False Memory

trash can.

Enter Dusty, and therefore on to the next level of the game, where the humble key of Level 1 now becomes a powerful and magical object, equivalent to the One Ring, the Master of all the Rings of Power, which must be conveyed back to Mordor and destroyed in the Fire from which it came, must be melted down before it can be used for evil purpose. But this was no game. These horrors were real. The blood, when it came, would be thick, warm, and wet, rather than a two-dimensional arrangement of red pixels.

Martie turned away from the van and hurried into the house.

The car key wasn’t hanging on the Peg-Board, where it should have been.

The sweating glass of unfinished ginger ale and a cork coaster were the only things on the kitchen table.

Draped over a chair: her raincoat. Two deep pockets. A few Kleenex in one. The paperback book in the other.

No key.

In the garage, Dusty was calling her. He must be out of the van, picking his way through the debris that she had left on the floor. Each repetition of her name was louder than the previous one, closer.

Out of the kitchen, into the hall, past the dining room, living room, into the foyer, Martie fled toward the front door, with the sole intention of putting distance between herself and Dusty. She was unable to think ahead to the consequence of this mad flight, to where she would ultimately go, to what she would do. Nothing mattered except getting far enough away from her husband to ensure that she couldn’t harm him.

The foyer carpet, small and Persian, slid on the polished-oak tongue and groove, and for a moment she was floor-surfing. Then she wiped out and went down hard on her right side.

When her elbow rapped the oak, wasps of pain took flight along the nerves of her forearm, swarming in her hand. More pain buzzed along her ribs, stung through her hip joint.

The most shocking pain was the least acute: a quick jabbing in her right thigh, sharp but short-lived pressure. She had been poked by something in the right-hand pocket of her jeans, and she knew at once what it was.

The car key.

Here was incontestable proof that she couldn’t trust herself. On some level, she must have known the key was in her pocket, when she had checked the Peg-Board, when she had scanned the table, when she had frantically searched her raincoat. She’d deceived herself, and there was no reason to have done so unless she intended to use the key to blind, to kill. Within her was some Other Martine, the deranged personality she feared, a creature who was capable of any atrocity and who intended to fulfill the hateful premonition: the key, the eye, thrust and twist.

Martie scrambled up from the foyer floor and to the windowed front door.

At the same instant, Valet leaped against the outside of the door, paws planted at the base of the leaded- glass pane, ears pricked and tongue lolling. The many squares, rectangles, and circles of beveled glass, punctuated by jewel-like prisms and round glass beads, transformed his furry face into a cubist portrait that looked both amusing and demonic.

Martie reeled back from the door, not because Valet frightened her, but because she was afraid of harming him. If she were truly capable of hurting Dusty, then the poor trusting dog was not safe, either.

In the kitchen, Dusty called, “Martie?”

She didn’t answer.

“Martie, where are you? What’s wrong?”

Up the stairs. Quickly, silently, two steps at a time, half limping because pain lingered in her hip. Clutching at the railing with her left hand. Digging in a pocket with her right.

She reached the top with the key buried in her fist, just the silvery tip poking out from her tightly clenched fingers. Little dagger.

Maybe she could toss it out a window. Into the night. Throw it into thick shrubbery or over the fence into the neighbor’s yard, where she couldn’t easily retrieve it.

In the shadowy upstairs hall, which was lit only by the foyer light rising through the stairwell, she stood in indecision, because not all the windows were operable. Some were fixed panes. Of those that could be opened, many were sure to be swollen after a long day of rain, and they wouldn’t slide easily.

The eye. The key. Thrust and twist.

Time was running out. Dusty would find her at any moment.

She didn’t dare delay, couldn’t risk trying a window that more likely than not would be stuck, and have Dusty come upon her while she still held the key. At the sight of him, she might snap, might commit one of the unthinkable atrocities with which her mind had been preoccupied throughout the afternoon. Okay, then the master bathroom. Flush the damn thing down the toilet.

Crazy.

Just do it. Move, move, do it, crazy or not.

On the front porch, muzzle to the jeweled window, the usually quiet Valet began barking.

Martie dashed into the master bedroom, switched on the overhead light. She started toward the bathroom — but halted when her gaze, as swift and sharp as a guillotine, fell on Dusty’s nightstand.

In her frenzied attempt to make the house safe, she had thrown out gadgets as innocuous as potato peelers and corncob holders, yet she had not given a thought to the most dangerous item in the house, a weapon that was nothing but a weapon, that did not double as a rolling pin or a cheese grater: a.45 semiautomatic, which Dusty had purchased for self-defense.

This was one more example of clever self-deception. The Other Martie — the violent personality buried within her for so long, but now disinterred — had misdirected her, encouraged her hysteria, kept her distracted until the penultimate moment, when she was least able to think clearly or act rationally, when Dusty was near and drawing nearer, and now she was permitted — oh, encouraged — to remember the pistol.

Downstairs in the foyer, Dusty spoke to the retriever through the window in the front door—“Settle! Valet, settle!”—and the dog stopped barking.

When Dusty had first purchased the pistol, he had insisted that Martie take firearms training with him. They had gone to a shooting range ten or twelve times. She didn’t like guns, didn’t want this one, even though she understood the wisdom of being able to defend herself in a world where progress and savagery grew at the same pace. She had become surprisingly competent with the weapon, a thoroughly customized stainless-steel version of the Colt Commander.

Down in the foyer, Dusty said, “Good dog,” rewarding Valet’s obedience with praise. “Very good dog.”

Martie wanted desperately to dispose of the Colt. Dusty wasn’t safe with the gun in the house. No one in the neighborhood was safe if she could get her hands on a pistol.

She went to the nightstand.

For God’s sake, leave it in the drawer.

She opened the drawer.

“Martie, honey, where are you, what’s wrong?” He was on the stairs, ascending.

“Go away,” she said. Although she tried to shout, the words came out in a thin croak, because her throat was tight with fear and because she was out of breath — but perhaps also because the murderess within her didn’t really want him to leave.

In the drawer, between a box of tissues and a remote control for the television, the pistol gleamed dully, fate embodied in a chunk of beautifully machined steel, her dark destiny.

Like a deathwatch beetle, its mandibles tick-tick-ticking as it quarried tunnels deep within a mass of wood, the Other Martie squirmed in Martie’s flesh, bored through her bones, and chewed at the fibers of her soul.

She picked up the Colt. With its single-action let-off, highly controllable recoil, 4.5-pound trigger pull, and virtually unjammable seven-round magazine, this was an ideal close-up, personal-defense piece.

Until she stepped on it while turning away from the nightstand, Martie didn’t realize that she had dropped the car key.