The Other Mrs.(51)

  I continue on my run. By the time I reach the fringes of town—a quintessential small town with the Methodist church, an inn, a post office, and a handful of places to eat, including a seasonal ice cream shop, boarded up with panels of plywood this time of year—it’s begun to rain. What starts as a drizzle soon comes down in sheets. I run as fast as my legs will carry me, ducking into a café to wait the storm out.

I swing open the door and scurry in, dripping wet. I’ve never been here before. This café is rustic and provincial, the kind of place where old men spend the day, drinking coffee, grumbling about local politics and weather.

The café door doesn’t have a chance to close before I overhear a woman ask, “Did anyone go to the memorial service for Morgan?”

This woman sits on a wobbly, broken-spindled chair in the center of the restaurant, eating from a plate of bacon and eggs. “Poor Jeffrey,” she says, shaking her head mournfully. “He must be devastated.” She reaches for a carton of creamer and douses her coffee with it.

“It’s all so awful,” another woman replies. They sit, a troop of middle-aged women at a long laminated table beside the window of the restaurant. “So unspeakable,” the same woman says.

I tell the hostess I need a table for one, by the window. A waitress stops by and asks what she can get for me, and I tell her coffee, please.

The ladies at the table go on. I listen.

“I heard them talking about it on the news this morning,” someone says.

“What did they say?” another asks.

“Police have been speaking to a person of interest.”

Jeffrey, I tell myself, is the person of interest.

“I heard she got stabbed,” I overhear just then, and my stomach lurches at the words. My hand falls to my own abdomen, thinking what it would feel like when the knife punctured the skin, when it slipped inside her organs.

The next voice is incredulous. “How do they know that?” the woman asks, slamming her mug too hard to the table, and the ladies leap, including me. “Police haven’t released any information yet.”

The first voice again. “Well, now they have. That’s what the coroner said. The coroner said she was stabbed.”

“Five times, they said on the news. Once in the chest, twice in the back and the face.”

“The face?” someone asks, aghast. My hand rises up to my cheek, feeling the insubstantiality of it. The thin skin, the hard bones. Nowhere for the blade of the knife to go. “How awful.”

The women wonder aloud what it would feel like to be stabbed. If Morgan felt the pain straightaway or not until the first signs of blood. Or maybe it happened so fast, a woman guesses, the repeated thrust in and out of her, that she didn’t have time to feel a thing because she was already dead.

What I know as a physician is that if the weapon hit a major artery on the way in, Morgan Baines would have passed mercifully quick. But if it didn’t, though she may have been incapacitated, death by exsanguination, bleeding out, would have taken longer. And, once the shock of it wore off, it would have been painful.

For her sake, I hope Morgan’s assailant hit a major artery. I hope it was quick.

“There were no signs of forced entry. No broken windows. No busted door.”

“Maybe Morgan opened the door for him.”

“Maybe she never locked it in the first place,” someone chirps. “Maybe she was expecting him,” she says, and a discussion follows about how most murder victims know their assailant. Someone quotes a statistic, saying how random crime is relatively rare. “Getting stabbed in the face. That sounds personal to me.”

My mind goes to the ex, Courtney. Courtney had reason to want Morgan dead. I think of her proclamation. I’m not sorry for what I did! What did she mean by that?

“The killer must have known Jeffrey was gone,” one of the ladies speculates.

“Jeffrey travels often. From what I hear, he’s almost always gone. If it isn’t Tokyo then it’s Frankfurt or Toronto.”

“Maybe Morgan was seeing someone else. Maybe she had a boyfriend.”

The incredulous voice returns just then. “It’s all hearsay. All rumor,” she says, admonishing the other women for gossiping this way about a dead woman.

Someone quickly contradicts. “Pamela,” the woman says, tone antagonistic. “It’s not hearsay. It was on the news.”

“They said on the news that Morgan had a boyfriend?” Pamela asks.

“Well, no. Not that. But they said that she was stabbed.”

I wonder if Will knows any of this.

“A knife, they said,” and I find this omniscient they starting to wear on my nerves. Who is they? “That’s what they said was the murder weapon. Can you imagine?” the woman asks, as she latches down on the handle of a butter knife and hoists it indecorously over her head, makes believe she’s stabbing the woman next to her with the blunt edge of the knife. The ladies admonish her. “Jackie,” they say, “stop it. What in the world’s gotten into you? A woman was killed.”

“That’s what they say,” the woman named Jackie continues. “Just stating the facts, ladies. According to coroner reports, it was a boning knife by the shape and length of the wound. Narrow and curved. About six inches long. Though that’s just speculation because Morgan’s killer didn’t leave it behind. He took it with him. Took it with him and probably tossed it out to sea.”