Page 53 of Call Off the Dark

The operator’s voice remained calm. “Who stabbed him?”

Helen dropped the phone and fell to her knees beside Tyler.

“Tyler? Tyler!” She grabbed his shoulders, shaking him. The encyclopedias slid from his stomach and came to rest on the carpet. “Tyler, come on. You had something to tell me, remember? Tyler?!”

His body was limp.

Helen wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his neck, sobbing. Helen’s love for Tyler was so vast that if her life were a fairy tale, the electrical charge of her heart pressed to his chest would have been enough to restart his heart.

But this was no fairy tale.

From the abandoned phone on the carpet, the faraway voice of the 911 operator drifted out.

“Ma’am, are you there?”

Chapter Twenty

Present day

Blinking back tears, Helen hurried out of the guest bedroom into the hallway. She needed to stop thinking about Tyler’s murder. She needed to focus on getting the current situation under control, getting Wade to think straight.

As she pulled the door to the guest room shut, a framed picture on the wall in the hallway fell to the floor. It was the photograph of Wade’s mother, the one he’d brought into the kitchen during dinner. It had still been propped beneath the table when Wade had ordered her into the bedroom to hold a conference about dead brothers. Isaac must have noticed the gap and the empty nail on the wall and returned it to its spot.

As Helen bent to retrieve the portrait, she considered the face of the woman who would have been her mother-in-law had she still been alive. Wade felt this woman had loved Isaac more than she’d loved him. Without siblings herself, Helen had no idea what that felt like or if it was a reasonable feeling or not.

She lifted the framed photograph, lining the mounting bracket up with the nail, and as she stepped back, she saw in the reflection of the glass that Isaac was standing directly behind her.

Her heart leaped.

She spun around.

No Isaac. No one was there.

Helen looked back at the picture. The glass was clear.

She had to pull herself together. Falling apart took little energy but putting oneself together required so much more than she had. Best to avoid it entirely. The day had been painful; her unanswered plea to Tyler had almost broken her. Killing a bird had oddly saved her from the worst, but the sadness of it had also fractured her further, if that was even possible. Agnes’s visit had temporarily helped to bring her back to baseline, but then things had unraveled again this evening. The initial panic of Isaac’s unexpected arrival had caused more stress. Then Wade’s tense behavior and bizarre declaration that Isaac was dead magnified the stress. It was too much. Anyone—even a happy, healthy person—would be bent into strange shapes from a day like this.

She just needed to calm herself, and then she could help Wade calm down too.

Helen took a few deep breaths, and she heard Edgar Allan Poe’s words in her head: I stand amid the roar of a surf-tormented shore, and I hold within my hand grains of the golden sand.

She repeated the lines of poetry in her head several times as she breathed deeply. There was no unkempt woman in the kitchen, there was no masked man in the closet, and Isaac was not a dead man. There was just the roar of the shore and the sand in her hand.

She was fine.

Wade would be fine.

It was October, and next would come November, and then December, and she would turn thirty-four and the sun would continue to shine and the coyotes would continue to whine. Yes, indeed.

Helen entered their bedroom and found Wade pacing. He stopped, hands on hips, and looked at her expectantly. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened. He’s about to go to sleep.”

Wade shook his head in disgust. “Sleep. That’s funny!”

She was not going to let Wade penetrate her calm. I stand amid the roar of a surf-tormented shore. She crossed to the dresser and knelt to get into the bottom drawer, where she would find spare pajamas for Isaac. She pushed aside the stack of letters and cards from Tyler’s family that she’d tied together with blue yarn. Helen occasionally wrote back, but really, what did she have to say? The green beans are ready to harvest. Wade was quiet at dinner. Besides, she knew they were just sending letters out of pity.

Helen found the cotton shirt and pajama pants she was looking for, and when she turned back around, Wade gestured at the bed. “Can you sit for a minute?”