A Talent for Murder

Librarian Martha Ratliff meets her new husband, Alan Peralta, in “the way couples meet nowadays, online, paired up because they are both self-proclaimed book nerds” (9). Though Martha is not initially attracted to Alan, she decides to pursue a relationship because of their shared interests and values, as well as his kind and funny personality. They date for a few months until Alan proposes during a vacation to Maine. Though she has reservations, Martha eventually agrees to marry him. On their honeymoon to London, Martha realizes that “she’[s] married a nice man” even though “he [is] a complete and utter stranger to her,” emphasizing that Alan never revealed much about himself during their time dating (11).

A year into their marriage, Martha still feels as if there are parts of Alan that she doesn’t understand. Alan works as a traveling salesman and frequently goes out of town to conferences where he sells math and science-related T-shirts to teachers. One day, when Alan returns home from a conference in Denver, Colorado, Martha realizes that she rarely thinks about her husband when he’s in town but constantly thinks about him when he’s gone. Martha traces this feeling to an incident that happened when he’d returned from a conference in Connecticut. Watching him through the window as he pulled into the driveway, Martha had seen an expression of malevolence on his face, which transformed into a pleasant vacuousness as he came into the house to greet her. Martha has never forgotten the disturbing expression and thinks of it frequently whenever Alan returns home from a work trip.

That day in the library, Martha recommends literature to library patrons before returning home to prepare for Alan’s arrival. She remembers a time when she’d googled a conference that Alan had attended in Connecticut, only to find a news story regarding a teacher named Josie Nixon, who was reported to have died by suicide after jumping from a sixth-floor balcony of the school’s dormitory. When she had asked Alan about Josie, he’d answered her questions vaguely, as if he didn’t understand why she was asking. Now, Martha thinks of this conversation as she watches Alan in the driveway as he practices his placid smile before he enters the house.

The next morning, Alan wakes before Martha, telling her that he has an early-morning work meeting. Before he leaves, he tells her that he’ll return mid-afternoon to take a nap with her, as Mondays are Martha’s days off from work. After he leaves, Martha ponders her anxiety the night before, wondering what she was even worried about in the first place.

Martha decides to wash Alan’s clothing from his trip and finds a white button-up with a mysterious brown stain. Martha wonders if the stain is blood and then chastises herself for even asking the question in the first place. To quell her nerves, Martha researches the conference he attended in Denver to see if anything unusual happened that might be able to explain the stain. When she searches for “Denver assault,” she finds an interesting result—a 21-year-old woman was found with a head injury in a parking lot near where Alan had been staying.

That night, Martha asks Alan about the stain. He defensively jokes as to whether she thinks he’s a serial killer, concerning Martha further. Martha lets the questioning go, but after he falls asleep in front of the television, she tries to calmly appraise the situation. She realizes that she truly doesn’t know Alan very well at all.

A week later, Alan heads to another conference, this time in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He sends her a selfie from the hotel pool, which “[makes] Martha feel as though a spider [is] skittering across the nape of her neck,” as Alan has never sent selfies from any of his previous trips (24). Martha gathers the travel receipts from Alan’s previous work trips and compares them to news results from the areas he visited, correlating five violent deaths to the locations and times when Alan was in those cities.

Martha paces around her house, thinking of the mysterious deaths and the disturbing expression on Alan’s face when he thinks he isn’t being watched. She thinks of a friend of hers from graduate school, Lily Kintner, who grew up in Shepaug, New York, the same town in which Josie Nixon died. Googling Lily’s name, Martha finds a news article describing an incident in which Lily stabbed a Boston police detective in self-defense after discovering that the detective was stalking her. Having known Lily to be a direct and confrontational person who’d once helped Martha through a difficult and scary breakup, Martha doesn’t feel surprised by this story. She does some further research to find Lily’s contact information and plans on calling her if she needs support in her investigation of her husband’s potential murders.

Martha goes to bed that night with her wedding album to look at the photos of her wedding day. She finds a photo of Alan staring at her sister’s stepdaughter, who had been wearing a tight and revealing dress that day. Martha wonders whether the photo caught him ogling the girl.

The next morning, as Martha prepares to reach out to Lily, Alan calls, acting pleasant and charming and offering to take her on a trip to the north of England to see the setting of Wuthering Heights. When she hangs up, Martha wonders whether his charm is genuine or whether he senses her suspicions.

Martha vacillates between thinking that Alan is deceiving her and wondering whether she is being unfair and overly suspicious. She decides that she needs to talk to someone else about her fears, reinforcing her desire to contact Lily.

The narrative shifts to the perspective of Lily, who lives with her aging parents in Shepaug. She arrives home with breakfast for her parents, and her mother informs her that she had a call from Martha.

Lily hasn’t talked to Martha in over 10 years but considers her the closest thing she’s ever had to a female friend. Lily and Martha attended the same archival studies program at Birkbeck College 10 years earlier. During orientation, Lily had become interested in Martha, who told the group that she’d considered herself cursed with love magic by a witch during high school. At a party, Martha explained the story further: A girl named Eve cast a curse on Martha after Martha kissed her boyfriend, and subsequently, Martha found herself unlucky in love, with a series of bad boyfriends as evidence. Over the course of the year, however, Lily observed that Larry Childs, the only man in their program, had clearly become smitten with Martha. However, when a visiting writer named Ethan Saltz attended an event at their program, Martha fell head over heels in love with him.

Lily explains her history with romantic relationships, as she’s sworn off men following a bad relationship, which taught her both how men can hurt women as well as “what [she] would do to the men who betrayed [her]” (40). That night at the program event, Lily felt concerned for Martha, knowing that Ethan shouldn’t be trusted. Ethan and Martha went home together that night, and the following week, Martha admitted to being in a relationship with him.

As the months passed, Martha began to attend fewer social events with the rest of her graduate program. In March, Lily noticed that Martha had become thinner and that her skin had become paler. One evening, she noticed Martha and Ethan leaving a restaurant together and decided to follow them into a bar. She noticed that Martha and Ethan kept involving third parties in their discussions, as if finding a person at the bar was a game they played together. Eventually, Martha and Ethan left with a young woman.

When Lily asked Martha about what she’d seen, Martha explained that Ethan liked to be sexually adventurous and involve other people in the bedroom. She also told Lily that Ethan would soon be leaving for a writing retreat, which would mark the end of the relationship. Lily asked whether Ethan had ever hurt her, and Martha told her that the girl they’d left with the other night was extremely drunk and that Ethan had tried to manipulate Martha into hurting her.

Martha agreed with Lily’s assessment that she should leave Ethan. The two women established a plan for Martha to break up with him at a bar, where Lily would observe in case anything happened between them. When Martha went to the restroom, Ethan spotted Lily and accused her of sabotaging their relationship, pretending to be unbothered by the situation.

After Martha and Ethan’s breakup, the two women became close friends, but on the final night before summer break, Lily threatened to “go up to Vermont and kill Ethan Saltz,” a comment that Martha found disturbing (48). Afterward, Martha and Lily fell out of touch.

Back in the present, Martha and Lily decide to meet up in Worcester, Massachusetts, for dinner. At the restaurant, Martha tells Lily about Alan: his personality, his job, the history of their relationship, as well as her suspicions regarding his strange behavior and the bloodstain she found on his clothing.

Lily assures Martha that her suspicions aren’t crazy, and Martha explains her predicament: If Alan is guilty, then she wants to report him to the police, but if he’s innocent, she worries about ruining their relationship based on unfounded accusations. Martha mentions what happened to Josie Nixon, an event with which Lily is already familiar since she lives near Shepaug.

Since Alan is away at a conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Lily tells Martha to pay attention to the news to see if any mysterious deaths occur in Chapel Hill while Alan is there. Meanwhile, Lily will conduct her own research into the other deaths to see if there’s any connection to Alan. When they leave that night, Martha sends Lily a copy of the notes she’s kept regarding Alan’s travel, as well as the information she’s gathered on the mysterious deaths.

That night, Lily talks to her father about an old friend named Henry Kimball, a private investigator who recently sent her a book of Anne Sexton poems. They became friends when Henry was a police officer who suspected Lily of committing murder. Lily stabbed him in the stomach during that investigation, but they managed to stay in touch and become friends afterward. Now, Lily’s father suspects that Henry and Lily are actually in love with each other.

Alan arrives home from North Carolina, and Martha feels nervous about seeing him. Alan behaves normally, taking a shower and offering to help with dinner. As they eat, Alan asks Martha whether she’s thought more about a vacation to England. They agree to take the trip the following August, and Alan tells Martha that he’s tired and goes to bed. Martha wonders whether his lack of desire for sex means “that he’s found and killed a woman down in Chapel Hill” (65).

Martha stays up late as Alan sleeps and reads the local news from Chapel Hill. She finds no articles relating to unsolved murders from when Alan had been in town. The next day, Martha tells Alan that she might be getting ill as a strategy to keep him at a distance. Suddenly, Alan confronts her, asking whether she’s having an affair. Martha responds with shock to the question, and Alan explains that she’s been acting distant and that 200 miles have been added to her odometer since the last time he checked.

Martha asks Alan why he frequently checks the miles on her odometer. She tells him that she’s been to Worcester to meet her friend Lily from graduate school but leaves out the purpose of their meeting. Though Alan promises that he believes her, he still acts tense. Martha asks whether Alan has ever cheated during one of his work trips, to which Alan asks, “What possible reason would I have for cheating?” (68).