The Other Mrs

Back in our bedroom, I shake Will awake. I won’t tell Will about Imogen because there’s nothing really to say. For all I know, she was up using the bathroom. She got hot and opened her window. These are not crimes, though other questions nag at the back of my mind.

Why didn’t I hear a toilet flush?

Why didn’t I notice the chill from the bedroom the first time I passed by?

“What is it? What’s wrong?” Will asks, half-asleep.

As he rubs at his eyes, I say, “I think there’s something in the backyard.”

“Like what?” he asks, clearing his throat, his eyes drowsy and his voice heavy with sleep.

I wait a beat before I tell him. “I don’t know,” I say, leaning into him as I say it. “Maybe a person.”

“A person?” Will asks, sitting quickly upright, and I tell him about what just happened, how there was something—or someone—in the backyard that spooked the dogs. My voice is tremulous when I speak. Will notices. “Did you see a person?” he asks, but I tell him no, that I didn’t see anything at all. That I only knew something was there. A gut instinct.

Will says compassionately, his hand reassuringly stroking mine, “You’re really shaken up about it, aren’t you?”

He wraps both hands around mine, feeling the way they tremble in his. I tell him that I am. I think that he’s going to get out of bed and go see for himself if there’s someone in our backyard. But instead he makes me second-guess myself. It isn’t intentional and he isn’t trying to patronize me. Rather, he’s the voice of reason as he asks, “But what about a coyote? A raccoon or a skunk? Are you sure it wasn’t just some animals that got the dogs worked up?”

It sounds so simple, so obvious as he says it. I wonder if he’s right. It would explain why the dogs were so upset. Perhaps they sniffed out some wildlife roaming around our backyard. They’re hunters. Naturally they would have wanted to get at whatever was there. It’s the far more logical thing to believe than that there was a killer traipsing through our backyard. What would a killer want with us?

I shrug in the darkness. “Maybe,” I say, feeling foolish, but not entirely so. There was a murder just across the street from us last night and the murderer hasn’t been found. It’s not so irrational to believe he’s still nearby.

Will tells me obligingly, “We could mention it to Officer Berg anyway in the morning. Ask him to look into it. If nothing else, ask if coyotes are a problem around here. It would be good to know anyway, to make sure we keep an eye on the dogs.”

I feel grateful he humors me. But I tell him no. “I’m sure you’re right,” I say, crawling back into bed beside him, knowing I still won’t sleep. “It probably was a coyote. I’m sorry I woke you. Go back to bed,” I say, and he does, wrapping a heavy arm around me, protecting me from whatever lies on the other side of our door.

SADIE

I come to when Will says my name. I must have spaced out.

He’s there beside me, giving me a look. A Will look, fraught with worry. “Where’d you go?” he asks, as I look around, get my bearings. A sudden headache has nearly gotten the best of me, making me feel swimmy inside.

I tell him, “I don’t know,” not remembering what we were talking about before I spaced out.

I look down to see that a button on my shirt has come undone, revealing the black of my bra beneath. I button back up, apologize to him for zoning out in the middle of our conversation. “I’m just tired,” I say, rubbing at my eyes, taking in the sight of Will before me, the kitchen around me.

“You look tired,” Will agrees, and I feel the agitation brim inside. I glance past Will and into the backyard, expecting to see something out of place. Signs of a trespasser in our yard last night. There’s nothing, but still, I prickle anyway, remember what it felt like as I stood in the darkness, pleading for the dogs to come.

The boys are at the table, eating the last of their breakfast. Will stands at the counter, filling a mug that he passes to me. I welcome the coffee into my hands and take a big gulp.

“I didn’t sleep well,” I say, not wanting to admit the truth, that I didn’t sleep at all.

“Want to talk about it?” he asks, though it doesn’t seem like something that needs to be said. This is something he should know. A woman was murdered in her home across the street from us two nights ago.

My eyes breeze past Tate at the table, and I tell him no because this isn’t a conversation Tate should hear. For as long as we can, I’d like to keep his childhood innocence alive.

“Do you have time for breakfast?” Will asks.

“Not today,” I say, looking at the clock, seeing that it’s even later than I thought it was. I need to get going. I begin gathering things, my bag and my coat, to go. Will’s bag waits for him beside the table, and I wonder if he stuck his true crime novel inside the bag, the book with the photograph of Erin hidden inside. I don’t have the courage to tell Will I know about the photograph.

I kiss Tate goodbye. I snatch the earbuds from Otto’s ears to tell him to hurry.

I drive to the ferry. Otto and I don’t say much on the way there. We used to be closer than we are, but time and circumstance have pulled us apart. How many teenage boys, I ask myself, trying not to take it personally, are close with their mother? Few, if any. But Otto is a sensitive boy, different than the rest.

He leaves the car with only a quick goodbye for me. I watch as he crosses the metal grate bridge and boards the ferry with the other early-morning commuters. His heavy backpack is slung across his back. I don’t see Imogen anywhere.

It’s seven twenty in the morning. Outside, it’s raining. A mob of multicolored umbrellas makes its way down the street that leads to the ferry. Two boys about Otto’s age claw their way on board behind him, bypassing Otto in the entranceway, laughing. They’re laughing at some inside joke, I assure myself, not at him, but my stomach churns just the same, and I think how lonely it must be in Otto’s world, an outcast without any friends.

There’s plenty of seating inside the ferry where it’s warm and dry, but Otto climbs all the way up to the upper deck, standing in the rain without an umbrella. I watch as deckhands raise the gangplank and untie the boat before it ventures off into the foggy sea, stealing Otto from me.

Only then do I see Officer Berg staring at me.

He stands on the other side of the street just outside his Crown Victoria, leaned up against the passenger’s side door. In his hands are coffee and a cinnamon roll, just a stone’s throw away from the stereotypical doughnut cops are notorious for eating, though slightly more refined. As he waves at me, I get the sense that he’s been watching me the entire time, watching as I watch Otto leave.

He tips his hat at me. I wave at him through the car window.

What I usually do at this point in my drive is make a U-turn and go back up the hill the same way I came down. But I can’t do that with the officer watching. And it doesn’t matter anyway because Officer Berg has abandoned his post and is walking across the street and toward me. He motions with the crank of a hand for me to open my window. I press the button and the window drops down. Beads of rain welcome themselves inside my car, gathering along the interior of the door. Officer Berg doesn’t carry an umbrella. Rather, the hood of a rain jacket is thrust over his head. He doesn’t appear to be bothered by the rain.

He jams the last bite of his cinnamon roll into his mouth, chases it down with a swig of coffee and says, “Morning, Dr. Foust.” He has a kind face for a police officer, lacking the usual flintiness that I think of when I think of the police. There’s something endearing about him, a bit of awkwardness and insecurity that I like.

I tell him good morning.

“What a day,” he says, and I say, “Quite a doozy.”

The rain isn’t expected to go on all day. The sun, however, won’t make an appearance anytime soon. Where we live, just off the coast of Maine, the climate is tempered by the ocean. The temperatures aren’t as bitter as they are in Chicago this time of year, though still it’s cold.

What we’ve heard is that the bay has been known to freeze come wintertime, ferries forced to charge through ice floes to get people to and from the mainland. One winter, supposedly, the ferry got stuck, and passengers were made to walk across yards of ice to get to the shoreline before the Coast Guard came in with a cutter to chop it up.

It’s unsettling to think about. A bit suffocating, if I’m being honest, the idea of being trapped on the island, cordoned off from the rest of the world by a giant slab of ice.

“You’re up early,” Officer Berg says, and I reply, “As are you.”

“Duty calls,” he says, tapping at his badge. I reply, “Me, too,” finger at the ready to hoist the window up so that I can leave. Joyce and Emma are expecting me, and if I’m not there soon, I’ll never hear the end of it. Joyce is a stickler for punctuality.

Officer Berg glances at his watch, makes an offhand guess that the clinic opens around eight thirty. I say that it does. He asks, “Have a moment to spare, Dr. Foust?” I tell him a quick one.

I pull my car closer to the curb and put it in Park. Officer Berg rounds the front end of it and lets himself in through the passenger’s side door.

Officer Berg cuts straight to the chase. “I finished speaking to your neighbors yesterday, asking them the same questions I asked of you and Mr. Foust,” he tells me, and I gather from his tone that this isn’t merely an update on the investigation—though what I want is an update on the investigation. I want Officer Berg to tell me that they’re ready to make an arrest so I can sleep better at night, knowing Morgan’s killer is behind bars.

Early this morning before the kids were up, Will searched online for news about her murder. There was an article detailing how Morgan had been found dead in her home. There were facts in it that were new to Will and me. How, for example, the police found threatening notes in the Baineses’ home, though they didn’t say what the threats said.

Overnight the police released the little girl’s 911 call. It was there online, an audio clip of the six-year-old girl as she fought back tears, telling the operator on the other end of the line, She won’t wake up. Morgan won’t wake up.

In the article, she was never referred to by name, only ever as the six-year-old girl, because minors are blessed with a certain anonymity adults don’t have.

Will and I lay in bed with the laptop between us, listening to the audio clip three times. It was gut-wrenching to hear. The little girl managed to remain relatively calm and composed as the dispatcher talked her through the next few minutes and sent help, keeping her on the line the entire time.

But there was something about the audio clip that got under my skin, something I couldn’t put my finger on. It pestered me nonetheless, and it wasn’t until the third go-round that I finally heard it.

She calls her mother Morgan? I’d asked Will, because the little girl didn’t say her mother wouldn’t wake up. She said Morgan wouldn’t wake up. Why would she do that? I asked.

Will’s reply was immediate.

Morgan is her stepmother, he said. Then he swallowed hard, tried not to cry. Morgan was her stepmother, I mean.

Oh, I said. I don’t know why this mattered. But it seemed it did.

Jeffrey was married before? I asked. It’s not always the case, of course. Children are born out of wedlock. But it was worth asking.

Yes, he said, but he said no more. I wondered about Jeffrey’s first wife. I wondered who she was, if she lived here on the island with us. Will himself is the product of divorced parents. It’s always been a sore subject with him.

How long were Jeffrey and Morgan married? I asked, wondering what else she told him.

Just over a year.

They’re newlyweds, I said.

They’re nothing anymore, Sadie, Will corrected me again. He’s a widower. She’s dead.

We stopped talking after that. Together, in silence, we read on.

I wonder now, as I sit in my car beside Officer Berg, about signs of forced entry—a broken window, a busted doorjamb—or blood. Was there blood at the scene? Or defensive wounds, maybe, on Morgan’s hands? Did she try to fight her intruder off?

Or maybe the little girl saw the attacker or heard her stepmother scream.

I don’t ask Officer Berg any of this. It’s been over twenty-four hours since the poor woman was killed. The etched lines on his forehead are deeper today than they were before. The pressure of the investigation is weighing on him, and I realize then: he’s no closer to solving this crime than he was yesterday. My heart sinks.

Instead I ask, “Has Mr. Baines been located?” and he tells me that he’s on his way, though it’s a twenty-some-hour trip from Tokyo with layovers at LAX and JFK. He won’t be home until tonight.

“Have you found her cell phone? That might give you something to go on?” I ask.

He shakes his head. They’ve been looking, he says, but so far they can’t find her phone. “There are ways to track a missing cell phone, but if the phone is off or the battery is dead, those won’t work. Obtaining a warrant for records from a telecommunications company is tedious. It takes time. But we’re working on it,” he tells me.

Officer Berg shifts in the seat. He turns his body toward mine, knees now pointed in my direction. They bump awkwardly into the gearshift. There are raindrops on his coat and his hair. There’s icing on his upper lip.

“You told me yesterday that you and Mrs. Baines never met,” he says, and I have trouble snatching my eyes from the icing as I reply, “That’s right. We never met.”

There was a photograph online of the woman. According to the paper, she was twenty-eight years old, eleven years younger than me. In the photo, she stood surrounded by her family, her happy husband on one side, stepdaughter the other, all of them dolled up in coordinating clothes and wreathed in smiles. She had a beautiful smile, a tad bit gummy if anything, but otherwise lovely.

Officer Berg unzips his rain jacket and reaches inside. He removes his tablet from an interior pocket, where there it stays dry. He taps on the screen, trawling for something. When he finds the spot, he clears his throat and reads my words back to me.

“Yesterday you said, I just never found the time to stop by and introduce myself. Do you remember saying that?” he asks, and I tell him I do, though it sounds so flippant now, my words coming back to me this way. A bit merciless, if I’m being honest, seeing as the woman is now dead. I should have tacked on an empathetic addendum, such as, But I wish I had. Just a little something so that my words didn’t sound so callous.

“The thing is, Dr. Foust,” he begins, “you said you didn’t know Mrs. Baines, and yet it seems you did,” and though his tone is well-disposed, the intent of his words is not.

He’s just accused me of lying.

“I beg your pardon?” I ask, taken completely aback.

“It seems you did know Morgan Baines,” he says.

The rain is coming down in torrents now, pounding on the roof of the car like mallets on tin cans. I think of Otto all alone on the upper deck of the ferry, getting pelted with rain. A knot forms in my throat because of it. I swallow it away.

I force my window up to keep the rain at bay.

I make sure to meet the officer’s eye as I assert, “Unless a onetime wave out the window of a moving vehicle counts as a relationship, Officer Berg, I didn’t know Morgan Baines. What makes you think that I did?” I ask, and he explains again, at great length this time, how he canvassed the entire street, spoke to all the neighbors, asked them the same questions he asked Will and me. When he came to the home of George and Poppy Nilsson, they invited him into their kitchen for tea and ginger cookies. He tells me that he asked the Nilssons what they were doing the night Morgan died, same as he did Will and me. I wait to hear their reply, thinking Officer Berg is about to tell me how the older couple sat in their living room that night, watching out the window as a killer slipped from the cover of darkness and into the Baineses’ home.

But instead he says, “As you can expect, at eighty-some years old, George and Poppy were asleep,” and I release my withheld breath. The Nilssons didn’t see a thing.

“I don’t understand, Officer,” I say, glancing at the time on the car’s dash, knowing I’ll need to leave soon. “If the Nilssons were asleep, then...what?”

Because clearly if they were asleep, then they saw and heard nothing.

“I also asked the Nilssons if they’d seen anything out of the ordinary over the last few days. Strangers lurking about, unfamiliar cars parked along the street.”

“Yes, yes,” I say, nodding my head quickly because he also asked this question of Will and me. “And?” I ask, trying to hurry things along so that I can get on to work.

“Well, it just so happens that they did see something out of the ordinary. Something they haven’t seen before. Which is saying a lot, seeing as they’ve lived half their lives on that street.” And then he taps away at that tablet screen to find his interview with Mr. and Mrs. Nilsson.

He goes on to describe for me an afternoon just last week. It was Friday, the first of December. It was a clear day, the sky painted blue, not a cloud to be seen. The temperatures were cool, crisp, but nothing a heavy sweater or a light jacket wouldn’t fix. George and Poppy had gone for an afternoon walk, Officer Berg says, and were headed back up the steep incline of our street. Once they reached the top, George stopped to catch his breath, pausing before the Baineses’ home.

Officer Berg goes on to tell me how there Mr. Nilsson rearranged the blanket on Poppy’s lap so that she didn’t catch a draft. As he did, something caught his attention. It was the sound of women hollering at one another, though what they were hollering about he wasn’t sure.

“Oh, how awful,” I say, and he says it was because poor George was really shaken up about it. He’d never heard anything like that before. And that’s saying a lot for a man his age.

“But what does this have to do with me?” I ask, and he reaches again for the tablet.

“George and Poppy stayed there in the street for a moment only, but that’s all it took before the women stepped out from the shade of a tree and into view and George could see for himself who they were.”

“Who?” I ask, slightly breathless, and he waits a beat before he replies.

“It was Mrs. Baines,” he says, “and you.”

And then, from some recording app on his device, he plays for me the testimonial of Mr. Nilsson, which states, “She was fighting with the new doctor lady on the street. The both of them were hooting and hollering, mad as a hornet. Before I could intercede, the doctor lady grabbed a handful of Ms. Morgan’s hair right out of her head and left with it in her fist. Poppy and I turned and walked quickly home. Didn’t want her to think we were snooping or she might do the same thing to us.”

Officer Berg stops it there and turns to me, asking, “Does this sound to you like an altercation between two women who’d never met?”

But I’m speechless.

I can’t reply.

Why would George Nilsson say such an awful thing about me?

Officer Berg doesn’t give me a chance to speak. He goes on without me.

He asks, “Is it often, Dr. Foust, that you swipe handfuls of hair from women you don’t know?”

The answer, of course, is no. Though still I can’t find my voice to speak.

He decides, “I’ll take your silence as a no.”

His hand falls to the door and he pushes it open against the weight of the wind. “I’ll leave you to it,” he says, “so that you can get on with your day.”

“I never spoke to Morgan Baines” is what I manage to say just then before he leaves, though the words that emerge are limp.

He shrugs. “All right, then,” he says, stepping back out into the rain.

He never said if he believed me.

He didn’t need to.

MOUSE

Once upon a time there was a girl named Mouse. It wasn’t her real name, but for as long as the girl could remember, her father had called her that.

The girl didn’t know why her father called her Mouse. She didn’t ask. She worried that if she brought attention to it, he might stop using the nickname, and she didn’t want him to do that. The girl liked that her father called her Mouse, because it was something special between her father and her, even if she didn’t know why.

Mouse spent a lot of time thinking about it. She had ideas about why her father called her by that nickname. For one, she had a soft spot for cheese. Sometimes, when she pulled strands of mozzarella from her string cheese and laid them on her tongue to eat, she thought that maybe that was the reason he called her Mouse, because of how much she liked cheese.

She wondered if her father thought she looked like a mouse. If, maybe, there were whiskers that grew along her upper lip, ones so small even she couldn’t see them, though her father could somehow see them. Mouse would go to the bathroom, climb up on the sink, press in closely to the mirror so she could search for whiskers. She even brought a magnifying glass along with her once, held it between her lip and her reflection, but she didn’t see any whiskers there.

Maybe, she decided, it had nothing to do with whiskers, but something to do with her brown hair, her big ears, her big teeth.

But Mouse wasn’t sure. Sometimes she thought it had to do with the way she looked, and then other times she thought it had nothing to do with the way she looked, but was something else instead, like the Salerno Butter Cookies she and her father ate after dinner sometimes. Maybe it was because of those cookies that he called her Mouse.

Mouse loved her Salerno Butter Cookies more than any other kind of cookie, even more than homemade. She’d stack them up on her pinkie, slide her finger through the center hole, gnaw her way down the side of the stack just like a mouse gnawing its way through wood.

Mouse ate her cookies at the dinner table. But one night, when her father had his back turned, taking the dishes to the sink to wash, she slipped an extra few in her pockets for a late-night snack, in case she or her teddy bear got hungry.

Mouse excused herself from the table, tried sneaking up to her bedroom with the cookies in her pockets, though she knew that crammed there in her pockets, the cookies would quickly turn to crumbs. To Mouse, it didn’t matter. The crumbs would taste just as good as the cookie had.

But her father caught her red-handed trying to make off with the cookies. He didn’t scold her. He hardly ever scolded her. There wasn’t a need for Mouse to be scolded. Instead he teased her for hoarding food, storing it somewhere in that bedroom of hers like mice store food in the walls of people’s homes.

But somehow Mouse didn’t think that was why he called her Mouse.

Because by then, she already was Mouse.

Mouse had a vivid imagination. She loved to make stories up. She never wrote them down on paper, but put them in her head where no one else could see. In her stories, there was a girl named Mouse who could do anything she wanted to, even cartwheels on the moon if that was what she wanted to do because Mouse didn’t need silly things like oxygen or gravity. She was afraid of nothing because she was immortal. No matter what she did, no harm could come to imaginary Mouse.

Mouse loved to draw. Her bedroom walls were covered in pictures of her father and her, her and her teddy bears. Mouse spent her days playing pretend. Her bedroom, the only one on the second floor of the old home, was full of dolls, toys and stuffed animals. Each animal had a name. Her favorite was a stuffed brown bear named Mr. Bear. Mouse had a dollhouse, a toy kitchen set with pretend pots and pans and crates of plastic food. She had a tea set. Mouse loved to set her dolls and animals in a circle on her floor, on the edge of her striped rag rug, and serve them each a tiny mug of tea and a plastic doughnut. She would find a book on her shelf and read it aloud to her friends before tucking them into bed.