The Last Housewife (4)
Meaning it was obviously a suicide. Right? Eight years ago, when I saw what Clem had done, I’d accepted the truth immediately—recognized that it made a deep, awful kind of sense. It had been powerful enough to break through the fog of my mind, like a lifeline cast into the sea of my disordered thinking. It had shaken me, made me see sharp and clear again. In the worst irony, Clem’s death had given me back my life.
But now Laurel was dead the same way, in the same pattern. With razor-blade marks all over her arms and her hands, just no words.
Jamie’s voice returned to the kitchen, warm against the cold. “The last thing I’ll say before we take an ad break is that, in the absence of information about Laurel and Clementine—like I said, the police reports are thin, and neither death received much media attention—I decided to widen my search and look at other women’s deaths in the Hudson Valley area since Clementine died. You know I’m always searching for patterns, and I can be persistent. What I found was alarming. There has been a high—and I mean unusually high—number of missing persons reports for women aged eighteen to thirty-five in the last eight years.”
I gripped the phone so hard I thought, for a moment, I might shatter it.
“Why is there an eleven percent higher chance a woman will go missing in this region than in any other place in America? Eleven percent might not seem big, but it is. Statistically, the area’s an anomaly. Where are these women disappearing to, and why is no one paying attention? We’re talking about an unsolved mystery right in my own backyard, and I had no idea until now.
“Research shows the only high-profile person to reference the disappearances is Governor Alec Barry, who vowed to investigate two years ago in his State of the State address. But his investigation doesn’t seem to have amounted to much. When our producers talked to some of the women’s families, most said they’d given them up as runaways—or suicides.
“So here’s my transgression of the day, and it comes in the form of a question. Laurel and Clementine fall into the same age group, and their ‘suicides’—that’s in air quotes, by the way—essentially bookend the years we’ve seen these other women go missing. According to her file, Clementine’s parents called from their home in Wisconsin a few months before she died, trying to file a missing person’s report, but the police dismissed it after they confirmed she was attending classes. And Laurel’s mother told the police it had been years since she spoke to her daughter. Missing, then dead; missing, then dead. Could there be a connection between Laurel’s and Clementine’s deaths and these other women?”
It felt again like Jamie Knight was sending a private message to me, hidden in a podcast episode.
And then it was no longer private.
“If anyone out there has information, big or small, email my producers.” Another pause, longer this time. “And if my friend from long ago ever hears this, the one who went dark…call me. Please. My number’s still the same.”
The next moment, Jamie’s voice was replaced by a cheerful woman recommending a brand of rosé guaranteed to slim your waistline. I clicked out of the episode.
Standing frozen in my bikini, surrounded by the gleaming white kitchen, I knew I was the wrong kind of picture. An aberration in this home, this monument I’d built to moving on. I could feel its displeasure. It wanted me calm and docile, and in my panic I was disobeying.
Don’t think like that, I told myself. Not everything is sinister. Not everyone has bad intentions.
But I fled the kitchen anyway, sprinting upstairs to the master bedroom, straight to my walk-in closet, shutting the door to make the space tight and secure. I ripped off my bathing suit and pulled on stretchy pants and a sweatshirt, wrapping myself in comfort, cover. These renegade thoughts were popping up more frequently, whenever Cal went away on his work trips. In his absence, my mind churned, twisting my life into a more disquieting picture. The house didn’t want me docile. That was ridiculous. I needed to stay calm and think.
My phone buzzed from where it lay on the floor, Cal’s face suddenly grinning up at me. I jumped, heart pounding. One hand pressed to my chest, I waited until the call died, then peered at the text flashing on the screen: You went to Houndstooth without me! Such a betrayal…
A stupid joke, so divorced from the news of Laurel’s death that I almost laughed at the sheer incongruity—except for the image that flashed in my head: Cal sitting in his hotel room, at his laptop, poring over our credit-card charges. Checking my spending like I was a child. Knowing where I’d gotten my coffee this morning, from hundreds of miles away.
But he was only being responsible. Keeping the life we shared in order was a form of intimacy, wasn’t it? Plenty of the Highland Park husbands managed their household finances. I forced myself to leave the closet, heading back downstairs, but the slap of my feet against the steps wasn’t enough to drown out Jamie’s voice, Laurel’s death, Clem’s memory. The ghosts had been unleashed, and now I couldn’t stop seeing my life through their eyes, couldn’t escape the suspicion that if they saw me here, in this cold, empty house, they’d shake me by the shoulders.
Cal and I had gotten married a year ago, and everything had been fine until I’d quit my job six months ago. Then the balance of power had shifted. Cal would refuse to admit there was even such a thing as a balance of power between us. According to him, that wasn’t how good marriages worked. And maybe he was right, maybe I was too sensitive because of how I’d grown up, watching my mom contort herself to keep men around, or too paranoid because of what happened in college. Because every time I saw two people, I saw a scale, tipping this way and that. And the scale had been tipped toward Cal for a long time. Oh, he would deny it, but now he held the purse strings; now every big decision was ultimately his. It had been six months of checked charges, of attending fancy Highland Park parties on his arm, of insipid gossip and aching loneliness, of staring at the blinking cursor on my laptop’s blank screen.