Лиза Марклунд: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, No. 1. Whole No. 833, January 2011

No. Wait. There was. The light picked out the shape of a rope. My hand trembled as I raised the beam to see that one end was tied around the heating pipe. My breath caught as I lowered the beam.

The bottom of the rope was tied in a noose. But the noose hung empty.

I lowered the flashlight and saw Amanda come walking toward me out of the darkness.

She was just as I’d seen her last. Her body was horribly bloated, her face disfigured, the eyes bulging, the skin bluish-green. In terror, I stumbled backwards. And the flashlight slipped out of my hands. It fell to the floor and went out. The blackness was complete.

I gave a strangled cry. I knew she was still coming toward me, but I couldn’t see her. I couldn’t see anything. With my hands out in front of me, I stumbled in what I hoped was the direction of the stairs. I found them. I grabbed the banister. Started up. But in the darkness, I tripped. I went down on one knee.

Cold fingers wrapped themselves around my ankle.

I cried out and yanked myself free. I charged upward blindly, tripping, stumbling, but finally plunging through the doorway into the kitchen. I slammed the basement door behind me and looked desperately this way and that, lost in the darkness. I had to get back to the stove. To the matches on the shelf. I started moving — and, as I did, I heard her again. Through the basement door. Singing softly.

“I wait for you. I wait for you.”

Her voice was growing louder as she slowly climbed the stairs.

I staggered across the kitchen. Bumped into the stove. Reached up, feeling for the box of matches. There it was. I grabbed it. I fumbled for a match, concentrating so hard that I barely noticed that the singing had stopped, that the darkness had grown silent again. I brought out a match. I struck it against the side of the box.

The flame flared and she was standing right in front of me, reaching for me with those dead hands.

I screamed and dropped the matches. Hurled myself headlong away from her. By sheer good luck, I bumped into the edge of the pantry doorway. I rolled off into the pantry itself and shut the door fast. My hand still clutching the knob, I braced my shoulder against the door. The knob turned in my hand. I could feel her trying to push the door inward.

I held it shut.

All night long, I heard her at the pantry door. Sometimes she rattled the knob, trying to get in. Sometimes she knocked softly or called my name in a laughing, teasing voice, trying to coax me out. I tried bracing my back against the door, covering my ears with my hands, but I still heard her. I hugged my knees to myself, trembling. It was enough to drive me mad.

I knew what she wanted. Revenge. She’d been waiting for it for seven years. She would never forgive me for what I’d done. Not just getting her pregnant. Refusing to marry her, refusing to sacrifice my future, my whole life, to take care of her and a child. Not just for shouting at her so that she stormed off, crying.

I think she would’ve forgiven me for all that if I hadn’t killed her.

But what else could I do? She never would have gotten an abortion. She would’ve had the child and used it against me. Forced me to come up with child support. Ruined any chance I had to be free, to be a success. I mean, deep down, Amanda was a very vindictive person. Well, that was obvious, wasn’t it? Look how long she’d waited to get back at me, nursing her bitterness all the while.

So anyway, I’d taken a rope — one of those stout ropes we’d used to haul the Christmas tree home from the woods. I went upstairs to her room. I pretended I wanted to make up with her so that she ran to me, put her arms around me. Then I slipped the rope around her neck and pulled it tight.

It took a long time. A long time. I don’t like to think about it. Finally, she slumped, unconscious. I carried her down to the basement and strung her up on the heating pipe. That was kind of awful too because she woke up for a while and struggled, hanging up there, before it was finally over for good.

It really was a brilliant idea to hide downstairs in the basement during the game. It gave me a chance to collect myself — and to act surprised and scream in horror when they found her. And no one would believe I would just sit down there like that in the dark for so long, knowing she was with me all the while.

Amanda had never forgiven me for any of it. She’d waited for me all this time.

All night long, she knocked and called outside the pantry door, trying to draw me out. But finally, I saw the first sunlight slip in under the door. I heard her voice grow softer and softer until it vanished.

I climbed unsteadily to my feet. I opened the door. Peeked out. She was gone.

I rushed out of the house. The snow had stopped. The sun was shining. I was delighted to see that the road and the driveway had been ploughed and sanded overnight. It was easy to get back to my car, easy in the daylight to push it free from the drift where it was stuck and get it back onto the road.

As I was driving away from the Wilson house, a Volvo came past me in the other direction. It was Jonathan. I don’t think he saw me. He didn’t stop.

When I reached the top of the hill, I looked back. I saw the Volvo go down the driveway to the house. A moment later, two more cars reached the drive from the opposite direction and joined the first. Jonathan got out and then David and Lucy and Rosemary. They all came together, hugging and kissing and shaking hands.

I left them to their reunion. Let them live in the past, not me. I wasn’t going to waste my one and only life wallowing in remorse about Amanda.

Although I must admit, as the years go on, as I move toward the end of middle age, I find myself wondering about that sometimes. Whether this is, in fact, my one and only life, I mean. Death wasn’t the end for Amanda, after all. Recently, more and more often, I hear her in the night, in the dark, in the distance, singing in that wistful voice:

“I wait for you. I wait for you.”

I believe she does.

See Studio 6 by Liza Marklund