All the Things You Are

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Book: All the Things You Are Read Online Free PDF
Author: Declan Hughes
she had called Dee, she’d made her way out to the apple trees and hunkered down by Mr Smith’s body for a spell. What kind of savages would do something like this? She felt she should bury him, but if the cops were summoned, they’d need to see what had been done to the poor dog. She settled for getting one of his old blankets from the car trunk and covering him with it where he lay.
    Fearing she was going to lose it again, she made herself walk the yard, breathing the cold night air, trying to recover her nerve, her focus, her clarity. She established a route, her sandals crunching on the frosty grass. She found that if she got close enough to the rear of the house, the sensor light finally came on and flooded the yard. She walked in a broad oval between Mr Smith’s body and the house and then down towards the gate that leads out to the Arboretum. That’s about as far as she could get before the light cut out. Each time she completed the route, she felt a little more self-posessed, a little less panicked. The ground was bumpy underfoot – she had wanted a wild country garden, not a manicured suburban lawn – and she thought of Katharine Hepburn in
Bringing Up Baby
when she loses a heel, chanting ‘I was born on the side of a hill.’ She didn’t feel much like chanting though, not when she remembered that the dog who played George in
Bringing Up Baby
also played Mr Smith in
The Awful Truth
, which is where they got the idea for the name. Danny had wanted to call him Asta, the role he took in
The Thin Man
, but Claire had won out. She didn’t feel like chanting, but she wasn’t going to curl up and die. So when she finally saw the wolf’s head stuck on the bough of an old apple tree, she was not only able to process the sight without screaming, she also realized almost instantly that it was no wolf’s head but a werewolf mask. The sensor light cut out, but she approached the tree and examined the mask by the light of her phone. It was a full face job with fake fur and vulcanized rubber teeth bared in a grimace. The mask came away from the tree easily – it had just been wedged between two branches – and something fell from it as she tugged it free. Claire bent down and picked up a postcard which bore the simple legend:
Trick or Treat!
    She had guessed correctly – Mr Smith’s horrible death was someone’s sick idea of a Halloween prank. One mystery solved, at least. She made her way inside, fully resolved now to call the cops. But when she found herself back in the house, she noticed just how much of Mr Smith’s blood there was on her feet and legs and hands, and when she reached the bathroom she saw she had blood on her face. She grabbed body wash and shampoo from her suitcase and took a long shower. Beneath the torrent of hot water, the tears came again, not just for her dog, but for her pathetic, deluded self. One minute she had been headstrong and reckless, giddy with notions of escaping the nest, high on a vision of freedom spied through the distorting lens of a vacation flirtation; the next she had been reduced to a whimpering animal pining for her master, a panicked child praying:
Let this be a sign; let that be a sign
. Anger bubbled up next, this time directed at her husband. Never mind hints and signs, what kind of bastard would abandon his wife like this without a concrete message? If he couldn’t phone, could he not have, what, left a note in back of the photo frame in the study (she checked, no dice) or under the mat, or in one of the goddamn cars?
    What had she done? Nothing. Nothing
really
; nothing in Chicago, nothing to merit
this
, surely she had done nothing else? She tormented herself with the idea that this must be her fault, but could find nothing beyond the mild feelings of discontent and disaffection and, frankly, boredom that must visit fifteen-year-old marriages the world over. A big fat dose of Is That All There Is?
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