I pushed him over then so he lay on his back with me on top, and wrung the fabric of his shirt away from his chest. The peeling knife was back in my hand and I let it play ever so lightly over his nipples while straddling his hips, feeling his want for me strain against the fabric of his pants. He moaned and cursed me, sucked in a sharp breath as the knife drew blood. Not much; just a smear. The look of it on his pale skin excited me even more and I bent down to lick the little wound, earning me another outcry from James. His hand was in my hair, pulling hard to lift my head, and when I did, he kissed me again, breath hot and strained on my skin.
I was done playing. I sat back up and pulled his pants and underwear down his legs, far enough that I could get what I wanted. I climbed back on top of him and slipped him inside me. I always relished that moment, that delicious few seconds when he entered me fully and I could squeeze him hard with my insides. I still held the knife while I rode him, wild and carefree. My hair had come undone by then; my skin was slick with salt, and the pewter button danced on its chain. James convulsed beneath me when he came—and I did too, right there on Mads’s bed. Just to spite.
James knew me well enough to know it. When we lay resting in each other’s arms, he said, “You and your contempt for all and everything. You will torch the house again just to spite them, won’t you? If you win the insurance claim.”
“I’m good with spite,” I told him. “And the devil hasn’t let me down yet.”
“No.” James chuckled. “I suppose he is far too amused by your antics.”
* * *
—
Eventually, the insurance companies had to give in. They had no evidence against me.
I went to their offices every day for a week, with all the girls, complaining about my misery. “How am I to feed these girls?” I asked Mr. Jackson with tears in my eyes. “How are they to live now that their father is dead and buried? It’s certainly not their fault that he died on such a troublesome day.”
Jennie sometimes cried at these meetings, from fear I suppose, as she disliked angry voices, but it certainly was effective. Lucy rode on my hip, dazzling the world with her large blue eyes. Myrtle clung to my skirts, as if I were the longed-for harbor in a terrible storm.
It was all so very perfect—and the insurance men in their fine suits could not wait to have us out the doors, promising a little too much, perhaps, in their eagerness to see us go.
No one wants a weeping widow standing on their marble floors, clutching a brood of little angels and lamenting the company’s heartlessness to every passing soul. It does not speak well for their business.
Oscar had gone home at last. His silly experiment with the autopsy had been stranded when he ran out of money, and the new examination of the body had ended before they even got to the heart. They had not found anything to condemn me, and I always made a point of reminding Mr. Jackson and Mr. Wicker of that fact.
Oscar did me a favor in that way.
What he had done to cause me grief was telling every one of my neighbors and acquaintances of his suspicions. I saw it in the eyes of every wife on the street, and every deliveryman who came to my door, that they had all heard about the life insurance and Oscar’s vile claims. No wonder my girl was being teased in school, when her uncle had been out spreading rumors about me.
But no one could prove a thing, and eventually I was paid.
Shortly after the insurance money arrived, I had James set a fire in the cellar in Alma Street, as I felt it would be better if we lived somewhere else. The children and I escaped out on the street, where kindly neighbors comforted us while the firemen battled the flames.
It did not burn down, which annoyed me some but pleased me too. Perhaps it would not be so bad to move back in if it was all redone and furnished with new things. The dream of a farm kept haunting me, though. I could not cease longing for privacy and peace. Even when we lived temporarily on Sophia Street while our own house was being repaired, I felt I was being looked at everywhere I went—that the taint of suspicion was with me always.
Jennie still cried every night.
I had money, though, and that was some comfort. Even if my nights were sleepless, I knew I could fill my pantry.
I had James set a fire on Sophia Street too, so I could get rid of the furniture from Alma Street, which smelled charred even after airing. It was better that the insurance company paid for the new things than I.
After both fires, they grumbled but could not prove a thing. At the last fire, I was not even in the house. “Maybe someone has it in for me,” I suggested. “Maybe someone wants to see me stranded without a home. Someone, perhaps, with a grudge.” I was thinking of Oscar, of course. It could not hurt to sow a tiny suspicion that perhaps he had agents with ill intent. I dearly wanted to get back at him for all the grief he had cost me, and he was a lucky man to live as far away as he did.
Should our paths ever cross again, I would surely repay him with interest.
The children and I went back to Alma Street after the renovation, but despite the new boards and paint, it still felt like a murky place, festering from within the walls.
I craved for a new life for us, my girls and me, far away from suspicions.
Surely I had earned as much, after all the trouble I had seen.
26.
Nellie
At first, when Bella asked me, I was adamant that I would not go. There was my back, for one, which prevented all comfortable travel, and then there was the rest of it: how Mads’s death had left such a bad taste behind, and the fear that sometimes gripped me at night and woke me up with a sense of being choked, covered in cold sweats and beset with shivers.
I no longer felt at ease around my sister.
John knew it, and sometimes asked me after we had gone to bed for the night.
“What is it that bothers you so?” he would say with worry in his dark gaze. His hair had turned gray, and his skin was wrinkled, but his good sense and kindness had not changed.
“Nothing,” I would say, but the lie would almost choke me, make my voice come out thick and muffled.
“Then why are you so rarely there anymore?” The way he looked at me then, as if daring me to voice what was truly the issue. He knew very well what was being said about Bella, but he seldom mentioned it at home, as he knew that it would upset me. My children knew as well. Olga would frown and sneer at it all, claiming the rumors to be nothing but lies. Rudolph took a more thoughtful approach, and remarked once, at one Sunday dinner, that their marriage had indeed been a powder keg. Little Nora, at thirteen, got in trouble at school for threatening to send her aunt after some boys who had teased her and called her names.
“Well, they did stop,” she said when I confronted her. “No one wants to make Aunt Bella angry.”
Nora was the only one of my children who still lived with us. Olga had taken a room above the hosiery store where she worked, and Rudolph shared a room with a friend. It felt empty and lonely without them, but they were growing up, and I had been much younger myself when I left home. The rooms around me seemed vast without them, though, and I missed the bustle in the mornings and the sounds they made at night. I truly should have spent more time with my nieces, helping Bella out—but I found it so hard to be there.
I believed her, I told myself. Of course I did believe her.
What else was there to do but believe?