Is he attracted to younger females?
There. She’s asked the question. A muscle in her cheek judders.
Images she doesn’t want to see come to mind, invading it, upsetting the prudish part of her, but she can’t keep them away. Of Toby making love to a younger woman. She is faceless, a perfect sum of tits, ass, smooth, gentle, soft, curves, taut, lips. A banquet of perfect flesh. She is young, too young. It is disgusting. Criminal. Ruth is appalled by how graphic her imagination is.
She raises her glass and tries to drink. It’s empty. She craves more and opens a bottle of red wine. Drink is where she is seeking answers. How pathetic. She almost laughs at herself. Perhaps she’s no better than Toby. No. If she’s right about him, she is better than him.
Her mind runs in frantic loops. She doesn’t have enough evidence to support her suspicions. She’s imagining it all.
Except that she isn’t. Because her suspicions began months ago when another letter arrived at their home.
It was posted through their door, by hand, one evening, when Toby was out at a departmental function. Ruth had stayed at home, heavily pregnant with Alfie.
The envelope was unmarked, and Ruth opened it.
This letter was long, rambling, and handwritten on cheap lined paper, the kind a student buys in the supermarket, holes prepunched in it.
“Dear Mr. Land,” the letter began. It was for Toby. She scanned the first few lines, wondering if it was from a neighbor but stopped when she saw a mention of Degas. She glanced at the end of the letter. It was signed “Lexi MacKay.”
She must be one of Toby’s students.
Ruth sat down and began to read in earnest. Lexi Mackay had a point to make, that Degas was a pedophile. “Wow,” Ruth said out loud. This accusation was old news to academics, but the letter had no time for Toby’s view that Degas’s work still deserved serious study. It was furious and violent in its condemnation of the artist. Another paragraph began:
Mr. Lane, do you think of Degas when you see young women in intimate settings? Did you think of him and his artists’ gaze when you were watching me in the library? Did that make it okay to you? Did it turn you on?
Ruth covered her mouth with her hand. Now she wanted to look away but couldn’t. She felt very cold, and very still. Her flesh crawled.
Degas had his favorite models. Am I yours? Degas brought girls to his studio to pose, hunched naked over bathtubs. Or to stand for hours in the painful postures of ballerinas. You told us that with a laugh but I didn’t find it funny. I imagine he walked around and around them, staring, until he had drunk in every detail. I imagined him correcting their poses, touching them, letting his hands linger on them.
I don’t spend time in your spaces, but I think you follow me into mine, to gaze at me. Study me. Am I right? Will the touching come next?
On and on it went, until the devastating final line.
Do you want to fuck me? If so, you need to be a man and say so. Or I’ll call the police.
And then, that name, at the end.
Lexi MacKay
Not the name of any old student. The name of an accuser.
Toby denied it, of course, when he got home. Lexi MacKay was troubled, he said. She could be hysterical. Everyone in the department made sure to keep their office doors open if she came for a one-on-one meeting. The letter disappeared into his pocket and Ruth never saw it again. But she remembered the name on it. And Lexi MacKay wasn’t difficult to find on social media. Ruth learnedeverything about her she could. Learned her face. Her friends. What she did and where she went.
But she gave birth two days later and while she hasn’t forgotten the letter, she hasn’t looked up Lexi MacKay since then. But she will now, as soon as she gets cell reception.
And she’s had another very worrying thought.
Imogen. Edie’s daughter. Toby has been tutoring her.
Is that all he’s been doing?
Because that would give Edie a motive to kill him.
I can’t stop thinking about Imogen lying about self-harming.
The first time she admitted to doing it, she showed me that horrible scar on her arm, which was so shocking that it gave her subsequent admissions that she’d hurt herself, or thought about it, the urgent weight of fact.
Everyone was hurting so much after Rob’s death. Did she need the humiliation of raising her shirt to prove that she had ugly scars crisscrossing and defiling her belly? She was capable of tending to those cuts herself—she had made assurances that they weren’t deep—and I assumed she had.
