By Nana Nkweti

They were bloodhounds worrying a bone. The two homicide detectives sniffed, smelled something off in the pairing of this forty-year-old Boston Brahmin and his young village bride. Elliot Coffin Jr. was as American as Coca-Cola, and capitalism. The bland portfolio of his upbringing was made of Happy Days and hedge funds in happier days, pre-Madoff. He was undisputedly American. His recently deceased wife—Victoria Coffin, née Chiamaka Victoria Okereke, recently of Cambridge, Massachusetts, by way of Lagos State, Nigeria—was not. These simple facts, on their surface, so nakedly banal in nature, had kept Coffin Jr. moored in the sterile Cambridge PD interrogation room, even as his wife lay below on a steel slab in the morgue, soul hovering, body beginning the slow decay that would solidify the truth of her death.

The detectives observed him through a one-way looking glass. The man before them had slate-gray eyes, seemingly void of grief, set deep in a handsome, angular face of severe symmetry broken only by a nose whose slight crook hinted that he could take a punch, or perhaps deliver one. The very definition of buttoned up: this man in navy- blue Brooks Brothers and Presidential pocket square, in a custom-fit Turnbull & Asser of crisp, creaseless white. Too quiet, he was, as if the intricate Eldredge knot of his silk tie were a garrote at his throat. Too sharp, he was, the obstinate geometry of his frame leaving you with the overall impression that if you brushed against him, however slightly, you might bleed.

He put the detectives on edge.

Coffin Jr. was an economist—no, statistician, he’d insisted—from a well-respected family: a financier father, a bepearled mother. But the girl in the morgue, just a girl, hardly a wife, was no blueblood. In the couple’s wedding portrait, now bagged and blood-splattered in evidence, she was soft and cocoa-skinned, like the sweet promise of uncut brownies.

 “Why don’t you start from the beginning, Mr. Coffin?” asked the detectives in tandem, a Greek chorus of interrogation. “Where were you this morning?” Their questions anchored him. For some time now Elliot’s thoughts had been fluid, even as a slice of his consciousness remained alert. He had always had a particularly tidy mind: compartmentalized, cubicles of awareness, now calculating and assessing his surroundings, his circumstances. He noted the taller detective, barely inching past his partner, had passed a hand through his rusty-nail head of hair ten times, waiting. He noted the second hand on the bulbous wall clock was off by 2.5 seconds, exactly. He time-lined the tragic particulars of his morning: relaying the data to them as neutrally as he could, maintaining a barely managed remove, even as a part of him silently screamed his innocence, while another grieved.

“I wake up at five on the dot every day,” said Elliot, breathing in deeply to steady himself, remembering the heady aroma of Ethiopian Sidamo coffee from that morning. “I noticed that Vicky’s side of the bed was empty but nothing felt amiss. Not yet.”

On Thursday mornings, he told them, his RN wife worked the eleven-to-seven shift at St. Joseph’s Nursing Home and Assisted Living the night before. This morning he woke up. He rose. Shuffled barefoot to the kitchen—Vicky has, no,“had,” remember, had a habit of borrowing his slippers and shedding them anywhere and everywhere but bedside. He had moved through the TV-less TV room, then through the dining room, his footsteps keeping time with the tick-tock of an octogenarian grandfather clock, a family heirloom, ostensibly a wedding gift from his parents, but really, only his mother. In the kitchen he’d fixed a cup of already percolating, preset joe. The fair-trade kind Vicky insisted upon. He’d yet to turn on a single light, had no need to, in fact, the predawn hallways imprinted on him, despite having lived there merely a few short months.

Their Beacon Hill home was his wedding present for a wife whose body lay cooling in a small pool of blood at the far end of the kitchen island even as he went outside for the morning paper. He had yet to find her. No, not yet. He’d read the paper. Had his morning constitutional. It was after. Only after retracing his steps—tick-tock, tick-tock—after the need for a second cup drew him to his private reserve of kopi luwak, hidden deep in the recesses of a cupboard’s topmost shelf, far from the disapproving harrumphs of a wife who’d deemed the harvesting of his “cat shit” coffee so unspeakably creepy and cruel, she’d shamed him into a secret stash, sipped only when she was— where exactly?—he wondered, confused and foot-dragging now, bare soles gathering dust as he considered call-outs and impromptu double shifts and who-the-hell-is-she-withs till he stumbled, practically tripping over her.

Before the crippling disbelief. Before the confusion/fear/rage rendered him a dark, howling thing, he had been smiling, chuckling inwardly, at the sight of one of his slippers, the right one, flung carelessly by a trash bin. Vintage Vicky. Stooping to retrieve it, it was then, in that moment, that he saw its mate, right there, lynched on the left foot of her prone body: her outstretched limbs in angles unnatural, knife embedded in her back to the hilt of its pearlized handle, a piece of another wedding gift, a full set, part of him dimly noted, even as another part had him screaming her name. Over and over and over again.

Everything rushed forward after that, with a relentless, an almost mechanized momentum: try to revive her, try again, shake her, shout out for her, shake her, shout, call authorities, answer door, answer questions, sit in ambulance, answer questions, submit to checkup, answer questions, watch them take her, answer questions, sit in waiting room, ask them questions, sit at this table, answer questions, answer questions, answer questions. All the while, what was your question?, hands spasmodic—open now, now shut—as he clutches a pinstriped blue slipper—now open, shut now—stained crimson with blood and a single tangerine drop of her favorite nail polish, Siren #440.

 “Tell us about your marriage, Mr. Coffin,” the detectives prodded genially. “How long were you two together? How’d you meet?”

“We were happy. Had our ups and downs, I suppose,” Elliot replied, what else could he say? In couples therapy, he’d called married life “nonmonotonic,” like a line graph that swings up and down, full of vicissitudes, variables aplenty. Dr. Klein misheard his one-word assessment and erroneously repeated “nonmonogamous” and Vicky, daughter of the second of ten wives herself, lost it. Together, they lost a whole session to that mishap yet the word still struck him as astute. The ups: she has, no, had, dimpled cheeks and dimpled knees. A way of peeling an orange that was pure art. One fluid curl springing zestfully off her knife’s edge. The downs that curved up: when they first met in Lagos, he’d been sick, she’d fed him vitamin C–laden oranges and tangerines and clementines along with mouthfuls upon mouthfuls of ji mmiri oku—the Igbo answer to chicken soup. He’d been bedridden, and mortified, at the time. He worked with the World Bank, for Christ’s sake, was more than well traveled across a continent rife with illnesses long since conquered in other climes (he half-expected bubonic plague to make a comeback there).

He was conditioned to keep his guard up. He’d taken all the requisite precautions. The regimen of shots—yellow fever, typhoid, cholera—and oral prophylactics, a grab bag of chloroquine, iodine tabs, plus the occasional herbal remedy.

It was chicanery that got him.

“You bought water from vendors on the street?” his future wife asked, barely concealing a grin.

“I was hot,” he’d answered, “and it was Perrier.” He grimaced at the acrid memory of its aftertaste. “So I thought.”

“Perrier isn’t spelled with four r’s.”

“I repeat. I. Was. Hot.” He was still hot—had a fever, in fact—and was unamused, in no mood really to be mocked by this nineteen-year-old housegirl—this Lagos parvenu from some backwater town in Anambra State. He vowed to tell his driver, Chibuzo, that this ridiculous young cousin of his just would not do, that he’d no need of a nursemaid, he was fine, really, just fine on his own. He’d weakly thrown off the thin bedsheet, which weighed down on him with the oppressive yet all-seeing heft of an X-ray bib—and her knowing stare.

“Ndo, you look hot,” she said, faint frown clouding her brow as she put her hand to his own. Satisfied by what she felt there, she was all smiles again, handing him a bottle of water, cheekily adding, “Don’t worry. I read the label.”

For two weeks, she’d been his Nightingale, the much-ballyhooed call to Chibuzo forestalled, then put off again till he’d gotten better and gotten back to work. On the evening of his third day back at the office, he came home to find her waiting on his steps, a covered food dish place-set on an Anatomy and Physiology book, all balancing on her knees.

Without a word, he took her in.

After that, she’d come daily: to feed him, to tidy, to finish homework on his computer. She was a nursing student. She teased him relentlessly about being her toughest clinical case. He grew accustomed to her: taught her chess, the Sicilian Defense, and how to sacrifice a queen. But mainly they talked. Or rather she talked—about her classes, her fledgling coin collection—and he listened. By turns, she drew him out. While he absolutely refused to ride the okada motorcycles or danfo buses that put-putted across the megacity’s pockmarked streets—playing chicken with pedestrians and motorists alike—he did allow Vicky to show him her Lagos. Places beyond the high, reinforced walls of his hermetically sealed condo complex on Victoria Island.

“Las Gidi is a city that is thick and heavy like nni ji. Best taken in small bites,” she told him, over dinner at a bukka chophouse, feeding him yam-foufou from the spoon of her fingertips. “Tasty though, no?”

Their first time was messy, feral even. They’d been lounging on the couch after supper, watching NTA TV as Chicken Little newscasters squawked on and on about yet another Nigerian airplane falling from the sky, the third in as many months. How irritatingly predictable, he’d thought, just as she turned to him, tears in her eyes. It was disconcerting and, and, stirring. Strange, altogether strange. Something moved through him, something unbidden. Unexpected. Unwanted? He stiffened. Gave her shoulders a glancing, there-there-now pat. His was not a family given to grand gestures of affection, yet somehow, inexplicably, even to himself, when she responded by moving closer to him, muscling a tear-stained cheek into his crisply tailored shirtsleeve, he took her in. Something happened in his chest then, a sawing sensation only vaguely reminiscent of breathing. Heartbeat tapping a staccato code against his rib cage. She’d looked at him, knowingly. Her upturned face saying she’d deciphered its message. So he kissed her then. Then all was chaos: teeth at his nape, nails scratching his thighs, hands fisting her braids. Exhilarating.

They fell for each other. The descent quick thereafter. He came to realize, quite quickly, how a man could utterly be held in sway by the tam-tam rhythm of a woman’s hips as she walked by. For her part, she came to love him, with a raw, singular intensity that he could never have anticipated—or purchased online. Yes, purchased, that’s right. He and Vicky heard the rumors later, the whispered asides of Cambridge neighbors when he’d brought her back home to the States. She must be a mail-order bride, wooed via keystroke. She was flesh trade goods from some chauvinist, male-fantasy site like Africanbeauty.com. Afrobride.com promised a selection of “elegant and lovely ladies” in a buffet of nationalities: Nigerian, Cameroonian, Ethiopian, Ivorian. Or perhaps her provenance was a sister site? One like foreignprincesses.com, where African women vied for Western Prince Charmings with international Cinderallas: Irina from Kiev, Naviya from Pattaya, Jun Li from Kunming. One day Elliot found Vicky browsing one such site, absorbed by the profile of “Sexy Kenyan Kitten,” twenty-one-year-old Nadine from Nairobi, smiling coquettishly over a shoulder tattoo and gushing about her willingness to “cater to my man.”

“Cater to you, hmph,” Victoria said, sucking her teeth and jumping up from the computer in disgust. “Save that for an R&B song. Igbo women are warriors, don’t you dare laugh, Elliot.”

He laughed, watching his diminutive wife scowl up at him, one hand poised on a cocked hip, the other sprouting a wagging finger. He turned around to hide his face. “I’m not laughing.” Why was she the only one who made him laugh? “I swear I’m not.”

“Mm-hmm. You know, Elliot, when an Igbo woman feels disrespected, we make war on men.”

He felt her grab the back of his favorite shirt, an umber guayabera, last reminder of the uniform he’d worn daily in the tropics.

“What are you—? Vicky, this is linen. You know you’re buying me a new one, right?”

He heard muffled chuckling. “See me this, fashionisto. When I met you, you had one-one shirt.” Tiny hands scaled up his neck. “Now keep quiet while I school you.” She hoisted herself fully onto his back. “I’m teaching you a history lesson. So listen up.”

“I’m all ears, Teach,” he replied, clamping her thighs securely around him. Wondering if poor attention would earn him the ruler. Wanting it.

Vicky began her piggybacked lecture.

“In 1929, ten thousand Igbo women started ogu umunwanyi, the Women’s War. When men do wrong, we ‘sit on you.’ It’s part of our tradition, how we protest.”

“You climbing on me. This is protest? Vicky—”

“Shhh, I’m not done, as for climbing, well, let’s say I’m improvising. I could also burn your hut, but it’s a very nice hut, and I live in it, too.”

As he walked them to the bedroom, she proceeded to school him about mass uprisings among Igbo women in villages across Eastern Nigeria. Women protesting in droves, as Britain’s colonial taxes handicapped their fledgling enterprises, the small goods and foodstuffs market that helped sustain their families. She spoke of women mobilizing, of war paint on faces, of war songs and rallying cries ringing out, of staring down enemies—the Brits, yes, but their colonial proxies, the warrant chiefs too, and local men these women knew: brothers, friends, and sometimes husbands who could be shamed. They sang, they chanted, they brought down the system.

“And the moral of this story is?” he asked, placing her on the bed for her finale.

“Always fight, never surrender,” she replied, then pulled him down to the bed and covered his body with her own.

Excerpt from “The Statistician’s Wife” copyright © 2021 by Nana Nkweti. Forthcoming in Walking on Cowrie Shells (Graywolf Press).

What do you think? Does Elliot sound like a murderer? Did Vicky fight? Grab a copy of the collection to find out.

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Walking on Cowrie Shells focuses on the lives of hyphenated-Americans with a multi-cultural heritage in the United States and Africa. The book spans genres – literary realism, horror, mystery, YA, science fiction – and features complex, fully-embodied characters: tongue-tied linguistic anthropologists, comic book enthusiasts and even water goddesses. The author hopes her stories entertain readers while also offering them a counterpoint to prevalent “heart of darkness” writing that too often depicts a singular “African” experience plagued by locusts, hunger, and tribal in-fighting.

Nana Nkweti (@nanankweti) is a Cameroonian-American writer, Caine Prize finalist, and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has garnered fellowships from MacDowell, Kimbilio, Ucross, and the Wurlitzer Foundation, among others. She is a professor of English at the University of Alabama.