to the kids as the school bus was setting off. Her husband should be in his office by now. A usual Tuesday. She went upstairs, humming some silly tune. What’s it from? Some commercial, probably. The housekeeper should be here soon. She’s too busy to do the chores herself. She has work to do. She has a story to write. She was coming to the age when a person has everything he or she needs – a house, a family, a rewarding job, – and starts craving something else.
An armchair in her room, a glass of something cold and bitter, an open laptop. A story abrupted mid-sentence. A former police officer was about to kill his wife. What he feels like? She did her researh. She knew perfectly well how to hold a weapon, how to get disposed of a body, and how to handle interrogations. But, as she figured out the moment she started writing, this wasn’t enough.
Downstairs, the door clacked. The housekeeper arrived.
She tried to imagine something that would make her bloodthirsty. She couldn’t.
The ground floor sounded busy: she could hear the steps, the water running, the furniture being moved around.
“What if I wanted to kill the housekeeper,” she thought. “Why would I do that?”
For a moment, she listened to the noise downstairs. Then smiled.
“No,” she thought, getting up. “The question is: why not?”
The lawyer got into his car and sat still for a while, his hands on the wheel, his eyes blank. This would be the easiest case in his career. Yet the most disturbing one. He’s seen quite a number of murderers in his life. He’s seen the passionate ones, screaming and threatening and unstable. He’s seen the cunning ones, scheming and lying and manipulating. He’s even met the cold-hearted ones, the cynical sociopaths with no concept of empathy. He was used to all of them, to be honest.
She was something entirely different, though. She wasn’t hysterical, she wasn’t shifty, neither did she look like a sociopath. She called the police immediately, she confessed immediately, she was perfectly polite with the officers and with the lawyer himself, smiling gently, apologising for “the bother”. Nothing in her reasoning suggested hidden insanity. Nothing in her life story could really be considered traumatic: a devoted daughter and wife of two businessmen, a caring mother of two bright pupils, a proud holder of two diplomas in remarkably unrelated fields. An amateur yet aspiring author.
Her husband, a wealthy man, hired an expensive lawyer, yet there wasn’t really anything the most callow attorney couldn’t handle.
“Why did you do it?” he asked her several times. Not that there was any need. Just to be sure.
“Oh,” she replied with the sweetest suburban housewife smile. “You see, I’ve always been a woman of action.”
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