Marie disliked her brother-in-law George Smith. It was a disturbing aversion which she couldn’t understand, for she deemed him to be, like Mary Poppins, “Practically perfect in every way.” Perhaps it was this very perfection, which triggered her dislike, or perhaps, deep down, her dislike was the result of an innate sibling jealousy. When she watched him objectively, she found his good looks and healthy physique pleasing and couldn’t help but wonder how much her sister, Anne, must enjoy her intimacy with such an ideal masculine specimen. 

Before the wedding, she tried to explain her sixth sense reservation to her parents. They suggested that her sense of foreboding was ill-founded. They pointed out his solicitous kindness, and the way that he appeared to adore his wife. She told them that she wondered whether his interest in her sister was triggered by her status as a wealthy woman. They told her not to be jealous. They informed her that her fears were unfounded because George, himself, had suggested an elaborate pre-nuptial agreement.

****

A few days after Anne’s ecstatic telephone call to tell Marie that she was pregnant Anne received a call from George. He was weeping and stammered his appalling news. Anne drowned in her bath. He requested that Marie call their parents as he asserted that he was too distraught to make any further calls. No-one could understand how Anne could have drowned until investigators postulated that she must have accidentally knocked her hair dryer into the water. Her autopsy confirmed that she had died from the combination of heart attack and drowning. This diagnosis had some appeal to Marie’s family as a few years earlier one of Marie and Anne’s school friends had died in a swimming pool accident due to a heart attack and subsequent drowning induced by a short in a faulty under-water pool light.

When Anne’s affairs were wrapped up, it transpired that she and George hadn’t signed their pre-nuptial agreement. Anne’s grieving family decided not to contest the inevitable and did not challenge the transfer of her assets to her unhappy widower. Marie even faced her dislike for George and joined her mother in helping pack up his possessions in support of his proposed relocation to “get away from it all” as he put it by taking up a new position in London. They used a hoard of old newspapers which Marie’s mother had saved for such an occasion.

It is a strange phenomenon that old newspaper stories frequently catch our attention as we use them to wrap-up fragile items. In Marie’s case, it was the photograph of a widowed husband standing outside his house, which caught her attention. He was clean-shaven while George was bearded, but something about the eyes got her attention. She took a pencil and added a beard and moustache rather as she had adorned pictures in her youth. She pointed the picture out to her mother. “George doesn’t have a twin brother, does he?” she asked.

“No dear, don’t you remember he had no family at the wedding.” Her mother reached for her reading glasses to better scrutinize the newspaper photograph. “Didn’t he say that they were all killed in a car wreck when he was a teenager.”

Marie stopped her packing and read the headline “Wife drowned.” This was accompanied by the photograph which caught Anne’s attention and instructions to turn to ‘Drowned’ on page A6. She sat down and read on. The names were different, but the circumstances were remarkably similar. Marie was so disturbed by her find that she contacted the police. They reviewed her evidence and although they agreed that there were similarities, they told her that they didn’t think it  sufficient to open the case for further investigation and certainly didn’t want to change their report of accidental death to murder.

****

George disappeared from their lives. Marie’s grandfather died and left her a fortune. Even though much of the family deemed her slightly insane as a result of her ongoing obsession about her sister’s death no-one contested her inheritance. Now that she didn’t need to work, she spent most of her time searching newspapers and obituaries. Her dedication was rewarded and she found him living in Hollywood under a different name. By now, she was so embroiled in her murder theory that she determined to catch him, and elicit revenge herself. She changed her name, died her hair, lost weight and moved to Los Angeles. Here she mixed with the rich and famous constantly manipulating until she managed to meet him, the George Smith, who married her sister, now going under the name Francis Brown. He invited her on a date, and she found herself attracted to him. Could it be. She wondered, that her original dislike really was a manifestation of jealousy?

****

She accepted his marriage proposal. They had a quiet chambers exchange of vows and purchased an enormous house with a lap pool. Francis told her that he liked to swim in the morning as part of his fitness regime. Before she did what she knew that she had to do Marie picked the lock to his desk and searched his papers. At the very bottom, she found his scrap book containing a jumble of images of not two but three wives all of whom had died in their baths. At this moment, Marie knew him to be a ruthless murderer. She ought to have gone to the police, but she didn’t. Instead, she researched electricity on-line and when she was confident that she knew what she was doing she switched one of the pool lights from a GFI circuit to a regular one. Then she wiggled the light and adjusted the worn wires so that a short would occur. Meanwhile, she managed to avoid marital intimacy by claiming a yeast infection sincerely hoping that the pool light would do its job before she ‘recovered.’

They were married less than a month when she saw her chance, while he changed into his trunks, she turned on the lights. They sparkled seductively in the morning light. She took her coffee and sat in a beach chair next to the pool. She blew him a kiss as he dove in. He came up spluttering clearly in the onset of cardiac arrest. He shouted to her but she smiled, and waved. She shouted “Remember them, remember Anne.” and slowly ambled inside to call 911.

Marie skillfully acted the bereaved wife and waited until he was interred before she ‘found’ his secret journal and alerted the police so that he could be named the ruthless serial killer that he was. She thought it poetic justice that she should inherit his vast assets but after the police dubbed him a murderer, she magnanimously contacted each of the bereaved families and restored to them the equivalent of their daughter’s assets. Then she emigrated to New Zealand to distance herself from the terrible memories which haunted her, and away from her fear that someone might question the strange way in which he had died.