Philly Stakes by Gillian Roberts

turned away. My shoulder hurt. I didn’t listen.”
    “You know, that idea of talking to a trained professional is a good one. I think somebody like that could be very helpful.” I left my shoes on the floor and curled my bare feet under me as a reminder that I was very untrained and barely professional.
    “Should I tell him, then?” she asked.
    “Tell who?”
    “Because if I don’t, maybe it’ll be listed as an accident. Why not? Why shouldn’t it be? Would it matter?”
    I tilted my head, hoping for a clearer view of what was going on.
    “If I told him, would he keep it secret? Is that how that works? I’m afraid to ask him.”
    My neck would only stretch so far, and even sideways, she wasn’t making sense.
    “But if Laura rushes to the police, even to your friend, I’d have to do something.”
    “Mrs. Clausen?”
    “Alice.”
    I took a deep breath. “Alice, what are you saying?”
    “I have to do something!” She was suddenly agitated. Her expensively kept hands flapped like rags in a strong wind. “I never do anything! I never listen!” She stood up, a reedy woman trembling in the winter light. “She protects me!”
    I, too, stood up, at the ready, even though I wasn’t sure what was coming. What would I do if the woman had a psychotic break? My only medical knowledge was first aid and whatever was the residuum of a long-lost summer fling with a medical student. My pulse accelerated as I followed her. She looped around the room, bumping into furniture, hands flailing. I moved a pot of dried flowers to the center of the coffee table, put our coffee cups out of danger in the sink, and picked up the still-unread sections of last Sunday’s New York Times, which she’d bumped onto the floor. She paced and I followed. “I have to!” she said abruptly.
    I stopped her, put my hands on her shoulders and spoke calmly. “What do you have to do?”
    She gave an exhausted sigh. “Tell them, of course.”
    “Tell who?”
    “The police.”
    “No, wait. We agreed that we wouldn’t say anything to them yet.”
    “Laura isn’t supposed to. I have to.”
    “Why? What do you have to tell them?”
    She looked surprised I’d ask. “That I did it,” she said. “I murdered my husband. Finally.”
    I lowered my hands and sat down abruptly. I didn’t believe her, but then I hadn’t believed Laura, and I believed even less that Santa held his breath until he died.
    “Laura is so used to covering for me, that she’ll say she did it. And they’ll believe her, because of…” She perched uncomfortably, tentatively on the arm of my mother’s old sofa, as if she might take flight any moment. “Because there was that…”
    “Other fire?” When she nodded, I continued. “But you said it was an accident. In fact, I thought both fires were.”
    She examined her manicure.
    “Well, for the sake of conversation, then, how did you, ah, do it?” The room temperature plummeted forty or fifty degrees. I put another log on the fire, but it made no difference.
    “I don’t remember,” she finally whispered. “I was…having a bad night. I was upstairs, asleep, hating him, and then I was downstairs, so angry, and he was dead and I was glad.” She studied her nail polish again. “Sometimes I…don’t remember. Even when I’m awake. It happens.”
    “Maybe you woke up, went down and found him already dead? And you were sleepy and confused, so you thought you had done something?”
    She shook her head.
    “But the news said you were asleep when the fire started. I assumed—a smoke alarm woke you up, didn’t it?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Did you and your husband quarrel?”
    She shook her head.
    “So for no particular reason, you—”
    “I had reasons.”
    “Such as?”
    “You think he’s so nice. Everybody thinks he’s so nice.” She looked at me darkly. “He was evil.”
    “How? In what way?”
    “I don’t want to talk about it.”
    “So you woke up, went downstairs and—did what?”