The Party

Cheerful Christmas Jazz on Spotify kept playing in the background, but the party came to an abrupt halt. He wondered for a moment why in movies the music always stopped when something shocking happened at a party. Then again, when did anything truly shocking ever happen at a party in real life? Record scratch moments weren’t reality. Sure, someone might get too drunk or make a pass at a coworker or overshare about a childhood trauma, but that was just normal suburban white people stuff. People did that all the time.

People’s dead wives did not show up at their Christmas parties all the time.

Catherine took a glass of champagne from a waiter, who stood dumbfounded at why all the guests had collectively gasped, then gone silent.

She took a sip, the bubbles glittering against her grandmother’s cocktail ring, strategically worn, he could see, on her left middle finger now. Her wedding rings, of course, were long gone. He’d gotten $5,000 for the set at auction a few months ago. How had he missed the cocktail ring? That baby would have gone for at least $5,000… maybe more -

He shook his head. Focus, Scott.

“Oh my God,” he said, “Catharine. How… what?” He started toward her now, hoping that his distraught husband act - a little rusty after 12 months - was playing to his audience. He heaved his breath, clutching his heart with astonishment. It wasn’t hard - he truly was shocked she was alive.

She laughed. Not the sweet, bubbly laugh that had intoxicated him when they first met. This laugh was rueful, deep. Angry.

Anger was something he knew a thing or two about.

Anger and secrets, the bedrock of any good marriage.

He took her hand, but she pulled it away, graceful as any prep school student. She took another sip of champagne. Alice and Jennifer flanked her now, all three of them in sparkling Christmas dresses, as if this were planned.

Wait, was this planned?

Catharine and her small army of glitter and hairspray….

He told himself to focus again.

He turned to the guests. This would require a commanding performance. “Friends, thank you so much for joining me tonight. This has been the first time I’ve felt like celebrating since…” (look down at the floor, tears in the eyes, give it a 1-2-3 beat,) “Well, you know.” (Look sheepish, sweet.) “But clearly my… wife,” (big smile now, as though this were the happiest moment of your entire life, as though your heart isn’t about to beat through this $400 dress shirt from Paul Frederick,) “Clearly my wife and I have some… things… to discuss.” (Smile again, bewildered head shake.)

The guests didn’t move. Catherine laughed again. “Merry Christmas!” she hooted and drained the rest of the crystal champagne glass. “Let’s go,” she said, and Alice and Jennifer followed her up the stairs.

The room of shocked guests took their permission to begin moving wordlessly toward the door, sorting coats from the closet as quickly as their hands could fly. Scott stood by the door, trying to look confident, if not overjoyed.

The men gave him a knowing look, a meaning he couldn’t quite place. A few shook his hand. The women looked at him scornfully. They, too, had a knowing look, which they passed between each other, not him. Some held tight to their husbands, not even allowing a polite goodbye. No one hugged him or gave him a dry kiss on the cheek as they had when they entered the sparkling, overdone Christmas party just two hours before.

Sweat dripped down his neck despite his attempt at confidence. He imagined these people, his friends and what they would say to each other in the car on their ride home.

He remembered having similar dishy, gossipy conversations with Catharine.

But that was before.

---

Catharine remembered distinctly the first time she knew Scott wanted to kill her. There was no fit of rage like in the movies, no progressively intensifying abuse. In fact, there was roughly 20 feet between them the first time she realized he wanted her dead.

The second book tour took a lot out of them both. The first time around they were younger, with more energy, and more excitement about posh hotels, an agent that catered to their every need, and black cars carting them around big, unfamiliar cities. They were bewildered that Catharine had actually done it, that she’d actually made it, and had a book published to smashing success. At one point, Catharine even thought Scott was proud of her. He quit his corporate job to join her on the road, and manage her social media.

Until her agent said he sucked at social media.

Not all social media, to be clear. He had actually done a pretty good job when he worked for a big hospitality conglomerate, taking stunning photos of hotel pools and bars and lounges. One could feel themselves in the big fluffy comforter of a five star hotel suite he had photographed and posted to 10.7 million impressions.

But when he photographed Catharine, the pictures were never quite right. They weren’t her. He never caught her best angle, never presented her in the light that followers on BookTok wanted to see from their favorite author.

“Maybe he’s just not good at photographing people,” her agent said when she called to tell Catharine they’d be sending a new social manager on the second book tour. “Not everyone has the same skills. I’ll call him this afternoon.”

But Catharine did not allow her agent to break the news to Scott. She did it herself. And Scott took it in stride. “I get it,” he said, hugging her. “I’m here to support you either way.”

Months later, she would be standing on a stage of a small theatre somewhere in New England, speaking to about 900 fans of her books - both political thrillers, described by the New York Times as “Smart, fast-paced, written to make the reader think.” Her readers were rapt. If she was good at writing, she was great at speaking. Great at talking about the things they cared about, and inspiring them to follow their own passions. She gazed out on all of the smiling, engaged faces - mostly women in their 40s, but plenty of men, too - who had been captivated by the twists and turns of her political narratives.

But one face looked back at her, unsmiling. Eyes narrowed. Hands clasped behind his back the same way he did when he was about to condescend to her in an argument. Jaw clenched so his lips made a tight line. This was the face of an adoring husband?

No. This was the face of a killer.

---

December 20th. Scott realized it was December 20th. Five days before Christmas, and the anniversary of the day the police had declared their search over. Based on the evidence, detectives determined that Catharine had fallen into the Niagara River, drowned, and subsequently went over the Falls. It was too dangerous to try to recover her body.

At the time, Scott could not believe his luck. Within days, the life insurance company transferred just over $4M into his bank account. For weeks he would open the app on his phone multiple times a day, just to see the seven digit number. By January 1, he’d have a book deal of his own to tell the story of his and Catharine’s love, and her eventual demise - as mysterious as the books she wrote.

Now he leaned against the door of their sprawling home, nestled among other McMansions in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. He thought of his manuscript, which he had painstakingly edited when the ghost writer was finished with it, and before sending it off to the same literary agent who represented Catharine. Had represented Catharine? Did the agent now represent them both? Was that a conflict of interest? Oh my God, the agent would be salivating, convincing Catharine to write her own series of the events that transpired between them. Catharine’s manuscript would tell a different tale, and it would be better written.

How did she always out play him? Always. The distraught husband had left with the other guests and now his chest was heaving, filled with rage. He started toward the stairs, but remembered Alice and Jennifer were up there, too. What did they know?

Realization swept over him… they didn’t know. Sure, they knew Catharine’s side of the story, her manuscript. But there were certainly details she had left out as well. Old details, things from years ago, but crucial details just the same. Suddenly Scott was calm. He had exactly what he always had over Catharine - a secret.

---

Catharine and her friends stood in the bedroom she and Scott had shared for over 15 years. The bed was unmade, absolutely zero shock to Catharine. The closet door was open, as it often was even when she lived there. But now instead of her dresses and sweaters, rows of expensive men's suits and dress shirts lined the walls. She opened the top drawer of the dresser, her underwear drawer. Instead of lace and underwire, it was brimming with unmatched socks. He may look slick and polished, but underneath it all, Scott was, himself, an unmatched sock.

“It’s like I was never here,” she said.

“Like you were dead,” Alice quipped, never one to mince words.

“What do we do now?” Jennifer asked, lifting open a jewelry box, now completely empty. Her grandmother’s cocktail ring was the only thing Catharine managed to grab when she decided she needed to run.

The day she found the Thallium.

She had been cleaning, not snooping, on a mission to clean out the area under the kitchen sink. Among long-forgotten cleaning products and dried out sponges, she found the tiny vial. She held it up to the light, the silver winking back at her, and knew immediately that it was intended for her.

As a writer of murderous thrillers, she was quite familiar with the poisons that were quickly metabolized, and therefore hard to detect. She also knew her fingerprints were on the glass now, and wiping them off would also wipe off Scott’s. She wiped them anyway, put the cleaning products back in the cabinet, and went upstairs to pack.

She left a note that she was going to hike at Devil’s Hole, something she did regularly. And she did, hiking down just far enough to throw her cell phone into the churning waters below.

So began a year of hiding.

Hiding, and planning. For years, Scott held the accident over her head, threatening to expose her greatest secret. When really, Scott had the biggest secret of his own.

---

Scott opened the door to the bedroom but did not walk in. Instead, he leaned in the door frame. “Do we have to do this in front of the firing squad?” he asked, referring to Alice and Jennifer.

“I’m certainly not doing it alone,” Catharine replied. She resisted the urge to shuffle on her feet, and instead widened her stance, attempting to appear more confident than she felt.

“Fine. So… what the fuck, Catharine?”

“You tell me, Scott.”

They were both silent, daring the other to make the next move. The air in the room was heavy.

“We know everything,” Jennifer finally said. “Just so you know.”

A cruel smile spread across Scott’s face. “Do you?” he sneered. “My wife has told you everything?”

Catharine could not help but shift now, shame yielding a cold fear in her belly. His eyes narrowed the way they had that night in the auditorium.

He looked hungry.

“We know you were going to poison her,” Alice said. “For fuck’s sake, Scott, what is this, the 1700s? Just get a divorce.”

“He couldn’t,” Jen replied. “She was worth more dead.”

Scott was silent for just a beat. “That’s right,” he said.

Catharine hated herself for flushing, but hearing him say the words, hearing him admit the truth was almost too much to bear.

“And she deserved it,” Scott said.

Her friends instinctively moved closer.

“But you know that, right?” Scott said, toying with them now. “You know that she ruined my life, and lied to all of you about it for years.”

Catharine swallowed hard.

“That night, four years ago, it wasn’t me who was driving. Oh, I was plenty drunk, don’t get me wrong. If I had been the one to hit that tree, I would have gotten a DUI. But I wasn’t driving, and yet, I did get the DUI. Isn’t that… interesting?”

The women didn’t move. Catharine had told them this part. Wracked with guilt, and sobbing over wine in Alice’s kitchen, she told them that the night of the accident, she had called Scott before the police, and begged him to take the fall. She was leaving in three days for her first book tour, and a DUI would ruin everything.

“That’s why I left my corporate job, ladies. It wasn’t so I could traipse around the northeast taking pictures of this bitch. It was so that she wouldn’t lose her entire career. But I did.” Scott coughed, then swallowed, trying to keep his composure. “She ruined my life so that she could be a star.” The hatred poured from him.

Catharine knew it was time to strike. “But that’s not all that happened that night, Scott, is it?”

He coughed again, now loosening his tie a bit, his neck and face flushing pink. He cleared his throat and steadied his breathing. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he retorted.

“You said the blood on the couch in the living room was yours - that you dropped a glass when I called you. I felt terrible that you sliced your hand open. I felt terrible that the couch was ruined. I felt terrible that you took the fall for me. The guilt was crushing.” Now Catharine coughed, and wondered when the last time this room had had a proper dusting. She cleared her throat. “But you didn’t cut yourself, Scott, did you? Your little game with Tracy went too far.”

Alice and Jennfier were the ones to shift now. This was not part of the conversation, not part of the plan. “What the fuck, Scott?” Jennifer said under her breath.

“Right. See I wouldn’t play his weird pain games. You girls know me, I don’t mind a little roughness in the bedroom, but I didn’t want him to cut me.” She smiled ruefully. “I know, what a prude!

“But Tracy - she let you do all that and more.”

Scott swallowed. His face was beat red now.

“Did you think I didn’t know, Scott? Did you think I didn’t know you had your little side piece? Of course I knew. I just didn’t care, because I had everything I ever wanted when I got that book deal. You were just… well, you were a side piece.”

The women laughed, Catharine coughing again.

“But that night, that particular night, it went just a little too far, didn’t it? Tracy never woke up.”

Scott collapsed to his knees, struggling to take in air. It was too much for him to bear.

“It took me a year to piece it together, but you killed her that night, and while I was sobering up and trying to figure out how to piece my life back together, you disposed of the body. But you didn’t work that hard to hide it, did you? You didn’t need to. Because now you had an airtight alibi. It would require you to pay some fines and go to court, and attend those stupid driving classes, but you could never be suspected of Tracy’s murder, because you were busy driving your drunk ass into a tree.” She stopped, out of breath, her vision hazy. It was out in the open now.

“And now,” Alice finished as Catharine tried to catch her breath, “the police are combing the woods near the accident site, because of an anonymous tip about a potential missing person’s body being located there,” Alice finished. She smiled.

Catharine’s head snapped to her best friend. “You knew that?” she choked.

“I knew,” Alice replied.

Scott was on the floor now, unconscious. Catharine fell down next to him, Jennifer looking on in horror.

“What the fuck?” she whispered. “I - this wasn’t….” She started for the door. She spun on her heel. “What is happening here, Alice?” she asked. “Enough with the secrets, for fuck’s sake.”

Alice shrugged. “Thallium,” she said. Using a handkerchief, she took the vial from the pocket of her glittering dress, and tucked it into Catharine’s hand, still adorned with her grandmother’s cocktail ring. “They were both liars. Cheaters. Murderers. They both deserved to die.”

Jennifer shook her head, unable to process what she was hearing.

“And,” Alcie added. “Tracy was my sister.”