Crying and gasping, she flushed the toilet. The porcelain would have to be cleaned, but for now she only lowered the lid and laid her flushed cheek on its cool beige plastic.
What am I going to do?
The obvious step was to call the police, but what if she did that and it all turned out to be a mistake? Bob had always been the most generous and forgiving of men—when she’d run the front of their old van into a tree at the edge of the post office parking lot and shattered the windshield, his only concern had been if she had cut her face—but would he forgive her if she mistakenly fingered him for eleven torture-killings he hadn’t committed? And the world would know. Guilty or innocent, his picture would be in the paper. On the front page. Hers, too.
Darcy dragged herself to her feet, got the toilet-scrubbing brush from the bathroom closet, and cleaned up her mess. She did it slowly. Her back hurt. She supposed she had thrown up hard enough to pull a muscle.
Halfway through the job, the next realization thudded down. It wouldn’t be just the two of them dragged into newspaper speculation and the filthy rinse-cycle of twenty-four-hour cable news; there were the kids to think about. Donnie and Ken had just landed their first two clients, but the bank and the car dealership looking for a fresh approach would be gone three hours after this shit-bomb exploded. Anderson & Hayward, which had taken its first real breath today, would be dead tomorrow. Darcy didn’t know how much Ken Hayward had invested, but Donnie was all in the pot. That didn’t amount to such of a much in cash, but there were other things you invested when you were starting out on your own voyage. Your heart, your brains, your sense of self-worth.
Then there were Petra and Michael, probably at this very moment with their heads together making more wedding plans, unaware that a two-ton safe was dangling above them on a badly frayed cord. Pets had always idolized her father. What would it do to her if she found out the hands which had once pushed her on the backyard swing were the same hands that had strangled the life out of eleven women? That the lips which had kissed her goodnight were hiding teeth that had bitten eleven women, in some cases all the way down to the bone?
Sitting at her computer again, a terrible newspaper headline rose in Darcy’s mind. It was accompanied by a photograph of Bob in his neckerchief, absurd khaki shorts, and long socks. It was so clear it could already have been printed:
MASS MURDERER “BEADIE”
LED CUB SCOUTS FOR 17 YEARS
Darcy clapped a hand over her mouth. She could feel her eyes pulsing in their sockets. The notion of suicide occurred to her, and for a few moments (long ones) the idea seemed completely rational, the only reasonable solution. She could leave a note saying she’d done it because she was afraid she had cancer. Or early-onset Alzheimer’s, that was even better. But suicide cast a deep shadow over families, too, and what if she was wrong? What if Bob had just found that ID packet by the side of the road, or something?
Do you know how unlikely that is? Smart Darcy sneered.
Okay, yes, but unlikely wasn’t the same as impossible, was it? There was something else, too, something that made the cage she was in escape-proof: what if she was right? Wouldn’t her death free Bob to kill more, because he no longer had to lead so deep a double life? Darcy wasn’t sure she believed in a conscious existence after death, but what if there was one? And what if she were confronted there not by Edenic green fields and rivers of plenty but by a ghastly receiving line of strangled women branded by her husband’s teeth, all accusing her of causing their deaths by taking the easy way out herself? And by ignoring what she had found (if such a thing were even possible, which she didn’t believe for a minute), wouldn’t the accusation be true? Did she really think she could condemn more women to horrible deaths just so her daughter could have a nice June wedding?
She thought: I wish I was dead.
But she wasn’t.
For the first time in years, Darcy Madsen Anderson slipped from her chair onto her knees and began to pray. It did no good. The house was empty except for her.
– 7 –
She had never kept a diary, but she had ten years’ worth of appointment books stored in the bottom of her capacious sewing chest. And decades’ worth of Bob’s travel records stuffed in one of the file drawers of the cabinet he kept in his home office. As a tax accountant (and one with his own duly incorporated side-business to boot), he was meticulous when it came to record-keeping, taking every deduction, tax credit, and cent of automotive depreciation he could.
She stacked his files beside her computer along with her appointment books. She opened Google and forced herself to do the research she needed, noting the names and dates of death (some of these were necessarily approximate) of Beadie’s victims. Then, as the digital clock on her computer’s control strip marched soundlessly past ten PM, she began the laborious work of cross-checking.
She would have given a dozen years of her life to find something that would have indisputably eliminated him from even one of the murders, but her appointment books only made things worse. Kellie Gervais, of Keene, New Hampshire, had been discovered in the woods behind the local landfill on March fifteenth of 2004. According to the medical examiner, she had been dead three to five days. Scrawled across March tenth to twelfth in Darcy’s appointment book for 2004 was Bob to Fitzwilliam, Brat. George Fitzwilliam was a well-heeled client of Benson, Bacon & Anderson. Brat was her abbreviation for Brattleboro, where Fitzwilliam lived. An easy drive from Keene, New Hampshire.
Helen Shaverstone and her son Robert had been discovered in Newrie Creek, in the town of Amesbury, on November eleventh of 2007. They had lived in Tassel Village, some twelve miles away. On the November page of her 2007 address book, she had drawn a line across the eighth to the tenth, scrawling Bob in Saugus, 2 estate sales plus Boston coin auc. And did she remember calling his Saugus motel on one of those nights and not getting him? Assuming he was out late with some coin salesman, sniffing for leads, or maybe in the shower? She seemed to remember that. If so, had he actually been on the road that night? Perhaps coming back from doing an errand (a little drop-off) in the town of Amesbury? Or, if he had been in the shower, what in God’s name had he been washing off?
She turned to his travel records and vouchers as the clock on the control strip passed eleven and started climbing toward midnight, the witching hour when graveyards reputedly yawned. She worked carefully and stopped often to double-check. The stuff from the late seventies was spotty and not much help—he hadn’t been much more than your basic office drone in those days—but everything from the eighties was there, and the correlations she found for the Beadie murders in 1980 and 1981 were clear and undeniable. He had been traveling at the right times and in the right areas. And, Smart Darcy insisted, if you found enough cat hairs in a person’s house, you pretty much had to assume there was a feline on the premises somewhere.
So what do I do now?
The answer seemed to be, carry her confused and frightened head upstairs. She doubted if she could sleep, but at least she could take a hot shower and then lie down. She was exhausted, her back ached from throwing up, and she stank of her own sweat.
She shut off her computer and climbed to the second floor at a slow trudge. The shower eased her back and a couple of Tylenol would probably ease it more by two AM or so; she was sure she’d be awake to find out. When she put the Tylenol back in the medicine cabinet, she took the Ambien bottle out, held it in her hand for almost a full minute, then replaced that, too. It wouldn’t put her to sleep, only make her muzzy and—perhaps—more paranoid than she was already.
She lay down and looked at the night table on the other side of the bed. Bob’s clock. Bob’s spare set of reading glasses. A copy of a book called The Shack. You ought to read this, Darce, it’s a life-changer, he’d said two or three nights before this latest trip.
She turned off her lamp, saw Stacey Moore stuffed into the cornbin, and turned the lamp back on again. On most nights, the dark was her friend-sleep’s kindly harbinger—but not tonight. Tonight the dark was populated by Bob’s harem.