Bile rose in Andrew's throat, but he willed himself not to vomit. He stared at the dead animal. There was something strange about the discolored lower half of the carcass, but he could not see what it was because of the angle at which it hung. Holding his breath against the stench of rot, he took another step forward.
A section of the woodchuck's underside had been shaved and an M carved into the translucent, pinkish white skin.
Monteith.
Was this Monteith? Gooseflesh prickled on Andrew's arms. The thought seemed plausible in some crazy, irrational way, but he could think of no logical basis for such an assumption. A woodchuck named Monteith? Why would Barbara have such an animal? And why would she kill it and mutilate it? Why would she write its name in her diary, on her stationery?
He tried to imagine Barbara tying the twine around the woodchuck's neck in the empty garage, hoisting the squirming, screaming, fighting animal into the air, but he could not do it.
How well did he really know his wife? he wondered. All these years he'd been kissing her goodbye in the morning when he left for work, kissing her hello at night when he returned, but he had never actually known what she did during the times in between. He'd always assumed she'd done housewife-type things—cooking, cleaning, shopping—but he'd never made the effort to find out the specifics of her day, to really learn what she did to occupy her time in the hours they weren't together.
He felt guilty now for this tacit trivialization of her life, for the unspoken but acted-upon assumption that his time was more important than hers. He imagined her putting on a false face for his homecoming each evening, pretending with him that she was happy, that everything was all right, while her lonely daylight hours grew more confining, more depressingly meaningless.
So meaningless that she'd turned to animal sacrifice?
He stared at the hanging insect-infested woodchuck, at the M carved on its underside. Something was wrong with this scenario. Something was missing. Something did not jibe.
He spit. The smell was starting to get to him, he could taste it in his mouth, feel it in his lungs, and he hurried out of the garage before he threw up, opening the big door to let in the outside air. He took a series of deep, cleansing breaths as he stood at the head of the driveway, then walked over to the hose to get a drink. He splashed the cold rubbery-tasting water onto his face, let it run over his hair. Finally, he turned off the faucet and shook his head dry.
It was then that he saw the snails.
They were on the cracked section of sidewalk next to the hose, and they were dead. He squatted down. Barbara had obviously poured salt on three snails she'd found in the garden, and she'd placed the three dissolving creatures at the points of a rough triangle on the sidewalk. Two of the shells were now completely empty and had blown over, their black openings facing sideways, the drying mucus that had once been their bodies puddled on the concrete in amoeba-like patterns, but the third snail had not yet dissolved completely and was a mass of greenish bubbles.
With a safety pin shoved through its center.
Andrew pushed the third shell with a finger, looking more closely. The pink plastic end of the safety pin stood out in sharp relief against the brown shell and green bubbling body. He stood. He'd never had any great love for snails, had even poured salt on them himself as a youngster, but he had never been so deliberately cruel as to impale one of the creatures on a pin. He could not understand why Barbara would make a special effort to torture one of them, what pleasure or purpose she could hope to gain from such an action.
And why had she placed three of them at the corners of a triangle?
Between the woodchuck and the snails, there was a sense of ritualism emerging that made Andrew extremely uncomfortable. He wished he'd never seen the stationery on the table. He wished he'd never followed up on it. Always before, he had phoned ahead prior to coming home. Even on those few occasions when he had left work ill, he had telephoned Barbara to let her know he was coming home, believing such advance notice an example of common courtesy. This time, however, he had not phoned home, and he was not sure why he hadn't.
He wished he had.
Monteith.
Maybe it wasn't the name of a lover after all. Maybe it was some sort of spell or invocation.
Now he was being crazy.
Where was Barbara? He walked out to the front of the house, looked up and down the street for a sign of her car, saw nothing. He wanted to forget what he had seen, to go inside and turn on the TV and wait for her to come home, but the knot of fear in his stomach was accompanied by a morbid and unhealthy curiosity. He had to know more, he had to know what was really going on—although he was not sure that this had any sort of reasonable explanation.
The thought occurred to him that he was hallucinating, imagining all of this. He'd left work because of severe stomach cramps and diarrhea, but perhaps he was sicker than he'd originally believed. Maybe he didn't have a touch of the flu—maybe he was in the throes of a full-fledged nervous breakdown.
No. It would be reassuring to learn that there was something wrong with himself instead of Barbara. It would relieve him to know that this insanity was in his mind, but he knew that was not the case. His mental faculties were at full power and functioning correctly. There really was a mutilated woodchuck in the garage, a triangle of tortured snails on the sidewalk, an empty diary with only one word on one page.
Monteith.
Were there other signs he had missed, other clues to Barbara's ... instability? He thought that there probably were and that he would be able to find them if he looked hard enough. He walked around the side of the garage to the back yard. Everything looked normal, the way it always did, but he did not trust this first surface impression and he walked past the line of covered, plastic garbage cans, across the recently mowed lawn to Barbara's garden. He looked up into the branches of the lemon tree, the fig tree, and the avocado tree. He scanned the rows of radishes, the spreading squash plants. His gaze had already moved on to the winter-stacked lawn furniture behind the garage before his brain registered an incongruity in the scene just passed, a symmetrical square of white tan amidst the free-form green.
He backtracked, reversing the direction of his visual scan, and then he saw it.
In the corner of the yard, next to the fence, nearly hidden by the corn, was a small crude hut made of Popsicle sticks.
He stared at the square structure. There was a small door and a smaller window, a tiny pathway of pebbles leading across the dirt directly in front of the miniature building. The house was approximately the size of a shoebox and was poorly constructed, the globs of glue used to affix the crooked roof visible even from here.
Had this been made by one of the neighborhood kids or by Barbara? Andrew was not sure, and he walked across the grass until he stood in front of the hut. He crouched down. There were pencil markings on the front wall—lightly rendered shutters on either side of the two windows, bushes drawn next to the door.
The word Monteith written on a mailbox in his wife's handwriting.
Barbara had made the house.
He squinted one eye and peered through the open door.
Inside, on the dirt floor, was an empty snail shell impaled by a safety pin.
He felt again the fear, frightened more than he would have thought possible by the obsessive consistency of Barbara's irrationality. He stood, and his eye was caught by a streak of purple graffiti on the brick fence in front of him. He blinked. There, above the Popsicle-stick house, on the brick fence wall, half-hidden by the grape vines and the corn stalks, was a crude crayon drawing. The picture was simple and inexpertly drawn, the lines crooked and wavering, and he would have ascribed its origin to a child had it not been for the subject of the illustration.