The Dead Husband

by Carter Wilson

  Also by Carter Wilson

  Mister Tender’s Girl

  The Dead Girl in 2A

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2021 by Carter Wilson

  Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Olga Grlic

  Cover images © Ebru Sidar/Arcangel

  Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  “The Girl at the End of the World” by James. © 2016, written by Tim Booth. Used with permission.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part I

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Part II

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Part III

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Sixty-Eight

  Sixty-Nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-One

  Seventy-Two

  Excerpt from The Dead Girl in 2A

  One

  Two

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Drew

  the nicest guy I know

  Remind me to breathe at the end of the world,

  Appreciate scenes and the love I’ve received,

  There’s always a girl at the end of the world,

  The departing,

  The departing.

  —JAMES, “THE GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD”

  Part I

  One

  Bury, New Hampshire

  August 11

  The name of the town is Bury, but it hasn’t always been. The local government renamed the town from Chester after a local Union soldier named William Bury did some heroic thing or another a hundred and whatever years ago.

  Poor Chester. They took the name of a whole town right away from him.

  Bury, New Hampshire.

  Most locals pronounce it berry, though there’s a small faction of lifers who insist it rhymes with fury. Doesn’t matter how it sounds out loud. In my head this town always makes me think of underground things, burrowed by worms, hidden from light. Secrets.

  I grew up here. Part of me has always been buried here.

  Thunderheads jostle for space in the summer sky. The air is heavy enough to create a drag on my steps, or maybe it’s just my natural hesitation to walk up the long stone path to my father’s front door. The house in which I grew up looms, as it always has, grand but not beautiful. Rum Hill Road is filled with mansions, but none of them feel like homes.

  Max grabs my right hand as we approach the door. He does this when he’s scared, feeling shy, or simply wants to be somewhere else. In other words, a lot of the time. Not atypical for any eleven-year-old, much less one who’s going through what Max is. What we both are.

  I look down and the diffused light from the gunmetal sky makes his blue eyes glow, as if all his energy is stored right behind those irises. Max has his dad’s eyes. Looking at my son, this fact haunts me, as if I’m seeing the ghost of Riley. I don’t want to see any part of my dead husband in Max.

  It hits me again. I’m only thirty-seven and a widow. It’s both depressing and freeing.

  “It’s okay,” I tell him. I think I’ve said those two words as much as I’ve said I love you to him over the past month. One phrase is the truth. The other is a hope.

  “I don’t like Bury,” he says.

  “We just got here.”

  He gives my arm a tug of protest. “It’s not Milwaukee. It’s not home.”

  I tousle his hair, which probably assures me more than him. “No, it sure isn’t.”

  We reach the front door, a curved and heavy slab of maple reinforced with iron hinges and bands. My father told me when I was a little girl that a door like ours conveyed wealth and strength. That we needed a thick door, like a castle, because it sent a sign to all who tried to enter. I asked him who we needed to protect ourselves from, and I’ll never forget his answer.

  Everyone.

  For a moment, I have the impulse to ring the bell of the house where I spent my childhood. I try the door. It’s locked, so I press the doorbell and hear the muffled ring of the familiar chime inside.

  I’m surprised when my father himself ope
ns it. He stares at me, then offers a smirk that never blossoms into a smile.

  The air of the house leaks out and crawls over me. Smells of the past. The aroma of time, of long-ago fear. My father is one of the reasons I left this town and never looked back. He’s also one of the reasons I’m back. Now, in this moment, a time when I need to be here but am dying to be anywhere else, my past threatens to scoop me up and wash me out to sea.

  Perhaps this is how it all ends.

  Maybe I was always meant to drown in Bury.

  Two

  When I was seventeen, my father showed me a BusinessWeek article about him. It was a profile of his private equity firm, Yates Capital Partners, and the reporter quoted anonymous sources labeling my father “cold-blooded” and “ruthless.” My father considered those terms high praise.

  Now as I look at him boxed by the mammoth doorframe, he doesn’t look all that different from his picture in the decades-old magazine. Just as bald, equally wiry and lean. If you asked a stranger what color my father’s eyes were, they’d probably guess wrong, because his eyes are largely hidden within a perpetual squint, the kind that makes the receiver of his gaze anxious. Logan Yates will stare at you in silence with that squint, embracing the tension, and wait until you talk first.

  And you will always talk first.

  The only signs of his aging are the deepened grooves forged by that squint, the dry riverbeds spider-webbing from the corners of his eyes. Etchings of time, and casualties of practiced, unwavering stares. My father would have made a hell of a professional gambler.

  “Hello, Dad.”

  “Rosie,” he says.

  Only he calls me Rosie. To the rest of the world, I’m just Rose.

  “Where’s Abril?” The housekeeper.

  “She only works part-time now. I realized I didn’t need someone skulking about the house if there wasn’t enough work to do.”

  Skulking is a fifty-cent Logan Yates word.

  I haven’t seen my father in nine years. There are no hugs. Hugs are luxuries of the weak, and the Yates family tree is carved from petrified wood.

  “Maxwell.”

  Max squeezes my hand as if clinging to a flotation device. “Hi, Grandpa.”

  The last time Max stood face-to-face with his grandfather, he was two. He’s only known him through phone calls and FaceTime since then. Max used to ask me why we never saw him, and I explained Grandpa didn’t like to travel, and I didn’t like going back to Bury. The answer never satisfied Max, but he eventually stopped asking. Children grow used to routine.

  “No more Grandpa,” my father says. “You’re twelve, right?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Okay, eleven. How about you just call me Logan. I call you your name, you call me mine. Agreed?”

  “I go by Max, not Maxwell.”

  “Fine, Max.” My father reaches a hand out to his grandson, who hesitantly takes it and gives it a feeble pump. “Son, you shake a hand like that in the real world, and you may as well yank your pants down and bend over.”

  “Dad.”

  My father looks at me in mock surprise, and still the squint remains.

  “What? He’s gotta learn these things.” He turns back to Max, sticks his hand back out. “Take my hand, Max.”

  Max hesitates, then does.

  “Now squeeze, boy.” My father looks down at their joined hands. “Harder, Max. Come on.”

  “Dad, please.”

  Max grunts as he puts all his strength into his grip.

  “Listen to me,” my father tells him, still squeezing Max’s bony hand. “A handshake isn’t a sign of friendship. It’s an assessment. You versus the other guy. Who would win in a fight? That’s what I want you to think about. You need to show the other guy that if you absolutely had to, you could tear his throat out. Now, squeeze like you mean it, son.”

  “Oh, for chrissakes, Dad.”

  Max grunts more and his eyes narrow; his intensity as he squeezes suggests he’s actually trying to inflict pain. Only then does my father allow a rare smile. “There you go,” he says. “That’s more like it. Now you’ve got me on the defensive. Good job.”

  Max releases but his defiant expression remains. I feel years of my parenting efforts crumbling away.

  “That’s not the kind of lesson he needs in his life right now,” I say. “Or maybe ever.”

  My father puts his hands up. “Fine, by all means.” He’s poised to say something else, perhaps one of the quips he had loaded at all times, ready to fire. Then he appears to think better of it, saying, “You’re right. You’re right. You’ve both been through a lot. I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  He stands aside and ushers us inside.

  1734 Rum Hill Road.

  There’s a faint current of electricity rippling through me as I enter, bringing goose bumps to my arms. Like walking through a collection of ghosts who desperately try to drive me away.

  I look down at my son. If he senses a change in the atmosphere, I don’t see it on his face. Why should he? This house doesn’t hold the memories for him that it does for me. Max has no idea what happened here, long before he was born.

  And now we’re here to live. For a while, anyway.

  My father lured me back to Bury after Riley’s death a month ago, and against all my urges, I had to concede I couldn’t do things on my own. Riley and I had always lived independently of my father’s wealth, but really, it was hardly living. My husband’s entrepreneurial ventures were always doomed to fail, and we’d saved up just enough cash to hold us over until he tried something new. As for me, my income from writing novels is just past the “hobby” threshold as defined by the IRS. I was hoping my third book would be my breakout, but it just hasn’t happened.

  Yet my father’s money wasn’t the only motivation for coming home. I couldn’t stay in Milwaukee. Not in that apartment where the coroner whisked away Riley’s body, which was cool to the touch when I placed a hand on his bare shoulder. I didn’t even want to remain in the city. Too many eyes, watching. Too many shadows, long and reaching. So I left the ghosts there to come face the ones here.

  See, the thing is, I need to be here. I need to face the things I ran from a long time ago. I have this idea of finding peace, but could be such a thing doesn’t exist.

  The goose bumps fade, and I breathe in the familiar smells of the house. The ghosts allow me to pass.

  For now.

  Three

  Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin

  Detective Colin Pearson looked down at his buzzing cell phone and saw the three letters on the screen he’d hoped against.

  Mom

  By the time he decided to answer, the call was already off to voicemail. He checked the time. Nearly 9:00 p.m.

  Probably four or five drinks in by now, Colin thought. Which meant her lips were loose and ready to spew out whatever came to her mind.

  “Jackie again?” Colin’s wife, Meg, rested an open book on her five-month-pregnant belly.

  “Yup.”

  Colin would listen to his mother’s voicemail, but he needed a minute. A minute, and a couple more sips of his beer.

  Colin and Meg were snug on their living-room sectional, perpendicular to each other, her head on his lap. Before bedtime, they’d taken to the habit of retreating here, each with a book, reading for at least thirty minutes. It was their time to decompress, air out the day, be together silently. It had become Colin’s favorite time.

  Until his mother called. And she always called.

  “Okay.” He sighed, then thumbed the phone to the voicemail app. One new message. Fourteen seconds. He pressed Play and held the phone to his ear, not wanting Meg to hear. He wasn’t hiding anything from his wife, but he knew how agitated Meg became when his mom set to drinking. Jackie Pearson was a lovely person until the evening, at which
time she turned into someone else entirely. Sometimes Colin wondered if it was the other way around, and his mom’s real acting chops were on display during daylight hours.

  “You probably don’t remember Linda Grassey,” the scratchy voice on the phone said. “But she was a real slut. They lived just down the street, and she always flirted with your father. Fawned about him like a goddamn saloon whore, getting him to help her out whenever she could. Oh, you’re such a good neighbor. And so strong! Bitch died twelve years ago.”

  Saloon whore?

  His mom’s foul-mouthed missives were a beacon, summoning Colin to come rescue her from her own mind.

  She’d been on a steady decline since Colin’s father died two years earlier. Her doctor labeled it anxiety, prescribing meds she refused to take, just as she refused so many other things. Refused to move out of the family home and into an assisted-living facility. Refused to stop driving until the state wouldn’t renew her license. Refused to stop drinking, even though it was probably the thing that’d end up killing her. She was only seventy-five but whatever life remained was eating her from the inside out.

  Colin and Meg had been happy in Madison, but he knew he needed to return to the town he grew up in and look after his mom, because no one else was going to. He had no siblings, no father, no relatives anywhere near Wisconsin.

  Meg agreed, though Colin knew the move from Madison to Milwaukee wasn’t what she wanted. By the time they’d settled into their rental home in Whitefish Bay four months ago, Meg was unexpectedly pregnant. Though they’d been trying, they’d put a pause on their plans until they had a better idea of how long they’d be in Whitefish Bay. But there was that one night they hadn’t been so careful, and now Meg, at thirty-five and on the cusp of being a first-time mother, was without her Madison friends and community.

  Colin hoped they could go back home in the not-too-distant future, but that, of course, would require his mother dying.

  “What’d she say?” Meg asked.

  “Something about a woman named Linda.”

  “You going over there?”

  “Suppose I need to.”

  She sighed.

  “Don’t stay late.”

  He never did. He just made sure his mother got into bed, just as she had done for him four decades ago when he’d been the one unable to figure out the world.