A Perfect Crime Read Free Page B

her arm.
    She said nothing. Not long after, she rolled over and went to sleep. The compartments in Ned’s brain reopened. The headache returned. His eyes stayed open.
    Francie showered, dressed, made the bed, went downstairs. She washed her wineglass, corked the wine, turned off the generator. Then she stood unmoving in the darkness. The silence was complete, Brenda’s cottage under a spell, as it so often was.
    Francie opened the door, letting in the river sounds, then closed and locked it behind her. Brenda’s key hung anonymously on her key chain, one of many. The moon had risen and in its light she saw mist along the bank, rising with the temperature; the ice had melted away. Francie climbed into the dinghy, cast off, rowed across the west channel to the stone jetty, reflected moons bobbing in her wake. She tied up, redid Ned’s knot—he’d taken
Prosciutto
, as always—substituting two half hitches for his series of lubberly grannies, and glanced back at the cottage: a geometric shadow under the free-form shadows of the elms. The owl rose into the sky, its white wings flashing like a semaphore in the night.
    She drove to the gate, got out, locked it, went on. For five or ten minutes she was alone with dark woods rising on either side, shutting out the sky. Then headlights of another car appeared. That broke the spell; she stepped on the gas like any other exhausted commuter hurrying home, although she wasn’t tired at all.
    The house—on Beacon Hill, but heavily mortgaged and in need of sandblasting and a new roof—was dark, except for the light in the basement office, a big, private space that would have made a perfect bedroom for a teenager, if one had ever come along. Francie let herself in, turned on the lights, checked the messages, checked the mail, opened the fridge, found she was no longer hungry, drank a glass of water. Then she went downstairs, through the laundry room, and stopped outside the closed office door.
    “Roger?” she said. No reply. Was he sleeping on his couch? Francie thought she heard the tapping of computer keys but wasn’t sure. She went upstairs, got into bed, and was almost asleep herself when
oh garden, my garden
took shape in her mind, with those rotten grapes and that skateboarding girl. A teenager, of course. She tried to stop herself from going on in that direction but failed, as she always did. To come into the house, to see a skateboard lying in the front hall and a backpack slung over the banister, to hear strange music rising up from that basement room. Think about something else, Francie.
    Em. She thought of Em. Em would soon be a teenager, although Francie wasn’t sure of her exact age, didn’t know her birthday. Ned almost never talked about her, never at all unless Francie asked, and of course Francie had never seen her, not even a picture. From the absent picture of Em back to
oh garden, my garden
wasn’t a big jump, and from there to an idea: what a present the painting would make for Ned! Was there any way of giving it to him? In some ways they were like spies, governed by the rules of their trade. She was never to call him, he called her, and only on her direct office line; no letters, faxes, E-mail; they met only at the cottage. Preserving his marriage was the reason, and Em was the reason for that. Francie understood. She could keep a secret, in the sense of not telling another person—and in any case had no desire to shout her love from the rooftops—but she hated the spycraft.
    Still, presents were a gray area; he did bring her flowers once in a while when he came to the cottage. Always irises, probably because she had made such a fuss about them the first time. She didn’t particularly like irises, although it didn’t matter much. They had usually wilted by the next time she saw them, the following Thursday. Francie fell asleep, turning over schemes for getting
oh garden, my garden
into Ned’s hands.
    Roger knew she was there, outside the door. He