She Did It

I’m disgusted by her doe eyes and half grin that she had plastered onto her face during the entire trial. She’s a psychopath, possibly demon-possessed. I’m the only one who knows the truth. She knows that I know. That’s why she was able to bat those flashy eyelashes and look everyone in the eye in the courtroom, the judge, the jury, even my husband’s mother, and never once could bring herself to look at me. She knew where I was sitting because I sat in the same spot every day of the trial, my grieving mother-in-law to my left and my sister to my right. I willed her to look at me, so I could shoot her the evilest look of loathing I could muster. She never did. 

That sick woman killed my husband. Now she sits in a cold, dark cell waiting for the jury to deliberate while a brick sits heavy in my hot, empty stomach. I don’t feel good about the way the trial ended. I saw the way the defense attorney gave her a cocky grin like he knew they’d won. How is he so blind to her guilt? Maybe he’s not, and he’s just doing his job. But he seems like an idiot to me. 

She is, of course, remorseless. The jury may have mistaken her carefree image for innocence, but I know who she really is. I know she lacks the ability to feel empathy or regret…to feel anything at all.

*****

She’s a carbon copy of my ex-boyfriend. He’s the reason I know so much about psychopaths. He charmed me until I was hypnotized into loving him. It took months before I realized the only person he was capable of loving was himself. His ego was filled to the brim, no room left for anyone else to seep in. After our relationship became violent, I finally wised up and left. I vowed to never let anyone like that into my life again. 

Years later, after my husband and I were married, we hired a housekeeper. She seemed sweet and did a good job with the house. My husband and I both worked long hours, so it was nice coming home to a clean house. Sometimes she would even cook for us. We eventually gave her a key to the house. That was my first mistake.

Gradually, she started coming around more, even when we were at home. It started to feel like she was always there, like an extra limb that I didn’t really want or need. She was there so often that there wasn’t enough work to be done, so she would sit in the sunroom and read or, once, I found her in my bedroom sitting on the bed watching TV. My second mistake was not firing her right there on the spot. She was always so apologetic, and I always gave in to her charms. Her charms felt familiar, but, at the time, I couldn’t place them. Now, my ex-boyfriend mocks me in my mind.

This brings me to my third mistake: turning a blind eye to the way my husband also gave in to her charms. He started offering to help her water the flowers or clean the pool. I would watch them from my bedroom window. They knew I could see them, didn’t they? They would make eye contact and let their gaze linger, or he would make jokes, and she would cackle like a hyena. 

I was a confident, good-looking woman. I had never felt threatened by another woman before. I thought she was too flirty, but I didn’t think it was harmful. I thought that was her personality, like she couldn’t help it, and that she had her own life that had nothing to do with me and my husband. I was so wrong.

She was trying to weave her way into our lives fully and seamlessly. She was trying to take my place, to take my husband and become me. I didn’t admit this to myself until it was too late. 

I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of voices arguing outside my bedroom window. They words were hushed and harsh. I felt for my husband in the dark, but he wasn’t in the bed. I jumped up and reached under the bed for the baseball bat. It was gone. I started to turn on the lamp, but I didn’t want to draw the attention of the intruders. I tiptoed to the window and pressed my ear against it, careful not to move the curtain. 

I recognized my husband’s whisper first. “You are not my girlfriend. You are no one,” he hissed.

“You need to give me another chance. I can be everything for you. Please,” a woman’s shaky

voice whispered back. Our housekeeper. I had to cover my mouth to muffle the sound of a gasp.

My husband retorted, “You need to get out of here, and don’t ever come back.”

She cried in the most theatrical way possible, “You are supposed to love me!” 

His voice got deep and serious then. “I don’t. Leave. Now.”

I could hear her faux sobbing. After a few seconds, I got brave and peeled back the curtain two inches, enough to see their shadows. A few moments before, when I realized my husband was one of the voices outside, I assumed then that he had the bat. I was wrong. Did he know she had it? Could he see it down by her side in the dark? Of course she had it, she knew our home inside and out. She had her own key. 

Like the voice of a demon, a sound unlike anything I had ever heard, rose from her throat. “If I can’t have you, no one will.” I opened my mouth to scream, but I was a second too late. In a flash she swung that baseball bat (with a speed and strength that can only be explained by the same demonic force that had also taken over her voice) and cracked it against the side of my husband’s head. His body fell in a heap onto the garden they had watered together. 

My scream came then. She dropped the bat and ran. 

*****

She spun a story that the police, her attorney, everyone seemed to believe, a nonsense self-defense tale. She made my husband out to be a bad guy, and it was my word against hers. She claimed to have saved not only herself from his madness, but me too. My husband’s cold-blooded murderer claimed to have saved my life. She was arrested and sent to be tried, but it felt like the world was rooting for her, like she was the victim. The world had lapped up the sugary hero story and licked the bowl clean.

The jury has made their decision; they’re ready to tell the judge. The guard brings her out of her holding cell, where I like to imagine she was waiting with fear and regret, but I know with my whole heart that is not true. She was probably humming show tunes, thinking of anything but this trial. I want her to look at me, so I can imprint my face onto her memory forever, give her some type of humanity, make her feel some sense of shame or remorse, to feel something. Maybe that’s the one thing she is afraid of: feeling. Maybe she knows the only way she will feel sorry is if she looks at me, and she is avoiding that like the plague.

She stands next to her attorney, facing the judge, with her back to me. I shoot lasers from my eyeballs hoping to evaporate her into thin air. I keep my gaze on her back as the head juror speaks.

“On the count of murder in the second degree, we, the jury, find the defendant—”

The courtroom sucks in a collective breath.

“Not guilty.” Most of the breaths are released in a sound of relief. My family releases theirs in sounds of gasps and cries of defeat and confusion. I don’t release my breath at all. My face gets redder and redder. I haven’t taken my eyes off of her. She hugs her attorney and turns to face me. She looks at me for the first time since she killed my husband.

The same demon that possessed her the night of the murder is now visible on her face. It grins from ear to ear. It taps the attorney on the shoulder and points to me. It mouths the words, “She did it. She killed her husband.”