Two days ago, Marta had been googling a recipe for pumpkin spice loaf when a text from one of Derrick’s buddies popped up on the tablet, something about fantasy football. She forgot to mention it to Derrick, who she assumed had accidentally set his new iPhone to sync with the iPad. But then, this afternoon, she had received a call from the bank. At that point, she remembered the iPad. Without a shred of remorse, she tore through Derrick’s messages to find out what else he was hiding from her. The messages he’d exchanged with a woman named Georgia were bad enough, definitely grounds for divorce. But it was the other messages that had made her throat clench like a fist.
Close to midnight, Derrick came home through the garage door and entered the kitchen hugging a McDonald’s bag to his chest. She knew what was in the bag without having to ask—he’d had one go-to order since he was twenty-one: Big Mac (hold the pickles), large fries, large Coke, and a baked apple pie.
“Oh, you’re up . . .” Derrick did not look happy to see her. He tossed his keys onto the counter beside a pile of unsorted mail. “Sorry, I couldn’t message. I didn’t find my phone. Goddamn, what a pain in the ass.” He pulled out a fry and shoved it in his mouth. “I, uh, thought you’d be asleep, so I didn’t get you anything. But look . . . I’ll let you have the bag fries.” He gave her a twinkly smile as if she should besograteful for this gallant gesture.
Marta glared at him. “I know,” she said.
“You know what? That I’d let you have some fries?” He placed his fountain drink on the counter behind him, beside the knife block. He didn’t notice the empty slot. Earlier, Marta had removed the chef’s knife—the longest, sharpest one—and placed it on the table beside the iPad, a security blanket of sorts.
“You synced your new phone to the iPad, you idiot!” Derrick froze in place, arm half-extended toward her, offering the brown paper bag. “I was going to tell you, but then I found out you plundered our savings. You were almost smart about it—the chunk you took out wasonedollar under the amount that would have generated an automatic alert to me regarding the withdrawal. But the bank—” Marta’s voice broke on the word. “The bank called today because we’d bottomed below the level we need to maintain in order to keep the higher interest rate on our savings account. Guess you forgot about that bit. After they called, I felt like I had a pretty good reason to go through your messages.”
“Marty, no, the money’s—”
“Let me talk. I read your messages. I know about you and Georgia. But what’s worse—”
“No, Marty.” He talked over her as if he could steamroll his version of reality over the bumpier truth. “I just moved the money around, that’s all. It’s fine, I promise you, everything’s fine. I’m so sorry you saw those messages with Georgia, I amsosorry. She meant nothing to me and it’s over.”
“Shutup, Derrick.” She couldn’t stand to hear him make excuses. Why had she never noticed how whiny his voice was? “I said I read your messages, are you listening to me? I read themall. I know about Antonia.”
The affair with Georgia, the student teacher, was the least of Derrick’s indiscretions. No,indiscretionswas too kind a word; what Derrick had done was a crime. Marta had read with disgust his exchanges with a woman named Antonia—saved innocuously in his contacts as Tony—but that disgust turned to horror when it became apparent that Antonia was not, in fact, a woman; she was a seventeen-year-old girl. One of Derrick’s students. Marta knew exactly how old Antonia was, because Derrick’s messages detailed all the places he wanted to take her when she turned eighteen, when they didn’t have to hide their love from the world anymore.
Derrick had started thisthingwith Antonia—Marta refused to think of it as an affair, a child can’t have an affair—last year, right around the time Marta was begging Derrick to have a baby with her. He’d refused because, in his view, they weren’t financially ready. Well, guess who did get pregnant? After Derrick pressured her into getting an abortion, Antonia turned on him and demanded fifty grand or she’d expose their illicit relationship. Derrick clearly thought she meant business, because he’d already given her more than half that amount.
“Youpervert.” Marta spat the word at him as she stood up, clutching the long knife for protection in one hand—she wasn’t planning touseit, but she didn’t know who her husband was anymore, or what he was capable of—and her cellphone in the other hand. “Who should I call first, Derrick? The school principal? Her parents? The police?”
“No, no. Marty, baby, no.” The veins in Derrick’s neck were standing out. “We can talk about this. You don’t want to do that.”
“Fuck you, Derrick!” she yelled. “You don’t get to tell me what I want to do. I’m calling the cops.”
It all happened very quickly.
Derrick darted forward to grab Marta’s phone and she instinctively swung out with the knife, slashing him across his grasping hands. He looked down in disbelief then let out a roar and lunged again, knocking the phone out of her hand as she screamed in fear, swinging again with the knife. This time, Derrick was faster than the blade—he dodged backwards and sideways to avoid her wild stab—but he tripped and lost his balance, falling against the corner of the granite countertop, making contact with his skull.Thwack.Athwumpfollowed, as Derrick’s body, no longer under his control, crumpled, and then there was a final, sickeningcrackas his head hit the tile floor.
Marta stared at Derrick’s unmoving body. She looked at the knife in her hand, baptized in red. “It’s going to be okay,” she said out loud. Her voice sounded wrong. She was oddly calm and floaty, like she was observing something happening in a dream. “I’ll call an ambulance.” Her phone was on the floor on the other side of the kitchen. She went to pick it up and, despite the now-cracked screen, it still worked.
It was so quiet that she could hear thetick-tick-tickof her watch, the heart of an evening beating out of control. Do it,she told herself,call 911 now.Marta put her phone down on the table as she stared at her husband on the floor. A puddle was forming under Derrick’s head. Did the bleeding mean he was alive? Marta looked closer and saw a trickle of blood leaking out of his ear. She would tell the operator he’d had an accident: He was drunk, he fell. But no, she realized as she saw his hands; the slash marks on his palms were neon arrows pointing to her as the guilty party.Defensive wounds.
She realized she was still clutching the knife in her right hand, so she stuck it under the tap and rinsed it thoroughly, then snatched a tea towel from the front of the stove to dry the blade before she stuck it back in the wooden block.I’ll need to get rid of the entire set.Marta stood wringing the cupcake-patterned tea towel in both hands, watching as the pool beneath Derrick’s head expanded. She started to walk closer to check his breathing, but then froze in place when his left hand spasmed. His wedding band glinted under the glare of the kitchen pot lights.
If she was going to do anything, she needed to do itnow. But her inertia had a force that was growing stronger by the minute. It struck her that this was the most control she’d ever had in their relationship. Marta thought about how they’d promised to love each other in sickness and in health, but she didn’t think his sick actions were covered by those vows. Unbidden, one of the dirty messages Derrick had sent to Antonia sprang to mind, burning against her eyelids.
It wasn’t too late to help him. Until it was.
How to move 180 pounds of dead weight?
Marta was about to hit Enter on the search bar when she came to her senses. This waspreciselythe type of search history she needed to avoid.This was how people got caught—she (of all people!) should know. Marta had read piles of true crime books and listened to countless hours of podcasts. She deleted what she’d just typed with a shaky finger, then set her phone down beside the stove. She noticed a faint turmeric stain on the white appliance from the last time she’d made Derrick’s favourite chicken curry. It was so stupidly banal, she thought, that one of the first things that popped into her mind was that she wouldn’t be making that recipe again any time soon. Maybe ever.
Marta’s entire body was humming, taut with electricity, but she simultaneously felt as if she was drowning in molasses, not able to think fast enough. For god’s sake, she’d almost entered the world’s dumbest question into Google. Okay, maybe not as bad as “Can you throw away body parts” or “Is it better to put crime scene clothes away or wash them” (both real-life questions that a real-life asshole had googled after killing his wife), but still. Moving through her familiar kitchen was like trying to run underwater.
The air smelled like McDonald’s, a smell that somehow made Marta hungry, in spite of everything. The crumpled brown bag was on the floor, a few fries spilling out. Derrick’s left arm was flung out away from his body and it looked as though he was reaching for the food. The dark blood beneath his head was still spreading slowly, creeping across the tiles. Marta stepped over Derrick’s body to pick up the bag, then sat down at the kitchen table and rapidly ate her way through the Big Mac and apple pie. She crammed handfuls of fries into her mouth—cold, but still soft—barely chewing the salty globs, choking once when she inhaled a chunk of potato. As she coughed it up, she let out an involuntary bleat of laughter. What a way to go that would have been, she thought. Whoever discovered their bodies would have had a real job piecing together what had happened. She washed everything down with the large watery Coke, gulping it in quick swallows, then let out a gut-shaking burp. With the fat, salt, and sugar singing through her brain, Marta finally felt able to make a plan.
First, she knelt by Derrick’s head to make sure he was totally, absolutely, for-sure-for-sure dead. Marta felt compelled to run through all the little tests she’d picked up over the years from her true crime obsession. She began by checking for a pulse in his neck. Nothing. Next, she used a finger to lift one of his eyelids, then shone the flashlight on her phone directly into his eye. No dilation, no movement. As she leaned closer to his body to rub his sternum, the unmistakable stench of feces crept into her nostrils.
Derrick was most definitely dead.
Rising from the kitchen floor, Marta used a hand to push herself up and accidentally got some blood on her palm. She stared at it for a second, then decided it was inevitable—there was no way she’d be able to deal with the body and stay clean at the same time. After a thorough check to make sure there was nothing in Derrick’s pockets (he was still warm to the touch, which was extremely disconcerting), Marta confirmed that he did not, in fact, have his cellphone on him.Guess he wasn’t lying about that, after all.
Using an entire roll of paper towels, Marta sopped up the blood from the kitchen floor—a rough first pass—offering up a little prayer of thanks that Derrick had bought bleach last month to kill the weeds growing between the flagstones in the backyard. From the garage, she retrieved both the bleach and the plastic drop sheets she’d bought back when she thought they might be painting a baby’s room. She found it absurd that she was now using them for this purpose.
