The first reported only the barest of facts. Cynthia Johansen, nee Batiste, a twenty-two-year-old senior at the University of Saskatchewan, had been in the bathroom of the apartment she shared with her husband of eleven months, Adam Johansen. The bath was separate from the sink area and she had closed the door. Her husband, a thirty-one-year-old freelance carpenter, had been cleaning the trap under one of the sinks. When he realized she had stopped speaking, he tried to get her to open the door. By the time he broke it down, Cynthia had bled to death from three deep cuts made by a man’s straight razor, two to the left wrist and one to the right.
According to the school newspaper, Cynthia’s best friend, Lena Gibbs, said Cynthia had miscarried two months prior to the incident and had gone into a severe depression. Gibbs said Cynthia had never talked about killing herself, but she had talked about being a bad person and suffered crippling guilt over the loss of the baby.
Twenty-two.
Anna slid farther down in the chair, the picture of a lowrider sans muscle car. Anna’s older sister, Molly, had been born when their mother was twenty-three. This was not abnormal. The body wanted to reproduce at a young age, when the chances of conceiving and the mother living through the birth to care for her offspring were greatest. From Anna’s vantage point, twenty-two seemed impossibly young to be dealing with college, marriage, pregnancy and miscarriage, yet women managed it without killing themselves – or anybody else. Often, younger women dealt with miscarriages better than their older sisters. Youth was resilient in body and mind. The future still held the possibility of many live births.
Anna wondered if Cynthia Jean’s guilt was brought on or exacerbated by other factors. Drugs, maybe, or intentionally rash actions designed to end an unwanted pregnancy. An abusive husband had brought on more than one miscarriage. Because Adam’s wife’s death was ruled suicide didn’t mean he didn’t kill her; it only meant that if he did, he’d gotten away with it.
The next article, written the following day and on page two of the paper instead of page six, reported that Adam had been removing the sink trap because his wife said she’d lost her engagement ring down the drain. He told police that while he worked, Cynthia had talked with him through the door about how much she loved him and how glad she was he had given her a home and that the eleven months they’d been married were the happiest of her life.
The phone rang and he went to answer it. He said his wife asked him to stay and talk to her, but he said he’d be right back. The call was from one of Cynthia’s teachers, and he brought the cordless phone into the sink area from the kitchen.
Cynthia wouldn’t respond when he spoke, and the door to the bath was locked. He told the police and, later, the newspaper reporter that he thought his wife was mad at him for answering the phone when she’d asked him not to so he ignored her and went back to working on the sink, occasionally making remarks. He said he got angry, then worried, and that was when he broke through the door and found her.
Anna saw her husband, Paul, in her mind, felt him in her heart and couldn’t imagine the kind of pain Adam must have suffered. That is, if he was telling the truth.
The only story she’d heard that was more tragic was the accidental death of a three-year-old who’d sneaked out and crawled behind his mother’s Camaro to surprise her when she left for the grocery store.
Paul Davidson was a Christian, an Episcopal priest, he believed in a loving God. Paul was also Sheriff of a poor county in Mississippi. He saw suffering of the worst kinds, cruelty and ignorance, predator and prey on the human scale, and it was far more vicious than anything between wolves and moose. Anna’s husband didn’t believe in the magical thinking of God granting wishes, but he did believe in the importance of prayer. He didn’t believe in pearly gates or Saint Peter or crossing the river Jordan. He didn’t believe in any other hell than the ones found on Earth. He didn’t believe in angels or ghosts or miraculous answers to prayers. Yet he believed he would be at one with his God when he died.
He believed Anna would, too, but she couldn’t quite get there with him. She couldn’t get her mind around a God who was purported to know – and care – about the ins and outs of human suffering. If there was such a watcher of the falling sparrows he – it was always he – was a bloodthirsty son of a bitch. Or he was a helpless son of a bitch.
Spending all eternity with either incarnation didn’t appeal to her.
The next article she clicked on brought her upright in her seat. The headline read: “No Ring Found in Trap.” Beneath it was a quarter-page color photograph of a young Adam Johansen on the front steps of a brick fourplex, carrying a bloody, naked woman. The woman’s arms hung at her sides. Her hands were completely red, and blood trailed down the leg of Adam’s khaki shorts and painted the side of his calf and the top of his running shoe. Cynthia’s head was back in the classic Fay Wray swoon, but the woman in the photograph was either dead or soon to be dead. Long hair, brown or dark blond, streamed to Adam’s ankles, the ends pointed and dark with water and blood. Anna could see the white paint on the doorframe behind Adam streaked from where the hair had been drawn across it when he carried Cynthia outside.
“It’s a still from a videotape.”
The voice was no more than six inches from her ear. Years of not responding to the machinations of people whose day she was ruining for one reason or another, Anna didn’t leap out of her skin, shrieking.
“Did I wake you up?” she asked.
Adam leaned down, looking at the photograph on the screen. He was shirtless. Heat radiated from his skin. Threads of long hair trailed across Anna’s neck like the tickle of spiderwebs walked through in the dark. Muscles at the corner of his jaw worked as he clenched and unclenched his teeth.
Fear on men smelled sour. Adam smelled of molten iron and metal ice-cube trays, red coals and rocks brittle with cold.
Adam reeked with a distillation of rage.
27
Anna sat perfectly still, her eyes on the picture on the monitor, and waited for the scalding anger boiling off Adam to dissipate. The back of her chair moved fractionally, the oak creaking as Adam leaned on it hard, using it as a lame man would use a crutch to push himself upright. The palpable heat of the man moved away from Anna’s cheek and the sense of being on thin ice over a raging volcano abated. She clicked the BACK arrow, getting rid of the bloody photograph.
“I can’t imagine anything worse than what you had to go through,” she said. She didn’t have to pretend to be sincere. If he had killed his wife, by the look of the young man in the picture it hadn’t been nearly as much fun as he’d hoped.
“I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Adam said.
“The coroner ruled it suicide,” Anna replied evenly. Adam was no longer breathing in her ear, his hair trailing over her shoulder, but he’d not stepped away either.
“Why are you looking at that?” Adam sounded more worried than angry at the breach of his privacy, or such privacy as remained in the instant-information era.
“Getting to know you,” Anna said. “Since we’re neighbors, let’s be friends.” She didn’t take her eyes from the monitor, but she wasn’t seeing. Every pore was opening to sense Adam: where he stood, how he stood, if he was dangerous.
His breath puffed out on a dry cough. The closest thing to a laugh he was going to make.
“You’re a piece of work, you know that?” he said and, rather than leaving, pulled up another straight-backed chair to sit next to her, scooting it up till his knees were less than a foot from hers. He put his long forearms down on his long thighs and leaned in till their faces were close enough, Anna could see the tiny red rivers of blood from broken vessels in his eyes. “Do you think I took Robin? Is that it?”