Sandy could feel her body leaning further away from Joyce.
“They say they found pornography in his car. And not some girlie magazines, but movies. DVDs. The really nasty sort. A bunch of them. And Rhonda always seemed such a nice woman, bless her heart.”
Sandy was released from having to conjure any sort of response to Joyce’s climactic tidbit when the phone at the nurses’ station rang and Joyce turned to answer it. Sandy slipped quickly away down the hallway. She wanted to bring Edith back into her room before she left for the day.
While she walked down the hallway toward the exit that led out into the courtyard, Sandy couldn’t avoid thinking how giddy Joyce must have been over the details of Sandy’s own tale. When Sandy was hired at the nursing home, Joyce Malden had already been working there for a few years. Sandy could imagine a cadre of nurses and aides gathered around the nurses’ station, intent and focused on Joyce at the center of the group for days after it all happened five years ago. Uncomfortable as it made Sandy to be the focus of anyone’s attention, she couldn’t have blamed Joyce or any of them all that much. It was a good story. Good enough for the publicly known facts to be ample grist for the imaginative embellishments inevitably added to the mix by the likes of a Joyce Malden.
Those publicly known facts had been transmitted by local newspapers, regional television news, and reports from the county sheriff’s office and the state police. Most anyone in the area would have known that in the late spring of that year Sandy Holston, a woman in her early thirties then, had moved into the Ripshin Valley from over the ridge in Dalton’s Ferry, taken a job as an LPN in the nursing home north of Damascus, and subsequently done her best to attract as little attention as possible. When asked officially, those she worked with said they hadn’t given her all that much thought, really, that she did her job efficiently and dependably, that she was quiet, a bit aloof, and seemed to keep to herself.
Afterwards it came out, of course, that her ex-husband, one Vernon Adams, had been serving a prison sentence for manslaughter, for beating a man to death in a bar fight. He’d served the full sentence, plus additional time for a failed escape attempt. Upon his release in the fall of that year, he’d tracked down his ex-wife at her new home on Willard Road near Damascus. Apparently bent on some manner of revenge, the ex-husband had pursued Sandy Holston into the waters of the lower Ripshin River, across the road from her home, where he found her trout fishing with her friend, one Margie Callander. The two women had fled across the river and downstream. Before he could reach his intended victims, the ex-convict ex-husband was caught unaware by the sudden and dramatic rise in the water level of the river, the result of a huge release of water from the hydroelectric dam upstream at Willard Lake. The assailant was swept up in the sudden surge of water, his head smashed into one of the many large boulders projecting from the riverbed, and drowned. His body was eventually recovered over a mile downstream. The two women had made it to the far riverbank just in time. Once the high waters of the dam release receded, they were able to return safely to the other bank. Authorities questioned the two women, their stories were confirmed, and no charges were filed.
As the public facts came out, they fed directly into the more fluid and variable versions of events narrated and amplified by the voices of the Joyce Maldens of the Ripshin River Valley. Most of these versions made it to Sandy’s ears in one form or another. She paid them little mind, but they were out there, nonetheless, vibrating in the air around her. There must have been an ill-advised affair with a married doctor or something like that because, really, why else would a nurse leave a good-paying job at the big medical center near Dalton’s Ferry to work in a nursing home in a little backwater like this? She’d moved into old Calvin Linkous’s house out on Willard Road, rented to her by his greedy little daughter not even a month yet after poor Calvin had dropped dead next to that big pile of old tires out behind the place. The daughter had even let this outsider take in Calvin’s dog, Stink, without even a how-do-you-do about how much Calvin loved that damn mutt. Some things just weren’t decent. Of course, who else would want that old mutt, smelling like he did of all the skunks he’d killed over the years?
When her husband killed that man, do you know, she was sitting right there at the bar, right in the middle of all that mess. Saw the whole thing happen right in front of her eyes and never said a thing. Never shed tear one. And the husband killed that man, someone said, because she must have been having an affair with him, and he was coming for her to do the same to her, and would have, except that other folks in the bar wrestled him to the ground until the police got there. Horrible as all that is, could you really blame him, bless his heart, her sitting right there, the hussy, with some other fellow for all the world to see? And just why is it she don’t have the same last name as her ex-husband? Someone knew someone who knew the deceased ex-convict ex-husband’s mother, and that woman was not at all shy to let it out what a lousy whore her ex-daughter-in-law had always been. Now, don’t you know, they say she’s taken up with that strange old widower, what’s his name, Keefe, lives in that little shack up on the fire road above the lake. Nurse up at the hospital emergency room in Sherwood said she brought him in with some sort of injury once. You have to wonder what she might have done to him. Now there’s a marriage made in heaven. Hard to tell which one’s more strange of the two. She acts more like a man than a woman, standing right out in the middle of the river, fishing all the time. Not normal for a woman, carrying on like that. And just what do you suppose was going on when her ex-husband came for her, her and that other woman, just the two of them, out there in the river, doing what? Fishing? Call it what you want, but looks more like those two gals are likely, well, you know, that way. Bless their hearts.
Sandy left these imagined facts and the known facts of her life to whirl and shift as they would. Walking down the long hallway, away from Joyce, in search of Edith, she held the private facts of her life close, to be shared partially with only a select few, to be shared fully with no one. She had no point to prove. She was who she was, at home in her skin with no more apologies to make.
She was Sandy Holston, that woman from over the ridge for whom not one but two men had died. And yet they hadn’t died for her, neither Vernon nor the drunken red-haired man Vernon killed at the bar, the red-haired man she’d never met before and whose name she still couldn’t recall. Both had died for a version of her—the beloved wife, the good-looking woman ripe for the picking on the adjacent barstool—versions of Sandy they had each fabricated themselves and attempted to drape over her. Neither version had ever fit her. She wondered if any of these other women ever understood that, the women she would still catch looking furtively at her from time to time, their quick glances revealing a mixture of envy, awe, and fear of the woman for whom men had actually died.
She was Sandy Holston, “a cold fish, that one,” some had said. And perhaps she was. She had finned her way into the world as a late “surprise” to her middle-aged, childless parents, both of whom had by that time long since settled comfortably into a life crafted for only two. Other than the shrine of old photographs on her mother’s bedside table, she had no memory of the father who died in a foundry explosion while she was still a toddler, leaving her with a mother entrenched in the life of a grieving widow and who seemed startled by the presence of a daughter who might intrude upon that grief. When her mother died, she closed up her mother’s house and married Vernon Adams because he had professed what he called love and his proposal had seemed reasonable and she could think of no reason not to accept. She stepped out of the shadow of the life her parents had shaped for themselves and into the one planned out by Vernon and felt no recognizable sense of loss. Nothing had yet presented itself that might sink a barb into the heart pumping blood through her flesh.
She was Sandy Holston, and yes, she had agreed to participate in her imprisoned husband’s ill-fated escape attempt. She could think of no simple way to refuse, and she doubted he would ever actually enact his plan—to wait for the right moment, then flee the prison work detail, escape into the national forest land nearby, run over the ridge and down to the clearing by Dismal Creek, where Sandy would be waiting with the car. And she did wait, as agreed,
