The Housewife(64)

“So you kept it.” She wants to speak but I raise a hand. “It’s fine. I would have done the same. And you watched it?”

She puts a hand over her mouth, and her face crumbles. Her eyes don’t leave mine as they fill with tears.

“I know,” I say.

She turns around, indicating the chair with the sheepskin. “Please, sit down.”

So I do. She sits on the sofa, her elbows on her knees, a tissue crumpled in her hands. “Where did you find it?” she asks.

“In his safe. He tapes his sessions with clients and keeps the recordings in his safe. That’s the only video I found of him and Deborah.”

She buries her face in her hands. “I couldn’t believe it. He was so awful to her. ”

“He’s a monster, Marie.”

“I always thought he was such a kind man…”

“Everybody did.”

She presses the heel of her hand against her forehead. “After I got fired from my job, I was at my lowest point. All my friends, my ex-colleagues, everyone shunned me. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with me. But he helped me out of that hole. He made me see I could turn my life around and start again, you know? He made me believe I wasn’t a horrible person.”

My hand hovers over her shoulder, hesitates, then I pull it away. “That’s still true,” I say. “What he did to Deborah has nothing to do with you.”

She dabs at her eyes. “I know. God…poor, poor Mrs. Deborah. I just can’t… I wish… If only—”

“Don’t,” I say. “You’ll think yourself into a pretzel.”

“Do you… Do you think he shot her?” she asks.

“I know he did. He can be quite violent, you know. He might not look it, but he’s a monster. Trust me.”

She drops her face in her hands.

“I know you said you weren’t here at that time, but you never saw any of this?”

“Never. I would have said something, of course.” But then she hesitates.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know if it’s significant, but he could be, at times, overly possessive of her. Always wanting to know where she was, wanting to be consulted if she went out somewhere. Sometimes it felt a little too much, but I suppose I mistook that for love. And she didn’t seem to mind.”

I bet she would have minded. I think back to the scene at the McIntoshes, the way Roy spoke to me after his friend Phil tried to feel me up. You think selling yourself to the highest bidder is the way to get ahead in this town?

“By the time Dr. Davies asked me to stay away, something was up. She was staying in her room a lot, but I never noticed anything wrong with her face. He must have done most of it while I was away.”

“He’s doing it to me too,” I say in a low voice.

Her eyes grow wide. “What?”

I bring my face closer. She tilts the lamp beside her to get a better view. I point to my eye. “See?”

“Oh, my God!”

“And here…” I point to my lip. “And there too,” I point to the side of my face.

“But how?”

I sit back. “I don’t know. It happens at night, that’s all I know.”

She’s on her feet. “We have to go to the police right now. We have to stop him!”

I raise a hand. “Not so fast.”

“But we must!” She swivels around, spots a jacket on the back of a chair, and grabs it.

“Hold on,” I say. “I don’t want to go to the police right now.”

“Why not?”

Because I lost my wedding band at the site of what now looks like a murder, and I have to get it back somehow .

But I don’t tell her that.

“Roy is going to be interviewed by the police tomorrow morning, more formally, about the death of his friend Veronica.”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “Do you think he had something to do with that, too?”

I tap my fingers on my chin, pretending to think about it. “I don’t know. Maybe.” God, wouldn’t that be nice if he got arrested for Veronica’s death. He will go down for torturing Deborah, of that I will make sure, but another murder would be nice. Not least because it gets me off the hook.

“We should let the police do their job,” I say, “and not muddy the waters. Then, in a day or two, we’ll take the thumb drive to the police. Do you have it, by the way?”

She glances toward her dresser. “It’s in a safe place.”

“Good, good. And you can tell them what you told me about Roy giving you the week off.”

“Sure,” she says.

But something in her face makes me stop. “What?”

“None of this will prove that he killed her. That he’s a monster, yes. But that’s all. You really don’t think she killed herself? Because I think that’s the most likely explanation,” she adds softly.

My head starts swimming. It occurs to me that I don’t want to think that Deb killed herself because I can’t handle the implication: She didn’t wait for me. I was weeks away from being released. No matter what was going on, I would have got her out of there, I would have helped her. But she didn’t wait for me because she didn’t believe in me. She thought the same thing everybody else did: that I’m hopeless, useless, a freak .