The Dead Husband

by Carter Wilson

  “Thank you,” I say. “Now, if you don’t mind.”

  “Nope, nope. I’ll let you be. Probably be contacting you again. Or, if the cards play out in your favor, maybe you’ll never hear another word from me.”

  Let’s hope for that option, I think.

  “Bye, Rose,” he says. “I’ll be keeping any eye out for your next book. I’m sure it’ll be as good as the others.”

  I nearly lose my grip on the tomato sauce. A jar crashing to the floor is not the reaction I’d want to give him, or my boss.

  Pearson walks a few feet down the aisle before turning back.

  “You said ‘concerning my husband,’” he says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said you had nothing to hide ‘concerning your husband.’ It’s just that most people wouldn’t have used a modifier. They’d have just said they had nothing to hide. Period.”

  I turn to the shelf and finally place the jar of tomato sauce next to all the others, hiding my face from Pearson.

  “You’re reaching now,” I say with my back to him.

  I picture him cracking a gentle grin, a cop smirk, the kind that’s supposed to be disarming.

  “Maybe I am,” he says. “Can I ask one last question? Just about being an author. I was curious about something.”

  “Fine,” I say, turning back to him and crossing my arms.

  He nods as if to say thanks and says, “I was thinking of that old piece of advice for authors and was wondering if it is really true.”

  “What advice?”

  “Write what you know,” he says. “Is that really a thing? Do authors write what they know?”

  If Pearson is trying to unnerve me, it’s working. I compose my thoughts the best I can and answer.

  “Doesn’t really allow much room for imagination,” I say. “Some of the best parts about writing are discovering new worlds.”

  He scans my face, and I keep mine as still as possible. Cops are trained to identify signs of a person being deceitful, simple physical tells. Averting of the eyes. Biting of the lips. Touching the face.

  If Pearson registers something about my face, I can’t tell.

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” he says. “Imagination.” He dwells over the word like a distant memory, then snaps his attention back to me and adds, “Say, you ever read Clara Tomson? Mystery writer, like you.”

  The name sounds vaguely familiar but I can’t place it. “No,” I say. Pearson certainly asked me this for a very specific reason, and because of that, I say nothing else, not wanting to go wherever it is he’s hoping to lure me. I do, however, etch the author’s name in my mind, because I sure as hell am looking this person up when I get home. Clara Thompson.

  “Oh, okay. Just thought I’d ask.” He holds a beat but I remain steadfast in my silence. Pearson then thanks me again and walks away. As I return to stocking the jars, I notice the tremors in my hands.

  Maybe ten seconds elapse before John, my manager, scurries up from behind.

  “He said he was with the Milwaukee police.” John comes around to the side and I look at him. His salt-and-pepper mustache twitches, and his eyes are wide with weird, nervous excitement, like a cat that doesn’t know what to do with the bird it’s just maimed. “What’d he want with you?”

  It’s none of your goddamn business, I want to scream. Why can’t everyone just leave me alone? Why do you all have to ask so many questions? I came here to escape my life, not be suffocated by it.

  But I don’t say anything, because there’s a rope still tethering me to social convention. The rope is well frayed and may only have the tensile strength of dental floss, but for now, it holds.

  “He’s just closing out the case on my late husband,” I say, jaw tensed, voice monotone, offering no more. I’ve never told John my backstory, but I’m assuming he knows about Riley. I simply assume everyone knows because this is Bury.

  John nods. “I see.” Assumption confirmed. “Well, I suppose that’s good,” he adds. “But…he came all the way here just to close out a case?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I tell him.

  “Okay.” Based on the fact that he doesn’t leave, I’m guessing it’s not really okay to him. He just hovers around a few more seconds until I finally reach out and put a hand on his arm.

  “John, everything’s good. I appreciate your concern, but this is a private matter. If it’s all the same to you, I don’t want to talk about it. Things have been hard enough.”

  He nods, the mustache twitches a little more, and he gives me another nod before turning and walking back down the aisle.

  I exhale, as if I could simply breathe out all the things that are eating me from the inside out.

  But those things stay inside, burrowing and devouring, until there is nothing left to be had.

  Twenty-Six

  I make it as far as the front seat of my car before I search Clara Thompson on my phone.

  The first Google result tells me she was a prominent psychoanalyst who died in the 1950s. I look at the Wikipedia page and see nothing about her being a mystery writer.

  I return to my search, scroll down, and realize I had the last name wrong. It’s Tomson, not Thompson. I find a link for her website.

  International Bestselling Novelist

  I click on it and scour through all her titles, none of which are familiar. That’s hardly surprising; I don’t read many cozy mysteries. Her bio page shows the face of an elderly woman, coiffed brunette hair, striking blue eyes, and an expression that conveys a mild displeasure at having her picture taken.

  The bio is long but hardly revealing. Born in Norway just before World War II, moved to Sweden as a child. Started her writing career in her twenties, and her work mostly consists of light, cozy mysteries and includes what appears to be a very successful series featuring a character named Victoria Landon. And cats. Lots of cats.

  The final bit of her bio states she’s been an evangelical Christian for over forty years. I try to find some significance in that, some tie-in to Pearson’s interest in me, but come up empty.

  Back to Google, type the name in properly. First entry is her website again, but the second is what I was hoping to find. A Wikipedia page for Clara Tomson. If there’s something about her that Detective Pearson wants me to know, I’ll find it here.

  The page loads, and the first thing I notice is a table of contents on the left side of the entry.

  The next thing I notice is the second heading in that table of contents, the one immediately following Early Life.

  It says Murder and Trial.

  I thumb the hyperlink and jump to this part of her bio. A part not mentioned at all in her official website.

  “Holy shit,” I say, my own voice startling me.

  In dry language, Wikipedia tells me that Tomson (born Elsa Holm), committed murder when she was only sixteen. In Gothenburg, Sweden, she and her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, Liam Persson, killed Clara’s father, with Clara claiming he’d raped her numerous times from ages twelve through fifteen.

  If I’m still breathing, I’m not aware of it.

  They stabbed him while he slept and the mother was out of town. The worst sentence is this: The attackers presumed one blow would kill him but it took more than twenty.

  Oh my god. Oh my god.

  Pearson just casually dropped the name of a mystery novelist who committed murder as a teenager.

  I furiously read the rest of the page, then a second time. It never states who actually did the stabbing. Maybe Tomson was just complicit but didn’t commit the act. It didn’t make a difference because both went to prison in Sweden. Tomson for just over three years, Persson for five. When they got out, Elsa Holm changed her name to Clara Tomson and started writing books. Now, she has more than thirty of them.

  This woman is highly successful.
<
br />   But she paid her debt to society. She never had to keep a secret. She might not detail this part of her past on her own bio, but she knows it’s not a secret.

  I don’t have that luxury, if you want to call it that. I have a weight that gets heavier every day, as all secrets do.

  And Pearson.

  He suspects something.

  Write what you know, he said.

  This is about more than Riley.

  This is about Bury.

  Twenty-Seven

  Colin walked at a slow pace as he left the grocery store, as if Rose Yates might still rush out and tell him she’d changed her mind. That she did want to talk after all. Clear the air.

  But he knew that wasn’t going to happen, and his pace had less to do with a hope of talking to her and more with a reluctance to return to Milwaukee just as clueless as when he’d arrived. He’d shot the moon getting permission to come here, and his sergeant’s expectation was he’d return with evidence to either arrest or exonerate her.

  Colin had neither.

  He barely even had a sense of Rose Yates. Before the trip, he found as much as he could about her online. There had been a handful of blogs by and about her, a couple of podcast interviews, and even a brief local TV news interview from a few years ago when her second book had come out.

  Colin thought he had a good picture of the woman. How to approach her. How to act to get her to trust him.

  But he’d been wrong.

  Rose Yates was a fortress wall, smooth and solid, with no place for handholds.

  Colin paused for one last moment before getting in the cruiser waiting for him. One breath. Three seconds of silence. Then he opened the passenger-side door and slid in.

  “No go?” Officer Drew Simmons—Colin’s local PD escort while he was in Bury—started the ignition, and cool air blew from the Dodge Charger’s air vents. Colin hadn’t been expecting seventy-degree weather in New Hampshire in the second half of October.

  “Negative,” Colin said.

  “So now what?”

  “ I go back to Milwaukee tonight.”

  “That’s a shame,” Simmons said.

  “Yeah.” Colin sighed. “It is.”

  Simmons pulled the cruiser from Tuli’s parking lot and turned right on Bryson Street toward the police station, about a mile away. He kept to the speed limit, bringing all other cars around theirs to the exact same speed. Everyone’s cautious around a cop, Colin thought. Some of the folks in traffic just didn’t want a ticket. Others perhaps really had something to hide, maybe the kind of crime that only gets discovered after a routine traffic stop.

  Colin scanned the rows of houses along the boulevard, sensing he was staring at a Norman Rockwell painting. After taking in the town for a few seconds, he turned to Simmons. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “And you said you grew up here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What was that like? I mean, this place seems so perfect.”

  Simmons shrugged, as if he had never considered his childhood before. “It was okay. Boring, I suppose. I’m sure my parents hoped I’d do something other than be a cop, but it’s what I wanted.”

  “Boring,” Colin repeated. “Nothing exciting ever happened?”

  Simmons turned to him. “Exciting like how?”

  Ever since Colin had found out about Clara Tomson, he couldn’t get the write-what-you-know notion out of his head. It was an overly simplified and ignorant notion, of course. Writers didn’t only write what they knew. There would never be a Game of Thrones or Pet Sematary if wild imagination didn’t come into play.

  But Colin had also learned to listen to himself. When an idea struck him in a certain way, as obtuse as it might be, he’d learned how to nurture that idea until it yielded something of substance. The idea that Clara Tomson committed murder when she was a teen and then lived the rest of her life writing mystery novels… Well, that struck Colin in a certain way, especially when he added Rose Yates into that same thought process.

  “Crime,” Colin said. “What kind of crime you have here?”

  “What, growing up or now?”

  “Has it changed?”

  Simmons allowed a grin. “Not really. Nothing here much changes. You’ve seen the board at the station. Not a lot on it.”

  “Pretty quiet town.”

  “We’re in the top three safest cities in New Hampshire. Truth is, it’s just that kind of area. Was the same way when I was a kid. Never really had to worry about being out at night, things like that.”

  The Pleasantville metaphor was becoming even more apt. “But you have crime,” Colin said. “Every place has crime.”

  “Sure, of course we do. Had a rape a couple of years ago.”

  In Madison, they had over a hundred rapes in Colin’s last year there before he’d transferred to Milwaukee. That was a much bigger city with a large university population, but still.

  “Okay, what else?” Colin asked.

  Simmons thought about it. “Car break-ins. The occasional DUI. Maybe three or four legit house burglaries a year. A couple of months ago, a guy torched his self-storage unit. Turned out he was going through a nasty divorce and wanted to burn all his wife’s stuff.”

  Colin processed this. He supposed given Bury’s size—just about seven thousand—it wasn’t unusual to have such a low crime rate. He also knew the socioeconomic profile of the town had a lot to do with it. Affluent white folks were less inclined to commit crimes warranting a 911 call. The crimes likely being committed in Bury were the less obvious ones. Those involving offshore accounts, routing numbers, and shell corporations.

  Then there were the vices of the rich.

  “Does Bury have a drug problem?”

  “Nah,” Simmons said. “Not like Manchester or anything like that. Some heroin issues, some opioid abuse. Nothing off the charts. Other than that, yeah, we’ve busted some kids with coke at parties. Some pot. Nothing more than recreational. No large-scale dealers or anything.”

  “And murder?”

  Simmons shook his head. “No, sir. At least not since I’ve been on the force the last two years. Had three suicides. One vehicular manslaughter. But no murders.”

  Not that you know of, Colin thought, not really knowing why that thought popped into his head.

  “When was the last murder in Bury?”

  Simmons thought about it a minute, then shook his head. “Can’t say I know. Like I said, it’s just not that kind of place.”

  Moments later, they arrived at the station. Colin had a couple hours before he had to leave for the airport, so he worked at an open desk and caught up with paperwork. He also spent some time chatting with Wallace Sike, the Bury chief of police. Sike had been around about a decade and mostly confirmed what Simmons had said.

  “Ayuh, Bury’s pretty quiet. Lower crime rate than Hillsborough County as a whole, that’s for sure. We assist the other jurisdictions more than they assist us.” Sike appeared on the edge of fifty and had a mustache as bushy as a raccoon tail, completely hiding his upper lip. His pronounced gut affirmed the fact that he didn’t spend a lot of his day running down suspects. “But there’ve been murders over the years, no doubt about it. Can’t think of any place without a murder every now and then. But ours are extremely few and far between.”

  “When was the last one?” Colin asked.

  “Been seven years. Manchester is the murder capital of the county, but they only average about one homicide a year up there. Though a few years back, they had that whole Mister Tender mess. Not sure if you heard about that, but made national news.”

  Colin indeed remembered.

  “Did you assist with that?” he asked.

  “Nah. But I have a couple of buddies on the job up there. Said it was a major shit-show. Never seen anything l
ike it.”

  “But the Bury murder, seven years ago?”

  The expression on Sike’s face passed from mild excitement to disappointment, as if he was embarrassed Bury didn’t ever get its sensational killing spree.

  “Drug deal gone bad. Out-of-town dealer meeting with his well-to-do Bury user. Dealer pumped three in the chest. Caught him a few hours later.”

  “And before that?”

  “Before that what?”

  “Other murders.”

  Sike leaned back in his chair, which squeaked in a violent protest to the assault. “Long before my time in the department.”

  Colin went with his gut, knowing there was something. There was something about Bury. If not outright malevolent, then at least mysterious. Suspicious. There are no perfect communities. Every town has a stain.

  “How about way back, say ten or twenty years ago?” Colin asked. “Any major crimes in Bury? Any…I don’t know…anything that got Bury a little attention beyond the town borders?”

  Sike peered up into the acoustic ceiling tiles of the station, as if all the answers he ever wanted could be found in their thousands of craters. After taking a moment’s reflection, he directed his gaze back to Colin.

  “Missing kid. Back in the nineties. Sixteen-year-old boy named Caleb Benner. Never found him.”

  “A sixteen-year-old boy?” Colin said. “That’s not a missing kid. That’s a runaway.”

  “Ayuh, that’s what most say. Not his family, though. Not his friends.”

  Colin crossed his arms over his chest, tucking his fingers into his armpits. “Were you here then?”

  “Manchester. But we came down to help search. Mike Patterson was the lead on the case.”

  “Is he still on the job?”

  Sike shook his head. “Heart attack killed him back in oh-nine.”

  “Do you remember the details of the case?”

  “I do indeed.”

  Colin nodded over to the coffee machine in the back corner of their room.