A Good Marriage

A Good Marriage is a novella by American writer Stephen King, published in the collection Full Dark, No Stars (2010).

Plot

Darcy Anderson has been married to Bob, an accountant from Portland, Maine, for 27 years. They have a happy yet humdrum relationship, running a mail order business selling and appraising rare coins. One day, while Bob is away on business, Darcy goes into the garage to search for batteries. When she rummages through Bob's belongings, she stumbles across a pornographic magazine showing sadomasochistic images. Unnerved by the magazine—and that it is in Bob's possession—Darcy finds a secret compartment behind the garage's baseboard and makes a more horrific discovery: a small box containing the ID cards of Marjorie Duvall, a victim of a serial killer called "Beadie".

Bob phones Darcy and senses her distress. Afterwards, Darcy looks up Beadie online and cross-checks Bob's business records with the locations of the murders, finding that Bob was close to most of the crimes. When Darcy wakes up the next morning, she finds that Bob has deduced her discovery and returned home early. He calmly explains his insanity to his horrified wife, recounting how he and a sadistic friend named Brian Delahanty—nicknamed "BD", from which "Beadie" was derived—planned a school shooting as teenagers. Delahanty was hit by a truck before they could carry it out, but Bob claims he had "infected" him with "certain ideas", resulting in his homicidal urges.