I turned away, kept walking, didn’t give him the satisfaction of smiling back.
I felt his eyes follow me from behind.
I spied my reflection in a storefront window. My hair, long, straight, with bangs. Rust-colored, stretching halfway down my back, over the shoulders of an arctic-blue tee that matched my eyes.
I saw what that chad was looking at.
I ran a hand through my hair. I didn’t look half bad.
Overhead, the “L” thundered past. It was loud. But not loud enough to tune out the street preacher. Adulterers, whores, blasphemers, gluttons. We were all doomed.
The day was hot. Not just summer but the dog days of it. Eighty or ninety degrees out. Everything smelled rancid, like sewage. The smell of garbage gagged me as I passed an alley. The hot air trapped the smell so there was no escaping it, just as there was no escaping the heat.
I was looking up, watching the “L,” getting my bearings. I wondered what time it was. I knew every clock in the city. The Peacock clock, Father Time, Marshall Field’s. Four clocks on the Wrigley Building, so that it didn’t matter which way you came at it from, you could still see a clock. But there were no clocks there, on the corner where I was at.
I didn’t see the stoplight before me go red. I didn’t see the cab come hustling past, racing another cab to snatch up a fare down the street. I stepped right into the street with both feet.
I felt him first. I felt the grip of his hand tighten on my wrist like a pipe wrench so that I couldn’t move.
In an instant, I fell in love with that hand—warm, capable, decisive. Protective. His fingers were thick; his hands big with clean, short nails. There was a tiny tattoo, a glyph on the skin between his fingers and thumb. Something small and pointy, like a mountain peak. For a minute, that was all I saw. That inky mountain peak.
His grip was powerful and swift. In one stroke, he stopped me. A second later, the cab raced past, not six inches from my feet. I felt the rush of it on my face. The wind off the car pushed me away, and then sucked me back in as it passed. I saw a flash of colors only; I felt the breeze. I didn’t see the cab shoot past, not until it was speeding off down the street. Only then did I know how close I came to being roadkill.
Overhead, the “L” screeched to a stop on the tracks.
I looked down. There was his hand. My eyes went up his wrist, his arm; they went to his eyes. His eyes were wide, his eyebrows pulled together in concern. He was worried about me. No one ever worried about me.
The light turned green, but we didn’t move. We didn’t speak. All around, people stepped past us while we stood in the way, blocking them. A minute went by. Two. Still, he didn’t let go of my wrist. His hand was warm, tacky. It was humid outside. So hot it was hard to breathe. There was no fresh air. My thighs were moist with sweat. They stuck to my jeans, made the arctic-blue tee cling to me.
When we finally spoke, we spoke at the same time. That was close.
We laughed together, released a synchronous sigh.
I could feel my heart pound inside of me. It had nothing to do with the cab.
I bought him coffee. It sounds so unimaginative after the fact, doesn’t it? So cliché.
But that was all I could come up with in a pinch.
Let me buy you a coffee, I said. Repay you for saving my life.
I fluttered my eyelashes at him. Put a hand on his chest. Gave him a smile.
Only then did I see that he already had a coffee. There in his other hand sat some iced froufrou drink. Our eyes went to it at the same time. We sniggered. He lobbed it into a trash can, said, Pretend you didn’t just see that.
A coffee would be nice, he said. When he smiled, he smiled with his eyes.
He told me his name was Will. There was a stutter when he said it, so that it came out Wi-Will. He was nervous, shy around girls, shy around me. I liked that about him.
I took his hand into mine, said, It’s nice to meet you, Wi-Will.
We sat in a booth, side by side. We drank our coffees. We talked; we laughed.
That night there was a party, one of those rooftop venues with a city view. An engagement party for Sadie’s friends, Jack and Emily. She was the one who was invited, not me. I don’t think Emily liked me much, but I planned to go anyway, just the same as Cinderella went to the royal ball. I had a dress picked out, one I took from Sadie’s closet. It fit me to a T, though she was bigger than me, Sadie with her broad shoulders and her thick hips. She had no business wearing that dress. I was doing her a favor.
I had a bad habit of shopping in Sadie’s closet. Once, when I was there, all alone or so I thought, I heard the jiggle of keys in the front door lock. I slipped out of the room, into the living room, arriving only a second before she did. There stood my darling roommate, hands on her hips, looking quizzically at me.
You look like you’ve been up to no good, she said. I didn’t say one way or the other whether I’d been being good. It wasn’t often that I was good. Sadie was the rule follower, not me.
That dress wasn’t the only thing I took from her. I also used her credit card to buy new shoes, metallic wedge sandals with a crisscross strap.
I said to Will that day in the coffee shop about the engagement party: We don’t even know each other. But I’d be an idiot not to ask. Come with me?
I’d be honored, he said, making eyes at me in the café booth. He sat close, his elbow brushing against mine.
He’d come to the party.
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.
I glance around the first floor, looking for Imogen, for Tate. As if he knows what I’m thinking, Will says to me, “Imogen isn’t home from school yet,” and Officer Berg, taking interest in this, asks, “No?”
School ends at two thirty. The commute is long, but still, Otto is home most days by three thirty or four. The clock on the fireplace mantel reads ten after six.
“No,” Will tells the officer, “but she’ll be home soon. Any minute,” he says, citing some tutoring session that Will and I know she didn’t have. The officer tells us that he’ll need to speak with Imogen, too, and Will says, “Of course.” If she isn’t home soon, he offers to drive her to the public safety building tonight. It’s a catchall building, where a couple of police officers double as EMTs and first responders in the case of fire. If our home went up in flames, Officer Berg would just as likely appear at my door in a fire truck. If Will or I had a heart attack, he’d come in the ambulance.
Only seven-year-old Tate has been spared from the police officer’s interrogation. “Tate is outside,” Will tells me, seeing the way my eyes look for him. “He’s playing with the dogs,” he says, and I hear them then, the dogs barking.
I give Will a look, one that wonders how smart it is to leave Tate alone outside when there was a murderer on our street just last night. I stray toward a rear-facing window to find Tate, in a sweatshirt and jeans, a wool hat thrust down over his head. He’s having a go with the dogs and a ball. He lobs the ball as far as he can—laughing as he does so—and the girls dash after it, arguing over which will be the one to carry it back to Tate’s waiting hand.
Outside, there’s evidence of a fire in the backyard firepit. The fire is dying down now, only embers and smoke. There’s no longer a flame.
It’s far enough away from Tate and the dogs that I don’t worry.
Officer Berg sees the smoldering fire, too, and asks if we have a permit for it.
“A permit?” Will asks. “For the fire?” When Officer Berg says yes, Will goes on to explain that our son Tate had come home from school begging for s’mores. They’d read a book about them, S is for S’mores, and the rest of the day, Tate had a craving for them.
“The only way we did s’mores back in Chicago was in the toaster oven. This was just a quick treat,” Will says. “Completely harmless.”
“Around here,” Officer Berg tells him, uninterested in Tate’s craving, “you need a permit for any open fire.”
Will apologizes, blames ignorance, and the officer shrugs. “Next time you’ll know,” he says, forgiving us this one transgression. There are bigger issues at hand.
“Can I be excused?” Otto asks, saying he has homework to do, and I see this discomfort in his eyes. This is a lot for a fourteen-year-old boy to handle. Though much older than Tate, Otto is still a child. We forget that sometimes. I pat him on the shoulder. I lean in close to him and say, “We’re safe here, Otto. I want you to know that,” because I don’t want him to be scared. “Your dad and I are here to protect you,” I tell him.
Otto meets my eyes. I wonder if he believes me when I’m not so sure myself. Are we safe here?
“You can go,” the officer tells him and, as he leaves, I find my way to the other arm of the sofa, Officer Berg and I bisected by a velvet sofa the color of marigolds, the furniture left behind in the home all midcentury, and not, unfortunately, midcentury modern. It’s just old.
“You know why I’m here?” the officer asks, and I tell him that Will and I heard the siren late last night. That I know Mrs. Baines was murdered.
“Yes, ma’am,” he says, and I ask how she was murdered, though the details of her death have not yet been released. They’re waiting, he says, until the family has been notified.
“Mr. Baines doesn’t know?” I ask, but all he’ll say is that Mr. Baines was traveling for business. The first thought that crosses my mind is that, in cases like this, it’s always the husband. Mr. Baines, wherever he is, has done this, I think.
Berg tells us how the little Baines girl was the one who found Mrs. Baines dead. She called 911 and told the operator that Morgan wouldn’t wake up. I sharply inhale, trying not to imagine all the things that poor little girl might have seen.
“How old is she?” I ask, and Berg replies, “Six years old.”
A hand rises to my mouth. “Oh, how awful,” I say, and I can’t imagine it, Tate finding either Will or me dead.
“She and Tate are in school together,” Will declares, looking at Officer Berg and then me. They share the same teacher. They share the same peers. The island school serves children in grades kindergarten through fifth while the rest, those in middle school and beyond, have to be ferried to the mainland for their education. Only fifty-some students go to the elementary school. Nineteen in Tate’s classroom because his first grade is combined with the kindergarten class.
“Where is the little girl now?” I ask, and he tells me that she’s with family while they try to connect with Jeffrey, traveling for business in Tokyo. The fact that he was out of the country doesn’t make Jeffrey Baines any less culpable in my mind. He could have hired someone to carry out the task.
“The poor thing,” I say, imagining years’ worth of therapy in the child’s future.
“What can we do to help?” I ask Officer Berg, and he tells me he’s been speaking to residents along the street, asking them questions. “What kind of questions?” I ask.
“Can you tell me, Dr. Foust, where you were last night around eleven o’clock?” the officer asks. In other words, do I have an alibi for the time the homicide occurred?
Last night Will and I watched TV together, after we’d put Tate to bed. We’d lain on different sides of the room, him spread out on the sofa, me curled up on the love seat as we do. Our allocated seats. Shortly after we’d gotten situated and turned on the TV, Will brought me a glass of cabernet from the bottle I’d opened the night before.
I watched him for a while from my own seat, remembering that it wasn’t so long ago that I would have found it impossible to sit this far away from Will, on separate sofas. I thought fondly of the days that he would have handed me the wine with a lengthy kiss to the lips, another hand feeling me up as he did so, and I would have found myself easily wiled by the persuasive kiss and the persuasive hands and those eyes. Those eyes! And then one thing would have led to the next and, soon after, we would have giggled like teenagers as we tried to hastily and noiselessly make love on the sofa, ears tuned in to the creaks of the floorboards above us, the rasp of box springs, footsteps on the stairs, to be sure the boys still slept. There was a magnanimity about Will’s touch, something that once made me feel giddy and light-headed, drunk without a drop to drink. I couldn’t get enough of him. He was intoxicating.
But then I found the cigarette, a Marlboro Silver with lipstick the color of strawberries along its filter. I found that first, followed shortly after by charges for hotel rooms on our credit card statement, a pair of panties in our bedroom that I knew weren’t mine. I realized at once that Will was magnanimous and intoxicating to someone other than me.
I didn’t smoke. I didn’t wear lipstick. And I was far too sensible to leave my underwear lying around someone else’s home.
Will just looked at me when I shoved the credit card statement under his nose, when I asked him outright about the hotel charges on our bill. He appeared so taken aback that he’d been caught that he didn’t have the wherewithal to manufacture a lie.
Last night, after I’d finished that first glass of wine, Will offered to top me off and I said yes, liking the way the wine made me feel weightless and calm. The next thing I remember was the siren rousing me from sleep.
I must have fallen asleep on the love seat. Will must have helped me to bed.
“Dr. Foust?” the officer asks.
“Will and I were here,” I tell him. “Watching TV. The evening news and then The Late Show. The one with Stephen Colbert,” I say as Officer Berg transcribes my words onto a tablet with his stylus. “Isn’t that right, Will?” I ask, and Will nods his head and confirms that I am right. It was The Late Show. The one with Stephen Colbert.
“And after The Late Show?” the officer asks, and I say only that after The Late Show we went to bed.
“Is that right, sir?” Officer Berg asks.
“That’s right,” Will says. “It was late,” he tells the officer. “After The Late Show, Sadie and I went to bed. She had to work in the morning and I, well,” he says, “I was tired. It was late,” he says again, and if he notices the redundancy, he doesn’t show it.
“What time was that?” Officer Berg asks.
“Must’ve been around twelve thirty,” I say because even though I don’t know for sure, I can do the math. He makes note of this, moving on, asking, “Have you seen anything out of the ordinary over the last few days?”
“Such as?” I inquire, and he shrugs, suggesting, “Anything unusual. Anything at all. Strangers lurking about. Cars you don’t recognize, cruising by, surveilling the neighborhood.”
But I shake my head and say, “We’re new here, Officer. We don’t know many people.”
But then I remember that Will knows people. That when I’m at work all day, Will has been making friends.
“There was one thing,” Will says, speaking up all of a sudden. The officer and I turn to him at the same time.
“What’s that?” asks Officer Berg.
But just as soon as he’s said it, Will tries to renege. He shakes his head. “Never mind,” he says. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I’m sure it means nothing, just an accident on my part.”
“Why don’t you let me decide,” Officer Berg says.
Will explains, “There was a day not so long ago, a couple of weeks maybe. I’d taken Tate to school and headed out on a few errands. I wasn’t gone long, a couple of hours, tops. But when I came home, something was off.”
“How so?”
“Well, the garage door was up, for one. I would’ve bet my life I put it down. And then, when I came inside, I was nearly knocked over by the smell of gas. It was so potent. Thank God the dogs were okay. Lord only knows how long they’d been breathing it in. It didn’t take long to find the source. It was coming from the stove.”
“The stove?” I ask. I tell Will, “You didn’t tell me this.” My voice is flat, composed, but inside I feel anything but.
Will’s voice is conciliatory. “I didn’t want you to worry for nothing. I opened the doors and windows. I aired the house out.” He shrugs and says, “It probably wasn’t even worth mentioning, Sadie. I shouldn’t have brought it up. It had been a busy morning. I was making French toast. Tate and I were running late. I must have left the burner on in a mad scramble to get out the door on time. The pilot light must have blown out.”
Officer Berg dismisses this as an accident. He turns to me now. “But not you, Doctor?” he asks. “You haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary?” I tell him no.
“How did Mrs. Baines seem the last time you spoke to her, Doctor?” Officer Berg asks me now. “Was she...?” he begins, but I stop him there and explain that I don’t know Morgan Baines. That we’ve never met.
“I’ve been busy since we arrived,” I say, apologizing, though there’s really no need to. “I just never found the time to stop by and introduce myself,” I tell him, thinking—though I don’t dare say it; that would be insensitive—that Morgan Baines also never found the time to stop by and introduce herself to me.
“Sadie’s schedule is fast and furious,” Will interjects, so that the officer doesn’t judge me for not making friends with the neighbors. I’m grateful for this. “She works long shifts, nearly every day of the week, it seems. My own schedule is the opposite. I teach only three courses, which overlap with Tate’s school schedule. It’s intentional. When he’s here, I’m here. Sadie’s the breadwinner,” Will admits with no indignity, no shame. “I’m the stay-at-home dad. We never wanted our children to be raised by a nanny,” he says, which was something we came up with long ago, before Otto was born. It was a personal choice. From a financial standpoint, it made sense that Will would be the one to stay home. I made more money than him, though we never talked about things like that. Will did his part; I did mine.
“I spoke to Morgan just a couple of days ago,” he says, answering the officer’s question for me. “She seemed fine, well enough at least. Their hot water heater was on the fritz. She was waiting on a repairman to see if it could be fixed. I tried to fix it myself. I’m handy enough,” he says, “just not that handy.
“Do you have any leads?” Will asks, changing topics. “Any signs of forced entry, any suspects?”
Officer Berg flips through his tablet and tells Will that he can’t reveal too much just yet. “But,” he tells Will, “what I can say is Mrs. Baines was killed between the hours of ten and two last night,” and there, on the arm of the sofa, I sit up straighter, staring out the window. Though the Baineses’ home is just out of view from where I sit, I can’t help but think about how last night as we were here, drinking wine and watching TV, she was there—just beyond my viewpoint—being murdered.
