Mary Kubica - The Other Mrs

He stands on the other side of the street just outside his Crown Victoria, leaned up against the passenger’s side door. In his hands are coffee and a cinnamon roll, just a stone’s throw away from the stereotypical doughnut cops are notorious for eating, though slightly more refined. As he waves at me, I get the sense that he’s been watching me the entire time, watching as I watch Otto leave.

He tips his hat at me. I wave at him through the car window.

What I usually do at this point in my drive is make a U-turn and go back up the hill the same way I came down. But I can’t do that with the officer watching. And it doesn’t matter anyway because Officer Berg has abandoned his post and is walking across the street and toward me. He motions with the crank of a hand for me to open my window. I press the button and the window drops down. Beads of rain welcome themselves inside my car, gathering along the interior of the door. Officer Berg doesn’t carry an umbrella. Rather, the hood of a rain jacket is thrust over his head. He doesn’t appear to be bothered by the rain.

He jams the last bite of his cinnamon roll into his mouth, chases it down with a swig of coffee and says, “Morning, Dr. Foust.” He has a kind face for a police officer, lacking the usual flintiness that I think of when I think of the police. There’s something endearing about him, a bit of awkwardness and insecurity that I like.

I tell him good morning.

“What a day,” he says, and I say, “Quite a doozy.”

The rain isn’t expected to go on all day. The sun, however, won’t make an appearance anytime soon. Where we live, just off the coast of Maine, the climate is tempered by the ocean. The temperatures aren’t as bitter as they are in Chicago this time of year, though still it’s cold.

What we’ve heard is that the bay has been known to freeze come wintertime, ferries forced to charge through ice floes to get people to and from the mainland. One winter, supposedly, the ferry got stuck, and passengers were made to walk across yards of ice to get to the shoreline before the Coast Guard came in with a cutter to chop it up.

It’s unsettling to think about. A bit suffocating, if I’m being honest, the idea of being trapped on the island, cordoned off from the rest of the world by a giant slab of ice.

“You’re up early,” Officer Berg says, and I reply, “As are you.”

“Duty calls,” he says, tapping at his badge. I reply, “Me, too,” finger at the ready to hoist the window up so that I can leave. Joyce and Emma are expecting me, and if I’m not there soon, I’ll never hear the end of it. Joyce is a stickler for punctuality.

Officer Berg glances at his watch, makes an offhand guess that the clinic opens around eight thirty. I say that it does. He asks, “Have a moment to spare, Dr. Foust?” I tell him a quick one.

I pull my car closer to the curb and put it in Park. Officer Berg rounds the front end of it and lets himself in through the passenger’s side door.

Officer Berg cuts straight to the chase. “I finished speaking to your neighbors yesterday, asking them the same questions I asked of you and Mr. Foust,” he tells me, and I gather from his tone that this isn’t merely an update on the investigation—though what I want is an update on the investigation. I want Officer Berg to tell me that they’re ready to make an arrest so I can sleep better at night, knowing Morgan’s killer is behind bars.

Early this morning before the kids were up, Will searched online for news about her murder. There was an article detailing how Morgan had been found dead in her home. There were facts in it that were new to Will and me. How, for example, the police found threatening notes in the Baineses’ home, though they didn’t say what the threats said.

Overnight the police released the little girl’s 911 call. It was there online, an audio clip of the six-year-old girl as she fought back tears, telling the operator on the other end of the line, She won’t wake up. Morgan won’t wake up.

In the article, she was never referred to by name, only ever as the six-year-old girl, because minors are blessed with a certain anonymity adults don’t have.

Will and I lay in bed with the laptop between us, listening to the audio clip three times. It was gut-wrenching to hear. The little girl managed to remain relatively calm and composed as the dispatcher talked her through the next few minutes and sent help, keeping her on the line the entire time.

But there was something about the audio clip that got under my skin, something I couldn’t put my finger on. It pestered me nonetheless, and it wasn’t until the third go-round that I finally heard it.

She calls her mother Morgan? I’d asked Will, because the little girl didn’t say her mother wouldn’t wake up. She said Morgan wouldn’t wake up. Why would she do that? I asked.

Will’s reply was immediate.

Morgan is her stepmother, he said. Then he swallowed hard, tried not to cry. Morgan was her stepmother, I mean.

Oh, I said. I don’t know why this mattered. But it seemed it did.

Jeffrey was married before? I asked. It’s not always the case, of course. Children are born out of wedlock. But it was worth asking.

Yes, he said, but he said no more. I wondered about Jeffrey’s first wife. I wondered who she was, if she lived here on the island with us. Will himself is the product of divorced parents. It’s always been a sore subject with him.

How long were Jeffrey and Morgan married? I asked, wondering what else she told him.

Just over a year.

They’re newlyweds, I said.

They’re nothing anymore, Sadie, Will corrected me again. He’s a widower. She’s dead.

We stopped talking after that. Together, in silence, we read on.

I wonder now, as I sit in my car beside Officer Berg, about signs of forced entry—a broken window, a busted doorjamb—or blood. Was there blood at the scene? Or defensive wounds, maybe, on Morgan’s hands? Did she try to fight her intruder off?

Or maybe the little girl saw the attacker or heard her stepmother scream.

I don’t ask Officer Berg any of this. It’s been over twenty-four hours since the poor woman was killed. The etched lines on his forehead are deeper today than they were before. The pressure of the investigation is weighing on him, and I realize then: he’s no closer to solving this crime than he was yesterday. My heart sinks.

Instead I ask, “Has Mr. Baines been located?” and he tells me that he’s on his way, though it’s a twenty-some-hour trip from Tokyo with layovers at LAX and JFK. He won’t be home until tonight.

“Have you found her cell phone? That might give you something to go on?” I ask.

He shakes his head. They’ve been looking, he says, but so far they can’t find her phone. “There are ways to track a missing cell phone, but if the phone is off or the battery is dead, those won’t work. Obtaining a warrant for records from a telecommunications company is tedious. It takes time. But we’re working on it,” he tells me.

Officer Berg shifts in the seat. He turns his body toward mine, knees now pointed in my direction. They bump awkwardly into the gearshift. There are raindrops on his coat and his hair. There’s icing on his upper lip.

“You told me yesterday that you and Mrs. Baines never met,” he says, and I have trouble snatching my eyes from the icing as I reply, “That’s right. We never met.”

There was a photograph online of the woman. According to the paper, she was twenty-eight years old, eleven years younger than me. In the photo, she stood surrounded by her family, her happy husband on one side, stepdaughter the other, all of them dolled up in coordinating clothes and wreathed in smiles. She had a beautiful smile, a tad bit gummy if anything, but otherwise lovely.