Chapter 2

She was dozing when he finally returned. Moving bars of light from his headlights swept across the wallpaper of their bedroom as he parked in the driveway. And then she heard the faint sound of the trunk being opened and closed, followed by the less-faint sound of him coming in through the front door. She could tell he was being quiet, trying not to wake her. Gilbert jumped heavily off the bed to go and investigate, but Martha decided to stay put. He'd be upstairs soon, probably take a shower, get into some clean pajamas, then slide under the covers and up against her body. She curled onto her left side and waited, but she was asleep by the time he came to bed.

In the morning, Alan was up before her.

"Oh no," Martha said from the tangle of sheets. "You're up already."

"Shh," he said. "Stay in bed. I have that breakfast meeting with Saul, remember?"

"Oh yeah," she said, pulling a second pillow underneath her shoulders. "I remember," she lied. "How was Denver?"

"Was I in Denver? When was that?" He chuckled at his own joke. "It was good, actually. Decent sales."

"Oh, I'm happy for you."

Before he left, Alan unpacked his carry-on bag in the bedroom while they talked some more about the convention he'd been at for the last three days. Then she told him about having to fire one of the volunteers at the library because she was talking too much to the patrons.

"Can you fire a volunteer?"

"You can tell them that their services aren't needed anymore. Jill was going to do it, but at the last minute she panicked and asked me to talk to her. It was awful."

"I'm sure you were as nice as possible."

"She asked me if it was something she'd done, and I lied and said that the board wanted to reduce the number of volunteers. I don't think she believed me."

When Alan had gone downstairs, Martha got up, brushed her teeth, and combed her hair, but stayed in the cotton nightgown she'd slept in, pulling a cardigan on over it because she was cold. She got down just as Alan was at the front door, wearing his wool winter coat. It was early April, but as she often thought, and sometimes said, in New Hampshire April is really just March Part Two. "Let me at least get a hug before you go," she said, sliding into his arms. Alan had large strong hands and he ran them up along her rib cage, grazing her left breast.

"Maybe we could take a little nap this afternoon," he said. "I'll be home around three."

"I'd like that," Martha said.

"What are your plans today?"

"Nothing," she said. It was Monday, but since she'd begun working from Tuesday through Saturday, Mondays were now her Sundays. "I can wash your clothes from the trip this morning. I was going to do laundry anyway."

"That would be a big help."

After he was gone, she took a long shower, then made herself tea and toast. Since having that little talk with herself the night before, she suddenly felt stupid about her suspicions. What had her suspicions even been, exactly? That Alan was grumpy when he returned from work? That Alan had something to do with a young teacher committing suicide?

It had begun to rain outside, a cold spring rain, and she was actually happy about it. Her mom had always reminded her that when she was a seven-year-old she had declared rain to be the best weather because it was reading weather. And she had never really shed that opinion. After starting a load of laundry she was looking forward to getting back into her novel, Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym. She'd never heard of Pym until one of her friends on Facebook posted something about her, and now she was steadily working her way through all of her books.

Alan's clothes from his trip were in the laundry basket and his bag was stowed away in his closet. Considering how much he traveled, she wouldn't have blamed him for never really unpacking. But he was fastidious about putting things away. "When I'm home," he liked to say, "I'm truly home."

She made two piles on the bed, one of colors and one of whites, then took a close look at Alan's two white shirts, making sure they were in good shape, no underarm stains or frayed collars. They both seemed fine, but flipping one of the white shirts around she spotted a reddish brown stain on the lower left-hand side of the back of the shirt. She touched it with a fingertip, a stain that looked as though a finger had left it. A finger dipped in something—chocolate, maybe? She looked closer, even sniffing at it, and there was the slightest smell of something elemental, earthy. Could it be blood? She tried to imagine Alan getting a paper cut or something on his finger, then wiping at his back. She made the move herself, twisting her arm around to see if it made any kind of sense. It didn't really.

Something moved inside of her, her organs shifting. Was there really blood on her husband's shirt?

She should just ask him about it. "Oh, honey. Did you cut yourself on your trip? I think I found some blood on one of your shirts." That's what an unsuspecting wife would do, right? And he would tell her about pricking his finger on some brooch he sold and then it would be over. But instead she found herself sitting in front of her laptop about to see if anything strange had happened during Alan's recent trip. All she knew about the conference he had just come back from was that it had been held in Denver, Colorado, and that it had been a conference for high school English teachers.

"I thought those were busts for you," she'd said before he'd left.

"They used to be. Old-school English teachers definitely did not go in for novelty mugs, but I think it's changing. I sell a ton of grammar T-shirts."

"What's a grammar T-shirt?"

"Oh, you know, let's eat kids. Then, let's eat (comma) kids"—he ran his finger across his chest to demonstrate—"and then it says something like punctuation saves lives."

"Oh, funny," Martha said. She really did think that most of Alan's humorous T-shirts were actually quite clever.

"Well, it's a break from math teachers, and for that I'll be thankful."

Martha punched in "English teacher" and "conference" and "Denver" and came up with something called Southwest English Teachers Symposium, or SWETS, that had been held this weekend. She read a little bit about it—it had been held at a downtown hotel, and the keynote speaker was a novelist Martha had heard of but hadn't read, giving a talk on diversity in curriculum choice. There was one small article about the conference in a local Denver paper, more of a mention, really, that said how the city of Denver would be inundated with English teachers over the weekend, so be sure to "watch your grammar" to avoid a scolding. It felt like something that might have been written fifty years ago, but Martha was a librarian and was used to stereotypes.

She put in a new search: "Denver" and "crime." She scanned the list of hits and nothing jumped out at her. She changed the search to simply: "Denver assault." Why assault? she thought as she hit the return button. She then switched the findings so that they were restricted to news stories, the most recent of which had the headline: "DPD Investigating Assault of Woman Found in Parking Lot." The article was dated yesterday, the incident occurring fairly close to where Alan had been staying. She clicked on it.

Police are investigating an alleged incident of assault in the Five Points neighborhood on Friday night. The victim was found unresponsive at the 25th Street Parking Lot just after 2 A.M.

The 21-year-old woman had suffered a head injury and is currently in stable condition. A spokesperson for the Denver Police Department said that they are looking for anyone who might have witnessed the attack to come forward.

After reading the brief article twice, Martha stood and walked from the kitchen back to the bedroom. Once there, she was confused for a moment, couldn't even remember climbing the stairs, or why she'd come to her bedroom. But then a familiar series of beeps alerted her that the washing machine had just completed a cycle. She looked on the bed, where Gilbert was now happily sleeping on a pile of colored laundry, and she remembered that she'd thrown the whites into the wash. It was a vague memory, though, even if it had happened less than an hour ago. Alan's white shirt with the bloodstain was now just a freshly laundered shirt. Maybe she'd done it on purpose, or maybe it was simply that the whole thing was ludicrous, the idea that her husband, the traveling salesman, was some kind of homicidal maniac. It would have been markedly stranger if there had been no crimes committed in Denver over the weekend.

She went to the washer and transferred the whites to the dryer, then went to get the remaining pile, but Gilbert lashed out with a paw when she tried to gather them up. She decided she wasn't in a rush and left Gilbert on his pile of Alan's clothes.

"What do you smell there?" she asked her cat. "What's Alan been up to?"

He stared back at her as though he knew but would never, ever tell.

That night, over dinner, Martha asked Alan about the shirt. He'd looked flustered at first, eventually claiming that he had no idea how the stain had gotten there.

"You think I'm some kind of serial killer, Martha?" he'd said, raising one brow.

It was an obvious joke, but something in his tone made Martha's flesh crawl a little bit. "Why would you say that?"

"I don't know. Because I had blood on my shirt?"

"I mean, wouldn't I think that maybe you'd cut yourself first? Why go straight to serial killer?"

"I was just making a joke." He put his hands up in a gesture of surrender.

That night they watched two episodes of the current season of Outlander. Alan fell asleep halfway through the second episode, the way he always fell asleep, his eyes simply closing while he remained in his normal seated position. Martha turned the volume down and flipped over to HGTV, not because she felt like watching it, but because she wanted something mindless on while she thought. She decided to calmly appraise her situation because she kept going over the odd discussion with her husband at dinner. She told herself that if she'd married a bad man, a man who (maybe) assaulted people, he'd have had some ready-made excuse for the evidence on his shirt. As it was, he'd seemed genuinely baffled by it. Or had he? She couldn't figure it out, and she thought, once again, that she just didn't know him that well, despite the fact that they were married. She knew everything external about him—the way he moved and spoke and made love and ate his food—but his internal world was a complete mystery. When he lay in bed at night she had no idea what he was thinking about, and she didn't know if that was unusual or not. Maybe everyone was the same as her, going through life surrounded by people who amounted to being little more than strangers?

Still, it bothered her. That sort of thing—not knowing—had always bothered her. Maybe it was why she'd become a librarian. When she was twelve years old, she'd given a class presentation on her favorite novel, The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin. Afterward the teacher, Ms.Myrvoll, had asked a few questions. One of them, and Martha remembered this like it was yesterday, was whether Martha sought out other books by Ellen Raskin. She hadn't, really. In fact, she'd hardly thought of it at all. It was the book she loved, not necessarily the author, but that night she lay in bed and thought about the question. Suddenly she not only wanted to know everything that the author had ever written, she was now determined to read it all. The next day had been a Saturday and she'd talked her mother into driving her to the library.

"That was the day you became obsessed with libraries," her mother had said, on more than one occasion. The other thing she liked to say, used to like to say, was how Martha always had her nose in a book. It was mostly true, what her mother said, but Martha wasn't just obsessed with books. She was obsessed with getting the whole story. How many books had this author written? What was their life like? Did they have a secret pseudonym?

A week later Alan went to another conference, this one for community college educators down in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The weather had finally turned nice, and on Alan's first day away, Martha walked into downtown Portsmouth to do some shopping and eat lunch at a Mexican restaurant she liked. While she was there Alan texted her a picture of himself, the hotel swimming pool sparkling in the sun behind him. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and wire-rimmed sunglasses. "Water's lovely," he wrote.

Something about that picture—since when did Alan send selfies?—made Martha feel as though a spider were skittering across the nape of her neck. Had he suddenly decided to send her updates from his trip, something he'd never done before? And if that was the case, then why? That night, after cheese and crackers for dinner, she went to her computer and decided to do the thing that she had been postponing doing since finding the shirt with the stain on it. First things first, she did a search of every email she'd gotten from Alan since they'd been in a serious relationship. He had a habit of always sending her his itinerary when he went away on a trip. It was always very formal, the subject reading "Wichita Trip" or "Chattanooga Conference" and then he'd provide details: the dates of travel; his flights, complete with links; the hotel he was staying at. It was actually a very helpful thing that he did, since Martha often found herself wondering where in the country he was at any given moment. She found a spiral notebook in one of the drawers of her desk and opened it up to a blank page, writing down a chronological history of her husband's trips. Since shortly before they'd gotten married he'd been on twenty-three trips.

After making her list she opened up a browser window and began to search news stories. It took her three hours, but when she was done, she had written down five separate incidents.

On February4, 2018, about two months before she and Alan were married, a twenty-four-year-old prostitute named Kelli Baldwin was found bludgeoned to death in Atlanta, Georgia. That same weekend Alan was at an Atlanta trade show of high school curriculum materials.

Three months later, Bianca Muranos, a single mother and a receptionist in the Chicago area, was found dead in the alleyway behind a downtown conference hotel. Cause of death was listed as blunt-force trauma to the head. This was in May, the same weekend that a national conference on STEM education was being held at the same downtown conference hotel.

In July of that same year was the incident at Shepaug University that she knew about already. Josie Nixon, pronounced a suicide.

The fourth incident had happened at the Making Math Fun Conference, an annual event held every October in Fort Myers, Florida. That conference had actually been mentioned in the article Martha found about Nora Johnson, the victim. She had been a bartender at the hotel where the conference was taking place and had been found strangled in her car in the hotel parking lot. One of the parking attendants at the hotel had been arrested and subsequently released.

The final incident that Martha recorded, not including the recent assault on the unnamed woman in Denver, involved another young woman, Mikaela Sager, identified as a massage therapist, in San Diego on the second weekend of February, when Alan had been attending a conference for English teachers. Her body had been discovered on Mission Beach, and the earliest stories had referred to the death as being an accidental drowning while later stories referred to it as a suspicious death.

Martha read through all her notes, then, barely conscious that she was doing it, she said all the names out loud. "Kelli Baldwin, Bianca Muranos, Josie Nixon, Nora Johnson, Mikaela Sager." She said their names again, adding, "and the woman whose name I don't know in Denver."