The Other Mrs.(9)

I gave him the address, told him I’d meet him inside.

We parted ways beneath the “L” tracks. I watched him walk away until he got swallowed up in pedestrian traffic. Even then, I still watched.

I couldn’t wait to see him that night.

But as luck would have it, I didn’t make it to the party after all. Fate had other plans that night.

But Sadie was there. Sadie, who had been invited to Jack and Emily’s engagement party. She was out of this world. He went right up to her, fawned all over her, forgot about me.

I’d made it easy on her, inviting him to that party. I always made things easy for Sadie.

If it wasn’t for me, they never would’ve met. He was mine before he was hers.

She forgets that all the time.



SADIE


There isn’t much to our street, just like any of the other inland streets that lie braided throughout the island. There’s nothing more than a handful of shingled cottages and farmhouses bisected by patches of trees.

The island itself is home to less than a thousand. We live on the more populous part, in walking distance of the ferry, where there’s a partial view of the mainland from our steeply sloped street, the size of it shrunken by distance. And yet the sight of it brings comfort to me.

There is a world out there that I can see, even if I’m no longer a part of it.

I drive slowly up the incline. The evergreens have lost their needles now, the birch trees their leaves. They’re strewn about the street, crunching beneath the car’s tires as I drive. Soon they will be buried by snow.

Salty sea air enters the window, open just a crack. There’s a chill to the air, the last lingering traces of fall before winter arrives full bore.

It’s after six o’clock in the evening. The sky is dark.

Up above me, across the street and two doors down from my own home, there is a flurry of activity going on at the Baineses’ home. Three unmarked cars are parked outside, and I imagine forensic technicians inside, collecting evidence, fingerprinting, photographing the crime scene.

The street looks suddenly different to me.

There is a police car in my own driveway as I pull up. I park beside it, a Ford Crown Victoria, and climb slowly out. I reach into the back seat to gather my things. I make my way to the front door, looking warily around to be sure that I’m alone. There’s the greatest sense of unease. It’s hard not to let my imagination get the best of me, to imagine a killer hiding among the bushes watching me.

But the street is silent. There are no people around that I can see. My neighbors have gone inside, mistakenly believing they’re safer inside their own homes—which Morgan Baines must have thought, too, before she was killed in hers.

I press my keys into the front door. Will leaps to his feet when I enter. His jeans are slouchy, baggy in the knees, his shirt partly tucked. His long hair hangs loose.

“There’s an officer here,” he says briskly, though I see this for myself, the officer sitting there on the arm of the sofa. “He’s investigating the murder,” Will says, practically choking on that word. Murder.

Will’s eyes are weary and red; he’s been crying. He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a tissue. He dabs his eyes with it. Will is the more thin-skinned of us, the more sensitive. Will cries at movies. He cries when watching the evening news.

He cried when I found out he’d been sleeping with another woman, though he tried in vain to deny it.

There is no other woman, Sadie, he said as he fell to his knees all those months ago before me and cried his eyes out, pleading his innocence.

To his point I never saw the woman herself, but the signs of her were everywhere.

I blamed myself for it. I should have seen it coming. After all, I was never Will’s first choice for a wife. We’ve been trying hard to get past it. Forgive and forget, they say, but it’s easier said than done.

“He has some questions for us,” Will says now, and I ask, “Questions?” looking toward the officer, a man in his fifties or sixties with receding hair and pitted skin. A small tract of hair grows above the upper lip, a would-be mustache, brownish gray like the hair on his head.

“Dr. Foust,” he says, meeting my eye. He extends a hand and tells me his name is Berg. Officer Berg, and I say that I am Sadie Foust.

Officer Berg looks troubled, a bit shell-shocked even. I gather that his typical calls are complaints of dogs leaving their feces in neighbors’ yards; doors left unlocked at the American Legion; the ever-popular 911 hang-up calls. Not this. Not murder.

There are only a handful of patrolmen on the island, Officer Berg being one of them. Oftentimes they meet the ferry down by the dock to be sure everyone boards and departs without any problems, not that there ever are. Not this time of year anyway, though I’ve heard of the change we’ll see come summer, when tourists abound. But for now, it’s peaceful and quiet. The only people on the boat are the daily commuters who paddle across the bay for school and work.

“What kind of questions?” I ask. Otto sits slouched in a chair in the corner of the room. He fidgets with the fringe of a throw pillow, and I watch as strands of blue come loose in his hands. His eyes look weary. I worry about the stress this is causing him, having to hear from a police officer that a neighbor was murdered. I wonder if he’s scared because of it. I know I am. The very idea is unfathomable. A murder so close to our own home. I shudder to think about what went on in the Baineses’ home last night.