He reached for the doorknob, but it didn’t turn; it only slipped through his fingers. Did she lock the door when he was gone? He didn’t believe it. That wasn’t Vicky. His worry-no, it was terror now increased. And yet there was one moment (which he would never admit to himself later), one small moment when he felt nothing but an urge to turn away from that locked door. Just hightail it. Never mind Vicky, or Charlie, or the weak justifications that would come later.

Just run.

Instead, he groped in his pocket for his keys.

In his nervousness he dropped them and had to bend to pick them up-car keys, the key to the east wing of Prince Hall, the blackish key that unlocked the chain he put across Granther’s road at the end of each summer visit. Keys had a funny way of accumulating.

He plucked his housekey from the bunch and unlocked the door. He went in and shut it behind him. The light in the living room was a low, sick yellow. It was hot. And still. Oh God it was so still.

“Vicky?”

No answer. And all that no answer meant was that she wasn’t here. She had put on her boogie shoes, as she liked to say, and had gone marketing or visiting. Except that she wasn’t doing either of those things. He felt sure of it. And his hand, his right hand… why were the fingers throbbing so?

“Vicky!”

He went into the kitchen. There was a small Formica table out there with three chairs. He and Vicky and Charlie usually ate their breakfast in the kitchen. One of the chairs now lay on its side like a dead dog. The salt shaker had overturned and salt was spilled across the table’s surface. Without thinking about what he was doing, Andy pinched some of it between the thumb and first finger of his left hand and tossed it back over his shoulder, muttering under his breath, as both his father and his Granther had done before him, “Salt salt malt malt bad luck stay away.”

There was a pot of soup on the Hotpoint. It was cold. The empty soup can stood on the counter. Lunch for one. But where was she? “Vicky!” he hollered down the stairs. Dark down there. The laundry room and the family room, which ran the length of the house. No answer.

He looked around the kitchen again. Neat and tidy. Two of Charlie’s drawings, made at the Vacation Bible School she had attended in July, held on the refrigerator with small plastic vegetables that had magnetic bases. An electric bill and a phone bill stuck on the spike with the motto PAY THESE LAST written across the base. Everything in its place and a place for everything.

Except the chair was overturned. Except the salt was spilled. There was no spit in his mouth, none at all. His mouth was as dry and slick as chrome on a summer day.

Andy went upstairs, looked through Charlie’s room, their room, the guest room. Nothing. He went back through the kitchen, flicked on the stairway light, and went downstairs. Their Maytag washer gaped open. The dryer fixed him with one glassy porthole eye. Between them, on the wall, hung a sampler Vicky had bought somewhere; it read HONEY, WE’re ALL WASHED UP. He went into the family room and fumbled for the light switch, fingers brushing at the wall, crazily sure that at any moment unknown cold fingers would close over his and guide them to the switch. Then he found the plate at last, and the fluorescent bars set into the Armstrong ceiling glowed alive.

This was a good room. He had spent a lot of time down here, fixing things up, smiling at himself all the time because, in the end, he had become all those things that as undergraduates they had sworn they would not become. All three of them had spent a lot of time down here. There was a TV built into the wall, a Ping-Pong table, an oversized backgammon board. More board games were cased against one wall, there were some coffee-table-sized books ranged along a low table that Vicky had made from barnboard. One wall had been dressed in paperbacks. Hung on the walls were several framed and matted afghan squares that Vicky had knitted; she joked that she was great at individual squares but simply didn’t have the stamina to knit a whole damn blanket. There were Charlie’s books in a special kid-sized bookcase, all of them carefully arranged in alphabetical order, which Andy had taught her one boring snowy night two winters before and which still fascinated her.

A good room.

An empty room.

He tried to feel relief. The premonition, hunch, whatever you wanted to call it, had been wrong.

She just wasn’t here. He snapped off the light and went back into the laundry room.

The washing machine, a front-loader they had picked up at a yard sale for sixty bucks, still gaped open. He shut it without thinking, much as he had tossed a pinch of the spilled salt over his shoulder. There was blood on the washer’s glass window. Not much. Only three or four drops. But it was blood.

Andy stood staring at it. It was cooler down here, too cool, it was like a morgue down here. He looked at the floor. There was more blood on the floor. It wasn’t even dry. A little sound, a soft, squealing whisper, came from his throat.

He began to walk around the laundry room, which was nothing but a small alcove with white plaster walls. He opened the clothes hamper. It was empty but for one sock. He looked in the cubbyhole under the sink. Nothing but Lestoil and Tide and Biz and Spic “n Span. He looked under the stairs. Nothing there but cobwebs and the plastic leg of one of Charlie’s older dolls-that dismembered limb lying patiently down here and waiting for rediscovery for God knew how long.

He opened the door between the washer and the dryer and the ironing board whistled down with a ratchet and a crash and there beneath it, her legs tied up so that her knees were just below her chin, her eyes open and glazed and dead, was Vicky Tomlinson McGee with a cleaning rag stuffed in her mouth. There was a thick and sickening smell of Pledge furniture polish in the air.

He made a low gagging noise and stumbled backward. His hand flailed, as if to drive this terrible vision away, and one of them struck the control panel of the dryer and it whirred into life. Clothes began to tumble and click inside. Andy screamed. And then he ran. He ran up the stairs and stumbled going around the corner into the kitchen and sprawled flat and bumped his forehead on the linoleum. He sat up, breathing hard.

It came back. It came back in slow motion, like a football instant replay where you see the quarterback sacked or the winning pass caught. It haunted his dreams in the days that came later. The door swinging open, the ironing board falling down to the horizontal with a ratcheting sound, reminding him somehow of a guillotine, his wife crammed into the space beneath and in her mouth a rag that had been used to polish the furniture. It came back in a kind of total recall and he knew he was going to scream again and so he slammed his forearm into his mouth and he bit it and the sound that came out was a fuzzy, blocked howl. He did that twice, and something came out of him and he was calm. It was the false calm of shock, but it could be used. The amorphous fear and the unfocused terror fell away. The throbbing in his right hand was gone. And the thought that stole into his mind now was as cold as the calmness that had settled over him, as cold as the shock, and that thought was CHARLIE.

He got up, started for the telephone, and then turned back to the stairs. He stood at the top for a moment, biting at his lips, steeling himself, and then he went back down. The dryer turned and turned. There was nothing in there but a pair of his jeans, and it was the big brass button at the waist that made that clicking, clinking sound as they turned and fell, turned and fell. Andy shut the dryer off and looked into the ironing-board closet.

“Vicky,” he said softly.

She stared at him with her dead eyes, his wife. He had walked with her, held her hand, entered her body in the dark of night. He found himself remembering the night she had drunk too much at a faculty party and he had held her head while she threw up. And that memory became the day he had been washing the station wagon and he had gone into the garage for a moment to get the can of Turtle Wax and she had picked up the hose and had run up behind him and stuffed the hose down the back of his pants. He remembered getting married and kissing her in front of everyone, relishing that kiss, her mouth, her ripe, soft mouth.