“I know how unhappy you’ve been,” he had told her—but of course he didn’t know, he couldn’t know, he would never have the faintest idea.
Stephen shifted in the bed again. A little more of him disappeared under the covers. Patsy aimed a little to the left of the shoulder she could see and took a deep breath and fired. Stephen made a sound like wind and jerked against the quilts. Blankets fell away from him. Patsy changed her aim and fired twice again. He seemed to be dead, as dead as anyone could get, but she couldn’t really tell. There were three black holes in the skin near his left nipple but no blood. Then she saw the red, spreading in a thick wash on the sheet underneath the body. The longer she looked at it, the more it seemed to darken, first into maroon, then into black. She let the gun drop and brought her legs together. She suddenly thought that it was so odd—even in this, even in the act of murdering her husband, the first thing a woman had to do was spread her legs.
Patsy walked over to the night table on Stephen’s side of the bed and put the gun down on it. The air was full of the smell of cordite and something worse, something foul and rotted and hot. Patsy made herself kneel down at the side of the bed and look Stephen in the face. His eyes were open, deep brown eyes with no intelligence left in them. She grabbed him by the hair and turned his head back and forth. It moved where she wanted it to, flaccid and heavy, unresisting. She let his head drop. His eyes are brown, she told herself, as if that really mattered. Then she walked out of the suite and into the hall, closing the single open bedroom door behind her.
The house was still too large, too empty, too hollow, too dead. Now it felt as if it no longer belonged to her. Patsy walked down the hall to the front stairs and down the front stairs to the foyer. She went through the foyer to the kitchen and through the kitchen to the mudroom. She walked into the garage and then carefully closed the mudroom door behind her. The Volvo was still packed and waiting on the gravel. The fog was still rolling in puffs just above the ground. No one would come looking for Stephen at all today. Anyone who came looking for her would assume that she had gone into the city to shop.
Patsy got into the Volvo and started the engine. Molly Bracken, who lived in the elegant Victorian, came out onto her front porch, looking for the morning paper. Patsy tooted her horn lightly and waved, making just enough fuss for Molly to look her way. Molly waved too, and Patsy began to drive around the gravel circle and head for the road.
The sun was coming up now, forcing its way through the clouds, eating at the fog. It was going to be a perfect bright day, hot and liquid. There were going to be dozens of people down at the Fox Run Hill Country Club, hanging around the pool. The city was going to be full of teenagers in halter tops and shorts cut high up on their thighs.
I am going to disappear, Patsy told herself, smiling a little, humming the ragged melody of something by Bob Dylan under her breath. I am going to disappear into thin air, and it’s going to be as if I’d never been.
2.
EVELYN ADDER HID HER food all over the house, in the attic and the basement as well as on the two main floors, in underwear drawers and empty boxes of Tide detergent and behind the paperback romance novels on the bottom shelf in the alcove off the library, in all the places her husband Henry would never think to look for it. It was Henry who had bought the refrigerator with the lock on it that now took up the west corner of the enormous main floor kitchen that had once been the thing Evelyn liked best about the brick Federalist. The locked refrigerator had all the real food in it—the meat and the butter, the bagels and the cream cheese, the Italian bread and the pieces of leftover lasagna and the slices of Miss Grimble’s Chocolate Cheesecake Henry liked to eat with his coffee after dinner. The other refrigerator, big as it was, held only those things Henry thought Evelyn should eat, and only in those amounts he thought suitable for a single day. Every morning Henry would get up and decorate Evelyn’s refrigerator with grapefruits sliced in half and lettuce and cucumber salads tossed with balsamic vinegar. Then he would sit down at the kitchen table and explain, patiently, why it was they were doing things this way. Henry had been a college professor when Evelyn first met him. He had, in fact, been Evelyn’s own college professor, at Bryn Mawr, in medieval literature. It was only after they were married that he had written the book called How to Take It Off, Keep It Off, and Never Make Excuses Again. It was the book that had made him rich enough to buy this house in Fox Run Hill.
“How do you think it looks,” he would ask her as he arranged grapefruit halves on plates. “What do you think people think it means, that the most successful diet book author in America has a fat wife?”