My Lovely Wife(63)

Now, Jenna is safe at home, asleep in her bed and not throwing rocks. Not throwing up. Not cutting off what’s left of her hair. Millicent is calm. She even brought dessert, a single chocolate éclair. She cuts it in two, and the halves are perfectly even. I take a bite of mine and she takes a bite of hers, and I wipe chocolate off her top lip.

“She’s not okay,” Millicent says.

“No.”

“We need to talk to her doctor. I can call—”

“Is she like Holly?” I say.

Millicent sets down her éclair as if it’s about to explode. “Like Holly?”

“Maybe it’s the same thing. The same illness.”

“No.”

“But—”

“No. Holly started torturing bugs when she was two. Jenna is nothing like her.”

By that comparison, she is right. Jenna screams whenever she sees a bug. She can’t even kill a spider, let alone torture one. “Then it’s our fault,” I say. “We have to get rid of Owen.”

“We’ve been trying to.”

“I think the hunt for Naomi should end,” I say. “We should let her be found.”

“How will that help—”

“So we can get rid of Owen for good.” When Millicent starts to point out the obvious, I hold up my hand. “I know, I know. Hard to get rid of someone that isn’t even around, right?”

“That would be one way to put it.”

“He was a great idea—I’m not denying it. But we’ve caused so many problems.”

“So many?”

“Jenna. The people in this town. Women are really afraid.” I am careful to omit what she doesn’t know, like Trista.

Millicent nods. “I never meant to hurt Jenna.”

“I know you didn’t.” I lean forward in my chair, closer to Millicent, so that she won’t miss what I’m saying. “It would be difficult, if not impossible, to fake his death without a body. Really, the only way is if he drowns in the ocean or a lake and is never found. But there would be doubt. And to make it halfway plausible, we would need someone credible to tell the story.”

“Like Naomi,” Millicent says.

“And what are the chances of letting Naomi do that?”

“In the negative.”

“Then maybe Owen doesn’t die. Maybe he just leaves.” I pause here, waiting for a reaction. When she doesn’t say anything, I keep talking. “Owen has such a big ego he wrote to a reporter so everyone knew he was back and knew exactly when he would grab his next victim. So why wouldn’t he tell everyone he is going to leave? He’s the type that would brag about what he did. He would say, ‘I told you exactly what I was going to do and when I was going to do it, and you still couldn’t catch me. Now you’ll never find me.’ ”

Millicent nods a little, like she’s thinking about it.

“I know it’s not ideal,” I say. “But if Owen’s gone, everyone will stop talking about him and maybe Jenna won’t be scared anymore.”

“The timing has to be right,” she says. “They need to find Naomi before you send another letter.”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“I’ll take care of that first.”

“Maybe we should do it together.”

She looks at me, her head tilted to one side. For a moment, I think she is going to smile, but she doesn’t. This is too serious now. We have moved beyond using this as foreplay.

“I can take care of Naomi,” she says. “You concentrate on the letter. You have to make everyone believe Owen has left.”

I want to argue and go with my idea, but instead I nod. Her idea makes sense.

She sighs a little. “I hope this works.”

“Me too.”

I reach over and slip my hand into hers. We sit like this until she picks up what’s left of my éclair and takes a bite. I take hers and do the same. A tiny smile appears on her face. I squeeze her hand.

“We’ll be fine,” I say.

Millicent has said this before. She said it when we were young and broke with one baby and another on the way. She said it when we bought our first house and then the second, bigger one.

She also said it after Holly, when her body was lying in our family room, her head smashed by the tennis racket.



* * *



? ? ?

While I stood over Holly, coming to grips with what I had just done, Millicent went straight to work.

“Do we still have that tarp in the garage?” she said.

It took me a second to process. “Tarp?”

“From when we had that leak.”

“I think so.”

“Get it.”

I paused, thinking we should call the police. Because that’s what you do when you kill someone out of self-defense. You call the police and explain what happened, because you did nothing wrong.

Millicent read my mind.

“You think the police will believe Holly was a threat to you?” she said.

Me, the athlete. Me, with the broken tennis racket.

Holly, with no weapon at all.

I did not argue. I went out to the garage and dug through the shelves and plastic containers until I found the rolled-up blue tarp. When I returned to the living room, Holly’s body had been readjusted; her legs were straightened, and her arms, flat at her side.