The Last Day of Emily Lindsey

by Nic Joseph

  Morbidly enough, it was also a key factor in my parents’ decision to purchase our home a decade earlier.

  “But there’s no shower,” my father had said as we stood shoulder to shoulder with the real estate agent in the bathroom.

  My mother was pregnant with Lucas at the time, and she placed one hand on her bulging stomach while she held on to me with the other.

  “I know, Alex, but think about the baths.” She made the face she sometimes made when she bit into something sweet, like a piece of chocolate, and I could see my father’s shoulders sag. The decision had been made.

  That my little brother would drown in that very tub just nine years later seemed, at best, a terrible coincidence and, at worst, an inevitable twist of fate that was sealed the day we all locked eyes on that porcelain, showerless beast.

  Lucas was small for his age, and still, the accident was, in almost every respect, impossible. “Freakishly contorted” was the not-quite-clinical-enough phrase I heard Dr. R. Rudolph Smith III, the medical examiner from two suburbs over, use to describe the body when he arrived at our home that night in the brutal winter of 1992.

  I remember Rudy’s face, round and reddened as he stood in my parents’ tiled master bathroom, the tips of his boxy, black shoes disappearing beneath the tub. He was still wearing his thick down coat, which made sense, given the single-digit temps outside, but he glowed from a thin layer of sweat inside the hot, stuffy bathroom.

  The room smelled of staleness and death, like an old, damp sneeze, and I struggled to fill my lungs with air while trying to remain as quiet as possible. Rudy held a swab in his gloved hand, and his eyes were glued to my brother’s body below him, the very sight that would wholly define my life moving forward.

  “My God…” he breathed, mostly to himself, and he seemed at a loss for what to do with the tiny, pristine, white cotton swab. I remember thinking that for a man who made his living attending to dead bodies, Rudy didn’t seem to be holding up very well. He stared at my brother’s body, and I couldn’t tell if he was going to cry or throw up. I’d done both only a few minutes earlier. The surprisingly few adults around at that point in the night kept saying they needed to get me out of there, away from the chaos and the death and the heartbreak that had stolen our night. But no one left. I was thirteen at the time. Deep down, I think both of my parents knew I would come out on the other end of it all much better than they would, so we stayed. We stayed, and they sobbed separately in different rooms of our two-story home in sleepy Lansing, Illinois, while I hid behind the bathroom door, alone, covered in my own vomit, watching the medical examiner as he struggled to do his work.

  I stood like that for a long time, peering out at the shiny tears as they wormed their way into Rudy’s white, feathery beard. I had no way of knowing it back then, but he’d been a medical examiner for thirty-three years, mostly in the Chicago suburbs, and he’d never once cried on the job. But then, Lucas’s death wasn’t the type you logged away in any rote fashion, checking boxes on a form, measuring splash, and noting the position of the head. His was a painful and soul-crushing death that took with it the lives of many others that night.

  In the twenty-three years since, I’ve said—with varying degrees of certainty and sobriety—that the claustrophobia and panic attacks started right then, as I crouched behind that bathroom door. It was the first time I ever encountered the painfully helpless sensation of feeling trapped inside my own body. I remember standing there, shaking, chest heaving, as the small, confining space between the door and the wall seemed to shrink and grab on to me the way cling wrap sticks to vegetables. I was suffocating. And yet, I was too terrified to move, afraid I’d see even a hint of Lucas’s tie-dye T-shirt as it billowed around him in the tub.

  Many years later, while on a date, I said something about that being the moment my panic attacks made a serious splash into my life. It had gone over the way most things do when you try, painfully, to lead with humor.

  “Francis, you really shouldn’t joke about something like that,” my date had said, and I’ll be honest about my fogginess surrounding her name. “The fact that you would say something like that tells me there are a lot of unresolved issues there.”

  There was a detective there the night Lucas died too. He was a large man, and he seemed to swallow up too much of the air in our home as he poked around, touching things, asking questions. Like Rudy, he still wore his knee-length wool coat, and he tugged mercilessly at the red-and-black-checkered scarf around his neck.

  I think he and Rudy knew each other, because they didn’t say anything for a long time after the detective—tall, broad shouldered, and turtle faced—walked into the bathroom and peered into the tub.

  “What do you think?” he finally asked.

  “Death almost certainly due to asphyxiation following head trauma.”

  “So he fell and hit his head, then drowned?” The detective stepped forward and peered into the tub. “It doesn’t seem right, a child that size.”

  “That’s what it looks like, but I’ll need a little time.” Rudy’s voice cracked on that last word. “Nothing from the other child?”

  “Nothing. Weird kid. Think he’s mute or something.”

  “He might be.”

  The men weren’t talking about me. They were talking about Sam Farr, the boy who had been playing upstairs with Lucas when it all happened. Sam was a year older than Lucas, a quiet, anxious kid, but he did speak—though I could understand why the detective thought he didn’t. The son of my parents’ church friends, Brian and Elizabeth Farr, Sam didn’t talk much on an ordinary basis. But since the moment he’d run downstairs, his face blanched with terror, his clothing completely drenched and clinging to his small frame, he hadn’t said a single word.

  A fact that had caused my mother to lose every single shred of her dignity.

  “Say something, you weird little fuck!” she’d screamed at Sam through the tears and the snot when he wouldn’t respond to her the first couple of times. She stood at the edge of Lucas’s bedroom door, the front of her burgundy, patterned dress soaked from where she’d reached into the tub moments earlier to lift her youngest son from the water before pumping furiously on his chest. “What happened? What happened to my baby?”

  Sam hadn’t said a word, pausing momentarily to stare at her before turning around and quietly putting his things away. We watched as he packed up his toys before grabbing his mother’s hand and pulling her toward the door. This had only infuriated my mother even more.

  “Where’s he going? Why won’t he say something?” she’d asked, spinning wildly toward Sam’s father, who was trembling where he stood, unable to respond or defend his son. “Brian, why won’t he say anything?”

  “Because he’s terrified!” Elizabeth had cut in angrily, blocking her son from my mother’s valid but batshit response. “Kate, you have to calm down. I’m so, so sorry, but you have to stop.”

  “But he won’t tell me what happened!”

  • • •

  Those words would echo throughout the rest of the night.

  And then for days after that.

  And then for months, and years.

  I think if Sam had said something that night—anything at all—we might have spared ourselves the many years of shit that followed. If he’d said, for example, “Lucas and I were trying to see who could hold their breath longer, and he slipped and hit his head” or “I stepped out for a second and came back and found him that way” or anything else that could give my parents something to grasp on to, something to believe, maybe they would have retreated into grief the way most people do. With booze, some prayers. Maybe a touch of belligerence.

  Instead, my parents went to court.

  They dressed up, grasped hands, and went to war with a ten-year-old boy.

  My father, handsome and tearful in his Lansing Police Department uniform, set out to p
rove that there was no way Lucas’s death could have been an accident.

  That Sam Farr had, for any number of well-crafted reasons, killed my little brother.

  That childhood is not synonymous with innocence, and that inside the mind of this ten-year-old was something vindictive, troubling, disgusting, and terrifying.

  Alex and Kate Scroll hired lawyers, the best our money could afford, and they went horrifically, and desperately, all in.

  I think their motivations changed along the way. But one thing remained the same: my parents figured that, at some point, Sam Farr would reach his breaking point and say something—absolutely anything—about what happened to my brother that night.

  That’s all they wanted.

  An admission of guilt, or even a denial. A plea for forgiveness.

  Anything.

  It never happened.

  Sam Farr has never once, in twenty-three years, said a single word to a single soul about what happened that night upstairs in my parents’ bathroom.

  Not to his lawyers, his family, the judge, or a screaming, angry, relentless press. Not even on the day, almost six years after Lucas drowned, when he walked out of court for the final time at the age of sixteen. Not even then did Sam Farr utter a word about what happened to my brother on that awful, frigid night.

  He simply looked at us, turned, and walked away.

  Someone behind us, in my parents’ sea of supporters, called out, egging on the crowd of friends, neighbors, and Lansing police officers.

  “He’s smiling! Can you believe it? That monster is smiling!”

  I didn’t see it.

  For more Nic Joseph check out

  Boy, 9, Missing

  On sale now

  A Conversation with the Author

  How did you come up with the idea for The Last Day of Emily Lindsey?

  It started with the idea of a woman who sits down on her couch and just completely shuts off. I had the idea one day when I was pretty much doing exactly that—I’d had a long day at work, I was tired, and I did the thing where you just sink down on the couch and shut down for the night. I started thinking about a story where that shut-down period lasts the entire night, and then the next day, and the one after that. Granted, when I did it, I wasn’t covered in blood; that idea came later.

  Your first novel, Boy, 9, Missing, also contained two distinct story lines set during two different time periods. What’s your process for creating stories with this structure? Do you write them separately or together?

  Together. I generally know the arc for each story line in advance. But I still write the book in a linear fashion. I’ll often scribble notes for later chapters if I’m writing one section and don’t want to forget something. But I like to write these types of stories in the order and way that they’ll be read; it just works better that way for me.

  What do you want readers to learn from Steve’s journey?

  Steve thinks that he’s protecting the people he loves—his parents, his wife, his partner—from himself by hiding his problems from them. But, of course, he’s not doing as good of a job hiding them as he thinks he is, which only serves to hurt his family even more. By the end of the novel, he starts to learn that they’re all with him for the long haul—even his ex-wife’s new husband!—and that the best thing he can do is start to address his very serious issues with them by his side.

  Do you ever write characters based on real people?

  I haven’t based a character completely on someone I know, but there are elements of friends and family in most of them. For example, Brat and Gumball definitely resemble myself and my older sister. Growing up, she was always the responsible one, while I was the type to run around with a bucket on my head until I toppled over.

  When deciding on an idea for your next novel, how do you filter the good ideas from the bad?

  I keep a running list of story ideas on my iPhone. I check it on a regular basis. The bad ones tend to linger there for months or even years until they get erased (either accidentally, or on purpose). The good ones keep bubbling to the top until I finally take a stab at outlining them or writing a first chapter. You never really know which ones are good ideas, only that some stay with you for a long time and at least deserve a shot at becoming something more.

  Do you write every day?

  Yes and no. When I get into a groove, I’ll sit down to write every day—several times a day, if I can find the time. When I’m not in a groove, my writing habits are a lot more spotty.

  For your own reading, do you prefer ebooks or traditional paper/hardback books?

  About a year ago, I would’ve said traditional printed books, for sure! But I’ve had to travel a lot in the past year and have gotten pretty close with my e-reader. So, I’d say it doesn’t really matter at this point—I’ll take a good story any way I can get it!

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to the incredible Sourcebooks team for knowing books and lovers of books so well, to Shana Drehs and Lathea Williams for their incredible guidance and vision, and to my agent, Barbara Poelle, for being the very best of the best.

  To my friends and family: there are not enough words to express my gratitude for all the love, texts, emails, squees, happy dances, and overall support you’ve shown throughout the past year. It has been nothing short of amazing. Seems most appropriate to just say thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

  About the Author

  Nic Joseph is the author of Boy, 9, Missing. She writes thrillers and suspense novels from her home in Chicago. As a trained journalist, Nic has written about everything from health care and business to aerospace and IT—but she feels most at home when there’s a murder to be solved on the next page. Nic holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s in communications, both from Northwestern University. For more information, visit NicJoseph.com or follow her on Twitter @nickeljoseph.

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