Page 63 of A Talent for Murder

Fall was usually Alan’s least busy time of year. Schools and universities had just started their new semesters and professional development was on the back burner. But there was an annual technology conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during the third weekend of October that he’d attended before, and when he’d been sent an invitation to be an exhibitor again, he’d decided to attend. It would be the first conference he’d been to since Martha, his wife, had passed.

He arranged to have his wares shipped to the conference center and hotel where ArborTech was being held, then had flown in a day early to set up. It felt surreal to be working again, back in the saddle as though nothing had really changed. He’d spent the whole summer dealing with the wreckage left behind by his wife’s death. He’d endured numerous police interviews, some of which made Alan feel as though he were somehow a suspect in the killing, despite the fact that he’d been in Saratoga Springs when the incident had taken place. He’d turned down several requests for press interviews, although he’d naturally followed the story himself. It was the second home-invasion death within a year in Portsmouth, the first happening on the other side of town, an elderly woman living alone whose house had, unlike Alan and Martha’s, been robbed. Down deep, Alan knew that what happened to his own wife had nothing to do with what had happened to Jean Leonard in the Colonial Pines Neighborhood.

People had told Alan not to make any big life decisions until a year after the death, but he knew he couldn’t stay in the same house in which Martha had died so violently. He’d put it on the market at a very competitive price and sold it within days, moving into a furnished town house south of Portland in the town of Hampton. He’d left Gilbert behind with a cat-loving neighbor, feeling a little guilty, but Gilbert had belonged to Martha, not him.

And he’d moved on with his life.

After setting up his booth in the exhibitors’ hall, Alan left the conference center and hotel to take a walk. He now remembered why he liked this particular conference. It was held downtown but adjacent to a large city park. It was a cold day, and unlike in New England, it seemed as though all the trees in Michigan were already bare. The park was covered with desiccated leaves the color of rust and the low sky was an ominous gray. Alan, after walking for less than half an hour, turned around and headed back to the warmth of the hotel.

His brief marriage to Martha now seemed like a distant memory. He’d been alone for a long time and then he wasn’t and now he was alone again. It had always been an experiment, his marriage, a way to test out a different kind of life. His first marriage had been a disaster. His mother had warned him at the time, pulling him aside a month before the wedding to tell him that Angelina had the mark of a whore. He hadn’t listened to her then, but she’d been right, of course, Angelina leaving after he laid down the law about how she should act in their bedroom. She’d given him ideas, Angelina. Lots of women had, but he didn’t expect that from a wife.

The truth was he’d always had bad thoughts. But he had good thoughts as well, plenty of those, and he told himself that the good thoughts evened out the bad thoughts. That was why he’d decided that he could marry again, because Martha only gave him good thoughts. He loved her, and wanted to protect her, and he even wanted to make love to her, to touch her physically. Sometimes she made him say bad things into her ear, but mostly it was fine. The good evened out the bad.

When he was on the road, he was a different man. He knew that, but convinced himself that the man on the road had nothing to do with the man who was married to Martha Ratliff and lived in a nice house in New Hampshire. It was like that ad campaign for Las Vegas—What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas—but his Vegas was all the time he spent away from home. It worked for a while, the Vegas motto. On the road he let himself feel hungry, he let the feelings build up and build up, and then he would find a woman. He always found one, sooner or later, because the world was full of dirty little whores. All you had to do was go looking for them. Sometimes you didn’t even have to look. They’d come and find you.

That was what had happened with Josie Nixon. He didn’t like to think about her too much, but he had to, sometimes, because what happened with her had changed his life forever. There was before Josie Nixon, and there was after Josie Nixon, and there was no way to get back to the before.

He had spotted her right away during registration, at the conference at Shepaug University. She was wearing a blood-red dress that showed a lot of cleavage. He guessed that the word for her was gothic, but there was also something literary about her look, like she had come straight from Edgar Allan Poe’s sex dreams. Her makeup was dark against very pale skin. There were tattoos on her exposed calves.

They met the next night when he spotted her alone on a couch. He’d seen her earlier, actually, weaving her way from the bar, a glass of red wine in her hand. He could tell by the way she was walking that she was drunk. Then he lost track of her, wondering if she’d gone out to eat somewhere in the small Connecticut town, or if maybe she was already spreading her legs for some man. He was about to leave when he spotted her on one of the couches that lined the walls of the hall where the conference was being held. He sat down next to her, the cheap plastic cushion making a sound like a groan. He told her the story he used on his trips, how he was married but it was passionless, and she told him how she was happily married but that she had sex with other people. She made it sound like a normal thing to do.

It was funny, thinking back to that time, and remembering that on the night he went to Josie’s room, he almost hadn’t gone. She’d invited him, told him she had some things to do first and for him to show up at midnight. Told him to knock three times on the door. If the conference had been held in a city, then maybe Alan would have gone out onto the streets to look for someone else—girls leaving bars, girls selling themselves for drug money—but the conference was at a rural campus. Where was Alan supposed to go? So, at midnight he knocked on Josie Nixon’s door just as she’d told him to. She’d opened the door and there she was, stark-naked. She had tattoos over her entire body (Mark of the whore, his mother’s voice said in his head) and one nipple was pierced. Her smile was so big that he was a little afraid of her teeth. He should have turned around and left, but he didn’t.

Afterward, she told him that she’d had fun even though he hadn’t really performed properly. She told him she liked what he did with his hands. And then she said, hesitating before she said it, “I suspect that your problem is that you’re scared of sexually confident women. Most men are, you know.”

He laughed as though she’d said something funny, said “probably.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.

“What are you scared of?” he asked, just wanting to change the subject.

“I’m not scared of anything,” she said, then laughed, and added, “No, that’s such a lie. I’m terrified of heights. I don’t even like being this high up in this dorm room.”

“You know this room has a balcony?”

“Like that wasn’t the first fucking thing I noticed when I got here.”

“Let’s step out there,” he said.

“Are you crazy?”

“It’s a beautiful night. I was out on my balcony earlier and you can see all the stars. We’ll go for half a minute. You’ll be conquering your fears, and then afterward maybe I’ll try conquering my fears of sexually confident women.” He worried that he’d said those last three words with a little too much sarcasm and anger, but she didn’t seem to notice. The rest of what happened was a disjointed blur. Eventually she agreed to step out on the balcony. When they were out there, his arms around her waist, she closed her eyes, spreading out her arms to feel the humid night air. Alan didn’t know for sure if he’d brought her out there to throw over the side or if he decided to do it at the last minute. All he knew was that he lifted her and then she was tumbling over the edge of the balcony, a strange, pinched scream in her throat.

After that night, the world went topsy-turvy. He tried to forget what he’d done, but it kept coming back to him in the waking hours of nighttime. Sometimes when he thought about it he was sick to his stomach. And sometimes it made him harder than he’d been since he was a teenager. It evened out.

In Florida he’d gotten drunk at another hotel bar and wound up in a car in the parking lot next to a woman, unzipping his fly, telling him he was a bad boy (he was, he was). And the next thing he knew she was struggling, flailing out with her arms, and someone in the backseat had something around her neck. He watched the whole thing happen. He thought he did, anyway. It was another confusing moment, too much alcohol in his bloodstream, confused about what time it was, voices in his head. Maybe it had never happened at all. No, he didn’t think that. It happened. And after the girl was dead, the man in the back seat said, “Easy, there, friend. You better run now.” He remembered it well, that other voice. And mostly he believed it was real. It was only sometimes that he thought maybe he’d been the one who strangled her.

All Alan really knew was that he had somehow manifested her death. He might not have been the one choking her, but he’d made it happen.

He’d brought death into his world and now it was eating everything up.

He knew these thoughts were crazy. He knew that. But what other explanation could there be? There was before Josie Nixon and after Josie Nixon, and there was no going back to the before. When he found out that Martha had been killed in their own bedroom, he hadn’t even been surprised. It confirmed everything he’d already known. A monster had risen up the night he threw Josie Nixon off that balcony. And that monster was in charge.

Back in his hotel room in Ann Arbor, he lay down on top of the covers and kept thinking about it, thinking about how death had come into his life and changed everything. Maybe he shouldn’t have come on this trip. Maybe it was too soon. At the town house in Hampton he hadn’t had so many of these thoughts.

But the following day Alan put on his suit pants and suit jacket and went down and manned his booth. The morning was slow, a trickle of teachers and administrators glancing toward his table, not wanting to commit and really look at what he had, but by lunch there was a big crowd and he sold around five hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise. The remainder of the day flew by, Alan’s mind free of all the junk that he’d been thinking about the night before.

That night he felt even better. He walked to a brewpub and had a decent dinner, inadvertently sitting next to a table of attendees from the same conference, two men and two women. One of the women was wearing a skirt that came to mid-thigh, and when she slid back into her booth after returning from the bathroom her skirt had slid up and Alan could see her white dimpled thigh. She wasn’t that pretty, weak chin, limp hair, probably a lifetime nerd who now taught computer science at some regional tech school, but the way she kept crossing and uncrossing her legs made Alan think she was most likely up for it, and he might just be...

---