Strange but True (24 page)

Still farther across town, at the Chases' large gray-stone colonial at 12 Turnber Lane, Philip is tossing and turning on the foldout sofa in the family room while his mother sleeps soundly upstairs with the help of the pills she swallowed before bed. Philip replays the recent turn of events concerning Melissa Moody and her baby, over and over in his mind. You already know that, eventually, he sits up and turns on the light. And you already know that he opens his musty Anne Sexton biography to a random page and looks down to see the lines of a poem scratched in black pen, like a message in the margin:

The woman wonders why he murdered their love

But the killer in him has gotten loose

She knows she should run while there is still time

But she pauses here

Soon to be dragged into darkness

Since the words have no particular resonance to him, Philip turns to another section and begins reading a chapter he's read before about the death of Anne's parents. After twenty minutes, he finds himself lingering over a single passage of a poem:

I refuse to remember the dead
.

And the dead are bored with the whole thing
.

But you—you go ahead
,

go on, go on back down

into the graveyard
,

lie down where you think their faces are;

talk back to your old bad dreams
.

His thoughts go back to his brother and then to Missy. Again he mulls over all that happened tonight until finally, he is just too tired to think or read anymore. His arms droop like the branches of the trees outside, and the book comes to rest on his chest. His eyes shut.

As the night passes, the starless winter sky over the small Main Line township of Radnor turns to an inky, fathomless black. The roads become empty, drained of all life. Even the highway on the outskirts of town is soundless, except for the occasional whoosh of a tractor trailer barreling past the exit ramp that leads to Radnor. And when it seems that it can't get any darker or quieter, the first bits of sunlight break on the horizon. The light comes slowly at first, then more quickly.

You know what's coming next, but you don't know all of it.

Inside the Erwins' small house, Gail lies awake in bed. Not once through the entire night did she come close to sleep. But with her insomnia brought the clarity she had been after, as well as this decision: she is not going to call the police and get herself or the girl tangled in an endless legal mess. No. Instead, Gail is going to see to it that Melissa moves away as soon as possible, then she will leave too.

With that thought paramount in her mind, she rises from bed. As Bill goes on sleeping, Gail walks to the living room, where she finds a piece of plain white paper and a pen. She has had hours to draft and redraft this letter in her mind, so it comes out in one fluid rush from the second she puts the pen to the page. She tells Melissa that she is sorry, but as of the first of the month she is seven months behind on her rent. She tells her that they have been very patient and understanding due to her condition, however they cannot allow her to occupy the cottage any longer if she is not going to pay the amount agreed upon. Finally, she tells her that they have no choice but to ask her to kindly vacate the premises as soon as possible. And in closing, she tells her that they—or the truth is, Gail—regrets this more than Melissa knows.

When she is done, Gail does not bother to read over the letter. She simply slips it in an envelope, then puts on her quilted down coat and boots before stepping outside. Her breath mists in front of her face in the early morning air as she walks toward Melissa's cottage. Those dreadful birds, which look as large as pheasants to Gail, are perched on the dented gutters, pecking at their oily wings. The sound of her approaching footsteps sends them into the trees in a rush of flapping and squawking. When Gail reaches Melissa's door, she bends and slides the envelope in the gap beneath before quickly turning toward home.

Back inside, Gail tugs off her coat and boots. She walks down the hallway and is about to return to the bedroom when she catches sight of the lump of her husband's body under the covers. She cannot bring herself to climb in there and lie beside him another second. Not one more second. Instead, Gail goes to the kitchen and puts on a pot of coffee. As the machine brews and the aroma fills the air, she stands by the paned window in the kitchen door and stares out at that vacant house, then over at Melissa's cottage, wondering how the girl will react when she finds the letter. Gail has yet to figure out exactly what she will tell Bill when Melissa inquires about it, but she trusts that the right words will come to her when the moment arises. Perhaps she will simply tell him that she decided to take charge of the matter once and for all in order to get their finances sorted out. And most important, as soon as Melissa is gone, Gail will leave too.

When the coffee is ready, she lifts a mug from the mug tree and fills it. Gail is stirring in milk when a dull, scraping sound comes from another part of the house. She carries the coffee with her to the living room and stops short when she sees the basement door open and that yellow glow shining up at her. With one hand on her chest, Gail walks quietly to the bedroom and peers inside. The covers are pulled back. Bill is no longer there.

That clogged feeling returns to her throat as she calls out, “Bill? Bill, where are you?”

From the basement comes his low, crackling voice, “Down here.”

Slowly, Gail walks to the top of the stairs, one hand still holding the steaming coffee, the other pressed to her fluttering chest. Down below, she sees his shadow, stretched and distorted on the cement floor. In a wobbly, uneven voice, she asks, “What are you doing up so early?”

“I couldn't sleep.”

“Well, I made some coffee. Why don't you come up and have some?”

“No thanks.” Gail sees his shadow shift and reshape before he says, “It looks like you've been busy down here.”

“I cleaned a little,” Gail tells him. She takes one step into the basement to try and see him better. “What are you doing?”

“I am waiting for you to come down here.”

“Why?”

He does not answer. His shadow vanishes, and Gail hears the rumble of the storm doors opening. “Bill?” She takes another step lower, but a moment later a noise comes from behind her. Gail turns to see the front door opening. Bill steps into the house, holding the bottom of that grass green flashlight in one hand, the top in the other. “How did you—” Before she finishes the question, Gail realizes that he went outside and came around. That's when she blurts, “Did you rape that girl? Did you get her pregnant?”

And this is her only answer: Bill drops the flashlight and lifts his hands to push her backward into the basement. But Gail is too fast for him. She splashes her hot coffee in his face. As his arms shoot up to shield his eyes, she cracks the mug against his skull, then turns and runs down the steps. Behind her, Bill lets out a groan. When she reaches the bottom, Gail's chest is heaving, her breath coming in shallow rasps. As fast as she can, Gail weaves between those makeshift support columns, slamming into two of them as she moves toward the open storm doors that lead out into the daylight. Two at a time, she lunges up the cracked cement stairs, but the moment she reaches the top, Bill is standing there. He is holding the garden shovel he bought yesterday and he raises it up and swings, sending Gail toppling backward down the stairs.

Her head whacks against the cold concrete floor.

Her limbs come to rest in twisted, unnatural positions.

Blood pools around her small body.

Bill stands at the top of the cellar stairs, gripping the handle of the shovel and looking at his wife below. Before going down, he turns to be sure no one has seen what just happened. The only witnesses are those beady-eyed crows and the blank face of that vacant hunting cottage with the plastic over the windows. He turns back toward the basement and lowers himself down the stairs, dragging that shovel and stopping to close the storm doors behind him. In the dull yellow light of his workbench, he sees Gail's eyes flickering open and closed, her chest rising and falling in fast, uneven motions. She is still alive, he thinks as he wipes the sweat and coffee from his brow. Sweet Jesus, she is still alive.

And then the crying begins. This is a man who has made grave mistakes before, but never one as grave as this. And the reality of what his sudden rage and fear has produced this time brings an onslaught of strangled sobs. Between each and every gasp for breath, he repeats one single question: “What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?”

The only thing that stops this crying is the warm feeling of more blood pooling around his bare feet. Bill turns and searches for something to stop it, and that's when he finds the lint-covered sock that went missing, dropped behind a black flashlight on the floor and a box of Tide. He picks it up and presses the scratchy material to the wound on Gail's head. In seconds it is soaked through, and the blood keeps coming. Bill is about to look for something more substantial when a banging noise comes from the top of the stairs. He stares up at the rotting floorboards, the same way Gail did yesterday, and hears the sound again.

Someone is at the door.

Without thinking, Bill yanks off his T-shirt and tries his best to make a tourniquet around his wife's head. Even though he did this to her, he wants to save her. That is all he wants right now. But whoever it is up there keeps banging, and Bill is afraid that it might be someone who saw what happened. And that person might go to the police. So he leaves Gail and climbs the stairs, then rushes down the hall to the bedroom, where he wipes the coffee from his brow, the blood from his hands and feet with a towel from the laundry basket. When he throws on another shirt, Bill goes to the living room and opens the door.

Melissa Moody is standing on the stoop—one hand on her stomach, the other clenching a piece of paper, tears streaming down her face.

“What is it?” Bill asks in a breathless voice. If she witnessed what happened from the windows of her cottage, and this is the reason for her tears, he doesn't know what he will do.

Melissa holds out the letter she found beneath her door. When he takes it from her, her voice croaks out the words, “This note … from your wife… I can't… I don't have anyplace to go.”

As Bill stares down and reads Gail's graceful handwriting with all its slopes and curls, his hands begin to shake. So this is what she was doing when he woke up this morning and found the bed empty. This is what she was doing when it finally dawned on him that she must know something. And when she came back inside and went to the kitchen to make coffee, Bill got the idea to go downstairs, push those tools aside, and see if the flashlight had been touched. Still, he had not planned on losing control, the way he had so many times in his life. He had not planned on something so horrible and irreversible to occur.

Once he is finished with the letter, Bill crumples it in his hands and takes Melissa nervously, tentatively, in his arms. Her soft, tender body feels familiar and foreign all at once, because he has never held her this way before. Not like this. The touch of her skin so close to his sends the shame he has felt all these months spreading through him like a poison. The two of them stand there just like that, shaking, clinging to each other, while down below in the damp darkness of the basement, Gail struggles for her every breath.

“You go back to your cottage,” Bill tells Melissa after hugging her against his chest for what seems like hours. “You have nothing to worry about. This has all been a terrible mistake. You are like a daughter to us now. Gail and I would never turn you away.”

THE MAN ON THE PHONE SAID THAT HIS BUZZER WAS BROKEN, SO
he instructed Philip to shout up from the street when he arrived. The plan sounded simple enough until Philip reached the slim brick building on Sixth Street, just off Avenue A in the East Village. Given the steady stream of foot traffic and customers pouring in and out of the health food store on the first floor, he feels ridiculous screaming a name that sounds like it is straight from the pages of a Dr. Seuss book. Philip stands on the sidewalk in the middle of this brisk October afternoon, listening to bits and pieces of passing conversations as he waits for the right moment to start yelling for Donnelly Fiume.

“The manager promised that the flaxseed was finally supposed to be in on Tuesday, so where the hell was it? This is beginning to get abusive,” a gaunt man says to an equally gaunt woman as they step out of the store and walk down the street, leaving a whiff of BO in their wake.

Why is it always the health nuts who look so sickly, smell so funky, and are
forever
in a crabby mood? Philip wonders as he thinks of the no-butter-no-cream-no-oil freaks who come into the Olive Garden. Over the years, there were so many times when Philip wanted to scream in their faces, “You are in an Italian restaurant! What the hell do you want us to serve you, a rice cake?”

But of course he never did anything of the sort, since he had to suck it up in hopes of getting a decent tip. Whenever Deb Shishimanian was in one of her good moods, she and Philip used to joke that the restaurant's slogan should be changed from “When you're here, you're family” to “If you're here, you're an asshole.” Thankfully, Philip doesn't have to worry about that place any longer. It has been almost twenty-four hours since he walked out during his shift, and he has not missed the job even once. Last night, he parked his car in the garage at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, checked into a suite overlooking Broadway, and ordered a turkey club from room service—all courtesy of his father, since Philip finally christened the emergency credit card.

When the door to Nature's Melody Health Foods swings open a moment later, out steps a woman so sweaty she looks as though she has just finished running a marathon. Beneath her arm, she is carrying a tightly rolled purple mat. At first, Philip thinks she is talking to herself until he sees the cell phone wire dangling from her ear. “The thing about Bikram is that it's a lot like growing up in Texas,” she says. “Every summer was so damn hot, it was like a three-month Bikram session. I swear that's why I adjust so easily. Plus, I was sick of Pilates. All that rolling like a ball and clapping like a seal. I just don't see how that was helping to downsize my ass.”