Page 21 of Kill Your Darlings

“Yes.”

“My husband was in bed with me.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes, of course. I remember that day well, getting the news of the death. I’d remember if for some reason Thom went somewhere that morning.”

“What time do you normally get up in the morning?”

“Well, I get up around seven most days. Thom gets up about an hour later.”

“Could Thom have left the house early that morning while you were sleeping?”

“Not without waking me up. At night I sleep deeply, but in the morning... not so much. If sleep was a pond, Thom’s on the bottom in the weeds and I’m sort of just under the surface. God, that’s an inappropriate metaphor, considering.”

Detective Elo laughed himself, not the laugh she’d been expecting, more of a spasmodic cough. “No, that’s okay. So your husband was home all morning?”

“Yes, my husband was home all morning.”

After letting the detective out and promising to call him if she remembered anything that might be important, Wendy stood for a moment and listened to the house. It was quiet. She went upstairs and knocked on Jason’s door.

“Who was that?” her son said after she entered his tidy bedroom. He was lying on his bed, one of his Ian Fleming Bond novels open on his lap.

“Police detective. I thought I heard you on the stairs.”

Jason seemed to think for a moment. “Nope. I was just in my room. Why was a police detective here?”

“He had some questions about Alex Deighton, your dad’s coworker.”

“Seriously?”

“Nothing that important. Pretty routine stuff.”

“Is Dad a suspect?”

“You mean, do they think your father murdered Alex? If they did, they don’t now. He was here sleeping when Alex drowned.”

“But that means that they think that it was a murder.”

“I don’t know about that. Maybe. I think they’re just making sure.”

“Interesting,” Jason said, and raised his eyebrows dramatically.

Walking back downstairs, she thought about what a strange age Jason was at, halfway between being a boy and becoming a teenager, although he was running pretty late in the teenager department. Most of his friends already had cracked voices and fuzzy upper lips, and Julia, Jason’s best friend, had recently sprouted into a supermodel, while Jason seemed stuck in his gangly child’s body. But he wasn’t really a child anymore, and she was pretty sure he’d just lied to her about not knowing the detective had come to visit. It didn’t bother her, but she felt a little bit sad about it. Once upon a time Jason told her everything.

ii

Thom offered to help Wendy with the big meal, was turned away, and happily went to his office. His parents had told him they would be there at noon, which meant eleven thirty, and that gave him two solid hours to write. He opened up his laptop, went to Word, and clicked on “open recent” in order to get back to the crushingly awful novel he’d started at the beginning of the summer. There it was, tentatively calledThe Ghost in You, but it wasn’t at the top of the list of recently opened files. There were two files above it, one titled “Letter of Resignation” and one called “From Paris to Berlin.” Thom, confused, hunted his memories from the previous day. Had he gotten so drunk last night that he had somehow opened up two old files with no memory of doing so? It was true that he’d had a few whiskeys in front of the television while watching his DVD ofThe Shawshank Redemption, but he’d stayed relatively sober. After the film was over, he remembered guiltily eating the rest of the mint-chocolate-chip ice cream over the sink, then he’d gone straight to bed. Who had opened these files on his computer?

He couldn’t even remember what “Letter of Resignation” was, so he opened it up first. It was vaguely familiar, something he’d written years ago, a joke letter that he had no intention of sending. It read:

To Professor Deighton,

This letter is to formally notify you that I’m resigning my tenured professorship at New Essex State University, effective immediately.

Thank you for this opportunity. All it has cost me is my sanity, my sexual potency, my sobriety, and my will to live.

And I want to thank you personally for the guidance and patience you have showered on me in my tenure under your supervision. Without it, I would have maintained the view that human beings, especially of the subspecies Universitus Administratus, were essentially benign in nature. I now know that this is false, that one human being, namely you, can embody every single terrible trait known to man, you flatulent, small-fingered, wobbly-necked, greedy, unfunny, pigeon-toed, pigeon-brained exemplar of the worst generation at the end of fucking civilization as we know it.

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