Before She Knew Him(68)

But I don’t really have a choice but to keep looking. The ceilings are low in this large house, and I’ve never given it too much thought, but there are no windows, just dark rooms that lead to other rooms. I tell myself to stop opening the doors, but I can’t stop even when I find terrible things in them: a rabbit split down the middle, but still alive; a Thanksgiving turkey, its cavity filled with spiders; our mother giving birth on the kitchen floor, but all that’s coming out is a river of blood.

Despite all this, I keep opening doors, keep hoping.



I’m in hiding now, even though it’s only Matthew who’s trying to find me. That will all change soon. The body will begin to smell and the neighbors will notice. Or someone will miss her and go check, and then I’ll be in hiding from the police as well. It’s only a matter of time.

Matthew calls me and calls me, even though he knows I’m not going to pick up.

I followed him back to his house after he went to Country Squire. I watched him get out of his car, and I saw the way he looked toward his neighbors’ house with something like longing. What has he told the neighbor? I peered through their window, and all I saw was some guy tossing and turning on the living room couch. I could feel the woman, though, Henrietta, in the house. She’s cast some sort of spell over my brother. I know this much. I get it. I finally saw her up close during Open Studios at Black Brick. Matthew didn’t know I was there, but I was. She wore tight black pants that showed her ankles and a large oxford shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and I bet she told herself that she looked like an artist, that all the men wandering into her studio weren’t imagine what was under that oversized shirt and under those pants, that they were interested in her children’s drawings. She crouched by one of her presses, pulling out a large sheet of paper, and I saw the skin above her pants, skin that looked as though it had never seen the sun, and her delicate rib cage.

I imagine all the blood that that skin, thin as tissue paper, must hold. I imagine she’s warm.



If I really wanted to get Matthew’s attention, then I think I killed the wrong woman.





Part 3

Brothers





Chapter 32




Instead of panicking, Matthew remained calm. He left Michelle’s apartment the way it was, but not before he called Michelle’s number one more time and listened as her phone rang from her kitchen counter, where it was plugged into a charger.

He unplugged it and slid it into his pocket, then slowly backed out of the apartment, making sure to wipe anything he might have touched with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. When he got to the hallway, he locked the door, then moved as fast as he possibly could out to the apartment courtyard and his car. He drove away, finding himself on a back road surrounded by woodlands on either side, his headlights providing a tunnel of light against the black. He came to an intersection, and a sign pointed him toward Dartford. He knew where he was now, passing an ice-cream stand that was only open during the summer months, a place he’d been with Mira on several occasions. He pulled into its empty parking lot, dousing the lights, and walked steadily toward the back of the single-story ice-cream stand. There was a small dumpster and two or three picnic tables. Where the gravel ended, a weedy field began, bordered on one side by a stone wall and on the other by a line of trees, dark against the purple sky. Matthew walked a hundred yards out into the field until he got to a section that was particularly rocky. He crushed Michelle’s phone between two flat rocks he found, shattering it so that he had to search through the weedy grass for fragments, then buried the busted phone and the keys underneath a larger rock he’d pried from the earth. The moon had crept out from behind clouds, and in its silvery light he could see earthworms moving in the damp black soil under the rock. He carefully put it back, then walked another hundred yards toward the line of trees. Just beyond the trees was a wire fence that marked the edge of a cow pasture. Matthew leaned over the fence and was violently ill. When he was done, he saw that one of the cows clustered together had turned her head to look toward him. Then the moon went back behind a cloud.

He drove home, trying not to think too hard about what he was going to do, trying to keep the panic from rising.

He doused the lights of the Fiat just as he pulled into his driveway, aware that it was very late and not wanting to be spotted by neighbors. He looked toward Hen’s house, noticed that the living room lights were still on, wondered briefly what had happened after the husband came home and found the two of them talking on the porch. Her husband had looked concerned, of course, his dull eyes taking in everything slowly, passing from Matthew to Hen and back to Matthew, not quite knowing what to think or to say. Was he smart enough to see the intimacy between them? Did he think they were having an affair?

Back inside his dark house, Matthew paced, briefly allowing himself a fantasy of killing Lloyd. They were in a spotless white room—maybe it was an upscale hotel room in Boston—and Lloyd was wrapped in duct tape so tightly that the only part of his body he could move was his eyes. Matthew lifted him and put him in a deep bathtub, turned on the water, and watched Lloyd drown, watched all the swagger and lustfulness and arrogance disappear from those eyes as he began to realize exactly what was happening. The fantasy was only a little bit distracting, because Matthew knew that in all likelihood he’d never be able to enact it. Those days were long gone, thanks to Richard. Matthew did jumping jacks, then climbed the stairs to the second floor.