My Duplicated Husband novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Pinky

She checks his hands for the marks her dead husband carried and finds none, then the dead man's phone lights up with a message.

I washed the dirt off my hands in the garden hose before I went back inside.

He had cleared the table and stacked the plates.

He was drying the last glass with a dish towel, and he set it down when he saw my face.

"Lyddie, you're shaking."

"It's cold out," I said. "Sit down. Let me look at your wrists."

"They're fine."

"They're not. Sit."

He sat.

I went to the cabinet and took out the first aid kit.

I needed something to do with my hands and a reason to touch him.

I knelt in front of his chair and took his left hand in both of mine.

It was warm.

It was real.

The skin was dry and rough, and the nails were bitten down.

I turned it over and made a show of studying the raw ring around his wrist.

Then I looked at his little finger.

It was straight.

Three years ago my husband broke his left pinky at the yard, or so he told me.

It healed crooked, bent hard to the side.

I'd watched the man in the rug lie on my living room floor with that finger curled against his palm.

This finger lay flat and long, the way it had on our wedding day.

"What are you doing?" he asked softly.

"Looking."

I pushed the flannel sleeve up his right arm.

The week after his father's funeral, my husband had come home with a shiny pink burn across his forearm.

He said the welding torch slipped.

This arm was smooth and pale all the way to the elbow.

There was nothing there.

I sat back on my heels.

My throat hurt.

"You're left-handed," I said.

"Yes."

"Show me."

He frowned, but he picked up the pencil from the grocery pad on the table.

He wrote LYDIA across the top in thick, backward-leaning capitals with his left hand, the way he did on every birthday card I ever got.

For the first three years of our marriage, I got those cards.

Then I got a husband who signed everything with his right hand and said his shoulder bothered him.

I hadn't thought about it.

Grief does strange things to men, I'd told myself.

"What's wrong?" he said. "Tell me what I'm missing."

"I need you to answer something."

"Anything."

"The night we got married."

"We danced to the Otis Redding song, and your aunt cried, and my father pretended he wasn't." He smiled a little. "Is that the one?"

"Everybody knows that."

His smile went away.

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he said, very quietly, "You lost a pearl earring."

I didn't breathe.

"It fell off while we were out on the dock, after everyone left."

"It went in the lake between two boards, and you started crying."

"I dove in after it, in my good shirt and my wedding shoes."

"Lorne."

"I was down there forty minutes."

"It was October and the water was like knives. I never found it."

His voice cracked.

"You made me swear I'd never tell your mother."

I put both hands over my mouth.

I had never told anyone.

Neither had he.

I'd checked, over and over, and the man who died on my floor had never once mentioned that night.

He had never mentioned anything from before.

"So," he said, trying to smile. "Do I pass?"

I started to cry.

I couldn't help it.

He slid off the chair onto his knees and pulled me against him.

His arms were so thin I could feel every rib.

He smelled like soap and old wool and the lake.

He did not smell like whiskey.

"Shh," he said into my hair. "I've got you. I'm here now. I'm not going anywhere."

I held on to him with my fists in the flannel.

Over his shoulder, in the quiet, I heard a buzzing.

It was coming from the kitchen drawer, the one with the dish towels.

The phone I'd taken from the dead man's jacket.

I went rigid.

He felt it and pulled back.

"What is that?"

"My phone," I said. "Spam. I'll turn it off."

I got up on unsteady legs, crossed to the drawer, and opened it just wide enough to slide my hand in.

The screen was lit up on top of the towels.

There was a name at the top of the message.

D.

Under it, two lines.

Where are you? You never came to the cabin.

Answer me or I'm coming to the house.

I stared at it.

Cabin.

Three years of late nights, and a husband who said he was working at the yard.

Three years of perfume on his collar.

I had thought I knew what the cabin was.

I thought it was somewhere he kept a woman.

I shut the drawer slowly.

"Who's D?" he said behind me.

I turned.

He was still on his knees on the floor, watching me with those tired gray-green eyes.

"Nobody," I said. "A wrong number."

A car door slammed in the driveway.

Then another sound came from the front of the house, the three sharp knocks of someone who is used to being let in.

And a woman's voice, bright and polite, calling through the wood.

"Lorne? It's Dina. I know you're in there."

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