I step backward toward the center of the room, grappling with the revelation. I might as well be in one of the paintings here, this moment as surreal as a tiny horse being served for dinner or flames shooting from a baby doll’s head.
“Actually, that’snotwhat I’m thinking,” I say, feeling my anger spike. “Mel was her own person, and I don’t care whether she was gay or bisexual or whatever. What Iamthinking is why in God’s name didn’t you come forward when she was murdered.”
“For obvious reasons,” she says and quickly tucks a tendril of hair behind her ear. “What good would it have done anyway?”
“Whatgood? You might have been able to help the police.”
“That’s highly unlikely,” she insists. “Your daughter was a very special person, but what we had was simply a two-month fling, which I was about to end anyway.”
I shake my head again, bewildered. My thoughts are spinning so fast I can barely see them, but one finally takes shape.
“Did your husband find out about you and Mel?” I demand.
She looks off, silent for several beats. I watch her chest rise as she takes a breath.
“Yes,” she says finally.
That explains Handler’s awkwardness toward me, as well as his failure to divulge where Mel’s writing was stored. He might have feared something in Mel’s work would unveil the affair.
“Let me guess,” I say, not caring how snide my tone is. “He wasn’t happy with the news.”
She doesn’t bother arguing my point.
And surely Handler wasn’t merely unhappy. He must have beenlivid. Not only had his wife cheated on him, probably a no-no in his book despite his own infidelities, but she’d also made it a million times worse by choosing a Carter College student.
“Did it not occur to you that your own husband might have killed Melanie?” I ask. “In a jealous rage?”
“What?” she exclaims, her face now pinched in distress. “Of course not. Jeffrey wasn’t jealous about the relationship.”
“Oh please, how could he not have been?”
She looks off briefly again.
“Because we have an open marriage,” she says. “It’s been that way from nearly the beginning.”
I part my lips in surprise, totally taken aback. So, she’s not the cuckolded, possibly wounded spouse I imagined her to be.
“And he didn’t mind that you chose one of his students for a fling?”
She hesitates for a second, and I sense her picking her words.
“That was clearly a mistake on my part, and it’s why I’d decided to call it off,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest. “An open marriage needs rules and boundaries, and for us that’s always meant only one outside person at a time, and no students or anyone else close to home. I came clean with Jeffrey, promised to end the relationship, and he forgave me.”
“Just like that?” I say. It’s hard to believe he’d be so sanguine.
“Yes. I’d been having a really difficult time with my work the previous months, and it caused me to get sloppy with the rules more than once, about seeing only one person at a time and who was off-limits. When I confessed everything to Jeffrey, he understood that it was about me losing my way for a while, not about him. I’ve never broken the rules again.”
I won’t judge her about her marriage, that’s her business, but I can’t stand how self-absorbed she sounds, talking about her sloppy phase as if she’d gotten tipsy at a couple of dinner parties. She seems oblivious to the fact that there could have been serious repercussions besides those impacting her and her husband.
“You implied you had nothing of value to tell the police, but initially they were looking at people in Mel’s orbit, and as far as you knew, you had information that could be important to them.”
“That’s not true. Mel and I talked about art and poetry, about the books we were reading, and not a word about our personal lives. There was nothing for me to contribute.”
She bites her lip again, the mistress of the forest now suddenly ruffled, as if she’s sensed there’s danger in the dark between the trees. The most staggering part: she’s incapable of seeing her failure to act as wrong.
I shake my head, disgusted, and hitch up the strap of my shoulder bag, more than ready to get out of here.
“Why in the world did you encourage me to come today?” I say.
