Chapter 3

Chapter Three

William

I woke up slowly, half opening my eyes and then instantly closing them again as the first light of the morning stung my eyes and sent a blast of pain through my head. I started to fall back into sleep when I realized what had woken me up in the first place. Carlotta was screaming.

I forced my eyes open, trying my best to ignore the way my head felt like it might explode at any second.

“What’s going on?” I asked thickly.

I just couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing or feeling. I mean, I was hungover, I knew that much, but I’d never had a hangover that was so bad that it left me hallucinating, and that’s what this had to be. It couldn’t really be possible that the glass in the large window beside the bed was broken, almost all gone except for a few ragged shards that lined the edges. The heat coming in and overpowering the air conditioning told me it could be possible, but my brain refused to accept it.

At least now Carlotta had stopped screaming, but I thought the way she stood at the missing window, looking out, her hands pressed to her mouth and her skin pasty white, was almost worse. She ignored my question, and I sat up and rubbed my eyes, trying to rub all of this away.

“I’m still asleep. This is all a dream,” I said to myself, triumphant that I’d worked it out.

“You’re not asleep,” Carlotta said, her voice shaking and shattering my moment of clarity.

I suppose I knew that already, but it was the only way to make sense of what I was seeing. I rubbed my eyes again, wishing I hadn’t drunk so much last night. If I had drunk a little less, then maybe I would be able to remember last night, and then maybe this would all somehow make sense to me.

“So, what the hell is going on? Why is the window broken? And what’s that noise?” I demanded.

The last part was an afterthought, brought on by the fact that I had noticed the hum of faraway conversation, like several people were standing in our garden, all talking at once. Where we hosting some sort of garden party we had forgotten about? Is that why Carlotta had looked so horrified because she had failed at her hostess duties?

No, I told myself, dismissing the idea as ridiculous. Whatever was going on here, it wasn’t that. Carlotta would never forget about a party she had organized. And she would have had a list of tasks for me to complete too, and she hadn’t so much as mentioned picking up some wine and beer. It was impossible that we both could have forgotten.

I knew on a rational level what I was doing. I didn’t know what had happened, but I knew by the heavy feeling of dread in my stomach that it was something terrible and so my mind was going off on a tangent, looking for an innocent explanation rather than have me face the truth of the matter. I couldn’t let that go on any longer, though. It sounded too much like starting out on the slippery slope to insanity.

“Carlotta, for fuck’s sake, will you answer me?” I snapped.

I knew she was in shock and most likely couldn’t find the words to explain what had scared her so much, but I could still feel myself getting angry with her for ignoring my questions.

When Carlotta still didn’t answer me, I sighed and pushed the sweaty sheet off me. I got up and walked to the window to join her, trying to ignore the pounding in my head and the cold, sick feeling in the base of my stomach. I needed coffee, painkillers, and a pee before I could even consider functioning.

Or so I thought until I looked out the window and saw the nightmarish scene unfolding before me. I still felt sick, but now it was a different sort of sick. The sort that overwhelmed me and made me take a step back from the window. My legs didn’t feel like my own anymore. It was like they were moving of their own accord, taking me away from a sight so horrible I didn’t want to see it, even though my mind insisted I needed to see it so that I could work out what the fuck was going on here.

I kept backing up on shaky legs until my calves hit the bed and I folded into a sitting position. Waves of nausea consumed me, and for a moment, all I could do was suck in big breaths of air through my nose and swallow hard over and over again, trying to keep my gorge from rising. Finally, the sick feeling started to pass, and I allowed myself to think about what I had seen when I looked out the broken window.

Below the window, several police officers and guys in white suits swarmed around. Some were talking to each other. Some were examining the ground. But the one who had caught my attention was the one who was bringing a white sheet closer to the house and draping it over the body that lay on the lawn out there right beneath our bedroom window. The body with the leg at a right angle to the torso. The body lying in a pool of blood. The body with staring but unseeing eyes. The body that belonged to Candy.

“What did you do, Carlotta?” I whispered when I finally trusted my voice to come out normal again.

I didn’t think I really needed to hear her answer the question. My mind was functioning enough now to show me what had happened. Candy coming into our bedroom. A drunk and pissed off Carlotta deciding she wasn’t willing to wait for the restraining order. That she was taking matters into her own hands. I could see her in my mind, shoving Candy hard enough for her to smash through the window and plunge down to the ground. To her death.

“I didn’t do anything,” Carlotta said .

Her voice sounded steady, but the red circles high on her bright white cheeks told another story.

“So, what happened?” I asked.

Could she have done it? Was my quiet, meek Carlotta really capable of this? Did she even care enough about me to want to bother laying claim to me? I didn’t know the answers to any of those questions, but I knew something had happened, and I desperately needed to know what it was. The main thing that kept me guessing was how and why Candy was here in the first place. Maybe Candy had broken in and caught Carlotta unawares and she had just acted in self-defense. That would be the best-case scenario.

“I was going to ask you the same question,” Carlotta replied, shaking her head like denying this was happening would make it all go away. “The last thing I remember is us arguing downstairs and then coming to bed. I fell asleep straight away. And then I heard sirens and noise, and I saw that the window was broken. I couldn’t work out how someone had gotten in that way. I mean, we’re on the second floor here. Then I realized there was no glass on the floor. I went to the window and I saw her. Lying there. Dead.”

I shook my head, unable to take all of this in .

“So what you’re saying is Candy got into our house and somehow managed to fall out the window?” I asked.

“I’m saying we have a broken window with a dead body below it. That’s all I know. What do you remember?” she said.

I paused for a moment, examining her words, her tone. There was no accusation there, just confusion. Was that because she knew she’d done something? I shook the thought away. She was giving me the benefit of the doubt. The least I could do at this point was do the same for her. But something had clearly happened. People don’t fall into windows hard enough to go through them unless they’re pushed. And I know I didn’t do this. So surely, that meant it had to be Carlotta.

“Not much,” I admitted. “I don’t even remember coming to bed, if I’m honest.”

“Maybe she jumped out of there,” Carlotta said.

It sounded like she was clutching at straws. But Candy was definitely unstable, and was it really any harder to imagine her jumping from the window than it was to imagine Carlotta, who hated confrontation, actually pushing her? If the window had been open rather than broken, then maybe I could have bought it. But even the most unhinged people don’t kill themselves by jumping out a closed window.

A loud knock on the front door rattled through the quiet in the house and stopped our conversation dead, and we looked at each other for a moment. Carlotta’s face was twisted in horror. Her open mouth and wide, staring eyes looked so exaggerated it would almost have been funny if it wasn’t the fact that I knew my own face wore the same expression.

“Get dressed,” I said as some of my senses came back to me. I turned around and picked up the jeans I was wearing last night and began to pull them back on. Carlotta just stood there in her flimsy robe, looking at me but with a glassy look in her eyes that told me she might be looking at me, but she wasn’t really seeing me. “Carlotta? Now. Get dressed. Quickly.”

She gave me a half nod and then she went to the wardrobe and pulled out a pair of rather ratty-looking jeans and a faded blue T-shirt. She moved like she was in a stupor, and although I knew the T-shirt and jeans she was wearing were the ones she usually gardened in, I let it go. At least she was wearing something other than the robe. The police would no doubt want to question us, maybe even arrest us, and if it was anything like the movies I had seen, if we were arrested, we would get dragged out of the house in whatever we were wearing at the time with no time to go and change. I wouldn’t let Carlotta go outside in the robe and nothing else.

The loud knock sounded again as I pulled on a shirt.

“Police. Open up,” a loud male voice shouted.

I knew with the window intact, I wouldn’t have heard it, but it drifted in the broken window as clear as day. I couldn’t ignore it. It would make us look guilty. I didn’t need to ignore it. I had nothing to hide. I hadn’t hurt Candy, and surely, the police should be concerned that a mentally unstable woman who had been stalking me and my wife had broken into our house rather than accusing us of shit. I knew that wasn’t the case, though. They would be more interested in the murder. And if I told them Candy was stalking me, wouldn’t that just give them a motive for me? I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t about to take any chances by trying to play the victim.

“Coming,” I shouted.

I glanced at Carlotta and nodded for her to follow me. By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, my shirt was fastened, and although my head was still pounding, I felt a little bit more like myself again. Whatever the police asked me, I was confident I would be fine. I hadn’t killed Candy, and they couldn’t prove that I had. How could you prove something that didn’t happen? You couldn’t.

I headed for the front door, Carlotta still following dutifully behind me. I pulled the door open and saw two uniformed police officers, one male and one female, standing there. They wore matching uniforms. The female officer had mousy blonde hair that was pulled back into a bun that was so tight, it made her eyes look like they were being stretched. The male officer had a crew cut and intense eyes. When he looked at me, I felt like he was somehow reading my thoughts.

“Good morning, Officers,” I said.

“Mr. Alden? I’m Officer Dumont and this is Officer Stanford,” said the male officer. He nodded to us, as did Officer Stanford as he said her name. “We’ll need both of you to accompany us to the station and answer some questions about what happened here.”

“Are we under arrest?” Carlotta asked quietly from behind me.

Officer Dumont shook his head .

“No, ma’am. We just need to find out what happened here,” Officer Stanford said.

Her tone told a very different story to her words. Her tone said one thing to me—you’re not under arrest ... yet. How could she take any other stance, though? It wasn't like there were any other suspects.