Page 4 of A Talent for Murder

“Can you fire a volunteer?”

“You can tell them that their services aren’t needed anymore. Jill was going to do it, but at the last minute she panicked and asked me to talk to her. It was awful.”

“I’m sure you were as nice as possible.”

“She asked me if it was something she’d done, and I lied and said that the board wanted to reduce the number of volunteers. I don’t think she believed me.”

When Alan had gone downstairs, Martha got up, brushed her teeth, and combed her hair, but stayed in the cotton nightgown she’d slept in, pulling a cardigan on over it because she was cold. She got down just as Alan was at the front door, wearing his wool winter coat. It was early April, but as she often thought, and sometimes said, in New Hampshire April is really just March Part Two. “Let me at least get a hug before you go,” she said, sliding into his arms. Alan had large strong hands and he ran them up along her rib cage, grazing her left breast.

“Maybe we could take a little nap this afternoon,” he said. “I’ll be home around three.”

“I’d like that,” Martha said.

“What are your plans today?”

“Nothing,” she said. It was Monday, but since she’d begun working from Tuesday through Saturday, Mondays were now her Sundays. “I can wash your clothes from the trip this morning. I was going to do laundry anyway.”

“That would be a big help.”

After he was gone, she took a long shower, then made herself tea and toast. Since having that little talk with herself the night before, she suddenly felt stupid about her suspicions. What had her suspicions even been, exactly? That Alan was grumpy when he returned from work? That Alan had something to do with a young teacher committing suicide?

It had begun to rain outside, a cold spring rain, and she was actually happy about it. Her mom had always reminded her that when she was a seven-year-old she had declared rain to be the best weather because it was reading weather. And she had never really shed that opinion. After starting a load of laundry she was looking forward to getting back into her novel, Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym. She’d never heard of Pym until one of her friends on Facebook posted something about her, and now she was steadily working her way through all of her books.

Alan’s clothes from his trip were in the laundry basket and his bag was stowed away in his closet. Considering how much he traveled, she wouldn’t have blamed him for never really unpacking. But he was fastidious about putting things away. “When I’m home,” he liked to say, “I’m truly home.”

She made two piles on the bed, one of colors and one of whites, then took a close look at Alan’s two white shirts, making sure they were in good shape, no underarm stains or frayed collars. They both seemed fine, but flipping one of the white shirts around she spotted a reddish brown stain on the lower left-hand side of the back of the shirt. She touched it with a fingertip, a stain that looked as though a finger had left it. A finger dipped in something—chocolate, maybe? She looked closer, even sniffing at it, and there was the slightest smell of something elemental, earthy. Could it be blood? She tried to imagine Alan getting a paper cut or something on his finger, then wiping at his back. She made the move herself, twisting her arm around to see if it made any kind of sense. It didn’t really.

Something moved inside of her, her organs shifting. Was there really blood on her husband’s shirt?

She should just ask him about it. “Oh, honey. Did you cut yourself on your trip? I think I found some blood on one of your shirts.” That’s what an unsuspecting wife would do, right? And he would tell her about pricking his finger on some brooch he sold and then it would be over. But instead she found herself sitting in front of her laptop about to see if anything strange had happened during Alan’s recent trip. All she knew about the conference he had just come back from was that it had been held in Denver, Colorado, and that it had been a conference for high school English teachers.

“I thought those were busts for you,” she’d said before he’d left.

“They used to be. Old-school English teachers definitely did not go in for novelty mugs, but I think it’s changing. I sell a ton of grammar T-shirts.”

“What’s a grammar T-shirt?”

“Oh, you know, let’s eat kids. Then, let’s eat (comma) kids”—he ran his finger across his chest to demonstrate—“and then it says something like punctuation saves lives.”

“Oh, funny,” Martha said. She really did think that most of Alan’s humorous T-shirts were actually quite clever.

“Well, it’s a break from math teachers, and for that I’ll be thankful.”

Martha punched in “English teacher” and “conference” and “Denver” and came up with something called Southwest English Teachers Symposium, or SWETS, that had been held this weekend. She read a little bit about it—it had been held at a downtown hotel, and the keynote speaker was a novelist Martha had heard of but hadn’t read, giving a talk on diversity in curriculum choice. There was one small article about the conference in a local Denver paper, more of a mention, really, that said how the city of Denver would be inundated with English teachers over the weekend, so be sure to “watch your grammar” to avoid a scolding. It felt like something that might have been written fifty years ago, but Martha was a librarian and was used to stereotypes.

She put in a new search: “Denver” and “crime.” She scanned the list of hits and nothing jumped out at her. She changed the search to simply: “Denver assault.” Why assault? she thought as she hit the return button. She then switched the findings so that they were restricted to news stories, the most recent of which had the headline: “DPD Investigating Assault of Woman Found in Parking Lot.” The article was dated yesterday, the incident occurring fairly close to where Alan had been staying. She clicked on it.

Police are investigating an alleged incident of assault in the Five Points neighborhood on Friday night. The victim was found unresponsive at the 25th Street Parking Lot just after 2 A.M.

The 21-year-old woman had suffered a head injury and is currently in stable condition. A spokesperson for the Denver Police Department said that they are looking for anyone who might have witnessed the attack to come forward.

After reading the brief article twice, Martha stood and walked from the kitchen back to the bedroom. Once there, she was confused for a moment, couldn’t even remember climbing the stairs, or why she’d come to her bedroom. But then a familiar series of beeps alerted her that the washing machine had just completed a cycle. She looked on the bed, where Gilbert was now happily sleeping on a pile of colored laundry, and she remembered that she’d thrown the whites into the wash. It was a vague memory, though, even if it had happened less than an hour ago. Alan’s white shirt with the bloodstain was now just a freshly laundered shirt. Maybe she’d done it on purpose, or maybe it was simply that the whole thing was ludicrous, the idea that her husband, the traveling salesman, was some kind of homicidal maniac. It would have been markedly stranger if there had been no crimes committed in Denver over the weekend.

She went to the washer and transferred the whites to the dryer, then went to get the remaining pile, but Gilbert lashed out with a paw when she tried to gather them up. She decided she wasn’t in a rush and left Gilbert on his pile of Alan’s clothes.

“What do you smell there?” she asked her cat. “What’s Alan been up to?”

He stared back at her as though he knew but would never, ever tell.

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