One Fatal Mistake

by Tom Hunt

  She felt like she could sleep for days.

  * * *

  • • •

  Karen hesitated for just a moment as she turned her house key and pushed open the front door. She knew she was being paranoid, but she had a brief, momentary feeling that someone was waiting on the other side, just waiting for an opportunity to snag her and Joshua, whisk them away, and begin everything all over again.

  But there was no one behind the door. Just silence. The living room looked as it always had. There was no indication that anything out of the ordinary had recently happened.

  She waved out to the police cruiser in which she and Joshua had been driven home from the hospital. The officer behind the wheel waved back and reversed down the driveway. He drove away on the road out front.

  Finally, she let herself breathe.

  She kicked off her shoes. Joshua did the same. She turned and looked at him. His arm was in a sling and his eyes were half-open. He looked so weary.

  “Doing all right?” she asked him. A foolish question, but she felt like she should say something. It was the first question that came to mind.

  “I think I’m going to lie down,” Joshua said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I almost dozed off a couple times on the drive home.”

  Joshua walked across the living room and over to the hallway. It felt like something more meaningful should happen after all they’d been through, like they should sit down with each other. Discuss their feelings. Talk about everything that had occurred. But she didn’t think she’d be able to string together more than a few coherent sentences. Her mind was like a computer that had overheated—the only way to continue on was to rest and reboot.

  Before Joshua disappeared into his room, she called out to him.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He turned to her.

  “Wait a sec,” she said. “Come here.”

  He walked back over to her. She reached out and hugged him. There was so much to say, but she didn’t have the energy to say any of it. She’d hugged him at the police station and the hospital, but this hug seemed as though it had more significance than those had. Like now that it was just the two of them and they were safely back home, everything truly was over.

  She held him in her embrace. She felt one of his arms close around her back and squeeze tight. When she finally let go, she saw that he had tears in his eyes.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  He walked away from her. She watched him disappear down the hall. A moment later she heard the door to his room close.

  She stayed in the living room for a moment after he’d gone, then walked to her bedroom. If she listened closely, she felt like she’d be able to hear the echoes of Shane’s footsteps thundering down the hallway.

  She stopped outside her room. Paused for a moment and opened the door.

  The cleaners were finished, she noticed. Franny had given her the number of a professional service to clean and disinfect her house once the police were done with the crime scene, and she’d called them from the hospital. They’d come to the hospital to get a key from her and told her they’d start on the house immediately.

  The room had a faint smell of disinfectant. The carpet had been scrubbed clean—somewhat clean, at least. Splotches and stains were still visible. The bloody bedsheets had been taken by the police as evidence, but the mattress was left behind; it was stained with dried blood. She’d have to throw it out, get a new one.

  She didn’t know how she would ever be able to sleep in this room. Would this room ever feel like her bedroom again, or would it simply serve as a reminder of everything that had happened?

  It wasn’t just her bedroom, either—would she ever be able to look at the house in the same way again? She doubted it. There was something sad about that. The house where she’d lived for nearly all her life might never feel like home again.

  It seemed like such a small thing, like something totally irrelevant in light of everything that had happened. And it was—there was so much else to be sad about—but it still left her feeling disappointed.

  She shook her head. She’d have plenty of time to think about things like this later on, tomorrow, for the rest of the week, for the rest of her life, even. But not now.

  She walked out to the living room and found a nice warm blanket in the closet. She lay down on the couch.

  And she fell asleep instantly.

  THE NEXT WEEK

  THIRTY-THREE

  On Monday, the story was covered constantly on local news broadcasts and in the papers. Karen watched all the reports, read all the articles. The full story that eventually came out was that a bank robbery had happened in Nebraska. Amber and Ross had ditched Shane after the robbery. Their car had died outside of Cedar Rapids. They’d found Karen in the forest and tried to steal her car. Amber had been shot during the scuffle. Ross forced Karen to drive Amber to the hospital. Took Joshua as a prisoner to ensure she didn’t go to the police, then forced Karen to break Amber out. The shoot-out at the car dealership happened after Shane tracked them down and tried to get money from Teddy before leaving.

  As with any good lie, some parts of the story were true, and some weren’t.

  It felt weird, giving interviews and telling her sanitized version of the story as if it were the truth, as if she had nothing to hide. Felt even weirder seeing the published articles, reading them and knowing there was so much more that wasn’t being told.

  She did her best to keep the details to a bare minimum during interviews. She was worried that she might let something slip that would contradict the official narrative. Say something that would start a chain reaction that would end with the police getting suspicious that she was hiding something.

  That was, if they weren’t already suspicious. As far as she knew, the investigation was ongoing. Franny had called her earlier, told her that Amber had mentioned that a dead body was already in the forest when she and Ross had arrived. When he’d gone to the forest to search, he hadn’t found anything.

  Karen said she had no idea what Amber was talking about. Franny told her he figured she was making it up, probably trying to complicate the investigation and confuse them, maybe even avoid punishment.

  * * *

  • • •

  Tuesday afternoon, a few of Karen’s coworkers visited. She’d politely turned away most people who stopped by the house to chat—she didn’t feel like talking or repeating her lies—but she decided to let her coworkers in. She missed them. She wanted to talk with them. Wanted to be around them. They’d briefly seen each other at the hospital, but the interaction had been so rushed.

  There were hugs, greetings, relieved smiles. And of course questions. Her nurse manager told her to take off as much time as she needed, but she told him she’d be back to work for her Friday shift. She honestly thought about going back sooner. It would offer a distraction. Give her something to do. Already, even after just a day, she’d grown tired of being boxed up in the house. The memory of what had happened in there was still too fresh. By Friday, she figured the story would be old(er) news and there wouldn’t be as much attention to deal with.

  They treated her as if it were a badge of honor to go through what she had, almost like she was a celebrity. In a way, she was; it was surreal to see herself and Joshua on the front page of the local newspaper and featured on the evening news. But it was also a false celebrity. They treated her like that because they thought she was a helpless victim. An innocent bystander who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  They talked some more, but something about the visit was off. It was in the way they looked at her, the way they reacted to her statements. When talking with her, they all seemed a little reluctant and tentative, not their normal selves. She figured they knew her well enough to be able to tell that she was hiding something, but she knew they couldn’t have suspected the entir
e story.

  After they’d left, she realized Carmella hadn’t been with them. Karen figured she must’ve been working.

  * * *

  • • •

  On Wednesday, Joshua returned to school. He put in only a half day, and when it ended, they spent the afternoon together. They went to the theater to watch a movie. Grabbed a bite from the mall food court. Went for a walk. She hoped it would be therapeutic, but they were both so sad and distracted.

  That night, they ate dinner together, just the two of them. It was the first night they’d been able to sit down and eat together like they normally did.

  “So, what was it?” Karen asked. “What was the highlight of your day?”

  Joshua shook his head. “Really, Mom? You want to play this game?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go. We have to start getting back to normal little by little. Or at least attempt to. So go ahead. Answer the question.”

  “A lot of people came up to me at school, told me they were happy I was okay,” Joshua said. “That was kinda cool.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “What about you?”

  The highlight of her day—what was it? Tough question. She’d moped around the house when Joshua was at school. Distracted herself by looking for bargain mattresses online to replace her old one. Tried to take a nap on the couch but had given up after lying there with her eyes open for almost an hour.

  “It was nice spending the afternoon with you,” she eventually said to Joshua.

  That was the obvious answer. Really the only answer. But even as pleasant as their afternoon together had been, it had felt off. Just a tad uncomfortable.

  They ate in silence for a while. She tried to think of a few questions that could spark conversation, but she couldn’t come up with anything.

  “Okay, be honest with me,” she finally said. “How are you doing?”

  He shrugged.

  “I don’t know. It’s tough.”

  “What’s tough?”

  “Everything. I keep thinking about all the stuff that happened. The dead guy. Being held hostage. All that. I can’t focus on anything else.”

  Focus. Yes, she was having trouble focusing, too. It was like there was a part of her that just wouldn’t let go of the memory of everything that had happened. A part of her that just wouldn’t let her move on with her life.

  “I wish I knew what to tell you,” she said. “It’s only been a few days. Things will get better.”

  Advice-wise, that was as good as she could do right now. It was still early, probably too early, to start to cope with it all. At least, that’s what she told herself. Both she and Joshua would begin trauma counseling at some point, but not yet. It seemed too soon.

  * * *

  • • •

  Teddy came over to their house after dinner. He sat across from Karen at their kitchen table, a cup of coffee resting in front of him. He wore a polo with his car dealership logo on the chest.

  “How are things?” she asked him.

  “Let me put it this way,” he said. “I feel worse than I look.”

  “You don’t look that bad,” she said.

  In truth, he did. Bags under his eyes. His expression distant. Looked like he’d gained a few pounds around his waist, but his face was thin and gaunt.

  “I just can’t sleep,” he said. “I’ll lie in bed at night. Close my eyes. And nothing happens. I just lie there as the minutes tick away.”

  “You’re not the only one,” she said. “Just being in this house creeps me out. Too much happened here. And the body . . . I can still picture the body. How . . . dead it was. The image of it floating away in the river.”

  Teddy took a sip of coffee. Stared down at the table. Earlier, when Teddy was still in the hospital, she’d told him how she got rid of the body in the river. The story had floored him.

  “Everything just feels so weird,” she said. “Seeing how people look at me with compassion. Admiration, even, for everything we went through. If they knew the entire story . . . I can only imagine how they’d look at me then.”

  “I know what you mean,” Teddy said. “My coworkers at the dealership have asked me to repeat my story of what happened about a million times. And every time, they always believe it. They don’t suspect I’m lying at all.”

  Teddy looked down the hallway. Joshua’s door was shut.

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Down. Sad. Not much different from me. The golf, I think that hurts him. Not having that. Big part of his life.”

  She’d taken Joshua for a checkup yesterday. His brain scans looked fine but his dislocated shoulder was worse than doctors had initially thought. They’d decided it would require surgery. With recovery time, he wouldn’t be able to swing a golf club for at least six months.

  “He’s bummed he’ll miss his senior year of golf,” she said. “He’s been looking forward to it. Pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, but it’s got him down.”

  “I’ve texted him a few times,” Teddy said. “To check in. I can just tell by his texts that he’s down. His responses are short. Terse. No emotion.”

  She stared down at his closed bedroom door. She just wanted to see him happy. That was it. She could handle her own gloominess. She just didn’t want to see Joshua so down.

  She and Teddy sat there for a moment, in silence. Any anger she’d felt toward him had disappeared. It’d be hypocritical to be angry with him. She could’ve gone to the police at any point. She’d had plenty of opportunities to do so. And every time, she’d lied, lied, lied.

  “The body’s still missing,” Teddy said. “No one has found it yet.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Hard to believe it’s been out there for three days and no one has found it.”

  “It might be an even longer wait. It could be carried anywhere. There’s no telling how long it’ll be until it’s found.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Not long, it turned out.

  The next day, an article ran in the local newspaper. Buried in the back pages. Few people probably even paid attention to it. The article stated that a body had been found in Missouri, washed up on the banks of the Mississippi River. The body was identified as that of William Scanlon, a resident of the Cedar Rapids area. Forty-two years old. No immediate family. Part-time carpenter.

  Karen searched online to learn more about him. There wasn’t much.

  A Facebook page. Thirty-one friends. Hardly any activity. Two messages of consolation were posted.

  She found an amateurish Web site showing a few photographs he’d taken, most of abandoned barns and wildlife. A few of the photos were actually pretty good.

  An arrest record online. A few counts of assault. Public intoxication.

  And that was mostly it. No LinkedIn page or other social media. There was no record of marriage. No children.

  The article mentioned foul play was suspected in his death but gave no details beyond that.

  * * *

  • • •

  On Friday, Karen found out that she’d lost her job.

  She showed up for her morning shift feeling a little excited. A bit of a jump in her step. She was looking forward to doing something more than sitting around the house. It’d be good to be around her coworkers again.

  When she arrived in the ICU bay, the nurse manager on duty told her she needed to go to the administration office. She was taken to a room and she waited until two women and one man, all wearing suits, entered.

  “We have a few questions for you,” one of the women said.

  She’d expected as much. She’d figured that she’d have to answer questions about when she’d broken Amber out of the hospital. Instead, the questions were focused on what had happened when she saw Carmella steal medication earlier in the year. She answe
red them honestly, told them the entire story: she’d seen Carmella steal the medication but had decided not to turn her in since it was for her mother.

  When they were finished with their questions, they sent her home for the day. Told her not to return to the hospital until she heard back from them.

  The call came two hours later. Her employment contract with the hospital was terminated, effective immediately. Her nursing license was suspended, pending further investigation by the state nursing board.

  She hung up the phone and stood in the living room for a long time, staring at the ground. Her hands were lightly trembling. Her head was floating.

  She was blindsided, barely able to stand. It had happened so suddenly. There had to be some way to fix this, but she could barely think straight.

  She moped around the house for the rest of the afternoon. Cried some. A coworker reached out to tell her how sorry she was and told her that Carmella’s contract had been terminated, too. Her license was suspended, possibly revoked, for stealing medication. She might face criminal charges.

  Strangely, the news about Carmella affected Karen even more than losing her own job.

  Carmella was so sweet; she’d only wanted to help her mother. She didn’t have anything to do with any of this. The only reason she was involved was because Karen dragged her into it. Blackmailed her. And now her life was close to ruined.

  * * *

  • • •

  “You starting to sleep better?” Karen asked Teddy, looking across the kitchen table at him.

  “Sleep?” he said. “What’s that?”

  “If you find out, let me know.”

  A brief smile from Teddy. He’d continued to come to the house every evening. She didn’t have anyone else to talk to about everything that had happened, no one she could relay her feelings to. There was Joshua, but she didn’t want to burden him. She was happy to listen to him, but she didn’t want him worrying about her. He had his own problems.