AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I blink rapidly. Once. Twice. Three times.
“What kind of accident?”
The woman cop leans forward as though she’s rehearsed her lines a dozen times. “I’m sorry to tell you your husband didn’t make it, Mrs. Anderson.”
I drop to my knees. I try to cry, I really give it my best effort. But nothing comes. She’s supposed to use the word dead. Or some form of it. I read that once. I blink again, when I look up at them. Maybe if I hear the word, it will stir something. “Is he dead?”
They glance at one another. “Is there someone we can call?”
I don’t answer. There is someone, yes. But I can’t tell them. It’s not wise to start there.
“Mrs. Anderson?”
“Beth.”
“Beth?”
“My best friend.”
Again, they look at each other.
Then they break the news about the Joneses. They ask me questions. More routine stuff. Did I know them to be drinkers? Did I know they planned to go boating? Did they often take the boat out at night?
“Yes,” I say to all of it. Tom told me he was stopping by after work to pick up some paperwork. He was supposed to come straight home afterward. I fell asleep and didn’t realize he hadn’t.
They follow me into the kitchen. Flashes of the way things were come at me from the side, like ambushes. Or at least I want them to. I have to evoke some sort of emotion, otherwise eyebrows might be raised. Tom’s mug is there by the coffee pot as though it’s waiting to be filled. The ordinary, a reminder, poking at me. The angle just right. A knife in the back. The sight of it knocks the wind out of me. Tears fall, I lie, and in some ways, things haven’t changed that much.
The officers explain that they found the wreckage just after daylight, when a fishing boat saw smoke. Is there someone that could identify the body?
I say I want to do it.
They advise this isn’t a good idea. Before I know it I am sobbing—wailing, to be exact. I’m just so thankful to be out from under the life sentence I’d agreed to at the altar.
Adam can do it, I tell them finally. Let it be a warning to him. It probably won’t serve as a sufficient warning, since Adam still thinks I bailed from the boat prior to the accident. He thinks Beth and Tom hauled me into the water in hopes that I would drown. He doesn’t know what I’m capable of. Yet.
Of the three of them, Adam tells me Mark was the most recognizable. Blunt force trauma did the job, but the rest of him was in good shape. He could have been sleeping.
And Beth? I’d asked. Her neck was snapped in two. Her body bloated from the water.
I don’t ask about Tom. Adam volunteers. He was bruised a bit. But that’s just how dead bodies look, he said. Adam is a liar. And sadly, an almost believable one. It’s okay; we all have our secrets, I guess.
Secrets do a lot of things. They make you exciting. They make you adventurous. They make you important. But there comes a point where having a secret without anybody knowing loses its fun. And while, maybe you don’t necessarily want to let others in on what that secret is, you at least want them to know you have one.
I tell myself no one will ever know I killed Tom.
Soon, someone has to know.
Maybe it will be Adam I confide in. Sometimes saying nothing says too much.
After all, he started this whole thing that night in a hotel bar. If it had not been for him, I’d be back at my parents. I’d be happily married to someone who wasn’t Tom. If it weren’t for him, I would not be Melanie Anderson. I shouldn’t have fallen in love with him. I shouldn’t have played his silly, dangerous game.
Agreeing to that dinner was the start of something. It was the start of secrets neither one of us knew the magnitude of. What I did know then was he wanted power. He wanted to lead New Hope, and he had a plan to propel himself to the top. He said that if I wanted in, there was money to be made. Money sounded nice. But what I really wanted was a home. I wanted something of my own. I wanted not to have to go crawling back to my parents, tail tucked neatly between my legs. I wanted someone to love me. In the end, we both got what we wanted, I suppose. You have to pick your enemies carefully because the way those enemies fight is who you become. It’s too bad so much damage was done in the process.
I gut the house. I don’t want to stay here, but I can’t sell it too soon. I had half-expected that Tom’s adult children might have contested the will, but they don’t. It’s apparent that they have moved on with their lives and prefer to leave the past in the past. Tom had told me that he gave them their mother’s life insurance settlement, and that they were set. The looks on their faces at the funeral tell me they are sadder about what could have been than what they actually lost. I think about my own parents dying someday. I think I can relate.
Your father loved you, I said to them. He talked about you all the time.
I don’t know if they knew I was lying because this time I tried really hard.
