Till Murder Do Us Part Read online

  Kathi feels tears coming to her eyes. Steve has always been able to sweet-talk her, and she’s afraid she’s going to fall for it again this time.

  “Okay, so I didn’t tell you that name,” he says, “but I was honest about where I came from. I could have lied about that, too. I probably should have lied about it. You ought to be flattered that I was so honest with you.”

  “But you weren’t honest, Steve,” Kathi says, unsure whether she should even call him Steve anymore. “You lied about your house burning down. You lied about your parents dying. I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

  In an instant, Steve’s expression turns from entertained to glowering.

  “What did you do?” he asks, his voice almost a growl, his eyes burning holes into her with his expression.

  “I talked to an old classmate of yours,” Kathi says defensively. “He teaches at the high school now. When we realized we were talking about the same person, I was pretty embarrassed that I didn’t know my own husband’s name.”

  “Did you share the name Steve Marcum?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell him where we live?”

  “I gave him our address,” she says. “He had to send the—”

  As quick as a snake, Steve’s hand flies to Kathi’s neck and grabs her throat in a vise grip. He shoves her hard, slamming the back of her head into the refrigerator. Magnets and photos from the fridge go flying. Tiny bursts of light dance across Kathi’s vision. She tries to say his name, but no words leave her mouth.

  And no air comes in.

  The path for oxygen has been completely cut off.

  Chapter 18

  With his hand on her throat, Steve glares at her, his eyes narrowed, teeth clenched. He looks like a monster.

  How could I ever kiss this man? Kathi asks herself. How could I make love to him?

  She claws at his arms and flails her feet, but to no avail. He lifts her by her neck until she has to get on her tiptoes in order to touch the floor. He’s stronger than she ever realized, holding her pinned against the fridge, her feet straining to find the ground below her.

  In a panic, she thinks, I’ve married a killer, and now he’s going to kill me. This is what I get.

  Then he releases her, and she drops to the floor, gasping, crying. The magnets and photographs from the refrigerator are spread around her on the tile floor, mementos from all the places they’ve visited together.

  Steve kneels down, breathing heavy.

  “You brought this on yourself.”

  He tries to put a hand on her, but she twists away. He won’t be denied. He grabs a fistful of her hair and makes her look him in the eye. He balls his other hand into a fist and draws it back.

  “Listen here,” he snarls. “Don’t mention the name Eric Wright ever again. Forget you ever fucking heard that name. Do you understand?”

  Kathi is paralyzed with fear.

  She doesn’t recognize the man staring at her. She realizes she’s seeing Eric Wright—the real person hidden behind the mask of Steve Marcum—for the first time in her life.

  Suddenly, he releases his grip on her and apologizes. His anger turns to despair, and he starts crying along with her.

  “I just snapped,” he explains. “You’ve got to understand that if the wrong people find out I’m here, I’m dead. And they’ll probably kill you, too. Do you see why I’m so upset?”

  But as Steve cries, Kathi finally sees through him. That night at the cemetery, he cried so hard that she believed there was no way he could be faking the pain. But it was all a lie—an untruth that had nothing to do with protecting himself from the CIA. If she could believe that his secrets and lies were all to protect himself from the wrong people finding him, she might be able to forgive what he just did. But he still hasn’t offered an explanation for why he made up those stories. No explanation for why he broke down in that cemetery and sobbed. All that elaborate deception was just done to manipulate her.

  To toy with her.

  If those tears were fake, these ones are, too.

  “I love you,” he wails. “But you really fucked up.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kathi says because she knows that’s what he wants to hear.

  “Can you forgive me?” Steve says, tears streaking his cheeks. “I can’t live with myself if you don’t forgive me.”

  Kathi wraps her arms around him.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I just want things to go back to the way they were. I forgive you. Let’s just forget the whole thing.”

  Look who’s lying now, she thinks.

  Chapter 19

  Divorce?” Sarah says. “I can’t believe it! What happened? Steve’s such a nice guy, and you two seem so good together.”

  Kathi sits with her old friend in a bar in downtown Denver. Out the window, they can see Mile High Stadium under a brilliant blue Colorado sky. Inside the bar, the handful of other customers are shooting pool. Cigarette smoke hovers in the beams of sunlight coming through the window. A Rockies game is on the TV, muted. A Pearl Jam song plays on the stereo.

  As the days count down toward her twelve-year anniversary with Steve, Kathi has done her best to make Steve—or Eric—think that everything is normal.

  When Steve wants to kiss her, she offers him a quick peck.

  When he wants a hug, she gives him one but is the first to break off the embrace.

  When he wants to have sex, she politely declines.

  “You said you forgave me,” he says, trying to slide a hand up her blouse.

  “I do forgive you,” she tells him. “I just need time, okay? That was pretty traumatic for me.”

  “I understand,” he says, pulling his hand away. “I’m sorry. I’ll give you all the space you need.”

  She feels as though she’s walking a fine line. She wants him to believe that she’s still upset but working toward forgiveness. If she acted as though nothing happened, he wouldn’t believe her. He knows her too well to think she’d let things go so easily. But she can’t let on how truly angry she is, how hurt. The truth is, she can never forgive him. There’s no going back to the way things were.

  His touch makes her skin crawl.

  His kisses make her want to scream.

  The thought of having sex with him makes her want to throw up.

  She has a meeting scheduled next week with a divorce lawyer, but she couldn’t stand being around Steve until then, so she told him she was going off to spend the weekend in Denver visiting her friend Sarah. Steve looked suspicious, and she could see the gears turning in his brain. He clearly didn’t want her to go, but if he said no, kept her on a short leash, that contradicted his claim that he’d give her space. So he didn’t protest.

  He did give Kathi a warning, however.

  “I know Sarah is your best friend,” he told her, “so if you want to tell her we’re having a rough patch, I understand. But you can’t tell her about all my secrets, okay? We can’t let this get out.”

  As Kathi sips from her glass, she decides that she doesn’t give a damn about keeping Steve’s secrets. She needs to get them off her chest.

  “Steve isn’t who you think he is,” Kathi tells Sarah. “Steve isn’t who I thought he was.”

  She tells her friend everything: about his time in the CIA, in prison, the lies about his parents and his home burning down. Sarah’s mouth is wide open practically the whole time Kathi speaks, with one gasp after another coming from her lips.

  Finally, Kathi pulls down the collar of her turtleneck to show Sarah the purple bruises still on her neck from where Steve clamped his fingers around her throat.

  “That son of a bitch,” Sarah says, having done a complete 180 on the subject of Steve Marcum since the beginning of the conversation. “Not only should you get a divorce, but you need to get a goddamn restraining order!”

  They order more drinks and talk over Kathi’s options. Outside the window, the sun descends toward the horizon, filling the bar with warm orange li
ght.

  “You know, if his name isn’t really Steve Marcum,” Sarah says, “if his whole identity is fraudulent, you might not actually be married at all. You could probably get the whole marriage nullified or invalidated or whatever they call it.”

  Sarah also points out that if Steve doesn’t want his identity outed, then Kathi can demand whatever she wants in the split.

  “I actually think you hold all the cards here,” Sarah says.

  They discuss a plan: Kathi will tell her lawyer about how Steve used a fake name, but she won’t reveal his real name—at least not yet. And she won’t mention the CIA or prison or anything like that.

  “I don’t want to get the guy killed,” Kathi says. “I just want him out of my life.”

  Sarah smirks and takes a sip of her beer.

  “What?” Kathi asks.

  Sarah shakes her head. “I don’t believe for one minute that Steve—or Eric or whatever the hell his name is—was ever in the CIA.”

  “Why not?”

  “I think he’s a compulsive liar who just wanted to get laid.”

  Sarah heads toward the bar to pay the tab. Alone, Kathi stares out at the setting sun, drinking the last warm swallow of her drink. Her friend is probably right. Has Steve been lying to her since the day they met? She tells herself she bought his stories because he always had an air of mystery about him, and that part wasn’t a complete fabrication. After all, he came to Colorado with hardly any possessions to his name. He had no old friends at the wedding. No relatives. Not a single friend from before they met.

  The son of a bitch is running from something. She’s sure of that much. But if it isn’t the CIA, what could it be?

  As she watches the last rays of sunlight disappear over Denver, she vows to find out.

  Chapter 20

  Kathi sits at a microfiche machine at the Denver Public Library, scrolling through back issues of various newspapers. She’s been at this for days. She called Steve and said she was having a great time with Sarah and planned to stay longer.

  But what she’s really doing is searching for Eric Wright.

  She spent two days making long-distance calls to Exeter, California—racking up who knows what kind of phone bills for poor Sarah—and talking to schoolteachers, the newspaper editor, and anyone she could find who remembered Steve. She couldn’t bring herself to call Eric Wright’s parents, but she did find out that Eric had served in Vietnam—at least that much seems to have been true—and, after returning, moved to the California Bay Area to become a police officer.

  That information led her to the basement of the Denver Public Library, where she’s been scouring old issues of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Oakland Tribune. She was afraid that the Colorado library wouldn’t have Bay Area newspapers on microfiche or microfilm and was pleased to learn that it had an extensive archive of major newspapers. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for exactly, but Kathi figures that if Eric was a police officer, his name might pop up somewhere. After hours of searching, she eventually stumbles upon a brief about the youngest person ever promoted to lieutenant in the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office: Eric Wright.

  The background the article gives on him matches what she’s learned so far. It says that Eric Wright served in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970 and then joined the sheriff’s office. He became a lieutenant at the young age of twenty-nine, making the promotion newsworthy.

  Despite this confirmation, Kathi can’t imagine Steve as a cop. Wearing a uniform. Following orders. Sure, he’s smart enough, driven enough, to have earned the promotion that the article mentions. That doesn’t surprise her. But Steve isn’t the kind of guy who does things by the book. He doesn’t like to follow rules—she can’t see him enforcing them.

  Funnily enough, she can picture him as a CIA assassin. That rogue way of life seems more his style.

  But it turns out that job was just another one of his lies.

  As Kathi searches, she tries to investigate Steve’s other story: that he served time in prison for manslaughter after a bar fight. She can’t find anything about that, and as she scrolls through the weeks, closing in on the time in 1980 when she met him, she thinks she’s not going to find anything.

  But then something else catches her eye.

  It’s not a big article, not prominently featured, just a brief with a headline stating that the police called off the search for a missing Oakland man. The detective interviewed stated that the man, a former lieutenant in the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, had faked his own abduction. The man’s name? Eric Wright. But it’s the final sentence in the article that leaves Kathi chilled to the bone.

  The article says that Eric Wright ran out on a wife and newborn baby.

  And that he had two children from a previous marriage.

  Kathi feels so nauseated, she has to sit back and take deep breaths. It sickens her to think that he was married before and never told her—and even worse, to know that he abandoned his children. Her skin is clammy. The contents of her stomach boil inside her like magma churning under a volcano. She closes her eyes and tries to calm herself to keep the vomit from erupting onto the microfiche console.

  When the queasiness finally passes, Kathi puts her head in her hands and cries. She weeps long and loudly with no regard for other library patrons who might hear her. She is mourning the twelve years of her life that she spent with a man she never really knew.

  Afterward, as she dries her tears, she feels thankful that she was able to find the information she did. She wanted to solve the mystery of Eric Wright. And now she has.

  At least she hopes so.

  She hopes there aren’t more skeletons out there, waiting to be discovered.

  Chapter 21

  Kathi sits in the busiest restaurant in Glenwood Springs during the lunch rush hour, waiting for Eric Wright. She’s decided to start thinking of him as Eric Wright, not Steve Marcum.

  That will make what she needs to do today easier.

  When he walks in, he tries to offer her his usual smile, but she can tell he’s forcing it. He sits across from her.

  “Hello, Kathi,” he says.

  “Hello, Eric,” she says, emphasizing his real name.

  He makes a sour face. “Please don’t call me that.”

  “It’s your name, isn’t it?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Did you legally change it?” she asks.

  “Not legally,” he answers, looking around and noting the crowded restaurant. He must know that she picked this restaurant and this time of day so there would be plenty of witnesses. “No one here knows me by that name. And I’d like to keep it that way. Please.”

  She doesn’t respond, just stares at him with her lips pressed tightly together.

  He looks down at the packet of paperwork lying on the Formica table between them.

  “Is that what I think it is?” he asks.

  She nods. He opens his mouth to speak, but the server approaches to take their order.

  “Want your usual, Steve?” the woman asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Kathi?”

  “Nothing for me,” she says. “I won’t be staying.”

  As the server leaves, Eric stares at Kathi with a pleading expression.

  “Please, Kathi. Don’t do this. We can work it out. I want to work it out.”

  Kathi wishes that were possible. She wishes she could go back to the life she had. The life she’s known for the past twelve years. It’s hard to give up. She misses skiing with her husband. Soaking in hot springs together. Going on hikes and camping trips. Mornings on their back deck, drinking coffee and enjoying the view of the Rockies rising up over the mist in the meadow behind their house.

  It all seems so comfortable and nice—so romantic—but she knows that life is over. It’s already been destroyed. Now that she knows the truth, she can’t go back to her old life.

  “I don’t want to get divorced,” Eric says.

  “We’re not,” Kathi s
ays, “since we were never actually married.”

  She explains that because he didn’t use his real name, their marriage isn’t legally binding. Therefore, the documents she wants him to sign will simply invalidate the marriage. As long as he doesn’t make the separation difficult, she promises not to drag him through a contentious court battle where she tells everyone in town his real name.

  She slides her diamond engagement ring and wedding band off her finger and lays them on the table. Eric pockets them quickly, looking around to make sure no one has noticed.

  “Please don’t do this,” Eric says. “You’re the love of my life.”

  “Did you use that line on your first wife?”

  Eric’s sad face turns to stone.

  “Or your second?”

  Eric takes a deep breath and sits back in his chair, crossing his arms. “So you know about that, huh?”

  Kathi nods gravely. “Technically,” she says, “you’re still married to your second wife.”

  “What else do you know?”

  Kathi gives a tight smile. This might be the first time in their relationship that she’s been the one with the upper hand, and not the other way around.

  “You ran out on three kids,” she says. “No wonder you didn’t want anyone to find you. You weren’t afraid of the CIA. You were afraid you’d have to pay child support. They’re probably all teenagers by now, aren’t they?” Kathi huffs aloud and says, “‘Most Dependable,’ my ass.”

  Eric takes another deep breath, clearly angry but trying to hide it. He looks around, reminding himself of all the bystanders in the restaurant.

  “Careful,” Kathi warns. “There are witnesses this time, Eric.” She emphasizes his real name, saying it loud enough that other people might hear.

  Eric leans forward, placing his elbows on the table. He cracks his knuckles, first one hand and then the other.

  “Okay, Kathi,” he says. “I’ll let you go.”

  “You’ll let me go?” she snaps. “You don’t own—”

  “Go on and live your own life,” he says, interrupting her. “But before you walk away, I want you to listen to something. Don’t keep digging up dirt about me. And don’t tell anyone what you know about me. This is your only warning.”