Chapter 3

Martha stood and paced around the downstairs of her house, at one point scooping up Gilbert and carrying him with her. He liked to be held as long as the human doing the holding kept moving. When Martha found herself back at her desk in the living room, she stared at the list again, tempted to cross out the jumping death of Josie Nixon in Connecticut. It was an outlier, the victim being an attendee of the conference, and the death being ruled a suicide. But she decided to not cross it out in the end. That was the trip Alan was returning from when she'd watched him in the driveway, practicing his smile. That phrase echoed in her head. Practicing his smile. Why else would he have smiled that way in their driveway? Humans—real humans—don't practice their emotions. Or maybe they do, she thought, remembering being a middle schooler and practicing biting her lower lip in the mirror because a friend had told her it was how to look sexy. Gilbert was squirming and she let him down, one of his nails snagging on her sweater as she did so. She plucked at the loose strand of wool, annoyed that she'd let her cat wreck another of her sweaters, but then she was thinking of Alan again. Maybe he was always pretending with her. Every action and every word simply a way to hide the inhuman thing that he really was. The radiator clicked on and she jumped. Telling herself to calm down, she returned to her computer.

There was another reason Martha had decided to keep Josie Nixon on the list of her husband's possible crimes, and that was the fact that Josie's death had occurred at Shepaug University. Shepaug made Martha think of Lily Kintner. Lily was a friend from graduate school, and if Martha remembered correctly, she had grown up in Shepaug.

She put Lily Kintner's name into her browser. There wasn't much, but there was a rather strange story. Lily had been involved in a dispute with a Boston Police Department detective who had apparently been stalking her. It had led to an incident where she had stabbed the police officer in self-defense. He hadn't died, but he had been removed from the force, while Lily had dropped all charges.

None of this surprised Martha, who knew that Lily wasn't really like other people. Maybe I should find her, she thought. And as soon as that thought entered her mind, Martha felt an almost physical sensation of relief, her back loosening, her lungs working better. Because, after reading the news articles that she'd found that morning, she did know that she had to do something. She either needed to confront Alan, or else bring the evidence to the police, and both of those possibilities were impossible to even comprehend. If she was wrong about her suspicions, and she most likely was, then her marriage would be over. What she really needed was a friend, someone to talk with about what she'd found, someone to look at the evidence through objective eyes. But she didn't have friends, not really. No, that wasn't true. She had friends, but not friends whom she could talk to about her husband. Not currently, anyway.

But Lily might just be perfect. When they'd been at grad school together Lily had helped Martha out of a scary relationship. Martha often wondered what might have happened to her if Lily hadn't stepped in and coached her through that particular breakup. And what she remembered of that time was that Lily had been utterly practical, almost coldhearted, about the whole thing. She hadn't been emotional or judgmental. And that was exactly what Martha was looking for now. She didn't want to tell Donna from the library, who would probably just keep exclaiming, "Oh my God," again and again before telling her that she needed to flee the country. She could call her sister, currently living in Alaska, but she knew how that conversation would go. Her sister would accuse her of reading too many books and watching too many movies and that the whole idea was ridiculous. But Lily... Lily would actually listen.

Wondering about how to find her, Martha remembered Lily's semi-famous father, David Kintner, an English author who lived somewhere in New England. Back in grad school Martha had read a few of his books, for no other reason than that she'd become good friends with his daughter. She remembered, in particular, a book called Slightest Folly, a very dark comedy about a fictional boarding school in England called Scoldingham. It was sort of an Upstairs, Downstairs type of book, focusing on both the pupils and the staff members. Martha had loved it, and she'd been surprised when she found out that Lily had never read it.

"Aren't you curious?" Martha had asked.

"I've read some of his stuff, but I'm saving that one for when he's dead." She'd said it with a straight face, as though it weren't a morbid thing to say at all. But that straightforwardness was what Martha had liked about Lily.

Wondering if David Kintner was still alive, Martha put his name into a new tab in her browser, and discovered that he was, although nothing indicated that he was still living in Connecticut. The last major news story about him had been a car accident he'd been in with his second wife, Gemma Daniels. He'd survived and she hadn't, and, judging from the number of articles written about it, it had been a big story in Britain, where it happened.

She did find an old profile of David Kintner, done long before the car accident, in which there was a picture of him and his then-wife Sharon Henderson, a local artist, standing in front of a dilapidated farmhouse. The caption referred to the place as Monk's House, David's name for the farm. The town was Shepaug. On a whim, Martha searched the name "Sharon Henderson" and "Shepaug," and among several hits was a White Pages listing that included a phone number. She wrote the number down in her notebook. She wasn't ready to make a call yet.

Before going to bed that night, Martha got into bed with both her Barbara Pym book and her wedding album. She flipped through the album, the images so familiar to her. It had been a small affair, just thirty-five guests, most from Alan's side of the family. Martha had only invited her mother and her sister, her sister's second husband and three stepchildren, two unmarried aunts, and one friend, Bethany Hart, whom Martha had known since elementary school. Lucy, her sister, was maid of honor, and she'd made a really sweet toast that had turned very religious at its close, something that had made Martha cringe at the time. In fact, something about the whole wedding, and about looking at the pictures now, was making her cringe inside. Why do humans want to celebrate their relationships? There was something almost unbearable about it.

There was one picture that Martha looked at more than the others. It was a candid shot during the cocktail reception, the small group assembled under a tent at the vineyard where they were married, a field of grapes in the background. Martha, in her wedding dress, and Alan, in his suit, were talking with a group of Alan's college friends. Everyone was laughing, but Alan's eyes were looking a little to the side, at another small group of talkers, which included her sister's stepdaughter, a strikingly pretty teenage girl who had worn a very small dress that day—Alan's mother had referred to it as "four handkerchiefs and a piece of string." Was Alan looking at her, ogling her, on his wedding day? Was that the man she married?

Early the next morning, after a night of brief snatches of sleep and forgotten dreams, Martha got up a few hours before she needed to be at the library. She showered and dressed and made herself breakfast. Then she sat down at her desk, the phone number for Lily's mother in front of her, and prepared to make the call. She was thinking about what she might say when the cell phone in her hand vibrated with an incoming call. It was Alan.

"Morning," she said.

"Morning, sunshine," he said back, sounding chipper.

"Everything okay?"

"Yeah, why? Because I'm calling? I was just going to text you, then decided I'd rather hear your voice instead. I knew you'd be up."

"How's Chapel Hill?"

"It feels like summer here already. My booth is actually outside on the main quad under a tent and I've sweated through all of my shirts."

They talked for a while about the weather and then Alan said, "I've been thinking. You and I should take a trip."

"Oh yeah? Where to?"

"I've been thinking about that, as well. You know how we both hate the heat in August. Maybe we could go to the North of England for a week. Haven't you always wanted to visit Haworth?"

It took Martha a moment to realize he was talking about Bront? Country, but once she figured it out it made perfect sense. On their first date they'd had a long conversation about Wuthering Heights, her favorite book.

"I'd like that," Martha said.

"Would you?" He sounded genuinely happy, as though he'd just asked her to marry him again and she said yes.

"Of course."

"Great. I have to go and open my booth, but when I get back let's pick a week and start to plan."

"Okay," Martha said, meaning it.

"One last thing before I let you go. I've been thinking of changing my walk."

"Changing your what?"

"My walk. I was thinking about it, how my feet point in and I lean forward a little, and I think I should have a much cooler walk. That's all."

"What did you have in mind?"

"I don't know, something smooth and iconic. Maybe Sean Connery's walk, the one he had in Goldfinger."

"Well, you should work on that, honey," she said.

He laughed and said, "I will."

After the call Martha sat unmoving for about five minutes, realizing that she had a faint smile on her face. Alan had two comic sensibilities—corny jokes, and then a kind of dry absurdist humor like that bit about his walk. She loved his dry humor and Alan knew that. It was like he was trying to win her back, being funny, promising vacations. A part of her—the part that believed in love curses and fate and the presence of ghosts—felt as though Alan had sensed that she was about to make a phone call that would alter their lives forever and that he'd called to intervene. Not that he knew what was happening, just that he felt it. And then she thought of his words—offering a vacation to a place she wanted to visit, making the kind of joke she liked—and she wondered if he'd practiced his call before making it. Like a sales pitch. Had he also reminded himself to sound like a regular human being? To smile on the phone because she'd hear it in his voice? An image of a frozen smile on her husband's face flared into her mind. She shivered, just as Gilbert rubbed his face against her ankle.

After feeding her cat she thought more about Alan's phone call. Maybe he was simply being thoughtful in suggesting a trip to see Heathcliff and Cathy's moors. Of course, she knew that he was thinking about all the English beer he'd be able to drink while they were there, but that didn't mean it wasn't a sweet thing to do. She thought about the tone of his voice when he'd said, "Would you?" as though he were genuinely happily surprised that she was interested in the possibility of the trip. It was one of his better traits, that he didn't take her for granted and that he felt grateful for her love. And now she didn't know what to think. He felt unknowable to her, but so was Gilbert, in the way that cats were unknowable, and she loved him fiercely despite it.

About twenty minutes before it was time for her to leave for her job in Kittery she had a different thought. What if Alan knew she was on to him, and he'd invited her to England to murder her in the moors? Was he going to do it there because it would be easier to get away with it, or did he want her to die in a place she loved? The thought of it made her almost laugh out loud at how ridiculous her life had become. But then she thought: Just talk to someone else about it. Call Lily. What harm could it do?