[story] the fifth door
author: jibrailis (jibrailis)
email: jibrailis [at] gmail.com
artist: rocket builder (rocket_builder)
I knew the mansion from the case photos, but even then I wasn't prepared for the sheer weight of it. When I say weight, I mean that the sight of it had a way of making you feel like your breath had been knocked out of your lungs, a grand slam that sent your nerves chasing your fear. It was just a house for Chrissake, nothing special. I had seen scarier on those Most Haunted Places on Earth reruns that I watched at three o'clock in the morning because I couldn't get no damn sleep. But where you could sort of see the wires and the fake special effects on the show if you squinted, this house was the real deal. Four women had been murdered, and I was going to be next.
I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and drove through the wrought iron gate with the million dollar security system to meet my husband.
It'd been a whirlwind courtship, the kind that's all too regular these days. We met at a swank party in the city. I was wearing a bold red dress and feeling uncomfortable with how tight it was, longing for my jeans and sneakers, when this big handsome man with a trim beard sidled over to me by the bar and refilled my scotch. "I don't believe we've ever met," he said, flashing crooked but white teeth, and I shook my head and said no, which was a lie - but he didn't know that.
When he last saw me, I was a brunette. This time I was a cheap dye job redhead. Coupled with the red dress, I must've been a flaming sight, but I guess he went for that sort of thing, or maybe it was because I looked so lonely and vulnerable at the bar, nursing my scotch and singing Robert Johnson under my breath.
Robert Johnson was his favourite singer. The case files said that too.
He proposed on our third date. I pretended to think about it before saying yes. The rock he gave me was huge, I don't even know how many karats. It sat on my hand like coffin nail.
Now here he was, waiting for me on the front steps. He opened his arms when I got out of the car, and swept me in a crushing hug, followed by a searing kiss. The man was a good kisser, I'll give him that. He'd been pleased enough to not have a wedding - like me, he said he wasn't into that sort of old-fashioned pageantry - but he'd sorely missed the presence of a honeymoon, which I had turned down because my mother had fallen down and broken her hip, and I needed to be with her at the hospital. What can you do, I'd said apologetically when the call came after we'd signed the documents and were preparing to board the jet to the Alps. Your mother is your mother.
My mother had been dead for a year. She killed herself out of grief.
He murmured my name into my hair. It wasn't real. Then he snapped his fingers and a servant came to whisk away my luggage. I started to protest - there were fragile items inside - but my husband pressed a finger to my lips and smiled mischievously. "Let me show you the house," he said. "You're going to be mistress of it, after all, just like you're the mistress of my heart."
He liked those kinds of lines. Made him feel like he was in a fairy tale. In the Forbes interviews, he always made a point to mention that before he went into biotechnology, he'd studied folklore and mythology at a private little college on the east coast. Folklore and mythology, how quaint. The art in his mansion was an eclectic mixture of Alan Lee sketches and paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites. Most looked like high quality prints, but he claimed to have an original painting by Millais that was in none of the records. It was of a woman reading a forbidden book, modeled after Millais' wife Effie, the woman he stole from John Ruskin. He showed it to me proudly, running a finger down my spine and whispering in my ear, "And I never asked what you studied in college, my dear."
"I didn't go to college," I said sadly.
"That's a shame," he said. "If you want, you can quit your job and go back to school. I daresay I can afford to support your education!" He laughed and I joined him. This part wasn't a lie. I hadn't gone to college. Mom couldn't afford it and we decided between the two of us that we'd be better off saving a college fund for my little sister instead, since she was the real brains of the family. We'd work and scrimp, and she'd be the one to go far.
My husband trailed his fingers along the shell of my ear, and then he kissed it softly. "Shall we go to bed?" he asked, and I squeezed my eyes shut to gather my ricocheting thoughts before turning to him and smiling in agreement.
I don't know what I had been expecting. Whips, chains, unusual positions, you know the type. He was a man of unusual tastes. But no, he was gentle and sweet and he buried his mouth against my neck as he crested, and if I was less than enthusiastic in response... well, I'd been driving for five hours, okay. I had my excuses. When we were done, it was still midday, so he got out of bed and ordered the servants to bring us lunch. I was dying for a burger, but he asked for sautéed foie gras with black salt and fennel salad and he watched me eat with intense, wolfish eyes.
He was called away on business a week later. "I'm so sorry, darling," he said, kissing my hair as he did every morning. "But the Singapore branch of the company is going into a meltdown and they need me there to man the ship. You'll be all right alone, won't you?"
"Sure," I said, looking up from my book. "Don't work too hard, all right?"
He chuckled as he went into our room to pack. When he came out, I was on the next chapter of my novel and he was holding a ring of keys. "I know you like to snoop," he said teasingly, and I smiled agreeably even though my heart froze. "So here are the keys to all the rooms in the house. It's your house too now, so you're free to go anywhere. Use the jacuzzi, visit the petting zoo, waltz in the ballroom, game in the game room, anything."
"Game room?" I said. "Now you can't be sure I'll be around to greet you when you return!"
"I know the feeling. The plasma screen is mesmerizing," he said and started explaining to me which key was which. There was a single master key that would unlock most of the rooms, but there were a few other additional keys, including the keys to some of his cars and a small blue key with a butterfly imprint that looked like something a woman might own.
"What's that?" I asked, interrupting him.
"Do you know that room down by the left wing stairs?" he said.
"I think so," I replied.
"Now, dear, what I've said so far is true. You're welcome to visit any part of the house you like! Except for that room. Even a married man must have his privacy." He smiled at me as if we were shaking a joke.
"What, is it a porn den?" I laughed.
"Why would I have porn when I have you?" he replied. "It's just where I keep some of my work-related files. Confidential and all that. You'd be bored by it anyway."
"Try me," I said.
"I'd rather not," he replied. "Will you promise me that, darling? Will you promise not to go into that room?"
"I suppose. Life is too short to be bored," I said. I tossed my novel aside and wound my arms around his neck. I had to stand on my toes; he was so tall. "Bring me back something nice from Singapore," I murmured against his beard, which at this proximity had streaks of grey in it so intense that they seemed blue.
I waited for an hour after he was gone. I'd said goodbye at the airport, waving at him cheerfully like a deranged 50's housewife. It left a bad taste in my mouth. Then I had the chauffeur drive me back to his mansion - I couldn't call it home, it wasn't home in the slightest - and I picked up the ring of keys from the bedside table. "All right," I said to myself and started searching.
You might have thought that I'd go to the forbidden room first. But in my defense, I thought it was a red herring. Why in the world would he point me towards the room he least wanted me to discover? And what I was looking for had to be somewhere in the house. The detectives had gone through all the other possibilities - and it was, after all, a very big house, more than big enough to hide the bodies of former wives.
There'd been four of them. Wives, I mean. The first had been his college sweetheart, a fellow folklorist who'd gone on to get a PhD and then disappeared one day when she was supposed to show up to lecture. The second had been the owner of a local bed and breakfast, a favourite for her spiced scrambled eggs, over which she had been proposed to by a handsome stranger passing through town. The third had been the most high profile, a B-list actress and former model. That had been when the police got interested, though my husband's clout kept the investigations from going anywhere meaningful. I don't know what he did, but even the paparazzi stopped looking at him suspiciously and started latching onto the story about his third wife dying of a drug overdose.
None of the records had indicated a drug habit at all.
The fourth wife had died two years ago. Cancer, apparently, though no one in her family had known she was sick. The fourth wife had been a lawyer representing a non-profit organization, a real do gooder type. She met my husband at a benefit ball and fell head over heels when he started discussing his passion for environmental causes and social justice. He was a smooth talker, that was for sure. He left his private cell phone number, telling her that she could call any time she wanted to chat, and the fourth wife was introducing him to her family within a month.
As I went through the rooms, I dialed a number on my cell phone.
"Hey Michael," I said when the person on the other end picked up. "He's out of the house. I'm starting the investigation right now."
"Are you sure the line isn't tapped?" Michael asked. I could hear typing and the sound of voices from the police station, including Sergeant Miller's distinctive boom of impatience, and I ached to be with them right now instead of undercover and married to a murderer.
"I'm sure," I said. "I know it's silly but I just wanted to hear a familiar voice."
"Yeah, I got ya," Michael said. His tone softened. "What are you looking at right now?"
"I'm going through the silverware."
"Really?"
"Nothing incriminating here, unless you count a stain," I said.
"What's it like living in the lap of luxury?" he asked.
"Exhausting," I said. "I didn't even know duck livers could stretch like that." I didn't say what I wanted to, which was I miss you and what I'm doing with him isn't real and I wish you would laugh for me again. "Hold on," I said instead, adjusting the phone against my shoulder as I fiddled with the keys. "I'm in the hall under the stairs. There's five doors here." Including the one that my husband had told me never to enter.
I decided to save it for last. I opened the first door with the master key and found myself in a small, elegant library. I poked around at the books, noticing that they were mostly academic volumes on the mythology of this or the ritualized sociology of that.
The second door led to a bedroom, checkered and quaint. There was a rocking chair in the corner and a half-finished baby booty still hanging off the knitting needles. "What the...?" I said. My husband had no children and there hadn't been any indication that any of his wives were pregnant, though thinking about it, I guess we wouldn't know. No bodies, no autopsies.
"Michael," I said. "I'm going to hang up now. I'll call you later."
"Okay," he said quietly. "Be careful, you hear?"
The third door led to a wardrobe. There were a lot of big name designers inside, a lot of strappy heels. None of it was to my taste, but I recognized them from photo shoots I'd seen of the third wife.
The fourth door - I choked down a sob.
It was a conservatory. Long glass windows made the walls facing the door nearly non-existent; they were just expanses of clear light shaded by small trees and hothouse plants. The shadows seemed eerily golden, and there were benches along the stone paths that curved like fine ivory. A book was lying open on the bench closest to the door. When I picked it up, I saw that it was a photo album. The photos were of three women over and over again; family, most likely, judging by their physical resemblance. The fourth wife was one of women, and the photos contained sequences of her gardening, eating ice cream, making a peace sign, playing piano, graduating from college - a life contained between two leather covers.
My hand felt sweaty and slippery on the flimsy plastic of my cell phone. I turned around and left as quickly as I could, my heart violent against my rib cage. I needed to know what was behind the forbidden door. It was no longer a matter of whether my husband was playing games with me. Even if there was nothing - even if it was a fucking surprise birthday party for me behind that door - I needed to know. My hand slipped into my shoulder bag; the oily pads of my fingers touched my Browning Hi-Power. I'd never fired it for real before. I'd only been an officer for a few months. My boss didn't even want to send me on this job because I was such a rookie, but I begged and humiliated myself to get this assignment, and in the end he couldn't say no. It actually worked to my benefit that I was new. My husband might have heard of me otherwise, even with the fake name and fake hair that I'd seduced him under.
The key, the key.
The door, the door.
This was the part in the fairy tales where Little Red Riding Hood met the wolf, when Cinderella met the concept of time, when Sleeping Beauty met the rude awakening after a hundred years of seemingly endless sleep, when Rapunzel realized that there was a world beyond her tower and that it contained sorrow --
And there they were, the wives, sitting all in a row.
He must have stuffed them. He must have drained their blood and filled their veins with embalming fluid. The bodies looked pristine and well-kept, like living dolls. They had hair and fingernails and some of them were even smiling - a quirk of their frozen dead muscles, no doubt. The four of them sat together, their hands resting against each other's in an approximation of a friendly circle. I could call them by name: Ling Lu, Samantha, Annie, Janelle.
I almost reached out to touch them, but even I wasn't that masochistic.
And then I heard the security system beep. Someone had unlocked the front door. My husband, he was returning home.
There was no blood. I didn't leave any marks on the key. God, how stupid do you think I am? There was quite a distance between the front door and the forbidden room, so I had time to quickly lock the door behind me and hurry to the parlour where I picked up the book I'd been reading and settled onto the couch, swiping my hair out of my face and rubbing away the sweat on my forehead. When my husband found me, I was the perfect indolent trophy wife.
"Back so soon?" I asked lightly.
"I forgot my passport, silly me," he said. He tilted his head. "What are you reading?"
"A murder mystery," I told him. "It's about a man who kills all of his wives and hides their bodies in his basement."
"Is it a good story?"
"It's bone-chilling," I said. "I don't understand how anybody could stoop to such evil."
"Me neither," he said, and he sounded so affable, like we were talking about adopting a puppy or what colour to paint the kitchen, and something within me snapped. I thought of my mother, wasting away from grief, and me on my knees on an autumn afternoon, cleaning her brain matter from the living room carpet.
I broke training. I said, under my breath, "She was my sister, you know."
"The writer?" my husband asked. "I didn't know you had a sister who wrote mysteries."
"No," I said. "Janelle." And he opened his mouth and closed it in surprise, and I looked at him, this man I had kissed, this man I had fucked, this man whose ring was on my finger and whose breath was on my body, this man who had killed my sister, my sister. My sister Janelle - Jan, Janny, The Little J - who on the day of her college graduation, turned to me and quoted Gandhi and Susan B. Anthony because she was going to change the world, and I wanted to say that she had already changed it for me and our mother, and I should have warned her then against men with too much flash and not enough substance, but I didn't.
"Darling," he said as my hand moved to my shoulder bag. "You shouldn't have kept these secrets from me."
"No more secrets," I promised. "I'll be totally up front from now on."
And I shot him.
In some versions of the story, the fourth wife's brothers come riding in at the last moment to save her. They kill the bad guy, wipe her tears, and presumably go home and have a picnic to celebrate their victory because that's what happy families do, don't they; they have picnics.
Well, this isn't one of them.
the end
email: jibrailis [at] gmail.com
artist: rocket builder (rocket_builder)
I knew the mansion from the case photos, but even then I wasn't prepared for the sheer weight of it. When I say weight, I mean that the sight of it had a way of making you feel like your breath had been knocked out of your lungs, a grand slam that sent your nerves chasing your fear. It was just a house for Chrissake, nothing special. I had seen scarier on those Most Haunted Places on Earth reruns that I watched at three o'clock in the morning because I couldn't get no damn sleep. But where you could sort of see the wires and the fake special effects on the show if you squinted, this house was the real deal. Four women had been murdered, and I was going to be next.
I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and drove through the wrought iron gate with the million dollar security system to meet my husband.
It'd been a whirlwind courtship, the kind that's all too regular these days. We met at a swank party in the city. I was wearing a bold red dress and feeling uncomfortable with how tight it was, longing for my jeans and sneakers, when this big handsome man with a trim beard sidled over to me by the bar and refilled my scotch. "I don't believe we've ever met," he said, flashing crooked but white teeth, and I shook my head and said no, which was a lie - but he didn't know that.
When he last saw me, I was a brunette. This time I was a cheap dye job redhead. Coupled with the red dress, I must've been a flaming sight, but I guess he went for that sort of thing, or maybe it was because I looked so lonely and vulnerable at the bar, nursing my scotch and singing Robert Johnson under my breath.
Robert Johnson was his favourite singer. The case files said that too.
He proposed on our third date. I pretended to think about it before saying yes. The rock he gave me was huge, I don't even know how many karats. It sat on my hand like coffin nail.
Now here he was, waiting for me on the front steps. He opened his arms when I got out of the car, and swept me in a crushing hug, followed by a searing kiss. The man was a good kisser, I'll give him that. He'd been pleased enough to not have a wedding - like me, he said he wasn't into that sort of old-fashioned pageantry - but he'd sorely missed the presence of a honeymoon, which I had turned down because my mother had fallen down and broken her hip, and I needed to be with her at the hospital. What can you do, I'd said apologetically when the call came after we'd signed the documents and were preparing to board the jet to the Alps. Your mother is your mother.
My mother had been dead for a year. She killed herself out of grief.
He murmured my name into my hair. It wasn't real. Then he snapped his fingers and a servant came to whisk away my luggage. I started to protest - there were fragile items inside - but my husband pressed a finger to my lips and smiled mischievously. "Let me show you the house," he said. "You're going to be mistress of it, after all, just like you're the mistress of my heart."
He liked those kinds of lines. Made him feel like he was in a fairy tale. In the Forbes interviews, he always made a point to mention that before he went into biotechnology, he'd studied folklore and mythology at a private little college on the east coast. Folklore and mythology, how quaint. The art in his mansion was an eclectic mixture of Alan Lee sketches and paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites. Most looked like high quality prints, but he claimed to have an original painting by Millais that was in none of the records. It was of a woman reading a forbidden book, modeled after Millais' wife Effie, the woman he stole from John Ruskin. He showed it to me proudly, running a finger down my spine and whispering in my ear, "And I never asked what you studied in college, my dear."
"I didn't go to college," I said sadly.
"That's a shame," he said. "If you want, you can quit your job and go back to school. I daresay I can afford to support your education!" He laughed and I joined him. This part wasn't a lie. I hadn't gone to college. Mom couldn't afford it and we decided between the two of us that we'd be better off saving a college fund for my little sister instead, since she was the real brains of the family. We'd work and scrimp, and she'd be the one to go far.
My husband trailed his fingers along the shell of my ear, and then he kissed it softly. "Shall we go to bed?" he asked, and I squeezed my eyes shut to gather my ricocheting thoughts before turning to him and smiling in agreement.
I don't know what I had been expecting. Whips, chains, unusual positions, you know the type. He was a man of unusual tastes. But no, he was gentle and sweet and he buried his mouth against my neck as he crested, and if I was less than enthusiastic in response... well, I'd been driving for five hours, okay. I had my excuses. When we were done, it was still midday, so he got out of bed and ordered the servants to bring us lunch. I was dying for a burger, but he asked for sautéed foie gras with black salt and fennel salad and he watched me eat with intense, wolfish eyes.
He was called away on business a week later. "I'm so sorry, darling," he said, kissing my hair as he did every morning. "But the Singapore branch of the company is going into a meltdown and they need me there to man the ship. You'll be all right alone, won't you?"
"Sure," I said, looking up from my book. "Don't work too hard, all right?"
He chuckled as he went into our room to pack. When he came out, I was on the next chapter of my novel and he was holding a ring of keys. "I know you like to snoop," he said teasingly, and I smiled agreeably even though my heart froze. "So here are the keys to all the rooms in the house. It's your house too now, so you're free to go anywhere. Use the jacuzzi, visit the petting zoo, waltz in the ballroom, game in the game room, anything."
"Game room?" I said. "Now you can't be sure I'll be around to greet you when you return!"
"I know the feeling. The plasma screen is mesmerizing," he said and started explaining to me which key was which. There was a single master key that would unlock most of the rooms, but there were a few other additional keys, including the keys to some of his cars and a small blue key with a butterfly imprint that looked like something a woman might own.
"What's that?" I asked, interrupting him.
"Do you know that room down by the left wing stairs?" he said.
"I think so," I replied.
"Now, dear, what I've said so far is true. You're welcome to visit any part of the house you like! Except for that room. Even a married man must have his privacy." He smiled at me as if we were shaking a joke.
"What, is it a porn den?" I laughed.
"Why would I have porn when I have you?" he replied. "It's just where I keep some of my work-related files. Confidential and all that. You'd be bored by it anyway."
"Try me," I said.
"I'd rather not," he replied. "Will you promise me that, darling? Will you promise not to go into that room?"
"I suppose. Life is too short to be bored," I said. I tossed my novel aside and wound my arms around his neck. I had to stand on my toes; he was so tall. "Bring me back something nice from Singapore," I murmured against his beard, which at this proximity had streaks of grey in it so intense that they seemed blue.
I waited for an hour after he was gone. I'd said goodbye at the airport, waving at him cheerfully like a deranged 50's housewife. It left a bad taste in my mouth. Then I had the chauffeur drive me back to his mansion - I couldn't call it home, it wasn't home in the slightest - and I picked up the ring of keys from the bedside table. "All right," I said to myself and started searching.
You might have thought that I'd go to the forbidden room first. But in my defense, I thought it was a red herring. Why in the world would he point me towards the room he least wanted me to discover? And what I was looking for had to be somewhere in the house. The detectives had gone through all the other possibilities - and it was, after all, a very big house, more than big enough to hide the bodies of former wives.
There'd been four of them. Wives, I mean. The first had been his college sweetheart, a fellow folklorist who'd gone on to get a PhD and then disappeared one day when she was supposed to show up to lecture. The second had been the owner of a local bed and breakfast, a favourite for her spiced scrambled eggs, over which she had been proposed to by a handsome stranger passing through town. The third had been the most high profile, a B-list actress and former model. That had been when the police got interested, though my husband's clout kept the investigations from going anywhere meaningful. I don't know what he did, but even the paparazzi stopped looking at him suspiciously and started latching onto the story about his third wife dying of a drug overdose.
None of the records had indicated a drug habit at all.
The fourth wife had died two years ago. Cancer, apparently, though no one in her family had known she was sick. The fourth wife had been a lawyer representing a non-profit organization, a real do gooder type. She met my husband at a benefit ball and fell head over heels when he started discussing his passion for environmental causes and social justice. He was a smooth talker, that was for sure. He left his private cell phone number, telling her that she could call any time she wanted to chat, and the fourth wife was introducing him to her family within a month.
As I went through the rooms, I dialed a number on my cell phone.
"Hey Michael," I said when the person on the other end picked up. "He's out of the house. I'm starting the investigation right now."
"Are you sure the line isn't tapped?" Michael asked. I could hear typing and the sound of voices from the police station, including Sergeant Miller's distinctive boom of impatience, and I ached to be with them right now instead of undercover and married to a murderer.
"I'm sure," I said. "I know it's silly but I just wanted to hear a familiar voice."
"Yeah, I got ya," Michael said. His tone softened. "What are you looking at right now?"
"I'm going through the silverware."
"Really?"
"Nothing incriminating here, unless you count a stain," I said.
"What's it like living in the lap of luxury?" he asked.
"Exhausting," I said. "I didn't even know duck livers could stretch like that." I didn't say what I wanted to, which was I miss you and what I'm doing with him isn't real and I wish you would laugh for me again. "Hold on," I said instead, adjusting the phone against my shoulder as I fiddled with the keys. "I'm in the hall under the stairs. There's five doors here." Including the one that my husband had told me never to enter.
I decided to save it for last. I opened the first door with the master key and found myself in a small, elegant library. I poked around at the books, noticing that they were mostly academic volumes on the mythology of this or the ritualized sociology of that.
The second door led to a bedroom, checkered and quaint. There was a rocking chair in the corner and a half-finished baby booty still hanging off the knitting needles. "What the...?" I said. My husband had no children and there hadn't been any indication that any of his wives were pregnant, though thinking about it, I guess we wouldn't know. No bodies, no autopsies.
"Michael," I said. "I'm going to hang up now. I'll call you later."
"Okay," he said quietly. "Be careful, you hear?"
The third door led to a wardrobe. There were a lot of big name designers inside, a lot of strappy heels. None of it was to my taste, but I recognized them from photo shoots I'd seen of the third wife.
The fourth door - I choked down a sob.
It was a conservatory. Long glass windows made the walls facing the door nearly non-existent; they were just expanses of clear light shaded by small trees and hothouse plants. The shadows seemed eerily golden, and there were benches along the stone paths that curved like fine ivory. A book was lying open on the bench closest to the door. When I picked it up, I saw that it was a photo album. The photos were of three women over and over again; family, most likely, judging by their physical resemblance. The fourth wife was one of women, and the photos contained sequences of her gardening, eating ice cream, making a peace sign, playing piano, graduating from college - a life contained between two leather covers.
My hand felt sweaty and slippery on the flimsy plastic of my cell phone. I turned around and left as quickly as I could, my heart violent against my rib cage. I needed to know what was behind the forbidden door. It was no longer a matter of whether my husband was playing games with me. Even if there was nothing - even if it was a fucking surprise birthday party for me behind that door - I needed to know. My hand slipped into my shoulder bag; the oily pads of my fingers touched my Browning Hi-Power. I'd never fired it for real before. I'd only been an officer for a few months. My boss didn't even want to send me on this job because I was such a rookie, but I begged and humiliated myself to get this assignment, and in the end he couldn't say no. It actually worked to my benefit that I was new. My husband might have heard of me otherwise, even with the fake name and fake hair that I'd seduced him under.
The key, the key.
The door, the door.
This was the part in the fairy tales where Little Red Riding Hood met the wolf, when Cinderella met the concept of time, when Sleeping Beauty met the rude awakening after a hundred years of seemingly endless sleep, when Rapunzel realized that there was a world beyond her tower and that it contained sorrow --
And there they were, the wives, sitting all in a row.
He must have stuffed them. He must have drained their blood and filled their veins with embalming fluid. The bodies looked pristine and well-kept, like living dolls. They had hair and fingernails and some of them were even smiling - a quirk of their frozen dead muscles, no doubt. The four of them sat together, their hands resting against each other's in an approximation of a friendly circle. I could call them by name: Ling Lu, Samantha, Annie, Janelle.
I almost reached out to touch them, but even I wasn't that masochistic.
And then I heard the security system beep. Someone had unlocked the front door. My husband, he was returning home.
There was no blood. I didn't leave any marks on the key. God, how stupid do you think I am? There was quite a distance between the front door and the forbidden room, so I had time to quickly lock the door behind me and hurry to the parlour where I picked up the book I'd been reading and settled onto the couch, swiping my hair out of my face and rubbing away the sweat on my forehead. When my husband found me, I was the perfect indolent trophy wife.
"Back so soon?" I asked lightly.
"I forgot my passport, silly me," he said. He tilted his head. "What are you reading?"
"A murder mystery," I told him. "It's about a man who kills all of his wives and hides their bodies in his basement."
"Is it a good story?"
"It's bone-chilling," I said. "I don't understand how anybody could stoop to such evil."
"Me neither," he said, and he sounded so affable, like we were talking about adopting a puppy or what colour to paint the kitchen, and something within me snapped. I thought of my mother, wasting away from grief, and me on my knees on an autumn afternoon, cleaning her brain matter from the living room carpet.
I broke training. I said, under my breath, "She was my sister, you know."
"The writer?" my husband asked. "I didn't know you had a sister who wrote mysteries."
"No," I said. "Janelle." And he opened his mouth and closed it in surprise, and I looked at him, this man I had kissed, this man I had fucked, this man whose ring was on my finger and whose breath was on my body, this man who had killed my sister, my sister. My sister Janelle - Jan, Janny, The Little J - who on the day of her college graduation, turned to me and quoted Gandhi and Susan B. Anthony because she was going to change the world, and I wanted to say that she had already changed it for me and our mother, and I should have warned her then against men with too much flash and not enough substance, but I didn't.
"Darling," he said as my hand moved to my shoulder bag. "You shouldn't have kept these secrets from me."
"No more secrets," I promised. "I'll be totally up front from now on."
And I shot him.
In some versions of the story, the fourth wife's brothers come riding in at the last moment to save her. They kill the bad guy, wipe her tears, and presumably go home and have a picnic to celebrate their victory because that's what happy families do, don't they; they have picnics.
Well, this isn't one of them.
the end