XVI

That evening, Mrs. March was alone in the apartment. Martha had asked to leave early for some kind of appointment—she hadn’t been paying much attention, instead luxuriating in the afterglow of her magnanimity in granting Martha her request. “Oh please, don’t worry about me,” she had said, waving her hand, “I’m dining alone tonight, so just prepare a light meal for me and leave it in the kitchen. I’ll warm it up myself and leave the plates in the sink for you.”

Mrs. March had taken an early bath, careful to use only small portions of the expensive bath salts, which had crumbled from disuse in their respective stoppered jars since she had bought them in Paris twelve years ago.

All afternoon she experienced a lingering, unpleasant sensation. Something about Sheila’s demeanor, the vacant, mechanical way she had put her hands on Jonathan’s shoulders, gnawed at Mrs. March, and now in the dark of evening, alone, she was finding it hard to shake off. Tying the belt of her terrycloth bathrobe so tightly her stomach ached, she left her bedroom with apprehension, stepping into the hallway gingerly as if it might, at the touch of her slipper, turn into water that would drown her, turning back into parquet flooring once she sank below the surface so that she might never be found.

She walked the length of the hallway, flicking on the overhead lights as she made her way into the living room. She looked carefully about the space, searching for strange men’s shoes poking out from under furniture, under drapes. She spotted a bulge behind one of the curtains. She walked over to it, hand outstretched, wondering whose face awaited her on the other side of the fabric, then slapped away her own wrist. The Christmas tree lights blinked in time to the ticking of the grandfather clock in the foyer, bulbs flicking yellow, dark, yellow. Mrs. March clicked her tongue to the rhythm, then envisioned the sound masking a stranger’s approaching steps, and turned quickly to face the room. Something in her chest tightened. She unplugged the lights.

Lowering her body onto the sofa in a huff, she tutted to herself in an attempt to feign indifference should anyone be watching, and turned on the television, flipping the channels at a dizzying rate in an attempt to find something, anything, pleasant being shown to bolster her false calm. Images sped before her—a strawberry-flavored soft drink, a bright yellow cartoon duck, a backfiring police car, a black-and-white scream, a dramatic embrace. She continued changing stations, her thumbnail sinking into the soft rubber button of the remote, until:

“The entire Northeast is grieving the loss of Sylvia Gibbler, whose body was discovered after weeks of frenzied searching by police and civilian volunteers.”

Mrs. March blinked, willing herself to move on to a different channel. The reporter on the screen looked out from the television, a grave aspect to her face. She stood in a burgundy tweed overcoat and matching burgundy lipstick against a backdrop of snowy streets, the occasional car moving behind her, and was gripping the microphone so tightly that it seemed like her hand had been carved from it. She continued, “Her body was found by two unsuspecting hunters, in the backwoods of Gentry, Maine—”

Mrs. March’s throat tightened. Her eyes blurred, black spots like inkblots scattering across her vision. A thousand different voices rang inside her skull. A coincidence, just a coincidence, cried one. But what if it isn’t, said another. After all, how many coincidences can one woman overlook? Isn’t that how murderers were eventually caught, when one observant soul put all the disparate pieces together?

The reporter explained how the victim, an orphan, had been living with her grandmother for the past few years. But no, Mrs. March told herself, George wouldn’t return to the crime scene if he were guilty. His indifference to the swarming nest of police and news reporters surely proved his innocence. Her relief was short-lived as she wondered if he had made the trip to destroy evidence now that the body had been found—a clumsy, amateur mistake that could potentially lead to his arrest. And was Edgar in on it? Unclear. George had his own set of keys to Edgar’s cabin. He kept them in a bowl in his study. He could come and go without Edgar even knowing.

“The initial autopsy report confirms she was murdered a little less than a month ago, which coincides with the date she disappeared—”

Hadn’t George been on another hunting trip about a month ago? He arrived home, making gobbling noises as he walked in, with a wild turkey for their Thanksgiving dinner. The memory had stayed with her because she’d had no clue what to do with the limp mass of feathers, the hanging red wattle, so Martha had taken it to her brother, a butcher in Brooklyn, to deplume and dress it.

Mrs. March swallowed, her pulse so quick and hard she could almost see it thrusting through her wrists.

“—further tests are needed to determine the cause of death, but coroners believe the victim was strangled,” continued the reporter in a flat tone, as if reporting this tragedy with any sense of urgency was somehow gauche. The only trace of feeling lingered in her eyebrows, which arched when she described the particularly gruesome details. “The body shows signs of rape”—she paused ever so slightly—“and blunt force trauma.”

Mrs. March unspooled memories in a panic, tracing every mundane conversation with neighbors in an attempt to recall which of them were aware of George’s hunting trips to Gentry. She pictured Sheila upstairs, watching the news, calling to her husband, who would then call the police.

“. . . hands bound behind her with a cord . . . scratches indicate a struggle . . .”

George’s nickname as a teacher had been “Beauty and the Beast,” a moniker acquired decades prior in his own college days. He was generally loved among the students and staff—leather-bound classics and butter cookies and the occasional engraved fountain pen often bestowed on him by way of his mail slot in the teachers’ lounge. He was praised for his sense of theatricality, once famously re-creating the Yorkshire moors by dumping bucketloads of moss and purple heath shrubs onto the lecture hall steps while teaching the Brontës. But his wrath was just as dramatic—his admonishments sometimes interrupting the physics department next door—and he had a penchant for dispensing disproportionate punishments for the most minor of offenses (the story of his suspension of his prize student for an honest failure to cite a source stoked fear in the hearts of each incoming class of freshmen).

“. . . body partially hidden by snow, and it was only thanks to a trusty hunting dog . . .”

There were casual anecdotes over the years, featuring moon-eyed coeds’ requests for “extra credit” or “one-on-one tutoring,” but such tales were played for laughs with George’s colleagues. Unlike the other professors, he seemed to have kept his trousers on. At least, there had been no rumors to the effect. And she never had reason to suspect. Nor had she cause to fear him either; in fact, over the years he had turned into a quieter, more sensitive intellectual. He continued to enjoy time with his friends—the long lunches, the occasional tennis match, the hunting trips with Edgar and the Scotch and cigars at his gentlemen’s club—none of it signs of a deeper corruption. And whenever she had needed to reach him, whether at the club or a restaurant—she could always find him.

Surely, if he were some sort of deviant predator, there would have been signs or stories. Rumors. Had his ex-wife witnessed his transformation into a monster, she would have spoken up, if not to warn the new Mrs. March, then at least to protect their daughter Paula from his violent, perverted grip.

This is all silly, she told herself. Of course George had nothing to do with the poor girl’s murder. She fumbled with the remote and the television switched off with a dull clink, the screen dissolving into a small white circle before blacking out and revealing Mrs. March’s reflection as she sat, mouth agape, on the couch.

“No,” she said simply, “no,” and rose from the couch, securing her robe tightly once again, as if doing so might protect her. She went to the kitchen, stopping to wash her hands in the guest bathroom. As she dried them, wrinkling her nose at the ever-present, medicinal smell of pine, she heard the neighbors’ television through the wall. Recognizing the reporter’s monotone, she hurried out—the webbing between her fingers still sudsy—slamming the door behind her.

She attempted to warm up a small portion of the pan-fried sole Martha had left under tinfoil on the kitchen counter, battling the microwave, which inexplicably kept switching off. Whatever residual satisfaction remained from Mrs. March’s benevolent early dismissal of Martha was now replaced with annoyance.

Martha had set the dining room table as she always did—with the linens and silver and Mrs. March’s beloved black olive bread cut into neat slices. Mrs. March lit the candles—the lighting felt off without them—and played Chopin’s nocturnes on the turntable, because that was the record they played during dinner and flipping through George’s intimidating record collection in search of something new would take forever.

Despite the tinkling piano rippling across the empty apartment—or maybe because of it—the night seemed quieter than usual. Mrs. March brought a forkful of room-temperature fish to her mouth. From the street a young woman’s drunken laughter pierced the silence, startling her. Picking up her dropped fork, she scolded herself under her breath for her jumpiness.

The figures in the portraits on the dining room wall glared down at her, as was their custom when she ate alone. One featured a middle-aged woman wearing a bonnet and a velvet choker, the other a bespectacled man in clerical garb. She returned their gaze.

Nobody spoke.