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chapter 5
    S HE PULLED THE TRIGGER, SAW THE BULLET ENTER JOE’S FOREHEAD.
    As Roxy floated on her back in the pool, eyes closed, she didn’t force the image away. Just stopped paddling and sank beneath the water as she saw Joe fall, dead by the time he hit the pavement. She drifted slowly upward and felt the sun on her face as she broke the surface.
    Opened her eyes to Lion’s Head, the rocky peak that flanked Table Mountain. The house clung to a cliff on its lower slopes, an engineering marvel. Joe’s pride and joy. She kicked once and flowed to the side of the infinity pool, water merging seamlessly with ocean and sky. With an easy motion she pressed her hands down on the edge and lifted herself out, sitting naked and dripping on the tiles.
    As she felt the sun warming her body, she caught her fingers tracing the bruises beneath the ribs on her right side. A month
ago they were as purple as pulped berries, but they had faded to a mottled yellow-brown, blending with her tan.
    The numbness that kept reality at a distance since last night was receding. A word came to her: culpable . No, fuck culpable . She was a killer. A murderer. Roxy was shocked by what she had done the night before. Shocked that she had killed her husband, sure, but astonished that she had managed to do something so out of character. So fucking vivid.
    Life had always been something that happened to Roxy. It was easy, when you were beautiful, to just lie back and let the current catch hold of you and wash you up someplace you never even knew existed.
    But she had never expected to end up here.
    She felt a surge of panic. Pure terror. Knew she was going to pay for what she’d done. Big-time.
    Told herself to calm down. Take it easy. Nobody suspected her. Crime was epidemic in this absurdly beautiful city. She’d been here long enough to know that most of the criminals and their victims lived out on the Cape Flats, the ghetto that had turned its hatred and fear in on itself. But crime touched the privileged, too. Home invasions and hijackings left tanned and well-fed corpses in the sitting rooms and driveways of the suburbs that adorned the slopes of Table Mountain.
    The cops the night before had seemed bored. She had felt they were going through the motions, the crime already solved for them, even if the hijackers had disappeared into the sprawl of the Flats. All she had to do was keep cool. Let Joe’s estate be processed and buy herself a ticket out of here. She’d overstayed her welcome, anyway. Came for a summer and stayed five years.
    Back when she was modeling, Roxy was always being touted as the next somebody, but her career hadn’t caught fire the way it was meant to. She did okay, but by the time she was twenty-eight she knew that she wasn’t going to have a fragrance named
after her, and she felt ancient next to the starved fifteen-year-olds who haunted the studios and catwalks.
    So Roxy migrated south to Cape Town, where the modeling scene was big, but not flooded with the huge names like Europe and the States. Catalog work and the odd TV commercial came her way. But she wasn’t going anywhere.
    Then she met Joe Palmer in a beachfront bar, an older guy with the confidence that money bought. He gave her a pair of Cartier earrings on their first date, and they were married six months later.
    She’d never loved him.
    Learned to hate him later.
    Roxy stood and wrapped herself in a printed cloth, shaking the water from her hair. It was hot, the dry heat that scorched Cape Town this time of the year. The wind had died during the morning, and she could see a smear of brown smog hanging over Robben Island and the Flats.
    As she walked up the staircase to her bedroom, Roxy found her fingers probing her bruised ribs again. Remembered flying down these stairs, hitting, rolling, ending up unconscious on the tiles below. She stopped at the door to the room at the top of the stairs. The pink room.