He liked to think she heard what he’d said.
The bit about family. He hoped she’d heard that, because it was all true.
Seconds later, Colin was asleep, dreaming terrible things.
Forty-Seven
Bury, New Hampshire
November 16
6:03 a.m.
Six in the morning, my phone buzzes. The text doesn’t wake me. I’ve been up for hours.
I slept fitfully for a couple hours after Pearson’s call, but by one thirty, I conceded defeat to any further rest. I put on my robe, grabbed my laptop and phone, and went downstairs into my father’s study. Poured myself a cognac and then eased into his chair. I wanted to be Logan Yates for a little while, if only to see what he would do in my position.
Bleary-eyed, sipping a drink I didn’t even enjoy, I summoned the mindset of my father. It didn’t take long before I realized exactly what he would do. He’d fight with every ounce of his being. He’d use his money and ego to rage against anyone posing a threat to him. He’d lie, he’d misdirect, he’d sue. Logan Yates wouldn’t be satisfied until he not only won the battle but humiliated his enemy in the process.
At what point would Logan Yates take off and run? The situation would have to be hopeless.
I don’t want to be like my father, and sitting there in the room smelling of cigar smoke and bitter years, I knew I had to do the exact opposite of him. The moment I came to my decision, a tremendous weight lifted, as if I’d been held captive for years and I woke one morning to find my cell door wide open.
After this decision, I wrote. Wrote like I never had before. Not in fits and bursts, but a marathon of words, hour after hour, getting up only to pee and refresh my drink. I didn’t even know where my current story was headed until I began typing, but it unveiled itself to me as I wrote, as if I were driving a hundred miles an hour at night and could just see enough of the road ahead to keep from crashing.
I exhausted myself after four thousand words. I’ve never written anywhere close to that amount in one sitting. For the past hour, I’ve sat here, staring at nothing, still marginally drunk, wondering how I will get through this day.
I reach over and lift my phone from the mahogany side table, a piece of furniture that hasn’t moved from this spot as long as I’ve been alive.
The text message is from the Bury School District. All schools closed due to weather. I’m completely disoriented, trying to remember any weather at all. There was snow a few nights ago, though it wasn’t bad. The night at the trailhead with Cora. A dozen lifetimes ago.
I can’t wrap my mind around what day it is, never mind the weather. I look back to my phone.
Monday.
How is it Monday already?
A year ago, I was on top of everything. Had to know the news. The temperatures for the coming week. People’s social-media tidbits. I consumed everything, but now my brain is so overloaded I can’t even remember the last time I showered.
I stand, aching from hours hunched over a laptop. Blood drains from my head, threatening to topple me. I fight it, steady myself, and walk over to the window and pull back the heavy gold drapes.
Under the pink wash of dawn, an unexpected foot of snow suffocates the landscape. The sight of so much transcendent white causes me to stare for minutes on end, mesmerized. More than mesmerized. In absolute awe.
I’ve experienced this one other time: freshman year of high school, a ten-day trip to Italy with my school. We had three days in Rome, and my friends and I were much more concerned with Italian boys than Italian culture. One morning was dedicated to touring the Vatican, which promised to be boring in addition to hot and crowded. I had no reason to be interested in anything religious; the only time my father mentioned God was in using his last name, damn it. Within the sea of worshipping humanity that morning, our tour group finally inched inside St. Peter’s Basilica. Self-absorbed fourteen-year-old that I was, I was impressed at only a minimal level. Another big cathedral. So. What.
But then we scuffled over to one side of the vast room, which was so packed you could nearly taste the mix of sweat, perfume, and body odor. I couldn’t even see over the tourists in front of me and was approaching claustrophobia and at the brink of losing my mind when something happened. All of a sudden, there was no one in front of me, and I was staring into a glass wall with a sculpture behind it.
It was the first and only time I’ve seen Michelangelo’s La Pietà. It took a moment to realize what it was, but then it clicked. This was Mary holding the body of her son. I had seen a thousand images of Jesus on the trip, but this sculpture grabbed my heart and squeezed so hard I stopped breathing. At that age, I cared little for art and had no connection with Jesus, but in that moment, I was so transfixed by this sculpture—how could it be so smooth?—that I began to weep. Right there. Tears fell, and I thought I was having some kind of religious experience.
But it wasn’t that. It was the combination of profound beauty and sadness at such an exquisite level that it left me no option other than to cry. I hadn’t experienced anything like that again.
Until now.
This snowfall.
The beauty enveloping the sadness.
With the tears welling in my eyes, I think once again about death. The rainbow in the cornfield. It’s all so gorgeous, and it’s all so tragic. The extremes of human emotion and how ironic that thoughts of dying fill me with such life.
I’m still staring transfixed at the world outside when my father’s voice resonates behind me.
“What a fuckhole of a mess out there.”
And the beauty is gone.
The sadness, however, remains.
Forty-Eight
I turn to my father, who’s dressed for work; he wears three-thousand dollar suits like a second skin. He’s always known how to package himself: crisp and clean, almost vintage. Even in these autumn years of his life, my father remains attractive on the outside, despite whatever ugliness festers within.
“Bobby just called. Said he can’t drive me. Can’t even get out of his own driveway.”
Bobby is my father’s driver, who for years has taken him and Peter to the Yates Capital office in Boston every weekday. I can’t even picture my father behind the wheel of a car anymore. It would be beneath him.
“They just closed the schools,” I say.
“I hate working from home.” He steps into the office and stares out at the landscape. I don’t imagine he sees what I do. He sees only inconvenience. “It’s lonely.”
“So take a day off,” I tell him. “Go back to bed. Enjoy some quiet.”
He looks at me as if I’ve just casually suggested he kill himself.
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not? Can’t you just enjoy the things you have? Or do you want to work until you die, dropping dead during a conference call?”
A grunt. “There’re worse ways to go.” He takes a step toward me and sniffs. “Jesus, you already drinking? I can smell it on you.”
“I haven’t stopped,” I say. “I’ve been up all night.”
“Doing what?”
“Losing my mind.”
His glance scans me up and down, as if looking for cracks. “That’s pretty dramatic.”
I don’t argue the point.
“You were right,” I tell him. “I shouldn’t have written what I did. And now it’s too late. Whatever’s going to happen, I can’t change it now.”
He lets his gaze rest on me a moment longer before walking to the door and closing it. He tells me to sit, which I do. In his chair. I expect a reaction from him, even just a subtle narrowing of the eyes at this infraction, but there’s nothing. He takes the other chair and leans back.
“Tell me,” he says.
And I do.
I tell my father everything.
About Detective P
earson’s first visit to Bury. About Cora and what I suspected she did to Tasha Collins’s poodle. What Willow said to Max, and even her creepy Lizzie Borden poster. I tell my father that Cora is both unhinged and dangerous and could be a threat to the rest of the family. I tell him about the drunken call from Pearson and what he said about Cora’s interview with the police.
Through all this, his face is ice. I’ve never spoken to him this honestly in my life, and there’s a comfort to his steely gaze, as if his tensile strength can withstand all the pressure I’m putting on him in the moment.
I reveal to my father my recurring nightmares. How I relive that night from two decades ago and can’t take it anymore. The final thing I confess is that the weight of the secrets has broken me and how I think about the allure of death more often than I should. Really think about it.
Some indeterminate amount of time later, I finish, drained of everything. I slump in my chair, thinking I could sleep a year and it wouldn’t be enough.
My father is quiet, contemplative. After a silence that stretches for minutes, the first thing he says is “I think you killed Riley.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
I force myself to look into his eyes, gaze past the perpetual squint and lock in on him with resolve. I would do this as a kid, in those times he showed enough interest to chastise me about something. I’d lock eyes with him and take his barrage, focusing as deeply as I could into his pupils, those black orbs behind the squint, nearly hypnotizing myself in the process. He could belabor his verbal abuse, never yelling (and never needing to), but as long as I kept my focus, his words lost their impact. He’d eventually run out of steam, and that felt like a victory for me.
I keep my focus on those pupils, just as I did as a kid.
“I’ve stopped caring what you think,” I say.
He doesn’t blink. He looks at me with a fierce intensity.
“The truth doesn’t matter,” he says. “I think you did, and I’m your father. So of course the cops think you did. They’re going to keep coming after you for that, and that’s already led to this Milwaukee detective sniffing around the Benner disappearance.” His left cheek twitches for a split second, the only sign of anger he’s allowed. “You said you can’t change what happens next, but you’re wrong. I’ve spent my life figuring out how to change inevitable destinies.” He leans in and jabs a finger to the sky, as if all the world’s answers are housed there. “And you can only change the future by doing something unexpected. Something the other guy never expects you’re going to do.”
I ask, “Who’s the other guy?”
“Whoever’s trying to fuck you.”
I break eye contact first. Damn it.
“How?” I ask. “How is it you’ve lived your life all these years in this way? You can’t be happy. Not with how you make everything a competition to win. A battle to survive.”
“I think you and I have very different definitions of happiness.”
“We’re different in every way,” I say.
“But are we really, Rosie?”
I choose another path, asking him something I’ve thought of many times but never voiced. “Did you ever love another woman after Mom?”
This jolts him, breaks his focus. I see it in his face.
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“Because I’m trying to figure out how much capacity for being a human you have. If any.”
His reaction is stunning. Logan Yates, the man of ice, the man who’ll come at you with biting words but no emotion, picks up the glass I’d been drinking from all night and throws it against the office door. It bursts, sending shards of Irish crystal raining through the room.
The sound of it is deafening.
The silence that follows is louder.
Do something the other guy never expects you’ll do.
His squint turns into a momentary pained scowl. Once his expression returns to its normal, indecipherable form, he says, “You don’t tell me about love. You don’t talk to me about your mother. You don’t say one more fucking thing about happiness, because with all my money, that’s the one thing I can’t afford. When she died, she took all that away. Don’t you see that?” He’s struggling so hard to maintain composure. “I’d be happier if I’d never known her at all. And if you tell me the shit about ‘better to have loved and lost,’ I’ll slap you right in the goddamn mouth.”
He’s never laid a hand on me in his life, but given the energy he’s radiating in the moment, I don’t doubt his words.
Still, I’m well past the point of fear.
“If you’d never known her,” I say, “then you’d have no daughters.”
Not even a pause. “Exactly.”
I’m not so numb that this doesn’t sting, even coming from a man who means less to me by the day.
“I have to leave here,” I say. “We’re going back to Milwaukee.”
“What good will that do?” he asks.
“I won’t be running away anymore.”
“But you will be,” he counters. “You’ve got problems there, you’ve got problems here. No matter which direction you run, you’re still running.”
My fingertips dig into the leather of the chair’s arms. “And what would Logan Yates do?”
“Confront your problems face on. Your sister is who you have to deal with immediately. Both of us do, really. Cora, she’s…” He turns and glances out the window; the sun’s reflection off the snow paints him into a ghost. “She’s unpredictable.”
It’s my turn to accuse, the desire fierce and consuming. I rise from my chair, lean over his, placing my face close to his ear. His sandalwood aftershave hits me, whisks me back thirty years, a time machine I wasn’t expecting. Tucking me in bed at night, I’d smell that exact scent, and how specific that memory is and what a narrow window in which it exists. He barely ever showed me affection, but I remember it now. How at one point he was somewhat sweet, or at least pretending to be.
“What did you do to her?” I ask.
“What?”
“Cora. What did you do to her?”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“You always liked her more than me. Paid her more attention. By the time I was ten, you didn’t seem to know I existed unless you were pissed off at me. And yet she turned into a monster.” It hits me that I’ve been trying to ask him this for over twenty years but never realized it. “What did you do to her?”
He leans in, jaw tight, face inches from mine. “You’re too soft, Rose. Cut the shit. Ask me what you’re really thinking.”
I swallow, finding the question hard to say aloud. Maybe it’s because I don’t know if I really want the answer. Deep breath. Close my eyes. That makes it easier.
“Did you touch her?”
I half expect him to hit me, denying my accusation with an open palm. The other half of me expects him to collapse into himself, a defeated man, admitting his guilt for the first time in his life.
Instead, he holds the straightest poker face the world has ever seen and says, “Did you kill your husband?”
The game continues.
I don’t answer. Neither does he.
“Well, then,” he says. “There you go.”
“I don’t want to be a part of this anymore,” I tell him. “This family. This…this life.”
He raises a hand, not to strike me but to touch my cheek, the kindest, coldest thing he’s offered me in a long time. “You can’t choose your family, Rose.” He removes his hand and my cheek warms. “Tonight,” he says. “Get Max out of the house. I don’t care how. Sleepover.”
“What? Why? It’s a school night.”
“I don’t give a shit. Just figure it out.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re going to have a famil
y meeting,” he says. “You, me, Cora. We’re going to figure this all out. Once and for all. No more loose ends.”
I start to protest, ready to launch into a verbal attack. He cuts me off with a raised hand.
“There is nothing more important than this right now,” he says. “You hear me? This requires our full attention.”
I want to defy him, tell him things are on my terms now. Tell him I don’t want to take his orders. But I don’t say any of these things.
Because he’s right.
If I have any chance of reaching the sister I used to love, of tapping into that tiny bit of humanity I know she still has left, it has to happen now.
Reach her, or stop her.
Tonight.
Forty-Nine
12:14 p.m.
The day fills, threatening to rise over my head and drown me.
Max slept in after I told him school was canceled, then bundled up and played outside long enough to make a snow fort. When he realized there were no other kids to play with, he came back inside and stuck his nose in a book.
A snowplow service came and dug out our driveway while municipal crews plowed the streets. Few cars have ventured out; it’s as if we’re all hunkering down and waiting for some threat to pass.
More snow from the same system is due this afternoon, lasting into the evening. As much as another ten inches. The Weather Channel has named the storm Jayden, but given its timing, it feels a lot more like a Cora.
I call Alec and ask him if he has Micah tonight. He says he does, and when I ask if Max can have a sleepover, he agrees before even asking why. I’m poised to tell him my prepared excuse about my father being ill and not wanting Max to be exposed but instead say nothing. It feels good not lying.
I fix Max grilled cheese for lunch and tell him about the sleepover. His reaction is what I expect.
“What? Why? I barely know Micah.”
“Well, this is a good chance to change that,” I tell him.
“But why?”
“Because I have a meeting tonight.” This is the truth after all.
The Dead Husband Page 21