by JoAnn Chaney
Janice walked past the cute little red car and climbed lightly up the steps to the house, paused when her hand was on the battered brass knob. She could turn around, go back down the steps and climb into her car and drive. It didn’t matter where, as long as it was away from here. West, maybe, to her mom’s place. She had some cash in her purse, a full tank of gas, and the credit card she had for emergencies—she could make it. She could be halfway across the country before Matt ever realized a thing, and it would be done. All of this would be behind her, a part of her past. She could look back on this moment in twenty years and laugh. Well, maybe not laugh, the thought of a cheating husband would never be funny, but maybe she wouldn’t think about it at all.
And Janice would’ve gone, turned around and walked—her hand had actually let go of the doorknob and she’d started to pivot away on the balls of her feet—but for one thing. A giggle. The window beside the door had been propped open, as it usually was on a balmy night like this, and that’s how it floated to her ears—a high-pitched, tinkling woman’s sound of delight. And then, a moment later, came Matt’s answering chuckle, low and throaty.
It was their laughter that made her decision, that brought her hand back up to the doorknob and twisted it, that lifted her foot and brought her home.
CHAPTER EIGHT
2018
“Please, stop! Don’t!”
The woman’s scream echoed off the sheer rock face, and birds lifted from the trees, startled into flight.
CHAPTER NINE
1995
A single gunshot rang out. A few people woke, but then went back to sleep. They all thought it was a dream.
CHAPTER TEN
2018
There were five or six people standing in the parking lot at the bottom of the trail, gathered in a small group, discussing their dinner plans in the creeping twilight. They’d have to drive into Estes Park, but there were some good places right on the edge of town, an Italian place and a barbecue joint that had an amazing buffalo—
“Help!” a man shouted, and they all turned toward the voice. He was coming down the trail, stumbling along on the loose gravel, something in his hand. A small rectangle of light. His phone. Something moved in the woods behind him, startled and then dashed away, shaking up the undergrowth. A rabbit, or a small deer.
“My wife, she fell,” the man said. He was sweating lightly, gasping for air as if the hike down had been a rough one. “My wife, I think she might be dead.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1995
You’d think that over ten years, a man would become accustomed to waking up at six in the morning to take the dog out, but Frank Jessup could tell you otherwise. He’d been doing the same thing every damn day of the year for the last decade, and it wasn’t even his dog. Sweetie belonged to his wife, but he was the one who had to take the little idiot out when it started yapping in the morning while Sandra snored. And it’d been just the same this morning—five fifty-seven on the dot, Sweetie was jumping up and down on her fat little legs and scratching at the door with nails that weren’t trimmed often enough, her eyes about ready to pop out of her head.
So Frank got up, went to the bathroom, and pissed, grimacing at the burning sensation he’d been having in his groin over the last few years, and slipped on his shoes. Sweetie had been barking the whole time, but Sandra was still fast asleep. Sometimes he was sure his wife was faking, just so she didn’t have to get up and lap the neighborhood with a plastic bag in one hand just in case Sweetie decided to take a shit, which she sometimes did, which seemed like some sort of punishment to Frank, fumbling around with a bag in the dark, trying to scoop up a warm pile of waste.
And of course, this morning Sweetie decided to take a squat right on the edge of ol’ man Vandercamp’s lawn, and she turned and stared right at Frank while she did her thing, as if the only way she could perform was through eye contact, and Frank was wondering, as he always did, how one little dog could produce so much shit without exploding. It was business as usual, until Sweetie suddenly straightened out, pinching it off, and started barking.
“Why don’t you shut up?” Frank hissed, yanking on her leash. “People are still sleeping, stupid.”
But Sweetie kept on barking, really working herself up into a frenzy, the way all small pea-brained dogs are apt to do, until Frank looked around to try to figure out what was driving her nuts. The only people ever out this early were trashmen and the lady who drove around in her station wagon, pitching newspapers out the window, and Sweetie ignored them. And then he saw the man in the street, walking toward him—no, not walking. The man was moving at more of a slow stumble, like he was drunk. Or injured.
“My wife,” Matt Evans said. This was once he’d come close enough, stepping into a circle of yellow light thrown down by a streetlamp. He nearly fell when his foot caught the curb but managed to save himself at the last moment. He reached a bloody hand out toward Frank, who shrank away from that reach. Frank recognized him—the young man lived two blocks down with his woman. They were a good-looking couple, kept to themselves. “My wife. I think she might be dead.”
And Sweetie barked on.
CHAPTER TWELVE
2018
“You saw her fall?” the ranger asked.
“No.”
“What were you doing, then?”
“I was—I was taking a leak, okay? I was back in the trees, and I couldn’t see her.”
“What was she doing so close to the edge?”
“I don’t know. I took her picture, then went to piss. And I heard her scream.”
“And after she fell, you looked over the side?”
“Yeah. I crawled out and looked down.”
“Crawled?”
“I’m scared of heights,” Matt said. He closed his eyes. “But I didn’t see her. It was too dark, and there was the water—”
“Yeah, the Three Forks River runs right under that cliff,” the ranger said. “Water level’s pretty high right now, so she was most likely swept off in the current.”
“Where would it have taken her?”
“River’s moving quick, so if she survived the fall it would’ve taken her south.” The park ranger pushed his hat back and wiped his forehead. It was completely dark but still warm, and he was sweating just standing in the parking lot. “It’s not going to be any use scouting the river while the sun’s down—it’s a dangerous hike down in the dark, and you can’t see anything that might float by. A rescue team would run the risk of injury or getting lost. It’s not worth it.”
“But if Marie swam out of the river and made it to shore—”
The ranger sighed. He’d worked at the park for almost fifteen years, he’d seen plenty of city folk come out to spend a day in the wild, to hike and take pictures, and it never failed to surprise him how stupid they could be. He’d heard it all: a woman had once suggested that the steeper trails be outfitted with escalators so people could enjoy the views from the top without a hard hike; or one time he’d been asked what they did with all the animals during the winter. And this situation was stupid, too, but it was also sad.
“Let me be completely honest, Mr. Evans,” he said. “I’m familiar with the cliff your wife fell from, and there’s no way she could’ve survived. Not from that high, and not with the river moving that fast. We’ll have to start searching for her body first thing in the morning.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1995
“This Janice Evans?” the detective asked, looking down at the unzipped body bag at their feet. ABRAHAM REID, that’s what it said on the badge he flashed at the crew picking through the wet, smoldering remains of the house. Two of the four main walls were completely gone, and the walkway leading down from the front door was scorched black, but the first responders had managed to contain the fire before it spread to the neighbors. The team was still in yellow rubber coveralls and boots, but Reid was dressed in a nice gray suit that hung loosely from his scrawny frame. The old man didn�
��t seem worried about the ash that would ruin his clothes, so no one mentioned it.
“Looks like it,” one of the guys said. “Not that you can really tell.”
“She was in the bed,” another one said. He pulled off his rubber gloves and wearily rubbed the back of his hand across his forehead, leaving a clean streak through the soot that had blanketed his skin. “Skull’s cracked in a couple places, teeth are all knocked out. Whoever did this really put a beating down on her, then doused her and the mattress in gasoline and lit it up. It burned fast and hot.”
Reid pulled a ballpoint pen out of his pocket and squatted beside the bones the men had collected from the rubble, carefully stirred around the pieces with one end.
“Got at least one tooth in here,” he said, standing up again with a painful grunt. “The coroner’ll need it to ID her.”
“We’ll sweep through again, see if we can find anything else.”
Reid grunted and pulled something out of his pocket. A candy, the fireman thought at first. A wrapped peppermint. Reid gently pulled both of the twisted ends, the same way you’d pull on the two ends of a Chinese finger trap, and the candy flew out, twisting end over end. Reid snatched it out of the air with surprising speed, closed one gnarled hand over it, and popped it into his mouth.
“Good trick,” one of the firemen said.
“Old dogs like me have our ways,” Reid said, smiling faintly. It wasn’t a candy, but a cough drop—the menthol was wafting from his mouth in a thick cloud. “Soaked in gasoline, eh?”
They all glanced down at those words. It was nothing more than a collection of blackened, hardened bones piled into a body bag—more like the leftovers from a campfire pit than a human being. The skull was the one thing that gave the appearance of a person—you could still make out the graceful curve of the head, the sharp stretch of jaw. Reid looked toward the street, where a crowd of neighbors and police had gathered.
“Let me know if you boys find anything else interesting,” he said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Matt’s shoulder hurt.
That’s where the bullet went through. A clean shot, the doctors said. In one side, out the other. Like a hot knife through butter. It’ll heal right up, might not even scar. Be like it never happened at all. The docs here said all kinds of things like that. Friendly, comforting words—but Matt got a good look at their eyes while they looked him over, when they poked and prodded and made notes on their charts, and he might as well have been a pig heading to the slaughterhouse. Cold, that’s how the docs looked. Unfeeling. But what could he expect? He was just another patient in a long line waiting to be treated, and they moved on to the next. Maybe doctors have a quota they have to meet and that’s why they hurry from one room to the next, asking questions and not really listening to the answers. Janice had been premed and she’d told him it wasn’t true, that doctors cared about every person they saw. But he wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was the truth, or maybe it was a lie doctors told to keep themselves from going crazy.
Or maybe, he thought, they looked at him that way because they thought he was a killer.
He’d asked for something stronger than the pills that got delivered to his room in a tiny paper cup every few hours, but the nurse only smiled blandly when he spoke and had backed quickly out of the room. They’d mostly left him alone for the last day, with only the television to keep him company. The TV, and the muted sounds of conversation from the nurse’s station down the hall. But it was nothing but garbled, muffled voices that made it through the walls—unless a nurse accidentally left the door open, which had only happened once.
“—poured gasoline all over the body and lit a match. I’ve got a buddy who works for the fire station, said the whole house came down in less than five minutes—”
“Jesus—”
“What a sick bastard.”
His nurse stuck her head into the room then, looking startled and more than a little guilty, and pulled the door shut. She even gave it an extra tug to make sure the latch clicked and it wouldn’t ease back open, so all the hospital staff could safely gossip without him eavesdropping. He was on trial out there, the jury was a bunch of medical staff in their squeaky white shoes and wrinkled scrubs, and they’d found him guilty of murdering his wife, without a shadow of a doubt. They’d have him strung up if they got the chance. Guilty until proven innocent.
He’d fucked up this time. Bad.
“Did you kill your wife, Mr. Evans?” Detective Reid asked. The cop had come in not long after the nurse had shut the door, wordlessly dragged a chair out of the corner and pulled it up to the side of the bed. He was sucking on a menthol cough drop, the smell of it surrounding him like a cloud. He was ancient, old enough that he might’ve started his career with law enforcement back when booze was illegal and women couldn’t vote.
“No.”
“Then maybe you’d like to explain how your wife ended up in her current—situation?” Reid asked. He was sitting with his legs crossed, in the graceful way only young women and very old men can manage, with a notepad propped up on one bony knee. This cop was droopy eyed, spoke slowly and moved even slower, but Matt had a feeling his brain zipped around like greased lightning. He’d have to be careful around this old man. There was something almost Southern about Reid, even though he didn’t have an accent. Or maybe gentlemanly was a better way to describe him.
“Situation?” Matt had repeated wearily.
“Yessir,” Reid said, nodding sleepily. “Early yesterday morning we got a call about a house fire over on Maple Avenue—8220 Maple. That’s where you live, isn’t it? Or lived? White house with green shutters?”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t call our fire department the fastest around, but they’re pretty damn quick, and by the time they got to that house with their hoses and whatnot it was too late. I’m exaggerating a bit here, but just about all that was left of that nice little place you’re renting was ashes.” Reid cleared his throat and hacked into a handkerchief he’d pulled from his pocket, then wiped his lips impatiently. “Ashes, and your wife. Well, what was left of her, anyway.”
Matt closed his eyes. The spots behind his eyes throbbed. Morphine, that’s what he needed. An IV threaded into his arm and a handy little button he could push to shoot some dope into his system, so he’d be nice and buzzed. But maybe that was why the nurses wouldn’t give him anything—they wanted him sober to talk to this cop.
“That fire sprung up quick, burned hot and fast,” Reid said. “But that’s what happens when there’s a couple gallons of gasoline dumped on everything. The first spark of a match and everything’s gone.” Reid held up a gnarled hand and snapped so loudly, Matt twitched in surprise and opened his eyes. “Like that. You ever light your own farts, Mr. Evans?”
“What?”
Reid’s liver-spotted lips spread in a smile.
“You know the old rhyme? Beans, beans, the musical fruit, the more you eat, the more you toot? Did your mama ever cook beans or chili and the next day your rear end wouldn’t keep quiet?”
“I guess so,” Matt said.
“I can imagine you as a little boy stealing his father’s lighter out of his pants pocket and sneaking outside to see if your farts would catch fire,” Reid said. He snorted in amusement. “I can imagine that, clear as day.”
“My father is dead,” Matt said.
“I’m sorry. How’d he go?”
“Heart attack,” Matt said, balling up a fistful of bedding. “It was a long time ago. When I was a teenager.”
“So your mother raised you alone?”
“Yes. She’s dead now, too.”
Reid made a mark on his notepad.
“So you never lit your farts?”
“Is this question part of your investigation?”
Reid shrugged and smiled again.
“Just curiosity.”
Matt sighed, turned his head on the pillow.
“Of course I did,” he said. “I was a kid onc
e.”
Reid laughed, a throaty, whistling sound that came from deep in his skinny chest, and gleefully slapped a hand against his thigh.
“I knew it,” he said. “Then I don’t have to tell you how quickly a fart lights up. Surprises you, doesn’t it? You don’t expect it to catch, even if you’ve done it before. It’s like a miracle every time. A smelly, god-awful miracle, but a miracle just the same.”
Reid laughed again, and Matt did, too. He couldn’t help it—the old man’s laugh was funny enough on its own. It was a good one, loud and clear as a bell, chortling and contagious. A man with a laugh like that could get an entire crowd laughing on his very own. He was a comedian’s dream.
“Was it like that with Janice?” Reid asked, still smiling, and for the first time Matt noticed the smile didn’t reach all the way to Reid’s eyes. His gaze was watery and red rimmed but also coldly calculating, watching for Matt’s reaction. “Were you surprised at how fast the fire lit once you poured that gasoline all over her? I saw her remains, you know. She looks like a charcoal briquette more than a person.”
The laughter dried up so fast it might have been a figment of his imagination, and his throat clenched unpleasantly. A charcoal briquette. Reid was spot-on, Matt had been surprised by how quickly the flames moved, how fast they ate up everything in their path. He’d seen how her skin had broken and peeled back like old, dry paper, and how the flesh underneath had blackened from the heat. The sight of this had been bad enough, but it was the smell that’d finally driven him out of the house and down the street, the scent of cooking human flesh that even overpowered the stench of the gasoline. It hadn’t been a bad smell, that was the worst of it. The cooking flesh had made him think of barbecues on long summer nights, of beef roasting on a grill, of the gristly bits of meat that would get caught between his teeth whenever he took a bite. Those were good times and memories, and he’d run from the house and those smells then, even as the walls were collapsing around him and the hot bile was bubbling up in his throat.