CHAPTER FIVE

Mom and Dad stood huddled together in a far corner of the living room. Dad chewed at his fifth or sixth helping and Mom kept running her mouth. Bri could imagine Mom’s words: She’s shattered, completely shattered, my poor little baby, and there she is trying to be tough, to be stoic and unemotional and, well, you know where that leads . . .

It led to the night when the cramps hit hard and she huddled beside the toilet, its cold rim numbing her arm, and all the days that followed, all the pathetic weeping that she wasn’t going to be a mother, that it was all so unfair, that after all the ovulation kits and rigid breeding schedule marked in red Sharpie on the calendar, the laboratory testing and the three surgical In vitro procedures, she still wasn’t going to have a child, something made of both her and Ward, something to make her a mother and revive their marriage (as easy to restart as a car battery needing a jump), and there had been Mom holding her close and smoothing her hair over and over and saying, It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.

Bri went outside to smoke.

She smoked on and off but these past few days had brought back the old Bri, the one who chain-smoked straight through her father’s triple bypass surgery five years ago. This Bri didn’t pilfer cigarettes: this Bri purchased her own and did so by the carton.

Each inhalation made her more lightheaded and a bit nauseated but not in an unwelcome way. It was comforting to know, for instance, that it was her action inducing vertigo and roiling her stomach, not something outside of her control. Something like a car accident.

How could he have known?

The envelope was tucked inside her jacket and every few seconds her hand went to it. Ward had written the brief note, taking enough time to maintain that impeccable penmanship, and given it to Gurlop, a just-in-case action of forethought. Ward had not stashed it in the house for Bri to find, which meant Ward trusted Gurlop and she should too. Right?

Ward had written the letter, no question, but hadn’t Gurlop seemed interested in waiting for Bri to open the note? Was that simple curiosity or something more?

Leaves fluttered off the trees in her front yard. The big maple she and Ward had planted the day they bought the house stood tall. The Marriage Tree. With Ward’s death, the tree should wither and wilt.

I could burn it down, she thought and took a long drag on her cigarette.

Who else had Ward spoken with? Had he gone to the Curtises next door or the Wolfs across the street and shared his deep philosophical inquires in their homes while everyone sipped coffee and mutually pondered questions no one would ever share with Bri?

And why the hell not? Did Ward think she couldn’t handle it? That she was too fragile, been through too much? That she wasn’t smart enough? Sure, Ward was a big hotshot businessman and she had only been a teacher for a couple of years and then a puzzle maker of word games, nothing terribly meaningful, yet she had a college education. Graduated with a 3.7 GPA. Didn’t that qualify her to share in her husband’s probing of the perplexities of morality?

Maybe he just didn’t think she’d care.

She dropped the finished cigarette, crushed it, and lit another one. Ward would be so pissed. Take that cancer stick out of your mouth, he’d say. Cancer schmancer, she’d tell him. Look who’s dead.

The cool air carried the sweet smell of fall and the undertow of winter.

It wasn’t an accident. Be careful.

But he’d been killed by a drunk driver: Ray Samuelson. And now he was dead too. The guilt too much to bear, Samuelson ended his life the way he lived it—with a few swallows. A well-rounded, perfect story. Wasn’t this where a conspiratorial voice whispered, Sounds a bit too perfect, doesn’t it?

She sucked hard on the cigarette. The nicotine, and God only knew what else might be going into her lungs, went right to her head. It was scientific fact that smoking improved brain function, something about the synapses. Maybe that was bullshit, but her mind felt clearer, reemerging from a thick fog.

What if the note was some sort of joke? Maybe Ward never even wrote it. Or maybe Ward had been losing his grip.

That made her pause, cigarette at her lips.

He’d been aloof for months, even years, and she’d been content to wallow in her own little world of mindless chores, errands, and chitchat. Suppose the warning signs had been there all along? Ward might have become one of those shooters who slaughtered people in a church or a mall or a school.

She could not picture Ward in one of his grey suits, brown shoes shiny, and some clunky AK-47 in his arms. Or even a small pistol. Ward wasn’t a killer.

Which is why he killed himself.

She puffed another long drag. Assume her husband had been depressed or even crumbling into instability—he would not enact a psychotic’s vengeance on innocent people. He would take his own life.

He drove into that tractor-trailer.

Ray Samuelson’s drunkenness was simply a coincidence, and that man’s suicide was misplaced guilt. Bri should contact Samuelson’s family, tell them her theory, and beg for mercy on Ward’s behalf.

It wasn’t an accident. Be careful.

The letter was so cryptic because Ward was not in his right mind. That made sense.

Maybe.

The door opened and Jacob Moore came out onto the front steps. He feigned surprise at discovering Bri, as if he hadn’t been watching her, waiting for the right moment to strike.

“I’m sorry about before,” she said. The nicotine helped her say that, true or not.

“Completely insensitive of me. Sometimes I can’t get my head out of the office no matter what’s going on.”

More like out of your ass, she thought and felt bad. “The papers are in your car?”

He smiled. An incisor peaked over his bottom lip. “Sure are.”

She followed him down the walkway to the driveway where his gray Lexus was parked half on the front lawn. The papers were in his leather briefcase in the trunk.

She dropped her cigarette and lit another one before she realized what she was doing. Oh, well, can’t let it go to waste.

A few cars were parked at the curb. Shelly’s, her parents’, and a few others. A man sat behind the wheel of a black Town Car across the street in front of the Wolfs’ bungalow. Bri squinted but sunlight smeared across the window. Was that the same guy from the church? The same guy who’d been watching her in the cemetery? Weren’t there criminals who scoured obituaries for homes to case, vulnerable widows to victimize?

“Here we go,” Jacob said. He offered a fountain pen.

There were four pages for her to initial here and here, and sign here, here, and here. One form was a Transfer of Fiduciary Custodial something or other and she didn’t even bother glancing at the others. She signed, using the briefcase as a table, which warped her signature into a fourth-grader’s scribble.

“Happy?” she asked.

Jacob straightened the pages and locked them back in the briefcase. The pen slipped into a suit pocket. “I’m sorry, but it’s better to take care of these things sooner rather than later. All kinds of legalities.”

She almost asked what he meant, but that would elicit some spiel punctuated with bureaucratic gibberish and the thought of enduring it exhausted her. “Thank you for looking out for me, Jacob.”

He nodded, offered his condolences again. “I’ll be in touch.”

She stepped aside and watched him back out of the driveway and speed off. Two wheel ruts indented her lawn.

A skinny woman in grey spandex was walking some variety of yappy dog. She glanced at Bri as she passed and hurried her pace. In one hand, she carried a plastic bag. A woman’s job is never done.

Maybe that’s all Ward’s letter was: a tiny pile of steaming poop she had to scoop into a baggy and then drop into the trash. Preferably into someone else’s garbage can.

And if the letter was real? What if it was not simply real, and the product of a sound mind, but what if she really was in some sort of danger? What then?

A cool breeze chilled her nose.

The man on the other side of the street now stood leaning against his Town Car. Dressed in a oily-black raincoat, the man seemed to be a part of the car, a living appendage. A clump of his dark hair waved free in the breeze.

He was the guy who stayed in the back of the church and then slipped out when she’d been lost in memory. He was the guy in the cemetery, pale-faced and ill-looking. Here he was again, hands in his pockets and standing still, his shadow stretching over the car and up the Wolfs’ front lawn.

In the sunlight, his face shone red.

She started down the driveway. What the hell did this creep want? What was his issue? Had he known Ward, had dealings with him or something? Or was he some weirdo who got his jollies watching people suffer emotional distress? Maybe he traveled from funeral to funeral to photograph the bereaved so he could whack off to their tears in a some putrid-smelling apartment.

She stepped off the curb just as her brilliant line, “Hey!” crested her throat and a blasting car horn rocked her back. She stumbled, and fell to the concrete with a thwack. The driver, a man in bright yellow polo, slowed, glared at her. Like she was the one speeding. If she hadn’t been so surprised, she would’ve given him the finger.

She was up and noticing that she had ripped her pants and was now bleeding when someone grabbed her arm. She almost screamed.

“Aunt Bri?” Endrah stood there with one hand on Bri and the other on those pearls. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, honey, I’m—”

The front door banged open and Shelly stepped out. “What are you doing?”

Both sister and daughter turned. Shelly made an exasperated sound and went back inside. The door swung shut behind her.

“Never ends, does it?”

“Why don’t you like Mommy?”

“It’s not that, honey. It’s a sister thing.”

A car door closed and an engine started behind her and when Bri turned, the Town Car was a pair of fading taillights.

The man was gone.

Next Chapter: Chapter Six: A Call Changes Everything