1. Adjourned
Part Three
He tied her wrists to the faucet.
Tea towel through chrome, a clumsy tight knot that bit when she tested it, clubhouse cotton going thin over bone.
Margaret’s arms stretched across the island, pearls hanging toward the dues envelope, cardigan riding up her ribs.
Grant pulled the rest of the towel up over her eyes — burnt-coffee smell, damp from a sink — and the kitchen went dark except for the red light she could still imagine on the phone.
Blind. Bound. Skirt at her hips. Hose shining.
The serving window still up on a hall she couldn’t see, a bright rectangle anyone stacking a last chair could walk through.
“That’s the treasurer,” he said, toward the lens, vice-chair voice, mean.
“Husband’s at home with 6B laminated. Highlights like scripture. He doesn’t know what to do with this. Nobody on the board likes the agenda voice. Parking stickers. The six-page email. She hiked the skirt herself. She put her wrists out.”
Margaret was already wet.
She shifted on the stool and the hose dragged on granite, a slick sound the phone would keep.
She didn’t tell him to stop recording. She didn’t tell him to shut the window.
She breathed out a sound that wasn’t a motion and opened her knees another inch in the dark so the camera and the glass would get the tidy seam she’d thought about through new business.
“More than you,” she whispered. “You said more than you. Let them look. Let them hear you talk about him. I sat through the voice. I want the rest.”
Grant’s belt clicked.
The ice machine dumped a load of cubes like applause. The phone watched from the sugar jar. The window stayed open on a woman who couldn’t see who walked the hall, who couldn’t see the bulge she’d glanced at, who could only feel the knot and the towel and the granite under her chest.