Aggie once asked me — this was last October, our love was still new then — whether we wouldn’t grow tired of each other soon enough, seek new partners again, look again for the danger or the thrill or the romance or whatever it had been that caused us to discover each other in the first place. She had been sitting on the edge of the bed naked, looking out toward the marsh on the eastern side of the house; the sun had already moved over to the beach side, this was two or thereabouts in the afternoon. She said she thought the reason people enjoyed stories about love affairs was not because they secretly longed for such affairs themselves. On the contrary, most of the stories ended in affirmation of the marital bond — the sinners going back to their respective spouses at the end. She went on to speculate that the happy ending was essential to any story of marital infidelity, and then she said—
She said that maybe those two strangers meeting on a train weren’t strangers at all. Maybe the woman was only Mrs. Smith as a young girl, and the man was Mr. Smith as he’d been when she first met him. The entire so-called “affair” was just a tale of their courtship and romance, a memory of more passionate times, with the “going back” at the end, the “happy ending” being a symbolic return to the humdrum safer reality of marriage. She was pleased with her idea. She waited for my approval, grinning, and then she kissed me. And then we made love again and in a little while I left her.
I drove over the causeway bridge now, and around Lucy’s Circle, and then across the new bridge to Sabal. But instead of continuing on toward Stone Crab Key, I made an abrupt left turn onto Jamie’s street and found myself driving slowly past the scene of the crime. The jacaranda stood leafless and flowerless in the center of the lawn. A month from now, it would explode against the sky in a glorious puff of feathery purple flowers, but now there were only naked branches and not a hint of promised bloom. I drove up the street toward West Lane, past the sewer into which the murder weapon had been dropped.
It occurred to me that Betty Purchase would probably never realize she was as guilty of committing those murders as was her daughter. Karin had wielded the knife, but she had also been her mother’s surrogate. The day Betty affixed the label “Goldilocks” to her husband’s new wife was the day she’d first planted the seed of murder. Nor would she ever understand that over the years she herself had become what she considered Maureen to be — the intruder, the other woman: Goldilocks for sure.
I made a left turn at the corner, parked the car in a clearly marked NO PARKING zone, and stepped over the chain Michael Purchase had crossed on Sunday when he’d fled that blood-drenched house. In the forest, I took off my shoes and the socks I’d been wearing since yesterday. The pine needles were soft underfoot.
I did not think I would go back to Susan.
But neither did I want to spend the rest of my life with Agatha.
Just before I reached the beach, I threw the socks into the woods.