She had collapsed on the spot. She’d wept bitter tears. Once he’d calmed her down, he’d determined that it wasn’t their unborn child he needed to be rid of, it was Mila. She was the impediment.
Even Mila’s pregnancy, which she had informed him of with unbridled joy, hadn’t deterred him. Whenever his conscience got a tenuous toehold, Norma reminded him that their baby had been conceived first. His loyalty must be to it, not to the product of his loveless marriage. Wouldn’t he choose true love over duty?
On the day he’d irreversibly chosen love, he had returned home from his rural route in time for supper. He hadn’t entered the house thinking that this was the night he would commit murder. Mila had greeted him with a kiss on the cheek, her unsuspecting smile, and a glass of iced tea.
He’d relaxed in the parlor and read the newspaper while she’d puttered in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on their meal. When it was ready, she’d called him into the dining room. There was a bouquet of flowers in the center of the table. The linen napkins smelled of starch. From a china tureen, she’d served him pork roast with potatoes and carrots.
He remembered these small details later. That evening he’d taken them for granted.
While they ate, she’d kept up her happy prattle, telling him about the first shoots springing up in the vegetable garden, the fabric she thought would do nicely for the nursery curtains, and the man who had stopped by to inquire about the room to let.
“I think he was hungry. I had just taken da shortbread out of dee oven. I gave him two pieces. Are you ready for your dessert?”
He remembered looking down at his empty plate, surprised to find that he’d eaten his whole portion without tasting it. His mind had been on Norma and his infant son whom he had stopped by to see that day. Arthur had been born a month earlier, not that day. His birth had been easy, not a difficult breech. Those were lies he’d later told the sheriff.
During that afternoon’s visit, Patsy had left him and Norma alone to admire their son. They lay on the bed with Arthur between them. Norma had wanted to make love, but he’d told her it was too soon for her after giving birth. She’d settled for playfully stroking his penis through his trousers and lauded it for the ideal son it had provided, a child untainted by foreign blood.
That was one of Norma’s familiar refrains: His wife’s German heritage continued to cost him patients even this long after the Armistice.
That’s what had reeled through his mind that evening as Mila left the dining table carrying their plates into the kitchen, keeping up her running monologue about mundane topics. He didn’t give a fuck about what color she’d chosen for the nursery curtains when he was stiff with the anticipation of fucking Norma again.
He’d gotten up from the dining table and walked into the kitchen. Mila had her back to him, cutting slices of shortbread for their dessert. He hadn’t been nervous or hesitant. He hadn’t paused to think: I’m going to kill her now.
He simply picked up a clean iron skillet from off the stove and swung it at the back of her head. The blow didn’t even break the skin, but he heard the crunch of bone as her skull caved in. Never having known what had hit her, she’d gone silent and fell to the floor.
Later, he didn’t recall how long he’d stood there staring at her inert form. Eventually he’d knelt down and checked to make sure her scalp hadn’t bled. It hadn’t. Not one drop. He’d felt her carotid. No pulse. No breath. Utter stillness. That’s when he’d realized the magnitude of what he’d done, and he experienced a paroxysm of panic. He’d thrown up his dinner in the sink.
Even after retching until he was empty, he was dizzy. His ears were buzzing. His mind was spinning with possible explanations. But he couldn’t land on one that sounded plausible. None would be believed. He would be charged and tried. During the trial, his affair with sexually unrestrained Norma would be exposed as an unquestionable motive. He would be sentenced to hang.
He’d witnessed a hanging once. His father had thought it would be good for his ten-year-old self to see firsthand the wages of sin. It had been ghastly. He didn’t want to die shitting his pants and twitching at the end of a rope.
Clutching his head between his hands, he tore at his hair, and sobbed.
Then as spontaneously as the panic had seized him, it vanished, and was replaced with an in
credible calmness. He thought through the idea that had suddenly occurred to him. He inspected it, looking for pitfalls. It wasn’t without risks, certainly. But he didn’t want to hang.
He’d stepped over Mila’s body, went into his office, and picked up the telephone to call Mayor Croft.
“Gabe?”
The sound of his name jerked him back into the present. Arthur was no longer nursing, but sleeping on his stomach beside Norma on the divan. She frowned. “You were miles away. Were you thinking about her?”
“No.”
She knew he was lying. The first night she had showed up on his doorstep, unexpectedly and near midnight, they had fought over the guilt eating at him. Then, after pitching a temper tantrum, she had cried and begged him to forgive her for being insensitive to his plight.
“You have a reputation to protect. You must preserve it. It’s just that I miss you so much,” she’d whispered into his neck.
That smoky seductiveness was in her voice now as she ran her fingers through his hair. “Thinking about it only distresses you. You did what was necessary for us to be together, Gabe. You see that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s done. We have Arthur. We have each other.” Her lower lip began to tremble. “Would you want to change things back to the way they were before? With her?”
“No. God no. Of course not.”
“Then stop punishing yourself. Instead, take advantage of the reason you did it.” She unbuttoned her dress the rest of the way and laid it open. Except for the chemise wadded up around her waist, she was bare.