His Partner's Wife. Janice Johnson Kay

Terror smacked her next. She froze, her own accelerated heartbeat as loud as a snare drum through a thin wall. Had she really seen a man lying in Stuart’s den? With his head…

      She didn’t want to think about his head.

      Through the half-open door she could see into her bedroom. It lay still and empty, just as she’d left it. The bed was made, the pinwheel quilt without even a depression left by the cat. The closet doors were closed. What she couldn’t see was what lay—or stood—behind the door: her dresser, the second closet that still held some of Stuart’s things, the doorway to the master bath. Somebody could be in there, waiting, listening to her heartbeat, her choked breathing.

      Somebody could also be hidden in the den with the body or in her sewing room, or downstairs, closing off her escape from the house.

      Forward or back? Her mind felt as paralyzed as her legs. Think! she told herself fiercely.

      The master bedroom door had a lock, if she dashed in.

      A dumb little lock that she’d picked herself with a hair pin.

      Back, then, she decided.

      Natalie eased slowly down the hall, trying to watch the three partially open doorways and the downstairs at the same time. She checked only briefly at the den. Yes, a man lay facedown on the gray carpet, and the back of his head seemed to have…well, imploded. She shuddered.

      This door, too, blocked her sight line to part of the room. She did not linger for more than the brief second she needed to be sure she hadn’t imagined the horror. Down the stairs. There she clutched the banister, white-knuckled, and scanned the living room and what she could see of the dining room. The familiarity comforted and jarred at the same time. If somebody had been murdered upstairs, why hadn’t the downstairs been tossed? If he was hiding in the kitchen, why was the morning newspaper open precisely where she’d left it on the table after breakfast? Why was the bread machine beeping as though nothing was wrong?

      Natalie recognized that she was on the verge of hysteria. Now, she told herself, and ran for the front door. She was sobbing as she struggled with the knob, finally winning the right to stumble out. Slamming the door behind her, she raced to the car, grateful—oh, so grateful—that it wasn’t parked in the garage. She had the presence of mind to check the back seat before she fell in and locked all the doors. Cell phone…oh, God. It was in her purse, which sat on the hall table. There was no way she was going back in.

      On another lurch of terror, she realized that, unfortunately, the car keys were in her purse, too.

      She did not want to get out of the car. She also had no choice.

      Her nearest neighbors on each side didn’t get home from work until nearer seven. The new people on the corner, she didn’t know. The Porters. She grasped at the thought of the couple, he just past retirement age, she the perpetual housewife. They’d be home. They were always home, nosy and dissatisfied with their neighbors’ conduct. Their ranch house with manicured lawn and unnatural edging of bedding plants was across the street and two doors down.

      Natalie took slow, deep breaths, made herself unlock the car door with shaking hand and get out. Nothing moved behind the windows of her house. Whoever had been there was surely long gone.

      At least, one of them was long gone. The other… She swallowed dryly. The other would leave in a body bag.

      She didn’t quite run to her neighbors’, but she came close. Their doorbell gonged deep in the recesses of the house. For a moment, the silence made her fear the Porters were, unbelievably, not home. How could that be? Everyone in the neighborhood swore they never went out, even to grocery shop, although Mrs. Porter grumbled about Safeway’s produce and Thrift-way’s service, just as she did about the mail carrier—who threw the mail to the back of the box—and the new people on the corner who didn’t mow often enough. Natalie didn’t know what the Porters said about her. Right now, she didn’t care.

      Please be home.

      Above her heartbeats she heard a footstep, and then the rattle of a chain. Trust the Porters to bother, in a town that had yet to have a serial killer going door to door.

      But there was that dead man in Stuart’s den.

      The door opened; Mrs. Porter peered around it. The suspicion altered instantly and the door swung wider. “My dear! What’s wrong?”

      “I…” For all the world, Natalie couldn’t seem to get further. Her mouth only worked.

      Mrs. Porter, miraculously, drew her in and locked the door behind her. “Come in here and sit down,” she said firmly. “There you go.” She steered Natalie into the living room, eased her into a wing chair and patted her hand. “Can you tell me now?”

      “What is it?” Mr. Porter asked from the doorway. He looked stooped, his hair whiter than Natalie remembered. It seemed as though he’d aged ten years in the one he’d been retired.

      “Hush,” his wife said. “Give her a minute.”

      “I…” Stuck again, Natalie closed her eyes. Big mistake. As though her mind had snapped a digital photo available for instant review, there he was. White bits of bone and brown hair matted with blood. Gray tissue. Her stomach heaved and she pressed a hand to her mouth.

      “You’re ill.” Mrs. Porter half rose.

      “No.” Natalie swallowed. She could not give in to the nausea. Not yet. “I…I just got home from work. And there’s somebody in my house.” Above their twittering, she finished. “Somebody dead.”

      They were amazingly kind and efficient. Mr. Porter called the police. Mrs. Porter wrapped an afghan about Natalie’s shoulders and vanished briefly to return with a cup of tea. The warm, sweet brew settled her stomach as nothing else could have. Her neighbors waited with her, Mr. Porter stationed at the front window.

      A color commentator, he peered through the crack between the drapes, announcing the arrival of a squad car. “No, two,” he corrected himself. “They’ve gotten out and they’re circling your house. Going in.”

      Natalie pictured the uniformed officers, guns drawn. What if she had somehow imagined the corpse in Stuart’s den? No. She couldn’t have. She hadn’t known that was how a skull would look if bashed in. She wished she could have continued in blissful ignorance.

      “There’s a plain car now,” her neighbor continued.

      Sipping her tea, huddled in the afghan, comforted by the delicate, papery touch of Mrs. Porter’s hand patting her every few moments, Natalie saw the scene through his eyes: two big men in suits conferring with the patrol officer who had come out of the house. Both disappearing inside briefly, then reappearing. Glancing down the street, spotting the Porter’s house. She knew before the knock when they arrived on the doorstep.

      Please, please, let them be friends, she prayed. Not strangers.

      Most of all, she quite fiercely wanted John McLean. He’d told her of Stuart’s death, carried one corner of her husband’s coffin, scraped out the gutters on her eaves last January, painted the house this July. He was quiet, soft-spoken, solid, her bulwark. He had been Stuart’s partner and, she supposed, was watching out for her from a sense of obligation to her husband rather than from real friendship for her. Nonetheless, she couldn’t imagine what she would have done without him this past year. She wished she had told Mr. Porter to ask for him.

      But Natalie knew that, even if she had thought of it, she wouldn’t have asked. She never called John, except a time or two to suggest he bring his children to dinner. Natalie refused to be the stereotype of a lonely widow, the kind of woman who needed a man at her beck and call, or at least wanted one. Her pride barely let her accept his help when he offered it.

      The doorbell rang, and Mr. Porter went to let the officers in. On a rush of relief almost painful in its intensity, Natalie recognized the slow, deep voice of Stuart’s former partner before he filled the entry to the living room. At about six feet, John McLean wasn’t unusually tall, but his shoulders were broad