“Have you heard anything, anything at all?”
“The not-knowing must be the worst of it, right?”
“I can only imagine how much you must need some sense of closure.”
You could guess the questions on the minds of those who chose to say nothing.
“Did you do it?”
“You feel pretty smug, thinking you got away with it?”
Or just:
“Why?”
I’d stayed in the Mulberry house for the better part of a year after it happened, and would have moved away sooner had I been able to sell the house more quickly. But the place was tainted. Prospective buyers, one way or another, had heard the stories about the current owners, or, more accurately, owner. There was no actual evidence anything grisly had actually happened on the property. It wasn’t as if someone had been buried in the basement or tucked a body away in the attic. But that didn’t do much to tamp down some potential purchasers’ anxieties. At least I was allowed to sell it. I’d registered the house in the name of my company. If it had been jointly owned with Brie, and I’d needed her signature to complete any sales deal, the house would still be there, and in all likelihood I’d still be living in it.
The plan had always been to do major renovations on the place, knock out some walls, blow out the attic to make a more usable third floor, redo the kitchen. Maybe live there, maybe sell it. Buying an older house, renovating it while we lived in it, and then selling it, was something we’d done three times before, and Brie was more than fed up with living that way. It was a major source of tension that nearly ruined our marriage. That, and a couple of other things. This house on Mulberry was one we were debating whether to settle in permanently.
The basic structure of the house — the bones, I called it — had been good. There was something to work with there, but everything about the place was out-of-date. It needed to be rewired, the plumbing was a catastrophe waiting to happen. I’d ripped away the drywall on some of the exterior walls and found insulation black with mold. The previous owner had been there for nearly fifty years, since the late seventies, and hadn’t done much beyond replacing the roof shingles. Those avocado appliances in the kitchen were but one item on a very long list of things that had to go. And that pink toilet in the upstairs bathroom?
“Don’t get me started,” Brie used to say.
But once everything went to shit, and my life became a public spectacle, fodder for true crime shows and social media speculation, I needed a fresh start. The house finally sold for about ten percent under what I was asking, and I felt lucky to get that. I found my current residence across the river in Stratford, but I hadn’t actually bought the place. I found it difficult to make decisions that involved permanence, so I was leasing with an option to buy.
I was, for a very long time, a mess. Having your wife disappear, and hearing the whispers behind your back that you’re responsible, will do that to you.
I lost my friends, except for one, and for a long stretch lost work. Nobody was keen to hire the guy who might have killed his wife and gotten rid of her body. I drank. A lot. I found alcohol helpful because when I was sober, I couldn’t sleep. At least drinking would put me out for a while.
If I had any real goal in the first three years or so after Brie vanished, it was to achieve a total state of numbness. I wanted to feel nothing. Happiness and contentment were off the table, but I didn’t want the flip side, either. The booze helped block the depression and the guilt and the grieving.
At least, up to a point.
One day, waking up fully clothed in an empty bathtub with no memory of how I got there, I decided that it was time to make a choice. Kill yourself, or get your shit together. I chose the latter. That one good friend helped me get through it.
And I got better, but I never fully pulled out of that dark place. Not until I met Jayne Keeling one day when her car stalled in the drive-through line at McDonald’s, blocking half a dozen vehicles behind her, including mine. I came to her rescue, got her car moving, and something just clicked between us.
That was when I forced the door shut on all that had happened to me in the preceding six years. I didn’t want Jayne to have even a peek into that room. I was afraid if she knew what I had been through, what some suspected me of having done, she’d walk away. Brie was gone and the world would have to carry on without ever knowing what had happened to her.
And then came the call from Max.
I did not know what to make of it.
“I think it was Brie.”
My wife, missing for six years and presumed, by many, to be dead, had shown up at my old address?
Impossible.
I figured, if I went over there in person, I might be able to extract more detail from him. He’d also said a girl living in the house that had been built on the site of my former home had seen this woman. Maybe I could talk to her, too.
I had the sense that my universe, such as it was, was on the verge of some kind of... unraveling.
There was so much I had not told Jayne.
Max had been expecting me, and was sitting on his porch when I pulled up in front of his house, parking the Explorer at the curb. He came down to greet me, extended a hand.
“Andy,” he said. “Nice... to see you.”
Nice and awkward was more like it. Max and I had been good neighbors to each other, chatting on trash pickup day when we would find ourselves bringing garbage and recycling to the street at the same time. If he needed a special drill attachment, he could borrow one from me. If I ran short of ice on a Saturday night, Max could provide. Brie and I occasionally socialized with him and his wife, Ruth. A backyard barbecue once or twice a year. But we weren’t what you would call close.
Max told me basically the same story he’d related over the phone. The black Volvo pulling into the driveway, the woman getting out and looking at the house, distressed that it was not the one she expected to find. His description of the woman was imprecise. She kind of looked like Brie, but he couldn’t swear to it. The closest he got to her was probably forty feet.
“But who else would be shocked to find the house gone?” he asked. “I heard that the McGuires, who you bought the original house from, have all passed, so, who else would come back here expecting to find a house that got torn down a long time ago?”
I had no idea how to respond to that.
As we stood in his driveway, I looked at the home that now stood where mine had been. It was a dramatic-looking building. Angular, modern, lots of glass. It didn’t fit in with the other, older houses on the street, but the neighborhood was slowly evolving, and in another ten years, as more homes came down and new ones went up, no one would give this place a second look.
I noticed, mounted discreetly under the eaves, a small glass bubble. A security camera with a wide-angle view.
I left Max standing there as I crossed the property line, went up to the front door, and rang the bell. It was one of those camera doorbells you see advertised all the time on television. It had the ability to capture a decent image of someone on the front step, but that camera below the eaves would have a broader field of vision.
The door was opened by a tall, portly man in his forties. I wracked my brain, trying to remember the name of the buyer on the property transaction from several years ago, but it wouldn’t come.
“Yes?” he said.
“Sorry to bother you,” I said. “My name’s Andrew. I used to live here. Well, not in this house. But the house that was torn down to build this one.”