Page 70 of Don’t Tell Me How to Die

SIXTY-EIGHT

I still had one more critical assignment on my middle-aged Nancy Drew things-to-do list.

“Find proof that Alex knows about you and the chief,” Johnny had said.

“What am I looking for?” I asked.

“Beats me. It could be anything—pictures, videos, maybe he hired a private detective and there’s a written report. But it also could be electronic, like a flash drive, a memory stick, or one of those cloud thingies. I don’t know shit about computers, but you’ve got teenagers. Maybe they can explain it to you.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “I’ll just say, ‘Hey, kids, Daddy is planning to kill Mommy. Can you help me hack into his cloud thingy so I can find out what he has on me?’”

“You love doing this, don’t you?” Johnny said.

“Doing what?”

“You dig yourself a hole, and then you act like I’m the one with the shovel. All I know is that Alex is not going to murder his wife on a rumor. He needs hard evidence. Your job is to find it.”

I spent the next three days looking. I searched the house from top to bottom and back again. When Alex was asleep, I went to the garage and combed through every inch of his car.

Everything on his computer was password protected. But he accumulated so many passwords that he had to install a password manager to keep track of them all. Then he realized that if anything happened to him, I wouldn’t be able to access our bank accounts, credit cards, insurance policies, or any of the countless websites that secure our electronic secrets.

So he gave me his master password. “It’s not an invitation to go through my stuff,” he said to me, half joking, half serious. “It’s just in case of emergency.”

I’d never been interested in his stuff , but I decided that saving my life qualified as an emergency, and I scoured his home computer.

I found nothing. Three days later I met Johnny at the diner, prepared to give him the bad news. But as soon as I sat down, he handed me a lab report.

“You were right,” he said. “The tea was laced with vitamin D—about twenty times the daily dose. Not enough to kill you, but over time, the toxicity builds up, and it leads to heart irregularities, kidney failure, and death.”

I could barely breathe. A wave of powerful emotions flooded over me now that my worst fears were fact. Shock. Anger. Despair. Heartbreak. Betrayal. But most of all, I ached for the life Alex and I could have had.

“I’m sorry,” Johnny said. “But at least now we know for sure.”

I shrugged. It wasn’t exactly the kind of consolation prize to get excited about.

“What did you find?” he asked.

“Nothing. I searched everywhere. The basement, the attic, his office, his car, his computer—I can’t find a thing.”

“Then keep looking.”

“To what end?” I asked. “You just proved that he’s trying to poison me. Who cares how he found out about me and Van?”

“Because in the words of the famous Chinese philosopher, ‘The more you know, the better off you are.’”

“If you mean Aristotle, I believe the actual quote is ‘The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.’ And he was Greek, not Chinese.”

“Fine. He was Greek. But the restaurant where I read the quote was Chinese. Look, Mayor Dunn, if somebody tipped off Alex, that’s one more person who knows about your affair. That person has the power to destroy your life. We have to find out who they are.”

“You’re right,” I said. “But I’ve looked everywhere. There’s nothing.”

“There’s got to be something, Maggie. Go through the house again. And if you can’t find anything there, search his office at the hospital.”

“He’d never put anything that private in his office,” I said. “Too many prying eyes.”

“What about the boat?”

The boat . Alex’s private little retreat. Another simple but brilliant Johnny Rollo idea. As soon as he said it, I knew he was right. Johnny, of course, could read me in an instant.

“You look like Wile E. Coyote when the light bulb goes on over his head,” he said.

“That’s a laugh riot, Johnny,” I said. “When I’m dead, see if you can work it into the eulogy.”

I drove to the marina. When Alex bought the boat and gave me the first official tour, he proudly pointed out its cool secret storage compartments. One, which I made him promise he would never show the kids, was the gun case under the bunk beds.

I got down on my hands and knees and ran my fingers along the bottom of the teak bed frame until I finally found a seam. I pried at it gingerly, somehow irrationally reluctant to sacrifice a fingernail to save my own life. No luck. And then I remembered what Alex had said.

“Even if the kids do spot it, they might try to jimmy it, but it won’t budge. You can’t pull it open. You’ve got to tap the hidden switch.”

Tap, don’t pull . But tap where? I wish I’d paid more attention when he showed me. Starting at the head of the bed, I began hitting the wooden base with the heel of my hand. I worked my way along, and the more I tapped, the more I felt like an idiot. And then I heard the electronic click, and like the bottom of a cash register, a drawer slid out from the base of the bed.

The gun was still in there. I took it as a minor victory. At least Alex wasn’t ready to shoot me in my sleep. There was also a wad of cash and an envelope marked private and confidential that had been mailed to Alex at the hospital.

I took out the contents. First a photo of Alex, me, and the kids that had run on the front page of the Heartstone Gazette the day after I was elected mayor. Someone had written the words “Perfect Family” across it in red Sharpie.

Next came a packet of about a dozen pages stapled together. On the cover the sender with the red Sharpie had scrawled “Not So Perfect Wife.”

I turned the page. My stomach wrenched as I stared at the printed screenshot of me, naked, straddling Van, my back arched, my head tilted up, my mouth wide open as the surveillance camera captured my sexual frenzy in midscream. The date and time were digitally burned into the corner of the image lest Alex wonder where he was at the exact moment I was violating our marriage vows.

I was loath to look at the rest, but I flipped through the pages. More of the same. Different times, different days, different positions. Every one of them grounds for ending our marriage.