The Dead Husband by Carter Wilson (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

“Nah. But I have a couple of buddies on the job up there. Said it was a major shit-show. Never seen anything like it.”

“But the Bury murder, seven years ago?”

The expression on Sike’s face passed from mild excitement to disappointment, as if he was embarrassed Bury didn’t ever get its sensational killing spree.

“Drug deal gone bad. Out-of-town dealer meeting with his well-to-do Bury user. Dealer pumped three in the chest. Caught him a few hours later.”

“And before that?”

“Before that what?”

“Other murders.”

Sike leaned back in his chair, which squeaked in a violent protest to the assault. “Long before my time in the department.”

Colin went with his gut, knowing there was something. There was something about Bury. If not outright malevolent, then at least mysterious. Suspicious. There are no perfect communities. Every town has a stain.

“How about way back, say ten or twenty years ago?” Colin asked. “Any major crimes in Bury? Any…I don’t know…anything that got Bury a little attention beyond the town borders?”

Sike peered up into the acoustic ceiling tiles of the station, as if all the answers he ever wanted could be found in their thousands of craters. After taking a moment’s reflection, he directed his gaze back to Colin.

“Missing kid. Back in the nineties. Sixteen-year-old boy named Caleb Benner. Never found him.”

“A sixteen-year-old boy?” Colin said. “That’s not a missing kid. That’s a runaway.”

“Ayuh, that’s what most say. Not his family, though. Not his friends.”

Colin crossed his arms over his chest, tucking his fingers into his armpits. “Were you here then?”

“Manchester. But we came down to help search. Mike Patterson was the lead on the case.”

“Is he still on the job?”

Sike shook his head. “Heart attack killed him back in oh-nine.”

“Do you remember the details of the case?”

“I do indeed.”

Colin nodded over to the coffee machine in the back corner of their room.

“Buy you a cup of coffee if you tell me everything you know about it,” he said.

“Coffee’s free here,” Sike said.

“It’s the gesture that counts.”

Sike grunted, which Colin took as an affirmation. Colin walked over to the pot, still half-full, and filled two paper cups. He took a sip from one, surprised that it tasted decent.

He walked back over and handed a cup to Sike, who offered another grunt.

Sike took his own sip, tilted back in his chair, and said, “Kid went missing on a Friday night.”

It took about twenty minutes for Sike to tell Colin the story of a missing boy named Caleb Benner.

Afterward, Colin couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Twenty-Eight

October 25

It’s Sunday night and I yearn for unconsciousness.

Over a week has passed since Pearson confronted me at Tuli’s, which earned me two more sleepless nights and only a few hours a night since then. Now I’ve reached a point of such extreme anxiety and fatigue that I can barely hold a conversation, which is okay, since I don’t want to talk to anyone anyway. But Max is wondering what’s wrong with me, and all I can manage to tell him is I’m not feeling well. It didn’t take long before my mood seeped into his, causing him to act out more than normal, lashing out whenever I asked him to do anything, even just putting on his shoes.

I can’t write. I can’t hold any attention at work, struggling to make it through my shifts. I canceled dinner plans with Cora last night and have been avoiding my father as much as possible.

After dinner, I slogged through a round of Sorry! with Max on the floor of his bedroom, happy to lose. He protested when I made him go to bed by nine (Mom, it’s Sunday!), but I told him he could either read a book or go to sleep, and he chose to get under the covers with the final Harry Potter volume of the series. The world just might run out of books for him to read.

It’s nearly ten now, and my thoughts drift beyond the mere need for sleep. To the wonder of what Riley felt as he slipped off for the last time. Probably nothing at all. But maybe there was a release, sweet and pure, that gave peace to his troubled soul. Maybe in those last seconds, he became a child again, innocent and uncorrupted.

I like to think so.

In my bathroom, I dig out two pill bottles from beneath my bathroom sink. Riley had a second stash of his sleep medications in his sock drawer and I kept them. How macabre is that?

I scrutinize the labels for the first time. One bottle is labeled diazepam, which I know is Valium. The pills are tiny and the blue of a robin’s egg. The other bottle holds zolpidem—Ambien. The pills are a chalky yellow.

I take a pill from each bottle and sit on the bathroom floor, studying them. I’ve never taken any kind of medication like these before, though Riley had suggested it every now and then whenever I had trouble sleeping. But I recall what the meds did to him, making him fade into the night, slipstreaming into unconsciousness. He used to take one of each, saying the Ambien knocked him out and the Valium kept him there. I asked if the doctor said he should take them together, and Riley simply told me it was fine. That he’d done it enough times to know it was what worked for him.

Until it worked more than he expected.

I suppose everyone has these thoughts now and then. Moments when we think about how easy it would be to make all our troubles go away. A shrink would likely tell me I was normal.

But what if I confessed I think about death more often than “every now and then”? That it comes to mind a few times each week, sometimes just as passing thoughts, dark clouds that float by after a minute or two. Other times sticking around longer. An hour. Maybe two. And all I can do is contemplate what it would be like to die. To be in