Page 3 of A Talent for Murder

Jean had asked Martha that before. “If there’s money in it, then I suspect someone will do it.”

“You should do it, Martha.” Jean was apparently under the impression that because Martha read so much, she would also be able to write a publishable book.

“I should, shouldn’t I?” she said to Jean. “Make a fortune. Leave this library for good.”

“Oh, Martha.” Jean smiled. She wore no makeup except for lipstick and some of it was on her right canine. Martha decided not to tell her.

Alan was coming home from Denver that night, a flight that was getting in around midnight. Maybe that was why she was thinking about him so much today. When he was around, he was simply there, blending into the well-worn furniture of their cozy house. But during his trips away, and immediately upon his return, he loomed large in her mind.

She wondered why that was, and suspected it had something to do with what had happened when—a few trips ago—he’d returned from Connecticut. She’d been standing at the bedroom window after hearing his car pull onto their pebble drive. It was a little before dusk, the light with that magical glow that clarifies everything it touches, and she could see Alan’s face as he got out of the driver’s side and went around to the back of his Hyundai to retrieve his luggage. He was tall and angular but moved with a languid elegance—it was what most attracted Martha to him initially. There was a grace about him that didn’t fit his rather studious face, gaunt almost, with large eyes. But that night, watching from her window, it was like she’d never seen him before. His face had an almost cold, ruthless look to it. She told herself she was seeing him from a distance, and that he was tired, but still, it was alarming to witness an expression on his face that she felt she’d never seen before. After gathering his luggage and locking his car, he then stood for a moment looking toward the sunset, his jaw slack, his eyes empty and uncaring. Then she watched him take a deep breath, swelling his chest. He shook his head and his expression changed, back to the vacuous sweetness of the Alan she knew. He even smiled, as though he were willfully transforming himself. Then he headed indoors.

She came down the stairs to meet him, and he greeted her the way he always did. A huge grin, some corny joke such as, “Honey, I’m home,” or “Was that your boyfriend I saw going out the back?” and then they hugged. Sometimes upon his return he’d used the phrase, “Hello, family.” It struck her as overly sentimental, although a part of her was moved by the sentiment.

But that moment from the summer, that view of his unguarded self outside of their house, had stayed with her. She forgot it when he was around, but often thought of it when he was on a trip, and almost always thought of it on the days he returned.

The last hour at the library went fast. One of her favorite patrons, Mr. MacNeice, who came in at least twice a week, had asked her for recommendations of woman authors he hadn’t read yet. She’d mentioned a few of her favorites—Edith Wharton, George Eliot, Joan Didion—but he told her he wanted young, contemporary writers. Mr. MacNeice (Martha thought his first name might be Alec, but she wasn’t sure) was at least eighty years old, if not older. They browsed the stacks together and he ended up leaving with Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Station Eleven by Emily St.John Mandel. Martha knew he’d return in less than a week having read both books.

She left the library in Kittery at about a quarter after five and got back to her house in Portsmouth ten minutes later. Even though she worked in Maine and lived in New Hampshire, on more than one occasion she’d actually walked to the library, just two miles away, over the Piscataqua River.

The house she shared with Alan was a cottage-style two-bedroom, its top floor a recent addition by the previous owners. The front of the house had a large living area that led into a small dining room and smaller kitchen. Upstairs were the two bedrooms, and a strangely large bathroom dominated by a hot-tub bath in black tile. Alan had let her decorate the house, and she’d filled it with bookshelves and overstuffed furniture. Before taking off her coat, Martha fed Gilbert his dry food. He meowed at her, his standard complaint, then consented to try it. She then made herself her own dinner. When Alan was away she rarely cooked. Instead, she would put cheese and deli meat and crackers and some fruit and sometimes some carrots on a cutting board and bring it with her to living room. She put on one of the home renovation shows that she liked and Alan didn’t, and slowly picked away at the food on the board. She didn’t particularly care for the couple who were having their very beige house redone into another beige house, and she found herself thinking about Alan again. After he’d returned from that trip to Shepaug University in Connecticut, after she’d watched him from the bedroom window, she’d decided to look up the conference he’d just been to. It was a strange whim. Well, maybe not strange. Alan always let her know where he was going and she often took a look at the conference sites. It was curiosity.

When she’d typed in the words “Shepaug” and “teachers’ conference,” the first thing that came up was a news story. One of the participants, a middle school art teacher from Woodstock, New York, named Josie Nixon, had committed suicide over the weekend. It was a short news article from a local paper. She’d apparently jumped from the sixth-floor balcony of the dormitory that she had been staying in. There was a mention that the police had concluded there had been no foul play, and then there were two paragraphs about how this latest death had reignited an argument about the dormitory building itself. Apparently, since it had been built, there had been more than one jumping death from the open balconies.

The day after Alan had returned from that trip she’d asked him about Josie Nixon, and he’d given her a blank look before saying, “Oh, I heard about that. Terrible.”

“Did you know her?”

“I don’t understand the question,” Alan said. It was a minor annoying habit of his, that instead of simply asking Martha what she meant, he always said how he didn’t understand her question.

“I mean, did you have any contact with her during the conference? Did she buy anything from you?”

“I guess she might have, but if she did, I don’t remember. My customers are like one big blur to me, honestly.”

Martha thought that was the end of the conversation, but about five minutes later, after talking about something else, Alan said, “It did cast a major pall over the conference when word got around.”

“What do you mean?” Martha said.

“The young woman who killed herself. After word got around, the conference turned kind of grim. The weather didn’t help, either.”

That had been the end of their conversation on the suicide. But she’d thought about it—the way he looked on his return, those few words—repeatedly. She’d read somewhere once that our memories are never reliable, that what we are actually remembering is not the event itself, but a replay of the last time we remembered the event. Our minds play videotapes, and those videotapes degrade over time. Martha wondered about that now as she pictured Alan in the driveway, the setting sun burnishing him, his face empty of any kind of humanness. And then she pictured him gathering himself, taking a breath, and smiling. In the beginning she’d read this action as him trying to change his mood, shake off the road, and prepare to enter back into his real life. But now she saw it differently. The smile wasn’t for him. It was a smile that would be for her. He was practicing, the way an actor might alter their face or posture while waiting in the wings for their cue. He was practicing his smile.

Chapter2

She was dozing when he finally returned. Moving bars of light from his headlights swept across the wallpaper of their bedroom as he parked in the driveway. And then she heard the faint sound of the trunk being opened and closed, followed by the less-faint sound of him coming in through the front door. She could tell he was being quiet, trying not to wake her. Gilbert jumped heavily off the bed to go and investigate, but Martha decided to stay put. He’d be upstairs soon, probably take a shower, get into some clean pajamas, then slide under the covers and up against her body. She curled onto her left side and waited, but she was asleep by the time he came to bed.

In the morning, Alan was up before her.

“Oh no,” Martha said from the tangle of sheets. “You’re up already.”

“Shh,” he said. “Stay in bed. I have that breakfast meeting with Saul, remember?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, pulling a second pillow underneath her shoulders. “I remember,” she lied. “How was Denver?”

“Was I in Denver? When was that?” He chuckled at his own joke. “It was good, actually. Decent sales.”

“Oh, I’m happy for you.”

Before he left, Alan unpacked his carry-on bag in the bedroom while they talked some more about the convention he’d been at for the last three days. Then she told him about having to fire one of the volunteers at the library because she was talking too much to the patrons.

---