Eight Perfect Murders(23)
The thing is, and maybe I’m biased by all those years I’ve spent in fictional realms built on deceit, I don’t trust narrators any more than I trust the actual people in my life. We never get the whole truth, not from anybody. When we first meet someone, before words are ever spoken, there are already lies and half-truths. The clothes we wear cover the truth of our bodies, but they also present who we want to be to the world. They are fabrications, figuratively and literally.
So I wasn’t surprised when I found my wife’s secret journal, and I wasn’t surprised that there were things inside it that she’d never told me. Many things. For the purposes of this story—of my story—I won’t go into everything that I discovered from reading the journal. She didn’t want the world to know, and I don’t either.
But I do need to record what happened between Claire and Eric Atwell. Not surprisingly, they had been sexually involved. It wasn’t a romantic liaison. Claire had become addicted to cocaine, and after a time during which Atwell had been furnishing it free of charge, he began to ask for money. She and I had shared one bank account together—for rent, for household expenses, for vacations—but we each had separate accounts as well. And hers had been emptied in about the space of three weeks. After that she had paid Atwell in sexual favors. It was his idea. Without going into detail, some of what he asked her to do was truly demeaning. At one point she’d told him about her bad experience with Mr. Clifton, the middle-school teacher; “I could see the excitement in his eyes,” she wrote.
I read the rest of the journal, then the following weekend, I drove out to Walden Pond in Concord, passing through Southwell. The lot was nearly empty—it was ten degrees outside, the pond frozen, the skies above a chalky white. I walked along a trail that climbed a ridge above the pond, then doused the journal in kerosene and burned it in a clearing, stomping on the remains until the book was nothing more than a crater of black soot in the snow and ashes in the air.
I never regretted destroying Claire’s journal although sometimes, to this day, I regret having read it. When I moved from our apartment in Somerville to the studio in Beacon Hill, I got rid of everything else that remained of Claire—her clothes, the furniture she’d bought for our place, her school yearbooks. I kept a few of her books, her childhood copy of A Wrinkle in Time, an annotated paperback of Anne Sexton’s collected poetry that she’d bought for a class during her freshman year at Boston University. That book is on my bedside table, always. Sometimes I read the poems inside, but mostly I look at Claire’s notes and doodles, the lines and the words she’d underlined. Sometimes I touch the indentations that her ballpoint pen made on the page.
Mostly, these days, I just like that the book is there, within easy reach. It’s been five years since she died, but I talk to her more now, in my head, than I did immediately after she died. I talked to her the night I got into bed with Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, told her all about the list, and the visit from Agent Mulvey, and what it felt like to be reading these books again.
I woke around eight thirty in the morning, surprised that I’d gotten any sleep at all. I’d forgotten to pull the curtains in my apartment and bright, hard sunlight was flooding in. At the window I looked outside toward the irregular roofline across the street, now covered with snow, icicles decorating the gutters. There were spidery lines of frost on the outside of the windows, and the street below had the grayish pallor that meant it was incredibly cold outside. I checked my phone, and it was currently registering one degree above zero. I almost considered sending emails to Emily and Brandon, letting them know that they could take the day off, that it was too cold to ask them to come in, but changed my mind.
I bundled up and walked down to Charles Street, to a café that served oatmeal. I was at a corner table reading a copy of yesterday’s Globe that had been sitting on the table when my cell phone rang.
“Malcolm, it’s Gwen.”
“Hi,” I said.
“Were you sleeping?”
“Oh, no. I’m getting breakfast. I’m about to go into the store. Are you still in Boston?”
“No, I got home yesterday afternoon, and all the books I’d ordered had arrived, so last night I read Strangers on a Train.”
“Yeah, and?”
“I’d love to talk with you about it. Is there a good time?”
“Can I call you back when I get to the store?” I said. My oatmeal had just arrived, steam pouring from the bowl.
“Sure,” she said. “Call me back.”
After finishing breakfast, I went to Old Devils. Emily was already there, and Nero had been fed.
“You’re here early,” I said.
“Remember that I’m leaving early.”
“Oh, right,” I said, although I hadn’t remembered that.
“Mr. Popovitch complained again,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “He wants to return his last shipment.”
“The whole shipment?”
“Yep. He says they were all improperly graded.”
David Popovich was a collector who lived in New Mexico, but all of us at the bookstore felt like he might as well live next door. He bought a ton of books from us and returned half of them, at least. He occasionally called to complain but mostly he sent us snide emails.