Twisted

having the shower for Christie.”
    “To see . . .”
    “Doug,” he answered.
    “Really?” Mo Anderson looked carefully at her fingernails, which she was painting bright red. He didn’t like the color but he didn’t say anything about it. She continued. “A bunch of women round here—boring. You’d enjoy yourself in Maryland. It’ll be fun,” she said.
    “I think so too,” Pete Anderson said. He sat across from Mo on the front porch of their split-level house in suburban Westchester County. The month was June and the air was thick with the smell of the jasmine that Mo had planted earlier in the spring. Pete used to like that smell. Now, though, it made him sick to his stomach.
    Mo inspected her nails for streaks and pretended to be bored with the idea of him going to see Doug, who was her boss, an “important” guy who covered the whole East Coast territory. He’d invited both Mo and Pete to his country place but she’d planned a wedding shower for her niece. Doug had said to Pete, “Well, why don’t you come on down solo?” Pete had said he’d think about it.
    Oh, sure, she seemed bored with the idea of him going by himself. But she was a lousy actress; Pete could tell she was really excited at the thought and he knew why. But he just watched the lightning bugs and kept quiet. Played dumb. Unlike Mo, he could act.
    They were silent and sipped their drinks, the ice clunking dully in the plastic glasses. It was the first day of summer and there must’ve been a thousand lightning bugs in their front yard.
    “I know I kinda said I’d clean up the garage,” he said, wincing a little. “But—”
    “No, that can keep. I think it’s a great idea, going down there.”
    I know you think it’d be a great idea, Pete thought. But he didn’t say this to her. Lately he’d been thinking a lot of things and not saying them.
    Pete was sweating—more from excitement than from the heat—and he wiped the moisture off his face and his short-cut blond hair with a napkin.
    The phone rang and Mo went to answer it.
    She came back and said, “It’s your father, ” in that sour voice of hers. She sat down and didn’t say anything else, just picked up her drink and examined her nails again.
    Pete got up and went into the kitchen. His father lived in Wisconsin, not far from Lake Michigan. He loved the man and wished they lived closer together. Mo, though, didn’t like him one bit and always raised a stink when Pete wanted to go visit. Pete was never exactly sure what the problem was between Mo and the man. But it made him mad that she treated him badly and would never talk to Pete about it.
    And he was mad too that Mo seemed to put Pete in the middle of things. Sometimes Pete even felt guilty he had a father.
    He enjoyed talking but hung up after only five minutes because he felt Mo didn’t want him to be on the phone.
    Pete walked out onto the porch. “Saturday. I’ll go visit Doug then.”
    Mo said, “I think Saturday’d be fine.”
    Fine . . .
    They went inside and watched TV for a while. Then, at eleven, Mo looked at her watch and stretched and said, “It’s getting late. Time for bed.”
    And when Mo said it was time for bed, it was definitely time for bed.

    Later that night, when she was asleep, Pete walked downstairs into the office. He reached behind a row of books resting on the built-in bookshelves and pulled out a large, sealed envelope.
    He carried it down to his workshop in the basement. He opened the envelope and took out a book. It was called Triangle and Pete had found it in thetrue-crime section of a local used-book shop after flipping through nearly twenty books about real-life murders. Pete had never stolen anything in his life but that day he’d looked around the store and slipped the book inside his windbreaker then strolled casually out of the store. He’d had to steal it; he was afraid that—if everything went as he’d planned—the clerk might remember him buying the book and the police would use it as evidence.
    Triangle was the true story of a couple in Colorado Springs. The wife was married to a man named Roy. But she was also seeing another man—Hank, a local carpenter and a friend of the family. Roy found out and waited until Hank was out hiking on a mountain path, then he snuck up and pushed him over a cliff. Hank grabbed on to a tree root but he lost his grip—or Roy smashed his hands; it wasn’t clear—and Hank fell a hundred feet to his death on the