The Other Mrs.(56)

Tate doesn’t like the brush-off. His posture shifts; he throws his arms across himself and begins to pout.

Will turns to me, wrapping his arms around me. It feels good, being held.

“I’ve looked into home security systems,” he tells me, returning to the conversation we started on the phone earlier today, about whether or not we’re safe here. “I set up an appointment to have one installed. And let’s give Officer Berg a chance to get to the bottom of this, before we cut and run. This is our home, Sadie. Whether we like it or not, for now this is our home. We have to make do.”

I pull back from his embrace. He’s trying to be reassuring. But I don’t feel reassured. I meet his eye, and ask, “But what if a security system can’t protect us?”

His look is quizzical. “What do you mean?” he asks.

“What if there’s a threat inside our home?”

“You mean as if someone got past the security system?” he asks, assuring me that we could keep the house armed at all times, that these things are monitored twenty-four hours a day. If the alarm was triggered, help would be on its way almost instantly.

“It’s not an intruder I’m thinking about,” I say. “It’s Imogen.”

Will shakes his head, disbelieving. “Imogen?” he asks, and I say yes. “You can’t possibly think—” he begins, but I interrupt him.

“Our k-n-i-f-e,” I tell him, spelling the word out for Tate’s benefit. Tate can spell, but not well enough. “Our boning k-n-i-f-e isn’t here. I can’t find it,” I say, admitting in a forced whisper, “She scares me, Will.”

I think about her in our bedroom the other night, watching us sleep. The strange exchange we had in the hallway. The photograph of her dead mother that she carries around on her phone. These are abnormal behaviors.

And then there’s the padlock on her bedroom door. “There’s something in there she doesn’t want us to find,” I say, finally admitting to him that I was in there the other day, before the lock was installed. I tell him about the picture I found with the man’s face scratched off, the Dear John note, the condoms. “She’s been sleeping with someone,” I tell him. “A married man, I think,” based on the content of the note.

Will doesn’t say much to this. He’s more disappointed that I would violate her privacy by snooping through her room. What he does say, however, is that there’s nothing criminal about sleeping with a married man. “She’s sixteen,” Will reminds me. “Sixteen-year-olds do stupid things all the time. You know why she put that lock on the door?” Will asks, saying before I can reply, “She’s a teenager, Sadie. That’s why. She doesn’t want people coming into her room. How would you feel if she went snooping through your stuff?” he asks.

“It wouldn’t matter,” I tell him. “I have nothing to hide. But Imogen is an angry girl with a short fuse, Will,” I argue. “She worries me.”

“Try putting yourself in her shoes, Sadie. You don’t think you’d be angry?” he asks, and of course I’d be grieving and uncomfortable—my mother dead by her own hand, me forced to live with people I don’t know—but would I be angry? “We have no idea what Imogen saw that day,” he asserts. “If we’d seen what she must have seen, we’d be on a short fuse, too. You can’t unsee that.

“Besides,” Will tells me, coming back to the knife, “I used the boning knife just the other day to skin chicken for a casserole. You’re all worked up for nothing, Sadie,” he says, asking if I checked the dishwasher for the knife. I didn’t. I didn’t even think to look in the dishwasher.

But it doesn’t matter right now, because my mind has moved on from the knife and to the picture on Imogen’s cell phone. The one of Alice dead. I know exactly what Imogen saw the day her mother died, though I’m reluctant to tell Will because the last thing he needs to see is what Alice went through. And yet I tell him anyway because it isn’t right, it isn’t normal, for Imogen to have taken a picture of Alice postmortem and for her to be carrying it around. What is she doing with it anyway? Showing her friends?

I look away from Will. I confess to him that I do know what Imogen saw. “Imogen took a picture that day before the coroner took Alice away. She showed it to me,” I say.

Will grows suddenly silent for a moment. He swallows hard.

“She took a picture?” he asks after some time. I nod. “What did she look like?” he asks, meaning Alice.

I’m generally nondescript. “Well, she was d-e-a-d,” I tell him, treading lightly. “But she looked peaceful,” I lie. I don’t tell him about claw marks, the severed tongue. I don’t tell him about the state of the attic, the toppled storage boxes, the broken lamp, the pitchpoled telescope. But I re-create them in my mind, imagining Alice’s thrashing body knocking into these things, toppling them, as her oxygen supply was siphoned off.

As I dredge up the images of them, something gets under my skin. Because I picture the boxes and the lamp overturned, and yet the step stool—the one Alice used to raise herself up to the height of the noose—stood upright. I remember that now.

How could the very thing that Alice would have needed to kick away to go through with the suicide not be overturned?