Henry was a professor of philosophy at Oldham College in upstate New York. His vitals were revealed to the public slowly, incrementally, like a photograph taken through Vaseline: his age (thirty-four and already a rising star in academia), his famous academic father (Thomas Malcolm, professor emeritus at Oldham), his identical twin (Jonathan Malcolm, the disgraced author), even his dissertation from Yale (“True Deception: A Philosophical Inquiry of René Descartes”). He was accused of killing his wife, Laura Malcolm, bludgeoning her on the stairs of the home they shared at 22 Woodlawn Lane on the Oldham campus. The murder weapon was never found, and for days one question, so horrible in its simplicity, screamed across the ticker at the bottom of my TV screen: MURDER OR ACCIDENT? Even now, I’m certain I know the answer.
Laura was the perfect victim. A famous professor’s wife, five years Henry’s junior, and strikingly beautiful, she was a fixture at Oldham charity galas and campus functions. Henry claimed to have returned home from a faculty meeting one night to find her at the bottom of the spiral staircase, crumpled and broken like a rag doll. She’d been waiting up for him; they were supposed to watch a movie together, the empty DVD box casually placed on the television, a foreign film Henry had rented from the college video store that afternoon. Henry’s frantic 911 call was replayed a thousand times by the celebrity dish shows—scripted, they said, playing it back again and again, focusing on every stutter, every pause and nuance.
There was much talk about how Laura had once been a philosophy major at Oldham. She had met Henry in her senior seminar, had fallen in love with her suave professor, been swept away by him. I knew a different story, and here is the way I would tell it: Laura got pregnant, she and Henry were forced to marry because of Oldham’s morality clause, the child was stillborn, and Henry spent a semester drinking and calling me at night and rambling, “John, Jonathan, listen to me—I can hear our son crying. He’s just downstairs . . .”
But the media’s narrative was different. In fact it was an outright lie.
A constellation of blood undid him. The way her blood streaked and slashed, how it had dried in odd places near the eighteen-foot-high ceiling of the couple’s campus mansion. Places where no blood should have been. There was a question about her fall, the plausibility of the killing wounds. The fatal crack in her skull was inconsistent with the shape of the steps. Before this discovery, my brother was merely a person of interest; now he became the prime suspect. Piers Morgan interviewed a colleague who said that Henry had never shown any emotion about Laura’s death, Anderson Cooper ominously suggested that Henry had been a member of a secret society (“Yes,” I remember shouting at my television screen, “yes, there, focus on that!”), and my brother became a villain almost overnight. Ivy League educated, too handsome, too elusive—he embodied everything the rest of us distrusted.
And yet there was no forensic evidence to link Henry to the murder. No physical clues. No sign of a struggle, no bloody clothes, and of course no murder weapon. (On 60 Minutes I watched blue-jacketed, goggled investigators test objects in a lab: a fire poker, a pool cue, the claw of one of our father’s old hammers that was found in the basement of the murder house. But in the end nothing fit, that scribble-like fissure in Laura’s skull being too wide or too narrow, and the missing weapon became Henry’s greatest coup.) There was even an eyewitness from the college who saw Laura with another man on the evening she was murdered. A different man.
Henry remained free. He staged a press conference, stood before a makeshift podium, our father and stepmother flanking him. He pleaded with the media to leave him alone so that he could get back to his students. My father spoke, choking back tears, his beefy hand clenched into a fist. He pointed at his son, his favorite son, and said, “Henry Malcolm loved Laura, and she loved him. Why would he want to ruin something so perfect?”—and at that he lifted the photo of them, the famous one, the stunning shot of the couple standing on a cliff overlooking the sea on their honeymoon, Laura’s sunglasses pushed up into unruly hair, freckles sprayed across her bare and peeling shoulders, Henry smiling wickedly, the Mediterranean black as glass behind them.
We waited, then, for the other shoe to drop. For Henry to be charged with the murder of his wife, for the puzzle of the evidence to reveal something new, or for the shadowy man with whom she had been seen on her last day to come forward.
Instead, something else happened.
My brother disappeared.