When he finished with Lisa, he rolled her on her back, kissed her forehead, and then went downstairs.
Elise was not in the kitchen. Or the living room. Or the bathroom. Or the den. Or the TV room.
And then he heard the faint noise from the basement. Elise was one of those women who liked instant contact when you came home. She always wanted a hug and kiss from you; and always returned the favor as soon as she got home. So why the basement? And why hadn’t she responded when he’d called out to her from Lisa’s room?
He opened the basement door. “Elise?”
No answer.
They had yet to finish the basement. It was a huge concrete bunker that housed furnace and washer and drier and assorted boxes with stuff they’d probably never use again.
He smelled gasoline. Smoke.
He rushed down the stairs so fast, he started to slide. He grabbed the slender wooden railing.
Elise stood, completely naked, in the center of the basement floor. Before her, in a pile, were the clothes she’d worn tonight. She’d set them on fire with the help of a small can of gasoline she’d apparently brought in from the garage.
She spoke only once. “I want you to go upstairs and not ask me any questions. Do you understand?”
The sensible, sensitive gaze of his good wife was gone, replaced by the kind of despair and frenzy one saw in the eyes of people who had just suffered some vast trauma.
“Elise. Please tell me what happened.”
She shrieked at him. In the eight years of their marriage, the perfect suburban couple, she’d never once shrieked at him before. “Get out of here and leave me alone, you son-of-a-bitch!”
She’d never called him a name before, either.
There was nothing to say. Do.
He went doggedly up the stairs, like a man dragging himself to his own execution. What the hell was going on with her, anyway?
Four showers.
Twenty, thirty minutes apart.
Four different showers. What was she trying to scrub off her?
He lay in bed in the darkness, listening to the guest room shower down the hall. She didn’t even want use their own shower. It was as if he’d alienated her in some irrevocable way. Every half-hour, he’d check on Lisa. He wanted to ask her what was going on with mommy.
He finally fell asleep near dawn.
Earl Frazier had made a bad mistake. It was one thing to rape hookers, as he sometimes did. It was another to rape women who lived in rich sub-divisions.
She was beautiful in a slender, almost ethereal way. But it hadn’t been about sex... She was the kind of woman who’d snubbed him all his life. Who’d made him feel stupid and cheap and unmanly. She was so sleek and polished and perfect. He wanted to ruin that perfection for life. Feel his dirty hands ripping away her purity, her beauty, her money, her privilege.
But she would have access to power. And she could destroy him.
Why in God’s name hadn’t he been able to stop himself?
After his shift, he hung up his uniform neatly and lay in the shadows of his bedroom, sipping whiskey and smoking Pall Malls and praying — actually praying that God spare him this time. That he would never do it again. Whores, yes, because nobody cared about them. But not women of so-called virtue. That was just too damned risky.
Elise was in a white terrycloth robe and slippers when he came down for breakfast. The smells were good. Bacon, eggs, toast. This was much more than the usual mid-week breakfast.
One look at her and he knew not to ask any questions. He felt awkward, bursting with doubts and dreads and curiosity, but unable to give them voice.
He was just finishing up when she sat down across from him in the breakfast nook.
“Isn’t your big presentation this morning?”
He nodded.
“I’m sorry. You probably didn’t get much sleep and it’s my fault.” She started to put her hand out, to touch his, but then pulled it back abruptly. As if she’d suddenly recognized that touching him might contaminate her in some way.
He couldn’t help himself any longer. “What the hell’s going on, Elise?”
She said it simply. No dramatics. “I was raped last night.”
“Raped? My God. Did you go to the police?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“It was a cop who raped me.”
The Chuck Wagon presentation went pretty well. The two women in charge of the account from the client side laughed in all the right places and expressed enthusiastic interest in the coupon program the agency had come up with. The competition was killing Chuck Wagon with aggressive coupon programs.
Josh did well, too. It was one of those moments when a person stands aside and lets his doppelganger take over. Yes, it looks like me and sounds like me. But actually the real me is off somewhere else.
In this case, Josh was mentally stalking the cop who’d raped his wife. Josh did not embrace the adolescent beer-commercial machismo of so many advertising men. But he had a bad temper. And he also owned a .38 Special he’d bought at a gun show a few years ago. It was kept in the bedroom nightstand in case of prowlers.
All the way home on the freeway, he kept glowering at cop cars, wondering if this could be the one carrying Elise’s rapist. Several times, he wished he had the family gun.
Elise left a note on the kitchen table.
TOOK TWO SLEEPING PILLS.
LISA NEXT DOOR. SHE’LL NEED
DINNER. LOVE, ELISE.
After retrieving Lisa from the neighbor’s, Josh fed her dinner and then spread out some of her toys on the floor of the TV room. He tried to concentrate on the Seven O’Clock News but it was impossible. All he could think about was Elise being raped. He didn’t kid himself. He knew that her pain and degradation were his main concern. Some women never psychologically recovered from being raped. But he also knew that his own ego was involved here. He felt that he’d failed her, hadn’t sufficiently protected her, must now defend her after the fact.
He got Lisa to bed around nine. Around ten, Elise came down in a Northwestern sweatshirt — Northwestern being their mutual alma mater — and went into the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee.
They sat in the breakfast nook. All she’d had time to tell him this morning was that a cop had raped her. He’d had to hurry into the city and his pitch to the Chuck Wagon folks.
He said, “Tell me.”
She said, “He pulled me over for speeding. I was out in the boonies. That new mall? I’d taken a wrong turn and was trying to get back to civilization. I was on some country road.”
“He was a city cop?”
She nodded, sipping at her coffee. “He pulled me over for speeding. Told me to come back to his squad car and get in. I figured he was just going to give me a speech about my driving. Instead, he drove up the road to a grove of trees and then told me to get out of the car. He took me behind the trees and raped me.” She looked tired but certain of herself. “That’s all I’m going to say.”
“Why didn’t you report it?”
“God, Josh, are you forgetting Sandy Lewin?”
Sandy Lewin was a classmate of theirs. In their senior year, she’d been raped by a very trendy broker who’d earlier interviewed her for a job. By the time his lawyers got done with her, the impression had been left with the public at large that Sandy Lewin was a very sleazy young lady. Sandy was not only Elise’s best friend, she was also one of the most respectable people Elise had ever known. But not anymore. Not to anybody who’d watched the rapist’s lawyers destroy her on the Seven O’Clock News every night. Sandy had finally left town, relocated to LA. The broker went free.