Page 16 of A Talent for Murder

“Okay, I will.” But she stayed seated while Paul Hollywood analyzed some under-baked biscuits. She wondered how she was going to get through the rest of the night, let alone the next week.

When the episode ended, Alan said he was heading up to bed, and Martha said that she might stay up and watch a little more television. Right before he left the room he turned and asked, “You sure you’re okay? You seem a little tense tonight.”

“Just my period, I think,” she said, even though she’d had it less than two weeks ago.

“Lady troubles,” Alan said, almost to himself, before leaving the TV room.

An hour later Martha stepped into their bedroom to hear Alan snoring into his pillow. She shut the bedroom door and went back downstairs into the dark living room, opening up her laptop, telling herself that she’d just do a quick check of North Carolina news to find out if anything had happened over the weekend. Perched on the edge of her office chair, she typed in “Chapel Hill,” which brought her to the local paper, the News & Observer. She scanned the news section, relieved that the lead story seemed to be that a team of firefighters had rescued a kitten from the roof of an apartment building. As far as she could tell, there were no recent murders, or violent crimes. Still, she did a search using the words “Chapel Hill” and “unsolved.” There were multiple hits, but nothing recent. She erased her browsing history, closed the laptop, and took the first deep breath she’d taken that night.

Martha worked the next day at the library, the hours passing in an almost dreamlike way, as though everything moved a little slower. She was working every day that week, and Alan was home on one of his staycations. He didn’t have a conference over the next weekend, and they’d talked about going somewhere, maybe down to an inn they liked in Gloucester, on Cape Ann.

“You doing okay, hon?” Mary said to her as she was walking past the reference desk. Martha must have been staring into space.

“If one more person asks me that,” she said, then saw the look of shame on Mary’s face and immediately apologized. “Oh, sorry, Mary. I’m fine, honestly.”

“I was just hoping you don’t have that flu that’s going around. Margie had it and said her throat felt like she’d swallowed thumbtacks.”

“No, I’m fine. It’s probably nothing.”

But that night she told Alan that she thought she might be coming down with something, that she felt flushed and her throat hurt.

“And you’re getting your period,” he said, and it took her a moment to remember that she’d lied about that to him the day before.

“When it rains...” she said.

She set herself up in the guest room, reading her book and having saltine crackers and ginger ale for her dinner, deciding that even though she wasn’t sick she could probably happily eat that particular meal on any given day. At ten o’clock Alan popped into the room to say good night, standing in the doorframe. “Hey, can I ask you something out of left field?” he said.

“Okay,” she said, alarmed by the serious tone in his voice.

“Don’t freak out on me for asking this, but are you having an affair?”

She looked at him for five seconds trying to process the words and saw that his face was bloodless, his jaw rigid with anxiety. “What?” she said. “No, of course not. Why are you asking?”

“It’s just... a feeling, I guess. You’ve been a little distant lately, and I go away for long periods of time. And there’s another thing, but I don’t know if I want to say it. It’ll make me sound crazy.”

“What is it? Now you are freaking me out a little.”

“So, you seemed so distant yesterday, and you were kind of vague about what you’d done over the weekend, so while you were in the shower... I went and checked your odometer. In your car.”

“I’m sorry. You did what?”

“I checked your odometer. And I saw that you added about two hundred miles to it since the last time I looked.”

“Since the last time you looked? Please explain that to me.”

“I don’t understand your question.”

“Why do you know what my odometer is at?”

“I always know that, just like I know exactly how much money we have in our checking accounts, and how long it’s been since we changed the water filter in the fridge, and the exact sales figures on all my merchandise. It’s just how I think. Where did you go, Martha?”

His little speech had been long enough for Martha to decide what to say. “I had lunch with a friend in Worcester. Her name’s Lily Kintner and she lives in Connecticut, so we met halfway there.”

“You’ve never mentioned her before.”

“Honestly, we’re not that close. We went to grad school together, then lost touch, but she reached out to me and we talked on the phone and decided last-minute to meet up. We went to this awful Irish pub that you wouldn’t believe—”

“I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me about it.” He tugged at an earlobe.

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