Page 6 of What Happened Last Night

“I didn’t do anything,” Carlotta said.

Her voice sounded steady, but the red circles high on her bright white cheeks told another story.

“So, what happened?” I asked.

Could she have done it? Was my quiet, meek Carlotta really capable of this? Did she even care enough about me to want to bother laying claim to me? I didn’t know the answers to any of those questions, but I knew something had happened, and I desperately needed to know what it was. The main thing that kept me guessing was how and why Candy was here in the first place. Maybe Candy had broken in and caught Carlotta unawares and she had just acted in self-defense. That would be the best-case scenario.

“I was going to ask you the same question,” Carlotta replied, shaking her head like denying this was happening would make it all go away. “The last thing I remember is us arguing downstairs and then coming to bed. I fell asleep straight away. And then I heard sirens and noise, and I saw that the window was broken. I couldn’t work out how someone had gotten in that way. I mean, we’re on the second floor here. Then I realized there was no glass on the floor. I went to the window and I saw her. Lying there. Dead.”

I shook my head, unable to take all of this in.

“So what you’re saying is Candy got into our house and somehow managed to fall out the window?” I asked.

“I’m saying we have a broken window with a dead body below it. That’s all I know. What do you remember?” she said.

I paused for a moment, examining her words, her tone. There was no accusation there, just confusion. Was that because she knew she’d done something? I shook the thought away. She was giving me the benefit of the doubt. The least I could do at this point was do the same for her. But something had clearly happened. People don’t fall into windows hard enough to go through them unless they’re pushed. And I know I didn’t do this. So surely, that meant it had to be Carlotta.

“Not much,” I admitted. “I don’t even remember coming to bed, if I’m honest.”

“Maybe she jumped out of there,” Carlotta said.

It sounded like she was clutching at straws. But Candy was definitely unstable, and was it really any harder to imagine her jumping from the window than it was to imagine Carlotta, who hated confrontation, actually pushing her? If the window had been open rather than broken, then maybe I could have bought it. But even the most unhinged people don’t kill themselves by jumping out a closed window.

A loud knock on the front door rattled through the quiet in the house and stopped our conversation dead, and we looked at each other for a moment. Carlotta’s face was twisted in horror. Her open mouth and wide, staring eyes looked so exaggerated it would almost have been funny if it wasn’t the fact that I knew my own face wore the same expression.

“Get dressed,” I said as some of my senses came back to me. I turned around and picked up the jeans I was wearing last night and began to pull them back on. Carlotta just stood there in her flimsy robe, looking at me but with a glassy look in her eyes that told me she might be looking at me, but she wasn’t really seeing me. “Carlotta? Now. Get dressed. Quickly.”

She gave me a half nod and then she went to the wardrobe and pulled out a pair of rather ratty-looking jeans and a faded blue T-shirt. She moved like she was in a stupor, and although I knew the T-shirt and jeans she was wearing were the ones she usually gardened in, I let it go. At least she was wearing something other than the robe. The police would no doubt want to question us, maybe even arrest us, and if it was anything like the movies I had seen, if we were arrested, we would get dragged out of the house in whatever we were wearing at the time with no time to go and change. I wouldn’t let Carlotta go outside in the robe and nothing else.

The loud knock sounded again as I pulled on a shirt.

“Police. Open up,” a loud male voice shouted.

I knew with the window intact, I wouldn’t have heard it, but it drifted in the broken window as clear as day. I couldn’t ignore it. It would make us look guilty. I didn’t need to ignore it. I had nothing to hide. I hadn’t hurt Candy, and surely, the police should be concerned that a mentally unstable woman who had been stalking me and my wife had broken into our house rather than accusing us of shit. I knew that wasn’t the case, though. They would be more interested in the murder. And if I told them Candy was stalking me, wouldn’t that just give them a motive for me? I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t about to take any chances by trying to play the victim.

“Coming,” I shouted.

I glanced at Carlotta and nodded for her to follow me. By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, my shirt was fastened, and although my head was still pounding, I felt a little bit more like myself again. Whatever the police asked me, I was confident I would be fine. I hadn’t killed Candy, and they couldn’t prove that I had. How could you prove something that didn’t happen? You couldn’t.

I headed for the front door, Carlotta still following dutifully behind me. I pulled the door open and saw two uniformed police officers, one male and one female, standing there. They wore matching uniforms. The female officer had mousy blonde hair that was pulled back into a bun that was so tight, it made her eyes look like they were being stretched. The male officer had a crew cut and intense eyes. When he looked at me, I felt like he was somehow reading my thoughts.

“Good morning, Officers,” I said.

“Mr. Alden? I’m Officer Dumont and this is Officer Stanford,” said the male officer. He nodded to us, as did Officer Stanford as he said her name. “We’ll need both of you to accompany us to the station and answer some questions about what happened here.”

“Are we under arrest?” Carlotta asked quietly from behind me.

Officer Dumont shook his head.

“No, ma’am. We just need to find out what happened here,” Officer Stanford said.

Her tone told a very different story to her words. Her tone said one thing to me—you’re not under arrest ... yet. How could she take any other stance, though? It wasn't like there were any other suspects.

Chapter Four

Jamie

Iwoke up to the insistent shrill ringing of my cellphone. I yawned and wiped the sleep out of my eyes, and then I picked up my cellphone and looked at the screen. It was the chief calling. I glanced at the time, sure I must have overslept, but I hadn’t. It was six a.m. and I knew this was no welcome back call.

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