I rose early each morning and spent my time cleaning the apartment with the strongest cleaners I could find using rubber gloves and paper towels. By the time I was finished the house and its furnishing had neither a trace of a fingerprint nor a spec of Amber’s blood. I removed all evidence that we or any other living creature had ever trespassed there.
The detectives interviewed Melanie down at the police station. She, of course, denied having seen Amber during the past several months but she did admit to talking to her as would have been found out by the telephone calls. The detective had mistakenly honed in on Amber’s poor husband, Charlie, much as they had done to me when Catherine died. But of course they could find no evidence of where she had been killed. I was actually proud of what an excellent job I had done, however accidentally, at disguising my trail. And good fortune also played a role as it rained heavily the night that I had dropped Amber’s body off and there were no identifiable footprints left by the culprit.
14
Risky as it was, Melanie and I decided to attend Amber’s funeral mass. Sarah stayed home. It was painful and sad to see Amber’s children grieving. She had a boy, Steven, about Sarah’s age and I could tell as he walked behind the casket holding his father’s hand that he was doing his best to be courageous in his little black suit and tie and his neatly combed brown hair but the tears that trickled from the corners of his eyes unmasked his efforts. Susie, Amber’s daughter, was only four and her cheeks were red and smudged and inflamed from her ceaseless effort to wipe away her tears as she buried her head in her father’s chest while she sat upon his free arm. Susie looked adorable and pitiful at once in her body-length black adult style dress with a little white bow below the collar. Her blonde hair was pulled up and tied with a black ribbon.
But it was Amber’s husband Charlie who extracted the most sympathy from me; perhaps because I could empathize so closely with his plight. I felt guilty for having placed him in the position of defending himself from a crime that I knew that he did not commit and I empathized with him for the loss of his wife and the realization that he would have to raise his children without her help. I had been diligently keeping up with the evolution of the case both on television and through the newspaper and the morning periodical had made mention of the leads which pointed to Charlie as Amber’s killer but he had not yet been indicted.
I was once a proponent of the death penalty but for obvious reasons I had changed my position over the course of the past year.
We stood between the vast pews of people, a warbling mass of dark bonnets and bobbing heads, as the priest, dressed in his solemn robe of white, praised Amber’s devotion to her children and her fidelity to Charlie. I smiled at the mention of the word fidelity in the same sentence as Amber’s name but I quickly donned a deliberately sullen expression when Melanie squeezed my hand and I looked down at her and saw that she was tearing up and sniffling. I was amazed at how Melanie had rationalized her perspective on her relationship with Amber after all of the grief that Amber had caused her over the previous months but I suppose that funerals tend to evoke the fonder memories and thus it enabled Melanie to forgive Amber’s transgressions.
At home with Melanie later that night as we lay in bed side-by-side staring at the spinning blades of the ceiling fan above us, our bodies barely touching, Melanie asked me a startling question.
“Did you kill Amber?”
I heard my throat emit a dry wheezing croak. “No.” I said emphatically (though my voice cracked when I spoke) as I turned and explored her eyes, “How could you ask such a thing?”
Guilt filled her eyes as they welled up like ponds, “I just needed to hear you say it.”
She sniffled.
“Where did that come from?” I lifted up and rested my weight on my elbow.
She drew a deep breath, “I’m sorry for asking.” She turned toward me and leaned her forehead into my chest.
“Okay, but what put that thought into your head?”
“Well,” She drew a long broken breath, “I read that the police said that Amber wasn’t killed in her neighbor’s bed,” She sighed again, and looked up at me “and they said that the semen they found in her didn’t match his or her husbands DNA, and your wife was murdered…and I just thought….”
“I know, but I told you I didn’t sleep with Amber that night.” I tried to hold her gaze so that she would believe my lie.
“But you went out the next night and the newspaper said that her car got dropped off that night…and I don’t know…I just needed to hear you say that you didn’t do it.” She started to sob.
I held her chin in my hand and I stared into her eyes so that she would know that I was being truthful. “I didn’t kill Amber.”
Melanie hugged me, and afterwards we just laid in bed, her head resting on my shoulder and my arm wrapped around her body, listening to each other breath as our thoughts wandered, her I supposed to her memories of happier times with Amber and mine to that eventful night and all that took place. I wondered if I had left any clues behind that could lead them to me. The papers made mentioned that Amber may have had an affair but the authorities couldn’t determine who her lover might have been. Given the history of my relationship and my unknown whereabouts I figured that my name had to at least have been mentioned.
My mind wandered to the locked glove compartment of my car in which sat, wrapped in a brown paper bag sandwiched between a stack of receipts and a leather binder, Amber’s cell phone. I had decided to keep it as a sort of memento though I knew that it was a risky thing to do; but her cell phone reminded me of the good times that we had shared during that year when we petted long distance and Amber was both loving and playful. I wanted to remember her that way before I came to know her face and the familiar touch of her soft tanned flesh and the cold-hearted alien that sometimes lived within that disguise. Amber had childishly adorned her flip-phone with little stickers of tiny red hearts around the outside edge of the face and it made me think about her innocent side; the side that had been so Beautiful before her father had molested her innocence away from her and before she had turned into a sexual deviant herself as so often happens to the victims of pedophiles. During our intimate conversations I often sensed that unsullied side of her personality when we played on the phone. It made her devious behavior seem more erotic, as though I were spoiling her wholesome purity; her virginity. It was as if I were a pedophile myself and I was enticing the child in her, as with a stick of licorice or a sweet-tart, to part her fleshy legs and offer up to me her tender prize.
In any event I couldn’t bring myself to part with Amber’s phone so one day when Melanie was out shopping at the grocery store I took a thin scrap of plywood from her garage and I crafted a false shelf underneath of my bottom bureau drawer (which could only be detected if the drawer were completely removed) and I hid the cell phone there, still wrapped in the brown paper bag. I knew that if
Melanie found out that I had Amber’s cell phone that she would think that I had killed her. I knew that if she found it she would not be able to trust me so I hid it where she would never find it.
During the wet spring days that followed Amber’s funeral, through incessant days of constant coolness and steady showers of unrelenting rain that seemed as though they would never end, Melanie and I settled into a routine of sorts. She rose with me early each morning and made my coffee and breakfast while I showered and dressed for work. After I had left she would summon Sarah (I know this because Sarah told me so) into our bed and she would cuddle her as if she were her mother until Sarah crept from her groggy state of slumber to a blissful wakefulness. Then the two of them would bathe in sweet smelling powders and dry and dress while playfully giggling and teasing one another, as though they were sisters. Melanie spent her days educating and entertaining Sarah; playing games and reading and teaching her how to cook. At night I would come home exhausted from my grueling day of work and we would sit down together as a family and eat whatever delicious concoctions the two of them had created. Afterwards we would watch television together or we would play soft jazz music and read by a warm fire while we nestled on the sofa. I would inevitably fall asleep sandwiched between Melanie and Sarah, and Melanie would wake me when she was ready for bed and we would all retire for the evening.