Bedbugs

Epilogue

It was the gunshot, Alex later explained, that brought him rushing down the stairs and into the basement. At first he thought the shot came from somewhere inside the apartment, so loud and nearby had it sounded. But then he realized it had come booming up from the basement, amplified and distorted by the airshaft. When the shot sounded, he had been standing in the doorway of the apartment, contemplating the corpse of Dana Kaufmann, which in a span of five hours had been entirely consumed; a handful of bugs was crawling in and out of the empty eye sockets, picking at what flesh remained.

In the basement Alex discovered the two of them, collapsed a few feet from each other: Andrea’s dead body and Susan’s, barely living. Alex lifted his wife close to his chest, ignoring the bugs that were swarming over her body, and carried her toward daylight and safety.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured over and over, though Susan was unconscious, her pulse barely registering in her neck. “I’m so sorry.”

He said it again when she woke in the hospital, said, “I’m sorry,” and hugged her so tightly that the nurse said, “Easy, buddy,” and gently separated them.

“You’re sorry?” whispered Susan. “I tried to kill you.”

“Yeah, well.” Alex stroked her hand and smiled. “You were unsuccessful. That makes a world of difference.”

Emma was at Alex’s parents’ house, in Roslyn Harbor. She was fine, and missed her mommy.

“I want to see her.”

“When you’re up and about.… ”

“I want to see her.”

Alex nodded. “Of course. Now you need to rest, OK? When I come back, I’ll bring her. She’s going to be so excited.”

Susan leaned back into the pile of pillows, looked dreamily around at the gleaming whiteness of the hospital room, the row of machines, the drips feeding various fluids into her arms, feeling no pain — and, she realized with a warm gush of relief, feeling no itches.

Her eyes were half closed and Alex was at the door, slowly pulling it closed, when her eyes shot open. The dream — the hammers—

“What about Louis?”

The crime-scene investigators had found Louis King in the second compost bin, his head protruding like a puppet’s from where he’d been buried neck deep in garbage, just as Susan had been, and Jessica before her. His forehead bore a deep indentation, at dead center; the hammer blow had driven the front part of his skull deep into his brain. The newspaper quoted one policeman as reporting that bedbugs were swarming over his forehead and cheeks, more bedbugs were crawling over his eyes.

When those same detectives turned up in the hospital to interview Susan about what happened, they used that same word—“bedbugs,” with an “e”—and she made no effort to correct them.

“So,” said Susan Wendt, on the night of February 12, as she and Alex shared a bottle of wine in the living room of their new 2,050-square-foot home in Montclair, New Jersey. “Theresa?”

Alex looked at her blankly for a moment and then burst out laughing. “Hey, what can I say? It was the most realistic name I could think of, with a knife to my throat.”

“What knife? Who had a knife?”

“Nothing, boo-boo.”

Emma had come prancing down the stairs, naked except for her rain boots and a pair of pink fairy wings. “Is anybody going to give me a bath? Fairies need baths!”

Alex had declared himself on vacation through the winter, turning over GemFlex to Vic, while Susan, on doctor’s orders, was doing pretty much nothing until her legs and skin were healed. They’d been visiting preschools as a family and zeroed in on a place called New Jersey Families, which Alex loved because it sounded like a Mafia-run preschool. Susan thought it was clean, bright, and charming, and Emma deemed the lead teacher, Ms. Jessica, “pretty much amazing, pretty much.”

They new house had a decent-sized yard, so they’d gotten a mutt from the North Shore Animal League, a good-natured squirmy puppy that Susan named Kaufmann.

Every night, before going to sleep, Susan Wendt stood naked before the mirror in her leg casts, examining her body carefully, tracking the progress of her healing. Her many scars were already fading, the welts receding from angry red to pale pink, then away to nothing, as welts are supposed to do. Some nights, when she performed this ritual, studying her flesh inch by inch, Susan allowed herself to believe that it might be over. If The Shadow Species had it right — and so far, unfortunately, it had been right in every detail — then the blight had been lifted with Andrea’s death.

Some nights she believed it, and some nights she didn’t. Every morning, when she woke, she lay in bed for a long time, until she felt ready to check her pillowcase.