Kimber Carson closed the door behind me and leaned against it.
“What?” she said. “Why do you have that look in your eye?”
“What look?”
“Don’t demean me, Buddy. Something’s wrong. What is it?”
“Can we start this by perhaps saying hello to each other? By acknowledging the rules of civility.”
She stared at me. She had on a man’s long-sleeved blue dress-shirt over a pair of cotton leotards. As usual, her hair was a jumble. She wore no makeup. She looked tired. Weary, actually. As much a casualty of the mess her late husband had concocted, as was any of his victims.
She had about her an air of remorse. Of guilt.
What if she’d acted on her suspicions and brought them to the attention of the authorities? Would she have prevented not only her husband’s death, but her own suffering as well?
What if it was her silence that had spawned the murder? That, with no help in sight, the killer had come to believe the only way out of hell was to eliminate the devil.
“I’m sorry, Buddy. Perhaps you’d like to come inside?”
I stepped around her and together, we wandered into the living room and sat on opposite chairs.
“So, what brings you to my door?” she asked.
“It’s worse than I thought.”
“Why am I not surprised? How so?”
“In your initial description, you neglected to mention that he would stop at nothing to get what he was after. That when the occasion called for it, he could be a paragon of charm. That he was relentless. And that once he got what he wanted, he no longer wanted it.”
She stared at me empty-eyed. Her spirits low, she seemed freighted with regret.
“I neglected to mention it because I felt stupid for having fallen for it.”
“It being?”
“His line. It was so intense, so all-consuming, so powerful that not accepting it was out of the question. Either you were in or you weren’t. Being ‘in’ carried with it the promise of unmitigated pleasure and joy. The idea that he was a phony was unimaginable.”
She swept the hair off her forehead and looked away. It was as if she had been informed that the world in which she was living had come to a sudden end which left her dangling in space.
“How many?”
“Girls?”
She nodded.
“Several. Most of them underage. Many now exhibiting signs of psychological trauma.”
“Do you blame me, Buddy?”
“Do you blame yourself?”
“I was with him for less than a year. He romanced me with more ardor than I could ever have imagined. You remember the expression, ‘swept off her feet’? Well, that was me. I didn’t know what hit me. He became my everything. I adored him. It was when we arrived here in Freedom that he turned his back on me.
“Initially, I thought it was my fault. That I was doing something wrong. For a while I was catatonic. Then my sense of self-preservation took hold. It took time for that to happen, but when it did several months ago, we essentially lived separate lives in the same house. We rarely spoke. He was gone a good deal of the time. I told him I wanted a divorce.”
“To which he replied?”
“He never replied.”
She stood and absently moved to the sparsely populated bookcase where she picked up one of the books that was lying facedown on a shelf. She looked at it without seeing it. Then she returned it.
She stared at me through distracted eyes. She wandered toward the kitchen. I followed.
She took a plastic water bottle from the fridge and offered it to me. When I declined, she dropped it on the table, then opened the kitchen door and stepped outside.
The yard was postage-stamp size. What had once been verdant, however, was now dry and desolate, the result of either negligence or drought. Or both.
She gazed at me briefly, then looked away. “You must think me awful.”
“Why?”
“For keeping his secrets.”
We stood silently for a while, then she said, “I didn’t kill him. Do you believe me?”
I nodded.
“Why?”
“You mean why do I believe you?”
“Yes.”
I considered my response for several moments. My opinions were subjective and still open to further examination. But she was suffering. And maybe my insights might help clarify things for her. So I took a deep breath and gave it my best shot.
“You were as much his victim as were the others. But your circumstance was different than theirs. You were confronted by a changing reality that shattered all of your assumptions about marriage and relationships. Not an easy thing to endure. Either physically or emotionally.
“We, none of us, can predict how we’ll behave when exposed to such unexpected suffering. We’re human and we improvise as we go along.
“Could you have done things differently? Might you have had a greater impact had you done so? Maybe. Maybe not. But you did the best you could. Nobody could have predicted his murder. In hindsight, had you known, perhaps you might have behaved differently. But you were in unfamiliar territory and the first order of business was self-preservation.
“Killing him wasn’t in the cards for you. He or she who did kill him was in deep emotional and psychological distress. Unlike the killer, you had determined to extricate yourself by leaving him.
“The killer couldn’t do such a thing. He or she was cornered. Rooted to the spot. Incapable of going anywhere else. Frightened and helpless. Killing him was the only way out.
“I’d bet anything that killing him was an obsession. Like there was no other option. You don’t match that profile, Kimber. I never thought for a minute that you did.”
“So who killed him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know that either.”