I leave the drawing where it is and carry my coffee to the laundry room. There I see that this morning, after I went back to bed, Will finished the laundry for me. The piles of clothes I left are gone. They’ve been replaced instead with an empty laundry basket and a clean tile floor.
I drop to my hands and knees beside the washing machine, looking beneath, grateful to find the bloodstained washcloth still there, and yet just as horrified as I was at seeing it for the first time. All the emotions come rushing back to me, and I know that I have to tell Will about this.
I leave the washcloth where it is. I go back to the kitchen to wait. I sit at the table. Otto’s drawing sits six feet away, the eyes of the decapitated head staring at me. I can’t stand to look at it.
I wait until nearly nine o’clock to call Will, knowing that by then he’ll have taken Tate to school. He’ll have dropped him off. He will be alone by now and we’ll be able to speak in private.
When Will answers, he’s on the ferry, heading to campus.
He asks how I’m feeling as he answers the call. I tell him, “Not good.” I hear the sound of the wind whipping around him, gusting into the handset. He’s outside, standing on the outer deck of the ferry getting peppered with snow. Will could be inside in the nicely heated cabin, but he isn’t. Instead he’s relinquished his seat indoors for someone else, and I think that this is so classic Will, to be selfless.
“We need to talk, Will,” I say, and though he tells me that it’s loud on the ferry, that this isn’t the best time, I say it again. “We need to talk.”
“Can I call when I get to campus?” he asks. Will talks loudly through the phone, trying to counter the noise of the wind.
I say no. I tell him this is important. That this can’t wait.
“What is it?” he asks, and I come outright and say that I think Imogen had something to do with Morgan’s murder. His sigh is long, exasperated, but he humors me nonetheless, asking why I think this now.
“I found a bloody washcloth, Will. In the laundry. Completely saturated in blood.”
From the other end of the line comes an earsplitting silence.
I go on, because he says nothing. I feel the words rattle in my throat. Before me, my hands have turned sweaty, though inside I’m so cold I shake. I tell him how I discovered it as I was doing the laundry. How I found the washcloth and hid it beneath the washing machine because I didn’t know what else to do with it.
“Where is this washcloth now?” he asks, concern in his voice.
“Still under the washing machine. The thing is, Will, I’m thinking about turning the washcloth over to Officer Berg.”
“Whoa,” he says. “Stop right there, Sadie. You’re not making any sense. Are you sure it’s blood?”
“I’m sure.”
Will tries to make excuses. Maybe someone had wiped up a spill with it. Paint, mud, some mess the dogs made. “Maybe dog shit,” he says, and it’s so unlike Will to be crass like that. But perhaps, like me, he’s scared. “Maybe one of the boys cut himself,” he suggests, and he reminds me then of the time Otto was small and ran the pad of his thumb across the razor’s sharp blade just to see what it would feel like, though he had been told before to never touch Daddy’s razor. The razor sliced through his skin. There was a surge of blood that Otto tried to hide from us. He didn’t want to get in trouble. We found bloodstained tissues packed in the garbage can, an infection festering days later on his thumb.
“This isn’t the same thing as playing with razors,” I tell Will. “This is far different than that. The washcloth, Will, was wet through with blood. Not a few drops of blood, but it was literally soaked. Imogen killed her,” I say decisively. “She killed her and wiped herself clean with that washcloth.”
“It isn’t fair what you’re doing to her, Sadie,” he says, voice loud, and I don’t know if he’s yelling at me or yelling over the wind. But he’s most definitely yelling. “This is a witch hunt,” he says.
“Morgan’s necklace was here, too,” I go on. “I found it on the stairs. I stepped on it. I set it on the kitchen counter and now it’s gone. Imogen took it to hide the evidence.”
“Sadie,” he says. “I know you don’t like her. I know she hasn’t taken kindly to you. But you can’t keep blaming her for every little thing that goes wrong.”
His choice of words strikes me as strange.Every little thing.
Murder is not an inconsequential thing.
“If not Imogen, then someone in this house killed her,” I tell Will. “That’s a given. Because how else can you explain her necklace on our floor, the bloody washcloth in the laundry. If not her, then who?” I ask, and at first the question is rhetorical. At first I ask it only to make him see that of course it was Imogen because no one else in the house is capable of murder. If she did it once—yanking that stool from beneath her mother’s feet—she could do it again.
But then, in the silence that follows, my eyes come to land on Otto’s angry drawing with the decapitated head and the blobs of blood. The fact that he’s regressed to playing with dolls. And I think of the way my fourteen-year-old son carried a knife to school.
I draw in a sudden breath, wondering if Imogen isn’t the only one in this house who is capable of murder. I don’t mean for the thought to leave my head. And yet it does.
“Could it have been Otto?” I think aloud, wishing as soon as the words are out that I could take them back, put them back in my head where they belong.
“You can’t be serious,” Will says, and I don’t want to be serious. I don’t want to believe for a second that Otto could do this. But it isn’t outside the realm of possibility. Because the same argument rings true: if he did it once, he could do it again.
“But what about Otto’s history of violence?” I ask.
