He didn’t think he’d driven his car. He put his arm around Marva, and she steadied him nicely. Out on the sidewalk she hailed a cab and helped him into it. It surprised him a little when she climbed in beside him, but he put his head on her soft bare shoulder, and the warmth of her felt good. He gave the driver his address, then slept during the ride home.
He received another mild surprise when Marva paid the driver, sent the cab off, walked with him up the path, helped him find the key and unlock the door. When she came inside with him though, he shook his head in mild protest.
“Hey, Alison wouldn’t want you in here.”
“Your wife is gone,” she said.
“Yeah... yeah, that’s right.”
He didn’t go into the kitchen, but on his way to the bedroom, he just angled past the kitchen doorway, the place where he’d last seen Alison. What he saw there now was only the pieces of the martini glass he’d thrown. Meticulous housekeeper though she was, Alison hadn’t stayed long enough to clean up the mess.
Did he awaken and move around during the rest of the night? Or did he sleep heavily, and merely imagine movement and wakefulness during a parade of nightmares? He asked himself these questions at the time, while he was dreaming — if he was dreaming — and also later. If these experiences were dreams, Alison invaded them, like a restless ghost, accusing him, haunting him.
Had the glass he’d thrown actually hit her? In one dream, at least, it had, for her face rose before him, cut and bleeding, dreadful to look at — and he had to do something, anything, to get rid of the awful vision. So he dug a hole and buried Alison’s body in it. Then for a while he seemed to feel better.
When he awoke, really awoke for certain, sunshine was streaming in the windows. It was already too late to bother going to work, and he had a horrible headache. But his mind was much clearer. He began to piece his world together, and the picture wasn’t very pleasant. There’d been that awful, stupid argument with Alison...
A noise from the kitchen interrupted his thoughts — a domestic kind of noise, made by a frying pan or something. He rushed out of the bedroom and toward the noise, shouting gratefully, “Alison... oh, Alison...”
There was a woman in the kitchen making noise with the frying pan all right, but it wasn’t Alison. Instead it was a big blonde woman, vulgar in a tight black dress, her round, puffy face heavily adorned with lipstick and mascara.
“Who are you?” he blurted.
“I’m Marva. Remember?”
Yes, slowly, he did remember now. But the memory only confused him further. “Where’s Alison?” he demanded.
“Not here.”
“Was she here at all... ever?”
The big blonde shook her head.
That was a relief to him, in a way, that Alison hadn’t seen him with this woman. “Well look... have you been here... all night?”
“Sure. I slept in the guest room.”
“Well, fine.” He hesitated, but finally had to be frank. “Thanks for bringing me home. I guess I was pretty bad off. But I’m okay now. So I won’t need you any more.” He reached in his pocket, found a couple of bills, and thrust them at her. “Here’s for your trouble. I mean, I guess you paid for the drinks and the cab.”
She accepted the money and put it down the front of her dress, but she made no move to leave. He stared at her. Didn’t she understand?
“You’d better go now. I’ve got to get dressed and go to the office.”
“I’ll fix your breakfast.”
“Thanks, but I really don’t feel like eating.”
Marva shrugged her bare, plump shoulders, and set the frying pan aside. He noticed that the kitchen was a bit messy. Alison had always kept everything so neat. This woman must have been cooking for herself.
“Okay,” she said, going past him toward the living room. “There’s a nice roast in the freezer. What time do you get home for dinner?”
A little twinge of annoyance, hardly alarm, passed through him, and he forgot about his headache. He followed her into the living room, and discovered that she was already curled up on the sofa, paging through Alison’s magazines.
“Hey!” That was all he could think of to say.
She looked up at him, her blue eyes innocent and questioning. “Hey, what?”
“What do you think you’re doing? You can’t stay here.”
“Why not? Don’t you like me, Tony?”
He chewed his under lip and tried to remain calm and patient. “Well, sure I like you. And I’m very grateful for your taking care of me last night. But you can’t just sit there like that. What if Alison walks in and finds you here? She wouldn’t understand...”
His protest dwindled off into an uneasy silence. He didn’t like the look on Marva’s face. There was something there underneath the wide-eyed innocence. He didn’t know what it was, only that it frightened him.
She returned his stare for a long time before she asked the question. “Don’t you remember?”
“Sure, I remember,” he answered, but without confidence. “Lots of things. Alison walked out on me. I got pretty drunk, met you in a bar, and you brought me home.” He hesitated again. “What else is there to remember?”
“You were blind, staggering drunk, Tony.”
“Okay, so I was. So what?”
“I guess you really don’t remember. Or maybe you don’t want to.”
“Remember what, for Pete’s sake?”
“What happened to Alison.”
A cold, terrifying chill seeped into him. A voice from a great distance, not sounding like his own voice at all, asked fearfully, “What happened to Alison?”
“You killed her.”
The room swam giddily before his eyes. The big bosomy blonde became the center of a whirlpool revolving ever more swiftly, threatening to suck him in. He groped for a chair, finally found one, and waited till the worst of the physical sensation had passed.
After a while he asked weakly, “How do you know I killed her?”
“How do I know? I saw her body. She’d been strangled.”
“By me?”
“Who else? You told me the whole story in the bar, about this big argument you had with her. Then we came home, and there she is on the kitchen floor. What else is it supposed to be if you didn’t kill her?”
He shook his head in desperate denial. “But I don’t remember doing it.”
“Honey, you don’t remember a lot of things. About how you got from here to where you met me last night, for instance.”
He had to admit that much. He’d been drunk, but not the kind of drunk where you collapse and fall asleep somewhere. He’d been active, done things, like finding that strange bar, and... yes, it was possible... strangling Alison. He’d been enraged and drunk, a combination that could have meant murder.
Suddenly he stood up. “You said the body was on the kitchen floor. I’ve been in the kitchen. There isn’t any body there.”
She looked away from him, and went back to paging through the magazine. “Not now,” she said.
He crossed to where she sat, and stood over her. “What do you mean by that?” he demanded.
“It’s gone, that’s all.”
“Gone where?”
“I took care of it, honey. Don’t you understand? You don’t have a thing to worry about.” She flipped pages, then stopped to gaze at an advertisement featuring mink coats. “There’s not a thing to worry about, honey. Go eat a bite of breakfast, take a shave, and get yourself down to the office.”
The transition was accomplished more smoothly than he had ever imagined such a thing could happen. One day Alison had been his wife, and they had lived together in this semi-secluded little ranch house. The next day Alison was gone, and her place taken by another “wife,” a new “Mrs. Courtner”, and nobody seemed particularly to care.