Marilyn Masterson awakes, sitting forward suddenly as if she’d been cozy in bed at home and one of her daughters had just cried out. But she’s not home. She’s in her office. She’s at work. She still faces the window. Outside, the rain still falls as it did when she dozed off for … how long? She checks her watch. Maybe about seven minutes. Too long for a work snooze, right? Marilyn wouldn’t know. First time she’s done this. Had anyone noticed?
The high-backed executive chair shielded her. Someone walking by peeking in maybe mistakenly thought that she’d been on her cell. At least her arms hadn’t hung over the sides.
Her desktop phone buzzes. She swivels, hits the button.
“Marilyn?”
It’s HR. She’s wanted in the lobby.
Here goes.
Marilyn stands, stretches, tidies herself by the faint reflection in the window. She pivots, strides out of the office, heads down the corridor toward the elevator, smiling at some colleagues, nodding at others.
“Love the new look!” one coworker exclaims.
“Thanks!”
Marilyn had become a blonde just that morning. She’d gotten an entire makeover in fact.
She hurries to the elevator and hits the down arrow.
Ding! Swoosh!
It’s empty. Good. As the door shuts (Ding! Swoosh!), she glances at the camera in the upper corner, then faces front. She swallows. She’s thirsty. She should have brought water. Too late.
What will Doug look like when he does this thing to her? What a strange question for someone to ask about a man she’s been married to for over 14 years and with whom she’s had two children. But this has been a strange day.
How can I kill Doug Masterson and get away with it? It needs to be done before the divorce, or he takes at least half.
That’s Doug Masterson as in the Berkley, Simon, and Masterson law firm. Doug had gotten his name on the shingle last year, a month after he turned 42, and two months before Marilyn turned 38.
How can I kill Doug Masterson?
That’s what she’d been thinking about when she drifted off.
Now, the elevator settles.
Ding! Swoosh!
Marilyn squares herself, steps out onto the glossy lobby floor, but no Doug. Instead, over by the reception desk stand two men in suits and she knows they’re detectives. She recognizes one from when Doug had been a prosecutor.
“Marilyn,” he says, “you may not remember me.” This as she’s ushered into the office behind the desk.
The detective tells her what’s happened to Doug, and as he speaks the separation takes place. Marilyn hides behind processing of her thoughts as she hears about Doug’s murder.
Minutes into the discussion with the detectives, Marilyn realizes that Doug’s friends in the prosecutor’s office will make sure that he’ll be buried with his good name intact.
Within hours the media will latch on. The killing of a successful lawyer and former prosecutor in one of the better neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Is anybody safe? She imagines the news.
“Police say that Doug Masterson and the alleged murderer were not having an affair but, rather, the woman had developed a romantic obsession with Masterson.”
Marilyn can just see the cable news chyron: Fatal Attraction.
The detectives do gently question Marilyn, and she tells them her truth. Yes, she did go home that morning, wanting to surprise Doug with her new look and drive him to the airport.
The front door not being closed tight meant the elimination of the sounds of jiggling keys and unlocking bolts. It also meant not needing to disarm the security system.
Marilyn had been this close to calling out “Hello!” when she heard Doug speaking on his cell. She treaded softly so as not to distract him as she heads toward her husband’s voice.
When she drew closer, she noticed a strange tone: Her intimidating dynamo of a husband pleading.
Words materialize.
“I don’t love Marilyn any more,” Doug insists. “It’s been dead for a long time. I love you, Tee. I want to be with you.”
Tee.
Teresa Walnut? Her? Doug’s legal assistant who Doug felt bad about having to give a so-so performance review to this year? The one with the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t marriage? That kid who’d never graduated college and who’s about 15 years younger than Doug? Her?
“I’ll handle Marilyn,” Doug says. “Yes. Today. I’m going to stop off on the way to the airport. In the lobby at her job. That way no scenes. Hand her the papers and say goodbye. A clean break.” Pause. “It’ll be an adjustment, but kids are resilient. You’ll find that out when we start making our own babies.”
Lying bastard!
New wife, new life. Just like he treated his first wife and that child. He cut off all contact with them, even though Marilyn encouraged him not to. And why wouldn’t she? She’d nothing to do with that breakup. Not guilty. Now her children with Doug — Tracey, 10, and Maggie, 8 — will have to grow up knowing that their beloved father deserted them, because that’s how he does. Eventually he’ll have as little to do with them as possible.
She knows Doug.
Marilyn had taken the morning off from her job as the manager of the risk assessment department at Newvolt Energy, and instead went to her hairdressers. She entered a brunette, and exited a strawberry blonde.
This will spice up the marriage.
The cosmetologist applied a foundation light enough to let her freckles show, and lipstick that uncannily enhanced a smile that so many had described as impish over the years.
“Your husband’s one lucky guy,” the stylist said.
“Oh, thank you so much!” Marilyn exclaimed.
“And what a change!”
Marilyn looks young, carefree, and, well — not that she’d ever say it — hot. Way too hot. It’s as if she isn’t the mother of two little girls who cry because Mommy can be so unfair. As if she isn’t the boss-lady who has to hire and unfortunately, once in a while, fire people. Well, she had done some modeling back in college, and had always attracted attention.
“You’ll really surprise him!” the hair stylist called after her as she left.
Now, in the hallway at home as she overhears Doug, Marilyn places a hand on the wall to steady herself. Her heartbeat pounds her temples. A migraine stabs its way into being, and she hadn’t had one of those in years. Rather than build up, the pain strikes with the force of what her last migraine had been at its worst. She feels nauseous, faint.
Steady. Steady.
She regroups with some deep breathing, and faces the new normal. Just like that she’d become the sort of woman she’d vowed she’d never be. A woman blindsided by a man’s infidelity. The kind of woman her mother had been. A victim.
Doug says: “Listen, Tee, don’t come here! That’s crazy! Stay put! I won’t even be here. I’m leaving soon! I’m taking a later flight. Calm down! Please!”
Marilyn hears Tee’s cacophonous rant.
“Another woman?” Doug scoffs. “You mean another other woman? How much free time do you think I have?”
And he laughs.
Well, well, well. Tee Walnut doesn’t trust Doug Masterson. I wonder why? Bastard!
Marilyn creeps back down the hallway, and scurries out the front door, making sure to leave it as Doug had left it when she’d found it — slightly ajar. She walks to her car, as she might if late for a dentist appointment.
As she pulls into traffic, Marilyn thinks she spots in the rearview mirror Tee Walnut. A navy blue SUV like the one Tee owns cruises hesitantly down the street, as cars do when the driver searches for a parking spot. Marilyn slows, squints into the rearview.
There’s the bright red parking permit sticker in the corner passenger side — same as the one Doug has — and there’s the Kelly green Eagles pendant hanging from the antenna. It’s Tee, all right.
Damn!
Had Tee spotted Marilyn? That wouldn’t be good.
Whoa!
Marilyn glances back to the road ahead just in time, managing to hit the brakes to avoid sailing through a red light and into a car driven by some blameless stranger.
Pay attention to your surroundings!
And she does. The trees in the Old City section of Philadelphia fly their autumnal colors this midmorning as if they’re pageantry in a Halloween parade. They’re in no hurry to fully unfurl their glory, and they provide shade for those who’ve made it. The professionals on the block — doctors, lawyers, architects, corporate titans, the annoyingly smug 20- or 30-somethings who’ve collected barrels of venture capital for the next big, breakthrough thingy. They live in spacious row homes, many of which sport the historic national register plaque, and some of which go for over a million dollars, like the one that houses the Mastersons, a family that’s had it good — great, in fact — up until now.
I will kill him.
But how?
“Every murderer always thinks that they have it all figured out,” Doug pronounced at a dinner party not long ago, actually rising from his seat during dessert. He’d been a prosecutor. He’d fought on both sides. He knows. He continued: “And they never do. Something always goes wrong. And it hardly ever is a woman. The killer, that is. Ninety percent of homicides in the United States; men commit. Every time I see a TV show where the murderer turns out to be a woman, I call ‘bullshit.’”
Kill!
Marilyn knows that she’s not thinking right. But who would? Would a woman in her position who hopes that somehow the affair constitutes a stage and he’ll come to his senses soon: Is that woman thinking right? Is the woman, like Mom, who a man abused and then walked out on, allowing his spouse and children to slide into shameful poverty: Is she thinking right? The woman who begs? The woman who cries? The woman who lashes out? The woman who takes a retaliatory lover? The woman who looks the other way? The woman who schedules couples therapy only to find about four sessions in that she’s doing marriage counseling solo? The woman who goes by the three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule? No. None of those women — none of those types, actually, and Marilyn’s met them all — would be thinking right. And most cheating men given three strikes wander off the field after the first strike.
But if she divorcees him? She’d collect only a portion of the jackpot. Doug is a lawyer, after all. He knows the system. Marilyn wants it all from this cheating rat-bastard. She’d put him through law school, breaking the glass ceiling to make the sort of money that freed wunderkind Doug from having to work so he could focus solely on his studies.
If she kills Doug and makes it seem like some random person did it — or, better yet, makes it look like an accident — she and the kids would get Doug’s $5 million life insurance, plus a year and a half worth of Doug’s salary. That’s not counting stock options and annuities, and all the other goodies, including both houses. A very substantial haul.
With the payout from Doug’s death, she could send her children’s children to college. Marilyn would take a three-year sabbatical to ease the girls through grief, which would be the major downside — the only downside, really — to killing Doug. It’s the one thing that gives her pause. Well, that and the odds that she’d get caught.
What choice do I have?
He owes her. He owes her his life or, at least, his life insurance.
But how?
She kept pondering, but no matter how she worked it, she gets caught. Then Tracey and Maggie will probably live with her sister in California or one of Doug’s siblings in Canada; cut off from everything they’d known, and carrying the mark of having a mother in prison for killing their father.
This murder needs to be foolproof. Perfect.
Her thoughts kicked up a racket in her mind, and even though it’s possible that she might have a year to do it — a year before the divorce becomes final — she needs to act immediately. Today. Because Doug would find some way to freeze all the assets. Yes, Marilyn thought hard about just how to kill Doug as she drove back to work, parked, and headed up to her office.
“I can do that….” No. That wouldn’t work.
“Maybe this?” No to this too.
“How about finding a way….” No way.
Doug’s pronouncement goaded and taunted her.
Every murderer always thinks that they have it all figured out. And they never do.
She won’t let him get away with it. She’ll come up with the perfect plan. She must. At her desk, in her office rubbing her temples, concentrating while staring at the blank computer screen. Turning to look at the rain when it begins pelting the glass. Thinking hard, but no solution. But there must be, must be, must be…. And that’s when she dozed off.
Now, Marilyn says to the detectives: “I guess he was arguing with Tee?”
They exchange just the slightest glance, something nobody would notice unless she happens to be the spouse of a prosecutor turned defense attorney. And that’s when Marilyn knew. They’d decided to cover up Doug’s sordid comings and goings not only from the world, but from his family as well. The dirty details would be lowered into Doug’s grave along with the coffin.
The media would report it as the act of a deranged woman. Had Doug Masterson and Tee Walnut been having an affair? An obvious question. A fair question. There’s nothing to suggest that. The separate and secret phones that they’d most likely used to communicate conveniently disappeared. The cops leaked Tee’s history of mental illness. Tee’s family could find no evidence tying her to Doug. She hadn’t told anybody, apparently, and nobody had ever guessed.
Well, Tee could keep a secret, at least.
Even more surprisingly, Doug hadn’t confided in anybody. Resisted the urge to brag. Or, if he did, that person had also been in on the coverup.
What Tee Walnut spied that fateful morning fed her paranoia about her paramour: A mysterious blonde leaving Doug Masterson’s house.
Tee shot Doug (with her licensed pistol), then herself.
For Marilyn, the money Doug’s death released made it easier. What money buys always makes it easier.
That Marilyn wound up not having to murder Doug certainly made it easier but only because she knew she would have gotten caught. Eventually. “There’s no statute of limitations for murder,” as Doug would say.
Killing him? The act itself? She was fine with that.
Now, no more problem.
Thank you, Tee Walnut.
She didn’t fake grief. People — Doug’s family, hers — just assumed that she put her energies into assuaging her girls’ brokenness. Her daughters had lost their beloved father. Marilyn by herself had to deal with all the heartache of little kids, then tweens, and then, almost overnight, she found herself the target of a mother lode of teenage bullshit.
From Tracey. Marilyn could never do enough, be enough. She need only say one wrong thing to Tracey — one time, no lie, it was “hello” — and that could start a battle. Marilyn’s very existence affronted Tracey.
“Why are you always here?”
“Do you mean here as in here at home? Or here as on planet Earth?”
“In my life!”
Yes, Marilyn often fought back (she had no choice), but sometimes she ducked, dodged, and marinated in emotional distance, which only enraged Tracey more.
One time Tracey yelled: “I don’t think you ever really loved Dad!” She stormed upstairs and slammed her bedroom door. (That door would eventually need to be replaced.)
Later, Tracey came down and sheepishly apologized and cuddled next to Marilyn on the couch. A rare moment.
“Sweetie,” Marilyn said, throwing her arm around her daughter as Tracey tilted her head onto Marilyn’s shoulder, “we all say things that we sometimes regret.”
“I know you loved Dad, Mom.”
“Oh, you know it!”
It’s an issue Marilyn pushes aside over the years. She must have loved Doug at one time — or, at least, thought she did — or else why marry? Why start a family?
With the girls, though, she sensed that this topic — though never overtly picked over — always lingered in shadowy silence.
How many times had Marilyn caught Tracey looking hard at her in reflections on unexpected surfaces, a window or one of the wall paintings when light hits it at the right time of day? The girl didn’t realize that her mother looked at her looking at her. Often at those moments, Tracey’s gaze rendered a judgment: guilty.
But of what? I didn’t murder Doug. Thoughts are not actions.
Then came Maggie. No problems, or at least comparatively few. Marilyn’s concern about Maggie centered on the child reacting to Doug’s murder by trying to be too perfect. Is that even a problem?
Maggie just continued being Maggie as she grew; progressively older versions of the same soul. Popular, athletic, effervescent, a joyous engine chugging toward a meaningful future.
Of course, that Maggie at some point found religion might have been worrisome if it had been some cult. But Maggie became Catholic like Marilyn and Doug, except Maggie practiced the faith. She actually believed.
She’ll grow out of it.
Maybe. Maggie decided to major in theology in college.
“Honey, what are you going to do with that?”
“I am going to be a lawyer, Mom. Just like Daddy.”
Why not? Doug had once told Marilyn that half the lawyers he knew hadn’t majored in pre-law or criminal justice as undergrads. And, yes, some had even studied theology.
For years after Doug, Marilyn arranged counseling for the girls which Tracey, of course, quit too soon but something must have stuck in those sessions because she’d decided that she’d major in psychology in college.
During one of their truces, when Tracey was a senior in high school, she told Marilyn the theme of one of her psych papers.
“Where does moral responsibility end and mental illness begin?”
“Hmm,” said Marilyn.
“Hmm?”
“Very interesting question,” Marilyn said. “Not really my field, sweetie.”
“Wow. Big help, Mom.”
However, Marilyn did help. One of Doug’s friends worked as a forensic psychologist for the prosecutor’s office and Marilyn steered Tracey toward that woman.
That’s all it took. Tracey heard the future calling. She planned to major in criminal forensics psychology and went to one of the best programs in the country. Tracey headed off to college. The next year, Maggie headed off as well (she’d skipped a year).
They’d grown into the templates of the physiques they’ll carry forward, allowing for X factors like fashion sense or what they might do to their hair at any given time or how they will carry the excess weight that comes with aging and just how much of it they might be carrying, which comes with decisions they’ll make about food and exercise and having babies.
Right now, however, they’re both dark-haired beauties blessed with figures that reflected different childhood interests: Tracey’s for dance, Maggie’s for sports. Tracey inherited Doug’s poor eyesight, and wore glasses that framed a warm smile, made all the more warmer because she didn’t squander its power. Her graceful movements always responded in just the right way to surroundings, as if everywhere she went became a stage.
The broken nose Maggie had gotten playing basketball and which never properly healed gave her the fun-loving look of a woman who preferred male companionship to the sisterhood when, in fact, she didn’t. Maggie looked like the party-hardy girl, but in reality drank moderately.
And now, they were gone, though there’d still be years before they officially moved out and would change their addresses on the growing bundle of forms that follows each person through life, billowing like the wake of a boat, only to disappear at the end of the ride.
Marilyn stretched out comfortably in her empty nest. She dated occasionally when the girls lived at home and, after they went to college, dated a little more often, always assuming that she might settle down with someone. But Marilyn never found anybody who lasted long.
“You’re a cold one, aren’t you,” one of the guys said to her at the breaking point.
She sighed. “I suppose I am.”
Another said: “There’s a piece missing inside you.”
She sighed. “There’s peace missing inside everybody.”
Not that these men couldn’t emotionally bruise her, but she healed quickly. Finally, she tired of the game and enjoyed keeping company with herself.
On their visits during semester breaks, Marilyn relished having interesting conversations with two dashing young women whom she happened to have given birth to.
Tracey told her of her thesis.
“About?” Marilyn asked.
“The difference between a sociopath and a psychopath.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Slight differences, some experts think.”
“Such as?”
“Well, sociopaths can love their children, one argument goes.”
“And psychopaths can’t.”
“Nope.”
“Nope.” Marilyn wanted more, but she wasn’t getting it.
“It’s not really clearcut,” Tracey said, as her attention melted into the glow of her cell phone, thumbs pecking away.
“Rude,” Marilyn protested.
“Can’t be helped,” Tracey said, scurrying up to her bedroom, which Marilyn had already planned to turn into a mini-gym.
The next day, almost the exact same scene played out after Maggie came home and mentioned her project.
“About?”
“The mystery of evil.”
“Come again?”
“Well, love is a mystery, Mom, right?”
“I suppose.”
“It is, but so is evil. The perverted pervasiveness of evil. It’s a mystery.”
“Isn’t evil just the absence of good?” Marilyn asked.
“Nope.”
“Nope.”
That night, before the arrival of the boyfriends starring in their latest relationships (Maggie’s seems serious; Tracey’s less so — but then serious enough to have him visit, so…) the three of them go to their favorite upscale-ish restaurant downtown. The one where Doug would take them to celebrate after he’d won a particularly taxing case.
They laugh over those memories and Tracey (or maybe it’s Maggie) tells a story about a faux pas that a friend at university committed; actually a quite common one of congratulating one of her professors on her pregnancy when the woman wasn’t.
Marilyn said: “Your father the lawyer, believe it or not, could come out with some doozies, when it came to that sort of thing. Once … well, never mind.”
“Mom!”
“You’re right, not fair,” Marilyn said. “It was one of his work gatherings, a party at somebody’s house. And one of the girls from the office brought her husband.”
“Who?”
“Oh, I forget.”
It was Tee Walnut and her five-minute spouse.
“A nice enough young man,” Marilyn continues, “but an introvert through and through.”
Tracey said: “Geek.”
Marilyn continued: “He might have been a scientist. I forget. Someone who blinks into microscopes for most of the day. It’s the first time this girl introduces him to coworkers.”
“And….”
“The guy had two rum and Cokes in two gulps. Chin-chin, chug-chug. Turns out he doesn’t even drink. He breaks into this outrageous sweat. He laughs too hard, and slightly behind schedule. The girl gets him the hell out of there. Leads him into another room.
“One of your father’s friends says, ‘Seems nice enough.’ You know. The way somebody says, ‘Well, that went well,’ after some disastrous discussion.
“Your father says, ‘Did you catch all the facial tics? It looked like he was trying to pick his nose with no hands.’ And nobody laughs because guess who happens to have come back into the room from the other side?”
“Oh no!” the girls exclaim.
“I swear I could have killed your father,” Marilyn says.
Tracy and Maggie exchange the sort of glance that reminds Marilyn of how those two detectives interacted the day they told her of Doug’s murder; the sort of look she’d kept locked in memory’s dungeon.
Marilyn wants to regroup and say, “Oh, God, not really,” but decides that mounting a defense casts her as a suspect.
Instead, Marilyn says: “And, believe me, I would have, too. I would have really killed your father.” Tracey says: “We believe you, Mom.”
Frank Diamond‘s poem, “Labor Day,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize Award. His short stories have appeared in RavensPerch, the Examined Life Journal, Lost Lake Folk Opera, Wordrunner eChapbook, Dulcet, Thriller Magazine, the Fredericksburg Literary & Art Review, and Stepping Stones Literary Journal, among many other publications. He has had poetry published in many publications. He lives in Langhorne, Pa.
Mountain Jay Books 