Chapter 61
The meeting with the detectives took longer than he expected.
Henry parks his car at the curb and climbs out.
He beeps it locked, and he spares the wife’s house only the briefest glance.
He thinks of her in there, her mess, her grief.
Her rejection of him the previous morning.
The sting of her repudiation, after everything he did for her. The unfairness of it.
Still, he gave her a day. He waited for her to soften, to turn to him, to understand that he’d do anything for her.
Perhaps she’d open the gift box, put the flower in a glass of water.
To allow herself to be pulled, the tug of their connection, that invisible thread, dragging her across the street to Henry.
But that didn’t happen. You make me uncomfortable. Go and don’t come back. Her words still scream through him, and she ruined everything. She left him no choice.
She has no idea what he just did, what he told those detectives. Revenge really is sweet. And that’s why, still watching her house, very slowly, he smiles.
When he steps into his own house, he can hear his mother’s voice, the shrill grate of it, the deluded imperiousness.
“Have you told your work yet?”
“Not yet,” comes his father’s low murmur in reply.
Henry closes the front door softly, gently. He does not flip the dead bolt, nor does he move. He stands, back pressed against the door, and he listens.
“Well, when are you going to tell them? You have to give notice. Two weeks?”
“I’m not quitting, Jan. It’s going to be longer than that.”
Henry tries to swallow, but his throat is too dry. That’s the only reason he came in through the front door—it was a more direct route to some water. He thought he’d be able to retrieve a glass in peace before stealing away, back into his basement lair.
“Once is a tragedy. Two is a pattern,” Henry’s mother says sharply.
“There was, what, twenty years between them?” Henry’s father says. “It’s not like they’re connected. Like someone has been picking off the residents of Hawthorne Heights.”
Henry’d brought a novel with him to the police station, in case he had to wait for the detectives. He shifts, sweat sticking the cover of the paperback to his forearm.
“You don’t know that, Bill. You don’t know who killed that man across the street.”
“They’ll catch him soon,” says Henry’s father, and Henry hears the rustle of paper. His dad is turning the page of his newspaper, or perhaps folding the sheet with the crossword puzzle.
Apparently, he took the day off from work again today. Henry wasn’t surprised that his father didn’t go to the office on Monday. His mother seemed frantic, rattled. Henry could sense her energy from two floors below. He hopes that she didn’t notice his foray into the wife’s house.
“Or maybe it was the wife,” Henry’s father continues. “It’s usually the wife.”
“It’s usually the husband,” his mother snaps.
“Not this time.”
There’s a brief silence, tight and tense.
Henry wraps his hand around the doorknob.
He’s going to open it silently, then slip back out.
He’ll go around the back and head in through the basement.
His thirst has become background noise, and he’s certainly not going to stride into the kitchen and reveal to his parents that he’s been standing in the foyer eavesdropping.
“We’re getting out of here,” his mother says. “Do what you have to do. But we’re moving.”
The knob spins under Henry’s hand. He pulls the door open. The jam squeaks.
Footsteps, bare feet slapping against the tiled floors, then his mother is there. Henry assumes the sound had startled her, and she’s come to investigate the source.
She appears in the opening at the end of the hall, blue-and-white cotton dress swinging against her knees, toenails aggressively pink, and he can tell that he’s right.
He scared her—the noise, the squeak of the door.
And now she’s seen—it’s just him, her son.
So the fear should drain away. But he looks into her face, and it doesn’t. It’s still there.