You Can Never Tell

by Sarah Warburton

  “She said spousal privilege is waived if we’ve talked. I’m not going to put you in danger.” I knew he’d walk away rather than change his mind.

  “Michael …” But I couldn’t speak over the swell of pain under my breastbone. Then he wrapped me in his arms again, hugging me until I almost couldn’t breathe. “You have to tell me. You have to.”

  He tried to turn away, but I grabbed his arms so hard my hands hurt. “Who’s dead? What did Brady do?”

  “I can’t tell you.” He ducked his head, trying to avoid my gaze, but I clung to him.

  “You have to. I’m your wife. I love you, no matter what.” Michael had never said no to me, not when I’d insisted.

  He ran a hand over the back of his neck, shifting from foot to foot. I knew he wanted to follow the rules and make the best, smartest choice. But he loved me, and I wasn’t letting go. Finally he inhaled and said, “We were drinking, watching the game, and I heard something upstairs. Brady got a funny look on his face, and he said, ‘Wanna see something cool?’ ” Michael’s gaze was distant. “So I followed him up, and—”

  Still looking intently at the floor, over my shoulder, anywhere but into my eyes, he said, “There was a woman, tied up, in the room at the end of the hall, the one they said was storage. It was …” He shook his head like he was trying to shake away the memory. “There was a bed, a camera, and video monitors. She’d rolled onto the floor, and he’d …” Michael pulled away from me. “I was too late to help her. And …” He swallowed hard. “And on one of the screens, I could see you. Asleep.”

  Grace let out another wail, but I was frozen in the realization that Brady had been watching me, watching us, for months.

  “I thought he’d kill me and then come for you. I couldn’t …” Michael turned away again, his shoulders vulnerable, his voice muffled and thick. “I told him whatever he wanted to hear, and as soon as I could, I came home.”

  “Five hours,” I whispered. Five hours when I’d been sleeping and Michael had been fighting for our lives. What would I have done in his place? Screamed, fallen on my knees beside the woman, run? Any of those choices would have gotten me killed. But how had he been able to convince Brady to trust him? I’d always been able to read Michael, and now I studied his face, but it was a locked door.

  In the hallway Grace was crying now, and Michael turned, almost running toward her. I followed him, the details of what he’d told me swirling. He stopped in front of the carrier and bent down. Grace’s sobs abated as she stared at him. He reached out with both hands, then hesitated and let them fall to his sides. “I can’t. You do it.”

  Quickly I unsnapped Grace from her carrier and picked her up, letting her nuzzle into my neck. Michael had shoved his balled-up hands into the pockets of his sweatpants. His face looked older and worn, and in the ill-fitting clothes issued by the police, he seemed almost like a stranger playing the part of my husband.

  The blood on his hands, the woman … “Was it Lena?”

  “What?” He did look at me then, his eyes rimmed with red.

  “The woman. Who was it?”

  He shook his head. “Not Lena. Younger. And she had brown hair. Like you.”

  And then he did step closer, his face crumpling again. Shifting Grace to one side, I pulled Michael close, feeling the dampness of his tears against my neck. He’d been so strong for so long, long before this terrible night. Now he needed me, and I was going to be just as strong for him. We were a team, and we’d get through this together.

  * * *

  The next few days were a nightmare, caught between piercing fear and unrelenting tedium, the grinding certainty that terrible things were on the horizon but all I could do was wait. Wait as the police summoned Michael for another round of questioning, wait as the reporters filled our lawn, wait until the next awful surprise.

  The police had gone over our house, every inch of it, and they had found cameras in the security system, hidden in the white boxes that housed the motion sensors. “Why didn’t they interfere with the alarm?” I’d asked the technician who’d carefully dismantled the box.

  He shrugged. “Plastic housing was big enough for both. And your system’s hooked into the landline, but these cameras are wireless.”

  The tech team searched every corner of our house, and the scanners they used made Brady’s look like a child’s toy. For all I knew, it might have been. We’d invited in the very person who’d installed the cameras, and we’d believed every lie he’d told us. No wonder his special sweeper hadn’t found them. He’d probably rigged it to beep whenever he wanted.

  And now our house had holes and gashes, missing pieces removed by the police, and the parts that remained were tainted and untrustworthy.

  They’d even dug up the tiered garden Michael and Brady had built. Now the lumber was piled to one side, the plants in a wilted heap beside the mound of loose earth the police had dumped back into the hole. Maybe it did resemble a fresh grave, but at least I knew it was empty.

  I did what I could, fixing concrete things that didn’t distract my mind from the vortex of questions. I had the locks changed and the alarms rewired and rearmed, for all the good those security features had ever done us. I bought a rosebush and stuck it into the space where the garden used to be. I hauled the lumber to the curb. And now Grace and I were waiting again. Just like we had been for days.

  But no, it was more than waiting. I had summoned all my strength to talk to my mother, to tell her the barest outline of what had happened. And then I spent twice as long talking her out of flying to be with us like she had after Grace was born. “You can’t do anything right now, Mom. Nobody’s sick. We’re okay,” I said, even though I wished to my bones that she was right next to me, wrapping me in a hug, making it all go away. But I wasn’t a child. Letting my parents come down would only put more people I loved in an untenable position.

  I called Michael’s parents, too, hoping to spare him some of the trauma of reliving the story. But of course it didn’t work. He was their only child. They had always been kind to me, they probably even loved me, but they needed to hear this from him. Which meant he had to explain to them why it wasn’t a good idea for them to try to travel, how he would be fine and how we had a good lawyer. And I listened as he minimized his own fear and pain to assuage theirs. When he hung up, I’d seen the shadow of his father’s oxygen tank and his mother’s tremor in the way he swiped a hand across his eyes.

  Now he was at work, negotiating with his bosses to keep his job. “Don’t worry,” he’d told me. “It’s not like I have a public position, and what I do is pretty specialized.” But he had been worried, and so had I. People got blamed for things that weren’t their fault, people got fired without cause, and maybe his company wouldn’t want to be mentioned, even peripherally, in conjunction with something as awful as this.

  “It’ll be all right,” I’d said as he left, and he’d nodded. But I couldn’t tell if he believed me or if I was just another burden, one more person whose feelings he was protecting, one more person whose needs were smothering his own.

  So Grace and I were alone, and I had to shore up our home, make it safe again, try to block the holes and keep the water from rushing in.

  I missed Lena. I missed knowing she was only one house down, that any moment of doubt or fear could be brushed away by her quick laugh, that I was never really on my own because I had a Come right over, I’m on my way, Let’s do it kind of friend. Now I didn’t even know if she was dead or alive, a murderer or a victim or both.

  I set Grace down on the quilt my mother had made her and tapped the stuffed play arch to make it swing. Then, crisscrossing my legs like a child, I sat next to her and tried to think. I’d need spackle to cover the holes left where cameras used to be. And paint. Was there paint in the garage? Even if there was, the heat had probably spoiled it. Maybe I should get the whole house painted. My breath was coming quick and shallow.

  Despite the midday sunlight streaming in through th
e window and Grace kicking and cooing beside me, I wrapped my arms tightly around myself. How could we stay here? Maybe we could start over again somewhere new. We could get a cottage with a ready-made garden, Michael could telecommute, maybe we’d pick a place close to my parents. My eyes were squeezed shut, but that didn’t stop the tears from running down my cheeks.

  We couldn’t sell this house, not so soon after buying it. We couldn’t afford to. And who else would want it after what Brady had done?

  Then I heard something. A tentative knock on the front door, not the banging I might have expected. Michael had already disconnected the doorbell. I’d suggested one of those video doorbells, but as soon as I did, I realized we’d never be able to trust any camera-related item in our home again. The police had taken Grace’s baby monitor, we’d taped over the cameras on our laptops, and Michael had smashed our Alexa with a shovel and thrown the shattered pieces in the garbage.

  The knocking paused, as though someone was listening for a response, then started again. I didn’t get up. No one I knew should be coming to the door. The reporters weren’t allowed on our front step. And even the police called first.

  Looking down at my phone, I saw I had received a message, but I’d muted calls and notifications. Elizabeth had texted me: Are you free? And then fifteen minutes later: Coming over. Bringing lunch.

  The knocking stopped, but I leapt to my feet and raced to the door, jerking it open just as she stepped off our porch. “Wait, sorry, I didn’t see your text. Come on in.”

  Elizabeth had Theo in his car seat hooked on one arm and a heavy diaper bag over the other, and she looked like she might have apologized or hesitated, but as a reporter broke free from the pack in front of Lena’s house, she hurried in after me.

  I locked the door behind her and motioned her through the kitchen and into the family room, far away from the front windows. Sure enough, I caught a glimpse of movement on the other side of the door, but thanks to Michael’s wire cutters, no doorbell sounded. And they’d already been warned about knocking on the door. Alondra had been positively terrifying.

  Elizabeth set Theo’s seat down carefully. His dark lashes curled against his rounded cheeks, and one hand made a loose fist while the other relaxed open, the palm smaller than the pad of my thumb. “I brought some sandwiches. I thought, if you weren’t busy, we could have lunch. But then I didn’t want to wake Grace up with the doorbell.”

  As if in answer, Grace gave two strong frog kicks and crossed her eyes at the star dangling from the play arch over her head.

  “The doorbell doesn’t work anyway. How have you been?”

  The words seemed so banal, so ordinary. Something I might have said to anyone at any point in my life. But this was the first time I’d seen Elizabeth since everything happened, and I wasn’t sure why she had come. Did she wonder if I knew more than I was saying?

  She glanced at the sofa and then instead sat on the floor in a single, fluid movement, still so poised, even though her hair looked like she’d scraped it back into a ponytail with her hands, and she wore no makeup. “I’m fine. I’m worried about you. Everything sounds so awful. Wyatt said Michael was going back to work, so this is your first day alone. Has it been like that outside the whole time?”

  I nodded, a lump in my throat. I’d been so busy holding it together for Michael and being calm and soothing for Grace that sympathy almost unhinged me. I sat next to the baby quilt and ran a finger across Grace’s feather-soft hair. Maybe she just felt sorry for me, the naïve wife, a trusting idiot who didn’t ask enough questions.

  Elizabeth straightened a corner of the quilt and set the play arch swinging again. “Do you need help with grocery shopping? Or anything, really? I could organize some meals—”

  “No thank you!” My words came out more strongly than I’d intended. But the last thing I wanted was for women I sort of knew to come into my house with pity in their eyes or worse, morbid curiosity.

  Elizabeth flushed. “Of course. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Worse than Elizabeth’s discomfort was the voice I could hear in my head. Aimee’s raspy tone: Those vultures want to pick your bones clean. They’ll be feasting on you at every gossip session for a month.

  “And the reporters, they’re always there?”

  “Since I got home after …” I didn’t want to say after my husband showed up covered in blood and we fled in terror to spend the night at the police station.

  She frowned, her lips pinched together. “That’s ridiculous. I’m going to—” She shook her head. “Later, I’ll make some calls. Tell me about Grace. It’s only been a week, but she looks like she’s growing.”

  For the rest of the day, we pretended nothing was wrong, absorbed in the babies and the food and the comfort of each other’s presence. We were still there on the floor when Michael came home from work.

  “How did it go?” I asked automatically, and then flinched. He wouldn’t want to talk about this in front of Elizabeth. Maybe he’d been fired; maybe we’d be homeless. He gave me a wan smile and shrugged, and the only thing I could tell from that was what I already knew. My husband was exhausted.

  As Michael fumbled for words and I struggled to tell Elizabeth how grateful I was, she got Theo settled in his car seat and put her packet of wipes, her baby’s play quilt, and the remains of our lunch back in her bag. Then she gave me a quick, fierce hug, and without another word, she hefted the car seat and left, not sparing so much as a sideways glance for the reporters on our lawn, not even the one I recognized from CNN.

  Without her comforting presence, the room seemed darker. I asked again. “How was it?”

  “Okay. Just like I said. Everything is okay.” He took me in his arms, and for just a second I let myself relax, even though I knew things couldn’t have been that easy. Oh, I really wanted to believe in this lucky moment. Michael wasn’t fired, we still had a paycheck, our family was intact. For now.

  But I couldn’t shake the fear born of a thousand true-crime dramas that he still might be charged. And that was the big legal fear. The personal one was that he’d already been tried and found guilty in the eyes of everyone in Texas.

  My peace didn’t last a second longer than our embrace.

  C2C TRANSCRIPT

  8

  Helen: So this is where things get weird. According to everything I could find, the police hadn’t identified an active serial killer at this point. Some of the cases were classified as missing persons, some hadn’t been reported at all, and only Frankie Watts, victim number two, and one couple, Jessica and Damen Weber, had been discovered and were being investigated as homicides.

  Julia: It’s like they have no respect for victimology. You can’t just switch back and forth from chopping up individuals to dismembering couples.

  Helen: That’s probably why the two cases weren’t linked initially. Watts was a murdered runaway from Dallas found in Humble, and the Webers were a Louisiana couple traveling back from a visit to family. First their car was found abandoned on the roadside; then their bodies were found in Brazos Bend State Park. A higher-risk kill, different victimology, but similar MO.

  Julia: And no one was looking for a serial killer, so there wasn’t anything to stop Lena and Brady Voss.

  Helen: That’s right. In fact, the time between victims was getting a little shorter, so if anything, it looks like there would have been more murders. But instead, on October third, the next-door neighbor Michael Tremaine went to the Vosses’ house for a drink. The couples had been friends for over a year. They had dinners together, the guys had worked on a garden project together, and Lena Voss was godmother to the Tremaine’s baby. But on this night, Lena was out of town.

  Julia: Or so Brady said.

  Helen: That’s the story, anyway, and the reason Michael went over while his wife stayed home with the baby. The guys had a couple of beers, and then something happened. In Michael’s statement, he says he “heard a noise and from upstairs, a sound like something falling.” Brad
y jumps up and runs upstairs, Michael follows him, and he gets there right after Brady kills his last victim, Shelby Jackson.

  Julia: And Michael just walks in on it?

  Helen: Apparently it was some kind of a murder room, all covered in tarp with cameras and video monitors on the walls.

  Julia: We have to talk about those later.

  Helen: And according to Michael, Brady kicks the dead body back into the room, grabs him—

  Julia: Grabs Michael—

  Helen: Yes, grabs him by the arm, pulls him into the room, and slams the door. Then Brady dismembers the body, wraps it in the tarp, and they carry it down to Brady’s garage and load it into one of the trucks there. During this time, Brady has a couple more drinks, and when the body’s packed in the truck, he asks Michael if he wants to dump it. Michael delays, telling him the moon’s pretty bright, that they’ll have better luck the next night, and that he thinks there’s a place under the bridge that might be good.

  Julia: Basically bullshitting.

  Helen: And this is as good a time as any to take a break and talk about the internet speculation. People are wondering: Why did he stay there so long? Why did he help Brady? Why didn’t he call the police right away or run screaming?

  Julia: Because we all think that’s what we’d do.

  Helen: But you can never tell. No one knows what they’d do. There aren’t many people who’ll ever be in a situation where your friend, your neighbor, invites you into a house where you’ve been a hundred times, you’re drinking and hanging out, and all of a sudden you walk into a crime scene and your friend says, “Hey, hold this ax.” So I know it’s exciting for people online to spin these conspiracy theories and speculate that the guy who reported the crime was involved, but I think there are some extenuating circumstances. I mean, first, he’s in shock.

  Julia: Well, you’d have to be.

  Helen: For all the reasons we just said. This isn’t a situation he ever imagined he’d be in. And second, he was in danger. Real, immediate, personal danger. Brady’s bulky, strong; it’s clear from the setup he’s done this before; he’s literally holding a weapon. I know it’s not action-movie material, but the truth is that if Michael had tried fight or flight, either way, he’d be dead.