Stephen King: A Good Marriage

I don’t want to know.

Right, right, but maybe she should find out, just the same. Because if there was just the one, she was right about its being sexual curiosity that had been fully satisfied by a single peek into an unsavory ( and unbalanced, she added to herself) world. If there were more, that might still be all right—he was throwing them out, after all—but maybe she should know.

Mostly… that clunk. It lingered on her mind more than the question about the magazines.

She snagged a flashlight from the pantry and went back out to the garage. She pinched the lapels of her housecoat shut immediately and wished she’d put on her jacket. It was really getting cold.

Darcy got down on her knees, pushed the box of catalogues to one side, and shone the light under the worktable. For a moment she didn’t understand what she was seeing: two lines of darkness interrupting the smooth baseboard, one slightly fatter than the other. Then a thread of disquiet formed in her midsection, stretching from the middle of her breastbone down to the pit of her stomach. It was a hiding place.

Leave this alone, Darcy. It’s his business, and for your own peace of mind you should let it stay that way.

Good advice, but she had come too far to take it. She crawled under the worktable with the flashlight in her hand, steeling herself for the brush of cobwebs, but there were none. If she was the original out-of-sight, out-of-mind girl, then her balding, coin-collecting, Cub Scouting husband was the original everything-polished, everything-clean boy.

Also, he’s crawled under here himself, so no cobwebs would have a chance to form.

Was that true? She didn’t actually know, did she?

But she thought she did.

The cracks were at either end of an eight-inch length of baseboard that appeared to have a dowel or something in the middle so it could pivot. She had struck it with the box just hard enough to jar it open, but that didn’t explain the clunk. She pushed one end of the board. It swung in on one end and out on the other, revealing a hidey-hole eight inches long, a foot high, and maybe eighteen inches deep. She thought she might discover more magazines, possibly rolled up, but there were no magazines. There was a little wooden box, one she was pretty sure she recognized. It was the box that had made the clunking sound. It had been standing on end, and the pivoting baseboard had knocked it over.

She reached in, grasped it, and—with a sense of misgiving so strong it almost had a texture—brought it out. It was the little oak box she had given to him at Christmas five years ago, maybe more. Or had it been for his birthday? She didn’t remember, just that it had been a good buy at the craft shop in Castle Rock. Hand-carved on the top, in bas-relief, was a chain. Below the chain, also in bas-relief, was the box’s stated purpose: LINKS . Bob had a clutter of cufflinks, and although he favored button-style shirts for work, some of his wrist-jewelry was quite nice. She remembered thinking the box would help keep them organized. Darcy knew she’d seen it on top of the bureau on his side of the bedroom for awhile after the gift was unwrapped and exclaimed over, but couldn’t remember seeing it lately. Of course she hadn’t. It was out here, in the hidey-hole under his worktable, and she would have bet the house and lot (another of his sayings) that if she opened it, it wouldn’t be cufflinks she found inside.

Don’t look, then.

More good advice, but now she had come much too far to take it. Feeling like a woman who has wandered into a casino and for some mad reason staked her entire life’s savings on a single turn of a single card, she opened the box.

Let it be empty. Please God, if you love me let it be empty.

But it wasn’t. There were three plastic oblongs inside, bound with an elastic band. She picked the bundle out, using just the tips of her fingers—as a woman might handle a cast-off rag she fears may be germy as well as dirty. Darcy slipped off the elastic.

They weren’t credit cards, which had been her first idea. The top one was a Red Cross blood donor’s card belonging to someone named Marjorie Duvall. Her type was A-positive, her region New England. Darcy turned the card over and saw that Marjorie—whoever she was—had last given blood on August sixteenth of 2010. Three months ago.

Who the hell was Marjorie Duvall? How did Bob know her? And why did the name ring a faint but very clear bell?

The next one was Marjorie Duvall’s North Conway Library card, and it had an address: 17 Honey Lane, South Gansett, New Hampshire.

The last piece of plastic was Marjorie Duvall’s New Hampshire driver’s license. She looked like a perfectly ordinary American woman in her mid-thirties, not very pretty (although nobody looked their best in driver’s license photographs), but presentable. Darkish blond hair pulled back from her face, either bunned or ponytailed; in the picture you couldn’t tell. DOB, January 6, 1974. The address was the same as the one on the library card.

Darcy realized that she was making a desolate mewing sound. It was horrible to hear a sound like that coming from her own throat, but she couldn’t stop. And her stomach had been replaced by a ball of lead. It was pulling all of her insides down, stretching them into new and unpleasant shapes. She had seen Marjorie Duvall’s face in the newspaper. Also on the six o’clock news.

With hands that had absolutely no feeling, she put the rubber band back around the ID cards, put them back in the box, then put the box back in his hidey-hole. She was getting ready to close it up again when she heard herself saying, “No, no, no, that isn’t right. It can’t be.”

Was that the voice of Smart Darcy or Stupid Darcy? It was hard to tell. All she knew for sure was that Stupid Darcy had been the one to open the box. And thanks to Stupid Darcy, she was falling.

Taking the box back out. Thinking, It’s a mistake, it has to be, we’ve been married over half our lives, I’d know, I would know . Opening the box. Thinking, Does anybody really know anybody?

Before tonight she certainly would have thought so.

Marjorie Duvall’s driver’s license was now on the top of the stack. Before, it had been on the bottom. Darcy put it there. But which of the others had been on top, the Red Cross card or the library card? It was simple, it had to be simple when there were only two choices, but she was too upset to remember. She put the library card on top and knew at once that was wrong, because the first thing she’d seen when she opened the box was a flash of red, red like blood, of course a blood donor card would be red, and that had been the one on top.

She put it there, and as she was putting the elastic back around the little collection of plastic, the phone in the house started to ring again. It was him. It was Bob, calling from Vermont, and were she in the kitchen to take the call, she’d hear his cheery voice (a voice she knew as well as her own) asking, Hey, honey, how are you?

Her fingers jerked and the rubber band snapped. It flew away, and she cried out, whether in frustration or fear she didn’t know. But really, why would she be afraid? Twenty-seven years of marriage and he had never laid a hand on her, except to caress. On only a few occasions had he raised his voice to her.

The phone rang again… again… and then cut off in mid-ring. Now he would be leaving a message. Missed you again! Damn! Give me a call so I won’t worry, okay? The number is…

He’d add the number of his room, too. He left nothing to chance, took nothing for granted.

What she was thinking absolutely couldn’t be true. It was like one of those monster delusions that sometimes reared up from the mud at the bottom of a person’s mind, sparkling with hideous plausibility: that the acid indigestion was the onset of a heart attack, the headache a brain tumor, and Petra’s failure to call on Sunday night meant she had been in a car accident and was lying comatose in some hospital. But those delusions usually came at four in the morning, when the insomnia was in charge. Not at eight o’clock in the evening… and where was that damned rubber band?