A talent for murder, p.5
A Talent for Murder, page 5
I parked a couple of blocks down from Ethan’s Jeep, donned a winter wool cap, pushing my hair up under it, and walked to the bar carrying my copy of The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. I pushed through the pneumatic front door of the bar and spotted an empty two-person booth to my right and went directly there. I took off my jacket but left my hat on. A waitress came by and I ordered a gin and tonic. After it had arrived, I finally looked around the place. It was larger than it had seemed from the outside, with both booths and tables, and was anchored by a large oval bar at the center of the room. Toward the back was a pool table and a jukebox, currently churning out a country song about drinking tequila. Ethan and Martha were on the far side of the bar, sitting shoulder to shoulder, and I could just make them out over the array of bottles and the fast-moving bartenders, three women all wearing the same pink T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the bar. It was possible that either Ethan or Martha would look up and see me across the blue cigarette smoke of the room in my cramped booth, but I doubted it. I decided to stay put and observe.
I was there for three hours, nursed three drinks, discouraged four men (one of whom claimed to be an Angela Carter fan), and watched as Ethan and Martha played some sort of game, the rules of which I couldn’t quite figure out.
From what I could tell, they would each have a drink at the bar—his looked like a whiskey and soda, and hers was a glass of white wine—then one or the other would wander away, only to come back with a third party. If Martha was the one to go patrol the teeming bar, then she usually came back with a man, but once she came back with a woman. Introductions were made, and at some point it seemed as though Ethan would say something that would cause the person to leave.
When Ethan left the bar, he’d come back very fast, always with a woman, and he’d make a big deal out of introducing her to Martha. Once I saw him pointing out the features of a particularly drunk participant, as though he were trying to sell her to the highest bidder. He was laughing. I kept worrying that he’d come over to the other side of the bar, where I was sitting, but he never did. There seemed to be a natural split that took place in the Three-Legged Dog that put the quiet couples and the loners on the right side of the bar, while the left side had turned into a freewheeling Saturday night party, soundtracked with classic country sing-alongs.
I decided that I’d seen enough, and also that I was lucky I hadn’t been noticed. As I was looking for my waitress to pay my bill, I watched Martha and Ethan talking to a girl who wasn’t possibly drinking age. She had long black hair and wore a cropped top and low-rise jeans. She was staring at Ethan as though she’d met a movie star. Before I paid my bill, the three of them left together.
I returned to my house on the salt marsh and thought about what I had seen. It was apparent that Ethan and Martha liked to go out to bars and find someone to have a threesome with. And if that was how they spent Saturday nights it was certainly no business of mine. But something about Martha’s complacency in the situation, and Ethan’s casual glee, made me wonder if what was happening was less than consensual.
The next time I saw Martha was in the Archival Appraisal class that we were taking together. Afterward, we walked across campus together.
“I saw you the other night,” I said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Saturday night. I drove down to Port Tobacco and had a quick drink at a bar there. I saw you with Ethan.”
We were walking side by side and I glanced at her and saw the look of alarm and fear on her face. “You should have said hi,” she said, her voice fairly normal.
“Honestly, I was just in there for a quick drink, and you two were obviously on a date and I thought it might have been awkward. It’s silly, though, I should have said hello.”
A Frisbee floated past, nearly clipping me on the shoulder, and the guy who caught it yelled out an apology. “Things good with Ethan?” I said, trying to make the words sound as casual as possible.
“Um . . . good?” she paused, and then said, “Things are very interesting with Ethan.”
“Okay,” I said.
We walked in silence for a moment, birdsong in the air, and I willed myself to wait her out.
“He’s sexually adventurous and I’m not, and that’s not a bad thing. I mean, it’s fun. He’s fun.”
We reached the student union, and instead of going in I steered Martha to a wooden bench that faced the main quad of the campus. We both sat. She began to speak, almost manically, as though she’d been dying to share with anybody the details of her relationship.
“I know that he’s going to Vermont for the summer for some writing retreat and that that will be the end of our relationship. It’s probably for the best. I mean, I never thought for a moment that I would wind up married to someone like Ethan Saltz. I just keep telling myself that being with him is an experience. I mean, he’s into threesomes, and we’ve done that and it’s okay, and he’s very into weird role-play stuff, and some of that has been a little scary, so I told him that maybe I’d passed my comfort line, or whatever you want to call it.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, he laughed. He laughs at everything. And then he said the thing that’s really been bothering me. He called me a project. He said, and I’m pretty sure these are the exact words: ‘You’re my project, Martha. That’s why I picked you, you know, to see how far I could get you to go.’ ”
“Ugh,” I said.
“I think he was just kidding, honestly. But, yeah, it’s icky.”
“Has he hurt you?”
She hesitated long enough for me to know that he had, then she said, “Nothing extreme. But . . . okay, now I’m actually going to tell you this . . .” She took a deep breath. “So, on Saturday night when you saw us at that bar, we were there to pick up someone to have a threesome with, which we’d done before. And we did end up going home with this kind of fucked-up local girl. I’m saying fucked-up because she was really drunk, and things got very strange very fast, and . . . I won’t go into details, but Ethan was trying to get me to hurt her.”
Martha pressed the heel of one hand to an eye, and I put my hand on her back and left it there. After a while I said, “You have to leave him, you know. That’s why you told me about it.”
“I know,” she said.
We formed a plan that evening, the two of us sitting on her single bed in her tiny concrete-block dormitory room. She’d decorated the room with framed New Yorker covers, most of them depicting a cat, although one of the covers, a watercolor of the New York skyline, was an issue I recognized from 1986, one that contained a story written by my father called “The Final Days of Martin Tobey.”
“Ethan won’t mind,” Martha said. “I mean, he won’t mind emotionally, or whatever. But he really does see me as a project, and I’m not sure that he’s finished with it . . . with me.”
We rehearsed some breakup lines together, and Martha made a plan to meet Ethan the following night at the Hideout. The plan was that I’d walk in around ten thirty. We established some easy signals. For example, if Martha took a sip of her drink after I walked over and said hello, then it meant that I shouldn’t stick around. If she pushed her hair back behind an ear, that meant I should join them. That way, if it turned ugly, I’d be there as support.
The next night I walked into the Hideout at ten fifteen, and immediately spotted Martha and Ethan at one of the back booths. I went to the bar and got a club soda with lime, tilting my stool so that I could keep an eye on them. From where I was sitting, I could see the back of Ethan’s head, his golden hair, and I could see Martha, her face anxious, explaining herself. When there was a lull in the conversation, I slid off my stool and walked over to them.
“Oh hey,” I said.
Martha tucked a strand of hair behind her left ear as Ethan looked up at me and said, “Hey, Lily.”
“Join us,” Martha said, sliding out of the booth. “I’ve just got to run to the bathroom.”
I slid onto the wooden seat of the booth vacated by Martha and looked at Ethan across the narrow table. He seemed amused. “How are you?” I said.
“It was like watching a puppet,” he said, still smiling. “Martha’s lips were moving, but your words were coming out of them.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Whatever. It’s no big deal to me.” He was leaning on the table and I could smell him. Masculine soap, the way he always smelled.
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You do, actually, but I’ll play along. Martha just broke up with me, and since you’re here to shepherd her home safely I’ll say this to you: If I wanted to get her back it would be the easiest thing in the world. But, honestly, I just don’t care enough to go through the effort. Also, since you’re here now, I realize you’re probably just pissed off at me because I wasn’t attracted to you, but you would have been too easy. You’re already a monster, Lily. It takes one to spot one.”
“Hey, Ethan,” I said, lowering my voice. “I am a monster. Remember that, okay?”
Martha was coming back to the booth, a little unsteady on her feet, either from too many drinks or from the stress of telling Ethan it was over. I stood up quickly and said, “Martha, I don’t feel too good. I hate to do this to you, but could you walk me home?”
“Of course,” she said, and after getting her coat we left together, Ethan laughing in his booth.
Martha came back with me to my rented room. We had to pass Ethel Watkins, my landlady, who liked to sit in the front room watching reruns of sitcoms on her old flickering television set. I thought she’d make a comment about my visitor, but she just glared at us both as we headed upstairs. Martha spent the night. She was full of adrenaline, telling me again and again exactly how the conversation had gone, then explaining how she really was going to give up men going forward. She fell asleep in her clothes on top of the covers and I curled up next to her.
That following week we were inseparable, Martha alternately giddy and bereaved because of the end of her relationship with Ethan, while I was wary of a counterattack. But it didn’t come. I only saw Ethan once, crossing the quad in a rugby shirt and cargo shorts. Our eyes briefly met, but there was no expression on his face.
Sometimes I wonder if Martha and I would have stayed friends after graduate school, or if I blew it by what I’d said to her on the final night before our summer break began.
“What are your plans?” she’d asked. We were sitting on the front porch of Ethel’s house, drinking wine and trying to ignore the blackflies.
“I’ll probably spend time with my mom, do some reading. And I might go up to Vermont and kill Ethan Saltz.”
She’d laughed her toothy laugh, and said, “Yes, make the world a better place.”
I should have left it there, but I was young then, and maybe I thought that Martha could handle hearing about my transgressions. “I’m serious,” I said. “I’m a firm believer in ridding the world of people like Ethan Saltz. It wouldn’t be hard to get away with it.”
A look of genuine shock crossed Martha’s face as she realized that I really was serious.
“Or not,” I said, and laughed.
That summer I kept the rented room and bounced back and forth between Maryland and Monk’s House in Connecticut. I spent August in London with my father. I didn’t visit Vermont and I didn’t kill Ethan Saltz. Martha and I stayed friendly for the next year of school, but, honestly, it was never the same, and I wasn’t surprised that Martha and I lost touch after school. All of which made me curious as to why she was contacting me now.
Chapter 6
“Is this Martha?”
“It is. Hi, Lily. Long time.” Martha could tell that her voice was shaky. She was in her office at the library and got up to close her door.
“It is a long time. But it’s nice to hear your voice,” Lily said, and Martha felt that she was being genuine.
“It’s nice to hear yours, too. You’re back living with your parents?”
“I am. It’s a long story, but the short version of it is that they got divorced but my father can’t be alone, and my mother doesn’t have enough money to support herself, so they need to live together. I’m there to keep them from killing one another.”
“Sounds like a lot,” Martha said, settling into the conversation, realizing that she’d missed Lily over the years.
“It’s not too bad,” Lily said.
“Are you working?”
“Do you know Winslow College in Massachusetts? I got a job there about a year after we both finished school. It was good, but I left a couple of years ago to come back here, and now I am mostly unemployed, although I’m busy working on my father’s archives.”
“Oh, how’s that?” Martha said, happy to keep the focus on Lily for a while.
“He keeps threatening to burn them in the fireplace, but he’s all bark and no bite. He kept everything, including some pretty scandalous journals. How about you? Working?”
“I’m the director of a public library in Kittery right now. Before that I was doing archival work at Boston University, but I don’t mind being back in a classic library setting.”
“No, of course not.”
Martha didn’t say anything right away. Part of her just wanted to keep talking about what they’d been doing since they’d known each other all those years earlier, but she also wanted to get to the point. Finally, she said, “So, I called you for a reason.”
“Okay,” Lily said. “I’m listening.” The way she said it made Martha feel as though they were hanging out in her dormitory room in Maryland all over again.
“So, I got married.”
“Oh yeah? When was this?”
“A little over a year ago. Alan is slightly older than me. He sells educational materials, so he’s always traveling.” Martha didn’t really want to go into what he sold just yet because people always had a lot of questions.
“And has he broken your love curse?”
“Oh, you remember that?”
“Of course I do. In fact, I was pretty sure you were calling about something to do with Ethan Saltz.”
“Ugh, that name. Just hearing it makes me shiver.”
“You haven’t heard from him?”
“No, thank God. I’m calling about my husband. I think I just need to tell someone what’s going on with him.”
“Is he hurting you?”
“No, no. Not at all. He’s this totally sweet guy, at least I think he is. Hey, I wasn’t going to ask this, but now that we’re having this conversation . . . Do you think . . . Is there any possibility we could meet up and do this face-to-face?”
“Sure,” Lily said. “You live in Maine?”
“I live in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, but I work in Maine. I could come to you, though. Alan’s away on one of his trips. I’m at work, but we are well staffed and I could leave anytime.” Suddenly, more than anything, Martha wanted to actually see Lily. She didn’t want to have this conversation over the phone.
“I’m happy to meet halfway. I wouldn’t mind taking a drive today.”
Martha brought up a map on her desktop computer and they decided to meet for an early dinner in Worcester, Massachusetts. She picked an Irish pub called Tipsy McStaggers because it was located right off the interstate, and they agreed to meet at four in the afternoon.
After hanging up Martha felt so relieved that she burst into sudden unexpected tears. She hadn’t known what to expect from the phone call, and part of her had wondered if Lily even remembered her. The fact that she had, and that she’d even remembered the love curse, was somehow a huge relief. And now they were going to meet in person and Martha could tell Lily what she suspected, and hopefully Lily would laugh the whole thing off, talk her down off the ledge. And that would be the end of that.
After the crying jag, Martha sat for a moment and composed herself. She sent a quick email to her staff saying that she would be leaving early that day, then tried to get some emails done that she’d been avoiding. Mary, the oldest librarian on staff, popped her head into Martha’s office to ask a question, and then, after Martha had answered it, said, “Hon, are you okay?”
Martha reflexively swiped at an eye and said, “Yes, fine.” When Mary didn’t immediately leave the room, she added, “I just talked to a friend who’s going through a very rough time in her marriage. That’s why I’m leaving early, to go and meet her.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Mary said, and frowned.
After Mary left the office, apparently satisfied with the half-truth, Martha decided it was time to leave. She stopped off at home to get her notebook, and decided to change. What was the right thing to wear when you were meeting an old friend to talk to her about your suspicious husband? She finally selected her best jeans, the slightly worn ones, and a printed top that one of the younger librarians had once referred to as “boho.”
Tipsy McStaggers was an enormous restaurant on an acre of parking lot, its front paneled in green-painted wood and festooned with flags and strung lights and Guinness signs. It was bright outside in the parking lot, and Martha’s eyes took a moment to adjust as she stepped into the dark interior of the restaurant. It was like a Walt Disney version of an Irish pub, every nook and cranny plastered with a shamrock or a leprechaun or another Guinness ad. A hostess ambled over and asked if it was just her.
“I’m meeting someone but I’m early.”
“You can sit wherever you want.”
She wandered into the confusing restaurant, passing two alcoves that each had a small bar and seating area, then went up two steps to what seemed to her to be the main bar area. She climbed onto a padded stool, ordered a Guinness from the college-age bartender, and waited. From where she was, she could look back toward the front entrance of the restaurant, and she found herself alternating between tiny sips of her drink and glances at the door. Earlier in the day she’d been so relieved about this meeting, but now that it was about to happen, she felt both nervous and slightly embarrassed. Had she really just asked someone she hardly knew to drive two hours to hear a wild theory?
