He was about to break a trust that had existed between them for fifteen years on the basis of... what? Nothing. A single ambiguous word.
He looked back at the table, at the sheet of stationery on top of it.
The word gnawed at him, echoed in his head though he had not yet spoken it aloud. He was still thinking, had not really decided what to do, when his feet carried him into the living room ... through the living room ... into the hall... down the hall.
Into the bedroom.
The decision had been made, and he strode across the beige carpet and opened the single drawer of the nightstand on Barbara's side of the bed, taking out the small pink diary. He felt only a momentary twinge of conscience, then opened the book to the first page. It was blank. He turned to the next page—blank. The next— blank.
He flipped quickly through the pages, saw only blank-ness, only white. Then something caught his eye. He stopped, turned the pages back.
In the middle of the middle page, written in Barbara's neatest hand, was a single two-syllable word.
He slammed the book shut and threw it back in the drawer. He breathed deeply, filled with anger and an undefinable, unreasonable feeling that was not unlike dread.
She was having an affair.
Monteith was her lover.
He thought of confronting her with his suspicions, asking her about Monteith, who he was, where she'd met him, but he could not, after all the discussions, after all the arguments, admit to snooping. After all he had said over the years, he could not afford even the appearance of invading her privacy. He could not admit to knowing anything. On the other hand, maybe she wanted him to learn of her indiscretion, maybe she wanted him to comment on it, maybe she was looking for his response. After all, she had left the stationery on the table where he was certain to find it. Was it not reasonable to assume that she had wanted him to see the note?
No, he had come home early, before he was supposed to. If this had been a usual day, she would have removed it by the time he returned from work, hidden it away somewhere.
Andrew's head hurt and he felt slightly nauseous. The house seemed suddenly hot, the air stifling, and he hurried from the room. He did not want to go through the kitchen again, did not want to see that note on the table, so he turned instead toward the back of the house, going through the rec room into the garage, where he stood just inside the doorway, grateful for the cool darkened air. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, but the air he inhaled was not clean and fresh as he had expected. Instead, there was a scent of decay, a taste of something rotten. He opened his eyes, reached for the light switch, and flipped it on.
A dead woodchuck was hanging from an open beam in the far dark corner of the garage.
Andrew's heart skipped a beat, and he felt the first flutterings of fear in his breast. He wanted to go back into the house, back to the bedroom, back to the kitchen even, but, swallowing hard, he forced himself to move forward. He crossed the open empty expanse of oil-stained concrete and stopped before the far corner. This close, he could see that the woodchuck had been strangled to death by the twine which had been wrapped around its constricted throat and tied to the beam. Hundreds of tiny gnats were crawling on the animal's carcass, their black pinprick bodies and clear miniscule wings moving between the individual hairs of the woodchuck and giving it the illusion of life. The insects grouped in growing black colonies on the white clouded eyes, swarmed over the undersized teeth and lolling tongue in the open mouth.
Bile rose in Andrew's throat, but he willed himself not to vomit. He stared at the dead animal. There was something strange about the discolored lower half of the carcass, but he could not see what it was because of the angle at which it hung. Holding his breath against the stench of rot, he took another step forward.
A section of the woodchuck's underside had been shaved and an
Was this Monteith? Gooseflesh prickled on Andrew's arms. The thought seemed plausible in some crazy, irrational way, but he could think of no logical basis for such an assumption. A woodchuck named Monteith? Why would Barbara have such an animal? And why would she kill it and mutilate it? Why would she write its name in her diary, on her stationery?
He tried to imagine Barbara tying the twine around the woodchuck's neck in the empty garage, hoisting the squirming, screaming, fighting animal into the air, but he could not do it.
How well did he really know his wife? he wondered. All these years he'd been kissing her goodbye in the morning when he left for work, kissing her hello at night when he returned, but he had never actually known what she did during the times in between. He'd always assumed she'd done housewife-type things—cooking, cleaning, shopping—but he'd never made the effort to find out the specifics of her day, to really learn what she did to occupy her time in the hours they weren't together.
He felt guilty now for this tacit trivialization of her life, for the unspoken but acted-upon assumption that his time was more important than hers. He imagined her putting on a false face for his homecoming each evening, pretending with him that she was happy, that everything was all right, while her lonely daylight hours grew more confining, more depressingly meaningless.
So meaningless that she'd turned to animal sacrifice?
He stared at the hanging insect-infested woodchuck, at the
He spit. The smell was starting to get to him, he could taste it in his mouth, feel it in his lungs, and he hurried out of the garage before he threw up, opening the big door to let in the outside air. He took a series of deep, cleansing breaths as he stood at the head of the driveway, then walked over to the hose to get a drink. He splashed the cold rubbery-tasting water onto his face, let it run over his hair. Finally, he turned off the faucet and shook his head dry.
It was then that he saw the snails.
They were on the cracked section of sidewalk next to the hose, and they were dead. He squatted down. Barbara had obviously poured salt on three snails she'd found in the garden, and she'd placed the three dissolving creatures at the points of a rough triangle on the sidewalk. Two of the shells were now completely empty and had blown over, their black openings facing sideways, the drying mucus that had once been their bodies puddled on the concrete in amoeba-like patterns, but the third snail had not yet dissolved completely and was a mass of greenish bubbles.
With a safety pin shoved through its center.
Andrew pushed the third shell with a finger, looking more closely. The pink plastic end of the safety pin stood out in sharp relief against the brown shell and green bubbling body. He stood. He'd never had any great love for snails, had even poured salt on them himself as a youngster, but he had never been so deliberately cruel as to impale one of the creatures on a pin. He could not understand why Barbara would make a special effort to torture one of them, what pleasure or purpose she could hope to gain from such an action.
And why had she placed three of them at the corners of a triangle?
Between the woodchuck and the snails, there was a sense of ritualism emerging that made Andrew extremely uncomfortable. He wished he'd never seen the stationery on the table. He wished he'd never followed up on it. Always before, he had phoned ahead prior to coming home. Even on those few occasions when he had left work ill, he had telephoned Barbara to let her know he was coming home, believing such advance notice an example of common courtesy. This time, however, he had not phoned home, and he was not sure why he hadn't.
He wished he had.
Maybe it wasn't the name of a lover after all. Maybe it was some sort of spell or invocation.
Now he was being crazy.
Where was Barbara? He walked out to the front of the house, looked up and down the street for a sign of her car, saw nothing. He wanted to forget what he had seen, to go inside and turn on the TV and wait for her to come
