The Good Wife

Men wearing wet-suits dragged a body up from the depths of Wheatley River just before the bridges opened for morning traffic. They huddled in waist-high water, like nature’s pallbearers, faces ghostly pale beneath the blinking emergency lights, their breath clouding into the freezing air. The woman’s matted blonde hair stiffened with frost while chunks of broken ice bumped gently along the rivers bank unable to keep up with the fast-moving current.

She was beautiful—or so the reports had claimed.

By the time the river surrendered her body, it was swollen beyond recognition and her beauty had long vanished. I doubt she ever imagined she’d end up like that, tangled in sharply frozen reeds, being pulled ashore beneath the gray light of mid-March. Then again, neither of us could have known what the river was willing to keep, and what it would sacrifice, but I noticed the ring immediately.

At first, I tried convincing myself I was mistaken. It was something I could’ve ignored had I not seen it for myself. My very own wedding ring sparkled brightly from the finger of a dead woman, looking as new as the day I last wore it. How odd. I could’ve sworn I watched that ring disappear beneath the black waters the same night my husband did, earlier that month.

Funny thing about time and nature, no matter how deeply you bury something, they both have a way of dragging themselves back up to the surface.

“My husband left town.” That is what I told the police.

I buried the truth so far inside myself I almost believed it. I should’ve known the river would eventually betray me. Being a Homicide Detective, I spent years studying what guilt does to people, especially when they lie. But I never imagined the river would know what I did, and now, more bodies were washing up. More whispers traveling through the small town. Strangers looked at me like they already knew the truth. Rumors of affairs, disappearances, and curses swirled beneath the surface of the Wheatley River, yet through it all, my husband remained missing. Naturally, the locals weren’t wrong to whisper. I wondered how long until they put the pieces together, I certainly couldn't lie to the people who investigate monsters for a living—I couldn't even convince myself.

As time stretched on and his body failed to surface, I actually began to wonder if I had imagined the whole thing.

**

The first body belonged to a college student, Summer Wallace. Next came Thomas Martin, a former addict, followed by Pastor Jim Williamson. Then the students, Clarissa Meyers and Ronan Justice—both from Summer’s college, both rumored to be her friends—were found. Investigators would have jumped on that connection in a heartbeat if I hadn't known the real truth. My only fear was that someone else had already connected the dots and beaten me to the punch.

The town dismissed it all as a mere coincidence but each victim harbored a lie, a dark secret. Their bodies held the clues to those long-buried truths. I knew it was only a matter of time before my husband washed up alongside them.

Perhaps the stress was finally getting to me but I could have sworn I saw him standing on the nearby bridge, watching me that very morning. It was impossible. He was dead. And Summer Wallace wasn’t just another tragic victim—she was the woman my husband had replaced me with during the final year of our marriage.

No one in my department knew.

Not one of them would have ever known that ring was mine, at least not upon first glance. But, as these things go, I just couldn’t help myself. My face gave away the recognition immediately.

“You okay, Detective?”

My partner Paul Raulerson was the first to pick up on my growing discomfort.

Maybe I deserved this. It was my fault, the reason this whole thing happened to begin with.

I hadn’t slept a wink since the bodies began showing up. I had seen my husband exactly seven times—in varying places. Once in the woods on my morning run, another standing at the corner in traffic, and a few more times looming over me at the foot of my bed. Just yesterday, I found puddles of water in the exact same pattern as footprints walking through my house. Changing the locks were the least of my worries.

No one prepares you for the exact shape your ruin will take when it comes for you, but I expect hell to be entirely the same.

**

By the time Old Sheriff Haskill came by to speak with me, half the department was buzzing with rumors. My husband’s infidelity had brewed up to the surface. It didn’t seem he hid it very well—not from me, not from the prying eyes of Detectives. Hundreds of pages—charges for dinners and coffee, jewelry and hotel visits. All the things we never did. Looking back, the deterioration of our relationship was my fault. I worked long days and even longer nights. I was too tired for plans or communication or fun.

“Keep your mouth shut,” Raulerson hissed as IA came around my cubicle for the forth time that week. “You can’t be seen here. Go to the back, take the rear stairs. I will meet you at my car.”

In theory this was a solid plan but the river wasn’t cursed, I was. Giving season was upon us all and I was smack-dab in the center of it waiting for the other shoe to drop. It wouldn’t be so easy to hide from the very department I worked for. Not with a State-Agency issued phone, walkie-talkie and vehicle. All things with tracking locators beaconing a big-red-arrow towards my direction.

“Parker! Sheryl! Hold on a second,” Sheriff Haskill barked, trailing me down the stairs.

“It cuts deep watching one of my own officers being investigated, but you’ve got to get out in front of this. You’re still off active duty until you are cleared. Go talk to the union reps right now. Don’t try to play the hero, Sheryl. This is ugly, and it’s not going away. They think you’re hiding something. Hell, if I'm being honest, the timeline looks damning. First your missing husband, then his dead mistress, and now they’ve found your ring at the scene.”

It was the only part of the conversation I remember. All I kept thinking back on were the five bodies in a short handful of weeks, all dredged up to the surface, all bloated and disfigured. All carrying the aforementioned secrets, secrets they think I knew.

It was obvious to me that someone was responsible for these murders. Yet the only body that hadn’t washed up was the one that mattered most.

Maybe it was the guilt. Maybe it was the overwhelming grief for a life unlived, or the maddening confusion of why the river kept everyone's secrets but his. Tears burned my eyes as the terror hit me: I was going to go to jail for a crime I hadn’t committed. They weren’t looking at anyone else but me.

There had to be another explanation. The river current deposited the bodies at a sharp bend where the water slowed. Maybe Summer Wallace had found my ring on my husband's corpse before she died. But if she had it, where was he?

The police weren’t asking about them anymore. They were asking about me.

Did I know her? Had I talked to her? Was I aware of the affair? Where was my alibi?

It was all torrid speculation.

I confessed to our rocky marriage. I confessed to being married to my job, and to being the last person to see him alive. I even confessed to wishing he would disappear forever with her and never come back. I admitted to a total mental breakdown. But I never confessed to murder, because in my mind, I hadn't done it.

At least, I didn’t remember doing it.

I woke up one morning to blood droplets near the bathroom sink. I remember the hollow sound of something heavy dragging across the floorboards. I remember standing over my husband at the top of Wheatley Bridge—and letting go.

But I didn’t kill him.

**

Sheriff Haskill slid photographs across the kitchen table, just out of reach of my fingertips.

One-by-one—photos of a man pumping gas, entering the front of Wheatley Park, signing in for an extended day pass over the course of several days. My husband— sitting in a motel diner from midnight until six-am the night each of the bodies were theorized to have been dumped. The photos were not grainy or distorted or distant. He was wearing a black shirt, gray flannel and a ball-cap in every photo.

“We never found your husband’s body, not because you hid him better than the others, but because he was never dead…”

He slid more photos over, lying them on top of the first set— “but that is not the problem Sheryl, look closely, look at these photos… Look at the dates and times, same as the time you were out on leave. The agency confiscated your badge and gun. Remember?”

A woman appeared in the second still-shot wearing light gray joggers, a white v-neck and a hoodie, sitting across from my husband, smiling.

The second photo had her loading black trash bags and gallons of bleach into the back of a trunk.

The third, fourth and fifth photos were of that same woman in the passenger seat at Wheatley Park, hours before the sun went down, hours before the first set of bodies were pushed into the water.

The face was unmistakable. Her jawline rigid, stiff. Her eyes cold and dark. Unrecognizably that of my own.

I stared at the photos so long my eyes began to hurt.

“There is no way, that is not me.”The words coming from my mouth were resolute, firm. No hint of fear or hesitation underlying somewhere in the dark where reality hid.

Sheriff Haskill said nothing.

My pulse rushed through my veins, the stack of photos kept coming, one-after-the-other laid out before me. Damning proof that I had, in fact, either committed murder, helped cover it up, or some strange combination.

“That is not me…I would never, ever do that…no…this is wrong…this couldn’t be me.”

Sheriff Haskill’s lips lined into a tight understanding look of sadness— “would you even remember?”

My mouth had long dried under the heat of my kitchen lights. A low humming buzz signaled the second-hand on my clock whirling around. Would I?

There had been signs.

Burned clothes.

Mud in the carpet.

Water tracked through the house.

Bruises, cuts and scrapes.

My skin raw from scrubbing with bleach.

None of this explained how or why I participated. But deep down, when the lights went out and sleep fell over the small town, I could remember everything, as though it was some bad dream replaying in my mind—only for me.

Me placing the ring off my finger, and on to Summer’s hand. It was what she would have wanted—and in that moment—I realized, it wasn’t my husbands’ body I let go of in the water, it was hers.