“I saw Dick Eberling’s van outside. I have to change an appointment with him.”

  “He’s upstairs somewhere,” Esther said.

  Spen, Bay View’s mayor, was by profession a butcher, and their house always smelled smoked or charred. It was dark on the second floor, close and warm, quiet and carpeted. Marilyn padded silently toward the bedroom, stopping just outside the door to watch Eberling from the hall. He was sitting on the ledge of the window, leaning back as if he were on a swing, soaping down the outside pane with his brush in figure eight over figure eight until his figure was blurred, until he appeared foam-streaked, and then skimmed it clear in the same motion of his squeegee, so he now appeared as though he’d just surfaced from the sea. He looked so much like her husband it was uncanny, though he was perhaps more handsome. He was leaner, for one thing. He’d stripped down to his undershirt, and she could make out the knots of muscle in his shoulders and stomach through the sopped fabric, could tell from just his hands that he was a strong man. Her husband’s hands were large, but they were soft, almost like a dentist’s, from all the scrubbing down. But mostly it was Eberling’s eyes that made him beautiful. They had the same color eyes, he and Sam, but Eberling’s were sad. Something had happened to him, and everything about him bespoke of this terrible event. Whenever he looked at her, it seemed he had something to tell her on the tip of his tongue.

  “Dick?”

  “Mrs. Houk?”

  He pulled himself back inside the house. Stepping into the room, she said, “No, it’s Marilyn.”

  He stared, sitting on the sill and blinking until his eyes adjusted, and then he looked down at the floor. “Hello, Mrs. Sheppard.”

  Wanting to take his chin in her hand, she said, “I saw your van outside.” She was afraid to swallow.

  He sat hunched at the window.

  “I was thinking about next week,” she said, “and was wondering if you might come over to clean on Monday instead.” Her heart was racing. This was easier than she’d imagined. She could feel him waiting on everything she said. “Come over in the afternoon. Chip could go next door for a while. He won’t bother us.”

  Eberling, still looking at the floor, was smiling now.

  “Like I said, you could bring your swim trunks.” She moved closer to him. His skin was like wet copper, so dark he was almost black. “We could play.”

  He stood there silently, not moving a muscle.

  “Would you like that?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “But … ”

  “But what?”

  “I wish it were sooner,” he said.

  She couldn’t help it. She was whispering. Except for Sam, she’d never spoken to a man like this. “I wish it were too.” She couldn’t believe herself. “I wish it were tonight.”

  Eberling seemed to process what she said, then looked up. She thought he almost looked angry.

  “Mrs. Sheppard, will you tell me something?”

  “Certainly.”

  His exhaled loudly, through his nostrils. “You’re not lying to me, are you?”

  The question made her blink. “Of course not,” she said.

  “You could like somebody like me?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “For a long time?”

  She shrugged, feeling a flash of doubt. “Why not?”

  He looked down again, smiling at the floor.

  “Monday, then?” she said.

  He nodded.

  “I have to go.”

  She walked down the stairs, thinking, that’s all it took to become someone else. When Esther called good-bye, she didn’t answer. It was sweet and mysterious what Dick had said. For a long time. And it was odd. Even before love started, everyone wanted to make sure it would last.

  She turned on the ignition and backed out, the Houks living only two houses down. She was about to shift gears when she saw Sam’s car parked in the driveway.

  She drove up slowly, pulling in next to his Jaguar, then closed the door gently after she got out. She left the groceries in the car and, Chip in hand, approached the house as carefully as if she’d suspected there was a burglar inside. She entered through the kitchen. “Sam?” she called. There was no answer. She sent Chip off to play and opened the door to the basement, calling out Sam’s name again, then closed the door and went upstairs to their bedroom. He wasn’t there, but his bed was made. The sight of this made her heart skip a beat.

  Through the window, she could hear Sam down by the boathouse.

  She paused on the landing above it to regard Sam through the wooden railing. The wind had calmed some, but it was breezy enough that he couldn’t hear her approach. Dressed casually, in corduroy pants and a T-shirt, he was hard at work. He’d paired all the skis, hung the life jackets out to dry, arranged the towlines in neat coils, piled the towels together, and even brought down a garbage can for all the food and beer bottles. He’d resecured the boat to the slip and was hosing off the prow.

  Hearing her when she stepped onto the dock, he turned around and, when she was close enough, took her in his free arm and kissed her neck, training the hose on the boat with his other hand. “You’ve ruined my surprise,” he said.

  “Which was?”

  “That I was going to have this all cleaned up before you got home. Plus the bedroom and even the bathroom. But I guess you beat me to it.”

  “Not all of it.”

  “Sorry I left this place in such a state. I’m glad you didn’t bother.”

  “I haven’t been down here in days.”

  “Well.” Sam shook his head once and then closed his eyes, as if he could fall asleep standing there.

  “What is it?” she said. “What happened?”

  “I don’t … ”

  “Tell me, love.” She put her arms around his waist.

  “A boy … got hit by a truck. He was only eight. It just backed into him. He had massive internal injuries. He came in conscious but died almost as soon as we got him on the table. The father … he really lit into me afterward.” He dropped the hose and put his hands on his knees and began to sob, covering his eyes with his hands. “I just don’t know why it’s bothering me so much.”

  He was shaking so hard she bent over and made him sit down, then she sat herself and held him. She’d seen him cry like this over patients only twice, and he now was trying so hard to hold back his sobs that he wheezed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I did everything I could to get his heart going, but it was futile. And his father … he called me a killer. He said I killed his son. I’m sorry, Marilyn, I’m so sorry. I came home early to clean up. But I was too late.”

  She told him, gently, to hush, to be quiet, and wrapped her arms around his still trembling shoulders. His body was hot with the effort and remorse. The breeze picked up and she shook too, chilled. Because what she felt, more than love for Sam, was how close she’d come to a perilous slip. But she was safe now. There was no harm. She was back, and Sam was nowhere but here; she was grateful for that—for knowing, and for this child, and for a great many things, and most of all to have been so blessed by luck.

  • • •

  “Let me tell you some of the things about your case that baffle me,” Mobius said, “the questions I can’t get out of my mind. Maybe you can answer them, because every piece of evidence is so ambiguous and contradictory that I find myself wondering sometimes if the Devil himself, or whatever animating spirit of evil traffics in our world, decided to turn your life into a hellish game—a labyrinth where the truth keeps falling down holes as you stumble through the maze.”

  “I don’t believe in the Devil,” Sheppard said.

  “What do you believe in?”

  “Consciousness.”

  Mobius rolled his eyes. “You called your neighbors—the Houks, Spen and Esther—first thing that morning, around five forty-five. Your first words to him over the phone were, ‘My God, Spen, get over here quick, I think they’ve killed Marilyn.’ Why they, Doctor?”

  “Detective.”

  “It’s such an interesting mistake with the pronoun. Did you really think you’d seen multiple people in the house, or was it just a slip of the tongue? Or were your injuries—the blood in your mouth and on your chipped teeth, the contusions on the right side of your face, above your right eye, and on the back of your neck, not to mention the broken cervical vertebrae there—so severe that you were completely disoriented, that your brain, playing tricks on your short-term memory, had somehow split the first form you claimed to have seen as you ran up the stairs into two? Did the man who first knocked you out become a second, the one you claimed you chased down to the lake, who overpowered and then knocked you out—again!—and conveniently left you there to soak in Lake Erie, your body half in and half out of the water? Was it simply one person—or two entirely different ones? How considerate of your wife’s killer—this man who’d beaten her face into a pulp—to leave you in a position where you wouldn’t drown. ‘My God, Spen … I think they’ve killed Marilyn.’ I think he killed Marilyn. Or, I think I killed Marilyn. Isn’t that what you meant to say?”

  “No,” Sheppard said.

  “Of course not,” Mobius continued. “Given the nature and extent of your injuries, it’s nearly impossible to believe they were self-inflicted. Someone gave you a good beating, but whoever it was didn’t beat you dead. And Marilyn was quite the athlete, wasn’t she? Terrific water-skier. A lady who could drub you—a college football player and track star—in tennis. She could’ve put up quite the fight, after all, or at least caught you with a good enough shot to send you into a blind rage. It’s not impossible, is it?”

  Sheppard listened impassively.

  “And then, of course, there’s the question of severity. Your injuries certainly were severe if we’re to believe your brother’s medical report, since Stephen whisked you off to your family’s hospital almost immediately, less than an hour after you called Spen, even before any detectives arrived. Meanwhile, Coroner Gerber found no indication of a broken neck in his x-rays, did he? Is it possible your good brother was protecting the Sheppard dynasty by pulling the old x-ray switcheroo?”

  Sheppard cleaned his pipe and then stared at the floor.

  “But I’m getting ahead of myself,” Mobius said. “Spen and Esther arrived nearly instantly and found you in your study, soaked and hypothermic, disoriented and naked above the waist. ‘Somebody needs to do something for Marilyn,’ you said. But you’d taken her pulse already. You knew she was dead.”

  Sheppard nodded but wouldn’t look up.

  “What happened to your T-shirt, Doctor? Am I to understand that in your struggle, this form or those forms took your shirt, tore it off, and kept it as a souvenir? As convenient—wouldn’t you say?—as your position in the water, since whoever beat Marilyn to death would have been covered in blood. Or you would have. Or was this the same shirt found several days later on the property adjacent to yours, the one torn from waist to sleeve and with brown stains the authorities didn’t bother to type for blood, and thus ignored?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It is true,” Mobius said, “that you had no open wounds on your body, not even scratches or cuts, defensive wounds on your hands or arms to be expected if it was you who beat Marilyn, though there was some blood on you—the large circular stain on the knee of your pants, from when, you claimed, you knelt on the mattress to check Marilyn’s pulse.”

  “That’s right,” Sheppard said.

  “And that gook on your knee matched Marilyn’s blood type—O negative—corroborating your story. If you were the killer, how in the world—in a room misted, sprinkled, and splattered with blood, where on the wall running alongside her bed there was a white outline of the killer himself, white because his body had absorbed that spray from her head and face—did you manage to have none on you at all?”

  “There was no blood on me because I didn’t kill her,” Sheppard said.

  “Sometimes I’m inclined to believe you. I am because of Marilyn’s injuries, especially her broken tooth, her upper incisor snapped at the root, the one detectives found in her bed, yanked out as opposed to smashed in, so most likely her killer cupped his hand over her lips to shut her up and she bit him hard enough that when he pulled his fingers away it took the whole tooth for a ride. She must’ve bit him down to the bone. That must’ve bled like a bitch, wouldn’t you agree, Doctor?”

  Sheppard shook his head miserably.

  “And yet I wonder how,” Mobius said, “Stephen was able to arrive at your house within less than fifteen minutes of being called that morning—showered and shaved and dressed in jacket and tie. I believe one of the Cleveland detectives made the same drive at the same hour and it took him twelve minutes. Was Stephen an accomplice? Did you call him in a panic in the middle of the night, after beating Marilyn to death? Was it the two of you who staged the robbery? Pulled out the drawers in the living room and study but took not one thing of value in the entire house? Knocked your medical bag over but didn’t take any of the drugs inside? Left Marilyn’s gold watch, flecked with blood, and the loaded shotguns in your study—one of which you could have easily grabbed before chasing her killer down to the beach? Didn’t even take your wallet after knocking you out in the bedroom? What burglar is willing to take a life but no loot? That’s a zero-sum game, don’t you think? Doesn’t that give credence to the witnesses who said they saw all the lights on in your house at two a.m. that night? That old couple who happened to be driving by? Or, more conspiratorially, more deviously, more gamely, more metacriminally, did somebody try to make it look like you were trying make it look like you were covering up a crime? Oh,” he said, “that would be good.”

  Sheppard stared at the barred window in Mobius’s cell.

  “Yet why would you kill your wife after the two of you had happily announced her pregnancy at dinner with your family just a month before? Or did Dr. Bailey—Donna Bailey’s husband—not tell the truth when he testified that when he congratulated you about the pregnancy on the morning of July third, your response was, ‘That’s what you get when you forget to use birth control’? Does that maybe answer that?” He took a deep breath.

  “Perhaps it’s simply the dual nature of marriage, the proximity of violence and love. Marilyn’s clothes were laid out on the chair in your bedroom, no? That meant she folded them neatly before putting on her pajamas and going to sleep. She went to sleep peacefully, routinely. If the Aherns saw you asleep on the daybed when they left just past midnight, as they claimed, that would mean you woke up and went upstairs with the intent to kill Marilyn. Or she woke up and then woke you up to start a fight that turned vicious enough for you to snap, bludgeoning her with a weapon that was never recovered. Who bludgeons his wife twenty-seven times on the head? How mad do you have to be to do something like that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Why didn’t the dog start barking?”

  “Kokie was meek.”

  “If you did kill her, how was it that a man of your strength instead of barely denting her dura couldn’t smash through her brain plate? Did the killer lack conviction? Was he a weak man or just meek like the dog?”

  Sheppard closed his eyes.

  “And what about the green duffel bag found the morning of the murder, in the woods halfway down the stairs to the lake, with your school ring, keys, and watch in it—the watch not only flecked with blood but also stopped at four fifteen and the crystal full of condensation. When asked about the blood, you said it must have gotten there when you took Marilyn’s pulse. You also told the detectives, without them asking, that it had gotten wet several days beforehand, when you played golf in the rain. Interesting you’d felt the need to explain that, just as it is that Eberling—not even a person of interest at the time—should, when questioned by police, blurt out that his blood was all over the Sheppard house because he’d cut himself removing a window screen the previous week and then went to the basement to wash the wound. There were multiple blood spots found in the house, from bedroom to kitchen to patio to basement, on the stair risers too, more than a trail, really, more like something from a meandering headless chicken—moreover, blood that investigators couldn’t match to yours or Marilyn’s. And yet the police were so sure it was you who did it they neither questioned Eberling further nor typed his blood. Interesting. Just as interesting, unidentified red fibers were found under Marilyn’s nails that matched nothing you were wearing. Just as it’s interesting who Hoversten should go off to play golf with the day before the murder, Dr. Robert Stevenson, to my mind the only man who’d really want to destroy you, since you’d been fucking his fiancée, Susan Hayes, for years—up until that March, in fact. Since you’d destroyed that relationship without giving it a second thought—which must’ve been galling to him, no? And if anybody wanted to hurt Marilyn herself and then came up with the sick idea to make it look like you killed her and tried to cover it up, well, you couldn’t really count Lester out on something that demented, either. Or could you?”

  Sheppard shook his head.

  “Here’s the hole in your story. Or the hole your story falls through. It comes back to the watch. Are you listening closely?”

  Sheppard lit his pipe.

  “You claimed that when you first came to consciousness, you saw your wallet lying under the bed, yes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You stood, saw Marilyn, then took her pulse—which was how the blood got on your watch’s crystal and wristband, correct?”

  “Go on.”

  “You heard someone in the living room, raced downstairs, saw somebody, pursued him to the lake, struggled, and were once again overcome.”

  Sheppard said nothing.

  “The duffel bag with your watch in it was found halfway up from the lake. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “That means that Marilyn’s killer left your wallet under the bed and your watch on your wrist after knocking you unconscious the first time. Then he ransacked the house, taking nothing of value—not your wife’s gold watch or the drugs in your medical bag or the guns—and after his struggle with you on the beach, after knocking you out again, this same burglar then removed your ring, watch, and keys and then what? Abandoned this loot on his way off the property. Why not take it since he was home free? Why go back in the direction he came? Was that the genius of the setup? Did the person framing you anticipate this implausibility? Or did you simply run out of time, racing around that dark, quiet, horrifically lonely house with Marilyn dead and your boy asleep in his bed and you all alone, injured and needing to come up with a believable story? You’re not much of a storyteller, are you, Doctor?”