Page 8 of A Talent for Murder

“How do you know that’s what she did to you?”

“I didn’t know at the time. But my senior year at college I went to a friend’s home for the weekend, and her mother, who was a part-time psychic, I guess, took one look at me and said that I’d had a love curse put on me. I immediately remembered that night—it just flashed through my mind. And it all made sense. Every guy I hooked up with in college turned out to be awful in some way.”

I was nodding, listening to her story, and she said, “I know what you’re thinking, that every guy everyone hooked up with in college was awful—”

“No,” I said. “I believe you. You’re probably cursed. What are you going to do about it?”

“Avoid men,” she said.

But Martha Ratliff didn’t avoid all men that first year at Birkbeck. First, she became friends with Larry, both of us did, but it was clear to anyone with half a brain that Larry was smitten with Martha. We all thought something was going to happen between them, but then, at the beginning of our second semester, some of us were having drinks out at a bar that primarily catered to college students called the Hideout. Larry was there, I remember that, and so was Martha, and Cecily brought along someone none of us had met. His name was Ethan Saltz and he was a visiting writer in creative nonfiction. Cecily made the introductions as Ethan loomed over the table. He looked like an Ivy League quarterback. Blond hair and a lantern jaw, and one of those bodies that formed a V, wide shoulders and a tiny waist. I watched his eyes scan the table, resting on each of us and putting us in categories (same as I was doing to him, to be honest), and then his eyes landed on Martha. Her pale midwestern skin reddened considerably. Ethan asked us what we were all drinking, then bounded off to the bar like a dog playing fetch. I looked over at Larry, sitting next to Martha, and saw that he had seen the same thing I had, that Martha had fallen in love at first sight, or something like it, with this handsome stranger.

Chapter5

During the whole Ethan Saltz affair, once I’d realized what he really was, I kept going back in my mind to that night at the Hideout, when he’d been brought up to our table and introduced to our small group of library science grad students. I remembered his eyes scanning the group, then landing on Martha and lingering there. When he’d returned with drinks it was as though we all cleared a space for him exactly where he wanted to sit, right next to Martha.

At the time I wondered why he’d picked her so suddenly and decisively. And I also wondered why he hadn’t picked me. That sounds vain, I know, and I had no interest in the Ethan Saltzes of the world, or any men, for that matter. But I did know that I was attractive, in the same way that a rabbit knows it looks appetizing to a fox. I’d grown up in a house that served as a revolving guest retreat for drunken artists and writers my whole life. I’d been stared at long before I’d ever hit puberty. But that wasn’t the reason I had sworn off both men and love. Eric Washburn was the reason. I’d fallen in love with him and he’d betrayed me. Familiar story, I know, but it had taught me not just what men would do to women, but also what I would do to the men who betrayed me. That was a part of me I didn’t particularly want to meet again.

I was happy that I didn’t need to fend off Ethan Saltz on the night we all met him, but I was also a little worried, even at the time, that he’d focused all his attention on Martha. I didn’t believe in love curses, but I definitely believed in asshole guys, and Martha had just attracted one. It occurred to me at the time that he was separating her from our herd not because he was attracted but because he sensed weakness in her.

The night ended with all of us going our separate ways outside the bar, our goodbyes plucked away by a frigid winter wind. None of us were surprised that Ethan Saltz happened to be going in Martha’s direction.

On the following Monday, each of us drinking our tea in the student union, I asked Martha what had happened. “Not details,” I said. “Just the big picture.”

She thought for a moment, then said: “I have a boyfriend, I guess.”

“What about the love curse?”

She’d laughed, although her eyes looked sad to me. “Oh, that hasn’t gone anywhere. I already know that Ethan is going to break my heart, but I guess I don’t care. He’s so beautiful, isn’t he?”

“He is beautiful,” I said.

After that conversation Martha disappeared for a while, deep into her burgeoning love affair. All of us in our small program disappeared a little, as well. It was a cold winter for Maryland, and the second semester course load was much harder than it had been in the fall. We saw each other in classes, but there was less socializing. On the rare occasion that Cecily hosted a party, or we all got together at the Hideout, Martha would either not come, or she would show up for one drink with Ethan, clinging to his arm like a castaway clinging to a piece of raft. When Ethan spoke, usually telling some amusing anecdote about the undergrad writing class he was teaching, Martha stared at him with an intensity that made us all uncomfortable. On paper, Ethan was a catch, and it wasn’t just his looks; he was smart and witty, and a surprisingly good listener. When someone else was talking, he would fix those blue eyes on them as though it were the best story he’d ever heard. It was a trick, of course, the ability to do that. I recognized it, but I only recognized it as a seducer’s trick. At the time, I thought that Ethan was some kind of serial monogamist, a man who traveled frequently and who quickly found a willing sex partner wherever he ended up. I was sure that there was a long line of bereaved young women in his wake, but there was no real crime in that.

But sometime in March, just as Maryland began to thaw, I saw something different in Martha. She was thinner, if that was even possible, her skin not just pale, but somehow chalky, as though if you touched her the pasty color would come off on your fingers. She seemed beat down, and one of our professors confided in me that she was in danger of flunking out.

I knew that there could be multiple reasons for why she might have changed, but somehow I thought it had to do with Ethan. I considered confronting her, but I knew that she would deny there was anything amiss. I told myself to leave it alone.

And I would have, I think, had I not driven up along the Chesapeake on one particularly nice Saturday in early April. I’d stopped at a crab place, then decided that I didn’t want to wait in the long line that snaked out of the door. I got back into my car and was getting ready to pull out of the parking lot when I saw Martha and Ethan leaving the restaurant and making their way to Ethan’s Jeep. There was something unnerving about seeing them from afar. Martha walked a step behind him, her eyes on his back, and then she waited at the passenger-side door until Ethan gave her the go-ahead to get in—at least that was what it looked like from where I watched. I stayed in my car, engine running, and watched them pull out onto the road and head south. I followed them, expecting them to return to Birkbeck, but instead they headed inland, ending up in a town called Port Tobacco, where they parked in front of a divy-looking bar called the Three-Legged Dog. The sun was beginning to set as they entered the bar.

Since I hadn’t eaten, I drove for a while and found a burger joint that had either been designed to look like a 1950s diner or was a place that was genuinely unchanged for the last sixty years. By the time I had finished the dried-out burger I had decided to take a look in the Three-Legged Dog. I don’t know why, exactly, but I wanted to see them in the wild; Ethan Saltz was slowly, and maybe intentionally, changing Martha Ratliff, and I wanted to know more. If they saw me right away, then I could have a drink with them and depart, but maybe I could find a spot to keep an eye on them.

I parked a couple of blocks down from Ethan’s Jeep, donned a winter wool cap, pushing my hair up under it, and walked to the bar carrying my copy of The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. I pushed through the pneumatic front door of the bar and spotted an empty two-person booth to my right and went directly there. I took off my jacket but left my hat on. A waitress came by and I ordered a gin and tonic. After it had arrived, I finally looked around the place. It was larger than it had seemed from the outside, with both booths and tables, and was anchored by a large oval bar at the center of the room. Toward the back was a pool table and a jukebox, currently churning out a country song about drinking tequila. Ethan and Martha were on the far side of the bar, sitting shoulder to shoulder, and I could just make them out over the array of bottles and the fast-moving bartenders, three women all wearing the same pink T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the bar. It was possible that either Ethan or Martha would look up and see me across the blue cigarette smoke of the room in my cramped booth, but I doubted it. I decided to stay put and observe.

I was there for three hours, nursed three drinks, discouraged four men (one of whom claimed to be an Angela Carter fan), and watched as Ethan and Martha played some sort of game, the rules of which I couldn’t quite figure out.

From what I could tell, they would each have a drink at the bar—his looked like a whiskey and soda, and hers was a glass of white wine—then one or the other would wander away, only to come back with a third party. If Martha was the one to go patrol the teeming bar, then she usually came back with a man, but once she came back with a woman. Introductions were made, and at some point it seemed as though Ethan would say something that would cause the person to leave.

When Ethan left the bar, he’d come back very fast, always with a woman, and he’d make a big deal out of introducing her to Martha. Once I saw him pointing out the features of a particularly drunk participant, as though he were trying to sell her to the highest bidder. He was laughing. I kept worrying that he’d come over to the other side of the bar, where I was sitting, but he never did. There seemed to be a natural split that took place in the Three-Legged Dog that put the quiet couples and the loners on the right side of the bar, while the left side had turned into a freewheeling Saturday night party, soundtracked with classic country sing-alongs.

I decided that I’d seen enough, and also that I was lucky I hadn’t been noticed. As I was looking for my waitress to pay my bill, I watched Martha and Ethan talking to a girl who wasn’t possibly drinking age. She had long black hair and wore a cropped top and low-rise jeans. She was staring at Ethan as though she’d met a movie star. Before I paid my bill, the three of them left together.

I returned to my house on the salt marsh and thought about what I had seen. It was apparent that Ethan and Martha liked to go out to bars and find someone to have a threesome with. And if that was how they spent Saturday nights it was certainly no business of mine. But something about Martha’s complacency in the situation, and Ethan’s casual glee, made me wonder if what was happening was less than consensual.

The next time I saw Martha was in the Archival Appraisal class that we were taking together. Afterward, we walked across campus together.

“I saw you the other night,” I said.

“Oh yeah?”

---