Before She Knew Him(12)

Hen said she had, but only because it woke her up at an ungodly hour.

They looked at the guest room, twin beds plus a quilt on the wall that looked Indian to Hen, and then they entered the third upstairs room, a room toward the front of the house with a sloped ceiling. The walls were painted a bright, cheery yellow. On top of a table were a sewing machine and a few stacks of fabric.

“My craft room, but, honestly, I never really use it,” Mira said. “It was going to be a nursery, but . . .”

“You tried to have children?” Hen asked.

“We did. For about three years. It just never happened, and now we’re okay with it. It makes life easier, not having kids, don’t you think?”

“I do. Definitely easier.”

“Not that . . . Are you planning—”

“No, it’s off the table.”

“Can I ask why?” Mira said.

Hen was surprised by the question, but not annoyed. “I have health problems—” she started.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to pry.”

“No, you didn’t. I’m . . . I suffer from depression and, honestly, I’m just not willing to go off my medication, which I would need to do if I got pregnant. I’m also not sure that I want to pass along my brain to the next generation.” She laughed to let Mira know it was okay to laugh as well.

“I’m so surprised,” Mira said. “You seem like a really happy person.”

“I’m doing really well now,” Hen said, thinking, I am a happy person, always have been. But that’s just my personality, which has nothing to do with this broken brain that periodically and very convincingly tells me that I’m a worthless person who doesn’t deserve to live.

Then Mira said, “My grandfather, who I was very close to, was depressed, too.”

“Yeah?” Hen said. One result of her decision to always be open about her mental illness was that people always seemed to have a story of their own, ranging from the trivial to the tragic.

“He killed himself when I was fourteen.”

“Oh, no. I’m sorry, Mira.”

“It was a long time ago. I tell myself that he was sick and that the sickness killed him.”

“That’s a good way to think about it,” Hen said, and found herself warming up to Mira. It was a habit of Hen’s, and not one she was proud of, that she was often interested only in people who’d suffered in some way.

They moved downstairs, looking again at the kitchen, Hen making sure to ask lots of questions about everything so that when they got to Matthew’s office she wouldn’t look too interested in what Matthew kept on his mantelpiece. After leaving the kitchen, and pausing briefly in the dining area, Hen was hoping they’d turn right toward the office at the back of the house, but they went through the living room first, Mira explaining in detail how they’d knocked out the wall to the foyer to open up the space. When they finally got to the office, Mira said, “Nothing in here, of course, has anything to do with me. This is Matthew’s domain.”

“I want to see how big the desk is, because we need to buy one ourselves.”

They stepped into the room, Hen shocked all over again by how different it was from the rest of the rooms. Her eyes went immediately to the mantelpiece, noticing straightaway that the fencing trophy was no longer there. In its place was a flat wedge of rock with writing on it glued to a stand. Hen tried not to stare and let her vision sweep around the room, to see if the trophy had been moved.

“Do you want me to get a measuring tape for the desk?” Mira asked.

“Sure. Why not?”

Hen listened as Mira went up the stairs, probably to her craft area. She went closer to where the trophy had been. For a brief moment, she considered the possibility that she’d been confused the night of the dinner party, that she’d seen it somewhere else, but, no, she was sure it had been there, centered above the fireplace. It had been moved.

He’d moved it because he’d seen her looking at it. He knew she knew.

And Hen was sure now that Matthew had killed his former student. She was as sure of it as she’d have been if the fencing trophy had Dustin Miller’s name on it.

“I found it,” Mira said, coming back into the room with the measuring tape. She pulled out a length of the yellow tape, and it snapped back. Both Hen and Mira jumped, then laughed. Together they measured the desk.





Chapter 6




Matthew made himself a pork chop for dinner the way he liked it: a little salt and pepper, then cooked in the cast-iron pan with butter. Boiled potatoes on the side, and steamed broccoli. He put a heaping spoonful of applesauce right on top of the pork chop.

He ate the meal with a glass of milk while he watched the local news. Another private school, one in the western part of the state, had just admitted that seven former teachers had sexually abused students in the 1980s. Sussex Hall, as far as Matthew knew, had never employed any such teacher. There had been the scandal with William Roth, a first-year English teacher, who quit after he became romantically involved with one of the senior girls. This had been only a few years after girls were first admitted to Sussex Hall, and most of the older teachers blamed the incident on that fact, rather than William’s inability to control himself. It turned out okay in the end. William Roth left the school, and Maggie Allen, who never lodged a formal complaint, went on to graduate at the top of her class.