Nobody Is Clean

Nobody Is Clean
Ruthie's POV

The first thing that hits me is the cloying, sweet-acid smell of pot. That’s the new normal. It’s the smell of my husband.
It’s almost 6 AM. The sky outside the dirty bedroom window is a bruised, sickly shade of purple. I haven’t slept. I never sleep here.
This apartment. East 89th Street.
We didn't pick this place, it bothers me and drives me crazy everytime I remember how all this happened.

He did. Eliot, my handsome, charming, veterinarian husband, came home three weeks ago with eyes bright with a fever I didn’t recognize and said, “We’re moving. I found a place. It’s perfect."
It wasn’t perfect. It was a rapid, horrifying relocation to a pre-war monolith with clanging radiators and neighbors I never see. And—he changed there. The man I married, the man Aiden begged me not to marry, disappeared. Replacing him is this... this stranger who smokes like a chimney, whose hands once so tenderly touched animals now jitter with a wired, restless energy.

Aiden. My best friend. The detective who’s been secretly in love with me for a decade. "He’s too perfect, Ruthie," he warned me, six months before the wedding. "Nobody is that clean. “I’d laughed it off. I told him he was just jealous.
That was true.
I am scared of my husband.
Fear is a physical thing, a cold stone in my stomach. I’m cleaning.I’m always cleaning. That’s all I can control. I’m scrubbing the baseboards in our bedroom, the chemical scent of bleach a comforting, sterile armor against the pot smoke.”

Eliot is in his study." He locks the door. He says it’s for his "tele-vet" consultations, but for one look through the keyhole all I saw was darkness.
I go to the heavy, old dresser that came with this cursed apartment. The top two drawers, Eliot claimed. I’m wiping down the dark, sticky wood of the third one when my rag snags on a loose splinter. The drawer sticks in place. I pull. It sticks. I yank harder, with a sob of frustration, and the entire rotting wooden frame gives way.
The drawer crashes to the floor, scattering its drab contents in a dusty fan.
It's not my stuff. It’s his. He fibbed about which drawers he was accessing.

I can feel my heart pounding in my chest, like a painful, desperate thump. This is against the rules. This is his space.
But I’m already on my knees. "
Old files. Receipts. And photographs.
My hand covered in bleach water gel, I go for the top one. It’s a faded Polaroid. A family. A smiling woman who looks exhausted, a man who seems stern-faced, and two boys. One boy, about ten, has Eliot’s eyes. He’s grinning, a gap-toothed, joyful smile. Next to him is a younger boy, perhaps seven, tiny and weak, holding the older boy’s hand like a lifeline.

He told me he was an only child. He told me his parents died a long time ago.
I dig deeper. More photos of the two boys. At a park.

Sitting opposite a cheap looking sofa. The older son has always looked out for the younger.
Then I locate the document. very stiff, laminated. A birth certificate.
My blood is ice cold. Nobody comes out of this with anything.
The name isn’t Eliot Raines.
It’s Bartholomew Peter Sanchez.
Mother: Maria Sanchez. Father: Unknown.
“Bartholomew,” I say under my breath. The name feels grotesque on my tongue. It’s a lie. His entire life is a lie.
I let go of the certificate as though it burnt me. Beneath it is a small leather box. Not locked up. I am opening it.

Newspaper clippings. There are dozens.
LOCAL LAWYER IS MURDERED BY MUTILATION.
CHILD ABUSE CASE PROSECUTOR IS KILLED..
SECOND VICTIM: ‘HE LET A MONSTER GO FREE’ SAYS ANONYMOUS TIP.
my breath halts. I know these cases. The city knows the cases. Aiden is on this case. He’s been working on it for weeks, coming home to our old apartment—before—looking gaunt, muttering about the killer, about the letters left behind the victims' ears.

My eyes are moving around the clippings. The names. Veronica Cheng. Amira Klein. Greta Johnson.
my god. Chacha Remirez.
The click in my brain is so loud, wants to be a sound you can hear.

A man who knows anatomy. A man who knows how to cut.
A liar, a man with a pseudonym his NAME is a lie.
A husband. Who suddenly moved us toEast 89th Street.
The address. I knew it from the news. I’ve seen that in Aiden's precinct on the whiteboard. It's in the "hot zone," the core of the killer's territory.

He didn’t just relocate us. He brought us to his house.
There’s one last thing at the bottom of the box. A single piece of thick drawing paper.
On it, in a thick, dried, flaking at the edges reddish-brown substance, there is a promise.
It's a child's scrawl, but the pressure is so deep it’s ripped through the paper.
FOR RONNIE. I’LL MAKE THEM ALL PAY. I’LL MAKE THEM SCREAM. I PROMISE.
Ronnie. The young, tiny boy in the pictures.

I drop the box. The contents scatter. The sound is a gunshot in the silent apartment.
"Ruthie?"
His voice. It’s not from the study. It’s in the hall. He’s been standing there. Watching me.
I scramble to my feet, my heart trying to tear its way out of my throat. I turn.
He’s not Eliot.
The man standing at the door is not the man I married. His handsome face is slack, his eyes dead. The pot-smoke smell is gone. Under it is something else. Something coppery and chemical.
"You… you’re Bartholomew," I stammer.
He smiles. It’s the chilliest thing I ever saw. "He was always the smart one not me.”

"What...what happened to Ronnie?" I ask, my voice a broken squeak.
“The lawyers happened,” he says, a low, rational monotone. "The ones who let our 'father' go. Ones who said Ronnie was a liar. The ones who sent him back." He tilts his head. "He lasted a week.

I told him I would make them pay. All of them.”
He is the killer. The man I love. The man I sleep with. He is the monster Aiden is hunting.
I have to get out.
I bolt. Not for the front door—he’s blocking it. I run the other way, deeper into the apartment, to the study. I slam my shoulder against the locked door.
It swings open. It wasn’t locked.
First the smell hits me. Hot metallic, like a slaughterhouse.
The room is dark, except for one high intensity vet lamp pointing down on a steel table.

He’s not a tele-vet. He’s not a tele-vet.
There is...something on the table. A rabbit, its fur matted. It’s been... opened. Opened in a crazy way like a zombie was eating it or a wicked child is playing with it.

There is a tray of tools. Scalpels and clamps and a pair of serrated garden shears. They are all dark and wet.
From the doorway behind me, he says, “This, this is how I wanted to kill Chacha Remirez.”
I spin around and lean against the bloody table.
“But she was on TikTok Live,” he adds, as he steps into the light. He looks genuinely disappointed, sad. “Can you believe that? Streaming to twenty thousand people. I didn’t do the ears good enough. I couldn’t give Ronnie his due. She just… wouldn’t stop screaming into the phone. It ruined the artistry.“
He takes another step. I’m trapped.

“Aiden,” he clarifies, pressing the tip of the blade with his thumb. “He’s a good detective. A little slow, but he good. He told you I was too clean, didn’t he? He was right. I am. I’m very very clean. I’m a surgeon, after all.”He’s taunting me. He knows. He knows everything.
“Eliot... Bartholomew... please...”
“Shhh,” he whispers. He’s close now. I can smell the iron on his breath. “You were my safe harbor, Ruthie! But you looked in the drawer.”

I do the only thing I can. I snatch a jar from a shelf— it’s filled with a dense, yellow formaldehyde — and I lob it at his head. He ducks, the jar smashing against the wall. He roars, the sound of pure animal fury.
I don't wait. I'm out the door, sprinting down the dark, narrow hall.
I hear him behind me. He's not running. He's walking. A calm, measured pace. He knows he has me.
I fumble for a door, any door. A closet. I pry it open, jump in and slam the louvered door shut, burrowing into a mound of old jackets and the pungent, stifling scent of naphthalene. I hold my breath. I'm shaking all over. I hear him. Step... click. The click is the sound of the scalpel, him tapping it against the hallway wall as he walks. Step... click. He's hunting. Step... click.
I fish for my phone. My hands are slick with sweat and god knows what from that table.

I botch the password. Twice. Come on, Ruthie!
I finally open up the screen. The light is blindingly bright. 6:00 AM.
My thumb finds the contact. The first one. Aiden.
The phone is pushed so tightly against my ear that I hear the plastic straining. It’s turning the shape of my ear.
It rings. Once.
Come on, Aiden. Pick up.
It rings twice.
Please, please, please...
The footsteps stop.
The clicking stops.
He's outside. He's right outside the closet door.

I hear him breathing, a low, steady inhale and exhale.
The phone in my hand rings a third time, the noise all of a sudden far too loud for the small, dark room.
He knows w
here I am.
"Come on, Aiden," I whisper, tears rolling down my cheeks, my hand clutching my mouth. "Pick up. Pick up. Pick up.”