Here on Ramble Road

Sensitive Content Warning: Death (not explicit)

The rhythmic slap of the butcher’s knife echoes as I dice onions for tonight’s dinner. I usually don’t mind cooking. Although, right now, the eye-watering sting of the onions feels like an unnecessary joke. I’ve cried enough today—earlier in the pantry. Not that I’ll admit that to Paul.

“Oh, bloody hell,” I say both at the situation and in chastisement of myself. I wipe at my eyes, and the stinging worsens. Here I go again.

I didn’t even know the old woman. In my blurry vision, it’s as if I can still see red and blue lights flashing through our windows. The police cruisers left hours earlier, though.

“A body,” they’d said. A dead body. Not that it means anything else when people say “body” without its possessive adjective. Nothing like this has ever happened here on Ramble Road. Someone killed her. Someone actually killed her.

The kitchen door creaks open, and I whip around, knuckles going white against my grip on the knife. I exhale. It’s just Paul—wearing his favourite plaid coat with a rip in it—the one I keep hiding in the back of the closet.

Putting the knife back on the counter, I take a deep breath to hide my panic and tears. Paul would think I’m being silly. Not that he’d say it, but his face would. After eighteen years of marriage, his thoughts are about as opaque as cling wrap.

Paul’s bent over, unclipping Jaz’s leash, but keeping hold of her collar. I smile when I see the mutt’s happy, panting expression.

“Any more news?” Paul asks from his crouched position, his voice betraying nothing but mild curiosity.

My face sours again. His unflappability grates at me. Sometimes, just sometimes, it would be nice if he were the one in shambles. But no, like always, it’s me who can’t stop my mind from spinning.

“No,” I say, not that I know since I switched off the television hours prior. Watching snowflakes land atop a body bag made me feel as cold as the scene itself. If it hadn’t been filmed so close to home, I could have imagined there’d been anything in that bag. Anyone. All I could wonder about now was whether she’d been wearing her white fur hat—the one Paul said made her look like a Q-Tip.

Mrs. Barrow—that was her name—though no one really knew if she was a Mrs. She’d lived alone, and from what I could tell, she liked it that way. She didn’t like us, that’s for sure. But I didn’t want her to die. I’m not a monster—not like Paul apparently, who is humming as he scratches Jaz’s ears by the door.

To die in such a brutal way too. She’d existed a shout away from us for years, and that’s also where they found her. In the ditch around the corner. A hit-and-run probably, or at least that’s what Paul thinks.

“People drive so fast,” he had said with a sigh. But nothing’s been confirmed.

Mrs. Barrow had walked at the same time every morning and never waved. She had usually been too distracted by glaring at our dog. This infuriated Paul. His only criterion for liking someone is whether they like our dog—and Mrs. Barrow did not like Jaz.

It wasn’t even Jaz’s fault, the reason for her hatred. It started one day as Paul had been raking. She’d hobbled across the road and told him she had a problem with our bird feeder. She’d called it “sick” the way we let Jaz chase the squirrels that gather beneath it. Not that Jaz had ever come close to a squirrel. We let the whole thing go, but the bird feeder stayed up.

Then things really took a turn. A few weeks ago, the woman walked over with her shovel, depositing a pile of excrement on our lawn. I’d watched from the window, noticing Paul’s puffed-up chest as he met her by the edge of the road. The only other time his face had looked that red was on the return flight from our honeymoon to Cancun.

“Coyote scat,” Paul had later told me. “That crow’s been collecting coyote scat from her yard thinking it’s from Jaz. She wants us to ‘deal with our own crap’ apparently.” He used finger quotes to let me know those were her words, not his, and he was laughing, but not really. “Jaz has never even stepped a toe onto her property.”

It wasn’t entirely true. There had been that small incident when Jaz cornered the woman’s cat behind her rose bush. But Jaz had come away from that with more injuries than the cat. I opted not to remind Paul of this, though. His jaw was still clenched in a way to suggest he was about to break a tooth. Or that he’d like to break someone else’s tooth.

But Paul is calm today. Serene even—saying very little to me since the whole commotion. He’s still by the door, towelling Jaz’s paws one at a time. With each lift of a paw, the mutt sidles further away from him. She at last slips his hold, running towards me. I bend my knees, waiting for the soothing greeting of my most favourite creature. But I should have known my dog better than that. She sprints past me towards the chicken on the counter.

It's as I shoo her off the counter that I see it. She has specks of blood on her snout. My heart drops. I scan around and notice that she’s also dabbed a mess across the hardwood floor—bloody footprints now circling where I stand.

“What the,” I say, jerking away from them. I look towards Paul with accusation. He just presses his lips together with a shake of his head, as if to say, “Don’t ask.” But when he turns away to hang his jacket, I swear I can see a guilty flush rising up his neck.

I scan Jaz’s whole body. Maybe she’d chased the cat into the rose bush again. As Paul turns back to face me, I see he's still unperturbed. Nothing much perturbs Paul.

Concluding that Jaz doesn’t appear to be the source of the blood, I relax my shoulders. A crease still sits between my brows. I shift sideways as Paul comes into the kitchen, heading for the sink.

“Where were you two?”

Apart from his Meals on Wheels deliveries that morning, Paul has been outside with Jaz nearly all day.

“Just up the road. Jaz needed her walk.”

“Our road?” My voice rises. “A woman just died there, Paul. How can you stomach it?”

Paul flicks water off his hands into the sink in the exact way I’ve asked him not to. He sprays tiny droplets of water onto the windowsill. I grit my teeth and pass him the hand towel.

We face off until he says, “Nina, please don’t start. It’s been a long day.” He gives the hand towel back to me and walks to the door, reaching for his jacket again.

“Where are you going?” It’s so like him—escaping any quarrel with some excuse to head back outside.

“Gardening,” he says. There is a sharp snick of the door behind his retreating figure. It’s February. The only greenery in the garden is the pile of beetroot leaves I dumped into the compost bin that morning.

It’s when I’m re-hanging the hand towel that I notice a faint red smear through its weave. Thoughts swirl together in my mind. I see Paul’s angry red face, the red blood, and our red station wagon—the one Paul takes on his deliveries every morning.

Impossible. I’m being ridiculous, but I storm after him—not stopping to grab a coat.

Jaz whines at the door to follow me, but I barely register it. I’m scanning the front of the station wagon for any signs of damage. They still don’t know what happened. No one does. Except Paul? He didn’t even seem to feel bad about what happened. He could have veered off the road at the wrong time.

When I see no signs of a collision, I breathe a little deeper. I cast my gaze around for him in the backyard. I'm hoping that the sight of him will cease my wild imaginings, but he's walking away.

As I march after him, he’s still humming for goodness’ sake. The off tune, disturbingly recognizable notes of the song grow louder. It’s “Let It Be.” His father’s funeral song.

A chill courses through me for reasons other than my lack of coat. As I near him, I notice the shovel in his hands, a white patch of fur held aloft on its blade.

White fur like Mrs. Barrow's hat.

I watch as he reaches the edge of the property—tossing the hat-like-thing into the brush. My breathing becomes shallower. It’s only when I’m behind him, my shadow greeting his, that I see the damning evidence. His back is to me, the shovel now upright. The snow crystals around the shovel’s blade are all red.

“The body. The blood,” I say. “You.”

“Who?” Paul says, turning around.

“The killer.”

“What?” Paul is laughing but not laughing, as he does. He approaches me.

I move to run from him, but a step into my fleeing, I slip on the wet ground and fall backward. His much bigger frame looms over me. I meet his gaze with a look I’ve never given him—not even that time he asked me to cut his hair, and I accidentally gave him a bald patch. Horror.

As I start shrieking, hours of build-up worry consuming the last shreds of my self-control, Paul bends down next to me. He’s stunned as I wriggle away from his attempt to grab my arm. I realize belatedly he was trying to help me up.

And that’s when I remind myself again this is absurd. He’s my husband. He’d never hurt me, even if he did hurt Mrs. Barrow. I should be helping him. In good times and in bad, right? Well, this is bad. Really bad. But he’s still my Paul.

I stand on my own, picking up the shovel with me. My hip aches, but I meet his eyes. There’s bafflement in his expression.

“I’ll love you no matter what,” I say, then swallow. “No matter what you did to that woman.”

A still beat passes between us. Nothing but blinks, brushes of falling snowflakes, and my wildly beating heart. Then, Paul lets out a laugh—a real one this time. It’s a single huff of breath caught in the space between us.

“I’m no killer, Nina.” He chokes out, then he shakes his head with a rueful smile. “But your dog is.” He moves to the side and gestures into the brush behind him. “I didn’t want you to have to see it.”

In the brush, atop the snow lies the source of all the blood. It seems, Jaz finally caught a squirrel. A squirrel with a white, piebald tail from the looks of it.

Tears spring to my eyes, but I’m laughing too. Laughing at myself. “What the devil?”

“That she is,” Paul says, coming to rest a reassuring hand on my back. We step away from the squirrel. He was going to bury it, he explains, but the ground is still frozen.

I'm too embarrassed to say anything. I can't even muster an apology.

“Come on, Nancy Drew,” he says, taking the shovel from my hands. “There’s already been too much death today.”

When we’re closer to the house, he adds, “I’m upset about Mrs. Barrow too.”

Paul wraps his arm around my shoulders. Jaz is watching us with her nose pressed to the window. In this mad world, I have a pretty good husband.