Free Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott Page A

her nurse?”
    “When I first blew into town. It didn’t last. She’s no bed o’ roses and that’s how come I always felt so for dear Joe. Can’t bepretty in that household. We try to keep his spirits up. Seems like you’re doing the same.”
    “I never knew that,” Marion said, wondering why Louise had never mentioned it before, or Joe.
    “Three months, best,” Louise said, waving her hand. “I got my better job and enough cabbage to pull Ginny from cooch dancing downtown. Just in the nick too. She was Camille up there on the stage and not enough meat on her chops to waggle anything but bones.”
     
    W ITHIN A WEEK, Marion began to think of it as a kind of demonic possession. At her desk, on the streetcar, at Mrs. Gower’s roasting dinner table and especially at night in bed, her body twitching. In private moments in late night hours, she thought demons may have set in and taken her body and she might require an exorcism to be free.
    Joe Lanigan. Mr. Joseph Lanigan. Entrepreneur. Beloved husband and father. Man about town. Friar. Knight of Columbus. Member, Chamber of Commerce. Lector at St. Mary’s Basilica. Gentleman Joe.
    “If I cannot see you at your room, I don’t see any other way,” he said. He had telephoned Marion at the clinic. Mrs. Curtwin, Dr. Milroy’s secretary, was not pleased that Marion was receiving calls at work. Marion had to speak quietly, discreetly into the receiver. She felt as though the woman could hear everything.
    “Mrs. Gower, she…It wouldn’t look…”
    “I think you should come here, Marion.”
    “To your home?” Marion’s voice turned rushed. The secretary’s eyes were fastened on her.
    “Write down this address.”
    She did. But she already knew where he lived, in that fine Victorian house on Lynbrook Street, three stories on a sloping hill and a large porch that curled around it.
    She determined not to go. She said to herself, This is it, Marion, your sin is great but you can save yourself from worse sins still.
     
    B UT STEPPING on that streetcar she did not go home. Instead, she took the streetcar to his grand house on Lynbrook Street. She just had to, like it was a fever. It was a fever.
    A nurse in white collar and apron answered the door and Marion said what he had told her to say.
    “I’m from the clinic. I have brought Mr. Lanigan the late orders for immediate processing.” And, palms wet, she showed her the accordion file she had brought.
    “This way, miss,” the nurse said, no expression. The house was dark, with shushing drapes drawn and thick-fringed brocaded chairs. Marion could smell mercury and rubbing alcohol.
    “Right through that door,” the nurse said, gesturing down the hallway. Then she lifted a tray of medicine and rubber tubing she had set on a hallway table and silently ascended the towering staircase of carved walnut.
    As Marion walked, she could feel the woman’s, the wife’s, Mrs. Lanigan’s, presence. Could feel the weight of her in her sickroom above. The house carried no sound.
    She paused in front of the heavy door to which she had been directed. She paused, and nearly lost her nerve. But it was too late and Joe Lanigan, in shirtsleeves and smoking a cigar, opened it. Oh, the look he gave her, didn’t it say such things to her. She feltlike he could move her as if by invisible strings. He had such ways, you see.
    It was his study, all mahogany and green leather with gold braid. The window behind the desk was draped and she saw the long tufted davenport and knew she was meant for it, that she would in moments be pinned there, one foot on the floor, and that he would have her, and he did.
    Afterward, her body rubbed to roughness, to blood-pocked flushy ruin, she fastened garters with shuddery hands and watched him, standing now, leaning against the front of his desk, cover his face with his hands like he might cry. He did not cry and she was glad he did not, but she couldn’t guess what was in his heart. She never