The Other Mrs.(80)

I say no. I tell him this is important. That this can’t wait.

“What is it?” he asks, and I come outright and say that I think Imogen had something to do with Morgan’s murder. His sigh is long, exasperated, but he humors me nonetheless, asking why I think this now.

“I found a bloody washcloth, Will. In the laundry. Completely saturated in blood.”

From the other end of the line comes an earsplitting silence.

I go on, because he says nothing. I feel the words rattle in my throat. Before me, my hands have turned sweaty, though inside I’m so cold I shake. I tell him how I discovered it as I was doing the laundry. How I found the washcloth and hid it beneath the washing machine because I didn’t know what else to do with it.

“Where is this washcloth now?” he asks, concern in his voice.

“Still under the washing machine. The thing is, Will, I’m thinking about turning the washcloth over to Officer Berg.”

“Whoa,” he says. “Stop right there, Sadie. You’re not making any sense. Are you sure it’s blood?”

“I’m sure.”

Will tries to make excuses. Maybe someone had wiped up a spill with it. Paint, mud, some mess the dogs made. “Maybe dog shit,” he says, and it’s so unlike Will to be crass like that. But perhaps, like me, he’s scared. “Maybe one of the boys cut himself,” he suggests, and he reminds me then of the time Otto was small and ran the pad of his thumb across the razor’s sharp blade just to see what it would feel like, though he had been told before to never touch Daddy’s razor. The razor sliced through his skin. There was a surge of blood that Otto tried to hide from us. He didn’t want to get in trouble. We found bloodstained tissues packed in the garbage can, an infection festering days later on his thumb.

“This isn’t the same thing as playing with razors,” I tell Will. “This is far different than that. The washcloth, Will, was wet through with blood. Not a few drops of blood, but it was literally soaked. Imogen killed her,” I say decisively. “She killed her and wiped herself clean with that washcloth.”

“It isn’t fair what you’re doing to her, Sadie,” he says, voice loud, and I don’t know if he’s yelling at me or yelling over the wind. But he’s most definitely yelling. “This is a witch hunt,” he says.

“Morgan’s necklace was here, too,” I go on. “I found it on the stairs. I stepped on it. I set it on the kitchen counter and now it’s gone. Imogen took it to hide the evidence.”

“Sadie,” he says. “I know you don’t like her. I know she hasn’t taken kindly to you. But you can’t keep blaming her for every little thing that goes wrong.”

His choice of words strikes me as strange. Every little thing.

Murder is not an inconsequential thing.

“If not Imogen, then someone in this house killed her,” I tell Will. “That’s a given. Because how else can you explain her necklace on our floor, the bloody washcloth in the laundry. If not her, then who?” I ask, and at first the question is rhetorical. At first I ask it only to make him see that of course it was Imogen because no one else in the house is capable of murder. If she did it once—yanking that stool from beneath her mother’s feet—she could do it again.

But then, in the silence that follows, my eyes come to land on Otto’s angry drawing with the decapitated head and the blobs of blood. The fact that he’s regressed to playing with dolls. And I think of the way my fourteen-year-old son carried a knife to school.

I draw in a sudden breath, wondering if Imogen isn’t the only one in this house who is capable of murder. I don’t mean for the thought to leave my head. And yet it does.

“Could it have been Otto?” I think aloud, wishing as soon as the words are out that I could take them back, put them back in my head where they belong.

“You can’t be serious,” Will says, and I don’t want to be serious. I don’t want to believe for a second that Otto could do this. But it isn’t outside the realm of possibility. Because the same argument rings true: if he did it once, he could do it again.

“But what about Otto’s history of violence?” I ask.

“Not a history of violence,” Will insists. “Otto never hurt anyone, remember?”

“But how do you know he wouldn’t have, if he hadn’t been caught first? If that student hadn’t turned him in, how do you know he wouldn’t have hurt his classmates, Will?”

“We can’t know what he would have done. But I’d like to believe our son isn’t a killer,” Will says. “Wouldn’t you?”

Will is right. Otto never hurt any of those kids back at his old high school. But the intent was there. The motive. A weapon. He very intentionally took a knife to school. There’s no telling what he might have done if his plan hadn’t been thwarted in time. “How can you be so sure?”

“Because I want to believe only the best about our son. Because I won’t let myself think Otto could take another life,” he says, and I’m overcome with the strangest combination of fear and guilt that I don’t know which prevails. Am I more scared that Otto has murdered a woman? Or do I feel more guilty for allowing myself to think this?

This is my son I’m speaking of. Is my son capable of murder?