Chapter 63
“The news, Kate. My own son-in-law.”
Kate is quiet. This conversation, one of so many things she’s been dreading since she discovered her husband’s body on Saturday night, could be avoided no longer.
“That’s not right,” her mother continues. “You know it isn’t.”
Kate nods, although her mother can’t see her.
Although there are so many things about this entire situation that aren’t right, and the way Kate’s mother learned about Ben’s death is the least of them.
She wants to point out that her mother had barely known Ben—that she’d barely known Kate.
That she’d always made Kate feel like there was something wrong with her for working so hard in school, for dreaming about having a successful career, for dreaming about moving away from the tiny swamp-like town where she was raised.
It was always just the two of them, growing up side by side in some ways.
Yet there was never the closeness one might of expect of a young single mother and her sole daughter.
There was a coldness. Kate always felt like the burden she knew she was.
And no matter how hard she worked, no matter what she accomplished in her career, her mother never seemed proud.
Only resentful, a misplaced and bizarre sort of envy seeping from her pores like the cheap perfume she’d always so aggressively worn on her neck and arms.
“It’s such a shock, Mom,” Kate says. “It still is. I couldn’t—I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. Not even you.”
Especially not you.
“I should come up there and stay with you,” her mother says, just as Kate feared she would. “I can help you.”
Kate inhales sharply.
Two knocks at her front door, crisp like gunfire.
“Mom,” Kate says firmly, “I have to go.” She stands, looks through the front windows, and her relief at having a reason to end this call so quickly is extinguished. “The police are here.”
She hangs up the phone.
It’s two uniformed officers, standing on her porch. She stares through the windows before she flips the dead bolt, watching them, their marked car in her driveway, for several seconds, cautious and unsure, as though fearful they might dissolve into something else.
She assumes they’re here to provide an update—an arrest, at least the zeroing-in on a single person. But they have no news, only a request that Kate get into their car and come to the police station with them because Detectives Perkins and Scott want to speak with her.
That’s how they put it: “Speak with you,” their expressions stern. They’re both young, both male, both reeking of judgment and authority. Kate’s unease, its stifling presence since she discovered Ben’s body, roars in her ears.
Still, she says, “Okay. Let me just get my keys.” What choice does she have? She must seem helpful. She must be helpful.
They step inside while she goes to retrieve her keys from the glass bowl on the kitchen counter. Ben’s wallet is still in there, and her eyes burn as she pushes it aside. She always leaves her keys here—Ben has been known to misplace his, but never her.
“I—I can’t find them,” she half calls to the officers. She wants to search for them; she wants to understand. But the officers will think she’s stalling, making excuses. They’ll think she’s scared, or guilty. She grabs Ben’s keys instead, and her own wallet, and tucks them into her bag.
She rides to the station in the back seat of the marked vehicle. There’s glass between her and the officers. She feels like a dog—one who’s been a very bad girl.
Inside, she’s led into a small windowless room, similar to the one they brought her to the night Ben was killed. In fact, it might be the same room. Kate can’t be sure. It’s all a blur, that night. Every moment since Ben was killed is dark, edges fuzzy, a charcoal drawing smeared with fingertips.
She doesn’t wait long before Detectives Perkins and Scott enter with their notebooks and cell phones and importance.
When they relay her Miranda rights, pass the half sheet of paper across the table toward her, and ask her to initial and sign, Kate pauses.
She’s known all along—her status as wife, her presence at home—that she’s a person of interest. But there’s been no physical evidence, no reason she would’ve wanted to kill her husband. Something decidedly is going wrong.
Don’t say anything, she tells herself. Don’t talk. Ask for a lawyer. Everyone knows that—it’s the only logical thing to do. But she didn’t do anything wrong. She did not kill Ben.
Her mind filled with fog, she draws the paper closer to her with the tips of her fingers, as though it’s white hot.
She has lawyer friends. She should call one.
But she’s too curious, too desperate to know what these detectives have, to delay any longer.
And she’s an intelligent and competent person—she used to be.
Can’t she protect herself? Too smart for your own good, she thinks suddenly—the words her mother has said to her countless times, starting when Kate was just a little girl, perhaps more apropos than ever.
She’s still feeling rattled from the brief conversation with her mom.
She’ll have to speak with her again soon. Her mother won’t give up.
Her thoughts race. She signs the paper, willing her hand steady, then shoves it back across the table.
“Why?” she asks, eyes flicking from the detectives to the cameras in the corners of the room, as a weariness, a numbness, a sense of removal, welcoming and dangerous, settles over her. “Why are you doing this?”
“Just some more questions for you,” says Detective Scott lightly. Kate’s rights, that half sheet of paper, gripped tightly between her fingers. She passes it to Perkins, who waves it vaguely, stands, and leaves the room.
“Obviously you have some new information,” Kate presses, their fabricated nonchalance grating so sharply. “You still have no idea who’s killed my husband, but you have something else on me. So what is it?”
Detective Perkins returns, a stack of papers in his hands.
He slaps the stack onto the table, far enough from her that she must lean forward to read the lines of black across the page.
The bottoming-out of her stomach when she does, and the pitiful size of the stack. It doesn’t look like a book at all.
It might seem, as you read, that ours is a story of love.
It’s not.
Ours is a tale of murder.
The reader’s first words, but not the first words she wrote. She’d added those later, after Klara killed Troy.
And the police have them. They read them, printed them. This knowledge makes her feel irrevocably exposed. It’s too hot in the room, but she wraps her arms around herself, as though she can disappear within the bends of her elbows.
“Interesting, isn’t it,” Perkins says, “that you were working on a novel about a wife who killed her husband?”
“How did you get that?” she asks. She reaches ineffectually for the pages, noticing the tremor in her hand. “I don’t understand.”
The detectives exchange a look, unspoken words flying between them.
“Your neighbor sent it to us,” Perkins says.
“My neighbor?” Kate leans back, aghast. “What neighbor? None of my neighbors know I’m writing a book.”
Scott’s head tilts, chin tipping, as though to say Are you sure? Are you sure you want to deny this?
Perkins removes a page from the bottom of the stack, slides it closer to her, and Kate can tell that it’s an email. It’s dated a couple weeks earlier. Here you go! reads the body of the message. There’s one attachment, the file name: Untitled Manuscript by Kate Harvey.docx.
The recipient’s email address is not one she’d known, but she does recognize the name. “Henry,” she says. Her throat bobs dryly. “How did he do this?”
“You sent it to him,” Perkins says firmly. “You were stuck, and you’d discussed books together. You were hoping another pair of eyes might help you, that he might have a suggestion for you to relieve your writer’s block.”
“Is that what he told you?” asks Kate. She thinks of Henry in the doorway of her closet.
“He broke into my house and read it. He must have. He did that yesterday, too. I was asleep and he came in. He told me my front door was open, but it couldn’t have been.
He’s—there’s something wrong with him. He’s been watching me and trying to run into me for months. ”
Another wordless glance.
“And you’re just bringing this up now,” Scott says. It’s not a question.
“You should be talking to him,” Kate insists, feeling frantic—sounding frantic.
She can almost hear the clock ticking. Time, they are all running out of time.
“Ask him about coming into my house yesterday. The pictures. He took pictures, I think, and my keys are missing.” She reaches for the email again.
“I’ll check my credit card records. I must have been out running an errand and he went into my house.
Or he somehow hacked into my laptop. On this date. ” She taps the page.
She sees now, too late, that he’s not harmless at all.
That she should have told them about what Henry was doing the first night they brought her here, as soon as she’d found Ben’s body.
That she should have, at least, called them yesterday after he’d let himself inside her house and found her in the closet.
After she realized the pictures were missing. She has been so dangerously inert.
“Talk to him,” she presses.
“We will,” says Perkins, lifting a palm, dismissive. “But for now, I’m more interested in the fact that you wrote a novel about a woman who murdered her husband.”
“That’s not what the novel is about,” says Kate, affronted by his gross simplification of the book’s themes.
“It’s about a woman in an unhappy relationship.
It’s about how this woman finds herself in this relationship that feels intense but nice at times but that isn’t healthy.
It’s actually abusive, but it takes her a while to see that. ”
“Is that like your relationship with Ben, then?” Scott asks. “Intense, unhealthy?”
Kate lifts her fingers to her forehead, feels the dampness there.
“Abusive?”
“Of course it wasn’t,” Kate says.
They watch her, nonplussed. They don’t believe her.
“This is ridiculous,” Kate snaps. “It’s fiction. It has nothing to do with my life. No one is interrogating Stephen King about cannibalism,” she insists, thinking of Holly, which she had recently devoured.
The detectives blink at her wordlessly, blankly, so she can’t tell whether they don’t understand her literary reference or are pretending not to.
Her head is swimming, throbbing, and she presses her fingertips into her eyebrows. The pain is the worst there.
“What time is it?” she asks wearily.
Scott glances at her watch. “It’s eight forty,” she says grudgingly, as though it’s difficult for her to offer Kate even this, so little.
There’s been no tea this time. Only lukewarm water, the smallest sips of which turn Kate’s stomach.
She only ever drinks her water ice cold.
Ben used to tease her, the way she’d fill her glass or water bottle with ice, going back for more once it had melted.
“You’re really only drinking melted ice,” he used to say.
She’s been here far too long, stuck in this room, while the person who killed Ben is out there.
“I didn’t kill my husband,” says Kate. She’s looking at the camera as she speaks, the one across from her in the corner. “Clearly there isn’t any physical evidence that I did. You’re wasting your time.” This, she tells the detectives.
Perkins seems to bristle, and she understands that if she makes him angry, if she prods at his misguided confidence and pride, he will only double down and hit her even harder.
And she cannot do this anymore. But she’s not willing to confess.
“You are wasting your time with me,” she says again.
“Henry has been watching me—stalking me. Breaking in. And there’s a convicted murderer living across the street.
I’d be focusing on them if I were you. And that is all I want to say.
I’m asserting my right to an attorney. I don’t need you to bring one in for me.
I’ll hire my own. And right now, I want to go home. ”