A Good Marriage (5 page)

One of Bob’s sayings. She had never much liked that one, and hated having it in her head now.

Marjorie Duvall had been found in a ravine six miles from her house in South Gansett, just over the North Conway town line. The County Sheriff speculated that the death had probably resulted from strangulation, but he couldn’t say for sure; that was up to the County Medical Examiner. He refused to speculate further, or answer any other questions, but the reporter’s unnamed source (whose information was at least semi-validated by being “close to the investigation”) said that Duvall had been bitten and sexually molested “in a manner consistent with the other Beadie killings.”

Which was a natural transition to a complete recap of the previous murders. The first had occurred in 1977. There had been two in 1978, another in 1980, and then two more in 1981. Two of the murders had occurred in New Hampshire, two in Massachusetts, the fifth and sixth in Vermont. After that, there had been a hiatus of sixteen years. The police assumed that one of three things had happened: Beadie had moved to another part of the country and was pursuing his hobby there, Beadie had been arrested for some other, unrelated
crime and was in prison, or Beadie had killed himself. The one thing that
wasn’t
likely, according to a psychiatrist the reporter had consulted for his story, was that Beadie had just gotten tired of it. “These guys don’t get bored,” the psychiatrist said. “It’s their sport, their compulsion. More than that, it’s their secret life.”

Secret life. What a poison bonbon that phrase was.

Beadie’s sixth victim had been a woman from Barre, uncovered in a snowdrift by a passing plow just a week before Christmas.
Such a holiday that must have been for her relatives,
Darcy thought. Not that she’d had much of a Christmas herself that year. Lonely away from home (a fact wild horses wouldn’t have dragged from her mouth when talking to her mother), working at a job she wasn’t sure she was qualified for even after eighteen months and one merit raise, she had felt absolutely no spirit of the season. She had acquaintances (the Margarita Girls), but no real friends. She wasn’t good when it came to making friends, never had been. Shy was the kind word for her personality, introverted probably a more accurate one.

Then Bob Anderson had walked into her life with a smile on his face—Bob who had asked her out and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Not three months after the plow had uncovered the body of Beadie’s last “early cycle” victim, that must have been. They fell in love. And Beadie stopped for sixteen years.

Because of her? Because he loved her? Because he wanted to stop doing Big Bads?

Or just a coincidence. It could be that.

Nice try, but the IDs she’d found squirreled away in the garage made the idea of coincidence seem a lot less likely.

Beadie’s seventh victim, the first of what the paper called “the new cycle,” had been a woman from Waterville, Maine, named Stacey Moore. Her husband found her in the cellar upon returning from Boston, where he and two friends had taken in a couple of Red Sox games. August of 1997, this had been. Her head had been stuffed into a bin of the sweet corn the Moores sold at their roadside Route 106 farmstand. She was naked, her hands bound behind her back, her buttocks and thighs bitten in a dozen places.

Two days later, Stacey Moore’s driver’s license and Blue Cross card, bound with a rubber band, had arrived in Augusta, addressed in block printing to BOOB ATTORNEY JENRAL DEPT. OF CRINIMAL INVESTIGATION. There was also a note:
HELLO! I’M BACK! BEADIE!

This was a packet the detectives in charge of the Moore murder recognized at once. Similar selected bits of ID—and similar cheerful notes—had been delivered following each of the previous killings. He knew when they were alone. He tortured them, principally with his teeth; he raped or sexually molested them; he killed them; he sent their identification to some branch of the police weeks or months later. Taunting them with it.

To make sure he gets the credit,
Darcy thought dismally.

There had been another Beadie murder in 2004, the ninth and tenth in 2007. Those two were the worst, because one of the victims had been a child. The woman’s ten-year-old son had been excused from school after complaining of a stomachache, and had apparently walked in on Beadie while he was at work. The boy’s body had been found with his mother’s, in a nearby creek. When the woman’s ID—two credit cards and a driver’s license—arrived at Massachusetts State Police Barracks #7, the attached card read:
HELLO! THE BOY WAS AN ACCIDENT! SORRY! BUT IT WAS QUICK, HE DID NOT “SUFFER!” BEADIE!

There were many other articles she could have accessed (o omnipotent Google), but to what end? The sweet dream of one more ordinary evening in an ordinary life had been swallowed by a nightmare. Would reading more about Beadie dispel the nightmare? The answer to that was obvious.

Her belly clenched. She ran for the bathroom—still smelly in spite of the fan, usually you could ignore what a smelly business life was, but not always—and fell on her knees in front of the toilet, staring into the blue water with her mouth open. For a moment she thought the need to vomit was going to pass, then she thought of Stacey Moore with her black strangled face shoved into the corn and her buttocks covered with blood dried to the color of chocolate milk. That tipped her over and
she vomited twice, hard enough to splash her face with Ty-D-Bol and a few flecks of her own effluvium.

Crying and gasping, she flushed the toilet. The porcelain would have to be cleaned, but for now she only lowered the lid and laid her flushed cheek on its cool beige plastic.

What am I going to do?

The obvious step was to call the police, but what if she did that and it all turned out to be a mistake? Bob had always been the most generous and forgiving of men—when she’d run the front of their old van into a tree at the edge of the post office parking lot and shattered the windshield, his only concern had been if she had cut her face—but would he forgive her if she mistakenly fingered him for eleven torture-killings he hadn’t committed? And the world would know. Guilty or innocent, his picture would be in the paper. On the front page. Hers, too.

Darcy dragged herself to her feet, got the toilet-scrubbing brush from the bathroom closet, and cleaned up her mess. She did it slowly. Her back hurt. She supposed she had thrown up hard enough to pull a muscle.

Halfway through the job, the next realization thudded down. It wouldn’t be just the two of them dragged into newspaper speculation and the filthy rinse-cycle of twenty-four-hour cable news; there were the kids to think about. Donnie and Ken had just landed their first two clients, but the bank and the car dealership looking for a fresh approach
would be gone three hours after this shit-bomb exploded. Anderson & Hayward, which had taken its first real breath today, would be dead tomorrow. Darcy didn’t know how much Ken Hayward had invested, but Donnie was all in the pot. That didn’t amount to such of a much in cash, but there were other things you invested when you were starting out on your own voyage. Your heart, your brains, your sense of self-worth.

Then there were Petra and Michael, probably at this very moment with their heads together making more wedding plans, unaware that a two-ton safe was dangling above them on a badly frayed cord. Pets had always idolized her father. What would it do to her if she found out the hands which had once pushed her on the backyard swing were the same hands that had strangled the life out of eleven women? That the lips which had kissed her goodnight were hiding teeth that had bitten eleven women, in some cases all the way down to the bone?

Sitting at her computer again, a terrible newspaper headline rose in Darcy’s mind. It was accompanied by a photograph of Bob in his neckerchief, absurd khaki shorts, and long socks. It was so clear it could already have been printed:

MASS MURDERER “BEADIE”
LED CUB SCOUTS FOR 17 YEARS

Darcy clapped a hand over her mouth. She could feel her eyes pulsing in their sockets. The notion
of suicide occurred to her, and for a few moments (long ones) the idea seemed completely rational, the only reasonable solution. She could leave a note saying she’d done it because she was afraid she had cancer. Or early-onset Alzheimer’s, that was even better. But suicide cast a deep shadow over families, too, and what if she was wrong? What if Bob had just found that ID packet by the side of the road, or something?

Do you know how unlikely that is?
Smart Darcy sneered.

Okay, yes, but unlikely wasn’t the same as impossible, was it? There was something else, too, something that made the cage she was in escape-proof: what if she was right? Wouldn’t her death free Bob to kill more, because he no longer had to lead so deep a double life? Darcy wasn’t sure she believed in a conscious existence after death, but what if there was one? And what if she were confronted there not by Edenic green fields and rivers of plenty but by a ghastly receiving line of strangled women branded by her husband’s teeth, all accusing her of causing their deaths by taking the easy way out herself? And by ignoring what she had found (if such a thing were even possible, which she didn’t believe for a minute), wouldn’t the accusation be true? Did she really think she could condemn more women to horrible deaths just so her daughter could have a nice June wedding?

She thought:
I wish I was dead.

But she wasn’t.

For the first time in years, Darcy Madsen Anderson slipped from her chair onto her knees and began to pray. It did no good. The house was empty except for her.

- 7 -

She had never kept a diary, but she had ten years’ worth of appointment books stored in the bottom of her capacious sewing chest. And decades’ worth of Bob’s travel records stuffed in one of the file drawers of the cabinet he kept in his home office. As a tax accountant (and one with his own duly incorporated side-business to boot), he was meticulous when it came to record-keeping, taking every deduction, tax credit, and cent of automotive depreciation he could.

She stacked his files beside her computer along with her appointment books. She opened Google and forced herself to do the research she needed, noting the names and dates of death (some of these were necessarily approximate) of Beadie’s victims. Then, as the digital clock on her computer’s control strip marched soundlessly past ten PM, she began the laborious work of cross-checking.

She would have given a dozen years of her life to find something that would have indisputably eliminated him from even one of the murders, but her appointment books only made things worse. Kellie Gervais, of Keene, New Hampshire, had been discovered in the woods behind the local landfill on
March fifteenth of 2004. According to the medical examiner, she had been dead three to five days. Scrawled across March tenth to twelfth in Darcy’s appointment book for 2004 was
Bob to Fitzwilliam, Brat
. George Fitzwilliam was a well-heeled client of Benson, Bacon & Anderson.
Brat
was her abbreviation for Brattleboro, where Fitzwilliam lived. An easy drive from Keene, New Hampshire.

Helen Shaverstone and her son Robert had been discovered in Newrie Creek, in the town of Amesbury, on November eleventh of 2007. They had lived in Tassel Village, some twelve miles away. On the November page of her 2007 address book, she had drawn a line across the eighth to the tenth, scrawling
Bob in Saugus, 2 estate sales plus Boston coin auc.
And did she remember calling his Saugus motel on one of those nights and not getting him? Assuming he was out late with some coin salesman, sniffing for leads, or maybe in the shower? She
seemed
to remember that. If so, had he actually been on the road that night? Perhaps coming back from doing an errand (a little drop-off) in the town of Amesbury? Or, if he
had
been in the shower, what in God’s name had he been washing off?

She turned to his travel records and vouchers as the clock on the control strip passed eleven and started climbing toward midnight, the witching hour when graveyards reputedly yawned. She worked carefully and stopped often to double-check. The stuff from the late seventies was spotty and not much help—he hadn’t been much more than your basic office drone in those days—but
everything from the eighties was there, and the correlations she found for the Beadie murders in 1980 and 1981 were clear and undeniable. He had been traveling at the right times and in the right areas. And, Smart Darcy insisted, if you found enough cat hairs in a person’s house, you pretty much had to assume there was a feline on the premises somewhere.

So what do I do now?

The answer seemed to be, carry her confused and frightened head upstairs. She doubted if she could sleep, but at least she could take a hot shower and then lie down. She was exhausted, her back ached from throwing up, and she stank of her own sweat.

She shut off her computer and climbed to the second floor at a slow trudge. The shower eased her back and a couple of Tylenol would probably ease it more by two AM or so; she was sure she’d be awake to find out. When she put the Tylenol back in the medicine cabinet, she took the Ambien bottle out, held it in her hand for almost a full minute, then replaced that, too. It wouldn’t put her to sleep, only make her muzzy and—perhaps—more paranoid than she was already.

She lay down and looked at the night table on the other side of the bed. Bob’s clock. Bob’s spare set of reading glasses. A copy of a book called
The Shack. You ought to read this, Darce, it’s a life-changer,
he’d said two or three nights before this latest trip.

She turned off her lamp, saw Stacey Moore stuffed into the cornbin, and turned the lamp
back on again. On most nights, the dark was her friend—sleep’s kindly harbinger—but not tonight. Tonight the dark was populated by Bob’s harem.

You don’t know that
.
Remember that you don’t absolutely know that.

But if you find enough cat hairs . . .