Dead to Her

Once a cheat, always a cheat.

Her love was evaporating in the heat of her jealousy and she wanted to turn over and flay him alive with her nails. She forced herself to lie still, trapped under the blanket of night, alone with her dark thoughts. What was Jason thinking on his side of the bed? Quietly planning how he could escape her? Was this how Jacquie, the first wife, had felt? When had her moment come, that second when trust slid into mistrust and love cracked wide, emptying, leaving only the brittle shell?

Jacquie had confronted Jason, and he’d told her it was all in her imagination, stringing her along until he was finally ready to leave. That wouldn’t happen to Marcie. She wasn’t going to let loose with hysterical accusations. Evidence. She needed evidence. There’d be no gaslighting her. She was way smarter and tougher than that.

Of course, the caller might not have been Keisha. Now that Marcie had opened the door of suspicion in her mind, other shadowy suspects emerged onto the stage. Sandy, the secretary? No, surely not. If Jason had wanted to bang her, he’d have done it years ago. Someone at the club? A waitress from the members only – which meant men only, given that wives were members by association – games nights at the club? Everyone knew William had been quite taken with one girl when Eleanor was dying. What was her name? Michelle, wasn’t it? Yes, Michelle from Michigan who was only there for a short while and then went back home to study. It hadn’t been a serious thing, an old man cheering himself up, but what if William’s actions had given Jason an itch for something new or a little something on the side that was now getting out of hand? He’d been behaving oddly – closed off – for a while.

But again her mind returned to Keisha. Beautiful, strong Keisha. A different kind of beauty from hers, just as her own blond delicate look was different from Jacquie’s brunette sophisticated one. Jason wanted control of the firm, did he think he could have William’s wife too? It was almost too audacious, but Jason was nothing if not ambitious.

Her thoughts whirled around and around until she was sure she’d drive herself to a fever of madness, but instead she exhausted herself into an hour or two of fitful sleep, the past and present colliding in her dreams in which she screamed in frustrated rage at her faithless husband and Keisha and Jacquie and others she thought she’d forgotten, until she woke, breathless and sweating, at first light.

She’d hoped to check his phone when he went to take a shower but her breaking heart sank when he took it with him. Another tick in the guilty box. She wasn’t deterred. She’d had plenty of time to think while he dozed before getting up. Jason didn’t stay so good-looking without any effort. He was a man who groomed. He never spent less than fifteen minutes in the bathroom and fifteen minutes might not be long for what she wanted to do, but it was better than nothing. As soon as she heard the water start to run, she scrambled out of bed and darted into his study where his laptop sat on his desk.

The leather seat was cold on her thighs through her thin robe as she quickly flipped open the lid and typed in his password – Atlanta_Braves89 – and the home screen came up. She let out her breath, relieved he hadn’t changed it. She moved the mouse to the bottom of the screen to find the iMessage icon. He may have taken his cell to the bathroom but all his messages would show up here. After a quick glance out to the corridor, she clicked on it. She frowned. Nothing. No messages. How could that be? He was always working in here, having left his phone tossed on the kitchen island or by the bed. He didn’t need it. He could make calls and answer texts from his laptop.

He’d disabled it. That was the only answer. His phone was no longer connected to his laptop and he’d deleted all his message threads. Why would he do that? Secrets. He was keeping secrets from her. New secrets. Maybe Keisha wasn’t the first woman to text him and it had only now occurred to him to remove all trace from the laptop. Cleverer men than Jason had been caught out by messages popping up on iPads and computers.

She’d try WhatsApp. Not that Jason ever used it, but Keisha looked like that kind of girl. A girl about town with various groups like the awful tennis set at the club or the self-proclaimed yummy mummies who spent their days at the spa and then in the bar after leaving their precious children at County Day.

She searched his applications folder. No WhatsApp. That was gone completely. Her heart thrummed faster. That didn’t mean anything in and of itself. He could have been cleaning up his computer and decided he didn’t need it – but combined with iMessage being empty? An app she knew for a fact he used? The whole thing stank of guilt and secrets.

Shaken, she looked at the photo that filled the background of the screen. Jason and Marcie a few years ago, her arms wrapped around his neck, cheeks pressed together, both grinning for the selfie, determined to capture that perfect moment of happiness. She remembered exactly when he’d taken it. Out on a boat. He’d just proposed. Jacquie was finished. Marcie had won. She was still new to all this then – this fascinating life of expensive clothes, nice cars, eating out whenever you felt like it, never looking at the price of things. She was in love – totally and completely – with Jason and everything he could bring to her life. Safety. Security. Respect. Well, despite her recent longing for financial freedom, she didn’t feel very safe or secure any more, and the respect had never been forthcoming. The happy couple in the image, smiling smugly out at her, were like strangers now. What had brought them to this?

She was about to close the lid when she spotted a folder in the corner of the screen. Untitled Folder. That wasn’t like Jason. He was neat and organised. A lawyer. Everything in place and a place for everything. She double-clicked, and it opened. Her stomach lurched in expectation of being presented with awful images of spreadeagled women smiling up at her husband from some awful motel room bed. Just like she used to. Stop it, stop it, stop it, she told herself. This is a path to madness.

Her heart slowed and her face flushed as the dullness of the actual document presented itself. It was only a spreadsheet of some kind. A list of numbers allocated to letters that meant nothing to her. Probably some shorthand for something to do with work. She needed to get a grip.

But still, she thought, as she closed the lid and left his study as she’d found it, heading downstairs to put on the coffee, there was still the phone call.

There was still the lie.

14

Keisha was wide awake and, for once, in a great mood. It was barely eight thirty and she’d only had four hours’ sleep, but the phone call before she’d crept back into bed had put a smile on her face and there was a spring in her step as she grabbed the rose gold MacBook Billy had bought her and headed downstairs. Why shouldn’t she be happy? She just had to be careful, that was all.

‘Would you like some breakfast, ma’am?’ Zelda was over at the walk-in refrigerator, having somehow already been to the store, unpacking individual cartons of odious coconut water, lining them up in the side shelf in pride of place. ‘I’m going to make Mr Radford some eggs and home fries.’ She was behaving perfectly normally, no hint of how she’d stared down at Keisha the night before. Keisha’s skin prickled as she remembered her motionless shadow. The brazenness with which she’d been watched.

‘It’s too early for me.’ She looked at the housekeeper as she meekly emptied the bags. ‘How did you sleep?’

‘Oh, I always sleep like the dead.’

‘Really?’ Keisha poured herself coffee from the machine. ‘I was sure I saw you last night. At your window. It was late. I went into the garden for some air. Cream, please.’

‘You must be mistaken, ma’am. I was in bed early.’ Zelda put the carton of cream on the large island. ‘Would you like a jug?’

‘This is fine.’ You lying spying bitch, Keisha thought, as she said, ‘It must have been a trick of the light then.’ She flashed her best razor smile. What was the woman’s problem? She didn’t like Keisha? So what? It wasn’t her job to like her.

How old was Zelda? she wondered. Old. Fifties, at least. Maybe over sixty. How long had she worked here? Billy probably had told her, but Keisha often found her thoughts drifting away when Billy was talking. She tried to remember. Twenty years? Or was it more? Had she loved Eleanor too? Did she think Keisha was an insult to the first Mrs Radford’s memory? Eleanor, Eleanor, Eleanor. The wife who would not be forced from this house, even in a coffin.

But Eleanor was gone and Zelda would get used to it. Now that it was morning and the sun was shining gloriously bright, Keisha was feeling too zesty to let the housekeeper and her night-time antics bother her, so she took her coffee and her laptop out to the sunroom by the terrace.

She opened a tab to her Gmail with dread, knowing what she was going to find. There was a message from Dolly sent a couple of days before – ‘Hope you’re having fun! Is he dead yet?’ followed by a couple of cry-laugh emojis and then Miss ya!’ and some kisses. There were three emails from Uncle Yahuba. All wanting money. She had to be a good niece. She knew what she had to do: various levels of implied threat. She sighed and closed them down. How was she supposed to send them money? She had a new credit card, true, but it wasn’t as if Billy was filling her bank account with cash. Why couldn’t they be patient? Why couldn’t they all just leave her alone?

They knew how to play her, how to draw on her insecurities and her dark, confused moods. As ever, the echo of Auntie Ayo’s words, spoken when Keisha was only six years old, not long after they took her in, when she’d seen the ghostly boy, haunted her. You got yourself cursed blood, KeKe, it’s there in the cards, no good will come of you.

KeKe. Her mother’s nickname for her, all she remembered of her really. Keisha Kelani, my KeKe. Auntie Ayo and Uncle Yahuba had even taken that from her, and now it was synonymous with her cursed blood. Had Auntie Ayo meant what she said, or was it purely to stop her blabbing her mouth off at school about the boy? She didn’t want to think about the boy. He’d never been there. She knew that. They’d told her. The boy was an error of her crazy mind. The boy was the first sign that she was wrong, a bad seed, unbalanced. She deleted the emails. Her family were thousands of miles away. She didn’t want to think about them today. They could wait. They didn’t have a choice.

‘Honey?’ Billy’s voice, master of the house, echoed through to her. ‘Hey, honey?’

‘Coming!’ she answered, light and frothy. A good wife. Keep him sweet. She grabbed her coffee and went to the breakfast room where she found him drenched in sweat from the treadmill.

‘You’re up early,’ he said, through his mouthful of eggs and fried potato.

‘It’s such a beautiful day.’ Keisha took a seat opposite him. ‘Shame to miss it.’ Zelda brought her some orange juice and a croissant even though she’d said she didn’t want breakfast, and then disappeared off again, taking the empty carton of coconut water away. Billy always downed it in one long swallow, Keisha noted. Maybe he didn’t much care for the flavour of it either, no matter what he said.

She peeled off the edge of her croissant, not sure what to do with it as there was no butter or jam on the table, and ate it dry while watching him shovel food into his mouth. His cheeks were flushed redder than normal, bursting veined beetroots on his face – had he run further and faster to make up for his inadequacies in the bedroom? Trying to recover his masculinity?

‘You’re supposed to dip it in your coffee,’ he said, staring at her as crumbs fell down her top. ‘Like the French do. That’s how Eleanor did it.’ He returned to his plate for a moment, easing his irritation with another mouthful of eggs. The pastry stuck to the roof of Keisha’s mouth, and she cringed once more with her ignorance and the hurt of the open comparison with Eleanor.

‘Sorry,’ she muttered, before tearing off another piece and carefully dipping it into her drink.

‘You’ll learn. Anyway, we need to think about our Fourth of July party.’ Billy finally rested his fork. ‘You want to organise it?’ He smiled at her as if this was some great offering of trust in her wifely abilities.

‘I can try,’ she said, eager for his approval. Kind Billy was always preferable to mean Billy. ‘You’ll have to help me with invites. I only know about five people.’

‘That’ll change, honey.’ He reached for his coffee. ‘Oh, that reminds me, I’ve booked you in for some tennis lessons at the club. We can go down to the pro shop and get you kitted out this morning. Maybe try the driving range too? Work on your swing. The girls here love golf and tennis as much as the guys. You’ll meet some wonderful people. Soon you’ll be running charity galas like it’s second nature.’

‘Sounds wonderful.’ Her heart sank. Golf and charity galas. He was already trying to shrink her into Eleanor’s shape. Who was he trying to kid? Her or himself? She wasn’t like Eleanor and never would be. He was displaying her like a piece of art he picked up on his travels. And calling his friends girls and boys was laughable. They were all so old.

But, she thought as she ate some more of her croissant, she’d play the game for the time being.

She had no choice.

15

It had been a bad couple of days. Alone in the house, Marcie stared into her box of private things. She’d tossed the photo of Jason and her over the side, resisting every urge to tear it up and flush it. While she’d tried to keep her suspicions to herself and behave normally, he’d been coming home late, snappy and distracted. He’d rarely had his phone out of his pocket and when it was, he put it face down. Casually, as if accidentally, but she knew better than that. This wasn’t his first rodeo. You’d think he’d have learned not to be so obvious. He hadn’t even mentioned trying for a baby or wanting sex, which until she turned up had been the only addition to their new house he seemed interested in.

She thumbed through the various pieces of old paper, all folded tightly, reluctant to be examined. Things she wished she could throw away, but knew she had to keep. Documents she might need one day. Relics of the past. This ritual of hers was normally a comfort, a reminder of how far she’d come – now she was trying to find her old strength in it. Maybe she’d have to be that person again. Someone who had the power and resolve to start over from nothing. And do it fabulously. But this life had softened her. The very thought of what she’d done then was exhausting. She no longer had the balls she’d had in her twenties. A couple of weeks ago she’d been feeling suffocated and quietly longing for some freedom and now she was terrified of losing this smothering safety. No, she realised. She wasn’t afraid of losing it. What she couldn’t stand was the thought of someone else daring to take it from her. She hadn’t changed that much in the past decade.

She closed the lid and hid the box in the ceiling before taking a deep breath to pull herself together. She looked in the mirror. There were dark rings under her eyes but nothing that some carefully applied concealer wouldn’t hide. She had to keep a cool head. She would not become the paranoid wife – at least not visibly. Whatever he was doing, Jason wouldn’t divorce her. Certainly not yet. It had taken long enough to make him picture a life without Jacquie, and where one divorce could be forgiven in this polite world they inhabited, she wasn’t so sure he’d get away with two, however many people might privately gossip that she was getting what she deserved. Not combined with what his father had done. The fine families of the South would start to withdraw. Jason came from good stock, but certainly not the best.

How far back could the Maddox name claim heritage? A century? Longer? Certainly not as far as William, Noah, Eleanor and Iris’s families. They were American blue bloods. Never a shameful moment of history with their ancestors, if the way they told it was to be believed. No doubt anything that might harm their good names had been smoothed away with cold hard cash. Maybe that was the shackle that bound them. All that virtuous goodness constantly on show. Not like her own tribe.

She started to brush brown shadow onto her eyelids, highlighting her blue eyes. There had been no virtue in her family. Scrabbling for dollars. Living on welfare. Looked down on by everyone. Resenting every new accidental mouth to feed as if it were the baby’s fault rather than that no one had thought to stick a rubber on his dick or get some birth control. Never enough money to go around. She imagined William’s blood to be a rich red wine. Hers would stink of rust. Name had never counted for anything good in the trailer park in Boise.

As each layer of make-up went on, she felt better. She drew some satisfaction too from her small act of revenge yesterday while Jason was at work; she’d ordered three divine new pieces of furniture for the second dining room out at the back of the house. They were one-offs and handmade to order. Eye-wateringly expensive for a room they’d probably never use and which Jason had been insistent they didn’t need to furnish straight away. Her stomach clenched at the thought of the argument to come when he got the bill, but she reminded herself he deserved it. He’d lied. He was lying, constantly, about something. Or someone.

She dressed in a slim-fitting pantsuit, consumed by the memory of that lie.

Just needed the bathroom.

The few words that had forced the widening cracks in her marriage to finally shatter. It hadn’t helped that over the past day or so she’d come to the lonely conclusion that she didn’t have a friend she could call and confide in. Someone to reassure her and calm her down. Iris was away, and although she could be snooty she was sage. There was no one else Marcie could trust to listen sympathetically without then blabbing to all and sundry that Marcie Maddox thought her husband had fallen out of love with her. People might be endlessly polite face to face here, but one thing she’d learned was, good lord, this city loved to gossip.

Shopping, she decided. She’d go shopping. Buy herself some new clothes. Revamp her look. Something less middle-aged. Something cool like the stuff the kids wore at the club. The kids. They were only a year or two younger than Keisha, most of them. Shopping always made her feel better – adding to her possessions so she didn’t have to face how lonely she was. Jason had brought her into this world, and all she had now was him. She didn’t share the years of friendship the others had. She didn’t have co-workers to laugh with. She really had nothing of her own any more except Jason, and now they were broken.

She wanted to wear her vintage Hermès scarf tied around her throat like a Sixties’ movie star. She loved that scarf. It made her feel bold rather than a pale ghost of a beauty who once was. Where had she put it?

She groaned. The last place she’d worn it had been to the mission. Her heart sank. And it was Wednesday today. If she went to pick it up the other volunteers would all side-eye guilt her into staying for her two-hour shift, the one she’d promised Virginia she’d do.

Just needed the bathroom.

Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to go and do the hours. There could come a time when she’d need these friends on her side and as much as there was something snide about Virginia, she’d make a better ally than an enemy if Jason was doing the dirty. Women tended to rally in those situations in a there but for the grace of God go I kind of way.

The mission then, she thought, leaving her glorious new house that now felt like a paper castle, and then she’d shop. Build a protective wall of expensive clothing around her damaged heart.

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