MOSTLY MURDER: Till Death: a mystery anthology Read online

  I shoved the thought out of my mind as soon as it struck me, but it lingered somewhere, in the less-bright recesses of my mind. I still couldn’t resolve myself to call the police on her, and knowing that they would definitely have some awkward questions for both of us at this point, I didn’t go to the hospital that time, either. I went into work, and didn’t comment on my bandaged hand at all and no one asked, but I knew eventually I would need to come up with some kind of story there, too, at least until I figured out what to do about Kanya.

  I knew if I divorced her, they’d deport her right away.

  And the problem was the same problem I’d always had with her.

  I didn’t want to divorce her. I loved her.

  More than anything, I wanted her to love me again, too.

  * * *

  “Could you come in here a second, Robert?”

  I froze, in the act of tossing my car keys on the kitchen counter. I’d never heard the voice before. It was male, deep, with the faintest trace of a Mexican accent.

  A complete stranger was somehow inside my house.

  My eyes searched for that stranger.

  I found him sitting on the leather couch, his hands clasped neatly together where he hung them over his own thighs. The classic, “trust me, I’m your friend” pose that a lot of therapists and social workers adopted. I remembered that pose well from all of the bullshit critical incident debriefing they put me through in San Francisco, when I left the lab there.

  Next to him on that same couch sat my wife, Kanya.

  They sat way too close to one another, in my opinion.

  She wore a sky blue dress, which somehow managed to make her look more Native American than Thai, and she sat forward with her hands clasped too. I couldn’t help noticing that the dress was low cut, and the man sitting next to her on the couch was about fifteen years younger than me, with a full head of thick black hair and handsome.

  His serious brown eyes met mine over the kitchen bar, and he motioned me over with a graceful flick of his tanned hand.

  “Please, Robert.” His voice exuded patience. “It’s important that we talk in here.”

  The thing that came out of my mouth next may not have been polite, but you have to remember, I was pretty surprised to find this strange man in my house.

  “Who the hell are you?” I heard hostility make the words ugly. “What are you doing in my house? What are you doing with my wife?”

  The man’s expression remained serene.

  Definitely some kind of quack therapist.

  “It’s your wife’s house too, Mr. Davenport. She invited me here…”

  He continued speaking as I walked around the counter. I couldn’t help giving Kanya a disbelieving look as I made my way into my own living room, where the two of them had apparently set up camp in order to ambush me.

  “…She’s worried about you,” Robert was saying now. “She didn’t feel she could handle the situation alone, so she sought help from a neighbor, who happens to be a friend of mine.”

  “Worried about me? A neighbor? What neighbor?”

  At the man’s cocked eyebrow, I let out a derisive snort. I saw the stranger, the handsome man who now sat in my house like he belonged there, look down at my bandaged hand.

  Watching him assess the bandage there, I scowled. “Did it occur to you that maybe I have a lot more reasons to be worried about her?”

  Again, the man didn’t react visibly to my words.

  “She’s worried for herself too, Mr. Davenport,” he said gravely. “Why don’t you tell me what happened to your hand?”

  I looked at Kanya, again, unable to believe what I was hearing.

  Was this really happening? Had Kanya brought in an outside party to somehow make her crazy behavior seem like it was coming from me? I hadn’t reported her to the police or even gone to a hospital where her violent acts might be reported by someone else.

  I’d stayed loyal to my wife, even though I was now missing all but my index finger and my thumb on that hand. I’d tried to protect her while I figured out how to help her… and this was how she repaid me?

  “I think you’d better go.” I stared at the man, no longer attempting to be friendly at all. “Right now.”

  “I’d like to talk first,” the man said patiently. “Your wife would like us to talk, as well. Are you willing to tell me what happened to your hand? Or what this is?”

  I followed his tapping finger to the top of our coffee table. I’d bought that for Kanya too, a dark wooden frame set with hand-painted Mexican clay tile. On that table, under his tapping finger, was the same notebook I’d seen my wife looking at in my office the night I noticed the cactus pot missing.

  “That is a design notebook.” I heard a haughtier tone reach my voice, even as I continued standing over him, and over Kanya. “I am an engineer.”

  “Weren’t you fired from your job recently?” the handsome man said.

  I blinked at him, then stared at Kanya, that time in open disbelief. “No. Where do you think I just came from?”

  “Your wife says you spend all day in the shed out back… that you work out there, designing things. Including this…” Again he tapped the notebook on the top of the table with his fingers. He did it more insistently that time, as if willing my eyes to go to the specific area where his fingers pointed, on the pages he’d displayed within the book. “Have you built this particular design yet, Mr. Davenport?” the man said, his voice holding a firmer edge now. “The mechanical hand? Could you show it to me?”

  “It is only a design,” I said, feeling my jaw harden. “A design for a new type of prosthetic hand… a ‘smart’ hand, they call it.”

  “But have you built it, Mr. Davenport?” The man’s dark eyes held a colder light. “Your wife says you have. She says you’ve threatened her with it.”

  “Threatened her?” My jaw just about dropped to my chest. “Kanya told you I’d threatened her?”

  “Yes, she did.” The man’s eyes remained that cooler shade of brown. “She said you’ve been locking her in the house. She said you’re restricting her movements and her interactions with others more and more often… that you took her car keys from her and then sold her car. That you took away her phone and her tablet so she couldn’t contact friends back home. She said you’ve been breaking things in fits of rage, often while wearing the mechanical hand you built. She’s afraid of you, Mr. Davenport…”

  The man’s deep brown eyes grew colder still. “Were you aware that she was a minor when you married her, Robert? That her parents in Thailand were not at all pleased when you left the country with her without their permission?”

  “What?” I stared at Kanya for real that time. “A minor? That’s impossible.”

  “I assure you, it is not. The issue came up when it turned out you’d falsified her enrollment information at UNM. Your neighbor, my friend Lara, confirmed it. Your wife was sixteen years old when you left with her from Bangkok. That story you told everyone, about meeting her in high-end hotel in Manilla because she had a ‘businessman boyfriend’… Kanya told Lara and I that was all a lie. Kanya had never been outside of Bangkok before she met you. She didn’t grow up in a village, either. She grew up in a suburb of Bangkok itself.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I really couldn’t.

  I glanced at my wife for the first time since he’d started talking.

  She stared up at me, wide-eyed.

  The perfect picture of the scared, abused wife. The delicate flower being held against her will in a paunchy, middle-aged man’s home. Looking at her and looking at me, I knew this man would see what most close-minded Americans would see. That we didn’t belong together. That all that mattered was what was on the outside. That she was young and beautiful and I was not would be enough to convict me in the eyes of most.

  I’d known I’d be judged, bringing her back to America with me. I knew jealousy would drive people to say and think all sorts of unkind things.

>   But never in my wildest dreams had I prepared for a betrayal of this kind.

  Not from my sweet Kanya.

  Kanya had somehow convinced this man that I was the one doing all of these crazy things. It may have started with the woman next door, but now, from the way she huddled against this man, it was obvious that she’d positioned him in the role of her savior.

  How? How had she conned both of them so thoroughly?

  I could almost believe it of that nosey, stupid, fat neighbor woman from next door, but what about this man, who was obviously educated, and likely trained to spot deceits of this kind? How had Kanya convinced him so thoroughly?

  Was she sleeping with him?

  The longer I looked between the two of them, the more likely it seemed.

  Why else would anyone believe her? She was a foreigner, barely spoke any English. I was an upstanding member of our community. I paid taxes, had a good job. And I’d been a good husband to her—a blameless husband. I’d only ever tried to give Kanya everything she wanted. I helped her get into those classes at UNM, even though I worried it might not be good for her, to be surrounded by young Americans who might indoctrinate her in Western culture. She wanted it, so I helped her. I bought her whatever she wanted, brought home gifts for her.

  Why would she turn on me like this, unless she was sleeping with him? Why else would she try to convince him I was this terrible monster?

  “I want to see this mechanical hand, Mr. Davenport.” The man’s voice was calm again, but firm. “Right now. I don’t want to bring the authorities into this, but if I have to, I will. Either way, Kanya isn’t staying here any longer. She’s not a minor now, so she can decide for herself what she wants to do, but it’s clear she doesn’t feel safe with you here.”

  I considered threatening to call the police myself.

  I considered threatening to tell them he’d broken in, that I needed him ejected from my home forcefully. But I could see in his eyes how thoroughly my wife had indoctrinated him into her cause. I could see in his eyes that he thought he was right and I was some kind of horrible abuser of my wife.

  Looking between the two of them for a few seconds more, I sighed, as if giving in. My wife avoided my eyes now, staring down at the sand-colored carpet.

  “Fine.” I nodded as if in defeat, combing my good hand through my thinning blond hair and then patting it down on the top. I knew something about this gesture tended to put people at ease, maybe by reminding them I was a paunchy balding man. Nodding again, I sighed more sadly that time. “Come on. Let’s settle this thing, since my wife has obviously convinced you this crazy story of hers is true…”

  Ignoring the frown that touched the handsome man’s full lips, I watched him glance at Kanya. Pretending not to notice that either, I motioned them towards the back yard.

  “It’s out in my work shed. Like she no doubt told you. I’ve been working on a few designs at home lately, which is why I’ve been here, rather than at the lab. My company wanted me to keep some of these patent filings quiet, so I told them I’d work out the prototypes on my own…”

  The man’s frown deepened. Again, he glanced at my wife.

  She returned his look, wide-eyed, like a baby deer, and the man patted her bare knee under her short dress, letting his frown melt to a reassuring smile. I fought not to scowl when I saw it, although clearly he was trying to pretend the gesture was harmless, possibly even paternal. Now I couldn’t decide which of them was the bigger fool, this man or Kanya.

  I suspected it was this man.

  Men were always stupid when it came to women.

  Women knew that. They counted on it.

  The man with the perfect black hair and the tanned skin and too-white smile and too-full lips and too-deep brown eyes rose easily to his feet, making the leather sigh as he got up.

  Kanya followed reluctantly when he motioned her up too, and the two of them followed me out into the yard in the midday sun, around the sky-blue pool on the blue and white tile, and deeper into our desert landscaped garden. We reached the adobe wall where the shed lived, and I pulled the key out from inside my shirt, again using my good hand.

  “You keep that key around your neck?” the man observed, giving another frowning glance back at Kanya.

  I saw my wife hiding behind him almost, as if using this strange man as a shield from me.

  Unable to believe the extent of her theatrics, I swallowed my annoyance.

  “I told you… I’m working on confidential patents.” I made my voice peevish that time, so that it jarred my own ears. I’d figured out long ago, even before San Francisco, that acting weak caused others to discount me. “…My company is trusting me a lot, letting me do this at home. I can’t let any of my work get into our competitor’s hands.”

  I felt the skepticism wafting off the man behind me, but I ignored that, too.

  “I work for defense contractors,” I added. That time, I couldn’t help but give Kanya a colder glare. I saw her shrink from it, clutching the man’s arm, and I looked back at him. “Most of our contracts are military. Even if the applications will be broader at some point, I have to be sensitive to the needs of my employers…”

  The man only nodded, his expression neutral, his eyes flat.

  I knew he didn’t believe me, though.

  I’d always been able to tell when people didn’t believe me.

  I could feel it.

  Swinging the shed door inward on its hinges, I stopped short as sunlight filled the small workroom I’d designed.

  Kanya had outdone herself.

  The potted cactus sat on the floor of the work shed, one side of it broken open and soil spilling over the floor. Most of the succulents inside appeared to be dead or browning. Her broken tablet lay next to it on a low bench, along with the blender, which was also broken, and her two sets of car keys and the old remotes.

  In the window hung the bird necklace I’d given her.

  The diamond glinted in the sun as it twisted gently from the air rushing into the room as I opened the door. I stared around at the workspace, feeling a deeper grief fill me as the truth slowly sank in.

  My wife had set me up.

  She wanted me gone. Out of the way.

  My wife wasn’t anything like I’d thought she was. She wasn’t at all the person I’d seen, pretty much from the instant I’d met her and fallen in love at that hotel in Manila.

  She was something else. Some kind of spiteful manipulator. Someone who pretended to be the perfect wife only to prey on the men who desperately needed to believe such an elusive creature existed. It had all been a lie. A way to take my life from me. A way to hollow out my heart and head until there was nothing of me left.

  And she’d enlisted this man to help her. To be her witness. To convince the world I wasn’t the man I pretended to be.

  To replace me, maybe.

  My worst fear had happened.

  I’d discovered my wife didn’t really love me.

  I’d discovered my wife was trying to destroy me.

  I looked back over my shoulder at her witness and accomplice, the handsome young Hispanic man with the puppy dog brown eyes. He wasn’t looking at the cactus or the necklace or the blender or the remote controls or the keys, however.

  He was staring at my wooden design bench, where a mechanical hand lay on a white cloth, like an insect that had flipped to its back, its legs curled in death.

  Watching him look at it, disgust and a faint horror in his eyes, I knew exactly what it was I had to do.

  * * *

  My therapist asks me every so often if I regret it all now.

  I never know how to answer that question.

  Regret it all? Regret what?

  Which part, exactly?

  That I left San Francisco? That I let my company shuttle me off to Asia, out of sight and out of mind, so they didn’t have to worry about lawsuits from liars and psychotics? That in Asia I found a new start in life? That I met my gorgeous Kanya? Did I regre
t that I married her and had two amazing years with her before I discovered the true nature she hid behind that lovely figure and face?

  Do I regret that I loved her? That I trusted her with my soul? That I was kind to her, bought her everything she wanted? Do I regret I didn’t seek help when all of her erratic behavior started? That I didn’t see her for what she was until it was too late?

  Which part along that twisted, winding path was I supposed to pinpoint the exact instant where I should harbor regret? Request a do-over?

  My therapist would always want to dwell on the irrelevant details though.

  Not even with Kanya.

  He always wanted to talk about San Francisco, which he would always refer to as “where it started.” He’d read me the same fabricated stories that I had to hear at the time, from another woman I’d first thought of as a soul mate and an ally, who turned out to be nothing more than one of those hateful, jealous women who live to manipulate and mess with men’s minds. Like everyone at my old job, though, my therapist always sides with her.

  He drags me through every detail of that investigation—even though I was totally acquitted of all wrongdoing and didn’t have a single conviction on my record at the time. When he points out that I nearly lost my job and that most people at my old work site believed I was guilty, that I’d simply fallen through the cracks of the justice system, I try to explain how that woman had manipulated them all into believing that, but he didn’t want to hear it.

  “Robert,” he would say, his blue eyes holding that fake-patience all shrinks seem to perfect over time. “In light of what you did in New Mexico, you must realize that everyone now believes you were guilty of that initial crime, as well?”

  Then he would go on and on about the trial in Albuquerque, all of the lies that got told about me there, too. He’d remind me how my employer testified that I’d been fired from my job for too many missed days of work, along with so-called “erratic behavior”… totally omitting the fact that I missed those days because I’d been drugged and mutilated by my wife while I slept.