“If not now, when?”
He bows his head a moment, nods it slowly up and down in agreement, then raises it again and locks in on me. His eyes are as bloodshot as an alcoholic on a three-day binge.
“I just need to know, Rose. Did you kill your husband?”
Sixty-Eight
Max iced for a time, as he’d been doing for months. He’d come to call these moments icing. He only called them this to himself. He didn’t talk about icing to anyone, not even his mom.
Icing was what happened when the darkness got so black he couldn’t do anything but be consumed by it. Didn’t matter time of day, didn’t matter sunlight or starlight. When it came on, somewhere deep inside, a cold blackness crawled out and devoured him, a billion ants bursting from a hole and covering him as completely as wraps on a mummy. It took only a second to happen, and then he’d be lost in it, unable to hear, speak, or even move. On the outside, he was paralyzed. On the inside, he was thrashing in terror.
The icing was bad now. As bad as ever, and Max had to tell his brain there was a world out there where he needed to be. It was like trying to wake yourself up from a bad dream, but you weren’t sure if you were even asleep. Maybe the terror was real. Maybe it would last forever.
This time, he came back, but with great effort. Maybe thirty seconds passed, but it felt like he’d been buried alive for days.
His mom had left the safety of their car and climbed inside with the man. She just sat there next to that man, chatting, like it wasn’t a problem at all.
But Max knew. He knew because that man had triggered the icing.
It’s not safe. The man isn’t safe.
He was a detective. His mom had called him that. Detective Something.
Max’s thoughts raced back to the night at the firepit. Back to roasting marshmallows with his cousin. To the moment Willow had told him about a cop investigating his mom over his dad’s death.
They think she did it, Willow had said. What do you think?
The memory scared him almost as much as seeing his mom in that car with the unsafe man. Max had worked hard to forget that night with Willow, worked so hard he’d come close to convincing himself it never happened. A dream. A mind-demon that sprouted up after all he’d been through. It couldn’t have happened, because the idea of what Willow had told him (mind-demon, that’s all it was!) was the worst thing he could think of. And he could think of plenty of awful things.
They’ll take her away for a long time, Willow had said. Then you wouldn’t have any parents left.
And now he was here. The unsafe man was here. Came all the way back in the snow to take his mom away. And look at her. Just getting into his car like it was okay. It wasn’t okay. She’d promised to never leave him, and she’d just jumped into the mouth of the monster. Just like that.
That made him so mad.
Mad to him felt like the sting of a burn, fingertips on a hot light bulb.
He’s going to take her away, Max thought. Right here. Just leave me in here with the car running, all the way until the gas runs out. Then I’ll die in Grandpa’s car. Frozen to death.
Max knew fury. He didn’t think others could see when it happened to him, but he sure felt it. It felt like this. This scramble in his brain. This need to smash and cut and burn and stomp.
The last time it was this bad was the night Dad died. But it had been bad enough a few times even before then. Enough to give Max ideas he knew he shouldn’t be having but couldn’t control even when he tried. And he tried so hard.
Pretty hard, anyway.
He’d read all his mom’s books. She didn’t know that, but it wasn’t hard to sneak them into his room. She said they were for grown-ups, but he’d read plenty of grown-up books. Plenty. And he’d wanted to read hers, because she was…well…Mom. Max wanted to see how she thought. How she used words. How she made stories.
He didn’t understand everything in her books. But he could tell she made good stories.
But most of all Max remembered the crimes. All the crimes in her books. All the work she did to make them realistic. And scary.
And Max remembered the killing of the man in one of her books. The husband who would hit his wife just because he was bored. He remembered how that man died.
Alcohol and sleeping pills.
Max knew his father liked both of those things.
He also knew his father had turned into someone mean. Mean and fierce.
Like a ghost suddenly stepping inside his body, Max felt his muscles move. His muscles were talking, and soon his brain got the message.
You have to do something.
You have to tell the truth.
Because the unsafe man’s going to take her away.
Forever.
And you’ll be alone.
Max opened his car door and stepped out, his boot plunging deep into the snow.
The moment he was outside the car, the cold air taking him into its arms, Max descended into a fog.
One step out. Then another.
He seemed to float through the snow. To the unsafe man’s car. To the man’s window.
Directly to the mouth of the monster.
He was hardly aware of his movements. Or of the sun. Of the exhaust of the two cars spiraling into the cold morning. He did hear a bird, just in that moment, a bird that didn’t escape the storm, a short cry, lonely and unreturned, then repeated.
It was maybe the saddest sound Max had ever heard. And it took a little of the fury away. Enough for him to get the courage to do what he needed to do. To think straight, at least long enough.
Max rapped on the glass of the unsafe man’s window.
The man rolled it down.
Sixty-Nine
Over Rose’s shoulder, Colin saw the back door of the Suburban open. He’d thought Rose had been alone.
Her son emerged from the car, looked first at the ground, then swiveled his head to them. Pale skin, moppy brown-blond hair. A cute kid, but there was nothing light and airy about the expression he wore.
Rose turned her head, following Colin’s distracted attention.
“Max, oh my god.”
“I didn’t know he was with you,” Colin said.
Colin expected the boy to go to his mother, but he didn’t. He and Rose watched in silence as Max trudged along the snowy country road, around the front of the Jeep, then stood directly next to Colin’s window, looking in. Then the boy knocked on the glass.
Colin lowered his window; a chill seemed to flow off the boy and swept inside the car. The kid just stood there, unblinking.
“Max,” Rose said, “you need to get back in the car. It’s cold out. We’re almost done talking.”
“So you’re Max,” Colin said to the boy, trying to put any cheer he could into his voice. He reached a hand out the open window. Max didn’t take it. “I’m Colin.”
“I know who you are.” The way Max said this unnerved Colin. Deep and slow, a boy possessed by something ancient and malevolent. “You came here to take my mom away.”
Had Colin been standing, those words might’ve buckled his legs. He’d come to Bury with few ideas of what he’d hoped to achieve, but ripping a parent away from a child was the last of his intentions. That didn’t suppress the reality of what would happen if Rose was ever convicted of Riley McKay’s murder, but seeing that possibility—right here, right in the face of this already traumatized boy—tore into Colin.
“No, Max. That’s not what I’m here to do.”
“Max,” Rose said, her voice firm. “Get back in the car. Right now.”
“No,” Max said, not moving his gaze from Colin’s.
A few seconds passed, an eternity as Colin and the boy stared at each other.
“What is it, Max?” Colin asked.
Finally Max blinked. And then he answered.
Seventy
I haven’t seen that expression on Max’s face since the moment I told him about his father. Smooth on the surface, a torrent behind the eyes, as if there’s a whole universe inside his head. Galaxies upon galaxies, captured in a fragile shell, ready to burst.
“What it is, Max?” Pearson says.
I’m immediately angered; how dare he ask my son any questions? It’s bad enough Detective Pearson keeps hounding me, but he has no right to say a single word to Max.
But then Max answers, and the universe explodes.
“I did it,” he says.
“What?”
My one-word question falls out of my mouth in a raspy breath, but it’s just a placeholder, a pause, a moment to try to redirect time on any path other than the one it’s on. It’ll be of no use.
“I killed him,” Max says, his voice colder than the air around him.
“No, no, no.”
Pearson says nothing; the words are mine. More placeholders, simple stutters. A primal response to something that here, in this shattering moment, I know is true.
Maybe I’ve known it all along. Somewhere, in the deep recesses of my mind, those dark pockets I tap into whenever I think of the rainbow in the cornfield, there’s a spot held for questions about Max. Why he never really cried over his father’s death. Why he sometimes talked about wanting it to be just him and me together. And questions about which of the family traits he carried. Specifically, the Yates ability to kill.
“Tell me,” Pearson says. Calm, like a counselor who deals with troubled children all the time. “It’s okay, Max. Are you telling me the truth?”
I scream. “Max, don’t say anything!” Then I clutch onto Pearson’s arm, not even sure why, but I want to rip it out of its socket. He turns to me and there’s a swirl of emotions in his eyes, but confusion reigns above all.
“You don’t get to talk to him,” I tell Pearson.
His tone remains gentle but commanding. “Let go of me.”
I do. But the rage and fear remain. “Max, we’re leaving now. Right now. Get back in the car.”
Max looks directly at me and says only one more thing. The words chill me more than the air spilling from the outside.
“It was always just supposed to be the two of us.”
“Go back to the car.”
This time, he listens, circling a path behind the Jeep. I turn my head just long enough to see him climb into the passenger seat of the Suburban before whipping back around to Pearson.
Time slows. Before saying anything, I perform a two-second meditation. One deep breath. A single mantra, spoken once inside my head.
Protect your child.
Seventy-One
When I speak, I’m surprised how suddenly calm I am. Maybe this is what it’s like on the cusp of slipping into shock.
“You don’t have jurisdiction here,” I say. “You aren’t even on active duty. You can’t do anything.”
“You know it doesn’t work that way. You can’t just run, Rose.”
“That’s my decision. Mine and Max’s. No one else’s.”
He puts his hand on my arm but doesn’t grab. It’s light, as if to comfort, but I’m also aware he’s larger and stronger than me. If he tries to restrain me, I’ll fight like hell. Fight with everything I have.
“Is it true?” he asks.
My instinct is to scream no as loud as I can, but I don’t. And that pause, my little hesitation, is probably all Pearson needs to know with certainty that I didn’t kill Riley.
“I…I can’t even…” I turn my head to the Suburban. To where my son waits for me. “I just need to go.”
“Go where?”
“Away from here,” I say.
“You can’t hide forever,” he says. “And Max is a minor. A case could be made about why he did it. Abuse. Self-defense. Protecting you.”
I look back to Pearson. “He’ll never confess to anything. As long as I live, I’m protecting him. He’s my only family. I’m the only one he has.”
Pearson nods, eyes heavy.
“Are you going to try to stop me from leaving this car?” I ask.
“No, Rose. I’m not.”
“Are you going to call Bury PD as soon as I drive away?”
He thinks on this a moment, face full of sorrow.
“There’s no way I can stop you from running?” he asks.
“Not a chance in hell.”
“In that case, I want to know the truth.”
“I already told you; I didn’t kill my husband.”
He lifts his hand from my arm, and in a strange way, I wish he hadn’t. His touch grounded me.
“Not about that. About Caleb.” Pearson nods to the house down the driveway. “The reason we’re here. We both showed up at the same house on the same snowy day. If you’re running for good, I want to know what happened. You owe me that.”
“I don’t owe you anything,” I say.
“Then you owe it to yourself.”
He’s right. How many times in twenty-two years have I wanted this? This chance to tell someone about what happened. To confess my sins. To confess all our sins. It’s the promise I made to myself just this morning.
I glance briefly at the clock, the digital time glowing blue and bold, the car’s heat still pumping into my face from the vents. I take this pit of shame, this thing that has done nothing but grow like a cancer in me for the last two decades, and I choose to take a scalpel and cut it out of my body, right here in this car, hoping I’ll be strong enough to survive the operation.
“Cora killed him,” I say. I don’t even let him react or ask questions. I just talk. I tell Pearson everything I’ve always wanted to say. Everything that happened back then, every gory detail that I relive in my endless nightmares. Everything about Riley, his affair, his unraveling, and the night he died. About my books and how the scene with the husband dying from alcohol and sleep meds was no more than a simple chapter in a mystery novel, but I couldn’t say for sure that Max hadn’t read the book. I admit I did write my new novel hoping to confess my complicity through fiction, but that backfired.
I tell him about my move back to this horrible little town. My father and his insistence on family above everything, a trait I have quite clearly inherited.
I talk about Cora. Our relationship, the sisters of Bury. I pass the point of worrying about what I’m saying, and it’s the most beautiful feeling I’ve ever experienced. Maybe it’s my moment of touching the rainbow, a release, followed by freedom.
I tell him I think she might have killed others. Perhaps many. Undoubtedly a poodle and a long-ago family pet. I tell Pearson that Cora is dead, and I killed her, an act of self-defense, inasmuch as that even matters. That my father buried her.
He takes all this in, saying nothing. I want to cry, but perhaps like him, I have nothing left to give.
I look at the clock.
Eleven minutes have passed.
Eleven minutes. The weight of all I carried for so long only took eleven minutes to unload. That alone is singularly painful.
“Where is Caleb?” From all the things I’ve just told him, this is the only question Pearson asks me.
“I don’t know. I think in the woods leading from the Chester Woodall trailhead. Maybe…maybe Cora is there, too.”
“Do you have anything else to say?”
“No. I’ve told you everything. I have to go. My son…”
The digital clock counts off another passing minute. Pearson says, “I’m going to get out of this car and go up and knock on the door of that house. Maybe they’ll answer, maybe they won’t. If they do, I’m going to ask for a bit of their time. If they’re kind enough to let me in and hear me out, I’m going to tell them a long story. One that ends with where I think their boy is buried. Once I leave that hous
e, I’m going to drive directly to the Bury Police Department and tell Chief Sike everything I know. So, Rose, by my best estimate, you have anywhere between ten minutes and ninety to get going.”
He pauses. My stomach’s about to come up through my mouth.
“You’ll never have proof,” I say. “Everything I’ve told you. You can’t prove it.”
“Maybe not, but I have to do something. I took an oath.”
“Okay,” I say, hardly breathing.
“That’s the best I can do, and more than I should. You need to protect your family, and I understand that with more heartache than I would ever wish on my worst enemy. But I can’t just let this go, Rose. Someone has to pay. Time doesn’t erase murder, never will.”
“I understand,” I whisper. “Thank you.”
He nods. “You’re welcome.” Pearson inhales deeply, as if he’s about to explore the bottom of the ocean on one lungful of air. The exhale is resigned. “You ready?”
“I’m ready,” I say.
I’ve never been less certain of being ready in my life.
Then follows a simple mantra, repeated in my head, just as I’ve done thousands of times before. A mantra to which I never truly connected but still repeated, hoping to understand. But now, as I repeat the two words—a total of three letters—there’s a clarity that’s eluded me for thirty-seven years. There’s a beauty in the words. A beauty and a sadness. And an absolute, stunning revelation.
I am.
I am.
I am.
“Goodbye, Rose.”
“Goodbye, Colin.”
He opens his door.
I open mine.
Seventy-Two
This world is no longer a familiar one. The landscape is a blazing white; the reflection of the sun off the snow sears my eyes. I blink. Tears gather, run halfway down my cheeks, then freeze in place.
I’ve walked a few feet toward my car when I stop and follow Pearson’s shuffle up to the house, watch as his boots plunge into the soft snow, leaving behind deep, dark imprints. Between ten and ninety minutes, he said. Ten minutes does no good. Ninety is probably enough to get me to the airport without being hunted down. I touch the front pocket of my jeans, feel the folded paper inside. The single phone number, my get-out-of-jail-free card. For all I know, whoever is supposed to answer the phone is long dead. The number no longer in service.
The Dead Husband Page 28