The Dead Husband

by Carter Wilson

  I don’t want to leave Alec, but god knows I’m ready to leave this town.

  Just one more stop first.

  Sixty-Three

  9:31 a.m.

  Colin slept in, a luxury he rarely allowed himself, though there was no pleasure in it today. Extra sleep didn’t much help when it was riddled with nightmares. Or, worse, fleeting bursts of hope that everything was okay, only to have reality kick him in the groin and tell him in no uncertain terms that his world was, in fact, completely fucked.

  He missed the hot-breakfast hours at the inn, but Franklin and Keith had left some coffee out along with an assortment of pastries. Colin drank three cups and picked at a blueberry muffin. Then he shaved, showered, and dressed, wishing he had a uniform to put on. He missed the days when he wore a uniform. If he had his blues, a gun on his hip, and the hard brim of a trooper hat over his face, he’d be a lot more confident about the visit he was planning to make.

  On his way out, he found Franklin reading the newspaper on a love seat in a small sitting room at the front of the house. A fat cat—long, white fur and eyes squinted deep in happiness—lazed on the neighboring cushion. Colin didn’t remember there being a cat.

  “You’re surely not going out in this mess,” Franklin said.

  “Yeah, planning to.”

  “Roads still being worked on. Heck, I didn’t even get today’s paper yet. This is yesterday’s. Driving’s going to be tough.”

  “I’ve seen worse in Wisconsin,” Colin said.

  “But you haven’t dealt with New Hampshire drivers. The only folks who are going to be out on the road are emergency services and stubborn fools convinced they can drive in anything.”

  Colin managed a weak smile. “Got someone to visit.”

  “Must be someone special.”

  Colin nodded. “Yeah. I suppose so. Thanks for the coffee.”

  “Our pleasure. Be seeing you later?”

  Franklin said this in a way that surprised Colin. As if there was a strong possibility Colin would never be seen by anyone ever again.

  “I wouldn’t miss your dinner,” Colin said. “If it’s going to be anything like last night.”

  Franklin smiled. “It will be.”

  “Okay then.”

  “Okay then.”

  Colin walked outside and spent ten minutes getting the snow off his car. Then he got inside, turned on the ignition, and breathed a fog of frost into the air.

  It was cold.

  It was so goddamned cold.

  Sixty-Four

  10:34 a.m.

  It takes twenty minutes and some slippery turns, but I make it to the house at the edge of the town. Seems appropriate that this place is in a distant orbit of Bury. Far enough outside the ecosystem of the town, but still just within the weakest pull of its gravity.

  I navigate the Suburban down a long road that’s probably dirt but currently snow. I pass only two other houses, each set back down its own lengthy stretch of driveway. Unlike the planned neighborhoods in most of Bury, the houses out here sit on several acres of land, but they aren’t farms. Just a smattering of homes with ample land and enough trees to feel cut off from the world.

  “Where are we going?” Max asks, and the question is bigger than he could possibly imagine.

  I want to tell him that once we leave Bury, we’re headed back to Wisconsin, toward a hard life but the life we’re supposed to have. Free from lies and deceit. Free from the crushing weight of the past. That he’ll finally know his real mother, and in my blistering vulnerability, in the light of my shame and self-forgiveness, I will be fully present for him for the first time in my life.

  I don’t say these things. Soon.

  “Just one last stop,” I say, summarizing all my thoughts of the future in those four little words.

  It’s the third and last house on the road I seek. As I creep closer, it unfolds into view.

  It’s a pretty house, in a simple way. A two-story front-gabled farmhouse, white-slatted siding matching the snow and camouflaging the house so much that the only dominant feature is the pitched roof, gray and steep, with a brick chimney rising from one side of the distant end. No smoke comes from it.

  On the outside, it’s a pleasant house. But I suspect there’s no lack of sadness and despair on the inside.

  I don’t dare pull down the driveway; it’s taken enough overcoming of my fears just to get this far. I pull over in front of the black-metal mailbox at the entrance to the drive. The faded, weatherworn family name is displayed in a series of gold-and-black adhesive letters, one of them missing.

  BEN ER

  James and Maggie Benner live here, or so a search of the county records told me. Both their names are on the title, and they moved out here three years after Caleb, their only son, went missing.

  A strange thing. Parents of missing kids tend not to move, keeping hope their child will one day walk back through the front door. But the Benners did move, and in relatively short order. They must have had a sense Caleb was never coming home, and I don’t know if that gave them any relief or not.

  Relief.

  Is that why I’m here? To tell them I know their son is dead because I watched it happen?

  I can’t imagine those words coming out of my mouth, and certainly not in front of Max. Truth is, I don’t have a plan at all. I thought maybe I’d come here and then know what to do. But I don’t. I’m as lost as ever.

  “What are we doing?” Max asks.

  “Climb into the back seat,” I tell him. “There’s some fresh clothes in a grocery bag. Get changed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so.”

  He unbuckles his belt and scampers over the second row and all the way back into the third.

  “Why are our suitcases here?” he asks.

  “Because we’re leaving.”

  “Leaving Bury?”

  “Yes.”

  “For good?”

  “For good.”

  I expect either a scream of happiness or an angry protest. But he remains silent, and as I flick my gaze to the rearview mirror, I see him processing the information.

  “No more school here?” he asks.

  “No, sweetie.”

  “Are we ever coming back?”

  I start to lie but force myself away from old habits.

  “No.”

  A little more silent processing followed by a simple “Okay.”

  And the world spins on.

  I just stare up the driveway as Max changes. No fresh tracks. A Ford truck is parked near the garage, but there’s enough snow piled on it to tell me it hasn’t been moved anytime in the recent past.

  I wonder if they’re inside. If so, I wonder what they’re doing. Are they retired? What do they do with their time? What did they do with all Caleb’s things? Did they give him his own room in a house he’s never seen, or are all his things in boxes, cardboard time capsules that will likely be thrown away before ever being reopened?

  I could spend my life wondering. Just, I suppose, as they have.

  Max makes his way into the second row and sits directly behind me.

  “Who lives here?”

  “Some people I don’t know. I knew their son, though. A long time ago.”

  “Was he nice?”

  I never thought about Caleb as being nice or not. I can only picture him scared. Scared and desperate.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess so.”

  “So how come we—”

  “Their son disappeared,” I interrupt, needing the words to come out before I get into a back-and-forth with Max. “Back when I was in high school. He was around my age, maybe a year or two older.”

  “What happened to him?”

  This is a question I would normally answer by saying He disap
peared, so no one knows. But I can’t say that, because I do know.

  “He died,” I say.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died, Max. That’s all I want to say about it.”

  “Did they find him?”

  “No.”

  “So how do you know?”

  I unbuckle my belt and turn to look at him, and as my eyes connect with his, tears fill mine. “I just can’t imagine,” I tell him. “These people. What they’ve been through. What they’re still going through. I just… It’s just so sad, Max. Do you understand that?”

  “Not really,” he says.

  “You lost Dad,” I say.

  “I know.” His tone is so normal. So matter-of-fact. “But that’s different.”

  I reach back and touch his cheek, having to fully stretch to do so. “Yes. It’s true. It’s different.”

  I turn back around and look at the house, thinking how I could put to rest two decades of wondering in three minutes. Isn’t that what I want?

  The practicality of it all is unnerving. What am I going to do, leave Max in the car while I have the most painful conversation of my life?

  I’m itching to do something. The fear slips away, the adrenaline kicks in, the thirst to do something right overwhelms me.

  My hands start to shake. I place them on the steering wheel; the shake travels up my arms to my shoulders. That, in turn, starts my teeth chattering.

  I’m going to do it.

  I have to. It’s the right thing.

  They need to know the truth.

  I’ll tell them, then I’ll drive away. Drive west to Wisconsin. Not running away, just driving toward my future. And whatever happens after that, happens.

  Everything will be okay.

  I’m just about to tell Max to stay in the car when something catches my eyes. Movement in the mirror.

  A Jeep. White, coming up the lane behind me. Lights on.

  It slows as it reaches me, then finally comes to a halt right next to my car.

  Is it them?

  It has to be them.

  The Jeep’s tinted front passenger window is streaked with melted snow, allowing me only the faintest definition of a shape inside.

  My heart races, my throat clogged to the point of asphyxia, wondering if their window is going to roll down.

  And then, it does.

  There’s only one person in the car, and it’s the last person I expect to see.

  He looks right at me, his gaze soul-searching, as if we’ve known each other in so many different lives that there’s nothing I can do to hide from him. Not his presence, his thoughts, his accusations, his truth. In his look, he knows everything.

  Detective Colin Pearson.

  Sixty-Five

  10:42 a.m.

  Colin had thought about visiting James and Maggie Benner ever since Chief Sike told him about Caleb’s disappearance twenty-two years ago, but he knew the pain he’d cause would outweigh any good. You never wanted to rip open old wounds if you weren’t bringing any recent developments on the cold case.

  And Colin knew better. There were no old wounds for those who’d lost a child. There were just wounds, forever open and festering, with no promise of even a crusty scab, much less any real healing.

  So he drove out to the Benners’ place on this day of cold and snow, a day of such quiet he felt as if he were navigating the lunar landscape, desolate in its isolation, painful in its beauty.

  Colin didn’t know what he was going to ask them. Maybe he wouldn’t ask them anything. Maybe he’d just tell them he was someone with information about their son and preferred to remain anonymous. Perhaps he’d tell them what he suspected about the Yates family and then just slip away, leaving them to their own devices.

  That kind of thing would get him fired, no doubt.

  But moreover, it was just wrong. He only knew what he knew, and all that knowledge stopped short of certainty. Maybe Cora Yates was just unfortunate in that she was one of the last to see Caleb. Perhaps the floor repairs Logan Yates rushed to complete the day after Caleb disappeared had been needed for years. Maybe Rose Yates truly mourned the death of her husband, who died accidentally when his desire for deep sleep outweighed his common sense.

  But when Colin thought about it, really thought about it, it wasn’t information he wanted to impart to the Benner family. He wanted advice.

  How do you do it?

  How do you push on, day by day, with such blackness covering your every thought? Does laughing make you feel guilty? Were you ever intimate again after your son disappeared, and if so, was that an act of love or just sheer desperation for touch, a need to feel something?

  Colin knew a lot about survivors and their coping mechanisms… You couldn’t be a detective and not know such things. But all he’d learned couldn’t reconcile how he felt, which was that he didn’t think he could last another week.

  So maybe the Benners could tell him how they did it. How they lasted. Or just how to make it that one more week.

  Whether or not he’d even summon the strength to knock on their door remained to be seen. All he knew was some invisible and indefinable source had told him to come here. Whatever unfolded would be unplanned, as were the best and worst things that happen to anyone.

  As he neared their house, his attention was drawn to the curb at the end of the Benners’ driveway. A Suburban idled in front of the house, its exhaust rising into the air like ghosts escaping into the wild.

  Colin slowed, squinted his eyes. Focused on the license plate.

  He knew that plate. Knew it by heart.

  It was the car Rose Yates drove. Registered to Logan Yates.

  “Holy hell,” Colin said, crouching over his steering wheel.

  He pulled up alongside the Suburban. Through his snow-streaked tinted window, he saw her.

  Rose Yates.

  Parked in front of the Benners’ house.

  Colin had been so sure something was going to happen today. And whatever that something was, it was going to happen now.

  Right now.

  He rolled down his window.

  Sixty-Six

  I roll my window down, because what else is there to do?

  I don’t have to explain anything. I’m not doing anything wrong. I don’t have to say a word.

  But I want to tell him everything.

  “Detective Pearson,” I say. I try to say it with the ease of meeting an old friend, but I can barely hear my words over the sound of the blood pumping through my head.

  “Rose,” he says.

  “You’re back.”

  “I am.”

  “Are you following me?”

  He shakes his head. “No. I believe this is one of those strange moments in life when things just line up.”

  “Do you believe in such things?”

  “I do now,” he says.

  He’s a hundred years older than when I last saw him, and it’s not just the heavy weariness on his face. It’s his soul. His energy. It’s 10 percent of what I saw just a month ago, an EKG close to flatlining.

  “I’m sorry about your wife,” I say. “And your…your baby.”

  “Thank you.”

  There’s nothing thankful about any of this.

  “Why are you here?” I ask.

  He thinks about this a moment, taking his time. “Well, I suppose I came to see you. And then, in the moment, I thought I’d come to see them.” He nods at the house. “But I guess I’m really just doing what you did. Running away after tragedy. Back to Bury.”

  Back to Bury. How that phrase hits me in the moment. I did come here to bury things, mostly my past. But the past doesn’t lie six feet underground. It’s a zombie, relentless in its need to feast.

  “I’m not running away,” I say. “I’m
going back to Milwaukee. Driving there today.”

  “That so?”

  “It is.”

  “Still, we should talk. Long as I’m here.”

  I look back at Max, who’s staring at me with wide eyes. The back windows of the Suburban are tinted so dark I doubt Pearson even sees my son.

  “Who is he?” Max whispers.

  I roll up my window. “No one to be concerned about,” I say. I hate dismissing his question, but I don’t really know how else to answer. “Someone I know,” I add.

  I see him processing, and then all his calculations get stuck as his mouth hangs open half an inch and his gaze goes out to the beyond. Max is having one of his moments, one of his fugues.

  “You in there?” I ask.

  He doesn’t reply, just stares out the windshield. Three months ago, this would have concerned me. Now, after a number of these spells, I know he’ll snap out of it in a moment or two. Were we at home, I’d sit next to him until he became responsive again.

  Now I don’t. Now I have to talk to Pearson. Max will be fine.

  I tell him to wait in the car and I’ll just be a few moments.

  I get out, leaving the ignition running, heat blowing.

  The Jeep is only feet away, and after I close the door of my car, I open the passenger door of Pearson’s.

  Now I’m sitting next to him for no reason other than I made a promise to myself, and it needs to start now.

  Sixty-Seven

  Pearson looks worn, like he’s been a beat cop for thirty years and has seen the worst of humanity.

  “Rose,” he says. “I’m on leave. Maybe I’m done with the department… I don’t know. But…but the point is, right now, I’m just a civilian. I can’t arrest you. I have no jurisdiction here. And I won’t blame you if you don’t believe this, but I’m more interested in the truth than any kind of justice. I just need some goddamned truth in my life. Some sense of black and white. Does that make sense?”

  He looks at me with some kind of weak and anemic hope. It’s gut-wrenching.

  “What are you trying to ask me, Colin?”

  He thinks a bit, then says, “That’s the only time you’ve called me by my first name.”