When Eva did not show up that afternoon, I was disappointed but not worried. She had, on occasion, to cancel at the last moment: the failure of a sitter, the illness of a child, the odd sprain or strain that brought Andrew home prematurely from his interminable training. If anything, this occasional disappointment and uncertainty added a piquant note to our relationship. I’m a great believer in regularity in marriage, but in affairs of the heart a certain suspense, a certain irregularity in what is, after all, an irregularity itself, opens the way for serendipity.
I hung around the magazine racks for a while, then went home with a handful of novels for Jane. I had supper, read two chapters of the dissertation I was supervising, and went to bed. I had no idea that my life had been drastically altered until the next evening when Gus Phillips called with the news that Eva Donaldson, my Eva! was missing. I only understood snatches of what he was saying, “car abandoned at the mall,” “sitter worried,” “Andrew frantic,” “police.”
“Police,” I said, uncomprehending. It’s odd how, at certain moments, you’re unable to fit together the pieces of the universe.
“Of course, he called the police,” said Gus, the half-horrified, halfdelighted bearer of news. “She’s been gone over twenty-four hours. Everyone’s alarmed.”
Only when I got the whole story again from Chloe Feingold, whose narration had an amplitude missing from Gus’s account, did I start to believe that Eva’s old Volvo had been found abandoned in the north mall parking lot. “Next to Filene’s,” said Chloe. “They’re having their big white sale at the moment.”
I believe she told me some details of the sale, but I had only one idea in mind: that Eva had been harmed. “At the mall,” I said. “The north lot.”
Chloe confirmed this, and with every word my heart sank. We never parked in the north lot, because it was near the academic’s consumer triangle of Computer City, the whole-foods shop, and the bookstore. We favored the south lot near Home Depot and Sears.
After I had hung up the phone and poured a gin and tonic with very little tonic, I thought about what I’d just been told. I was sure that Eva would not have parked her car in the north lot, and, with a heavy sense of fatality, I wondered if she had driven her car there at all. The mall was barely five miles from her house. Five miles. What’s five miles for a marathon runner? And just as if I were an old shaman dancing before the fire in the long house with my drum and rattles and wolf jaw, I saw Andrew getting out of the Volvo and locking it and slipping down the row of cars; out to the highway verge, over the fence to the bike path, then galloping for home with his elbows flying and his skinny, muscular legs pounding out the yardage. Five miles was nothing: I was sure he’d done it.
And where was Eva? The next afternoon I got in my canoe, not really believing in her disappearance. I thought I could glide across the pond, slip up the little branch of the river, and see her waving to me from the pasture. Instead, the field was empty, and I saw something else that had not registered before, the new meadow along the dirt road.
Eva had told me about their plans. A narrow, bumpy track ran beside their yard from the state road back into the Websters’ property, which includes part of the swamp and a good spread of grazing land between the Donaldsons’ property and ours. The plan was to have the strip of scrub, weeds, and hay along this old road plowed up and re-seeded with wildflowers. “Easier than a regular flower garden,” Eva had said, “and wonderful for butterflies.”
Kneeling in my canoe, I could hear her saying, “wonderful for butterflies,” and, with that memory of her sunny, open face, of her delight, I burst into tears. I knew she was dead. The place of our happiness was suddenly unbearable, and I was about to paddle away into the swamp when I looked at the bare plot of earth. It had been harrowed since I visited last, harrowed and, no doubt, seeded with the daisies and coreopsis, goldenrods and black-eyed Susans, wild geranium, Indian Paintbrush, blue-eyed grass, and clovers that have been blooming so successfully these last few years. I looked at the newly harrowed field, and I’d have bet my life that my darling Eva was lying hidden under those neat rows.
There followed the most excruciating period of my life. I was caught by the discretion which had deprived Andrew of any obvious motive. Oh, the police looked at him all right; it tells you something about marriage that the husband is always a prime suspect, but he seemed grief-stricken and, more important, he had an alibi: that same damn field. Old Webster, who’s been senile as long as I’ve known him, swore up and down that Andrew was working on the wildflower meadow the whole afternoon. He heard the tractor. The whole afternoon.
That left the morning. The children were in nursery school in the morning, but they had a sitter for the afternoon because Eva was going to the mall and Andrew planned to do the meadow. He claimed she left just before the sitter arrived, but there was no proof of that. He could have killed Eva, buried her, driven the Volvo to the mall, run back, hopped on his tractor, and harrowed the plowed field and the new grave into oblivion. That’s what I thought he’d done; I was sure of it.
I think the police may have had thoughts along those lines, too.
Andrew was at the state police station three, four, five times. But nothing came of it. There was no evidence, no motive. By the time they searched the house there wasn’t a clue. He’d had a couple more floors refinished by then — they’d been doing the rooms a few at a time to spare the children the fumes, and the little wildflower meadow was a foot tall and growing lush. Chloe Feingold told me that Andrew showed the troopers around with tears in his eyes. When nothing turned up, he posted a $10,000 reward for information about his wife’s disappearance, which suggested that his last book, a reader for undergraduates, was doing better than any of us had expected.
Still, he was a suspect, really the only one. The problem was that the police couldn’t give him a motive. I was the only person who could provide that — unless Jane had seen more than I’d thought — and I was in a bind. To get at Andrew, I’d have to ruin my marriage and my comfortable relationships with our children — and Eva would still be gone forever.
Perhaps you’ll decide I wasn’t worthy of Eva either, and that cowardice kept me silent. Cowardice and convenience. Perhaps I did have a time of cowardice and confusion, but this is to record the fact that ultimately I stirred myself to be worthy of my love and seek revenge.
Just how I was to achieve that satisfaction was not so easily determined. I can’t tell you how many spring and summer days I paddled over to the edge of the pasture and tortured myself with memories. I stared at the meadow, flourishing undisturbed, but its soft green and yellow tints gave me no inspiration, no solutions.
I watched Andrew, too. I studied him in the faculty senate, followed his moves at parties, lurked in the swamp while he was mowing the pastures. I took to calling him up, standing nervous at pay phones in the mall, listening to the ring, ring down the line. Sometimes I thought his voice sounded anxious and sometimes tired. Once or twice, late at night, he got angry. I listened without saying anything, waiting, always waiting for the admission, the confession — as if, after all his cares and plans, he was likely to blurt out the truth to a mysterious and silent caller. You will appreciate that I was not myself then.
I actually stooped to a poison-pen letter. I’m not proud of that. My only excuse was my desperation: I felt I had to frighten Andrew out of his complacency. I was at the computer lab one night, the big one, not the little departmental lab, and before I knew what I was doing, I’d typed, “You killed her,” and printed it out.