Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

people only do in movies
.) Now she was pretending just
the opposite, as if she forgot that I knew her. I backed
away.
‘Tell me everything, Amy. But first: Was there ever a
baby?’
The baby was a lie. It was the most desolate part for me.

---

My wife as a murderer was frightening, repulsive, but the
baby as a lie was almost impossible to bear. The baby was
a lie, the fear of blood was a lie – during the past year, my
wife had been mostly a lie.
‘How did you set Desi up?’ I asked.
‘I found some twine in one corner of his basement. I
used a steak knife to saw it into four pieces—’
‘He let you keep a knife?’
‘We were friends. You forget.’
She was right. I was thinking of the story she’d told the
police: that Desi had held her captive. I did forget. She was
that good a storyteller.
‘Whenever Desi wasn’t around, I’d tie the pieces as
tight as I could around my wrists and ankles so they’d leave
these grooves.’
She showed me the lurid lines on her wrists, like
bracelets.
‘I took a wine bottle, and I abused myself with it every
day, so the inside of my vagina looked … right. Right for a
rape victim. Then today I let him have sex with me so I had
his semen, and then I slipped some sleeping pills into his
martini.’
‘He let you keep sleeping pills?’
She sighed: I wasn’t keeping up.
‘Right, you were friends.’
‘Then I—’ She pantomimed slicing his jugular.
‘That easy, huh?’
‘You just have to decide to do it and then do it,’ she
said. ‘Discipline. Follow through. Like anything. You never
understood that.’
I could feel her mood turning stony. I wasn’t

---

appreciating her enough.
‘Tell me more,’ I said. ‘Tell me how you did it.’
An hour in, the water went cold, and Amy called an end to
our discussion.
‘You have to admit, it’s pretty brilliant,’ she said.
I stared at her.
‘I mean, you have to admire it just a little,’ she
prompted.
‘How long did it take for Desi to bleed to death?’
‘It’s time for bed,’ she said. ‘But we can talk more
tomorrow if you want. Right now we should sleep. Together.
I think it’s important. For closure. Actually, the opposite of
closure.’
‘Amy, I’m going to stay tonight because I don’t want to
deal with all the questions if I don’t stay. But I’ll sleep
downstairs.’
She cocked her head to one side, studied me.
‘Nick, I can still do very bad things to you, remember
that.’
‘Ha! Worse than what you’ve already done?’
She looked surprised. ‘Oh, definitely.’
‘I doubt that, Amy.’
I began walking out the door.
‘Attempted murder,’ she said.
I paused.
‘That was my original plan early on: I’d be a poor, sick
wife with repeated episodes, sudden intense bouts of
illness, and then it turns out that all those cocktails her
husband prepared her …’
‘Like in the diary.’

---

‘But I decided 
attempted
murder wasn’t good enough
for you. It had to be bigger than that. Still, I couldn’t get the
poisoning idea out of my head. I liked the idea of you
working up to the murder. Trying the cowardly way first. So I
went through with it.’
‘You expect me to believe that?’
‘All that vomit, so shocking. An innocent, frightened
wife might have saved some of that vomit, just in case. You
can’t blame her, being a little paranoid.’ She gave a
satisfied smile. ‘Always have a backup plan to the backup
plan.’
‘You actually poisoned yourself.’
‘Nick, please, you’re shocked? I 
killed
myself.’
‘I need a drink,’ I said. I left before she could speak.
I poured myself a Scotch and sat on the living room
couch. Beyond the curtains, the strobes of the cameras
were lighting up the yard. Soon it would no longer be night.
I’d come to find the morning depressing, to know it would
come again and again.
Tanner picked up on the first ring.
‘She killed him,’ I said. ‘She killed Desi because he
was basically … he was annoying her, he was power-
playing her, and she realized she could kill him, and it was
her way back to her old life, and she could blame everything
on him. She 
murdered
him, Tanner, she just told me this.
She 
confessed
.’
‘I don’t suppose you were able to … record any of it
somehow? Cell phone or something?’
‘We were naked with the shower running, and she
whispered everything.’
‘I don’t even want to ask,’ he said. ‘You two are the

---

most fucked-up people I have ever met, and I specialize in
fucked-up people.’
‘What’s going on with the police?’
He sighed. ‘She foolproofed everything. It’s ludicrous,
her story, but no more ludicrous than our story. Amy’s
basically exploiting the sociopath’s most reliable maxim.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.’
‘Come on, Tanner, there’s got to be something.’
I paced over to the staircase to make sure Amy was
nowhere nearby. We were whispering, but still. I had to be
careful now.
‘For now we need to toe the line, Nick. She left you
looking fairly bad: Everything in the diary was true, she
says. All the stuff in the woodshed was you. You bought the
stuff with those credit cards, and you’re too embarrassed to
admit it. She’s just a sheltered little rich girl, what would she
know about acquiring secret credit cards in her husband’s
name? And my goodness, that pornography!’
‘She told me there was never a baby, she faked it with
Noelle Hawthorne’s pee.’
‘Why didn’t you say—That’s huge! We’ll lean on Noelle
Hawthorne.’
‘Noelle didn’t know.’
I heard a deep sigh on the other end. He didn’t even
bother asking how. ‘We’ll keep thinking, we’ll keep looking,’
he said. ‘Something will break.’
‘I can’t stay in this house with that 
thing
. She’s
threatening me with—’
‘Attempted murder … the antifreeze. Yeah, I heard that
was in the mix.’

---

‘They can’t arrest me on that, can they? She says she
still has some vomit. Evidence. But can they really—’
‘Let’s not push it for now, okay, Nick?’ he said. ‘For
now, play nice. I hate to say it, I hate to, but that’s my best
legal advice for you right now: Play nice.’
‘Play nice? That’s your advice? My one-man legal
dream team: 
Play nice
? Fuck you.’
I hung up in full fury.
I’ll kill her
, I thought. 
I will fucking kill the bitch
.
I plunged into the dark daydream I’d indulged over the
past few years when Amy had made me feel my smallest: I
daydreamed of hitting her with a hammer, smashing her
head in until she stopped talking, 
finally
, stopped with the
words she suctioned to me: average, boring, mediocre,
unsurprising, unsatisfying, unimpressive. 
Un
, basically. In
my mind, I whaled on her with the hammer until she was like
a broken toy, muttering 
un, un, un
until she sputtered to a
stop. And then it wasn’t enough, so I restored her to
perfection and began killing her again: I wrapped my
fingers around her neck – she always did crave intimacy –
and then I squeezed and squeezed, her pulse—
‘Nick?’
I turned around, and Amy was on the bottom stair in
her nightgown, her head tilted to one side.
‘Play nice, Nick.’

---