But the very fact that nothing is amiss makes me feel instinctually that something is wrong.

WILL

The door bursts open. There she stands, all slovenly and windblown.

Nice of Berg to give me fair warning that she’d been let go.

I hide my surprise. I rise to my feet, go to her, cup her cold face in my hands. “Oh, thank God,” I say, embracing her. I hold my breath. She smells putrid. “They finally came to their senses,” I say, but Sadie’s giving me the cold shoulder, pulling away, saying I left her there, that I abandoned her. It’s all very dramatic.

“I did no such thing,” I say, playing to her weakness, her penchant for losing time. Roughly a quarter of the conversations Sadie has, she doesn’t remember having. Which has become unexceptional for me, but is quite the nuisance for coworkers and the like. It makes it difficult for Sadie to have friends because on the surface she’s moody and aloof.

“I told you I’d be back just as soon as I made sure the kids were all right,” I say. “Don’t you remember? I love you, Sadie. I would never have abandoned you.”

She shakes her head. She doesn’t remember. Because it didn’t happen.

“Where are the kids?” she asks, looking for them.

“In their rooms.”

“When were you going to come back?”

“I’ve been making calls, trying to find someone to come stay with the kids. I didn’t want to leave them alone all night.”

“Why should I believe you?” she asks, a doubting Thomas. She wants to look at my phone, see whom I’ve called, and it’s only because fortune smiles down on me that there are recent calls in the call log to numbers Sadie doesn’t know. I assign them names. Andrea, a colleague, and Samantha, a graduate student.

“Why wouldn’t you believe me?” I fire back, playing the victim.

We hear Tate upstairs jumping away on his bed. The house groans because of it.

She shakes her head, feeling spent, and says, “I don’t know what to believe anymore.” She rubs at her forehead, trying to figure it out. She’s had a hell of a day. She can’t understand how a knife and washcloth could just up and disappear. She asks me, her tone exasperated and contentious. She’s looking for a fight.

I shrug my shoulders and ask back, “I don’t know, Sadie. Are you sure you really saw them?” because a little gaslighting never hurts.

“I did!” she says, desperate to make me believe her.

This is turning into a bit of a shitstorm now that the police are involved, unlike last time when things went so smoothly. I’m usually so much tidier about such things. Take Carrie Laemmer, for example. All I had to do that time was wait for Camille to come, put the idea in her head. Camille is suggestible, as Sadie is easily suggestible. It’s just that Sadie isn’t the violent type. I could have done it myself. But why would I, when I had someone willing to do my bidding for me? I cried my eyes out, told her all about Carrie’s threats, how she accused me of sexual harassment. I said I wished she would just go away and leave me alone. My career, my reputation would be gone if Carrie made good on her threats. They’d take me away from her; they’d put me in jail. I told her, She’s trying to ruin my life. She’s trying to ruin our lives.

I didn’t specifically ask Camille to kill her.

And yet, nevertheless, a few days later Carrie was dead.

The way it happened was that one day, poor Carrie Laemmer went missing. There was a wide-scale search. Word had it that she’d been at a frat party the night before, boozing it up. She left the party alone, stumbled out of the house, drunk. She fell down the porch steps while fellow partygoers watched on.

Carrie’s roommate didn’t return home until the following morning. When she did, she found that Carrie’s bed hadn’t been slept in, that Carrie hadn’t made it home the night before.

Security cameras across campus caught glimpses of Carrie staggering past the library, falling down in the middle of the quad. It was unlike Carrie, who could hold her liquor, or so said the students who saw the CCTV footage. As if it was brag-worthy, a high tolerance for alcohol. Her parents would be so proud to know what their fifty grand a year bought them.

There were lapses in the video surveillance. Black holes where the cameras didn’t reach. I was at a faculty event that night. People saw me. Not that I was ever a suspect because no one was. Because that time, unlike this, things went swimmingly. No pun intended.

Not far from campus was a polluted canal where the university’s crew team rowed. The water was more than ten feet deep, contaminated with sewage, if the rumors were true. A wooded running path sat parallel to the canal, all of it shadowed by trees.

After three days missing, Carrie turned up there, in the canal. The police called her a floater because of the way she was found, most of her body parts bobbing buoyantly on the surface of the canal, while her heavy head dragged beneath.

Cause of death: accidental drowning. Everyone knew she’d been drunk, stumbling. Everyone saw. It was easy enough to assume, then, that she tumbled drunkenly into the canal all on her own.

The entirety of the student population mourned. Flowers were laid at the edge of the canal beneath a tree. Her parents traveled from Boston, left her childhood teddy bear there at the scene.

What Camille told me was that Carrie never thrashed about in the water. She never gasped and screamed for help. What happened instead was that she bobbed listlessly on the surface for a while. Her mouth sank beneath the water. It came back up, it went back down.

It went on this way for a while, head tossed back, eyes glassy and empty.

If she bothered to kick, Camille said, she couldn’t tell.

She struggled that way for nearly a minute. Then she submerged, slipping silently beneath the water.

The way Camille described it for me, it sounded as undramatic as drowning gets. As anticlimactic. Boring, if you ask me.