Megan Abbott - Bury Me Deep

It is all over, Marion thought, and I am somehow glad. It is my time to speak. It is my time to lay my sins bare.

“I am ready,” she said. But before she knew it, her head wobbled and her chest turned to fire and she felt herself falling again.

THE POLICE DOCTOR was peering over her with his aluminum headlamp glaring like a magnificent third eye.

“I fainted,” Marion whispered. She who’d not fainted in her life now twice in three days.

“Correct,” the doctor said. His breath smelled of cloves. Marion thought of Christmas back in Michigan, of clove-spiked oranges dusted in cinnamon hanging on snow-pattered windows at school. Had Christmas passed this year? Why couldn’t she remember the mistletoe and the holly pricking her fingers?

He kept peering.

“I’m all right,” she said.

“Glad about that,” he said, “but why don’t you tell me now about the hole in your hand.”

Marion looked down at her bullet-torn palm, then back up at the doctor, who tilted his head, watching her closely.

“I’m not talking. I’m through talking,” she said, feeling peaceful, half dead. This was to be it. This was to be it and suddenly it felt so perfect. “The only talking I will do now is to confess. To confess all. I will bear the sins no longer. I will walk those gallows steps head held high.”

“Mighty strong words, miss,” he said, taking her hand in his and turning it over. “But I don’t guess you heard.”

“Heard?”

He took an alcohol-daubed swab to her hand and she cried out.

“About your husband,” he said. “I guess it’s to me to tell you.”

She felt all the sound go out of the world and then she screamed.

TWELVE HOURS PRIOR,bleary and still broken, Dr. Seeley had dressed and found a doctor’s coat, contriving to secure ten grains of morphine, and so taking, wandered out the hospital doors and hitched rides all the way to the big reservoir on the far northern edge of the city. The jump from the top of the concrete dam was more than two hundred feet and he was found by maintenance workers. The note he left on his hospital bed proclaimed:

To all who would listen:

Ten days ago, while in the farthest depths of Mazatlán, I began to have dark notions. Mad with narcotics abuse, I became consumed by a false belief that my wife had been untrue. I determined to leave my post, traveling all the way from Mexico with the idea of entrapping her. By the time I arrived, I was fevered and unsound. Not finding my wife at home, I proceeded shamelessly to Nurse Mercer’s home, knowing my wife spent many evenings there. Nurse Mercer and her friend, rightly sensing I was disordered, tried to calm me and assure me that my wife was not present. I now see they were protecting her. They saw my state and were shielding her. I became enraged. I do not know what possessed me, but for what has been done to my head from years of self-abuse. I was raving. The women were frightened and bid I leave. When I refused and attempted to force my way in, Nurse Mercer ran for a small pistol and begged me to retreat. I pushed through and I seized that gun and I shot them both dead. I shot them both dead. First, Miss Hoyt as she tried to stop me from harming her friend, and then Nurse Mercer too. I couldn’t stop myself. I am a fiend.

My wife is everything to me. I forced her to assist me. I operated on the bodies and packed them in those trunks and forced her to take them away. She is so sweet and lovely I knew she could move without suspicion. I compelled her and, out of fright, obedience and love, she helped me conceal my ghoulish deeds. I am ruined, torn through with shame, and I can go on no more.

It is the morphine. It is the morphine in the veins. That first time, that first time, back in ’26, I will never forget. Everything was as never before. Strange and beautiful. I felt, for one thrilling hour, I could do anything. It was the most wondrous hour of my life. I wish it had been my last.

The letter was all. When Marion read it, and she would only read it once, she wondered how long it would take her to understand the nature of her husband’s sacrifice.

Part of her wanted to confess everything and clear his name—this was the biggest part. But doing so would deny his ultimate gesture.

Part of her wanted to follow him.

Part of her could feel herself falling, feel the water filling her mouth, her chest. The peace in that.

But part of her, in the winnowing corners of her fevered head, felt very, very differently. Part of her could not stop herself from thinking, hot-teared: Dr. Seeley, you have taken something from me. I was ready. It was time. This was to be my redemption and now it is yours.

“MRS. SEELEY, we know you were trying to protect your husband. We know your motives were pure and selfless. And that will not be forgotten.”

That’s what they told her. Mr. Quint, her lawyer, took the reins fast and handled everything.

What could be more noble, what could be a greater act of love than Dr. Seeley’s keen sacrifice? On lower currents, she knew the answer: for him to have let her choose how to reckon with it, to have left it to her to choose. That would have been greater still. For she had been ready to face her crimes and, most of all, her sins. And now her chance, it was gone.

Privately, Mr. Quint did not believe his client to be of sound mind after her husband’s demise. He did not believe her ramblings about Mr. Joseph Lanigan—hell, he knew Joe Lanigan, had dinner with him at the lodge once a month and went hunting with him every November. What stories lovestruck ladies will tell. Alas…

Mrs. Everett Seeley, the platinum-tressed widow of the bloody trunk murderer who took his own life seven months ago following his frenzy of terror, will be released today, after serving a six-month sentence for helping conceal her husband’s crimes. Mrs. Seeley confessed to “aiding and assisting” in the transport to Los Angeles of the bodies that the demon doctor hacked to pieces in his bloody rage.

Dr. Seeley claimed to have shot Louise Mercer, a nurse at the Werden Clinic, and her roommate, Virginia Hoyt, in a fit of jealous rage, believing that his wife had been seeking the attentions of a local man. The man has never been formally identified, although speculation is rampant that the man in question is Mr. Joseph Lanigan, owner of Valiant Drugs and vice president of the Chamber of Commerce.

“I knew the girls,” Mr. Lanigan told the Courier. “I sought to help them. Miss Hoyt was sick and they were struggling to make ends meet. I tried to be a friend to them, and to Mrs. Seeley, who was lonely without her husband or family. I tried to bring cheer when I could and it appears Mrs. Seeley wrote to her husband and he misunderstood. It is a tragic consequence.”

Mr. Lanigan, who just added a new store in the Country Club Park District to his growing Valiant Drugs business, has been widely praised for his generosity in paying for both girls’ remains to be delivered to their families and a small shrine to be erected at the Werden Clinic.

“I’m a big Mick and I can take it,” Joe Lanigan laughed, laughed all the rumors away, to all the out-of-town reporters who didn’t know that, facts aside, Gentleman Joe Lanigan could never be a part of something as sordid as this, would never dip his manicured finger (oh, didn’t he love his weekly manicures the cute marcelled girls at the Biltmore gave him) into such low revels, this a Lodge man, an Elk, a Mason, for goodness’ sake. Didn’t these Los Ang-e-lees scribes, with their pomade and shiny shoes, grabbing for ink, making the most of their small entr’acte in the crime of the decade, didn’t they know our Joe?