An Unwanted Guest(49)
He takes a deep breath and exhales. ‘It was a living hell. An unbelievable nightmare. My wife had been murdered and I was arrested for it – put in jail, denied bail – and I hadn’t done it.’
There’s a long silence while everyone tries to digest what they’ve just heard.
‘But they dropped the charges,’ Gwen says, her voice low.
He looks back at her. She’s leaned forward a bit. ‘Yes. They didn’t have any evidence against me. They assumed I had a motive, but there wasn’t one scrap of physical evidence to pin the crime on me. If I’d done it, I would have had blood on me, on my clothes. They tried to figure out how I could have killed her and cleaned myself up and destroyed any evidence in that hour. But they didn’t have anything. They didn’t even have the murder weapon.
‘The most damning thing was that I didn’t have an alibi. I was sitting alone for that hour, in my own living room. They determined that the time of death must have been very close to around the time I arrived home. I must have missed whoever did it by a few minutes. The investigating officers asked the neighbour if he’d seen anything, but he’d been out at his bridge game up until just before he saw me arrive, so he was no help. And the neighbour on the other side of us was out of town, and the ones across the street go to bed early. No one saw anything.’ He looks intently at the small group seated around him, listening with wide eyes. ‘Anyone could have parked on the street and walked up to the front door – or sneaked in the back. Nothing was stolen. There was no sign of forced entry, but Barbara might have let someone in if she knew him. She wasn’t afraid of anyone. Maybe she was having an affair. I don’t know. I never suspected such a thing. They didn’t find anything like that.’
David shakes his head slowly. ‘Someone obviously wanted her dead – or was setting me up,’ he says. ‘I’d like nothing more than to find out who.’ He frowns deeply. ‘They had to drop the charges. But this – stigma – has become part of my life. I wish I could say I’ve got used to it, but I haven’t. I don’t think I ever will.’
He looks at each of them in turn. ‘I can’t make any of you believe me. I’ve told the truth, but I’ve found that people believe what they want to believe. I can’t help that.’
Chapter Twenty-four
GWEN HAS LISTENED to both sides of David’s story with a feeling of horror. She is much colder inside her blanket now than she was before.
It sounds worse than she expected. She thought at first that maybe they’d arrested him simply because he was the husband, and had quickly realized their mistake. But this sounds so inconclusive. Unsatisfactory. There hadn’t been enough evidence to send him to trial – but does she believe him? Riley is right about one thing – he would have had the best possible defence lawyer.
It’s very disturbing, the admission of the missing hour between his arriving home and calling 911. And he’s a criminal defence attorney. He would know what to do – how to destroy evidence, or get rid of it. She doesn’t know what to believe.
Henry squirms uncomfortably in his seat. His breathing is shallow. This entire situation is becoming more and more surreal. All these revelations are bizarre – Riley with her stories of being held hostage, of having a gun held to her head, of severed limbs in the streets – no wonder she’s so peculiar. And this thing about David has given him a nasty jolt – my God, did he murder his wife?
Henry suspects he is looking at it from a slightly different perspective than the others. He looks at his wife, seated a short distance away, and allows his gaze to rest on her. He doesn’t doubt that David killed his wife. Because he can understand it. He can understand the impulse to want to kill your wife. To just want to end things, and to be able to move on, without all the carping. He would like to reach over to the hearth and grab the iron poker – it’s an arm’s length away – and strike his unsuspecting wife over the head with it. He knows just how it would feel, how the poker would feel in his hand, because he’s been tending the fire occasionally. He imagines leaning down as if to poke the flames, then changing course and turning suddenly, raising his arm and bringing the poker down as fast and as hard as he can and spilling her brains. Would she look up in time to realize what he was doing? What would her face look like? He would have to make the first blow count. He wonders if a poker would do it, if it would be heavy enough. Would he have enough force in his arm? How many times would he have to hit her, to be sure? Perhaps something heavier …
Henry realizes he’s clenching his hands into fists underneath the blanket. He blinks his eyes rapidly, as if to dispel the fantasy, which has run away with him. Of course he wouldn’t do that. Even if there was no one here watching, he still wouldn’t do it. Thoughts are not actions. They aren’t the same thing at all. But he can understand the impulse. So he has no difficulty believing that David might have murdered his wife.
He catches his own wife staring back at him in the dark. For a moment, he wonders nervously if she can read his thoughts.
But then he has a thought, and before he fully considers it he voices it out loud. ‘Maybe Candice knew David. Maybe she was writing a book about him.’ He leans towards David. ‘You say the case was in all the papers.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ David says dismissively.