Page 9 of A Talent for Murder

“Saturday night. I drove down to Port Tobacco and had a quick drink at a bar there. I saw you with Ethan.”

We were walking side by side and I glanced at her and saw the look of alarm and fear on her face. “You should have said hi,” she said, her voice fairly normal.

“Honestly, I was just in there for a quick drink, and you two were obviously on a date and I thought it might have been awkward. It’s silly, though, I should have said hello.”

A Frisbee floated past, nearly clipping me on the shoulder, and the guy who caught it yelled out an apology. “Things good with Ethan?” I said, trying to make the words sound as casual as possible.

“Um... good?” she paused, and then said, “Things are very interesting with Ethan.”

“Okay,” I said.

We walked in silence for a moment, birdsong in the air, and I willed myself to wait her out.

“He’s sexually adventurous and I’m not, and that’s not a bad thing. I mean, it’s fun. He’s fun.”

We reached the student union, and instead of going in I steered Martha to a wooden bench that faced the main quad of the campus. We both sat. She began to speak, almost manically, as though she’d been dying to share with anybody the details of her relationship.

“I know that he’s going to Vermont for the summer for some writing retreat and that that will be the end of our relationship. It’s probably for the best. I mean, I never thought for a moment that I would wind up married to someone like Ethan Saltz. I just keep telling myself that being with him is an experience. I mean, he’s into threesomes, and we’ve done that and it’s okay, and he’s very into weird role-play stuff, and some of that has been a little scary, so I told him that maybe I’d passed my comfort line, or whatever you want to call it.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, he laughed. He laughs at everything. And then he said the thing that’s really been bothering me. He called me a project. He said, and I’m pretty sure these are the exact words: ‘You’re my project, Martha. That’s why I picked you, you know, to see how far I could get you to go.’ ”

“Ugh,” I said.

“I think he was just kidding, honestly. But, yeah, it’s icky.”

“Has he hurt you?”

She hesitated long enough for me to know that he had, then she said, “Nothing extreme. But... okay, now I’m actually going to tell you this...” She took a deep breath. “So, on Saturday night when you saw us at that bar, we were there to pick up someone to have a threesome with, which we’d done before. And we did end up going home with this kind of fucked-up local girl. I’m saying fucked-up because she was really drunk, and things got very strange very fast, and... I won’t go into details, but Ethan was trying to get me to hurt her.”

Martha pressed the heel of one hand to an eye, and I put my hand on her back and left it there. After a while I said, “You have to leave him, you know. That’s why you told me about it.”

“I know,” she said.

We formed a plan that evening, the two of us sitting on her single bed in her tiny concrete-block dormitory room. She’d decorated the room with framed New Yorker covers, most of them depicting a cat, although one of the covers, a watercolor of the New York skyline, was an issue I recognized from 1986, one that contained a story written by my father called “The Final Days of Martin Tobey.”

“Ethan won’t mind,” Martha said. “I mean, he won’t mind emotionally, or whatever. But he really does see me as a project, and I’m not sure that he’s finished with it... with me.”

We rehearsed some breakup lines together, and Martha made a plan to meet Ethan the following night at the Hideout. The plan was that I’d walk in around ten thirty. We established some easy signals. For example, if Martha took a sip of her drink after I walked over and said hello, then it meant that I shouldn’t stick around. If she pushed her hair back behind an ear, that meant I should join them. That way, if it turned ugly, I’d be there as support.

The next night I walked into the Hideout at ten fifteen, and immediately spotted Martha and Ethan at one of the back booths. I went to the bar and got a club soda with lime, tilting my stool so that I could keep an eye on them. From where I was sitting, I could see the back of Ethan’s head, his golden hair, and I could see Martha, her face anxious, explaining herself. When there was a lull in the conversation, I slid off my stool and walked over to them.

“Oh hey,” I said.

Martha tucked a strand of hair behind her left ear as Ethan looked up at me and said, “Hey, Lily.”

“Join us,” Martha said, sliding out of the booth. “I’ve just got to run to the bathroom.”

I slid onto the wooden seat of the booth vacated by Martha and looked at Ethan across the narrow table. He seemed amused. “How are you?” I said.

“It was like watching a puppet,” he said, still smiling. “Martha’s lips were moving, but your words were coming out of them.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Whatever. It’s no big deal to me.” He was leaning on the table and I could smell him. Masculine soap, the way he always smelled.

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

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