The Other Mrs.(96)

I didn’t specifically ask Camille to kill her.

And yet, nevertheless, a few days later Carrie was dead.

The way it happened was that one day, poor Carrie Laemmer went missing. There was a wide-scale search. Word had it that she’d been at a frat party the night before, boozing it up. She left the party alone, stumbled out of the house, drunk. She fell down the porch steps while fellow partygoers watched on.

Carrie’s roommate didn’t return home until the following morning. When she did, she found that Carrie’s bed hadn’t been slept in, that Carrie hadn’t made it home the night before.

Security cameras across campus caught glimpses of Carrie staggering past the library, falling down in the middle of the quad. It was unlike Carrie, who could hold her liquor, or so said the students who saw the CCTV footage. As if it was brag-worthy, a high tolerance for alcohol. Her parents would be so proud to know what their fifty grand a year bought them.

There were lapses in the video surveillance. Black holes where the cameras didn’t reach. I was at a faculty event that night. People saw me. Not that I was ever a suspect because no one was. Because that time, unlike this, things went swimmingly. No pun intended.

Not far from campus was a polluted canal where the university’s crew team rowed. The water was more than ten feet deep, contaminated with sewage, if the rumors were true. A wooded running path sat parallel to the canal, all of it shadowed by trees.

After three days missing, Carrie turned up there, in the canal. The police called her a floater because of the way she was found, most of her body parts bobbing buoyantly on the surface of the canal, while her heavy head dragged beneath.

Cause of death: accidental drowning. Everyone knew she’d been drunk, stumbling. Everyone saw. It was easy enough to assume, then, that she tumbled drunkenly into the canal all on her own.

The entirety of the student population mourned. Flowers were laid at the edge of the canal beneath a tree. Her parents traveled from Boston, left her childhood teddy bear there at the scene.

What Camille told me was that Carrie never thrashed about in the water. She never gasped and screamed for help. What happened instead was that she bobbed listlessly on the surface for a while. Her mouth sank beneath the water. It came back up, it went back down.

It went on this way for a while, head tossed back, eyes glassy and empty.

If she bothered to kick, Camille said, she couldn’t tell.

She struggled that way for nearly a minute. Then she submerged, slipping silently beneath the water.

The way Camille described it for me, it sounded as undramatic as drowning gets. As anticlimactic. Boring, if you ask me.

This time, it was just unlucky that Sadie got to that laundry before me.

I’ve been careless. Because the night with Morgan, the transformation from Camille to Sadie happened too quickly, leaving me to clean up the mess. Her clothes I burned. The knife I buried. I just never counted on Sadie doing the laundry. Why would I? She never does. I also never knew that Camille had taken Morgan’s necklace. Not until I saw it sitting on the countertop this morning.

Camille should have been more careful where she stood that night. She should have better anticipated the sprays of blood. It wasn’t like it was her first rodeo. But she came home a bloody mess. It was up to me to wipe her clean, leaving my fingerprints on the knife and washcloth. I couldn’t let the police find that.

Sadie rubs at her face and says again, “I just don’t know what to believe.”

“It’s been a long day. A stressful day. And you haven’t been taking your pills,” I say. It dawns on her. She went to bed without taking her pills. She forgot about them this morning. I know because they’re still where I left them.

That’s why she feels this way, out of control as she always does when she doesn’t have her pills. She reaches eagerly for them, swallows them down, knowing that in a short while she’ll be back to feeling like herself.

I almost laugh out loud. The pills do nothing. It’s only in Sadie’s head that something happens. The placebo effect. Because she thinks popping a pill will naturally make her feel better. Have a headache, pop some Tylenol. A runny nose? Some Sudafed.

You’d think, as a doctor, Sadie would know better.

I bought the empty capsules online. I filled them with cornstarch, replaced the ones the doctor prescribed with these. Sadie took them like a good girl, but she’d whine about it at times, say the pills made her tired and fuzzy because that’s what pills are supposed to do.

She can be so suggestible sometimes.

I make Sadie dinner. I pour her a glass of wine. I sit her down at the table and, as she eats, I rub her cold, dirty feet. They’re mottled and gray.

She nods off at the table, so tired she sleeps upright.

But she sleeps for only a second at best, and when she awakes, she groggily asks, voice slurred with fatigue, “How did you get home in the storm? Otto said the ferries weren’t running.”

So many questions. So many fucking questions.

“Water taxi.”

“What time was that?”

“I’m not sure. In time to get Tate.”

She’s coming to now, speaking clearly. “They kept the kids at school all day? Even with the storm?”

“They kept them there until parents could get to them.”

“So you went straight to the elementary school? You didn’t come home first?” she asks. I tell her no. She’s cobbling together a timeline. I wonder why. I tell her I took the water taxi to the island, picked up Tate, came home. Then I went to the public safety building for her.