Chapter 37

It was four days before I was left alone in the house.

In that time, William and I went to a home goods store and he insisted on buying a print of my choice to hang in the house.

"I want you to make it your own," he said.

I ended up choosing an abstract piece featuring swirls of paint. William hung it in the living room and its colorfulness clashed with the whiteness of the space.

I discovered that William always put the cap back on his toothpaste, put his dirty clothes in the hamper immediately upon taking them off, and made the bed each morning. Dishes weren't allowed to sit out on the counter or soak within the sink, and when we moved the decorative pillows on the couch for ease of sitting, it was expected that they be put back in their place when we were finished.

"Sorry," he apologized. "I'm a bit of a neat freak."

"No, I appreciate it. I could stand to be a little tidier," I told him.

I also discovered the spot on his ear that made him melt when I kissed it. He made me orgasm so hard that I discovered a new universe inside of myself. We got memberships at the yoga studio a few blocks away and William took me to a running store to get a new pair of running shoes.

He didn't try to kill me even once.

On the morning that William went back to work we ate breakfast together, plates of scrambled eggs and toast spread with local jam. Everything was wholesome and delicious.

"You look cute in your running gear," William said. He was back in a suit, a look that I thought of as "trial William." It was jarring to see him in everyday clothes, even if his sweatpants cost more money than my most expensive dress.

"Thank you." I smiled and took a bite of toast.

I had no intention of going running. Instead, I planned to search the house.

"Goodbye, sweetheart," William said, and kissed me on the forehead. The word "sweetheart" felt like it belonged to someone else, as though he'd temporarily forgotten my name.

"I'll miss you," I replied.

I breathed a sigh of relief when William walked out the door and evaluated the space around me. I needed to search the house in a way that ensured that everything looked the same when William returned. The pitfall of having a house where everything had its place meant that the slightest deviation was cause for alarm.

William's underwear drawer was the first place that I looked. This was projection. As a teenager, I'd frequently hidden contraband in my underwear drawer. Things that seemed bad at the time and now were so innocent: condoms, notes passed between friends, and a book about sex that I'd gotten as a gag gift.

When I opened the top drawer of William's dresser, I discovered that William was the kind of man who folded his briefs.

I took out my notebook.

Folds his underwear,I wrote in the guilty column.

The second drawer contained a variety of neutral-toned T-shirts that were equally as organized as his underwear and the last drawer contained several pairs of sweatpants. On top of the dresser was a mug where William deposited spare change, and a display box for his collection of expensive watches as well as several types of cologne that my plebeian nose was unable to fully appreciate.

His bedside table was similar. Whereas my table held a dog-eared novel and a glass of water that was accumulating dust, his was devoid of everything aside from a cell phone charger. I wondered if neatness was a trait that he'd always had or something he picked up in jail like a former military man who made his bed like he was still on active duty.

Fastidiously clean,I wrote beneath the note about his underwear.

Being neat didn't inherently mean that someone was a murderer. Surely, there were just as many killers who left their dirty clothes on the floor and dishes in the sink, as I was apt to do. However, I couldn't stop thinking about the testimony at the trial where they talked about the cleanliness of the killer, how they hadn't left any part of themselves behind.

Looking at William's closet, the rows of button-down shirts, it occurred to me that it could've belonged to anyone. The only thing of note in the closet was a box. I hesitated to open it, worried that I would find teeth or hair or some other remnant of a body. Serial killers, I knew from television, liked to collect mementos from their victims to remind them of their kills.

It was, in fact, a box of mementos, though not ones from dead women. There were birthday cards from people whose names I didn't recognize, wallet-sized pictures from high school, and a packet of handwritten notes bound by a rubber band. I froze when I saw my own handwriting. They weren't all from me. William, it appeared, had kept some of the mail he'd received while he was in jail. I flipped through the letters, looking for anything of interest. All of them appeared to be from women, judging from the handwriting. If any men had written him, William hadn't kept it. I cannot bear the thought of you being locked up, one of the letters started. You fucking psychopath, began another. I need to feel you between my thighs, said a third. It was painful to read them, this correspondence with other women. I wasn't sure if William had responded to any of them, but there were a few notes by the same people, which suggested that they were written as a response.

Writing other women,I noted in the guilty column.

I didn't reread the letters that I wrote. Even though they had only been written weeks or months earlier, I already thought of that version of myself as someone na?ve and inarticulate. I didn't want to revisit who I was then, someone so desperate for love.

In my notebook, I jotted down the names of the other women who had written him.

Lily, Cara, Jessie, Stacey, Allison.

I wanted a list, in case one of them later turned up missing, or for the second, less nefarious reason, that I wanted to know their names in case William was still in contact with them and was engaged in a type of epistolary adultery. I couldn't ask him about the letters because to do so would be to admit that I had snooped. Ordinarily, carrying such a suspicion around with me would've been unbearable, but I was already investigating to determine whether my fiancé was a serial murderer. What were a few letters on top of that?

Underneath the letters, I found a key. I took a mental snapshot before returning the contents of the box, doing my best to replicate their earlier placement.

I checked the hall closet, which was empty aside from a couple of jackets and an umbrella hanging on a hook on the wall and the towel closet that contained only extra towels and sheets. The living room was too spotless to hold any secrets and I doubted that he would hide anything amongst the pots and pans in the kitchen, though I checked just to be sure.

The guest room was sterile. It was like entering a hotel room, the bed already made and towels hanging neatly in the bathroom. My decrepit suitcase was stored in the closet next to William's brand-new luggage as well as a couple of prints that William didn't want to hang on the wall but said he "couldn't bear to get rid of for sentimental reasons."

The Thompson family took compartmentalization of their emotions very literally within their interior design.

I checked the office last.

Though I'd never had a home office or even a home of my own with separate rooms, I understood that this was supposed to be a sacred space for certain types of men. Home offices in movies always had mahogany walls and a drink cart full of whiskey. William's office was painted white and light filled, but he did have the drink cart.

The desktop computer was asleep and when I tried to turn it on, it asked for a password that I didn't know. There were no errant papers or Post-it notes containing a possible password and I decided it was best to leave the computer alone. After all, it wasn't like a smart serial killer would open a Word document and type out a confession.

The top drawer of the desk held an assortment of office supplies that were neatly organized in a tray. I didn't know that a desk could be like that. When I had worked, a past that was starting to seem impossibly long ago, my desk had been an avalanche of papers and pens that I would clean off only for the mess to reappear a couple of hours later. Messiness was part of the work for me. William, it seemed, thrived on tidiness.

In the bottom drawer of the desk was another box, this one with a lock. I recalled the key in the box in the bedroom closet and ran to get it. There was immense satisfaction as the key slid into the lock and effortlessly turned.

Inside the box there was a gun.

Gun!!!I wrote in my notebook. No additional commentary was needed.

I stared at it. I'd never seen a gun before, not in person. Where I was from, guns were used largely for hunting, and my family did not hunt. No one I knew casually kept a gun in their desk, at least not to my knowledge. I reached for the gun, the pull almost magnetic, and then I hesitated, my fingers mere millimeters away. The gun could have fingerprints on it that were evidence of some crime, or, worse, my own fingerprints could be transferred and used to incriminate me. Though none of the women found in the ravine had been killed by a gun, I didn't want to make any assumptions.

My desire to pick up the gun outweighed my rational brain. I got a T-shirt from the bedroom and wrapped it around my hand. The gun was heavy, heavier than I was expecting. I wasn't sure if bullets were inside of it and I didn't know how to check. I held it like I was going to shoot and then felt a tingle of discomfort up my spine that told me to put the gun away.

I had been so busy marveling over the gun that I neglected the other items in the box. At first glance, they appeared to be innocuous things, notable only in their proximity to a weapon. There was a gym card, a hair tie, a half-empty pack of cigarettes that had been crushed by the weight of the gun, and a worn paper bookmark.

Upon closer inspection, I realized that the gym card bore the same logo that the temporary pass I'd been given to Jill's gym had. That wasn't such a shock; after all, everyone knew that Jill was William's personal trainer. It was only natural that he had a gym card. Still, the weirdness of its placement gave me pause. I didn't know what to make of the cigarettes or the bookmark. William, as far as I knew, hadn't ever been a smoker. He was the type that valued his health over momentary pleasures, something that he confessed to occasionally regretting while he was behind bars. I opened the pack and next to the cigarettes, there was a green matchbook with a Celtic logo on the front.

Next, I examined the bookmark, which appeared to be from an independent bookstore in Atlanta. That too wasn't unusual as William was a known reader and in the few short days that I'd lived with him, I'd noticed his penchant for shopping local.

Finally, I picked up the hair tie. Hair ties were so ubiquitous in my life that I hardly noticed them. I always had at least two around my wrist in case I needed to pull my hair back. They were also an item passed amongst women in bathrooms, like tampons for a surprise bleed. More than once, I'd gifted desperate strangers the hair ties on my wrist and glowed in their thankfulness for an unreasonable number of hours.

William, however, had no need for a hair tie. He wasn't the type of man to have a man bun and the careful placement beneath the gun indicated that it wasn't some mistakenly dropped piece of ephemera. No, it was a hair tie of import. I looked closer at it and found a blond strand wrapped around the elastic. I got the same feeling that I did when plunging down the drop of a roller coaster, my stomach abandoning the rest of my body.

Could the hair belong to Anna Leigh? I carefully ran my fingers over the hair and held it up to my nose to sniff, disappointed at its odorlessness.

I spread the items out on the desk and took pictures of them one at a time as well as a picture of the gun. William's office, temporarily, became my evidence room. I also added comments in my notebook. Beneath where I'd written Gun!!!, I wrote gym card, cigarettes, matchbook, bookmark, hair tie, with a note beneath hair tie that said Anna Leigh's hair??? I placed the items back in the box, doing my best to re-create how I'd found them.

I went to relock the box and then hesitated. Because I didn't own anything of value, I'd never been afraid of burglars and thus didn't understand why people felt the need to leave guns unsecured in their homes. That, of course, was before I moved in with a man who'd been acquitted of serial murder who kept a used hair tie wrapped with blond hair in a box in his desk. I returned the box to the drawer without locking it and slipped the key back into the other box in the bedroom.

When I had finished my search, I made my way through the house, making sure that nothing was out of place, my mind continually drifting back to the things that I'd found in the office. It was possible that they were nothing, miscellaneous items that had made their way into William's office in the haste of the move. I doubted that was the case. For a man who valued cleanliness so highly, I could think of only one reason why William would want to keep things that were essentially garbage: they were murder souvenirs, the type that the police were looking for and never found during their investigation.

My skin tingled when I thought about the way that William and I had made love the night before. How he was so eager that we didn't bother removing our clothes and how he fucked me from behind while moaning about the deliciousness of my body. What items was he collecting off me to put in his little box of gore?