Chapter 19: The Shed
Hugh woke with his cheek in the dirt and a cobweb across his open eye. He tried to lift a hand to his face and his wrist caught, cinched tight, and the tug rolled something heavy against his back. Vera's shoulder blade. He knew the shape of it. He knew the smell of her too, sweat and coconut and the harsh bite of her body wash, all of it under the damp earth and the creosote and something older, rot.
He got one knee under himself and fell sideways into her. She made a sound behind the tape and kicked him in the shin, twice, hard enough that he grunted.
"Vera." His tongue was dry as a glove.
She worked her jaw against the tape until it loosened a corner and peeled sideways and stayed stuck to her cheek with grit in the glue. She spat out a thread of it. "Hugh?"
"I'm here."
"Where the fuck are we?"
"I don't know."
She twisted and the rope ground against his wrists. Light came through the slats where the boards had never been pried off. Gray, thin, the wrong side of the trees. Nails stood in the walls with nothing hung on them. Something rusted lay in the corner with leaves piled on it. Vera got a look at all of it and he could hear her hating it.
"Can you see anything?"
"Boards. A door. Trees, maybe."
"Whose house is this?"
"It isn't a house."
She went quiet, which scared him worse than shouting would have. Then she said, "How did we get here? What do you remember?"
He remembered the couch. The man standing in the middle of his living room with no clothes on, grinning like he had already won it. He remembered the coffee table going to pieces under his chin.
"Your husband," he said into the floor. "In my house. Naked."
"Joaquin was in your house."
"On my rug."
"Where's Marnie?"
"Would you leave her out of it."
"She's my neighbor, I'll ask what I want." Vera tried to sit up and fell back onto his shoulders. "Where's my watch? Where's my ring?"
"Ask him."
"Where's your wife, Hugh? Is she in the house? Is she on the couch too?"
He didn't answer. He was thinking about the text. It had come off his own screen. His thumb had chosen the letters and hit send, he was certain of that part, except he had been lying on the floor by then with blood running into his eyebrow, and Vera had walked in the door anyway.
"Where's my phone?" he said.
"Where's my phone," she mimicked. "That's what you're worried about."
"Somebody texted you from it. I didn't send that."
Vera stopped moving. "From my phone. From yours."
"I didn't send it."
For three seconds she had nothing. Then it came out of her the way water comes out of a split pipe, all pressure and no direction. This was his fault. No, how could it, she was dragged through a doorway with a rag over her face, she woke up in a shed with dead spiders in her hair, and if he had ever once in his life controlled his own household, if he had put that wife of his in her place the way he was supposed to, none of this would be happening.
"My fault," he said. "You sent me to the house at midnight to make her kneel."
"I sent you to do one thing."
"And you had Joaquin standing on my lawn the day before."
Vera yanked the rope and his arms followed. "How would they even know? How would they find out? Who would tell them?"
"Nobody tells anybody anything."
"Then how?"
"I don't know."
She was quiet again, breathing through her nose. Under the rotting wood, something scratched and stopped. Hugh thought about the envelope. He thought about the schedule Marnie had put in front of him years ago, the one he had signed without reading, because he had been late for a flight and she had made it easy.
"We apologize," he said.
"What?"
"We apologize. We mean it, Vera. Look at the two of them. Joaquin used to take your shoe to the side of the head and thank you for it. Marnie has cooked me dinner for ten years and never once raised her voice. They love us. They don't know how to do anything else."
Vera laughed, short and flat. "You think they'll fold."
"I think they'll cut us loose the second we say we're sorry. That's who they are."
"You're pathetic." She tested the rope at her wrists, rolled her shoulders, and found the head of a nail with her thumb. She began working the rope against it, back and forth, patient. "No. We fight. That door isn't even hung straight. I get one hand loose and I put my heel through the panel and we run."
"And go where? We don't know where this is."
"Then we find out," she said. "I am not going to beg anybody."
The door opened.
Light came in low and yellow and full of dust, and two shapes stood in it, backlit, dressed in clean clothes neither of them had left the house in. Marnie was in jeans and a flannel that hung off her, hair down, laughing at something. Joaquin had a canvas duffel over one shoulder and a grocery bag in the other hand, and he was laughing too, quietly, the way he laughed at the end of the joke rather than the front.
Then their eyes came down and found the two of them in the dirt.
"Oh, look who's finally awake," Marnie said. "I thought we might have lost you both for a minute there."
Vera spat on the floorboards.
"Where the fuck are we?"
"That's not really important."
"Honey. Please." Hugh got his voice up out of the grit. "Untie me. We can talk about this."
Vera's head turned toward him so fast the rope bit. "Oh, you want to talk to her now? I thought you just wanted to put your hands on her."
"Nobody's talking to you. I was talking to my wife."
"Joaquin." Vera's voice cracked like a whip across the room, and it landed on the man in the doorway the way it must have landed on him a thousand times. "What do you think you're doing? Get your ass over here and untie me right now before I lose my shit on you."
Marnie and Joaquin looked at Vera, then at Hugh, then at each other. And they broke.
Joaquin doubled over with it, the canvas bag sliding off his shoulder and thudding onto the boards, and Marnie put a hand on the doorframe and laughed until she had to wipe her eyes with the back of her wrist.
"You think you have power here," Marnie said finally, straightening up.
"Oh no," Joaquin said. "In our marriages you two may have held the power. That was only because we let you."
"Yes. What did you call us? Weak and pathetic. That was all an act."
"A role we were happy to play. But then you both went and fucked around. Both figuratively and literally."
Marnie stepped in off the threshold and let the door swing shut behind her. She crossed the floor, unhurried, and crouched so that her face came down level with Vera's. The bruise on her throat had gone yellow at the edges. She looked rested.
"Now we welcome you to the find-out stage," she said. "Neither of you realized who you were married to."
Joaquin knelt by the bag and unzipped it with a long tearing sound. He tipped it out onto the dirt between the two of them. A paring knife, thin and bright. A coil of copper wire. A box of freezer bags, still flat and folded. Vera's watch, its face cracked, ticking away in the middle of the pile.
Then her ring. The heavy gold signet, catching the light where it lay in the dust.
Vera looked at her own things lying there and did not say anything at all.
Marnie took the locket off her neck, opened it with her thumbnail, and drew the needle out. She set it down with the rest, gently, the way you would set a fork at a table.
Joaquin sat down in the dirt with his back against the wall and folded his legs under him. He picked up Vera's cracked watch and set it ticking on his knee.
"Hugh. Can I ask you something?"
Hugh was working his wrists against the rope. He stopped. "Ask me."
"How well do you know your wife?"
Hugh blinked at him.
"Outside of the HOA president. Outside the housewife. Outside the amazing cook and baker." Joaquin turned the watch over in his palm. "What do you know about her, really?"
Hugh opened his mouth. The floor was cold under his hip and the smell of creosote had got into the back of his throat. He thought about the pie crust on Saturdays. He thought about the driveway, and about a phone he had answered from a pocket at a board meeting and could not remember the conversation. He thought about the envelope and the schedule and the ten years of dinners, and every one of those things was a thing she had made for him rather than a thing he knew.
He said nothing.
Joaquin let the silence sit there and get comfortable. "That's what I thought."
"Vera." Marnie had not moved from her crouch. "I'll ask you the same question. How well do you know your husband?"
Vera had stopped sawing at the nail. She looked past Marnie at Joaquin and her lip curled off her teeth.
"I know my husband is a weak little man who hides behind strong women like us." She said it flat, like a line she had used before. "Kill him. Kill Hugh, I don't care. Just let me go."
Marnie stayed very still.
"Marnie, I underestimated you." Vera's voice dropped into something almost warm. "I think after all this is done you will find out we are one and the same. We could be great friends."
Marnie's palm caught her across the face. The sound filled the shack and came back off the boards. Vera's head snapped sideways and blood beaded at the corner of her mouth where her own tooth had cut her.
"I am nothing like you," Marnie said.
Vera spat, checked her lip with her tongue, and smiled at the floor like she had won something.
Joaquin got up and brushed the dirt off the back of his jeans.
"Since you two know nothing about us," he said, "let us tell you what we know about you both."
They took turns. Marnie started, kneeling in front of Hugh with the flannel sleeve hanging off her wrist.
Hugh's father had died of a stroke at sixty-one and Hugh had cried about it, once, in a hotel in Denver. He had never told Marnie that. He had told his phone, in a voice memo he had recorded driving home from the airport and never deleted and never sent. It was on his cloud, under a file titled Margins.
He stared at her.
"You have four hundred and thirty-one voice memos on that account," Marnie said. "Most of them are about yourself."
Vera laughed once, out of her bloody mouth, and then Joaquin turned to her and she stopped.
The Escalade. The late nights with the excuse of Ashburn. The fact that Vera had signed a prenuptial agreement she had drafted herself and never shown Joaquin, in which the word revocation appeared eleven times. He said the number. Eleven. Vera's face did not move but her breathing changed.
"I know about the girl in Austin," Joaquin said. "I know about the money you moved into the account with your mother's maiden name. I know you cry in the shower and run the water so nobody hears it. I've been running that water for six years."
Hugh watched Vera's throat work.
"All that other stuff," Joaquin said. "Even the affair. We could have lived with."
"But the name calling and you putting your hands on me," Marnie said. "That is what really did it."
Hugh found his voice. It came out thicker than he meant it to.
"Cut the shit. Neither of you are going to do anything about it."
Vera nodded slowly, still smiling. "Yeah. You both love us too much. It's not like you're going to kill us or anything."
"Oh, but yes we will," Marnie said.
She did not say it loudly. She said it the way she said the mail had come.
"You see, we're something like serial killers," she said. "In ten years of marriage I have killed twelve people. Don't worry. They all deserved it."
Joaquin picked the paring knife up off the dirt and used it to scratch at the underside of his thumbnail. He did not look at Vera.
"And I've probably done about the same," he said. "They were no one anybody would miss. That was before we met and found out we have more in common than either of us thought possible."
Marnie stood up. She took the needle between two fingers and held it where the thin light from the slats could find it.
"And you think we couldn't kill two people who have wronged us and beaten us?" she said. "You couldn't possibly be that dumb."
The shack went quiet except for the watch ticking on the floor between them.
Hugh looked at his wife standing over him in another person's flannel, hair loose, the yellow bruise on her throat, and he thought about her pulse. He had felt it under his thumb at the stove and it had slowed. He had noticed that at the time and filed it away because he had a call at eleven.
Vera got her breath back first.
"You're lying," she said.
Marnie crouched again and set the needle down in front of Vera's knee, close enough that she could have picked it up if her hands were free.
"Ask him," she said. "He's the one who signed my schedule."
Hugh's mouth had gone dry again. "What schedule."
"The envelope. The one I put under a pen on a Sunday and you signed on your way to the car." Marnie tilted her head. "You never read it, Hugh. You have never read a single thing I have given you. You signed it in eleven seconds."
"What did it say?"
"That you'd stay out of my calendar and I'd stay out of yours." She let that land. "You've kept your half beautifully."
Something in the treeline outside knocked twice against the shack wall, a branch or an animal, and Hugh flinched so hard the rope burned. Vera was looking at the needle now and not at anyone's face. Her jaw was tight, and for the first time since the dust had settled on her coat, she had nothing to say back.
Joaquin walked to the door and put his hand flat on it.
"So," he said. "We're going to need you to listen to the rest."
Joaquin put his palm flat on the door and stayed leaning on it. He laid the rest out without any pleasure in it. That was the thing Hugh kept hearing in his voice. The man delivered bad news like a monthly bill.
Nobody was looking for them. Vera had told no one where she was going, because Vera never told anyone anything.
Her Range Rover sat in Marnie's driveway with her purse on the passenger seat and her phone in the glovebox. Doors locked. Keys in the cupholder.
"The merger closes Tuesday," Joaquin said. "Nobody at your office starts asking until Wednesday. Assistants do not call the police about their boss."
Hugh's eyebrow had gone stiff with dried blood. It cracked every time he breathed through his nose.
Vera had gone still against his back. He could feel her working, feeling along the walls of it for a handle, some bolt she could turn.
"What do you want?" she said.
Marnie didn't answer. She walked to the wall, set a bucket upright with the toe of her boot, and sat down on it. The lid creaked. The flannel sleeve slid down over her wrist.
"Marnie. Look at me."
She looked at him.
"Ten years," he said. His voice came apart in the middle of it and he let it. "You're going to kill me over this. Over one mistake. I'm sorry. I am sorry, for the stove, for my hand on you, for all of it."
She let him finish.
"Whatever you want me to say, I'll say it. Whatever you want signed, I'll sign it. I'll read this one twice. I never read the last one and I should have and I know it."
"Name one thing I did on a Tuesday last year," Marnie said.
Hugh blinked at her.
"One Tuesday. Any one. You can pick."
The shack ticked. Cold worked up through the floorboards into his hip.
"I was at Ashburn most Tuesdays," he said. "You had the HOA, I think. The library."
"I was in a motel in Copper Creek with your neighbor's husband," she said. "I came home Wednesday and made you meatloaf."
His mouth opened and nothing came out.
Across from him Vera had stopped moving altogether. Then she straightened her shoulders and started talking in the voice she used on conference calls. She had eleven million liquid, she said. She would wire every dollar wherever they wanted, tonight. She would sign over Marsh Analytics in the morning. She would divorce Joaquin and leave the state and never speak either of their names again.
Joaquin pushed off the door and picked up her cracked watch off the dirt.
"The account in your mother's maiden name ends in four-four-one-seven," he said. "You moved six-fifty into it in March. You cry in the shower with the water on so nobody hears it. I've been running that water for six years, Vera. You asked me once why I take so long in the kitchen. It's because I'm waiting for you to turn it off."
She looked at him like she was seeing him for the first time, and clearly she did not care for the view.
"You want me to kneel? Is that it? You want to hear me say it?"
Nobody answered her.
She rolled onto her knees in the dirt, which took her a while with her hands behind her. Dust came up around her shins. She lifted her chin and said it flat and fast, the way she paid parking tickets.
"You are above me. There. Are you happy now?"
Marnie stood up off the bucket. She crossed the floor, bent, and took the needle up off the boards between two fingers. She didn't put it in the locket yet. She just held it.
"You are going to die in your own bed," she said. "Door locked. Shoes off. It will feel like a pinch behind your ear and then a warmth down your left arm, and you will not wake up."
Vera's jaw worked.
"The coroner writes cardiac event and signs it before lunch. Your mother cries at the funeral in a hat she bought for the occasion. Your assistant sends lilies, then asks your replacement about the parking spot."
"You're lying."
"I don't lie. I'm a housewife. We don't have the imagination for it."
Hugh heard himself breathing. It was loud in the small room, and he hated it.
"You're going home tonight," Marnie said. "Both of you. You'll sleep in your own beds. You'll show up to the closing on Tuesday and you'll smile for the photographers. And then one night soon it happens, and neither of you will know which night it is until it's already over."
Marnie closed the locket and the click of it went around the shack and came back.
Joaquin had not moved off the door. He stood with his palm flat against it, head tipped, watching Vera the way you watch a pan come to a boil.
"You have something to say," Vera said. "Say it."
He pushed off the door and crossed the dirt. He stopped with his boots in front of her knees and looked down at her right wrist, where the rope had gone dark and shiny from working against the nail.
"That is unless one of you does something stupid."
Hugh's gut went cold. He felt it travel all the way down into his knees.
Joaquin crouched, slow, until his face was level with hers. He smelled of woodsmoke from the drive up. "I have dreamed many nights of something like this. Please do something. I have an itch I have been dying to scratch."
Vera's face did not change at all. But her hand did. She had quit working the rope the second his boots stopped, and now she took it up again, patient, giving nothing away.
Hugh could feel every pull of it in his own wrists. The rope ran from her to him and back.
"Vera. Don't."
"Shut up, Hugh."
"He means it."
"I said shut up."
She kept her eyes on Joaquin and pulled, and pulled, and there was a small wet sound of fiber parting behind her back. She went still. Then she did it again, and this time a strand gave all the way and her right hand came loose at the wrist, rope still dangling off it in a bracelet.
She was on her feet before Hugh could open his mouth. The copper wire was in her hand. She had scooped it off the dirt with the free hand as she came up, and she swung it at Marnie's head with everything she had, and there was no plan in it, just the arm.
Marnie got her forearm up. The wire caught her across the back of the wrist and drew a line there, thin and red, and kept going into the boards, and the whistle of it went through the shack.
Then Vera ran for the door.
Joaquin caught her by the hair and the back of the flannel collar and turned her, and put her down hard. Dust came up in a wave around them. The wire skittered off across the floorboards and lay still.
Vera came up swinging. She got him once across the ear with her loose fist, which was more than anyone else in the room had managed all night, and Joaquin smiled about it. He got her wrist. He got the other wrist. He rolled her onto her front and put a knee behind her shoulder blade and held her there, face down in the dirt, breathing hard through his nose.
Vera turned her head sideways and spat dirt and looked back at him with one eye.
"Get off me."
"Say please," Joaquin said.
"Fuck you."
He took her right hand and laid it flat on the boards, palm down. Then he took her index finger and bent it back the way you bend a stick to test it, slow, so it took a long time.
"Joaquin." Marnie's voice, flat. "The plan."
"One," he said.
The knuckle popped. Vera's scream filled the shack and came down off the cobwebs and got into Hugh's ears and stayed there. He was fighting the rope now, both wrists, tearing the skin, and Marnie did not even turn around to look at him.
Joaquin took the middle finger.
"Two," he said.
This one took two tries. Vera screamed through her teeth and then stopped screaming, and by the end of it she was making a sound like a kettle with nothing left in it, and the finger lay over sideways against her ring finger, wrong.
Joaquin let go of her and sat back on the dirt and looked at his work. His chest was moving. He had the look of a man stepping out of a cold lake.
"What did you cut her with?" Marnie asked. She was holding her own wrist up to the light, the red line on it already darkening and beading along its length.
"She touched you," Joaquin said. "You saw."
"I saw." Marnie pulled the flannel sleeve down over the cut. Then she walked across and stood over Vera, and for a moment the only sound in the shack was the watch ticking on the boards and Vera's breath hitching. "Was it worth it?"
Vera didn't answer. Her hand lay out in front of her and would not lie flat now.
"You should see the two of you," she said at last, into the floor. "You're going to be very happy together."
"We know," Marnie said.
"I'll tell people."
"I'll tell people."
Marnie and Joaquin looked at each other. A slow smile came up on both their faces at once, the way a light comes up in a room when you hit the switch. The original plan had a hole in it now and they could both see the hole.
"Now why would you go and say that?" Marnie said, turning to Vera. Joaquin walked out the door without a word. The yard went dark behind him.
"You two belong in jail."
"Maybe," Marnie said. "But that won't be happening anytime soon."
"Listen to me." Hugh pulled against the rope and the knots held. His voice cracked on the way out. "Marnie, please. I'm your husband. Vera seduced me. She ambushed me in my office, she had me in that boardroom before I knew what was happening, you have to understand. I will never betray you again. Please, Marnie. Please."
"I seduced you?" Vera's laughter came out scraped and raw. "You're just as pathetic as Joaquin. If memory serves me correctly, we both thought our spouses were beneath us. You told me yourself you would have ruined Marnie if you'd met me earlier in life. In your kitchen. Against your island. You said it right into my ear."
Hugh's face went the color of the floor.
"Ruin me, huh?"
Marnie's voice was soft. That was the part Hugh knew. She only went soft right before the thing that hurt.
"Marnie, please no." He was begging now, properly, the way people begged in movies and nobody did in real life. "I was an idiot teenager. Yes, I used to bully people and ruin their lives for fun. That's who I was. But you changed me. You made me better. Ten years, Marnie. Ten years of you. Please."
Vera made a sound like she wanted to spit on him and couldn't get the angle.
"You're going to beg her? After you said you'd put her on her knees for me?"
"You told me to say that."
"You told me you wanted it."
"I never said that."
"You said she curdles. You said you'd curdle her like milk."
The word came up out of his mouth at the stove and landed here in the dirt and sat between them. Marnie heard it and something in her face went still. Not angry. Just still.
The door opened and Joaquin came back in with his arms full. Brown glass bottle in one hand. Two folded rags in the other. A white pharmacy bottle tucked under his chin.
"What are these two arguing about, baby girl?"
"Oh, nothing." Marnie hadn't taken her eyes off Hugh. "They were just turning on each other. It's quite entertaining."
"Sorry I missed it."
"They were praising each other one minute and stripping each other bare the next."
"Pity." Joaquin set the bottle and the rags and the pills down on the overturned bucket. "It's almost dawn. We'll have to put them on ice for the day."
"Aw." Marnie's voice went small and disappointed. "I wanted to have some fun with them first."
"Don't worry, baby girl." Joaquin crossed the dirt and stopped an arm's length from her. "We have more than enough time for fun with them tonight."
"Promise?"
"Of course."
He handed her two white pills from the pharmacy bottle. She took them without looking. Folded rag over his forearm. The chloroform bottle open at his hip, dripping one dark bead onto his boot.
Marnie walked over to Vera and knelt in the dirt in front of her. Vera watched her come with flat grey eyes, her broken hand cradled against her stomach, the two fingers lying wrong against the ring finger.
"Open," Marnie said.
"Fuck you."
Marnie pinched her nose shut with two fingers and held Vera's jaw with the heel of her other hand until her mouth came open for air, and dropped both pills in. Then she took the rag and tipped the bottle into the center of it and pressed it down over Vera's face.
Vera fought. She got one heel into Marnie's knee and Marnie rode it. She turned her head sideways and got a jawful of air and Marnie followed her. By the ninth breath Vera's hands had come up slack off her stomach and her head went heavy against the floor.
Marnie didn't move for another ten seconds. Then she took the rag off and looked at Vera's face. The grey eyes had gone empty, pointed at the ceiling. Her lipstick had smeared across her cheek from where her face had scraped the boards.
Joaquin crouched on the other side with Hugh.
"Come on. Swallow."
Hugh worked his throat and gagged and swallowed. Joaquin gave him a second pill and he took that one too, quiet, watching Marnie's back the whole time. Then the rag went over his face and he breathed it in and his chest went still.
Marnie checked both wrists, both ankles, and retied the knot at Vera's back with two extra passes of the rope. Joaquin did the same on Hugh, then stood and brushed the dust off his jeans.
The two of them lay in the dirt in the grey dawn light. Vera's cracked watch ticked on the boards where it had been left.
Marnie was turning to pick it up when Joaquin got her by the arm and pulled her into it.
The kiss came up out of nowhere. His hand was in her hair, his other arm came around her back and hauled her against him, and for a long moment there was nothing in the shack but two people breathing each other's air. The rags hung forgotten from their fists. The chloroform bottle tipped and rolled off the bucket and landed soft on the dirt.
Marnie broke it first.
"Come on," she said. Her voice had gone low and grain. "Let's finish this up. I have unspeakable things I want to do to you in your wife's bed."
Joaquin looked down at her and smiled. "You picture it often?"
"Every Tuesday."
He laughed, quiet, and pulled the door open. The light came in low and gold across the floor, across the two still bodies, across the wire and the knife and the cracked watch.
Marnie took his hand. He folded his fingers around hers like he'd been doing it his whole life. They stepped out of the shack and pulled the door shut behind them, and the latch dropped into place with a sound like a lock turning.
The trees went quiet around them. Somewhere past the treeline, the first bird of the morning began to call.
They walked back through the woods hand in hand, and neither of them let go, and every step of the way Marnie could feel the heat of him against her palm and could feel the night already waiting for them like a door left open.