The Other Mrs.(97)

Only some of it is true.

“What was Otto doing when you came home?” she asks.

I’ll have to shut her up soon. Because her curiosity is the only thing standing between me and getting off scot-free.



SADIE


I stand in the bedroom, rummaging through my drawers, finding clean pajamas to replace the ones I have on. I need a shower. My feet are aching, my legs bruised. But these things are inconsequential when there are bigger worries on my mind. It’s an out-of-body experience. What’s happening can’t possibly be happening to me.

I spin suddenly with the knowledge that I’m no longer alone. It’s a metaphysical sensation, something that moves up my spine.

Otto comes into the bedroom unannounced. He’s not there and then he is. His sudden arrival makes me leap, my hand going to my heart. I come to face him. The signs of his illness are now visible.

He wasn’t lying. He’s sick. He coughs into a hand, his eyes vacant and feverish.

I think of the last conversation I had with Otto, where he accused me of putting the knife in his backpack. If what that policewoman said is true, I didn’t do it. But the part of me known as Camille did. The guilt is enormous. Otto isn’t a murderer. Quite possibly, I am.

He says to me, “Where were you?” and then again he coughs, his voice scratchy like it wasn’t before.

Will didn’t tell the kids where I was. He didn’t tell them I wasn’t coming home. How long would he have waited to tell them? How would he have said it, what words would he have used to tell our children I’d been arrested by the police? And when they asked why, what would he have said? That their mother is a murderer?

“You just left,” he said, and I see the child still in him. He was scared, I think, panicked that he couldn’t find me.

I say vaguely, “I had something I needed to take care of.”

“I thought you were here. I didn’t know you were gone till I saw Dad outside.”

“You saw him come home with Tate?” I assume. I picture Will’s small sedan fighting its way through the snow. I can’t imagine how the car made it.

But Otto tells me no, it was before Tate came home. He says that soon after we talked in the living room, he changed his mind. He was hungry. He wanted that toast after all.

Otto says he came down to find me. But I wasn’t here. He looked for me, caught a glimpse of Will traipsing through the backyard in the snow.

But Otto is mistaken. It was me, not Will, he saw in the backyard in the snow.

“That was me,” I tell him. “I was trying to get the dogs inside,” I say. I don’t tell him about the knife.

I realize now what must have really happened with the knife back in Chicago. Camille must have put it in Otto’s backpack. The story he told me about the night, on the fire escape, when I convinced him to stab his classmates wasn’t a pipe dream. From Otto’s perspective, it happened just as he said it did. Because he saw me.

And the disturbing drawings, the strange dolls. That wasn’t Otto. That was also me.

“It was Dad,” he says, shaking his head.

I realize that my hands are shaking, my palms sweaty. I rub them against the thighs of my pajama pants, ask Otto again what he said.

“Dad was here,” he repeats, “in the backyard. Shoveling.”

“Are you sure it was your father?” I ask.

“Why wouldn’t it be?” he asks, put off by my questions now. “I know what Dad looks like,” he says.

“Of course you do,” I say, feeling light-headed and breathless. “Are you sure it was in the backyard that you saw him?”

I’m grateful that he’s speaking to me. After his disclosure this afternoon, I’m surprised that he would. I’m reminded of his words. I’ll never forgive you. Why should he? I’ll never forgive myself for what I’ve done.

Otto nods his head. He says out loud, “I’m sure.”

Will was shoveling the lawn? Who in the world shovels grass?

I realize then that Will wasn’t shoveling. He was digging through the snow for the knife.

But how would Will have known about the knife? I only told Officer Berg.

The answer comes to me, shaking me to my core.

The only way Will would know about that knife is if he was the one who put it there.



WILL


Sadie is quickly working out that my story is full of holes. She knows someone in this house killed Morgan. She knows it might be her. With a little sleuthing, she’ll soon discover—if she hasn’t already—that I’m the puppet master pulling the strings. And then she’ll tell Berg.

I won’t let that happen. I’ll get rid of her first.

After she ate, Sadie went upstairs to wash up for bed. She’s tired, but her nerves are frayed. Sleep won’t come easily tonight.

While the pills she takes are placebos only, that doesn’t mean that the pills I pick up at the pharmacy—those I save for a rainy day—aren’t the genuine thing. Combine them with a little wine and, voilà, I have myself a deadly cocktail.

The best part of the plan is that Sadie’s mental state is well documented before we came to Maine. Add to that the discoveries of the day and it wouldn’t be such a stretch to think she might want to kill herself.

A murder meant to look like a suicide. Sadie’s words, not mine.