Over the next several days Ruth went through her entire repertoire of threats, taunts, fits of pique, crocodile tears, and refusal to cook his meals or do his laundry. All of these had bent him to her will at one time or another, but on the den issue he was unbendable. Whenever her tirades became too much to bear, he retreated into his den. With his headphones on, she could rant and rave and pound on the door until she was blue in the face; he wouldn’t hear her, wouldn’t even know she was there.
When he wasn’t in the den, he kept the door locked and the key on the ring in his pocket. At night he put the key ring under his pillow, in case she had any ideas of trying to appropriate it while he was asleep. Eventually she pretended to give in and settled into an icy, spiteful silence, but he wasn’t fooled. It was only a temporary cease-fire in the war of nerves.
He began spending more and more time in the den. Mainly listening to folk music and Dixieland jazz, his two favorites, and reading Hawthorne, Melville, Dickens. Alone, unbothered. Content.
Until he had the heart attack.
It happened one morning while he was boiling a breakfast egg for himself. When he finally managed to convince Ruth that the chest pains were more serious than indigestion, she drove him, grumbling, to the hospital. Doctors confirmed the cardiac episode and he was bedridden for three days while they ran more tests to determine the extent of the damage. It turned out to be relatively little; the attack had been mild, his body “delivering a warning,” as his cardiologist put it.
Ruth didn’t come to see him during his stay — his only visitor was Charlie Ledbetter — but she did deign to pick him up when he was released and drive him home. The whole way she wore an odd, satisfied little smile that puzzled him until a few minutes after their arrival, when he unlocked the door to his den and stepped inside.
And discovered that he didn’t have a den anymore.
The room was empty.
He swung around to see Ruth standing in the hall behind him, her arms folded across her chest, the satisfied smile wider on her mouth now. No, not satisfied — gloating. A smile of gloating triumph. And he realized she’d resorted to the same key trick he had, but with malice rather than necessary deception: taken the key while he was in the hospital, unlocked the door, then returned it to his key ring so she could savor his reaction.
“My den,” he said. “You stole my den.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. All I did was clean out a pest hole.”
“Pest hole? My books, my chair, my TV—”
“Rubbish, the lot of it. I had it all hauled away.”
“Hauled away where?”
“To the dump, of course. The only fit place for rubbish.”
She turned away from him, still smiling, and waddled into the kitchen. Wyatt followed her, confronted her again in front of the stove. His hands were shaking; he had never before been this angry.
“You had no right,” he said. “No right.”
“I had as much right as you did to sneak around and destroy Katie’s room in the first place.”
“It’s not Katie’s room, it’s mine.”
“Oh no, it isn’t. If you have any idea of building another man cave to hibernate in, you’d better forget it. The room is mine now.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Mine. I’ve decided it’s too late to put it back the way it was, so I’m going to make it into an indoor garden. Orchids, schefflera, and the like. Once those window blinds are taken down, there’ll be more than enough light.”
“No,” Wyatt said. “No, no, no.”
“Yes,” she said, still smiling. “Yes, yes, yes.”
A thickening red mist formed behind his eyes. Her face shimmered in it, was consumed by it. Dimly he heard a thudding sound. Another. And then the mist was gone and he saw Ruth lying on the floor at his feet, felt the weight of an iron skillet in his hand. He didn’t remember picking up the skillet or hitting her on the head with it, but that was what he’d done: the left side of her skull was crushed.
His first reactions were shock, horror, remorse, but none of them lasted long. A strange sort of calm descended on him. He put the skillet back on the stove, bent to feel for a pulse that wasn’t there. Then he went to what had been his den and locked himself inside.
He knew he should call 911. Or Ruth’s sister Elaine or Charlie Ledbetter. Or drive to the police station and turn himself in. Something. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t bring himself to leave the empty, ravaged room, not even for a few seconds.
He was still there two days later, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, when Elaine came and found the body and called the police.
Wyatt made a full voluntary confession. The detectives who questioned him were dubious at first when he told them why he had killed his wife. But when he explained in detail the manner in which she’d stolen the one thing that mattered most in his otherwise empty life, they seemed to understand.
He was held in custody in the crowded county jail before and after his arraignment, where he was charged with murder in the second degree. Tom and Katie came for brief visits; Laura called from her home in Minneapolis. They, too, seemed to understand that he’d been driven to do what he’d done, but their expressions of support were tepid and dutiful. They resented him for not being there for them while they were growing up, he knew, and always would. The chasm between him and his children that Ruth had created, and his passivity had widened, was too great ever to be bridged.
The trial went swiftly. The young public defender did his best against an uncompromising prosecutor, calling Tom and Charlie Ledbetter to testify as character witnesses in an effort to gain the jury’s sympathy. But the evidence against Wyatt was irrefutable. The jurors deliberated for less than an hour before returning a verdict of guilty without recommendation for leniency.
The judge gave him the maximum punishment of twenty years, which, of course, amounted to a life sentence. There was, however, one tempering factor in the judgment. Because of his age, his heart condition, and lack of a prior criminal record, Wyatt was remanded to one of the state’s minimum-security prisons.
He thought he would be unhappy in prison, but he wasn’t. Just the opposite. He adjusted quickly to the routine, and over a period of time grew comfortable with it.
At first he had to share space with another inmate, but because he was a model prisoner, quiet and cooperative, he was soon given a private cell and permitted a television set and a CD player with headphones. His job in the prison library allowed him unlimited access to books and CDs, and eventually the warden rewarded his good behavior by allowing him a small secondhand armchair. He was required to leave his cell, which was almost exactly the same size as his den had been, for only a few hours each day — meals, work in the library, a short stay in the exercise yard. The rest of the time he was left alone. That was the best part — no one bothered him while he was locked up tight in his cell.
The room of his own at home hadn’t been perfect, but all things considered, this one was. About as perfect a man cave as Wyatt Potter could ever have hoped to have.
When I Drink Alone
by Jonathon King
Jonathan King was a journalist for more than two decades before he shut himself away in a cabin in North Carolina to write his first novel, the Edgar-winning The Blue Edge of Midnight. The book, which introduced P.I. Max Freeman, is set in the Everglades, a place the author knows and loves. In the years since his first appearance on the crime-fiction scene, Mr. King, a former police reporter, has produced five more books in the Freeman series and two stand-alones; but he’s never before appeared in EQMM.