Before She Knew Him(42)
Chapter 22
After receiving the protective order from a burly, disinterested process server on Tuesday morning, Hen called Lloyd at work to let him know it had happened.
“Shit, it’s real,” he said.
“Yep.”
“How do you feel?”
“I don’t know,” Hen said. “Like I’ve been validated, a little bit.”
“But you’re not going to do anything more, right?”
“What do you mean? Like break into their house?”
“Uh-huh.”
“No. I’m done. I’ve had my say. I’ll get my blood levels checked to see if my meds are working. I’ll keep my head down. I’m fine, Lloyd. I’m not manic.”
“I believe you.” It had taken all of Hen’s persuasion to get Lloyd to go into the office that Tuesday. She had promised him that she was feeling okay and also that she’d call him every two hours to check in.
“I will say this, though. If nothing happens in this case . . . if Matthew isn’t arrested, then maybe we should think about moving. He is a murderer.”
“Okay,” Lloyd said, and she could hear the muffle of the phone as he put his hand over it and spoke briefly to someone in his office. “Yes, I agree. That’s fine.”
“I’ll call you in a little bit.”
She went to the large window that looked out onto Sycamore Street. She’d pulled the curtains on all the windows that faced their neighbor. Since she’d confirmed for herself that Matthew was a murderer, and was also sure that he knew she knew, she wondered why she didn’t feel more scared. Wouldn’t he come for her at some point? But she didn’t think that would happen. One of the reasons was that if something bad happened to her, the police would obviously immediately suspect Matthew, the man she’d accused. But it wasn’t just that. It was also that she didn’t think she was his type. He killed men. She didn’t know why, but that’s what he did.
One of the neighborhood moms walked by. She was wearing yoga pants and carried small weights in her hands. She turned and glanced toward the house, and Hen took a step back from the window into the shadows. Did the woman know anything? Hen didn’t think so; neither Matthew’s name nor hers had been mentioned in any of the reports about the homicide in New Essex. Still, she wondered.
It was a beautiful day out, the sky a hard blue, and the maple tree across the street fully red now, only a few of its leaves having fallen. Hen loved weather in all its forms, but something about the big months of change—October and April—made her ache with a sadness that she couldn’t quite articulate. She thought of her parents, just back to upstate New York from a three-week river cruise on the Rhine. Her father would be obsessing about the yard, the number of leaves already fallen, and her mother would be planning their next trip to Europe. Hen decided to call them later, after taking a walk down to her studio space. Open Studios was this weekend, and she had a lot of work to do.
That week, as the weather stayed perfect, each day cloudless and crisp, Hen got into a solid routine, walking every day to the studio after breakfast, working all morning on the remaining prints for the Lore Warriors book, getting lunch at the small riverside café just down from the studios, then spending the afternoon preparing for the weekend. She cleaned her space, selected fifteen prints—including her most recent, the cat in bed with the girl on the windowsill—to display on the wall. She even drove to Walmart to buy one of those giant plastic buckets of pretzel nubs filled with peanut butter. It was her favorite junk food, and she only ever allowed herself to buy them on open studio weekends, putting out a bowl for the visitors, but, really, it was her small reward for the misery of having strangers stroll through her workspace, judging her.
It was a good week, strangely enough, despite how often she found herself thinking of Matthew Dolamore and what she’d seen him do. In the evenings, Lloyd and she cooked dinner together. The Red Sox had bowed out in the first round of the playoffs, sending Lloyd into a silent sulk for twenty-four hours, but now they were free to catch up on the last season of Game of Thrones.
She kept all the curtains that faced the Dolamore house pulled closed. Lloyd had no doubt noticed, but he hadn’t mentioned it.
On Saturday morning Lloyd walked with Hen to Black Brick Studios to see what she’d done with the space. Open Studios was noon to five both weekend days, and the place was bustling, as it had been all week. Lloyd drank coffee and looked at the prints she’d selected to hang on the wall. Hen knew that most of them were familiar to him—her “greatest hits” that she always trotted out for shows—but he hadn’t seen her newest work, and he stared at it for a while before asking, “Have I seen this one before?”
“I just did it.”
“I like it,” he said. “Creepy. What’s it about?”
It was a question she hated, and a question that Lloyd should have known she hated, but sometimes he couldn’t help himself. He loved her artwork, at least he always said he did, but also felt a need to analyze it to death.
“It’s about Matthew Dolamore,” she said.
Lloyd swung around, concerned, and she bugged her eyes out at him and said, “Kidding. I don’t know what it’s about. It just popped into my head.”