Page 101 of Nightwatching

Are you sure? Would you have known? How do people know? You didn’t even know he was talking to his dad.

“Are you trying to tell me something? Have you found someone?”

“No,” the sergeant said in his cryptic way. “It would be normal for you to have suspected something, is all. Most married people have suspicions at some point, yeah?”

“Well, I didn’t. I never did.”

The sergeant looked at her like she was touched in the head, and she found herself covering her face, covering her biggest marking with a palm, feeling its whiteness flare with insecurity, with the implication that of course her husband might have had an affair, because look at her.

“Mmm. Okay,” the sergeant said. “Now, I brought a couple things here to show you.” He unzipped a duffel bag and laid out two items next to her on the couch. They were sealed in large clear plastic bags.

“Are these the shoes the intruder was wearing? The shirt?”

In one bag was sealed a pair of fresh white Reeboks, men’s size 9. They had a black stripe and brown gum soles. In the other bag was folded a black T-shirt with a photo of a diamond-encrusted, black-eyed skull printed on the front.

“These are my husband’s things.” She set the bags back down, pointed. “The shirt, he got that at a museum. See the writing? The shirt the Cor—the man was wearing, the design was on the back, not the front. The skull had messy hair, yellow eyes. And the sneakers are my husband’s, too. The man’s shoes, they didn’t have this black part. They were older, cracked. All white. But yellowing. And they were high-tops. Did I tell you that? Plus, you know…bigger. He had to walk sideways down the stairs his feet were so big.”

The sergeant gave a curt nod, then put the bags back in the duffel. “Not sure if you noticed as we’ve been walking around, but there’s no signs of forced entry. No broken window, no doors kicked in, no locks messed with.”

“Oh, I…right.” Her mind tripped over their walk-through, trying to recall the state of the windows, the doors.

What’s wrong with you? How out of it are you that you didn’t notice?

“How do you think someone might have gotten in?” the sergeant asked.

The pain was trickling behind her back teeth now. She stretched her mouth wide, then closed it again.

“I—I don’t know. I locked all the doors. Windows. How did the police get in? That night?”

“The door was unlocked,” the sergeant said coolly.

She could almost feel her brain skitter over this new piece of information, trying and failing to grasp it.

Impossible.

“Wait, what? Which door?”

“The entry door. Maybe you forgot to lock it.”

Sometimes she’d jerk up to sitting in bed, thinking of open doors. Couldn’t sleep until she threaded her way downstairs in the darkness, trying not to wake her husband and have to listen to him saying, “You’re paranoid! Who cares if it’s unlocked?” The reason she needed to check, needed to make sure, was that she could never actually remember locking up. It was a thing so automatic, such a part of her routine, that she wasn’t conscious of it. Like a person who commutes every day, but can’t recall anything about their drive that particular morning.

“It’s not possible,” she said. “I never leave a door unlocked.”

“You remember locking them that night?”

No, she thought.

“Yes,” she lied. “But maybe he found the hide-a-key?”

“That rock thing?”

“Yeah.”

The sergeant shook his head. “Nah. We found it buried in the snow where you said. Undisturbed. The key was in there.”

“It’s just, this is going to sound—”Crazy. “Strange? But after my husband died, after an article came out about his art? I felt like—I thought—someone might be watching us.”

“How so?” The sergeant and the boyish officer exchanged a darting look.

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