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

Stay
calm
. ‘Supposed to?’
‘It looked wrong,’ Gilpin continued. ‘From the second
we saw it. To be honest, the whole thing looked staged.
First of all, there’s the fact that it was all centered in this one

---

spot. Why wasn’t anything messed up 
anywhere
but this
room? It’s odd.’ He proffered another photo, a close-up.
‘And look here, at this pile of books. They should be in front
of the end table – the end table is where they were stacked,
right?’
I nodded.
‘So when the end table was knocked over, they should
have spilled mostly in front of it, following the trajectory of
the falling table. Instead, they’re back behind it, as if
someone swept them off 
before
knocking over the table.’
I stared dumbly at the photo.
‘And watch this. This is very curious to me,’ Gilpin
continued. He pointed at three slender antique frames on
the mantelpiece. He stomped heavily, and they all flopped
facedown immediately. ‘But somehow they stayed upright
through everything else.’
He showed a photo of the frames upright. I had been
hoping – even after they caught my Houston’s dinner slipup
– that they were dumb cops, cops from the movies, local
rubes aiming to please, trusting the local guy: 
Whatever
you say, buddy
. I didn’t get dumb cops.
‘I don’t know what you want me to say,’ I mumbled. ‘It’s
totally – I just don’t know what to think about this. I just want
to find my wife.’
‘So do we, Nick, so do we,’ Rhonda said. ‘But here’s
another thing. The ottoman – remember how it was flipped
upside down?’ She patted the squatty ottoman, pointed at
its four peg legs, each only an inch high. ‘See, this thing is
bottom-heavy because of those tiny legs. The cushion
practically sits on the floor. Try to push it over.’ I hesitated.
‘Go on, try it,’ Boney urged.

---

I gave it a push, but it slid across the carpet instead of
turning over. I nodded. I agreed. It was bottom-heavy.
‘Seriously, get down there if you need to, and knock
that thing upside down,’ Boney ordered.
I knelt down, pushed from lower and lower angles,
finally put a hand underneath the ottoman, and flipped it.
Even then it lifted up, one side hovering, and fell back into
place; I finally had to pick it up and turn it over manually.
‘Weird, huh?’ Boney said, not sounding all that
puzzled.
‘Nick, you do any housecleaning the day your wife went
missing?’ Gilpin asked.
‘No.’
‘Okay, because the tech did a Luminol sweep, and I’m
sorry to tell you, the kitchen floor lit up. A good amount of
blood was spilled there.’
‘Amy’s type – 
B positive
,’ Boney interrupted. ‘And I’m
not talking a little cut, I’m talking 
blood
.’
‘Oh my God.’ A clot of heat appeared in the middle of
my chest. ‘But—’
‘Yes, so your wife made it out of this room,’ Gilpin said.
‘Somehow, in theory, she made it into the kitchen – without
disturbing any of those gewgaws on that table just outside
the kitchen – and then she collapsed in the kitchen, where
she lost a lot of blood.’
‘And then someone carefully mopped it up,’ Rhonda
said, watching me.
‘Wait. Wait. Why would someone try to hide blood but
then mess up the living room—’
‘We’ll figure that out, don’t worry, Nick,’ Rhonda said
quietly.

---

‘I don’t get it, I just don’t—’
‘Let’s sit down,’ Boney said. She pointed me toward a
dining room chair. ‘You eat anything yet? Want a sandwich,
something?’
I shook my head. Boney was taking turns playing
different female characters: powerful woman, doting
caregiver, to see what got the best results.
‘How’s your marriage, Nick?’ Rhonda asked. ‘I mean,
five years, that’s not far from the seven-year itch.’
‘The marriage was fine,’ I repeated. ‘It’s fine. Not
perfect, but good, good.’
She wrinkled her nose: 
You lie
.
‘You think she might have run off?’ I asked, too
hopefully. ‘Made this look like a crime scene and took off?
Runaway-wife thing?’
Boney began ticking off reasons no: ‘She hasn’t used
her cell, she hasn’t used her credit cards, ATM cards. She
made no major cash withdrawals in the weeks before.’
‘And there’s the blood,’ Gilpin added. ‘I mean, again, I
don’t want to sound harsh, but the amount of blood spilled?
That would take some serious … I mean, I couldn’t have
done it to myself. I’m talking some deep wounds there. Your
wife got nerves of steel?’
‘Yes. She does.’ She also had a deep phobia of
blood, but I’d wait and let the brilliant detectives figure that
out.
‘It seems extremely unlikely,’ Gilpin said. ‘If she were to
wound herself that seriously, why would she mop it up?’
‘So really, let’s be honest, Nick,’ Boney said, leaning
over on her knees so she could make eye contact with me
as I stared at the floor. ‘How was your marriage currently?

---

We’re on your side, but we need the truth. The only thing
that makes you look bad is you holding out on us.’
‘We’ve had bumps.’ I saw Amy in the bedroom that last
night, her face mottled with the red hivey splotches she got
when she was angry. She was spitting out the words –
mean, wild words – and I was listening to her, trying to
accept the words because they were true, they were
technically true, everything she said.
‘Describe the bumps for us,’ Boney said.
‘Nothing specific, just disagreements. I mean, Amy is a
blowstack. She bottles up a bunch of little stuff and –
whoom! – but then it’s over. We never went to bed angry.’
‘Not Wednesday night?’ Boney asked.
‘Never,’ I lied.
‘Is it money, what you mostly argue about?’
‘I can’t even think what we’d argue about. Just stuff.’
‘What stuff was it the night she went missing?’ Gilpin
said it with a sideways grin, like he’d uttered the most
unbelievable 
gotcha
.
‘Like I told you, there was the lobster.’
‘What else? I’m sure you didn’t scream about the
lobster for a whole hour.’
At that point Bleecker waddled partway down the
stairs and peered through the railings.
‘Other household stuff, too. Married-couple stuff. The
cat box,’ I said. ‘Who would clean the cat box.’
‘You were in a screaming argument about a cat box,’
Boney said.
‘You know, the principle of the thing. I work a lot of
hours, and Amy doesn’t, and I think it would be good for her
if she did some basic home maintenance. Just basic

---

upkeep.’
Gilpin jolted like an invalid woken from an afternoon
nap. ‘You’re an old-fashioned guy, right? I’m the same way.
I tell my wife all the time, “I don’t know how to iron, I don’t
know how to do the dishes. I can’t cook. So, sweetheart, I’ll
catch the bad guys, that I can do, and you throw some
clothes in the washer now and then.” Rhonda, you were
married, did you do the domestic stuff at home?’
Boney looked believably annoyed. ‘I catch bad guys
too, idiot.’
Gilpin rolled his eyes toward me; I almost expected
him to make a joke –