Page 96 of The Wife Upstairs
More drinks.
The sky overhead is dark, too, a new moon that night, nothing to illuminate what happens.
As with Mama, Bea doesn’t have to do that much work, really.
When Blanche has slumped into unconsciousness, it’s a simple matterof taking the hammer she’d bought, the heavy one, the one that looks exactly like the kind of unsubtle murder weapon a guy like Tripp would buy, and she brings it down.
Once. Twice. Three times. A sickening crunch giving way to a meaty, wet sound, and then she’s rolling Blanche off the deck of the boat. It’s dark, and her hair is the last thing Bea sees, sinking under the lake.
She stands there and waits to feel something.
Regret, horror. Anything, really. But again, once it’s done, she’s mostly just relieved and a little tired.
Swimming back to the house is something of a chore, her arms cutting through the warm water, her brain conjuring images of alligators, water moccasins. Below her, she knows there’s a flooded forest, and it’s hard not to imagine the dead branches reaching up for her like skeletal hands, to see her body drifting down with Blanche’s to lay in that underwater wood.
Something brushes against her foot at one point, and she gives a choked scream that sounds too loud in the quiet night, lake water filling her mouth, tasting like minerals and something vaguely rotten, and she spits, keeps swimming.
The story is so simple. Girls’ weekend. Tripp showing up unexpectedly. They went out on the boat, they drank too much. Bea fell asleep or passed out, to the sound of Tripp and Blanche arguing. When she woke up, Blanche was gone, and Tripp was passed out. Bea panicked, dove in the water trying to save her best friend, and when she couldn’t find her, swam back to the house.
Tripp had been so drunk he won’t have any idea what happened, won’t even remember he wasn’t on the boat, and everyone knew he and Blanche were having problems. Maybe he’ll luck out and they’ll assume Blanche fell or jumped in of her own accord, never finding her body there at the bottom of the lake. Maybe they will find it, see that hole in her skull, and think he murdered her.
Either one works for Bea.
And it all would have been just that easy had Eddie not come along and fucked it all up.
He’s in the house when Bea walks up the dock, his eyes going wide as he sees her. She doesn’t even think about how she must look, soaking wet, shivering even though it’s hot. All she can think is,Why is he here?
And that’s it—the moment she loses it all.
She should’ve been paying more attention to just how weird it was that he was there, to that panicked look on his face. Eddie never had handled being surprised well, and like a lot of men, he always thought he was smarter than he actually was.
Bea had always believed that a man who overestimates his intelligence is a man who can be easily manipulated. Turns out, he’s also a man who can be really dangerous.
Later, she wanted to tell him just how badly he’d fucked it all up, that she would’ve taken care of it, that shehadtaken care of it, just like she always did, but of course Eddie rushed in without thinking, just like always.
I stood there in the living room of the house Eddie built and I created, and I thought about that again, about what Jane had said.
He loved you.
That was it. That was the piece that made it all make sense. Why he didn’t call the police that night, why he didn’t just leave me to die upstairs. If all he wanted was the money, I had given him the perfect excuse to get rid of me and take it all. We hadn’t signed any kind of prenup because I’d wanted to prove to the world—mostly to Blanche—that I trusted Eddie more than anything.
He could’ve taken what I’d given him.
But he hadn’t.
And okay, yes, he’d met Jane, yes, he’d planned to marry her—but he still came up to my room, still talked to me, still made love to me.
All that time trying to figure out what the secret was, the key to unlock all of this, and it was that simple.
He loved me.
Jane was in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen now, her phone in her hand. “Bea, I know you’ve been through something horrible, and you’re probably in shock, but we have got to call the police. We can’t wait any longer. This is crazy.”
She looked back down at the phone, went to punch numbers in, and suddenly I was there, her wrist clutched in my hand, her bones so fragile underneath my fingers.
“Don’t,” I said, and in that moment, I saw the flash in her eyes that told me she understood what was really going on here.
I liked Jane, respected her even, but she was not going to fuck this up for me.
