“Your wife says she noticed it missing around the time of the first murder.”
“She never mentioned it.”
“You see the problem we’re having, don’t you, Mr. Malville?” Stride asked. “We’re searching your car right now. Soon we’ll search your house and your office. Are we going to find that knife?”
Malville was silent.
“Speaking of your car,” Stride added, “your wife checked the mileage on your odometer before she went to bed the night before last. That was the night that Sherry Morton was killed.”
“So?”
“So she checked the car in the morning, and it had been driven thirty miles overnight.”
“What?”
“Thirty miles happens to be almost the exact round trip distance between your house and Sherry Morton’s apartment.”
“You’re lying. I don’t believe it. Alison didn’t say anything like that.”
Stride and Maggie stared at him, letting the truth sink into his mind.
“Look at the evidence, Mr. Malville,” Stride went on. “Your wife’s clothes go missing and wind up on the bodies of three dead women. A knife goes missing from inside your house. Your car is driven thirty miles on the night of one of the murders. Can you think of any explanation for what we’ve found? Anything that doesn’t point to you as the man who killed these women?”
Malville grimaced. “I can think of one possibility, but I must be wrong.”
“What is it?” Stride asked.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but there’s no other explanation that makes sense. Alison must have killed those women herself.”
They let Alison go before midnight.
She picked up Evan, who was already asleep, at her sister’s house, and she deposited him in her car without waking him up. Evan could sleep like the dead. She drove home, where the silence inside their house was like a cathedral. She knew what to expect in the morning. The police would come. They would paw through every inch of her house, touch her things, sweep through their personal lives, and carry away their secrets. Tonight, for one more night, she could be alone. For the first time in weeks, she could feel safe.
Without Michael.
She draped Evan across his bed and covered him, knowing he would kick off the blankets overnight. She watched her son sleeping and wondered how she would explain it to him. What his father had done. What the future held for the two of them. She realized she didn’t have any answers.
Alison undressed in her bedroom and put on her silk robe. She went downstairs to the kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of white wine to settle her nerves. She took it into the formal dining room and sat at the end of the oak table, as if she were hosting a party for a crowd of invisible guests. She set her wine on a coaster made of red-and-black colored glass, but she left it untouched. As she blinked, tears swelled out of her eyes.
She’d hoped she would feel better when it was done, but she didn’t. Guilt made her chest tight. Acid traced a fiery line up her throat. Under her robe, she felt the ants crawling all over her skin. They hadn’t left. They were still swarming in the ceiling.
What if Michael was right? What if she was insane?
“Go away!” she screamed at the empty room. “Do you hear me? Leave me alone!”
She grabbed her wine glass and threw it at the far wall. Sauvignon blanc spilled across the table like a river. The glass struck the wall and shattered in a spray of razor-like shards. Some of the pieces landed on the table and glittered like diamonds under the light of the chandelier. She stared in disbelief at what she’d done, tasting blood in her mouth as she bit her lower lip between her teeth.
She stood up, tipping the chair backward. She put both hands flat on the dining room table and closed her eyes, feeling herself breathe in and out. She knew what she had to do. Leave. Get away. Take Evan and go. She realized now that her hallucinations had nothing to do with herself or with Michael. It was the house they’d built. The house was haunting her. The house was evil. It had crept inside her husband’s brain and made him into a killer. It had begun to eat away her own sanity.
Get away.
She fled from the dining room without picking up the chair or attending to the broken glass. In the kitchen, she stood stiffly, like a statue, thinking about what she had to pack. She could stuff her entire life in a single suitcase, and it would still be half-empty. Suddenly, there was almost nothing from this place that she wanted to remember or preserve. She didn’t want the photographs on the mantle above the fireplace. She didn’t want the rings, the necklaces, the bracelets. She didn’t even want her clothes, because when she thought about them, she saw the faces of the dead women dressed in her own wardrobe. She would rather let a charity cart it all away.
She had no idea when she’d return, if ever. She would leave the house to the police. Without Michael, there was nothing here for her anyway. The life she’d known was gone, and all she could do was cut the threads that held her here and start over.
Her kitchen.
If she would miss anything, it would be the time they had spent here on holidays, with the smells of good food suffusing the air. All of them together. Evan reading his comic books. Michael typing on his laptop. Alison, rubbing spices on the roast and chopping up vegetables with an expert hand. She could dice an onion with a knife into perfect translucent cubes.
The knife.
Alison stared in disbelief at the kitchen counter. The butcher block for their knives sat at an angle to the sink, the way it always did. Each slot was filled. A black handle jutted out of the empty gash that had taunted her for weeks. None of the knives was missing. The carving knife that had disappeared was back again, as if it had never vanished, never cut into the bodies of three innocent women.
She began to doubt herself. Had it ever been gone? Had she imagined the missing knife?
What was happening to her?
Alison stretched out her hand with her fingers curled like a claw as she approached the counter. She hardly dared to touch the knife, as if it would disappear when she reached for it. But the handle was real and solid. She drew it out slowly, and as she hoisted the blade in the air, her mouth curled into an “O” of horror. The honed silver was covered over and crusted in streaks of dry crimson. It was a killing machine, bloody from its latest butchery.
“Mom?”
Alison spun in shock, expecting Michael behind her. She clutched the knife in front of her chest to protect herself. Instead, she saw Evan at the bottom of the steps, studying her with fear in his big eyes. She cried and let the knife fall from her fingers. It clattered to the floor.
“Oh, my God,” she murmured, running to her son and sinking to her knees. She gathered him up in her arms and smothered him with kisses. “Oh, Evan, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. What’s wrong? Why aren’t you sleeping?”
Evan glanced at the vacant hallway upstairs, where they could see the closed door of his bedroom. His face was grave and mature. He leaned into his mother and whispered in Alison’s ear.
“It’s the spitting devil,” he told her. “He’s here.”
Alison stroked Evan’s hair as she held him. “Don’t worry, honey, you just had a nightmare. You’re safe with me now.”
Her son shook his head firmly. “It’s not a dream. He’s real.”
“Did you read something in one of your comic books? Were you looking at them in bed again? I told you not to do that.”
“I’ve seen him,” Evan insisted. “He lives in my closet.”
Alison stared at her son in confusion. “Evan, sweetheart, what are you talking about?”
“He walks around at night,” the boy said. “I hear him coughing sometimes. I pretend to be asleep, but I see him in my room when he comes and goes.”