It was almost a week before he felt like himself again. It may have been three days after that, while he was lying on the couch in the den, that his eye fell on the shelf of Ellen’s books. There had been a death by food poisoning, he remembered, but which book was it? He thought of asking her, but was embarrassed. He spent the next hour rereading parts of her books. The truth was that he hadn’t read her novels closely. He really didn’t care for mysteries. Military history and biographies were more his speed. Ellen’s habit of keeping her manuscripts a secret until they were published was probably for the best. It was easier to be enthusiastic about a successfully published work that brought in royalties every few months than an untested draft.
He found the poisoning in the third novel. A young woman serves her older lover some brandy laced with arsenic. Ellen had included it as a red herring from the primary plot, which revolved around an art expert who plagiarizes his artist wife’s work. The expert ends up dead, floating in the pool of a famous collector, the aqua water tinged with red streaks that flowed from a severed artery in his neck. Charlie started to feel queasy again as he read, and deciding that he wasn’t altogether better, lay down on the sofa, and turned on the end of a golf tournament.
When Charlie came within feet of the downed power line, Ellen was remorseful. Of course, she couldn’t have known that it lay just yards from where the car was parked in the driveway. But she never should have asked him to go out and get her laptop from the car, he heard her telling Annie Johnson on the phone. “At the very least I should have gone for it myself. When I think what could have happened. What would I do without Charlie?”
There had been a wild storm the night before and she had raced into the house without an umbrella — she had forgotten it on the hall table — leaving a puddle in the front hall that Charlie stepped in half an hour later when he went to check that the door was locked. He had scolded her. But Ellen only looked up from her book with a mild expression and an unsatisfying “Oopsie.”
She seemed to have caught a chill, though, and the next morning although the storm was over, they realized the power was out and that she couldn’t turn on her office computer.
“Would you mind, Charlie?” she asked. “I promised I’d finish this chapter by the end of the week.”
It was still miserable outside and he cursed as the wind shook the trees and rain falling from a branch dripped on his head and down the back of his collar.
With the laptop under his arm, he was just closing the trunk when he saw the flashing lights of the Con Ed truck and a worker called out for him to stay back. Razzie, restrained by her leash on the Allens’ front porch and eager to run out toward the street, was barking wildly. As Charlie turned back toward the house, frightened and angry, he wished the Allens would let her off the leash.
Charlie and Ellen had spent the rest of the day inside, quietly. “It’s nice not to have to go anywhere,” Ellen had said. Charlie, who had a new biography of Patton to read, didn’t feel as pleased and after volunteering to make lunch — “Such a nice surprise,” Ellen said — found himself watching her periodically as she sat across from him in their pleasant living room. She was reading a book with the unsettling title Delusions of Gender, a paperback with a glossy cover and a photo of a baby doll in a blue satin dress. “Research,” she said, smiling, when she looked up to find his gaze directed at her.
The next morning, electricity restored, Charlie felt restless again. As soon as Ellen left for the library, he straightened up the kitchen and wiped down the surfaces. Must she always leave the refrigerator door sticky? Time to get out of the house, he thought as he headed upstairs for a shower. But here too there was disorder. The slick soapy residue of the mango bath gel Ellen favored had left a pale orangish glaze on the bathtub enamel. The cloying sweet scent filled the room. She knew he wouldn’t let this go and she could count on him to wipe it away. But today was different. He’d be damned if he’d clean up her mess, and he strode down the hall to what he still thought of as the kids’ bathroom, which was cramped, but clean. He shaved there too, and distracted by the lilac-and-white flocked wallpaper in the mirror’s reflection, cut himself on his chin,
In their bedroom, as usual, he found her damp towels slung over the chair and a pile of papers next to the bed. He thought for a moment of leaving the towels on the chair, but didn’t want the upholstery to stain. Exasperated, he picked up the papers.
Crumpling them a bit in his hand, he went to Carrie’s old room, which, with the proceeds from Fond Regrets, Ellen had converted into her office. Charlie seldom went in. If her disorderliness distressed him, they had agreed, it was better not to look. Inside the desk was messy with open files, copies of her latest book, miscellaneous pages of notes, and the mail from the last few days. Charlie dropped the handful of papers on one of the piles and resisted the urge to straighten and stack the files and close the half-open center drawer that was stuffed with pens, paperclips, a ball of yarn, and some hard candies with loosened wrappers. Ellen had scribbled in the margins of some typed pages that rested precariously at the edge of the desk, and he noticed a sticky note on which she had scrawled in purple ink: Dangerous fish and mollusks? Patricia High-smith smuggled snails.
Her computer was on sleep mode, but realizing why he’d really come in here, he started sifting through the debris in her drawer. Her password, Pluto3, was on a card — where anyone could find it — on a list of other “Important Information” that also included her ATM password. Charlie went right to her browsing history — he had read Ellen an article from the AARP magazine on the importance of covering your electronic trail, which she had naturally ignored. He found searches for death by bee sting, electrocution, hunting accidents, animal bites, and transportation. He scrolled past these entries and clicked on The Top 5 Causes of Accidental Home Injury Deaths. Charlie clicked on this title and found falls, poisoning, fire and burns, airway obstruction, and water. More than 18,000 Americans die from accidental injuries in the home each year, the article said.
He closed the browser and looked at her documents. He opened one named Home Sweet Home, which described a house like theirs and a list of needed repairs. Stairway bannister safe? she had noted at the bottom. And the name and number of a repairman, Cole Edwards (unlikely... they always called Jim Strensky when something needed fixing), was underlined. Could this be a working title? As with her physical files, her digital filing system was disorganized. Before he turned the computer off he opened a file called The Murderer’s Habit. In it Ellen had written a single paragraph:
Explore the importance of language... Does the way we say things matter more than the content? What about habits? Consider a character whose language or idiosyncrasies drives another character mad — to the point of murderous rage. What if it was sanctioned or encouraged?
Enough, he told himself and, getting up suddenly, felt the edges of his line of vision darken. He knew it was a sudden drop in his blood pressure, a condition that his doctor had cautioned him about. Sometimes controlling blood pressure was a balancing act, Dr. Jones had said, and stress could be a factor. Charlie was almost sure he had taken his pills that morning as usual. Best to check, he told himself. There had never been a problem before; this was something new.