Eight Perfect Murders(22)

“Sounds like a creep,” I said.

“I don’t know. More like a con man. I think he’s just really hoping to stumble into the next big thing and make a quick buck.”

She spent a weekend at the farmhouse—the name of his company was Black Barn Enterprises—and when she returned, I sensed that something had changed in her. She was jumpy, a little irritated, but also somewhat more affectionate with me. A few days after the weekend, Claire woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me, “Why do you love me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just do.”

“You must have reasons.”

“If I had reasons to love you, then there’d be reasons for me to not love you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I’m tired.”

“No, tell me, I’m curious.”

“Okay. So if I loved you because you’re beautiful, then that would mean I wouldn’t love you anymore if you had some kind of accident that disfigured your face—”

“Or simply grew old.”

“Right, or grew old. And if I loved you because you’re a good person, then that would mean I would stop loving you if you did something bad. And that wouldn’t happen.”

“You’re way too good for me,” she said, but she laughed.

“What do you love about me?” I said.

“Your youthful good looks,” she said, laughing some more. “Actually, I love you because you’re an old soul in a young man.”

“And one day I’ll be an old soul in an old man.”

“I can’t wait,” she said.

Because I worked mostly during the daytime and she tended to work night shifts at the restaurant, it took me a while to find out that she had kept going back out to Southwell during the daytime hours. I started keeping track of the mileage on her Subaru; I felt bad spying in that way, but my suspicions turned out to be correct. It was clear that she was going out to Southwell two or three times a week. I assumed she was having an affair either with Atwell, or maybe with one of Atwell’s tenants. It didn’t occur to me, at least not in those first few weeks, that she’d been going to Black Barn Enterprises for another reason, until I realized that the normally skintight jeans she wore to work were beginning to look baggy around her waist. I found her cocaine, plus a small pillbox filled with an assortment of pills, in one of the compartments of the jewelry box she’d inherited from her grandmother.

Later, after I’d confronted her, she told me how that first weekend at Black Barn Atwell had thrown a dinner party with a ton of great wine. When she’d told him she was ready for bed, he’d talked her into a small amount of coke just to keep the party going. The next day, after she’d finished getting footage for her film, he’d thanked her by giving her a bottle of the Sancerre they’d been drinking the night before, plus a half gram of the cocaine. He’d also explained to Claire that he had devised a system for his drug use, spreading it out, so as to not get addicted. He convinced her it was okay, so long as you followed his scientific schedule.

If I’d initially known that Claire’s trips out to Southwell were for drugs and not for sex, I might have tried to intervene sooner. As it was, by the time I was hearing about it, Claire was a full-blown addict again. I decided to do what I always did. I decided to wait it out in hopes that she would eventually agree to quit, or to go to rehab. I know how it sounds. I know that maybe if I’d done something—given her an ultimatum, contacted her parents, gotten her friends involved, anything—that maybe the outcome would have been different. I still think about this all the time.

When I was a teenager, I remember asking my mom why she put up with my father’s drinking.

She’d frowned, not because she was upset, but because she was confused. “What choice do I have?” she’d finally said.

“You could leave him.”

She shook her head. “I’d rather wait for him.”

“Even if you have to wait forever?” I said.

She nodded in response.

That was how I felt about Claire during those moments when she wasn’t fully mine. I was waiting for her.

When the two uniformed officers knocked on my apartment door early on the first day of 2010, I knew that she was dead before either of them spoke.

“Okay,” I remember saying after they’d delivered the news that she’d been in a car accident at three in the morning, and that she’d been killed instantly.

“Was anyone else hurt?” I asked.

“No, she was alone, and no other vehicles were involved in the accident.”

“Okay,” I said again and went to shut the door, figuring that the police were done with me. But they stopped me from closing the door, explained that I needed to come down to the station for identification purposes.



Three months later I found a journal she’d been keeping. It was hidden behind a number of larger hardcovers in the section of our bookshelf that she had claimed for herself. I almost burned it without reading it, but curiosity got the better of me, and one wet spring evening I bought myself a six-pack of Newcastle Brown, settled in, and read the entire contents.





Chapter 10




Even though I don’t read contemporary mysteries anymore, I keep up with the trends. I am well aware that Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn has changed the industry, that unreliable narrators are suddenly popular, along with domestic suspense, with books that posit the question of whether we can really trust anyone, especially the ones closest to us. Some of the reviews I read make it sound as though this is a recent phenomenon, as though the idea of discovering a spouse’s secrets constituted something new, or that the omission of facts from a narrative hadn’t been the bedrock upon which psychological thrillers have been built for over a century. The narrator of Rebecca, a novel published in 1938, never even gave the readers her name.