Good Marriage Read online

  She pushed his hand away and sat up. “What in God’s name are you talking about? You come sneaking in, you wake me up—”

  “Yes, you were sleeping with the light on—I saw it as soon as I turned up the driveway.” There was no guilt in his smile. Nothing sinister, either. It was the same sweet-natured Bob Anderson smile she’d loved almost from the first. For a moment her memory flickered over how gentle he’d been on their wedding night, not hurrying her. Giving her time to get used to the new thing.

  Which he will do now, she thought.

  “You never sleep with the light on, Darce. And although you’ve got your nightgown on, you’re wearing your bra under it, and you never do that, either. You just forgot to take it off, didn’t you? Poor darlin. Poor tired girl.”

  For just a moment he touched her breast, then—thankfully—took his hand away.

  “Also, you turned my clock around so you wouldn’t have to look at the time. You’ve been upset, and I’m the cause. I’m sorry, Darce. From the bottom of my heart.”

  “I ate something that disagreed with me.” It was all she could think of.

  He smiled patiently. “You found my special hiding place in the garage.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, you did a good job of putting things back where you found them, but I’m very careful about such things, and the strip of tape I put on above the pivot in the baseboard was broken. You didn’t notice that, did you? Why would you? It’s the kind of tape that’s almost invisible once it’s on. Also, the box inside was an inch or two to the left of where I put it—where I always put it.”

  He reached to stroke her cheek some more, then withdrew his hand (seemingly without rancor) when she turned her face away.

  “Bobby, I can see you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about something, but I honestly don’t know what it is. Maybe you’ve been working too hard.”

  His mouth turned down in a moue of sadness, and his eyes were moistening with tears. Incredible. She actually had to stop herself from feeling sorry for him. Emotions were only another human habit, it seemed, as conditioned as any other. “I guess I always knew this day would come.”

  “I haven’t got the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  He sighed. “I had a long ride back to think about this, honey. And the longer I thought, the harder I thought, the more it seemed like there was really only one question that needed an answer: WWDD.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Hush,” he said, and put a gentle finger on her lips. She could smell soap. He must have showered before he left the motel, a very Bob-like thing to do. “I’ll tell you everything. I’ll make a clean breast. I think that, down deep, I’ve always wanted you to know.”

  He’d always wanted her to know? Dear God. There might be worse things waiting, but this was easily the most terrible thing so far. “I don’t want to know. Whatever it is you’ve got stuck in your head, I don’t want to know.”

  “I see something different in your eyes, honey, and I’ve gotten very good at reading women’s eyes. I’ve become something of an expert. WWDD stands for What Would Darcy Do. In this case, What Would Darcy Do if she found my special hiding place, and what’s inside my special box. I’ve always loved that box, by the way, because you gave it to me.”

  He leaned forward and planted a quick kiss between her brows. His lips were moist. For the first time in her life, the touch of them on her skin revolted her, and it occurred to her that she might be dead before the sun came up. Because dead women told no tales. Although, she thought, he’d try to make sure I didn’t “suffer.”

  “First, I asked myself if the name Marjorie Duvall would mean anything to you. I would have liked to answer that question with a big ole no, but sometimes a fellow has to be a realist. You’re not the world’s number one news junkie, but I’ve lived with you long enough to know that you follow the main stories on TV and in the news paper. I thought you’d know the name, and even if you didn’t, I thought you’d recognize the picture on the driver’s license. Besides, I said to myself, won’t she be curious as to why I have those ID cards? Women are always curious. Look at Pandora.”

  Or Bluebeard’s wife, she thought. The woman who peeked into the locked room and found the severed heads of all her predecessors in matrimony.

  “Bob, I swear to you I don’t have any idea what you’re tal—”

  “So the first thing I did when I came in was to boot up your computer, open Firefox—that’s the search engine you always use—and check the history.”

  “The what?”

  He chuckled as if she’d gotten off an exceptionally witty line. “You don’t even know. I didn’t think you did, because every time I check, everything’s there. You never clear it!” And he chuckled again, as a man will do when a wife exhibits a trait he finds particularly endearing.

  Darcy felt the first thin stirrings of anger. Probably absurd, given the circumstances, but there it was.

  “You check my computer? You sneak! You dirty sneak!”

  “Of course I check. I have a very bad friend who does very bad things. A man in a situation like that has to keep current with those closest to him. Since the kids left home, that’s you and only you.”

  Bad friend? A bad friend who does bad things? Her head was swimming, but one thing seemed all too clear: further denials would be useless. She knew, and he knew she did.

  “You haven’t just been checking on Marjorie Duvall.” She heard no shame or defensiveness in his voice, only a hideous regret that it should have come to this. “You’ve been checking on all of them.” Then he laughed and said, “Whoops!”

  She sat up against the headboard, which pulled her slightly away from him. That was good. Distance was good. All those years she’d lain with him hip to hip and thigh to thigh, and now distance was good.

  “What bad friend? What are you talking about?”

  He cocked his head to one side, Bob’s body language for I find you dense, but amusingly so. “Brian.”

  At first she had no idea who he was talking about, and thought it must be someone from work. Possibly an accomplice? It didn’t seem likely on the face of it, she would have said Bob was as lousy at making friends as she was, but men who did such things sometimes did have accomplices. Wolves hunted in packs, after all.

  “Brian Delahanty,” he said. “Don’t tell me you forgot Brian. I told you all about him after you told me about what happened to Brandolyn.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “Your friend from junior high? Bob, he’s dead! He got hit by a truck while he was chasing down a baseball, and he’s dead.”

  “Well …” Bob’s smile grew apologetic. “Yes … and no. I almost always called him Brian when I talked about him to you, but that’s not what I called him back in school, because he hated that name. I called him by his initials. I called him BD.”

  She started to ask him what that had to do with the price of tea in China, but then she knew. Of course she knew. BD.

  Beadie.

  - 9 -

  He talked for a long time, and the longer he talked, the more horrified she became. All these years she’d been living with a madman, but how could she have known? His insanity was like an underground sea. There was a layer of rock over it, and a layer of soil over the rock; flowers grew there. You could stroll through them and never know the madwater was there … but it was. It always had been. He blamed BD (who had become Beadie only years later, in his notes to the police) for everything, but Darcy suspected Bob knew better than that; blaming Brian Delahanty only made it easier to keep his two lives separate.

  It had been BD’s idea to take guns to school and go on a rampage, for instance. According to Bob, this inspiration had occurred in the summer between their freshman and sophomore years at Castle Rock High School. “1971,” he said, shaking his head goodnaturedly, as a man might do when recalling some harmless childhood peccadillo. “Long before those Columbine oafs were even a twinkle in
their daddies’ eyes. There were these girls that snooted us. Diane Ramadge, Laurie Swenson, Gloria Haggerty … there were a couple of others, too, but I forget their names. The plan was to get a bunch of guns—Brian’s dad had about twenty rifles and pistols in his basement, including a couple of German Lugers from World War II that we were just fascinated with—and take them to school. No searches or metal detectors back then, you know.

  “We were going to barricade ourselves in the science wing. We’d chain the doors shut, kill some people—mostly teachers, but also some of the guys we didn’t like—and then stampede the rest of the kids outside through the fire door at the far end of the hall. Well … most of the kids. We were going to keep the girls who snooted us as hostages. We planned—BD planned—to do all of this before the cops could get there, right? He drew maps, and he kept a list of the steps we’d have to take in his geometry notebook. I think there were maybe twenty steps in all, starting with ‘Pull fire alarms to create confusion.’” He chuckled. “And after we had the place locked down …”

  He gave her a slightly shamefaced smile, but she thought what he was mostly ashamed of was how stupid the plan had been in the first place.

  “Well, you can probably guess. Couple of teenage boys, hormones so high we got horny when the wind blew. We were going to tell those girls that if they’d, you know, fuck us real good, we’d let them go. If they didn’t, we’d have to kill them. And they’d fuck, all right.”

  He nodded slowly.

  “They’d fuck to live. BD was right about that.” He was lost in his story. His eyes were hazy with (grotesque but true) nostalgia. For what? The crazy dreams of youth? She was afraid that might actually be it.

  “We didn’t plan to kill ourselves like those heavy-metal dumbbells in Colorado, either. No way. There was a basement under the science wing, and Brian said there was a tunnel down there. He said it went from the supply room to the old fire station on the other side of Route 119. Brian said that when the high school was just a K-through-eight grammar school back in the fifties, there was a park over there, and the little kids used to play in it at recess. The tunnel was so they could get to the park without having to cross the road.”

  Bob laughed, making her jump.

  “I took his word for all that, but it turned out he was full of shit. I went down there the next fall to look for myself. The supply room was there, full of paper and stinking of that mimeograph juice they used to use, but if there was a tunnel, I never found it, and even back then I was very thorough. I don’t know if he was lying to both of us or just to himself, I only know there was no tunnel. We would have been trapped upstairs, and who knows, we might have killed ourselves after all. You never know what a fourteen-year-old’s going to do, do you? They roll around like unexploded bombs.”

  You’re not unexploded anymore, she thought. Are you, Bob?

  “We probably would have chickened out, anyway. But maybe not. Maybe we would have tried to go through with it. BD got me all excited, talking about how we were going to feel them up first, then make them take off each other’s clothes …” He looked at her earnestly. “Yes, I know how it sounds, just boys’ jack-off fantasies, but those girls really were snoots. You tried to talk to them, they’d laugh and walk away. Then stand in the corner of the caff, the bunch of them, looking us over and laughing some more. So you really couldn’t blame us, could you?”

  He looked at his fingers, drumming restlessly on his suit-pants where they stretched tight over his thighs, then back up at Darcy.

  “The thing you have to understand—that you really have to see—is how persuasive Brian was. He was lots worse than me. He really was crazy. Plus it was a time when the whole country was rioting, don’t forget, and that was part of it, too.”

  I doubt it, she thought.

  The amazing thing was how he made it sound almost normal, as if every adolescent boy’s sexual fantasies involved rape and murder. Probably he believed that, just as he had believed in Brian Delahanty’s mythical escape tunnel. Or had he? How could she know? She was, after all, listening to the recollections of a lunatic. It was just hard to believe that—still!—because the madman was Bob. Her Bob.

  “Anyway,” he said, shrugging, “it never happened. That was the summer Brian ran into the road and got killed. There was a reception at his house after the funeral, and his mother said I could go up to his room and take something, if I wanted. As a souvenir, you know. And I did want to! You bet I did! I took his geometry notebook, so nobody would go leafing through it and come across his plans for The Great Castle Rock Shoot-Out and Fuck Party. That’s what he called it, you know.”

  Bob laughed ruefully.

  “If I was a religious fella, I’d say God saved me from myself. And who knows if there isn’t Something … some Fate … that has its own plan for us.”

  “And this Fate’s plan for you was for you to torture and kill women?” Darcy asked. She couldn’t help herself.

  He looked at her reproachfully. “They were snoots,” he said, and raised a teacherly finger. “Also, it wasn’t me. It was Beadie who did that stuff—and I say did for a reason, Darce. I say did instead of does because all of that’s behind me now.”

  “Bob—your friend BD is dead. He’s been dead for almost forty years. You must know that. I mean, on some level you must.”

  He tossed his hands in the air: a gesture of goodnatured surrender. “Do you want to call it guilt-avoidance? That’s what a shrink would call it, I suppose, and it’s fine if you do. But Darcy, listen!” He leaned forward and pressed a finger to her forehead, between her eyebrows. “Listen and get this through your head. It was Brian. He infected me with … well, certain ideas, let’s say that. Some ideas, once you get them in your head, you can’t unthink them. You can’t …”

  “Put the toothpaste back in the tube?”

  He clapped his hands together, almost making her scream. “That’s it exactly! You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Brian was dead, but the ideas were alive. Those ideas—getting women, doing whatever to them, whatever crazy idea came into your head—they became his ghost.”

  His eyes shifted upward and to the left when he said this. She had read somewhere that this meant the person who was talking was telling a conscious lie. But did it matter if he was? Or which one of them he was lying to? She thought not.

  “I won’t go into the details,” he said. “It’s nothing for a sweetheart like you to hear, and like it or not—I know you don’t right now—you’re still my sweetheart. But you have to know I fought it. For seven years I fought it, but those ideas—Brian’s ideas—kept growing inside my head. Until finally I said to myself, ‘I’ll try it once, just to get it out of my head. To get him out of my head. If I get caught, I get caught—at least I’ll stop thinking about it. Wondering about it. What it would be like.’”

  “You’re telling me it was a male exploration,” she said dully.

  “Well, yes. I suppose you could say that.”

  “Or like trying a joint just to see what all the shouting was about.”

  He shrugged modestly, boyishly. “Kinda.”

  “It wasn’t an exploration, Bobby. It wasn’t trying a joint. It was taking a woman’s life.”

  She had seen no guilt or shame, absolutely none—he appeared incapable of those things, it seemed the circuit-breaker that controlled them had been fried, perhaps even before birth—but now he gave her a sulky, put-upon look. A teenager’s you-don’t-understand-me look.

  “Darcy, they were snoots.”

  She wanted a glass of water, but she was afraid to get up and go into the bathroom. She was afraid he would stop her, and what would come after that? What then?

  “Besides,” he resumed, “I didn’t think I’d get caught. Not if I was careful and made a plan. Not a half-baked and horny-fourteen-year-old boy’s plan, you know, but a realistic one. And I realized something else, too. I couldn’t do it myself. Even if I didn’t screw up out of nervousness, I might out of gui
lt. Because I was one of the good guys. That’s how I saw myself, and believe it or not, I still do. And I have the proof, don’t I? A good home, a good wife, two beautiful children who are all grown up and starting their own lives. And I give back to the community. That’s why I took the Town Treasurer’s job for two years, gratis. That’s why I work with Vinnie Eschler every year to put on the Halloween blood drive.”

  You should have asked Marjorie Duvall to give, Darcy thought. She was A-positive.

  Then, puffing out his chest slightly—a man nailing down his argument with one final, irrefutable point—he said: “That’s what the Cub Scouts are about. You thought I’d quit when Donnie went on to Boy Scouts, I know you did. Only I didn’t. Because it’s not just about him, and never was. It’s about the community. It’s about giving back.”

  “Then give Marjorie Duvall back her life. Or Stacey Moore. Or Robert Shaverstone.”

  That last one got through; he winced as if she had struck him. “The boy was an accident. He wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  “But you being there wasn’t an accident?”

  “It wasn’t me,” he said, then added the ultimate surreal absurdity. “I’m no adulterer. It was BD. It’s always BD. It was his fault for putting those ideas in my head in the first place. I never would have thought of them on my own. I signed my notes to the police with his name just to make that clear. Of course I changed the spelling, because I sometimes called him BD back when I first told you about him. You might not remember that, but I did.”

  She was impressed by the obsessive lengths he’d gone to. No wonder he hadn’t been caught. If she hadn’t stubbed her toe on that damned carton—

  “None of them had any relation to me or my business. Either of my businesses. That would be very bad. Very dangerous. But I travel a lot, and I keep my eyes open. BD—the BD inside—he does, too. We watch out for the snooty ones. You can always tell. They wear their skirts too high and show their bra straps on purpose. They entice men. That Stacey Moore, for instance. You read about her, I’m sure. Married, but that didn’t keep her from brushing her titties against me. She worked as a waitress in a coffee shop—the Sunnyside in Waterville. I used to go up there to Mickleson’s Coins, remember? You even went with me a couple of times, when Pets was at Colby. This was before George Mickleson died and his son sold off all the stock so he could go to New Zealand or somewhere. That woman was all over me, Darce! Always asking me if I wanted a warm-up on my coffee and saying stuff like how ’bout those Red Sox, bending over, rubbing her titties on my shoulder, trying her best to get me hard. Which she did, I admit it, I’m a man with a man’s needs, and although you never turned me away or said no … well, rarely … I’m a man with a man’s needs and I’ve always been highly sexed. Some women sense that and like to play on it. It gets them off.”