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

a flash of that same knife thrusting into my stomach. “You lured that animal out of its yard and slit its throat. You’re a monster.”

“No, sweetie. I’m a survivor. And everything was fine until you moved back to town. Now bad things are happening, and it’s all your fault.”

As I stare at my sister, I try once again to reconcile this woman with the little girl I knew. My big sister, who I can remember smiling as a child. Cora didn’t change overnight. It was a gradual shift, one I didn’t notice, until the seventeen-year-old version was the person she was meant to be all along. This person standing in front of me is the true Cora. I don’t understand it, don’t like it, but I can’t change that simple fact. Imagining my sister as an adult version of the sweet, happy child I once knew is like picturing Hitler dying of old age after an uneventful life as a painter.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask her. “Do you want me to move away? Is that it?”

“I don’t really care what you do, Rose, as long as it doesn’t involve disrupting all I have here.”

“And what is it you have? Some vapid, plastic existence? Your daughter has a poster of Lizzie Borden on her bedroom wall. Does that make you happy?”

“I’m letting her be the person she wants to be,” Cora says.

“And what if she turns into you?” I ask. “Is that what you want? Are you counting the days until she’s seventeen? Are you waiting to see if she’s capable of doing what you did? What would you do then?”

This lands a punch, but her reaction is subtle. A couple blinks, a tighter smile. But rather than answer me, she turns and walks a few steps away, closer to the trailhead and the surrounding woods.

Her figure is backlit by a solitary streetlight, and she glows like some kind of fallen angel. The snowfall is lighter now, and through the flakes, I watch as she reaches into her purse and retrieves something. Facing away from me, she lowers her right hand and I see the silhouette of what she’s holding. A knife. Thin and long. She just holds it at her side in her gloved hand, loose. Stares out into the dark, into the distance, as still as a mannequin gathering dust.

I have no idea if the knife is for effect, but she’s surprised me, which is the last thing I wanted. Cora is ten feet away and I ease a few steps backward. This scene should be as improbable as a bad horror movie, but if I drew a line through all the moments of our collective past, it’s obvious that this is where it all leads.

“This place is special because he’s out there, somewhere,” Cora says to the night.

That statement alone chills me more than the snow. Scares me more than the knife.

“Caleb?” I say.

“Daddy told me once. Said this is where he brought him.”

Revulsion of the memory of that night overcomes me, but I can’t back away. In fact, I reverse course, start walking toward Cora because I don’t know if the recorder on my phone is picking up what’s she’s saying. I slide the phone out of my front pocket and palm it against my thigh.

“Dad buried Caleb out on this trail?”

She answers my question with one of her own. “Don’t you remember that morning when he finally came back home? It was nearly daylight. We hadn’t slept. You pissed yourself, just another stain we had to clean.”

“No,” I tell her. “I don’t remember that.”

“Daddy walked in the house, nearly passed out from exhaustion. Covered in dirt and sweat. Grabbed a drink and collapsed in the big leather chair. Didn’t even change out of his clothes.”

This part is all blank to me. I remember my father telling us to go get a tarp, and the next thing I recall is waking up in my bed sometime the next day.

“I must have blocked that out,” I tell her.

She turns and the sudden movement startles me, causing me to drop my phone, which clunks on the parking-lot asphalt. Instead of reaching for it, I remain upright. Cora is a few fast strides away.

“You were nearly catatonic at that point,” she says. “Daddy told us to sit on the floor next to his chair, and we did.” The hand holding the knife sways like a sunflower in a gentle wind. “He patted us on the heads, like dogs. Said he’d been out on the Chester Woodall trail, and what he’d done was the hardest thing in his life. Physically, emotionally. But he said he did it because we were a family, and no matter how sideways families got, they stuck together.”

I remember none of this. I glance at the ground and see my phone, screen pointing up. I’m horrified to see the recorder app visible, counting away the seconds as it captures our conversation.

“He never supported me,” I say.

“That’s because you left, Rose. Sticking together means being together, all the time.”

I almost ask what happened to her to make her who she is, but the moment I part my lips to speak, they are shut by a horrible, blinding thought. A thought so distorted and perverse it can’t be tethered to reality, but it invades my brain as if planted there in a microchip.

The thought is this:

My father molested Cora.

Maybe for years. And this is why she’s who she is. Why she did that to Caleb Benner. I have no evidence of this, or even an inkling of it, but it’s forcefully real and possible.

I gasp. She takes a step closer. I hold out my arm and kneel to the ground, scooping up my phone.

“You’re overcome,” she says, taking another step closer.

“Stay away from me.” I rise.

“Daddy was so loyal to us. How he protected us when the police came and asked us questions.”

I’m dizzy with fear and adrenaline. “I barely remember talking to them.”

“You didn’t talk to