And honestly—you’re not going to believe me, but like I said, we’re all about truth right now, baby—I never thought much about it after that.
Not until Hurricane Marie.
Not until the storm that lived inside me decided to break.
People don’t talk much about Marie herself anymore, the actual storm, and I think they’ve forgotten what an unusual one she was. How fast she moved, how quickly she came in. We’d been getting the warnings for days, but until that last afternoon, she was still just a Category 1, looking like she’d go overland in central Florida. We expected rain, thought we’d probably lose power and all that, but no one knew that she’d swell up out of nowhere and make a hard left for St. Medard’s.
I wanted to say that at the trial. How could I have plotted to use the storm to cover up my crime when none of us even knew how bad the storm would be untilafterLandon was dead?
But of course, I couldn’t say that because it would only lead to questions abouthowI knew exactly when Landon died.
I’m getting ahead of myself, shoot.
Let me back up.
I think if he had chosen anyone else—anyone in St. Medard’s, anyone in theworld—other than Ellen, I might have survived it.
I knew there were other girls occasionally. Yes, yes, I lied to the cops when I insisted that Landon was faithful to me (well, in his fashion). I said that I never suspected he was with anyone else besides his wife, but that wasn’t true. I was nineteen and naïve as all get-out, but I wasn’tstupid, and Landon wasn’t always careful. There was the time I caught him talking on his car phone at two in the morning, parked outside the bungalow. “International stuff,” he’d said, but I’d seen the way he’d been smiling in the dome light before he’d noticed me standing in front of the hood of the car.
And there were the random weeks of silence, the mysterious trips he was always vague about, even the clichéd lipstick on the collar once, a rich ruby red that was nothing like my hot pinks or Alison’s tasteful dusty rose.
I knew, and I ignored it because, like I said, I believed that I didn’t get to be jealous.
But Ellen…
Even now I’m shocked that he pulled it off for as long as he did, seeing us both. More than that, I’m shocked that Ellen never gave it away. Not with a guilty look or a teary moment as I waxed rhapsodic about Landon, not with an agonized confession over drinks at The Line. Do you know, she even spent the night at the bungalow with me once when Landon wasn’t there, the two of us having a slumber party like we were still in seventh grade? She lay next to me in the bed I shared with the man she was also in love with, and she slept like a goddamn baby.
Looking back on it now, I feel some of that same pride and admiration I felt when Mama first told me what she’d done to Daddy. Sounds crazy, I know, but it must’ve been so hard keeping all that in, and she did it without flinching. Maybe you’ll say that makes her a bad person, but I don’t see it that way. I think it made her strong. Loyal, even.
I sure as hell couldn’t have done it.
She had him first, you see. In a way.
Years before he walked into The Line, he’d met little Ellen Chambers at the Rosalie, and they’d become friends. Pen pals, you could say, writing back and forth. And as she got older, the letters got longer, the yearning in them more explicit, but she was a good girl, the kind who felt guilty for simply being in love with a married man, so she’d ended it before it had ever really begun.
And then he found me, and that was good, I guess.
For a while.
He never stopped writing her, though. Not the entire time we were together.
That’s actually how I found out.
The prosecution were right about a few things. Ididcall Landon the day before Marie landed, telling him I wanted to talk to him. I had to leave a message with his secretary (always a huge bitch to me, but fair enough, Linda, fair enough). And Iwasupset when I made that phone call.
But you’d be upset, too, if you’d just found a letter from your best friend to your lover telling him that she regretted sleeping with him just a few months before, that it had been a “beautiful mistake, but a mistake all the same,” that she was moving on with her life, that she hoped he was happy—“with Lo or Alison or both or neither.”
Mama had wanted me to help out at the store, and I had, but that had taken us only until lunch, so after that, I’d gone to the bungalow with some half-assed idea of storm prepping only to realize I had no idea what to actuallydo. I’d seen people board up windows, but where did you even get those boards? (Cut me some slack, I was nineteen.)
So instead of doing anything sensible, I started cleaning the place. Shit you not. Making up the bed, washing the two wineglasses we’d left in the sink. Outside, it had started to rain, and the wind was picking up, but it wasn’t anything scary, not yet. I’d had the radio on, and I remember it was playing “Gloria” by Laura Branigan. That wasmysong even though no one ever called me Gloria, and I was singing along as I scooped up the few things in the little bathroom hamper, just one of my negligees, a damp bathing suit, and a hopelessly wrinkled linen jacket of Landon’s.
I’ve thought about it a million times, how none of it would’ve happened if he hadn’t left that flimsy white jacket behind on his last visit. Or if I hadn’t gone to the bungalow, or just picked a different useless chore to do. So many tiny little things like that, our whole lives hinging on them.
But I did pick up the coat, and I could feel something in the inside pocket, paper crinkling slightly.
I wasn’t even suspicious, that’s what kills me. I reached into that jacket still singing along with Laura, just sort of mildly curious, wondering if it might be an envelope of cash since Landon always seemed to have twenties and hundreds flowing from his fingers, but instead, it was a letter.
There were no names on it. Not his—the letter was just addressed to “L”—and no signature.
