Caught Red Handed

She's Gone

I opened the brass door handle to my own home and immediately knew something was amiss. The well worn turquoise chair in the corner of the living room was too dusty, the house was too quiet, the air too stale. I caught a drift of a rotten smell and took a step back in revulsion, the gears turning in my head as I tried to comprehend what was happening. I called my wife's name to no response.
I looked back to my beat up red car parked in the driveway, as if making sure it was still there before stepping into the house. I kept the door open behind me as I took another step in, then another. I deal with things like this on a daily basis, it's my job after all. But never like this.
I called her name again, pausing in the entryway to the kitchen. The smell was overwhelmingly awful, but worse than the rancidity of it was the fact that it was familiar. The smell of rotting, dead meat left out in warm weather. I could only hope she had forgotten a steak out on the counter before going to the grocery or on a walk, but I knew what I would find. As I leaned my head in around the corner, I saw what I hoped would not be there but was anyway.
"Molly!" my voice came out in a panicked whisper, I could not tell you why but I felt the urgency to be quiet. I dropped to her side, feeling the cold kitchen tiles under my knees. Through the early night darkness I could see she was in the same yellow dress spotted with flowers I remember her last being, her stained white apron draped over it as usual, her wild curly hair tied up like it always was. The smell told me she was long dead. The detective part in me leaned in closer, despite the person part wanting to run away. She looked completely regular, as if she had just fallen a second before. I noticed her neck shone in the light coming in from the window. Her neck was wet? Had she been strangled? Yes, she must have been, her neck was red like I had seen so many times before in so many other people. But why was it wet?

I looked back up at her face, stray strands of her ginger hair covering her features. That is for the best. I stood up, my heart pounding but the weight of the situation not dawning on me yet. Anxiety gripped my chest when I realized the person who did this may still be in the house. My head whipped around in a panic, trying to find if there were any signs of recent struggle. There was a cooking knife on the floor and I recognized it, it was part of a set we received as a wedding gift, but it looked wrong, and I knew somehow this was not my knife and not my house and not my wife lying on the floor. I backed into the glass sliding door in the joint dining room, stumbling into a chair and knowing I was making too much noise. I slapped my hand over my mouth and an odd panicked sound escaped my throat as I slid to the floor.
Calm down, I have to calm down. I have to breathe. Whoever did this did it a long time ago. The smell and the dust make that clear. And so far I have found nothing that suggests another person was even in the house at all. I closed my eyes tight. What should I do?

The air was suffocating. I tried to breathe through my mouth to negate the smell but I found that now I could taste it. I got up, running my hands hard through my hair, fumbling my way through the kitchen and living room out the front door. I hadn't realized just how foul the air inside was until I stepped out into the fresh early fall wind, coughing before moving back to my car but not getting inside. What should I do?
I have to call Dass. He's a bit more fanatic than I am, but maybe he knows what to do with things like this. I pull out my telephone and find it trembling in my hands as I try to select his number. No, the phone isn't shaking, I am. I hold it up to my ear and try to breathe, listening to the repetitive ringing of the object. After eight rings, Julio Dass picks up, my closest friend and 'partner in crime-solving' as everyone likes to call us. Another popular nickname would be Sherlock and Watson. Though these names irritate me I guess it is true that we bear resemblance to the two fictional characters.

"Yes?" He sounds tired and possibly annoyed. I suppose I may have woken him up.

"Dass," I say, my voice coming out more panicked than I thought it would. "Molly, she's... It's..." I lose my words as if I had dropped them from my hands. All exhaustion that may have been there leaves his voice, he must realize that it's serious. It is not terribly often that I would call him at night in such a state. "What happened? What about Molly? Grey, where are you?"
I stare at the ground in front of me, trying to conjure up words. "I just got home, from the trip, and she's... I went in and..." I find my teeth chattering, and not just from the cold. "She's in the kitchen, but she's... she's..." I heard noise from the other end of the phone, fabric rustling. I try to force the sentence out of my throat, but it's as if it's stuck. "She's dead."