Couldn’t they have warned me? I’m going to hyperventilate. Ugly as I am, Alessandra is so beautiful. Abnormally beautiful, outrageously beautiful. The first label that everyone, woke or not, bi or straight, will give her: stunning.
Alessandra’s hunting dog jumps to the door handle of the living room and pushes the door open for us. An even better trained dog is a robot.
“Good, Paul!” she shouts and she sees me looking up. “Paul is his name, from my sweet Vizsla dog, it’s a joke I made up with Ria.”
She pats the sofa next to her, as if calling on himself and him.
“Not even twenty-four hours ago, everything was normal,” she says, shaking her head.
“That he was murdered. A murder in this neighborhood, unbelievable.”
She only uses superlatives for the family. They have had an extremely good time together for years.
“You were the mistress?”
She flies up, the dog Paul growls.
“What an ingrained and anti-feminist idea that any mistress would want to marry. Never. I was pregnant, he then tried to force me to have an abortion but I miscarried. I was allowed to clean the shower myself afterwards too.”
“You were not in his will.”
“I didn’t need his money. Paul got stingy. Or maybe more controlling. Ria and I laughed so hard at him, he thought he was the patriarch who decided everything, but he was often the victim. He has become something of a ghost lately. He hid behind his laptop, in a corner doing odd jobs or on his racing bike in the fields. We understood him less and less.”
“We?”
“But we all help each other.”
Are the two women a couple who killed him? Or is it a thought I allow too easily? Alessandra talks and talks, as if to bury her first confessions with other stories. She sees me looking at the scar on her arm.
“May I ask how…?”
“Billie,” she explains, “has always been a special kid. Short fuse. I can handle her, temperamentally. This scar is a memento of a barbecue party when she was eight. She was so furious because she got a “false sausage” that she threw the hot sausage at me. Now she is a vegan herself.” Alessandra smiles.
“What exactly happened on Saturday night?” I ask.
“I went to return the nail gun after their fight and…”
“The nail gun? Ria said it was already in the kitchen to hang up the camera the next day,” I say.
“Did I say gun? My mistake, sorry, I was wrong,” she says immediately. “I meant the screwdriver. We share all our tools.”
Suddenly she is silent and sinks back into the sofa. Chills run down my spine as the skinny hound jumps up, walks to the door handle, and sniffs the door open for me. A clear incentive to disappear.
As I drive away, I see in my rear-view mirror Ria entering Alessandra’s back door.
Next week: The Hedgehog.