It was from Addy.
Trina is dead, it said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE JOYCE
It’s strange what a person can get used to, Joyce thought as she dialed the number for their lawyer once again. Simon was at the police station, being questioned about another young person’s death, but this didn’t give Joyce much pause. Not like it did a year ago. A lot can happen in twelve months.
A lot can happen in twenty-four hours.
She’d thought about accompanying Simon to the station, but she was finding herself at her breaking point for compassion towards her husband. She had other important matters to attend to. At the rate things were going, she’d be spending all her time in hospitals, police interrogation rooms, or morgues if Simon didn’t get a handle on their life.
Joyce was glad Trina was dead, although she wasn’t glad for the extra hassle she and Simon would need to go through to prove he was innocent. God, she needed a vacation.
Another call came through on her other phone while Joyce was talking with the lawyer. Which was a joke unto itself—as if the two of them could be considered a family.
When she clicked to see who it was she read the name and sighed, because there was no way she wanted to have this conversation any time soon. The message she was waiting for hadn’t come through yet—plans had changed, been updated. She needed to know everything was in order, but she also needed to be patient. Joyce sent a text in reply to the caller.
She set the kettle to boil on the stove and listened for where Clara was inside their house. The vacuum hummed from somewhere upstairs. Joyce sat down to a little privacy in her kitchen. She retrieved another cup before she settled, anticipating Clara coming down for a chat soon.
Her secret phone pinged with a text. It was all righteous indignation, because she put the guy’s name into her other phone wrong. She called him Ralph, but his name was really Randy. Oh well, she thought. Close enough. But still, she’d have to work on his bruised ego, and that was effort and time she didn’t have.
Joyce really should be more careful, although she didn’t think Simon suspected anything. Over the years her affairs ranged from passionate indiscretions to almost bleak, frozen meetings where she came away more closed and dispassionate than when she arrived.
There was one time, where a man she’d met in the grocery store earlier that week had come to the house—it was Clara’s day off—and they’d ravaged each other like two wild animals on the floor of the formal dining room, until Joyce heard the distinct sound of Simon’s keys in the lock and she’d had to rush her gentleman caller out the back door, pull her pantyhose up, and smooth her skirt before Simon made his way further into the house. She’d worried he could smell the musky odor of sex on her, but he’d been distracted by a situation with a patient and had headed straight for the drink cart in the study once he found her to say hello and tell her he was home early.
Another time she’d met a man—a boy, really, God he must have been only nineteen or twenty—at the Motel 6 outside the edge of town and he’d been so nervous she finally had to ask him what was wrong. He confessed that he didn’t really want to sleep with her, he was just trying to make his wife jealous.
“Wife?” she said. They’d met online, a dating site for older women to find younger men. It had an awful name—Cougar Hunting or something like that—but this boy messaged her first, and so she thought it would be a good fit for a time.
“We got married after high school because she was pregnant, and then she lost the baby and we were just married.” The poor kid sobbed on the stiff polyester bed cover and Joyce tried to muster something that was kind or maternal, but she just found herself annoyed she’d wasted a perfectly good afternoon not getting laid.
That time she’d just rolled up her clothes, patted him on the shoulder, and then driven home to wait for Simon to be done with his last appointment.
Another call came in, on her normal phone this time.
She didn’t recognize the number. She picked up for the banal thrill of not knowing what would happen when she did.
“Joyce?” The voice quavered on the other line. “It’s Susan. Can we meet?”
A feeling grew in Joyce’s chest, like a stone dropping into a deep pool.
“Of course we can.” Joyce pulled the kettle off the stove as it started to whistle. “What’s wrong? You sound upset.”
“I’ll tell you when we’re together. I don’t want to mention it over the phone.”
“All right.” Joyce suggested a small café near her house, different from the one they went to yesterday. “Do you need me to pick you up?”
“No, no. I can drive. I just need to talk to someone, you know? Who isn’t a police officer.”
“You had your interview with the detectives? Is that what you’re so upset about? What did they say?”
Susan paused. Joyce heard traffic in the background. Snippets of a conversation leached down the line, something about school lunches and a PTA meeting that was abruptly canceled.
“Where are you?” Joyce asked.
“I don’t know. In a park somewhere in the center of town.”
“Does it have a little climbing wall and an orange slide?” Joyce asked.
It did.
“Hold on, I’ll come to you. We can walk through the park and talk. It might be easier for you than sitting at the café.”
“All right,” Susan acquiesced.
Joyce told her she’d be there in five minutes. She knew the park well from walks she’d taken with Simon. There was also a public bathroom made of red brick, where she’d met a few men over the years for fun in the dark. Most of the time it had actually been nice, despite the dampness of the concrete floor.
“Just stay put. I’m coming.”
Clara walked in as Joyce hung up. “Can I help you, Mrs. M?”
“Where’d you put my gun the last time you cleaned it?”
Clara gave her a knowing smile. “Exactly where you prefer me to put it.” Clara walked to the wedding photo of Joyce and Simon hanging in the front hallway, only to swing it aside and reveal the safe behind it.
The code, of course, was Joyce’s wedding anniversary.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX ADDY
She didn’t want to be here. The psychology department office felt abandoned after 5pm, with most of the faculty clearing out and the staff gone as of 4:30. The days were short and the building had few windows to begin with, so most of the hallways and communal areas were almost blacked out by the time Addy made it to the office after waiting at Trina’s apartment for the police to arrive and for them to interview her.
Everything felt surreal, like she was moving through a fine and suffocating mist. When she passed a fellow grad student who was leaving for the day Addy could barely keep herself from screaming out “Trina is dead!” instead of the passive smile and head nod she managed to eke out. While she’d stood at the scene, wrapped in a metal emergency blanket from the EMS who’d arrived with really nothing to do except comfort her and offer condolences before taking a smoke break out back, she’d succumbed to the habit of checking her email and noted two from her advisor, with increasing urgency asking for results prior to her revisions being posted to the committee.
In academia, not even death could slow the cogs of bureaucracy. Addy turned the key in her shared grad student office and flipped on the light. The department packed twenty students into a windowless office built comfortably for four. Dividers and shared desk space where you signed out time was supposedly the answer. Usually someone was cranking away at one of the old desktops in the office, but no one was there, sitting in the dark coding data or polishing citations.
Addy wished she wasn’t alone.
She could have gone back to her apartment, but she wasn’t ready to face seeing her excessively chipper roommate, Eve, who would likely be making a vegan stir-fry in their kitchen and want to know how Addy’s day was. She’d been avoiding Eve as much as possible since everything with Dermot went down, but Addy couldn’t hold out forever, and she didn’t feel emotionally or physically capable of watching Eve’s smiling face deteriorate into genuine pain as Addy told her about today. Eve would want to hold her hand and sit on the couch together while she asked Addy gentle questions and assessed whether she was okay or needed further support. Eve might suggest Addy text a crisis helpline.
Addy couldn’t handle any of it. Focusing on her data, on crossing the finish line of her graduate program, would be a welcome distraction. This is what she needed to get through the next twenty-four hours—science, determination, grit. She kept telling herself that on the way over to campus. And one day she could tell her children how she’d finished her dissertation despite her recent lover being murdered and finding her would-be friend and faculty member dead in her apartment.
On second thought, perhaps she’d never tell anyone about this.
Addy settled into her shared desk, brushed crumbs from someone’s granola bar off the fake wood surface and into a garbage basket, and clicked into her account. She needed to do some analyses, and the department wouldn’t pay for her to get a personal license on her laptop for the program she used.
It was cold in the office, as though the heat had been turned down at the end of the day, and Addy pulled her coat around her shoulders. It didn’t register to Addy that her weary body might simply be in shock.
A half hour passed without her mind cracking open at the horror of it all, and she managed to work through two of the points on her revision checklist. The data appeared to be behaving itself, and she remembered to click the right boxes in the analysis to manage to keep the results printing the way she needed to without having to resize everything for her dissertation. The world might be digital, but the graduate school still measured margins with a ruler to ensure doctoral candidates followed their designated minutiae.
