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

“Let’s give it a little more time,” he said. “We haven’t been here all that long. We’re adjusting, she’s adjusting. Besides, it’s an easier conversation to have in the daytime with her.”

Meg looped a strand of her shoulder-length hair behind her ear. “I just don’t know what good we’re doing here. And when the baby comes, we’ll have even less time to spend with her.”

“But maybe having the baby will help turn her around,” he said. “Maybe our child is the spark she needs.”

“If she makes it until then.”

“We’re family,” Colin added. “Just being close by, it means a lot to her. We don’t have to solve every problem right now. We just need to be here.”

Colin walked up to the bed, leaned down, and kissed Meg on the cheek. As he did, he reached with his left hand and lightly traced his fingertips along the base of her neck, down over her breasts, and finally up and around her stomach, which was only half-covered by one of his loose-knit tank tops. He thought once again of their child, though this time, Colin didn’t picture a baby but an adult, a person his own age. He pictured a man, Colin’s son, forty years old and grappling with the same issues Colin faced now. Was Colin destined to end up like his mother, old and rattled, a collector of junk, alternatingly lucid and crazed?

And would Colin’s child be there for him?

He hoped the answer to the first question was no. But if history was going to repeat itself, Colin liked to think the answer to the second was yes.

Meg gave him enough of a smile to let him know she didn’t want an argument, either, and then went back to her book.

Colin stripped to his boxer briefs and joined Meg in bed. After leaning over and kissing her shoulder, he grabbed his own book from the nightstand. It was a novel, but although he was enjoying it, he wasn’t reading it for pleasure.

He looked at the cover again.

The Broken Child by J. L. Sharp.

He’d never heard of the author before a couple weeks ago, though that wasn’t unusual, considering he didn’t pick up a whole lot of books, and when he did, they were usually of the true-crime variety. But he had to admit Sharp’s books were well written, intriguing, and not too full of flowery descriptions. Colin hated flowery descriptions.

In fact, Sharp’s writing was so well honed that Colin had torn through her first two books in a week before starting The Broken Child a couple of days ago. Each book centered on a female protagonist, Detective Jenna Black, who investigated cold-case files in Missouri, cases most often involving children.

The reason for this recent literary quest was that J. L. Sharp was the pen name for Rose Yates, a thirty-seven-year-old ex-Milwaukee resident and recent widow. Her husband, Riley McKay, had recently OD’d on alcohol and sleep medication. The coroner’s report didn’t rule it a suicide but rather an accidental overdose. Colin wasn’t so sure; Riley McKay’s toxicity levels suggested he must have had significant trouble sleeping to ingest as much as he had.

The Yates case was a small one for the Milwaukee PD and one that Colin, as a member of the Special Investigations Unit, would normally never have seen. But Riley McKay died right as the assigned detective, Bertram Cooper, was about to retire. Cooper worked the case for a week but his retirement day came before the case was closed out. Colin, with the least seniority in his new department, was told to deal with it. Put the case to bed, his sergeant had said.

Colin assumed it would be a matter of routine paperwork, but it hadn’t taken long before he had questions.

Why was there no extensive interview with the wife?

Why wasn’t the doctor who prescribed the meds consulted?

Why were there no notes about the family dynamic, any notes of mental illness or depression history, or observations from friends or family about the relationship between Riley McKay and Rose Yates?

The likely answer to all these questions was because Detective Cooper, on his way out, had seen the Riley McKay death as a simple overdose, perhaps suicide, and nothing more. Maybe in his anticipation of sailing the world or doing whatever he had planned, Cooper had been a little sloppy with the McKay case. Or, perhaps, he was just a mediocre detective.

Colin had planned to talk to Rose Yates, only to find she and her son moved to New Hampshire just a few weeks after her husband died. A little town called Bury.

Then, when Colin had discovered Rose Yates wrote novels about detectives, that piqued his interest, so he’d bought her first three books and read them. He hadn’t known what, exactly, he was looking for in these books but figured he’d know when he found it. He’d read through the first two books with interest, but it was the third book that grabbed him. One chapter in particular.

Now, in his bed, he thumbed open Sharp’s third book and opened to page 108.

Chapter 12. He’d just read it for the first time earlier in the day.

All in all, a seemingly inconsequential chapter, unless it ended up taking on greater importance later in the book. In the chapter, Detective Jenna Black recounted an old case of hers to a work colleague. A case she was proud to have finally solved after it had gone cold years ago.

The case involved the death of a forty-year-old man. Turned out, Black told her colleague, he’d been killed by his wife.

The colleague inquired about the method of killing.

And this was the part that sent a thousand-watt jolt right through Colin when he’d first read Jenna Black’s answer in the pages of chapter 12.

A mixture of alcohol and sleep medication.

Eight

Bury, New Hampshire

August 12

I jolt awake, sweat basting the back of my neck. It takes a few seconds to orient myself.

I’m in a bed. Nighttime. I’m at…Dad’s house.

It was a dream.

It was the dream.

I