Before She Knew Him

by Peter Swanson

The two couples met at a neighborhood block party, the third Saturday in September.

Dartford was a well-heeled commuter suburb forty-five minutes from Boston, but West Dartford, separated from the rest of the town by the Scituate River, had smaller houses spaced closer together, all built for the workers from a long-defunct mill that had recently been turned into artist studios.

“All the houses on this street were,” Matthew said, rubbing at the space between his lower lip and his chin. When he took his finger away, Hen saw that he had a scar there, like Harrison Ford.

brown hair, pale blue eyes, square jawline—were

Later, when they all had dinner together, she would decide that he was one of those harmless, cheery men, the type of person you’d be happy to see but would never think of when they weren’t around. Much later she’d realize how wrong that first impression was.

Lying in bed later, Lloyd asleep next to her, Hen told herself that it had been a ridiculous thought to have, that the world was full of fencing trophies, and that they probably all looked the same. But it’s not ridiculous, is it? Matthew teaches at Sussex Hall, and that’s where Dustin Miller went to high school.

The thought that she knew what he had done to Dustin Miller—even if she just suspected—filled him with both a feeling of terror and a feeling of something close to giddiness.

Matthew did not always love being a teacher, but he did love the Sussex campus, with its Gothic dormitories and its nondenominational stone chapel.

There was also a stack of boxes in the far corner that contained the original cutlery from the dining hall. It was there that he slid his box of mementos, sure that they would never be disturbed or found, even if someone were looking for them. And even if someone did find the box, he’d made sure to wipe any fingerprints off all the items, and he’d checked that his name was not in any of the old textbooks.

Her neighbor Matthew Dolamore, a teacher at Sussex Hall, obviously knew Dustin—he’d probably been one of his teachers. Maybe Matthew knew that the sexual assault—never proven—had actually happened. Five years later, he murdered Dustin out of revenge, or a sense of justice, and took the fencing trophy. It was ludicrous, somehow, but also entirely possible.

Matthew had thought about killing Dustin ever since Courtney Cheigh accused him of rape while the two had been on a trip to St. Louis for a fencing tournament.

“I know you already told me, but you sell . . . educational software, right?” “To school systems mainly. Charlotte is one of my biggest clients. I’m there a lot.”

“No, you didn’t. I’m . . . I suffer from depression and, honestly, I’m just not willing to go off my medication, which I would need to do if I got pregnant. I’m also not sure that I want to pass along my brain to the next generation.” She laughed to let Mira know it was okay to laugh as well.

It would sound crazy, but what if Matthew Dolamore had already been a suspect?

What if her sighting of the fencing trophy would push them toward a deeper investigation, would allow them to get a search warrant?

Lloyd worked in public relations.

“No, it would be a huge coincidence that we lived on the same street as the victim, then moved to the same street as the murderer.”

sometimes she missed the Lloyd she’d first known when they’d each answered an ad to move into a six-bedroom house in Winter Hill in Somerville.

It was Thursday night. She and Lloyd had made fish tacos for dinner, then watched two episodes of Better Call Saul before Lloyd said he was going to bed to read.

They would watch this show

He wasn’t surprised by what he’d seen. He would have been more surprised if Scott had gone straight home after his gig. It wasn’t just that Scott was a typical predatory male who would obviously use whatever tiny amount of fame he got from his band to seduce anything in a skirt; it was also that Michelle was a victim, one of those women who believed in the goodness of the human race. She believed that her students cared about learning. She believed that the arc of the universe bent toward justice. And she believed that her fox-faced, untalented boyfriend would be true to her. Because of all these beliefs, Michelle was probably doomed, but Matthew did have an opportunity to do something about it. If he could find a way—a flawless way—to murder Scott Doyle, then he would do it. He would rescue Michelle.

She still hadn’t sketched the two remaining illustrations for the new chapter book she was working on. The book was called School for Lore Warriors: The Anti-Claus

it was about a military school for teenagers that taught them how to fight supernatural creatures.

then there was a story about a Henrietta Mazur who had been involved in an incident at Camden College about fifteen years earlier.

She had been charged with criminal assault for attacking a fellow student.

the basics were that Henrietta had had some sort of breakdown and had become convinced that a fellow student was trying to kill her. She’d raised these concerns with both her college adviser and the local police, but then she’d attacked the other student herself, winding up in a psychiatric hospital and then court.

If you gave a man just the smallest amount of power—a handsome face, the ability to sing, a little money—the first thing he’d do is destroy a woman, or two if he could.

“Well, it’s embarrassing, but I googled her, just because I was curious, new neighbor and all, and she has a history of accusing people of crimes they didn’t commit.

“No, I’m serious. Do you think that Mom knew?” “Do I think that Mom knew what?” “That we’re like Dad, that we think like him and act like him.” The way that Richard put emphasis on the word act made Matthew suddenly very nervous.

She was thinking of Jay Saravan (she’d been thinking about him a lot lately, because of everything that was happening with Matthew).

And now, all these years later, she was thinking about it again, wondering if Matthew really had killed Jay Saravan.

He only kills men. He kills men who mistreat women.

No, Matthew is much more likely to try to deal with me himself. Keep it in the family, he’d say. He killed Dad, after all, even though he swears to me that he didn’t. But we both know that it was him.

The reason I know that Matthew was the one who shoved Dad down the cellar stairs was that Dad never went down there, at least not that I know of.

No one in the family went down to the cellar, so it made no sense when Dad was found at the bottom of the steps, dead from a head wound. It happened when both Matthew and I were at school, and Dad was home with the bad back.

I imagine all the blood that that skin, thin as tissue paper, must hold. I imagine she’s warm.

But it was Matthew, even though there was something different about him, in his eyes maybe, even in the way he was walking, the set of his head. “Who are you?” she asked. “I’m Richard,” he said. “We haven’t officially met yet.”

Maybe Richard is his twin, she thought, but then she saw the scar below his mouth, the one that made him look a little like Harrison Ford, and she realized that there was no brother named Richard.

out. So I looked into it. There were police reports on both of your parents’ deaths, and both of those reports only mentioned you, Matthew. Neither mentioned a brother. Neither mentioned any siblings. I called the detective who investigated your father’s death—he’s retired now—and he remembered the case, only because he said he suspected that you had something to do with it, even though he could never prove it.

asked him if you were the only child, and he said that you were, that there had been a brother called Richard, but that Richard had died in infancy. It was a crib death, he said, sudden infant death syndrome.

If he was going to rape her—and he was definitely going to rape her—then maybe he’d raped someone else before, and if that was the case, then that might have been a motive for the crime. But she never went to the police. She couldn’t bring herself to do it, and eventually she told herself that what had happened that week had maybe never happened at all. It was just a foolish, terrifying moment that she needed to forget. But she couldn’t forget it, and she poured all of her guilt and remorse into her obsession with who had killed Dustin.

Thinking back, Hen realized that before she knew him, before they were neighbors, Matthew had already been a huge part of her life. It felt logical to her now that she and Matthew eventually met, even though she knew it wasn’t.