I did, however, find a chair pulled out from the kitchen table at a sloppy angle, and Rita’s shoes flung haphazardly down beside it. Her work was once again piled up on the table, and her blouse hung messily from the back of the chair. Across the room I saw a yellow square stuck to the refrigerator and I went over to look; it was a Post-it note, presumably from Rita, although the scrawled words did not look like her usual neat handwriting. The note was stuck to the freezer door and it said, “Brian called—where were you!?!” It had taken her two tries to write the “B” in “Brian,” and the last word was crookedly underlined three times; the point of the pen had gone all the way through and made a small tear in the paper.
It was only a small yellow note, but something about it made me pause, and I stood there by the refrigerator for a moment, holding the Post-it and wondering why it troubled me. It was surely not the slapdash handwriting; no doubt Rita was simply tired, frazzled by rushing out of work after a long tense day of fighting her annual crisis at work, and then hustling three kids through the hot and crowded Miami evening and into a burger joint. It was enough to make anybody tense up, grow weary, and …
… and lose the ability to make the letter “B” properly?
That didn’t make any sense at all. Rita was a precise person, neurotically neat and methodical. It was one of the qualities I admired in her, and mere fatigue and frustration had never before dimmed her passion for doing things in an orderly way. She had faced many hardships in her life, like her disastrous first marriage to the physically abusive drug addict, and she had always dealt with the violent disorder of life by making it stand up straight, brush its teeth, and put its laundry in the hamper. For her to scrawl a messy note and leave her shoes and clothing scattered across the floor like this was very much out of character, and a clear indication that, um … what?
Last time it had been a spilled glass of wine—had it spilled because she’d had more than one? And done the same thing again tonight?
I went back over to the kitchen table and looked down at where Rita had sat and left her shoes, and I looked at it as a trained and highly skilled forensics technician. The angle of the left shoe showed a lack of motor control, and the sloppily hanging blouse was a definite indication of lessened inhibition. But just for the sake of scientific confirmation I walked over to the big covered trash can by the back door. Inside the can, underneath a scattering of paper towels and junk mail, was an empty bottle that had recently contained red wine.
Rita was enthusiastic about recycling—but here was an empty bottle stuffed into the trash can and covered over
with paper. And I did not remember seeing the bottle when it was full, and I am usually very familiar with what is in my kitchen. This was a whole bottle of merlot, and it should have been visible almost anywhere in the kitchen. But I hadn’t seen it. That meant that either Rita had gone to some trouble to hide it—or else she bought the bottle tonight, drank it all in one sitting, and forgot to recycle.
This was not a glass of wine while she worked and I ordered pizza. This was a whole bottle—and worse, she drank it when I was out of the house, leaving the children unwatched and unprotected.
She was drinking far too much, and far too often. I had assumed that she was just sipping a little wine as a way of dealing with the temporary stress—but this was more than that. Had some other unknown factor suddenly changed Rita into an emerging lush? And if so, wasn’t I supposed to do something about it? Or should I wait until she began to miss work and neglect the children?
From down the hall, as if on cue, I heard Lily Anne begin to cry, and I hurried into the bedroom to her crib. She was kicking her feet and waving her arms around, and when I lifted her out of her little bed it was obvious why. Her diaper was bulging out against her sleepy suit, full to overflowing. I glanced at Rita; she was facedown on the bed, snoring, one arm flung up and the other pinned under her. Clearly, Lily Anne’s fussing had not penetrated the fog of her sleep, and Rita had failed to change the baby’s diaper before she went to bed. It was not at all like her—but then, neither was secret and excessive wine drinking.
Lily Anne kicked her feet harder and moved the volume of her crying up a few notches, and I took her over to the changing table. Her problem was clear and immediate and it was something I could deal with simply. Rita would take some thought, and it was too late at night for thinking. I got the baby changed into a dry diaper and rocked her until she stopped fussing and went back to sleep. I put her back in the crib, and went over to my bed.
Rita lay there in the exact same position, sprawled unmoving across two-thirds of the bed. She might have been dead, except for the snoring. I looked down at her and wondered what was going on in that pleasant-looking blond head. She had always been totally reliable, completely predictable and dependable, never deviating even one small step from her basic pattern of behavior. It was one of the reasons I had decided it was a good idea to marry her—I almost always knew exactly what she would do. She was like a perfect little toy railroad set, whirring around the same track, past the same scenery, day after day without change.
Until now—clearly she had gone off the tracks for some reason, and I had the unpleasant idea that I was supposed to deal with it in some way. Should I stage an intervention? Force her to go to an AA meeting? Threaten to divorce her and make her keep the kids? This was all foreign turf to me, ideas that were in the syllabus for Advanced Marriage, a postgraduate course in the area of human studies, and I knew almost nothing about it.
But whatever the answer might be, I was not going to figure it out tonight. After the long workday, dealing with Shadowblog and whimpering coworkers and Detective Knucklehead, I was bone-tired. A thick and stupid cloud of fatigue had spread over my brain and I had to sleep before I did anything else.
I rolled Rita’s limp body over to her side of the bed and climbed under the sheet. I needed sleep, as much as possible, and right now, and almost as soon as my head hit the pillow I was unconscious.
The alarm woke me up at seven, and as I slapped it off, I had the entirely unreasonable feeling that everything was going to be all right. I had gone to bed with the worry bin full: Rita and Shadowblog and Camilla Figg—and during the night something had come along and swept away all my fretting. Yes, there were problems. But I would deal with them; I always had before, and I would this time. It was entirely illogical, I know, but I was filled with relaxed confidence instead of the bone-tired anxiety of last night. I have no idea why the change had happened; maybe it was the effect of deep and dreamless sleep. In any case, I woke up into a world where unreasonable optimism seemed like common sense. I am not saying I heard birds singing in the golden sunlight of a perfect dawn, but I did smell coffee and bacon coming from the kitchen, which was a far better thing than any singing bird I have ever heard. I showered and dressed, and when I got to the kitchen table there was a plate of sunny-side-up eggs waiting for me, with three crisp strips of bacon on the side, and a mug of hot and strong coffee on the table next to it.
“You were out awfully late,” Rita said as she cracked an egg into the skillet. For some reason, it sounded almost like she was accusing me of something, but since that made no sense, I decided it was just the residual effect of too much wine.
“Camilla Figg was killed last night,” I said. “The woman I work with?”
Rita turned from the stove, spatula in her hand, and looked at me. “So you were working?” she said, and once again that too-much-wine-last-night edge was in her voice.
“Yes,” I said. “They didn’t find her until late in the day.”
She watched me for a few seconds, and then finally shook her head. “That would explain it, wouldn’t it,” she said, but she kept looking at me as if it didn’t explain anything.
It made me a bit uneasy; why was she staring like that? I glanced down to make sure I was wearing pants, and I was. When I looked up again, she was still staring.
“Is something wrong?” I said.
Rita shook her head. “Wrong?” she said. She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Is something wrong, he wants to know?” She looked at me with her hands on her hips and tapped one toe impatiently. “Why don’t you tell me if something’s wrong, Dexter?”
I looked back at her with surprise. “Um,” I said, wondering what the right answer was, “as far as I know, nothing is wrong. I mean, nothing out of the ordinary …?” It seemed like a sadly inadequate answer, even to me, and Rita clearly agreed.
“Oh, good, nothing’s wrong,” she said. And she just kept looking at me, raising one eyebrow and tapping her toe like she was expecting more, even though what I had already said was so very feeble.
I glanced behind her to the stove; smoke was rising from the pan, where fragrant steam should have been. “Um, Rita?” I said carefully. “I think something’s burning?”
She blinked at me, and then, as she understood what I had said, she whipped around to the stove. “Oh, shit, look at that,” she said, leaping forward with the spatula raised. “No, shit, look at the time,” she added in a voice that was rising with what must have been frustration. “Damn it, why can’t it— There’s just never any— Cody? Astor? Come get your breakfast! Now!” She scraped two eggs out of the pan, threw in a pat of butter, and broke two more eggs into the pan in a series of motions so rapid that it seemed like one move. “Kids? Now! Come on!” she said. She glanced at me again—and then hesitated for just a moment, looking down at me. “I just— We need to …” She shook her head, as if she couldn’t think what the words might be in English. “I didn’t hear you come in last night,” she said, the end of the sentence trickling off weakly.
And I might have said that last night she wouldn’t have heard the Queen’s Own Highland Regiment marching through the house with bagpipes skirling, but I had no idea what she wanted me to say, and why ruin a lovely morning trying to find out? Besides, my mouth was full of egg yolk, and it would have been rude to talk through the food. So I just smiled and made a dismissive sound and ate my breakfast. She looked at me expectantly for a moment more, but then Cody and Astor trudged in, and Rita turned away to hurry their breakfast onto the table. The morning went on in its perfectly normal way, and I was once more feeling the feebleminded glimmer of unfounded hope I woke up with as I drove in to work through the crawling traffic.