Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 36, No. 6, June 1991

The new people: that was us. Brad and Lainie, his first wife, had moved into the subdivision almost twenty-five years ago, both commuting to work on the new expressway. After Lainie left, Brad had stayed for Emily and Tommy’s sake. I’d moved into Brad’s house twenty years ago, quitting my librarian job to take care of the family, writing my poetry between loads of wash. After a few years, the only reminders that Lainie had ever lived there were her infrequent letters to the kids.

I’d grown from young womanhood to middle age in the community. Emily, designing furniture in Chicago now, had been born here. Carol’s younger sister had once dated Tommy, a stockbroker in New York for three years already. Brad still commuted to the West Linden hospital where he was an anesthesiologist and I was still a poet and homemaker, and we were both still “new people” to the natives of Rivers End.

A sheriff’s car honked at the van. Brad revved the engine. “I’ll see you at home,” he said.

“I’ll be right there,” I yelled after the moving van.

Carol called to the boys, and they brought Honey to me. “Gosh, to think if I picked flowers I’d’ve found the bones,” she said wistfully.

She had told me her husband was a traveling salesman. (“No jokes, please.”) With the children at home, she didn’t want to work. I had the feeling she was as bored as I was — as I would have been without my poetry.

“Call me if you hear anything.” I waved to the boys and tugged at Honey’s leash.

Carol nodded. “I’ll buzz Don later tonight. See what he knows.”

Walking home with Honey, I remembered that Helen would be over. My steps slowed. Then I remembered the bones, and my steps quickened.

Helen headed an advertising agency and had more in common with Brad’s first wife, who’d sacrificed her family for her career, than with me. In Helen’s company, my accomplishments — raising two children who weren’t mine and selling my poetry for free copies — seemed less important than a polka dot on one of Princess Di’s dresses. Not tonight, though. For once Helen looked to me for information. She was as fascinated with the bones as Carol and I were.

Talking, I felt myself expand. Every word I said was listened to with the attention Barbara Walters gave to her interviewees. Come to that, Helen resembled Ms. Walters with her dyed and styled hair, her madeup face, her thin-to-the-bone figure.

She picked at the roast, though it was leaner than she was. “Was it a woman’s body or a man’s?”

“I don’t know. All I saw was that one bone. The deputies wouldn’t tell us anything.”

“Probably a woman. They’re usually the victims.” She said it as if she didn’t belong to the sex.

“For Christ’s sake.” Brad’s fist crashed down and my good china jumped. Under the table, Honey barked.

I looked at Brad with more surprise than trepidation. His bursts of temper had come less often as the years had passed. The last time had been when we received our tax bill, and he kicked a hole in the pantry door.

In the beginning of our marriage, I’d been afraid he would turn the violence on me. But he always took his anger out on things. And never in front of his mother.

“Is there a reason for this display of bad manners?” she said, her mouth tight.

Brad looked at her with dislike. I bit my lip. Anything I said would make Brad’s mood uglier.

“I work with death every day,” he said. “I don’t want to hear it dissected over my dinner.”

“My dear son, this isn’t a person we’re discussing. It’s a skeleton. A handful of bones. A mystery.”

I nodded. Exactly. I could hear the award-winning advertiser in Helen’s choice of words. As a poet, I couldn’t have said it better. Why hadn’t I realized before how much we had in common?

But Brad’s face darkened. I took my cue and started chatting about the latest vice-presidential blunder. That always distracted him.

After dinner, Helen rose to help me clear instead of drinking a martini with Brad in the living room as usual. Brad looked as if he were unsure whether to join us or catch the news. In the end, he stomped into the living room, Honey prancing at his heels. It would take more than a few bones for Brad to lift a dirty dish.

I stifled the spurt of bitterness. I’d thought I’d gotten through all that two decades ago, when every one of my friends was talking about women’s rights and I was running a four bedroom home and raising two kids without any help from Brad — except his love and appreciation. After all, wasn’t that what every person wanted, really wanted? To be loved, to be appreciated? Add my poetry, and I was a fulfilled woman.

Helen zoomed in and out of the kitchen as if she were twenty-some years younger than I was instead of at an age to consider retirement. I followed her, my teeth gritted.

In the kitchen, I rinsed the dishes and Helen stacked them in the washer. I turned on the machine. She sat at the table while I poured coffee into two mugs. Neither of us mentioned joining Brad.

“Tell me everything,” she said, leaning toward me.