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“I thought I’d give it a try. You were right. It’s invigorating.”
They circled each other for a few minutes, chatting. Wendy had no intention of trying to drown Alex on this particular day. She was still fact-finding, still even deciding if this was something she wanted to do, or something she felt she could get away with.
“Not too cold for you?” Alex said. It was strange talking to what looked like a disembodied head bobbing on a misty surface, although she could make out the shifting fleshy abstraction of his submerged body.
“No, I like it, but I don’t plan on staying in much longer.”
“Have you seen the log?” he said.
“What log?”
“It’s been here for years. Come with me.”
She followed him to the shadiest area, where an enormous log, the size of a telephone pole, bobbed gently. “The key is to get on top of it and stay balanced. Here, hold it for me.”
Wendy, now beginning to shiver a little, wrapped her arm over the slippery, mossy surface as Alex clambered on top and straddled it. She was happy to see he was wearing swim trunks. He placed his hands on the top of the log and stood up in one fluid movement, his stringy body tensing with the effort to stay on top. He was upright for about three seconds, grinning down at her before losing his footing and crashing back into the water.
“Your turn,” he said when his head reemerged.
“Maybe some other day, Alex,” Wendy said. “I’m cold and I’m going to get out now.”
“I can warm you up,” he said, propelling himself toward her, one of his hands sliding around the small of her back. His face was alarmingly close, and Wendy somehow resisted the urge to push him off of her. “What happens under the water doesn’t really happen, you know? It’s another realm with different rules.”
He slid his hand off her hip and took hold of her wrist. For a moment she thought he was performing some kind of underwater dance move, then realized that he was placing her hand forcefully onto the rather unimpressive bulge in his swimming shorts. Wendy squeezed, relatively hard, and watched Alex’s face flicker through several emotions. Lust, surprise, pain, fear.
“Is this what you had in mind?”
“Um.” He was moving his hips backward and she let go of him, then laughed.
“I really am getting out of the water now. Maybe if I come back we can test your water-realm story, but no one knows I’ve come here this morning. I’d like you to keep it that way, okay?”
“God, of course. I won’t tell a soul. I already know that you have secrets, Wendy, don’t forget it.”
The way he said those words caused a flare of hatred in Wendy, and she knew in an instant that she wasn’t just fantasizing about murdering Alex.
“No one,” Wendy said one more time.
He mimed locking his lips then throwing the key away.
Wendy, satisfied, turned and swam quickly back toward her rock. After she’d clambered up and wrapped her large white beach towel around her, she turned back to see Alex still holding on to the submerged log. Returning to the path, Wendy saw where Alex had hung his towel, plus a long, thick robe. She kept walking, wondering how long he’d stay in the water.
Back at home she thought about how she’d do it. Maybe she could somehow attach a lead pipe or something like it to the log and thenshe’d lure him back there, tell him she wanted to try and stand on top of it herself, then get hold of the lead pipe and bash him in the head. Professor Alex Deighton, in the quarry, killed with a lead pipe. A few years earlier Jason had gone through a brief obsession with the board game Clue. She’d been excited at first, remembering it from her own childhood, until she realized what a dull game it truly was. The only good parts were the descriptions of the suspects and the rooms and the murder weapons. Where did one get a lead pipe, exactly? And she couldn’t imagine that it would be easy to bash Alex on the head while she was floating in water. She discarded the idea.
What if she simply took him in her arms in the middle of the quarry, wrapped her legs around him, and held him under the water. He was a small man, not much bigger than Wendy, and quite a bit older. How hard could it be? Once upon a time, in another life, Wendy’s father had drowned in their bathtub when Wendy was just a teenager. She’d never forgotten her mother, Rose, telling her afterward that drowning was a pleasant way to die, almost like falling asleep. And if Alex somehow fought his way out of her embrace, she could apologize and say she was overcome by passion. He might suspect her, but it wasn’t something he would bring to the police. In that way, it was kind of a foolproof plan.
iii
She went back to the quarry two more times that summer, once in the second week of July, a Monday morning, no sign of Alex. She decided to swim anyway. It was a warm dawn, the air still and the light soft. She stripped down to her bathing suit and stepped gingerly out along the flat ledge of a mossy rock. When she was ankle-deep, she realized the water was almost the exact temperature of the air. On a whim she quickly shucked off her suit, throwing it so that it landedon her pile of clothes, then did a shallow dive into the perfect water. She stayed in for close to thirty minutes, slowly making her way back and forth, happy that Alex hadn’t been at the quarry, although expecting to see him emerge from the woods at any moment.
When she returned home that morning, relaxed and dreamy, she felt certain that she really did want to kill Alex. He was a loathsome man. Not just that, but a loathsome man who felt as though he had the upper hand on her. Plus, more and more these days, Thom seemed to be beaten down by his position in life, his perceived failures. With Alex gone, the job of department chair would be his for the taking. His life would open up in a way that her life had opened up years ago after her first husband had died.
But there was something else as well, a feeling that was hard to put into words. Taking a life would allow her to cross that boundary that her husband had crossed for her all those years ago. It was an experience she wanted for herself. She’d plotted a murder before, of course, but part of her wondered how she’d fare at the actual moment of death. It was knowledge she didn’t have. Very few people did, but Thom, her husband, was one of them. Maybe it would help her to understand him more. Years ago, she felt she understood almost everything about him, that she could see him as clearly as she saw herself. They were bound by their twinhood, after all. But these days Thom’s interior life was more and more of a mystery; she was aware that there was a black hole inside him, eating away at his health, his confidence, his sobriety. Maybe killing Alex would give her some insight into that black hole. At the very least it would equalize them.
Just over a week later, as she walked through the cool shadows of the woodland path to the quarry, she seemed to know for a certainty that Alex would be there. It was cool and overcast, the air filled with a dusting of mist, as though she were moving through a cloud. When she reached her rock she could hear him, the rhythmic disturbance of the water his sidestroke made, before she saw him,that dark head slicing out of the fog. A calm came over her. She even gently folded the clothes she’d removed before diving into the water herself. It had only been a week and a half since she’d been here, but the water now seemed warmer than the air. She did a careful breaststroke out toward Alex, now waiting for her at the deepest point in the quarry.
“You’ve come back,” he said.
“Are you surprised?”