and then other times she thought it

  had nothing to do with the way she looked, but was something

  else instead, like the Salerno Butter Cookies she and her father

  ate after dinner sometimes. Maybe it was because of those cook-

  ies that he called her Mouse.

  Mouse loved her Salerno Butter Cookies more than any other

  kind of cookie, even more than homemade. She’d stack them

  up on her pinkie, slide her finger through the center hole, gnaw

  her way down the side of the stack just like a mouse gnawing

  its way through wood.

  Mouse ate her cookies at the dinner table. But one night,

  when her father had his back turned, taking the dishes to the

  sink to wash, she slipped an extra few in her pocket for a late-

  night snack, in case she or her teddy bear got hungry.

  Mouse excused herself from the table, tried sneaking up to

  her bedroom with the cookies in her pockets, though she knew

  that crammed there in her pockets, the cookies would quickly

  turn to crumbs. To Mouse, it didn’t matter. The crumbs would

  taste just as good as the cookie had.

  But her father caught her red-handed trying to make off with

  the cookies. He didn’t scold her. He hardly ever scolded her.

  There wasn’t a need for Mouse to be scolded. Instead he teased

  her for hoarding food, storing it somewhere in that bedroom of

  hers like mice store food in the walls of people’s homes.

  But somehow Mouse didn’t think that was why he called

  her Mouse.

  Because by then, she already was Mouse.

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  MARY KUBICA

  Mouse had a vivid imagination. She loved to make stories

  up. She never wrote them down on paper, but put them in her

  head where no one else could see. In her stories, there was a

  girl named Mouse who could do anything she wanted to, even

  cartwheels on the moon if that’s what she wanted to do because

  Mouse didn’t need silly things like oxygen or gravity. She was

  afraid of nothing because she was immortal. No matter what

  she did, no harm could come to imaginary Mouse.

  Mouse loved to draw. Her bedroom walls were covered in

  pictures of her father and her, her and her teddy bears. Mouse

  spent her days playing pretend. Her bedroom, the only one on

  the second floor of the old home, was full of dolls, toys and

  stuffed animals. Each animal had a name. Her favorite was a

  stuffed brown bear named Mr. Bear. Mouse had a dollhouse, a

  toy kitchen set with pretend pots and pans and crates of plastic

  food. She had a tea set. Mouse loved to set her dolls and ani-

  mals in a circle on her floor, on the edge of her striped rag rug,

  and serve them each a tiny mug of tea and a plastic donut. She

  would find a book on her shelf and read it aloud to her friends

  before tucking them into bed.

  But sometimes Mouse didn’t play with her animals and dolls.

  Sometimes she stood on her bed and pretended the floor

  around her was hot lava oozing from the volcano at the other

  end of the room. She couldn’t step on the floor for risk of death.

  Those days, Mouse would scramble from her bed to a desk,

  climbing to safety. She’d tread precariously across the top of the

  small white desk—the legs of it wobbling beneath her, threat-

  ening to break. Mouse wasn’t a big girl but the desk was old,

  fragile. It wasn’t meant to hold a six-year-old child.

  But it didn’t matter because soon enough Mouse was clam-

  bering into a laundry basket full of dirty clothes on the bed-

  room floor. As she did, she took extra care not to step on the

  floor, breathing a sigh of relief when she was safely inside the

  basket. Because even though the basket was on the floor, it was

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  safe. The basket couldn’t get swallowed up by lava, because it

  was made of titanium, and Mouse knew that titanium wouldn’t

  melt. She was a smart girl, smarter than any other
girl her age

  that she knew.

  Inside the laundry basket, the girl rode the waves of the vol-

  cano until the lava itself cooled and crusted over, and the land

  was safe enough to walk on again. Only then did she venture

  out of the basket and go back to playing along the edge of the

  rag rug with Mr. Bear and her dolls.

  Sometimes Mouse thought that that, her tendency to disap-

  pear to her bedroom— quiet as a church mouse, as her father put it—and play all day was the reason he called her Mouse.

  It was hard to say.

  But one thing was certain.

  Mouse loved that name until the day Fake Mom arrived. And

  then she no longer did.

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  Sadie

  I’m sitting on the floor in the lobby of the clinic. Before me is

  an activity table, the kind meant to keep kids entertained while

  they wait. The dark carpet beneath me is thin and cheap. It’s

  unraveling in spots, with stains that blend into the nylon so you

  wouldn’t see them unless you were as close to it as I am.

  I’m cross-legged on the floor, sitting on the side of the activ-

  ity table that faces a shape sorter. I watch on as my hand drops

  a heart shaped block into the appropriate opening.

  There’s a girl on the other side of the table. At first glance,

  she looks to be about four years old. She wears a pair of crooked

  pigtails. Strands of blond hair have come loose from the elas-

  tics. They fall to her face, hang into her eyes where she leaves

  them be, not bothering to shove them away. Her sweatshirt is

  red. Her shoes don’t match. One is a black patent leather Mary

  Jane and the other a black ballet f lat. An easy enough mistake

  to make.

  My own legs have begun to ache. I unknot them, find a dif-

  ferent position to sit in, one better suited for a thirty-nine-year-old woman. The waiting room chair catches my eye, but I can’t

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  rise from the floor and leave, not yet, because the little girl across the table is watching me expectantly.

  “Go,” she says, grinning oddly, and I ask, “Go where?” though

  my voice is strangled when I speak. I clear my throat, try again.

  “Go where?” I ask, this time sounding more like myself.

  On the floor, my body is stiff. My legs hurt. My head hurts.

  I’m hot. I didn’t catch a wink of sleep last night and am paying