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

It’s light, as if to comfort, but I’m also aware he’s larger and stronger than me. If he tries to restrain me, I’ll fight like hell. Fight with everything I have.

“Is it true?” he asks.

My instinct is to scream no as loud as I can, but I don’t. And that pause, my little hesitation, is probably all Pearson needs to know with certainty that I didn’t kill Riley.

“I…I can’t even…” I turn my head to the Suburban. To where my son waits for me. “I just need to go.”

“Go where?”

“Away from here,” I say.

“You can’t hide forever,” he says. “And Max is a minor. A case could be made about why he did it. Abuse. Self-defense. Protecting you.”

I look back to Pearson. “He’ll never confess to anything. As long as I live, I’m protecting him. He’s my only family. I’m the only one he has.”

Pearson nods, eyes heavy.

“Are you going to try to stop me from leaving this car?” I ask.

“No, Rose. I’m not.”

“Are you going to call Bury PD as soon as I drive away?”

He thinks on this a moment, face full of sorrow.

“There’s no way I can stop you from running?” he asks.

“Not a chance in hell.”

“In that case, I want to know the truth.”

“I already told you; I didn’t kill my husband.”

He lifts his hand from my arm, and in a strange way, I wish he hadn’t. His touch grounded me.

“Not about that. About Caleb.” Pearson nods to the house down the driveway. “The reason we’re here. We both showed up at the same house on the same snowy day. If you’re running for good, I want to know what happened. You owe me that.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” I say.

“Then you owe it to yourself.”

He’s right. How many times in twenty-two years have I wanted this? This chance to tell someone about what happened. To confess my sins. To confess all our sins. It’s the promise I made to myself just this morning.

I glance briefly at the clock, the digital time glowing blue and bold, the car’s heat still pumping into my face from the vents. I take this pit of shame, this thing that has done nothing but grow like a cancer in me for the last two decades, and I choose to take a scalpel and cut it out of my body, right here in this car, hoping I’ll be strong enough to survive the operation.

“Cora killed him,” I say. I don’t even let him react or ask questions. I just talk. I tell Pearson everything I’ve always wanted to say. Everything that happened back then, every gory detail that I relive in my endless nightmares. Everything about Riley, his affair, his unraveling, and the night he died. About my books and how the scene with the husband dying from alcohol and sleep meds was no more than a simple chapter in a mystery novel, but I couldn’t say for sure that Max hadn’t read the book. I admit I did write my new novel hoping to confess my complicity through fiction, but that backfired.

I tell him about my move back to this horrible little town. My father and his insistence on family above everything, a trait I have quite clearly inherited.

I talk about Cora. Our relationship, the sisters of Bury. I pass the point of worrying about what I’m saying, and it’s the most beautiful feeling I’ve ever experienced. Maybe it’s my moment of touching the rainbow, a release, followed by freedom.

I tell him I think she might have killed others. Perhaps many. Undoubtedly a poodle and a long-ago family pet. I tell Pearson that Cora is dead, and I killed her, an act of self-defense, inasmuch as that even matters. That my father buried her.

He takes all this in, saying nothing. I want to cry, but perhaps like him, I have nothing left to give.

I look at the clock.

Eleven minutes have passed.

Eleven minutes. The weight of all I carried for so long only took eleven minutes to unload. That alone is singularly painful.

“Where is Caleb?” From all the things I’ve just told him, this is the only question Pearson asks me.

“I don’t know. I think in the woods leading from the Chester Woodall trailhead. Maybe…maybe Cora is there, too.”

“Do you have anything else to say?”

“No. I’ve told you everything. I have to go. My son…”

The digital clock counts off another passing minute. Pearson says, “I’m going to get out of this car and go up and knock on the door of that house. Maybe they’ll answer, maybe they won’t. If they do, I’m going to ask for a bit of their time. If they’re kind enough to let me in and hear me out, I’m going to tell them a long story. One that ends with where I think their boy is buried. Once I leave that house, I’m going to drive directly to the Bury Police Department and tell Chief Sike everything I know. So, Rose, by my best estimate, you have anywhere between ten minutes and ninety to get going.”

He pauses. My stomach’s about to come up through my mouth.

“You’ll never have proof,” I say. “Everything I’ve told you. You can’t prove it.”

“Maybe not, but I have to do something. I took an oath.”

“Okay,” I say, hardly breathing.

“That’s the best I can do, and more than I should. You need to protect your family, and I understand that with more heartache than I would ever wish on my worst enemy. But I can’t just let this go, Rose. Someone has to pay. Time doesn’t erase murder, never will.”

“I understand,” I whisper. “Thank you.”

He nods. “You’re welcome.” Pearson inhales deeply, as if he’s about to explore the bottom of the ocean on one lungful of air. The exhale is resigned. “You ready?”

“I’m ready,” I say.

I’ve never been less certain of being ready in my life.

Then follows a simple mantra, repeated in my head, just as I’ve done thousands of times before. A mantra to which I never truly connected but still