Even though I don’t read contemporary mysteries anymore, I keep up with the trends. I am well aware that Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn has changed the industry, that unreliable narrators are suddenly popular, along with domestic suspense, with books that posit the question of whether we can really trust anyone, especially the ones closest to us. Some of the reviews I read make it sound as though this is a recent phenomenon, as though the idea of discovering a spouse’s secrets constituted something new, or that the omission of facts from a narrative hadn’t been the bedrock upon which psychological thrillers have been built for over a century. The narrator of Rebecca, a novel published in 1938, never even gave the readers her name.
The thing is, and maybe I’m biased by all those years I’ve spent in fictional realms built on deceit, I don’t trust narrators any more than I trust the actual people in my life. We never get the whole truth, not from anybody. When we first meet someone, before words are ever spoken, there are already lies and half-truths. The clothes we wear cover the truth of our bodies, but they also present who we want to be to the world. They are fabrications, figuratively and literally.
So I wasn’t surprised when I found my wife’s secret journal, and I wasn’t surprised that there were things inside it that she’d never told me. Many things. For the purposes of this story—of my story—I won’t go into everything that I discovered from reading the journal. She didn’t want the world to know, and I don’t either.
But I do need to record what happened between Claire and Eric Atwell. Not surprisingly, they had been sexually involved. It wasn’t a romantic liaison. Claire had become addicted to cocaine, and after a time during which Atwell had been furnishing it free of charge, he began to ask for money. She and I had shared one bank account together—for rent, for household expenses, for vacations—but we each had separate accounts as well. And hers had been emptied in about the space of three weeks. After that she had paid Atwell in sexual favors. It was his idea. Without going into detail, some of what he asked her to do was truly demeaning. At one point she’d told him about her bad experience with Mr. Clifton, the middle-school teacher; “I could see the excitement in his eyes,” she wrote.
I read the rest of the journal, then the following weekend, I drove out to Walden Pond in Concord, passing through Southwell. The lot was nearly empty—it was ten degrees outside, the pond frozen, the skies above a chalky white. I walked along a trail that climbed a ridge above the pond, then doused the journal in kerosene and burned it in a clearing, stomping on the remains until the book was nothing more than a crater of black soot in the snow and ashes in the air.
I never regretted destroying Claire’s journal although sometimes, to this day, I regret having read it. When I moved from our apartment in Somerville to the studio in Beacon Hill, I got rid of everything else that remained of Claire—her clothes, the furniture she’d bought for our place, her school yearbooks. I kept a few of her books, her childhood copy of A Wrinkle in Time, an annotated paperback of Anne Sexton’s collected poetry that she’d bought for a class during her freshman year at Boston University. That book is on my bedside table, always. Sometimes I read the poems inside, but mostly I look at Claire’s notes and doodles, the lines and the words she’d underlined. Sometimes I touch the indentations that her ballpoint pen made on the page.
Mostly, these days, I just like that the book is there, within easy reach. It’s been five years since she died, but I talk to her more now, in my head, than I did immediately after she died. I talked to her the night I got into bed with Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, told her all about the list, and the visit from Agent Mulvey, and what it felt like to be reading these books again.
I woke around eight thirty in the morning, surprised that I’d gotten any sleep at all. I’d forgotten to pull the curtains in my apartment and bright, hard sunlight was flooding in. At the window I looked outside toward the irregular roofline across the street, now covered with snow, icicles decorating the gutters. There were spidery lines of frost on the outside of the windows, and the street below had the grayish pallor that meant it was incredibly cold outside. I checked my phone, and it was currently registering one degree above zero. I almost considered sending emails to Emily and Brandon, letting them know that they could take the day off, that it was too cold to ask them to come in, but changed my mind.
I bundled up and walked down to Charles Street, to a café that served oatmeal. I was at a corner table reading a copy of yesterday’s Globe that had been sitting on the table when my cell phone rang.
“Malcolm, it’s Gwen.”
“Hi,” I said.
“Were you sleeping?”
“Oh, no. I’m getting breakfast. I’m about to go into the store. Are you still in Boston?”
“No, I got home yesterday afternoon, and all the books I’d ordered had arrived, so last night I read Strangers on a Train.”
“Yeah, and?”
“I’d love to talk with you about it. Is there a good time?”
“Can I call you back when I get to the store?” I said. My oatmeal had just arrived, steam pouring from the bowl.
“Sure,” she said. “Call me back.”
After finishing breakfast, I went to Old Devils. Emily was already there, and Nero had been fed.
“You’re here early,” I said.
“Remember that I’m leaving early.”
“Oh, right,” I said, although I hadn’t remembered that.
“Mr. Popovitch complained again,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “He wants to return his last shipment.”
“The whole shipment?”
“Yep. He says they were all improperly graded.”
David Popovich was a collector who lived in New Mexico, but all of us at the bookstore felt like he might as well live next door. He bought a ton of books from us and returned half of them, at least. He occasionally called to complain but mostly he sent us snide emails.
“Cut him off,” I said.
“What?”
“Write him back and tell him that we’ll accept whatever returns he has but that he can’t order through us, anymore. I’m done with him.”
“You serious?”
“Yes. Would you rather I write the email?”
“No, I’m happy to do it. Should I cc you?”
“Sure,” I said. Banishing Popovich would probably hurt our bottom line in the end, but for the moment I didn’t care. And it felt good.
Before calling Gwen back I sent an email to a publicist at Random House that I’d been ignoring and confirmed a date for her author to come and give a reading in March. Then I opened up the glass case and got our first edition copy of Strangers on a Train, bringing it back with me to the phone. Its cover was deep blue, garishly illustrated with a close-up of a man’s face and a sickly-looking woman with red hair.
Gwen picked up after one ring.
“Hi, Gwen,” I said, and her first name sounded strange coming out of my mouth.
“Thanks for calling me back. So, this book.”
“What did you think?”
“Bleak. I knew the story, because of the movie. But the book was different. Darker, I thought, and do both the men commit murders in the movie?”
I tried to remember. “I don’t think so,” I said. “No, definitely not. I think the main character in the movie—the tennis player—almost kills the father but doesn’t. That probably had a lot more to do with the production code than with what Hitchcock actually wanted to do. I don’t think they were allowed to have characters get away with murder.” I hadn’t read the book in many years, or seen the movie again, but I remembered both of them pretty well.
“The Hays code,” she said. “If only it was that way in real life.”
“Right.”
“And he’s not a tennis player in the book.”
“Who?”
“Guy. The main character. He’s an architect.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Was reading the book helpful?”
“You mentioned in your list that you thought it was the very best example of a perfect murder,” she said, ignoring my question. “What exactly did you mean?”
“It’s a perfect crime,” I said, “because when you swap murders with someone else, a stranger basically, then there is no connection between the murderer and their victim. That’s what makes it foolproof.”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking about,” she said. “What’s clever about the murder in the book,” she continued, “is that the person committing it can’t be connected to the crime. It has nothing to do with the method.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Bruno kills Guy’s wife at an amusement park. He strangles her to death. But there’s nothing clever about that. I’ve been thinking about Charlie’s rules again. So, if you were Charlie, just humor me, then how would you commit a murder based on Strangers on a Train?”
“I see what you mean. It would be very hard.”
“Right. You could just go strangle someone at an amusement park but that wouldn’t be following the philosophy of the crime.”
“He’d have to find someone else to commit a murder with him.”
“That’s what I thought, but not necessarily, really,” she said. “If I were Charlie, if I were trying to copy Strangers on a Train, then I would select as a victim someone who is already likely to be murdered. My mind is going blank right now, but suppose someone just went through a bitter divorce, or . . .”
“Who’s the guy in New York, who stole everyone’s money?” I said.
“Bernie Madoff?”
“Right, him.”
“He’d work, but there are maybe too many people who want him dead. I would pick one-half of a bad divorce, I think. Something slightly public, then I would wait until the spurned spouse was away, and I would commit the murder. I think that would be the best way to honor the book.”
“That makes sense,” I said.
“I think so too. Worth looking into. How about you, did you have any new thoughts last night?”
“I was pretty tired last night, after staying up the night before. So, no. But I’ll keep thinking about it.”
“Thanks,” she said. “You’ve been helpful.” Then she added, in a slightly different tone of voice, “Don’t forget to send me your flight information for the trip you took to London this past fall.”
“I’ll do that today,” I said.
After I hung up, Nero came clicking along the hardwood floor to settle himself down by my legs. I watched him, in a slight daze, thinking about the phone conversation I’d just had.
“I did it,” came Emily’s voice, and I turned around; she was coming toward me, a rare grin on her face.
“Did what?”
“Sent the email to Popovich. He’s going to be in shock.”
“You seem very pleased.”
“No, I’m . . . you know how much he drives me crazy.”
“It’s fine. Honestly, I think he needs us more than we need him. The customer isn’t always right, you know.”
Emily grinned again, then said, “Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m fine. Why?”
“Oh, nothing. You seem distracted, that’s all. I didn’t know if there was anything going on.”
It was so out of character for her to express this much interest in me that I realized that I must be acting noticeably different. I think of myself as stoic, as someone who never reveals too much of themselves, and it worried me that that might not be the case.
“Would it be okay if I go for a walk?” I said. “You can cover the store?”
“Sure.”
“It’ll be a quick walk,” I said.
Outside it was still bitterly cold, but the sun was out, the sky a hard, unforgiving blue. The sidewalks had been cleared and I walked toward Charles Street, thinking I’d cut up to the Public Garden. I kept thinking about the conversation with Gwen about Strangers on a Train, a book that I’d worked hard at not thinking about for many years.
There were more people in the park than I thought there would be, considering the temperature. A father was wiping snow off one of the Make Way for Ducklings bronze figures so that he could put his toddler on top of it and take a picture. I must have walked past those ducklings a thousand times and there was always a parent, or a set of parents, posing their child for a photograph. In summertime there was often a line. And I always wondered what the parents got out of it, their insistence to document a particular moment. Not being a parent, I don’t really know. It was actually something that Claire and I had never talked about, having children. I had told myself it was up to her, but maybe she’d been waiting for me to broach the subject.
I walked around the frozen pond, the wind now spinning dead leaves, and started to make my way back to the store. I was not innocent, even though sometimes I allowed myself the luxury of thinking that I was. And if Gwen Mulvey discovered the truth, then I would have to accept it.