Bastard (A Novel)

Author's note: I'm not quite sure if this will be a novella or a novellete or a very long short story, but here it is. You can find my outline as well, although that gives away the ending. I have just written down chapter 1 and some of chapter 2. Thank you for your feedback.

It was a rainy day in April. The skies were gloomy in London, and George Hamilton was heading home from work, drenched in rain from his walk to his apartment. The man was scared of buses and didn’t care for crowded rooms, nor traffic, so he had found himself alone, without an umbrella, on the streets.

Finally, he arrived home, to apartment 23—on the first floor—and knocked on the door. His lovely wife Jennifer answered him even though she was on the phone.

“What?! They want a blue background on my blog website? Seriously? I can’t believe they didn’t surrender to pink. Honestly, this is absolutely ridiculous.”

“What’s the matter, then?”

She waved her hand dismissively at her husband and voiced silently, “I’m on the phone.”

Jennifer Hamilton is always on the phone, George thought to himself, though he said nothing.

She’s always talking yet she never has a thing to say.

Finally, after an hour or so of grumbling to the people building her website on his dime about the preferred background color, she put the phone down.

“Hello, hello. Soup?”

She had a wonderful pot of tomato soup on the stove, wafting pleasantly into the air.

She put a sprinkle of salt and then a sprinkle of pepper into the pot.

“How was your day at work, darling?” she asked as she strolled over balancing a bowl of piping-hot soup in one hand and a glass of water in the other. She knew the man always wanted a glass of water.

He got dehydrated quite easily.

“It was hard. A woman is dead. Her husband is the primary suspect.”

“Oh dear. What was her name?”

“Rosanne Miller.”

“Rosanne Miller. Who is her husband? I think I know him.”

"Her husband’s name is Frank Miller. He is a lawyer. Rumor has it that he knows how to get himself out of all sorts of trouble. Bastard.”

“How do you know it’s him though?”

George sighed.

“That’s just it. I don’t know that it’s him. I have no idea. We haven’t run the DNA test, so it’s just a looming suspicion.”

“Well, it could be anyone I suppose,” Jennifer replied, then shrugged.

“Could be,” George nodded as he ate his soup thoughtfully.

He picked up the morning paper and read through it.

It was front page news.

“Rosanne Miller. Dead. Suspected Killer: Frank Miller.”

The writer had sensationalized every detail…

George threw the thing away, perplexed.

“I wouldn’t think the man was capable of such a thing,” Jennifer continued.

“I knew the couple. Remember that Christmas dinner we attended? They were quite lovely.”

George looked solemn.

“No one knows what goes on behind closed doors, my love. No one.”

Jennifer’s spine tingled as she began to frown.

“Perhaps,” she answered, in a rather disembodied voice.

“Perhaps.”

She scurried off to go work on her cooking blog. It wasn’t off the ground yet, but it was her passion, and George was supporting her with it. He knew how much she loved it and wished her every success in the world, but he had to admit that he did get just a tad resentful at times.

After all, they did have a daughter, Marlene, and she was going to an expensive college to get her degree in journalism. He was the primary breadwinner, after all.

Roseanne Miller. She was 80 but looked a young 65. She always dyed her hair a golden blonde and wore beautiful red dresses. That’s how she’d been found that day—in a crimson dress that matched the lines of blood flowing from her chest to her shoulders, the bullet wedged right in the middle of her heart.