So when he pulled in to their driveway and saw those three suitcases sitting on the porch, he recognized what they meant or were supposed to — she was leaving him — but more than anything the sight struck him as theatrical, almost comic. The front door was half open. Had she forgotten something and gone back inside for it? He remembered crossing the lawn and thinking they’d probably run right into each other there. She’d be surprised for a moment, then determined. And what would he do? Let her go? Keep her by force, at least until he could get to the bottom of whatever was troubling her?
She was just inside the open door. She’d been hurrying, that much was clear. The rug at the top of the stairs — now in a heap, halfway down — was probably the culprit. Raymer himself had slipped on it more than once. Becka had tasked him with finding a mat to put beneath it, but he kept forgetting, and this, right here, was somehow the consequence. Her forehead was planted on the bottom step, her hair having fallen forward to cover her face, her knees two stairs up, arms behind her, rump in the air. She looked like she’d been swimming the breaststroke from the top of the stairs to the bottom and died before she could get there.
How long did he stand there, paralyzed? He hadn’t even checked to make sure she was dead, just stood there staring at her, unable to process what he was seeing. Even now, thirteen months later, he cringed to recall his breathtaking incompetence at the scene. What he couldn’t get out of his head was how staged the whole thing looked — Becka’s body impossibly balanced like that, no blood to speak of. To Raymer it resembled a museum diorama whose bizarre purpose was beyond his grasp. She was, after all, an actress, which made what he was witnessing a performance. She couldn’t hold that ridiculous pose forever. If he was just patient, she’d eventually get to her feet and say, Is this what you want to happen to me? Fix that fucking rug!
But no. It was no performance. Becka was dead. He found the tented note she’d left on the dining room table while he waited for the ambulance. I’m sorry, it said. I didn’t mean for this to happen. Try to be happy for us. It was signed with Becka’s usual capital B.
She didn’t mean for this to happen? It took him a moment to realize that by “this” she didn’t mean falling down the stairs, or dying, because of course she couldn’t have. No, what she hadn’t meant to do was fall in love. Falling out of love with him was something he could, in time, come to terms with. In point of fact, hadn’t he understood from the beginning that his luck in marrying Becka was too good to last? But falling in love with somebody new? Try to be happy for us? How could that happen when he didn’t know who us was?
—
DURING THE LAST THIRTEEN MONTHS the images from that terrible afternoon — Becka dead, the EMTs and investigators trying to work around her on the stairs, her rigored body being maneuvered onto a gurney and then out the front door, the neighbors having gathered outside to watch — had mercifully begun to fade, like photographs left in the sun. Tom Bridger’s words, by contrast, had lost none of their force. Over a forty-year career, Tom had developed a medical examiner’s mordant humor. Arriving on the scene, he’d taken one look at Becka, her forehead seemingly stapled to the bottom step, her rear end in the air, and said, “What the hell did this woman do? Come down those stairs like a Slinky?” He hadn’t intended the remark to be cruel, not realizing the dead woman’s husband was in the next room to overhear it. What made it so awful was its truth. Because Becka had looked for all the world as if she’d done exactly that — Slinkied down the stairs. Which again put Raymer in mind of old Miss Beryl, who, back in eighth grade, famously maintained that the precise word, the carefully chosen phrase, the exact analogy, was worth a thousand pictures. Back then he and his classmates had been convinced she had it backward, but no more. When he remembered the horror of that afternoon’s events, the phrase “like a Slinky” still played on a loop in his brain, still made his stomach roil. The words actually had a taste: stomach acid on the back of his tongue. Their meaning had gradually evolved, morphing from horror into anger, then into despair and finally into…what? Lately, when the phrase “like a Slinky” scrolled uninvited across his consciousness, he found himself involuntarily grinning. Why? He certainly didn’t think there was anything funny about what had happened. Even if Becka had been planning to run off with another man, he wasn’t glad she was dead. At least he didn’t think he was. What had happened to her wasn’t justice, poetic or otherwise. Where, then, did the shameful impulse to grin come from? From some dark place in himself? Who, he wondered, as Miss Beryl had so often done, is this Douglas Raymer?
“My dear friends,” intoned Reverend Tunic, who unless Raymer was much mistaken hadn’t a single friend, dear or otherwise, within earshot, “I submit that it is not the duty of one man, no matter how great and wise, to bring justice and rectitude to the world. No, that responsibility belongs to us all, to each and every one of us…”
Except me, thought Chief of Police Douglas Raymer. Blinking back perspiration or tears — he couldn’t be sure which — he was beyond weary of all obligation. No, the thing to do was abdicate. Surrender the field. Admit defeat. Become a gravedigger.
As he’d become lost in the memory of Becka’s tragic end, his hand, he now realized, had unconsciously migrated back into his trouser pocket, where it was again depressing the metal plate of the garage remote. What was the range on these things? he wondered. Was a door — or several doors, if Charice was right — sliding up somewhere in Bath? In Schuyler Springs? In Albany? Raymer found himself smiling at this patently absurd notion, picturing his wife’s lover, the asshole, watching his garage door go up, then down, then up again, and knowing that the man who was making this happen was nearby and armed.
Was this the compromise he was searching for? Quit the job he wasn’t cut out for, but first find out who the opener belonged to and let the rotten bastard know he was busted? If Raymer could solve just this one mystery, he could let go of everything else — responsibility and rectitude, obligation and the fucking Iroquois with their supple moccasins and whatever other happy horseshit Reverend Tunic was running up his spiritual flagpole. Okay, maybe it wasn’t possible to reinvent yourself, but you could move on, right? People did it every day. He didn’t hate Becka for her faithlessness. She was simply, like his career in law enforcement, a mistake. Everyone but he himself seemed to have recognized this from the start. When introduced to the bride-to-be at the rehearsal dinner, Jerome, who’d reluctantly agreed to be his best man when Raymer confessed he had no other close friends, immediately sussed out the situation. “Damn, Dougie,” he said. “You’re marrying up, boy.” Raymer had been pleased by the other man’s enthusiasm and proud that Becka was such a fine-looking woman. And of course it felt good to have his own assessment — that he was a lucky man — confirmed. But trailing in the wake of his friend’s enthusiasm was his unspoken assumption that luck this good was bound to run out.