A Splendid Wife

Book excerpt: This short story is excerpted from the upcoming collection of stories Damage Control by Amber Dermont, to be published in March 2013. One by one, the wives of Portsmouth, Rhode Island are disappearing from Darling Vista Park. Detective Mitchell Landry searches for the rhyme, reason, and meaning behind each of these disappearances by investigating their husbands and trying to find the missing connections between them. But are there connections to be made, or are these random similarities merely coincidences? Who had the means, motive, and opportunity to steal the wives of Portsmouth? What happened to them, and more importantly, why? As Detective Landry delves deeper into the lives of these women, he tries to makes sense of his own wife's suicide, and wonders why some questions simply have no answer.