My Husband's First Wife Died a Saint, Then I Found Her Key novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Workbench

"Not here," Patrick said, in the dark of the coat closet, with the card in his fist. "Not in my mother's house. Midnight. The carriage house."

"She watches that door now."

"Then come over the wall by the pear tree."

I did.

I climbed over a brick wall at midnight in a nightgown and a pair of my own sneakers.

I had never pictured doing that as the wife of an architect.

He had left the lamp off, and one bulb burned over the workbench.

The card lay under it, next to the little brass key.

He was sitting on a stool with his elbows on his knees, and he looked up at me.

He had plainly sat there since dinner.

"She wrote that on the pad by the telephone," he said. "I know the pen. It was a blue felt-tip she bought by the box."

"You're sure."

"I'd know that hand in a burning building."

He turned the card over once more.

"She wasn't afraid of anything," he said. "Not a storm, not a client, not a man three times her size. She once told a bank president to his face that he was reading the contract upside down."

"What was she afraid of?"

"I don't know."

He said it very low.

"I've asked that for three years, and every time somebody told me she was just a delicate girl, I believed them for an afternoon."

I pulled a stool beside his and sat.

"Tell me about the week she went."

He rubbed his face with his hands.

"I fell off a scaffold on the twenty-eighth of September. I woke up on the seventh of October in a bed with my head bolted together. My mother was in the chair."

"And Ivy?" I asked.

"Mother said she'd walked out on the dock on the fourth. They found the scarf and the shoe by the pilings."

"Who found them?" I asked.

He rubbed his jaw. "The sheriff. My mother's cousin's boy."

He looked at the key on the bench.

"The log says he took the call at ten past six that morning," he said. "I read it in the second year. Mother called the sheriff before she called the hospital to tell me."

"Before she called you."

"She phoned the ward at noon. I was sedated, so a nurse took the message and held it for me."

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