The Scarlet Letter Scandal (17 page)

When Lisa pulled her car into the driveway, she was surprised to see Jim’s car there, since he’d told her he would not be home.
Maybe he’s going to surprise me
, she thought, though he sometimes parked inside the garage. She saw his passenger’s side door was open and thought that odd, too. And then she noticed that the house was completely dark. What was going on? She looked around, thinking maybe he had seen a neighbor, though it wasn’t like him to stop and talk.

She walked to the front door and it was locked. Now this was odd. The trashcans were still on the curb; the garage was closed. Where could he have gone? She walked back to her car and got back in, leaving the door open. She figured Jim would show up any moment, having run into a neighbor to talk about—what? They never talked to the neighbors, really. She didn’t even know her next-door neighbors well enough to go to their door.

She got out of the car and locked it, walking over to Jim’s car. The keys were dangling from the ignition. She couldn’t imagine how, since he’d told her he would not be home and not to wait up, he’d be in the house, but it was the only logical place. Maybe he’d had to go to the bathroom or something and just not returned to the—but his keys were in the car and the house was locked…

She’d check anyway. She opened the house with her own keys and the mail was on the foyer floor. He hadn’t been in here yet. He would have turned the lights on. And then she started to feel a sense of dread.

She walked back to Jim’s car, seeing his wallet in the center console. He had to be right nearby.

“Jim?” she called. She didn’t want to yell and disturb the neighbors but she wanted him to hear her.

She started walking around the side of the house to the backyard, though she couldn’t imagine what he’d be doing back there in the pitch black. The sidewalk light illuminated their driveway, but out back it was very dark.

She took her phone out of her purse and touched the “Jim” contact. And she heard the familiar ringtone, the one she’d hear when he couldn’t find his phone in the house and asked her to call it. The electronic tone sounded muffled, somehow distant, but close. As she turned the corner from the side of the house to the backyard, she saw the faint light. It took her mind a moment to even remember the cellar steps. She never used them. What on earth would he be doing down there at this time of night?

“Jim?” she called again.

It was too dark to see where she was going, so she double-clicked the home button on her iPhone, keeping the phone call alive but opening her flashlight app. She moved toward the cellar steps, expecting him to walk up the stairs at any moment. The closer she got to the steps, the brighter the light from his phone got until suddenly it was dark again. She looked at her phone and the call had ended.

She figured he was inside the basement for some reason and hadn’t heard her. Her flashlight app illuminated the curled green garden hose. She cursed herself for forgetting to wind it up on its reel, picked it up and tossed it aside so she wouldn’t…then suddenly she saw a white plastic bag puffing up in the breezy fall gusts. It fluttered up a few steps, back down…she traced it with her flashlight when to her shock the beam illuminated her husband. He lay on his back, his legs twisted under him oddly, his head bent at a horribly unnatural angle.

Lisa screamed at the top of her lungs, an agonizing wail that echoed in all the corners of her brain and across their 0.601 acres of land and beyond. A dog from three houses away barked from inside the house, but she didn’t hear it as she ran down the steps. She knew, even the first moment she saw him, that he was dead. His eyes were open. Blood had trickled down the side of his mouth and she saw that it was red.
Still red, so it just happened.

Lisa felt herself spinning, like she would throw up or faint. But the thought of passing out on her husband’s corpse was enough to bring her brain back to a steadier place. She felt for a pulse, knowing there wouldn’t be one. She propped her phone on the step to provide light, and then she saw the open shoebox and the four-inch red leather spike heels. She recognized the Louboutin box, though it had been so many months since she’d seen shoes like that.

She picked up her phone, moved up a few steps, sat down, in shock at the realization. She began to bawl, at first nonsensically for the baby who would never have a father, even though that baby hadn’t lived. She cried out of guilt for the loneliness she had felt in her marriage, what she could have done better, and for the shame he must have felt about the shoes, that he had to hide them from her. She wondered if she unlocked the basement door right now, if she’d see stacks and stacks of them. She couldn’t face that. And then she was suddenly angry: if he hadn’t come down here to hide the shoes in the first place, he wouldn’t have… and then she wailed again, remembering the garden hose. It was her fault.
I killed my husband
. However unintentionally, Lisa thought,
I am at fault
.

She was sure she would go to jail. She shook and trembled and cried, more quietly now. Had the neighbors heard her? Should she run and get one of them? Call 911? He was already dead. Her thoughts flew, and she had the odd thought that she should feel more sad right now. Why wasn’t she more upset?

Lisa hesitated for a few moments and then decided to call Maggie. She really couldn’t think of anyone else to call—she didn’t have any friends in the neighborhood and she was terrified to call 911, of the police and the questions. Wouldn’t they arrest her?

“Hey there, baker,” Maggie answered. “What are you doin’ calling this la—?”

She stopped talking when she heard Lisa’s sobs. “What’s the matter, hon?” Maggie asked with concern.

“I need you to come to my house,” Lisa sputtered out. “My husband is dead and they are going to think I killed him.”

“Don’t move a muscle,” said Maggie. “I will be right there. Don’t touch anything or move anything, and get away from where he is. Sit tight. I will see you in five minutes.”

She hung up, and Lisa put down her phone and breathed. Maggie would somehow make everything okay, though it would obviously never be okay again. She shivered in the fall breeze, pulling her arms tightly around her thin frame. She wanted to go inside, she didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to look, but she couldn’t look away. She put her head down on her knees.

Jim’s cracked phone screen lit up again, a ping noise jolting her out of her frozen state.
NEW MESSAGE FROM K
appeared on the front screen, with the “slide to unlock” option. She instinctively slid, and the password screen came up. She thought for a second. His birthday? No. Her birthday? No. Their wedding anniversary? 0-4-0-7. And suddenly she was looking a text message with a photo. A photo of a woman’s foot dangling seductively out of a single dark blue spike heel and the words
: Ready for another foot job soon?

She smashed the phone onto the concrete as hard as she could. She didn’t care that she wasn’t supposed to touch anything—the wrecked phone would look like it happened in the fall. She didn’t care anymore. She shakily ascended the cellar stairs, tossing the garden hose out of the way, walked into the house, then into the kitchen, opened a bottle of wine, and sat at her kitchen counter barstool, waiting for Maggie to get there.

When Maggie came through the door, Lisa was on her second glass of wine and looked a mess. Maggie ran over and hugged her.

“What happened? Are you okay?” Maggie asked.

“It’s so awful,” said Lisa. “He’s out back.”

She took Maggie around the house to the backyard and shone her flashlight app down the steps. Maggie gasped.

“Holy shit, you didn’t push him, did you?” she asked.

“No!” said Lisa. “I came home and couldn’t find him and then I heard his phone ringing…” Her voice trailed off as she got choked up.

Maggie hugged her again. Lisa pointed to the garden hose.

“I left it across the stairs,” she said. “It’s my fault. I will have to go to jail.”

“Oh, honey, no,” said Maggie. “This isn’t your fault. It was an accident. I thought he got rid of the shoe thing.”

Lisa sighed, trying to get the strength to tell the story.

“I thought so too,” she said. “When I was waiting for you his phone lit up and it was his…shoe girlfriend or whoever.”

“What?” asked Maggie.

“I smashed his phone when I saw it, and I’m sure that’s more evidence—the police will think I killed him!”

“Okay, sweetie, listen to me,” said Maggie. “You didn’t kill him, you came home and found him dead from a tragic accident. If the police make you go down to the station, you’re not even going to talk to them without Eva there, if that’s even necessary.”

“I’m supposed to be sad but I’m not and they’ll know,” whispered Lisa as she trembled.

“I’ll call the police. And we will say we came home in the same car and found him together,” said Maggie.

“But it’s a lie!” said Lisa. “We can’t lie to the police!”

“If I’m a witness that he was already dead,” said Maggie, “you won’t even have to worry about them wondering how he got that way.”

Then Maggie pointed to the garden hose and looked at Lisa, who understood, picked it up, and placed it back across the top of the stairs where it had been when Jim fell.

“You only went down the steps to see if he was still alive,” said Maggie, “and I will make the 911 call. The end.”

Lisa looked down the darkened stairs, seeing only shadows—her husband’s, and the glint of the bright red shoe from the cellar stair where it had landed, upright.

“The end,” she echoed.

M
aggie sat at the kitchen counter with her (estranged? first? She never knew how to refer to him) husband Dave, drinking coffee. He’d just brought in the morning newspaper. Things had been peaceful in the months they’d been back together; their lives had slipped into a comfortable routine and Maggie was pleased at how much she’d missed the simplicities of family life. Her grown daughters would come and go for visits, but she appreciated the sense of quiet in her life now—something she hadn’t experienced often in raising kids.

“How do you think Lisa is going to be today?” asked Dave.

“I think she will probably still be in shock even though it’s been a few days,” said Maggie. “She made the decision yesterday to have his body cremated and said she can’t deal with planning a memorial service right now. And I do not blame her. His own family hasn’t even asked about a memorial service—it’s weird.”

“I feel so bad for her, she seems like a bit of a loner,” said Dave.

“She’s a quiet one,” said Maggie. “But she will get through this. I know it really helped her when she lost the baby to get away for the weekend and visit Eva on the island, so Eva is setting up another girls’ weekend for us in a week or two. She really needs to get out of that house.”

“That neighborhood gives me the creeps,” said Dave.

“Oh hell yeah,” said Maggie. “Fucking Peyton Place meets Twin Peaks over there for sure. She’ll have that place for sale in no time. You know, I was thinking about letting her stay at my place for a while.”

Maggie said this offhandedly but Dave looked up from the paper at her. Maggie had spent almost every night with him in their family home in recent months, keeping her apartment over the shop just to use the kitchen or take a break while she worked in town. He had sensed her resistance to letting the apartment go, but hadn’t wanted to pressure her into moving out of her comfort zone.