Chapter 58
The wife isn’t answering the door, and Henry is concerned.
Any normal person would have gone to stay elsewhere under these circumstances.
Who would remain in the house where her husband was murdered?
Only a wife who wasn’t terribly sad about the murder.
A wife who hadn’t been happy. Like her. And he saw her open the door to the detectives yesterday.
He hasn’t seen her leave since. He knows she’s still here.
He rings the doorbell again, jamming his finger into the plastic button, which is brittle, a crack down the middle. His ear is pressed close to the door, and he hears nothing. It must be broken.
So maybe she’s deep within the house and she cannot hear even his persistent knock. Maybe she’s asleep, covers shielding her face. Maybe she’s in the shower, water beading on her smooth skin, dripping from her hair, trailing down, down, down.
Henry reaches for the doorknob, twists his hand ever so gently. The door isn’t locked.
He pushes it open, calling out, “Hello? Kate, it’s me.” If she can hear him, if she’s even here, she would have no idea who “me” is, and she wouldn’t recognize his voice, but he’d wanted to say it anyway. He wanted to know how those words would taste. Kate, it’s me; the intimacy of them.
The house is too warm, and there’s both an odor and a feel of dampness, but he closes the door behind him.
Henry assumes that Kate isn’t in the kitchen or anywhere else on the first floor of the house.
If she was, there would have been some reaction to his call.
Still he hears nothing, so he takes his time, moving through the rooms.
The stairs are slick, hardwood, and Henry doesn’t try to silence his steps.
“Kate,” he calls out again from the landing, ready for her to know that he’s here. “Are you home?”
Nothing.
The house is similar to his own, lacking his mother’s dated touch of floral wallpaper trim, but with the same floor plan.
And, of course, he’s been inside before.
Henry turns toward the primary bedroom, and while he can’t yet see her, he senses that she’s near.
He takes the last few steps quickly, bursting into the room.
But it’s empty, and he’s doubting everything until he hears a sharp intake of breath.
He looks to the bathroom.
“Are you here?” he calls out authoritatively. “Are you hurt?” He abandons his implication of closeness, instead behaving like the police might if they were looking for the wife, expecting her to be here, and she’d failed to answer the door.
In response to this call, finally, there is something. A terrified something—not quite a scream but holding the same level of fear that a scream does.
Henry is in the bathroom, then the closet, in only a second. The wife is there, sitting on the floor, face red and sleep creased, eyes hideously swollen, hair matted.
“What are you doing here?” she asks. She leans away from him, clutching her shirt around her chest as though he’d walked in on her naked, but she appears to be wearing quite a bit of clothing, like a homeless woman draped in everything she owns, despite the damp heat of the house.
He feels unexpectedly angry with her. She looks awful. She looks like a mess.
“Your front door was open,” he lies. “I came by to express my condolences and saw that it wasn’t shut all the way. I thought something was wrong.” Something is wrong, clearly. She looks like she’s been sleeping on this closet floor for days.
“It—what?” she asks. “So you just came in instead of calling the police?”
“What if you were hurt in here? Your husband was just killed. I didn’t know how much time there was.”
He’s impressed by his quick thinking, although he does wonder whether she will report what he said about the door to the police. He doesn’t want to be questioned about that, about coming to visit her.
“Can I…help you with something?” he asks quickly, trying to distract her. “Do you need me to get you some water? Or something to eat?”
Kate shakes her head and begins to climb to a standing position. She’s moving stiffly, and the shirt, a white button-down, hangs to her knees, and Henry sees that it’s not hers at all, but one of her dead husband’s, and he does not like this.
“Please leave my house,” she says, backing farther away.
Henry blinks at her, extends his offerings.
“I brought you this,” he says. The gift box he’d found in his parents’ pantry—squares of chocolate and nut brittle, still wrapped in plastic, likely a holiday present his father had received as work.
He must have brought it home and his mother hid it, for herself or simply so that his father wouldn’t eat it.
She was always worrying about her husband’s weight.
And that she kept it in the house, that she didn’t dispose of it, despite that it’s rife with nuts, shows Henry what sort of mother she is.
And on top of the box, a flower, clipped from his mother’s front garden. Petals red and vibrant, not yet wilting.
The wife shakes her head sharply, and the way she’s looking at the flower, at the box, as though they’re weapons, unsettles him.
“Please,” he says. “Take it. You’ll be doing me a favor. I’m deathly allergic to nuts, so I really can’t keep it.”
He takes a step toward her, and she flinches. “No,” she says. “Please, no.”
Henry wants to insist again. He hesitates, opens his mouth.
“Please, just go,” she says again, firmer, wild.
He stares, uncomprehending. After all that he’s done for her? And he’s here now with kindness, with gifts.
“You make me uncomfortable.” She’s almost shouting now. She’s snapped, her fear uninhibited. “You are making me very uncomfortable.” Each word a bite, crisp.
“I didn’t do anything,” Henry says, stunned. By her venom, by her terror. Her suspicion is palpable, and he understands that he must deflect. “It was the murderer, who lives in the house next to mine. It wasn’t me.”
He expects her to soften, to ask him for more details—to thank him. But the terror doesn’t drain from her face.
“I didn’t say it was,” she says, so soft, and a touch bewildered, and he realized that he misread her suspicion, that he said too much.
She’s pressed against the rack of clothes behind her now, as though she can disappear herself within them. “Please go,” she says again. “You can’t just let yourself into someone’s house. Go and don’t come back, or I will call the police. I swear.”
He stares at her for another beat. He’s nearly certain that she doesn’t have her phone on her, that it’s not concealed within the folds of her dead husband’s shirt. But she could get to it later, and she could tell them that he refused to leave her house.
He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want her to tell them about this at all.
So, although his anger is roiling, a force that cannot be ignored, he goes.
Back down the stairs, dropping the gift box, the flower onto the floor in the foyer because he can’t bear to leave the house with them, then through the front door, and she’s ruined it. She’s ruined everything.