COME UP

At the end of June, Martin's wife disembarked from the harbor behind their house and entered the pool, and never went up again. At the time, Martin was sitting in the yard, reading lazily. He walked past her, smiled shyly, and paddled barefoot down the harbor. As he was already back in his book, he didn't see him dive, he only heard the spread.

How long did it take for him to realize that something was wrong? A minute, maybe two. He was reading, still reading, but his mind was still holding something and soon he could not put words into the sentences. What was wrong? It was, somehow, very quiet. Marking his place with his finger, he looked up and saw the empty booth, the calm, clear water on the lake across.

"Kat?" he sighed.

There was no response. He got up halfway from his chair and bowed down and stared at the glass doors returning to the house. There is no sign of internal movement. He entered the harbor, the wood-burning under his feet. Nothing to see there again. Just a surface of the water from it goes straight to the pines on the other side.

"Kat?" he called again, shouting loudly at this. Throwing his book away, he began searching for him sincerely.

At first, she had hoped that he would just leave her. The thought, however, came to his mind - he, as he was about to tell the police a few hours later, left him in front. He was, he admitted to the police, he was a farmer - they would find out on their own when they started talking to his wife's friends, he thought, so it's best to admit it first - and he was always bored.

The other women said nothing to him, he knew that. Besides, it should be noted that he had paid her to think about not having sex with her close friends. Very much.

"But we were a nation," he told two police officers. “I was not cheating. It doesn't make sense if he was gone now. "Besides, every time he walked by it was after yelling at him. This time there was no shouting. Most of the time, he wanted to show that he was leaving, and he told her why. He cried a lot and threw things away, packed his bags, and left. But at last, she had seen him, she was wearing a bathing suit and accustomed to the end of the booth not to indicate that everything was not going well. Police turned on their lights in the harbor. They flashed them in the water, the flash beam quickly disappeared from the murk. They went into the house to look at his wife's belongings and asked her if anything was missing.

"No, nothing," he said.

"Let me ask you," said one of the officers, a poor man with a shaved head, "what kind of insurance did you have on him?"

"Excuse me?"

"Of course, in cases like these - nothing is missing, the wife disappeared, the stranger - she is often killed, and usually a man."

There were times when Martin wanted to strangle his wife, of course, but he thought it best to tell the police. That was true of all marriages, was it not? There was always a time when you wanted to kill your spouse - indeed there were a few times when he wanted to kill you. But he did not want the authorities to misunderstand him.

Instead, he said, “The average amount of life insurance. I did not kill him. ”

"What is ordinary money?" said the policeman. "I did not kill him," he said. "No one says he did," said a second-haired police officer. "I loved my wife," he said. "There, there," comforted the second officer. Eventually, they sent someone to turn around, who found nothing. The water was very cloudy, he explained. He could not see more than a few feet, and the pool was particularly deep.

"If he's really down there," said Martin and officials, "he might not show up again." His scuba mask pushed over the top of his head looked at Martin like a second metal face, facing upwards. “Or, who knows, maybe you will. But I will not find him. We will have to wait for the corpse to come by itself. ”

I thought you meant me, thought Martin.

Officials hung up after the divers left, but in the end, they were not sure what, if anything, they would do with Martin or Martin. They will file a report and finally make a decision. Was there a crime? If things had happened just as Martin said at the time, they would not have happened.

“But what happened to him?” asked Martin. "What do you think happened to him?" Said the bald policeman. "If we find any clues, we will let you know," said the second official. He had to call them if he remembered anything that might be appropriate, no matter how small. Anything else. If his wife showed up, dead or alive, he should have called them. Maybe that didn't say it, the second official said, but he still said it.

"Above all, stay in place," said the bald man. "Don't go anywhere."