The Other Mrs.(94)

I didn’t need to connect with Morgan. I needed to disconnect. I didn’t know she lived on the island when we moved here. If I did, we wouldn’t have come.

Imagine my surprise when I saw her for the first time in ten years. I could have let it go, too. But Morgan couldn’t let sleeping dogs lie.

She threatened to snitch. To tell Sadie what I’d done. The picture of Erin she left for Sadie to find. I found it first, put it in the last place I expected Sadie to look. It was just my luck that she did.

Morgan was a stupid kid the night I took Erin’s life. She heard us fighting because Erin had fallen for some dick when she was off at school. She came home to break the engagement off. She tried to give me the ring back. Erin had only been gone a couple of months, but by winter break she was high and mighty already. She thought she was better than me. A sorority girl while I was still living at home, going to community college.

Morgan tried to tattle, to tell everyone she heard us fighting the night before, but no one was going to believe a ten-year-old over me. And I played the role of the distraught boyfriend quite well. I was heartbroken as could be. And no one yet knew Erin had been seeing someone new. She only told that to me.

The evidence—the storm, the icy patches on the street, the lack of visibility—was also insurmountable that night. I’d taken precautions. When they found her, there were no external signs of violence. No signs of a struggle. Asphyxiation is extremely difficult to detect. They didn’t do a tox screen either, on account of the weather conditions. No one considered that Erin might’ve died because of a shitload of Xanax in her system, because of hypoxia, because of a plastic bag strapped down over her head. The cops didn’t. They didn’t think once about the way I pulled the bag from her head when she was dead; how I moved Erin’s body to the driver’s seat, shifted the car into Drive, watched her corpse take a ride into the pond before I walked the rest of the way home, grateful for the snow that covered my tracks. No, they thought only of the icy road, of Erin’s lead foot, of the indisputable fact that she swerved off the road and into the freezing water—which was quite disputable after all. Because that’s not the way it happened.

Premeditated murder. It was almost too easy to do and get away with.

I moved on, met Sadie, fell in love, got married. Enter Camille.

She took care of me in ways Sadie never could. I never imagined all that she’d do for me over the years. Morgan wasn’t the first woman she killed for me. Because there was Carrie Laemmer, too, a student of mine who accused me of sexual harassment.

Again Sadie speaks. “They say I disassociate. That I’m only one of many parts. That there are people living inside of me,” she says. “It’s ludicrous. I mean, if you, my husband, didn’t see it, how could they?”

“It’s one of the many things I love about you. Your unpredictability. Different every day. I’ll tell you this, Sadie—you were never boring. I just never came up with a diagnosis for your condition,” I say, though it’s a lie, of course. I’ve known for eons what I was dealing with. I learned how to turn it in my favor.

“You knew?” she asks, aghast.

“It’s a good thing, Sadie. The silver lining. Don’t you see? The police don’t think that you killed Morgan. They believe that Camille did. You can plead not guilty by reason of insanity. You won’t go to jail.”

She gasps, coming undone. It’s fun to watch. “But I’ll be sent to a psychiatric institution, Will. I won’t be able to go home.”

“That’s better than jail, isn’t it, Sadie? Do you know what kind of things happen in jail?”

“But, Will,” she tells me, desperate now. “I’m not insane.”

I step away from her. I go to the door because I’m the only one of us with the freedom to leave. There’s power in that. I turn and look at her, my face changing, becoming visibly apathetic because the sham-empathy is getting exhausting.

“I’m not insane,” she tells me again.

I hold my tongue. It wouldn’t be right to lie.



SADIE


Sometime after Will has gone, Officer Berg steps into the room with me. He leaves the door open.

I know my rights. I demand to see a lawyer.

But he just shrugs half-heartedly at me and says, “No need,” because they’re letting me go. They have no evidence to hold me on. The murder weapon and the washcloth that I said I saw were nowhere to be found. The going theory is that I made them both up in an effort to throw off the investigation. But they can’t prove that either. They say I killed Morgan. That I transformed into some other version of me and killed her myself. But the police need probable cause before they can arrest me. They need something more than mere suspicion. Even Mr. Nilsson’s statement isn’t damning enough because it doesn’t place me at the crime scene. The cell phone in my home also doesn’t do that. These things are circumstantial.

It feels like some phantom thing. There are parts of my life I can’t account for, including that night. It’s in the realm of possibility that I murdered that poor woman—or some version of me did—though I don’t know why. The pictures Officer Berg showed me come to mind and I stifle a cry.

“Would you like us to call your husband to come get you?” Officer Berg asks, but I say no. Truth be told, I’m a bit upset that Will left me at the police station alone. Though the weather outside is still inclement, I need to be alone with my thoughts. I need fresh air.