Mr. Murder

the kitchen, he heard Paige enter, and a moment later she slid both arms around his waist, embracing him from behind.
        "You okay?" she asked.
        "Yeah, well…"
        "Bad day?"
        "Not really. Just one bad moment."
        Marty turned in her arms to embrace her. She felt wonderful, so warm and strong, so alive.
        That he loved her more now than when they had met in college was no surprise. The triumphs and failures they had shared, the years of daily struggle to make a place in the world and to seek the meaning of it, was rich soil in which love could grow.
        However, in an age when ideal beauty was supposedly embodied in nineteen-year-old professional cheerleaders for major-league football teams, Marty knew a lot of guys who would be surprised to hear he'd found his wife increasingly attractive as she had aged from nineteen to thirty-three. Her eyes were no bluer than they had been when he'd first met her, her hair was not a richer shade of gold, and her skin was neither smoother nor more supple. Nevertheless, experience had given her character, depth. Corny as it sounded in this era of knee-jerk cynicism, she sometimes seemed to shine with an inner light, as radiant as the venerated subject of a painting by Raphael.
        So, yeah, maybe he had a heart as soft as butter, maybe he was a sucker for romance, but he found her smile and the challenge of her eyes infinitely more exciting than a six-pack of naked cheerleaders.
        He kissed her brow.
        She said, "One bad moment? What happened?"
        He hadn't decided how much he should tell her about those seven lost minutes. For now it might be best to minimize the deep weirdness of the experience, see the doctor Monday morning, and even have some tests done. If he was in good health, what had happened in the office this afternoon might prove to be an inexplicable singularity. He didn't want to alarm Paige unnecessarily.
        "Well?" she persisted.
        With the inflection she gave that single word, she reminded him that twelve years of marriage forbade serious secrets, no matter what good intentions motivated his reticence.
        He said, "You remember Audrey Aimes?"
        "Who? Oh, you mean in One Dead Bishop?"
        One Dead Bishop was a novel he had written. Audrey Aimes was the lead character.
        "Remember what her problem was?" he asked.
        "She found a dead priest hanging on a hook in her foyer closet."
        "Aside from that."
        "She had another problem? Seems like a dead priest is enough.
        Are you sure you're not over-complicating your plots?"
        "I'm serious," he said, though aware of how odd it was that he should choose to inform his wife of a personal crisis by comparing it to the experiences of a mystery-novel heroine whom he had created.
        Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it sometimes was for a writer? And if so-was there a book in that idea?
        Frowning, Paige said, "Audrey Aimes… Oh, yeah, you're talking about her blackouts."
        "Fugues," he said.
        A fugue was a serious personality dissociation. The victim went places, talked to people, and engaged in varied activities while appearing normal-yet later could not recall where he had been or what he had done during the blackout, as if the time had passed in deepest sleep. A fugue could last minutes, hours, or even days.
        Audrey Aimes had suddenly begun to suffer from fugues when she was thirty, because repressed memories of childhood abuse had begun to surface after more than two decades, and she had retreated from them psychologically. She'd been certain she'd killed the priest while in a fugue state, although of course someone else had murdered him and stuffed him in her closet, and the entire bizarre homicide was closed.
        In spite of being able to earn a living by spinning elaborate fantasies out of thin air, Marty had a reputation for being as emotionally stable as the Rock of Gibraltar and as easy-going as a golden retriever on Valium, which was probably why Paige still smiled at him and appeared reluctant to take him seriously.
        She stood on her toes, kissed his nose, and said, "So you forgot to take out the garbage, and now you're going to claim it's because you're suffering a personality breakdown due to long-forgotten, hideous abuses when you were six years old. Really, Marty. Shame on