Unrevealed

bedroom because there’s something quite calming to me about going to sleep with only the amber light from a fire and the reassuring crackle of the logs spitting embers onto the stone. It’s like camping, minus all the annoying shit. I stood there for a second and imagined Winston and Abbey curled up in their high-rise bed staring at the roaring fire and talking about their long day at the pub.
    Walking around to the foot of the bed, I turned on a decorative lamp that stood on a small table. I determined that Winston slept on the right side of the bed based on the fact that on the left side table, there was a jar of jasminescented hand cream, a box of pink Kleenex, and a small photo of Winston. Call it preschool deduction, but that had
to be Abbey’s side of the bed. I stepped back and retraced the most likely steps that Winston would have taken in the dark if, as he claimed, he had made his way around the bed and out the door. There were those surface cuts on his upper thigh, some of which had bled, that had attracted the attention of the cops on the scene. From what I could see, his alleged route showed several telltale signs of recent travel. For example, a framed photo was on the floor beside the small table that held the decorative lamp. A pair of slippers were several feet apart, as if someone had stumbled over them. Signs of a physical altercation in the room? Maybe. I peered closer at the corners of the bed but the dark wood made it difficult to see major blood transfer. Mr. Gambrel initially said that he tore off his wife’s lacy panties because he thought he saw a puncture wound in her pelvis. But there was no puncture wound anywhere on her body.
    I went back to those motives for murder: sex, money and gettin’ even. That’s where the secrets like to play. When you have bloodied lacy panties, you’ve gotta consider rough sex gone wrong or rape. It didn’t mean that he killed her on purpose. Working out this twisted scenario in my head, I wandered onto the landing off the bedroom and tried to picture the possible ways this could have gone down. Abbey and Winston could have been going at it on the landing; maybe he rubbed against something sharp and transferred his blood onto her panties. Perhaps that’s when he ripped them off her body and tossed them downstairs, which would make more sense given their final location. But without getting too graphic here, no matter how many sexual positions I tried to visualize the Gambrels engaged in, I couldn’t find any sign of activity on the landing nor could I figure out how they might have been having sex in order for Abbey to land
in the manner she did. Even though Winston said he turned her over to do CPR, the manner in which she was initially sprawled — again, according to Winston — indicated that she fell forward down the stairs. Of course, Winston could have lied to us about how he found her body, but my initial take was that his telling of that part of the story truly seemed genuine. What I didn’t buy was his second version of the story, when he had his head lowered and never looked me in the eye. That was guilt showing through. What that guilt was connected to, I didn’t know yet.
    One of the first cops on the scene called up to me at that point. Mr. Gambrel was now in the other room. “There was no sign of sexual penetration on the deceased,” he offered, as if he somehow knew I was up there visualizing the Gambrels getting frisky.
    Okay, I thought, cross sex off the list. That left money and gettin’ even. But this was spouse-on-spouse, which revolved in its own orbit. And that orbit is known as rage . Typically, you kill your spouse because you find out he or she is cheating on you. It can be premeditated but it’s usually a boiling hot explosion wrapped in a blinding primal frenzy that starts with a verbal confrontation, graduates to throwing and breaking various household items, and escalates to a full-blown physical fight that leads to the death that lawyers justify as a “crime of passion.” I thought about how shattered Mr. Gambrel looked. If that was an acting job, the guy should get an agent and go to Hollywood. As far as I was concerned, he loved his wife with a depth most people never experience. But that kind of unflagging devotion could certainly make the pain of finding out she had a lover even more cutting, which could result in a swift and sudden fight to the death. And yet, where was the proof of this violent