I remember the day I got the first message. It was a day like any other day, and that was part of the horror.
The subject line was: “I have something to tell you about James.”
James, my fiance, was a consultant and travelled a great deal for work. The rational part of my brain knew he was working his butt off so we can buy a house and start a family. But at the back of my mind, I couldn’t help imagining James living a double life unknown to me.
So when I saw the message, it was the confirmation of my worst fears.
“Hi,” it said. “You don’t know me, but by chance I ran across your social media profile. It seems to me that your fiance and my husband are the same person. This is not a joke. We need to talk.”
Of course I didn’t believe it.
But I didn’t delete the message and I didn’t tell James.
When he left to go on another work trip, I dropped him off at the airport as usual. And the day after that came the second message: “I know you don’t believe me, but you have to hear me out.”
*
Ever since my husband David died, I had been terrified by the idea of another relationship. And then I met James and everything changed: I felt as if I had won the lottery for the second time in my life.
But now everything was about to crash down, again.
I didn’t work that day and stayed in bed eating pizza and watching horror movies. When James called me during lunch to check in as he always did when he was out of town, we talked as usual. He said I sounded sick, and I said I thought I might be coming down with something.
As we were talking, I looked out the window and saw a woman coming up the walkway. As James prattled on about his day in the phone, the woman and I made eye contact.
The woman continued approaching the door and passed out of my line of vision. I hastily got off the phone, got dressed and waited for the doorbell to ring. I felt like a prisoner going to my execution.
But the doorbell didn’t ring.
When I opened the door, there was no one there.
*
That night, I heard a scratching sound at the window.
If I had been entirely awake, I would have cowered under my blankets or called the police. But because I was half-asleep, the normal inhibitions and fears were not in play. I got up and threw open the curtains to see what the hell was going on when I saw a face staring back at me. It was a young man, a very young man, no more than 19 or 20. He looked eerily familiar, and for a space of two or three seconds, we stared at each other. And then he ran off, disappearing into the night.
When I woke up the next morning, I figured I must have dreamt the whole thing. But when I left the house, I saw that the bushes under the bedroom window were trampled.
When I got home that day after work, the woman from the day before was standing outside my door. And of course I knew right away who she must be: she looked exactly like how I imagined. In a crowd she would not have stood out, but up close she was dazzling. Her delicate features were like something out of an old photograph.
“Hi,” she said, “I’m Laura.”
I invited her inside and she told me everything, how she and “Robert” met, their subsequent engagement and then dream wedding. They were going to start a family once Robert got transferred to a desk position. As it were his job took him on the road three weeks out of the month. The pay was good, but she might as well be a single mother with that kind of schedule.
One day Laura was on social media and randomly stumbled on my profile pic which was of me and James. Intrigued by the resemblance to her husband Robert, she clicked on the link. She wondered if Robert had a long lost twin. And then as she scrolled through my public posts, she realized James also travelled for work.
She thought it was a strange coincidence, no more than that.
And then she discovered a crumpled up bill in Robert’s pocket. It looked like it had been through the washing machine and the words were smudged, but she could just about see that the name on it was James, not Robert. She managed to make out enough to piece together the address of our house.
I was stunned. It was just such a wild story. “What was the bill for?” I said, my voice weak with amazement.
She stared at me for a moment, her face blankly, shockingly beautiful. And then she said, “I don’t remember.”
*
I listened in a sort of stupor as Laura explained how we would kill Robert/James. I suppose I was in shock.
She asked me if I had ever lost somebody I loved.
“Yes,” I said. “Have you?”
“A long time ago,” she said. “It ruined my life.”
“What would killing Robert accomplish?” I asked her even though I knew the answer already.
“Revenge,” she said. “It’s the only thing I have left to live for.”
*
When James got back, I told him everything starting with the messages.
James chuckled. “So you finally met my wife.”
“It’s not funny James,” I nearly shouted at him. “She knows where we live, she’s been in this house, and she wants to kill you. She even told me how she was going to do it.”
“But why?” he said, the remnant of a smile still lingering around his mouth.
I could tell he was still not taking this seriously. James was the type who could never see the bad in other people. He didn’t believe in evil.
It was a warm April day but the chills ran down my back. “I don’t know,” I said. Which was the truth, though I suppose you could say it wasn’t the whole truth. “But I know this James: somebody who’s killed once will kill again.”
*
In my previous life I was a realtor. I sold houses, a lot of houses. I made more money than I knew what to do with and then I met David. He lived in a sort of artistic squalor with a vast and confusing array of friends, and was as elegant and fragile as a hothouse plant. I was fascinated by him at first sight, he was so different from the kind of people I knew in the world of real estate.
We got married in the wedding of my dreams. I had nine bridesmaids. My dress was custom made from locally produced silk. The flowers were flown in from South America, the catering was flawless, and the waiters wore white gloves and glided like ice skaters through the crowd of guests offering Champagne and lobster and caviar. Not a single thing went wrong.
The day after was when the nightmare began, though I only realized that in retrospect.
But at the time, it was only somebody else’s tragedy that I was only vaguely, tangentially connected with, or so I thought.
A man had killed himself and his wife in a murder-suicide. It was a small town and details like how the man had climbed in through his own window the morning of the murder, and the woman was found in her high heels were the stuff of dinner table gossip by late afternoon.
My connection with the whole mess was just this: I had sold them their house. That was it.
Mr. Henderson was a doctor and Mrs. Henderson was a lawyer, and they made more money in one year than what my parents’ entire retirement savings amounted to. When I first met them, they were an attractive couple who looked ten years younger than their age. They had a daughter who was about 12 at the time, as lovely as a Botticelli angel, the only flaw, if you could even call it that, a tiny mole under one nostril.
I showed them one house after another and there was always something wrong. Finally, I showed them a new build by a local company that specialized in luxury homes that had just come on the market, and they loved it. They were happy, I was happy, everybody was happy, or so I thought.
About two years after the Hendersons moved into the house, they started calling me asking questions about the construction materials like the imported marble. They sounded on edge. I got the builder to send me all the materials they had on the house construction, and went through everything with them with a fine tooth comb. But the Hendersons didn’t seem satisfied no matter what. In any case they stopped calling me eventually so I figured they had moved on to something else to get obssessed about.
I had actually sent them an invite to my wedding and was surprised to not receive even a reply back. When I saw Mrs. Henderson at the grocery store just before the wedding, I thought she looked absolutely awful. And then three weeks later her husband killed her and then killed himself. Just goes to show how you can never know what somebody’s life is like no matter how perfect it seems.
*
My husband David died in a hotel room while on the road with a theater group he was working with that summer. The police told me he had most likely died of self-induced hypoxyphilia. I thought they were talking about some kind of rare disease at first.
The police barely investigated it. The hotel security cameras had been broken for months and anybody could have been in David’s room.
But if somebody had murdered David, then it wasn’t random. Because next to the body the police had found a model toy house, small enough that it could fit on the palm of a hand. I knew the house just like I knew all the houses I had ever sold by heart inside and out: it was the exact replica of the house I had sold the Hendersons down to the custom windows and marble tiling. Somebody had made it with painstaking care, and it was found in the room in which my husband had died under suspicious circumstances.
When I told the police this, they didn’t believe me. The Henderson house had been razed years ago and the pictures from the time were grainy and made the house look like the typical bougie mansion of the upwardly mobile. It was my word against common sense as far as the police were concerned. They had me down as the hysterical widow in denial that her husband was a sex freak, and they weren’t going to budge from that.
*
After David died, I started drinking and thinking. My mind became a frightening place, full of rabbit holes, blind alleyways and deadends. Something about the crime reeked of obsession. Somebody out there wanted me to suffer. And I was convinced this person was insane.
I refused to work in real estate again. I started delivering groceries, pizza, takeout, doing rideshares etc. If I couldn’t sleep I got up and worked. If I found myself thinking crazy things, I went out and worked. Sometimes I just drove around until a job came in. Sometimes I just put my head on the steering wheel and cried myself to sleep. Anyway, that was how I met James, delivering him his dinner five times a week. And after two years he asked me out.
*
After David died, I hired a private investigator to track down where the Hendersons’ daughter was. I thought talking to her might give me a lead. But after six months, the investigator told me they couldn’t find any trace of her. The girl’s grandmother had died just before David was killed, and the girl, who had just turned 18, apparently vanished into thin air.
I couldn’t stop thinking about her. What did she look like now? What was she doing? What was her life like? I lived with the idea of her for so long that when I saw “Laura” for the first time, it was as if I had known her for years and years. The feeling I had about this woman was so overwhelming that it was like a physical nausea.
After that first meeting, I waited for the next message or visit from her but it never came. When I replied back to the last message I received from her, the email bounced. Before I knew it, six months had passed.
I wanted to go to the police about her from the beginning, but James said they would never take us seriously. After some thought, I decided he was right. I had no evidence for any of the things she said, so it would be my word against a person I couldn’t even prove existed.
For Laura had seemingly vanished into thin air, again.
*
During our first meeting, Laura had said to me, “When I saw James, it was like deja vu.” I couldn’t stop thinking about it because that was how I felt too when I first saw James. I had so many questions to ask her, so many things I wished I had said but didn’t. I never imagine she would just disappear.
On the outside at least, life went on more or less as usual. One day I did a delivery to a retirement community. Mrs. O had mobility issues so I helped her carry the groceries into the house, and on her mantle was a picture of her and a couple in wedding attire and the bride looked just like Laura.
“Do you recognize her?” Mrs. O said proudly.
“What?” I said, feeling as if I had stepped into the twilight zone.
“It’s my daughter-in-law,” Mrs. O said. “She’s in the local theater group. They just put on a play, it’s very popular. Have you seen it?”
“Your daughter-in-law?” I choked out.
“They got married just last month, it was very nice. Lovely wedding…”
*
I waited for Laura backstage after the show. When she saw me, she became visibly embarrassed and downright distraught.
“You’re a very good actress,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said awkwardly.
“May I ask why you tried to ruin my life?” I said.
“Ruin your life?” she said, startled. “He told me it was a April Fools day joke!”
“Who’s he?” I said.
Her answer surprised me. “James, your fiance,” she said.
I was immediately suspicions. Perhaps, I thought, she was one of James’ ex-girlfriends.
“And you believed him it was a joke?” I said. “Did I look like I thought it was funny?”
“He paid me two thousand dollars,” she said. “He said it was just a prank and you guys were always pranking each other. I needed the money for the wedding.”
She started to cry and I began to think she might be telling the truth.
“I wasn’t getting any acting jobs then and really needed the money with the final payments for the wedding coming up,” she said. “He saw me at a workshop and said I looked just the part. I thought he was a creep at first, but then I went to the house to check it out, and it seemed like what he said.”
I suddenly had an idea. “Did you stand outside my window one night?”
She flushed a bright red. “It was me.”
“Watching me sleep,” I said, “while pretending to be a boy.”
“He said it was part of the joke,” she almost wailed at me.
*
When James came home, I was waiting for him.
“Who are you?” I asked him.
He gave me a strange look, and then his face changed and it was as if he had taken off a mask. “So you figured it out,” he said with a laugh. “Took you long enough.”
He sat down at the table and poured himself a drink. “It’s funny how you never guessed,” he said.
I couldn’t stop looking at him. The sense of deja vu I had when I saw him for the first time came back to me.
“There is no glory in outstripping donkeys,” he said. “That’s what my brother always said. It’s a Roman epigram. He was the brains of the family, not me. He was a classics major before going to medical school.”
“Your brother was a doctor?” I said.
He nodded. “He was ten years older, so more of a father figure to me than a brother. When he got married, I was the best man. He married a lawyer, one of the most brilliant wonderful woman I would ever know. They had a daughter and moved to a town known to be a good place to raise children, if you can afford it of course. But of course my brother and his wife could afford it, and they bought a house. And then they got a dog.”
“Yes,” I said, “I know. I was their realtor.”
“And then the dog died,” he said, “of some rare cancer. They did all they could, but that just prolonged the inevitable. The kid saw it all, maybe too much. That was a year after they moved in.”
“I’m sorry but-“
“Two years later, my brother started feeling unwell. Both he and his wife actually. At first they thought it was work stress and the long commute, but it quickly became obvious that wasn’t the case. And they had both seen what had happened with the dog, so they knew what was in store for them.”
There was a silence as he looked off into a point behind my head as if he had forgotten I was there.
“When they realized what was happening,” he said, “the first thing they did was to send the daughter away to her grandmother’s. The girl was healthy for the time being anyway, and they were desperate to keep it that way. They were convinced there was something in that house making them sick, you see?”
“But I saw the soil and water inspection reports,” I said. “Everything was normal.”
“That’s exactly what I said,” he said. “But I hadn’t seen the house then. I had just gotten back from overseas and I had to break in the back door because he won’t let me in the front saying it was contaminated, cursed or whatever. And when I finally got into the house, I could sense the place was all wrong. It stank of evil.”
He stared hard into my eyes as if to impress me with the strength of his revelation.
“Anyway,” he went on, “they put the money into trust for the kid, and asked me and her grandmother to be the guardians. Of course I agreed.”
“But if they thought the house was making them sick,” I said, “why did they stay there?”
“That’s a good question. Maybe you can ask them on the other side but I don’t know how much they’ll want to talk to you. My best guess is they figured they were past help and it was cheaper to stay put. They had already put up the house for sale and were obsessed with putting every penny they had into the trust for the kid. My brother knew I would die for that kid, but I was never good at making money.”
“Money isn’t everything,” I said.
“Money is everything,” he said flatly. “Look, if I had the slightest idea of what was going to happen, I would have moved into the house myself to stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“She begged him to do it, in front of me,” he said. “She saw what happened to the dog.”
I was beginning to be glad my parents didn’t let me have a dog when I was a kid.
“My brother tried to convince her to try this or that treatment, but they both knew there was no hope. They were in an experimental trial for a new drug, but all it did was make them sicker and sicker. Whatever was in that house was eating them alive. The oncologists suggested it might not even be cancer. They said they had never seen anything move that fast on two healthy adults.”
“Then what was it?” I said.
He shrugged. “Like I said, I wasn’t the brains of the family, but even the doctors didn’t know. Maybe ask a priest, but I’m not religious either. Or maybe let’s just call it evil, bad luck, something that rode in with the imported Greek marble or whatever was put into that house.”
“So he killed her because she asked him to?”
He gave me a look of withering disgust. “She shot herself. But her family was Catholic, and it would have killed them if they got wind of it, so he took the gun, wiped her prints off, left a note to make it look like he did it and shot himself.”
“How do you know all that?” I said.
He regarded me with something approaching disinterest. “I loved my brother,” he said finally.
“Where’s your niece,” I said.
“She died,” he said. “She was already sick when her parents sent her away, just not as sick as them. The doctors told me to take her to Germany because the EU was suppose to be more advanced with experimental treatments. The doctors there tried everything on her and the girl was terrified because she saw what happened to the dog.”
The dog again…
“She knew what was coming down the line for her if the treatments didn’t work. In the end she was begging me to let her die.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
“Grief makes you do crazy thing,” he said. “I came back from Germany and got them to raze the house. The town gave me trouble at first but I took care of that. Took care of a lot of things that needed taking care of. Had a lot of time on my hands, ya know?”
“And now you’re going to take care of me,” I said. “Just like how you did David.”
He burst into laughter. “I took care of him alright.”
He took out a gun and played with it as if it were a toy. I went up to him as if I hadn’t seen the gun. Maybe he never intended to shoot me, or I had caught him off guard, or perhaps he was just waiting to see what I would do. He seemed almost curious as I leaned towards him and bit down on his nose.
Shock temporarily paralyzed him and the gun fell with a clatter to the floor. Few people are mentally prepared to attack another person with their teeth, but rage had made all kinds of inhibitions irrelevant in me. The pain jolted him into action and he twisted like a large muscular fish beneath my grasp, but to no avail: I did not let go. I couldn’t punch or kick but grappling holds came naturally to me, and I clung like a tick to his neck with my hands as we fell to the floor. My teeth were still clamped tight on his nose and I could taste the blood on my tongue. He was screaming in agony.
The whole thing lasted for perhaps five seconds, but it felt much longer to me. And then there was a boom and he was still and limp beneath my grasp.
*
It is difficult to believe that so much could have changed in so short a time and that I was the cause of it. That such drastic consequences could have resulted from any action of mine was unbelievable to me.
As James and I rolled around on the floor, the gun went off. He had rolled right on top of it, and the bullet went into his buttocks, missing me by pure luck. When the ambulance came, he was still raving about whatever had happened to the dog. Nuttier than a truckful of trail mix, one of the paramedics said.
I would have been in a lot of trouble were it not for Laura. She had come to the house to apologize to me, and heard James and I talking through the window. Our neighbor saw her at the window and came to check out what was happening, thought she was some kind of weirdo at first. They both saw James take out the gun. If not for them, I doubt the police would have believed my version.
Laura’s husband was a detective, and as a favor to me, he looked up old hospital records for the Hendersons. He said apart from a routine mammogram, Mrs. Henderson didn’t visit the hospital at all in the year before she died. Mr. Henderson’s last hospital visit was six months before his death for a routine physical. So far as medical history went, the Hendersons’ were what you’d expect for two healthy middle aged people who took great care of themselves.
The Hendersons’ dog had been adopted by one of the officers who was on the scene at the Hendersons’ murder-suicide.
As for the Hendersons’ daughter, the girl had died under mysterious circumstances in Europe, and the large trust and life insurance which her parents had left her was now in legal limbo. There were no records of her receiving treatment in any European or American hospital.
“She died intestate somewhere in Europe,” Laura’s husband said, “and the lawyers over here are saying it doesn’t look right and now everything’s tied up in the courts. It looks bad.”
The police were now re-investigating the Henderson case.
A neighbor of the Hendersons had said she saw Mr. Henderson on the morning of the murder, said he looked different somehow and she almost didn’t recognize him. The police now suspected that might have been James. At the very least they had reason now to place him at the scene.
“So it was all for the money?” I said.
Laura’s husband nodded. “Looks like it. James probably didn’t like you hiring private investigators to look for the Hendersons’ daughter, and that must’ve been why he hired Laura to get you to think the girl was still alive. To get you off the scent so to speak. He really thought you were onto him.”
“But I only looked for her because he left a model of the house next to David’s body!” I said.
There was an uncomfortable silence. When he spoke again his voice was kind and gentle. “I know the police haven’t been great to you, but whoever killed David couldn’t have been James. He was in Germany at the time.”
And so now I was back at square one.
I felt like I was falling down the rabbit hole all over again just when I thought I was starting to understand.
*
He was thinking about using it as part of the set, David’s best friend Jack told me when I showed him the toy house. That was the way David worked, Jack said. He built everything on a model size first to get an idea of how it would look, and he would keep fiddling with it until he got it exactly right. He went through at least three iterations before starting on the real thing. He was, Jack said, one of the best in the business.
How did I not know any of this?
David was a theater set designer, and since he sometimes came to open houses with me, that was probably how he saw the Hendersons’ house. I regretted not taking more of an interest in his work, but I was too self-centered and preoccupied with my own work to take an interest in his. I was intimidated by anything vaguely artistic, which was, I suppose, why I found people like David who moved so easily in that mysterious sphere so compelling.
David on the other hand often volunteered to come with me to my open houses, and listened with real interest to my endless shop talk. I had vaguely assumed it was because he wanted to live in the kind of houses I specialized in, i.e. luxury homes, which frankly speaking, we would never have been able to afford in this lifetime. And I had always felt a little contemptuous of him for not being practical enough to realize that. But as it turned out his interest in the houses had all been for his professional work, for his craft, about which I had never bothered to ask even the simplest questions.
*
It was difficult to believe that I could have so thoroughly misunderstood David, even more incredible to believe the sequence of events my misunderstanding and misguided conclusions had caused. I had only to close my eyes to see David as I saw him for the first time, and I came to realize that while for years I thought I was looking for his murderer, I had in fact been looking for him. And in finding him, I had only lost him all over again, for what I discovered was only my own errors and ignorance.
“What do you think made James tell me that silly story about the dog and everybody getting sick?” I asked Laura.
“You want my honest opinion?” she said. “It sounded to me like he really believed it. He killed all those people for money only to find out he was never going to get it. It’s pretty ironic if you ask me. It would drive anybody out of their mind.”
“I can’t imagine being that evil AND crazy,” I said.
“I can’t either, so that must be why we’re friends,” Laura said, taking my hand.
I felt awkward and ugly next to her, but something in the brightness and the beauty of her face gave me hope. Her skin was as delicately translucent as a porcelain figurine. It didn’t seem possible to me there could be so much loveliness in a world with so much pain and evil. Her grip on my hand tightened as she pulled me close to her, her long sharp nails digging into my skin. And as I stared into her face, there was, I noticed under the strong sunlight, a small circular dent under one nostril.
The only flaw, I thought, if you could even call it that.