The Dead Husband by Carter Wilson (best summer reads of all time .txt) 📗

Also by Carter Wilson

Mister Tender’s Girl

The Dead Girl in 2A

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Books. Change. Lives.

Copyright © 2021 by Carter Wilson

Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

Cover design by Olga Grlic

Cover images © Ebru Sidar/Arcangel

Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

“The Girl at the End of the World” by James. © 2016, written by Tim Booth. Used with permission.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks

P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

(630) 961-3900

sourcebooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Part I

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Part II

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Part III

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Fifty

Fifty-One

Fifty-Two

Fifty-Three

Fifty-Four

Fifty-Five

Fifty-Six

Fifty-Seven

Fifty-Eight

Fifty-Nine

Sixty

Sixty-One

Sixty-Two

Sixty-Three

Sixty-Four

Sixty-Five

Sixty-Six

Sixty-Seven

Sixty-Eight

Sixty-Nine

Seventy

Seventy-One

Seventy-Two

Excerpt from The Dead Girl in 2A

One

Two

Reading Group Guide

A Conversation with the Author

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Back Cover

For Drew

the nicest guy I know

Remind me to breathe at the end of the world,

Appreciate scenes and the love I’ve received,

There’s always a girl at the end of the world,

The departing,

The departing.

—JAMES, “THE GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD”

Part I

One

Bury, New Hampshire

August 11

The name of the town is Bury, but it hasn’t always been. The local government renamed the town from Chester after a local Union soldier named William Bury did some heroic thing or another a hundred and whatever years ago.

Poor Chester. They took the name of a whole town right away from him.

Bury, New Hampshire.

Most locals pronounce it berry, though there’s a small faction of lifers who insist it rhymes with fury. Doesn’t matter how it sounds out loud. In my head this town always makes me think of underground things, burrowed by worms, hidden from light. Secrets.

I grew up here. Part of me has always been buried here.

Thunderheads jostle for space in the summer sky. The air is heavy enough to create a drag on my steps, or maybe it’s just my natural hesitation to walk up the long stone path to my father’s front door. The house in which I grew up looms, as it always has, grand but not beautiful. Rum Hill Road is filled with mansions, but none of them feel like homes.

Max grabs my right hand as we approach the door. He does this when he’s scared, feeling shy, or simply wants to be somewhere else. In other words, a lot of the time. Not atypical for any eleven-year-old, much less one who’s going through what Max is. What we both are.

I look down and the diffused light from the gunmetal sky makes his blue eyes glow, as if all his energy is stored right behind those irises. Max has his dad’s eyes. Looking at my son, this fact haunts me, as if I’m seeing the ghost of Riley. I don’t want to see any part of my dead husband in Max.

It hits me again. I’m only thirty-seven and a widow. It’s both depressing and freeing.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. I think I’ve said those two words as much as I’ve said I love you to him over the past month. One phrase is the truth. The other is a hope.

“I don’t like Bury,” he says.

“We just got here.”

He gives my arm a tug of protest. “It’s not Milwaukee. It’s not home.”

I tousle his hair, which probably assures me more than him. “No, it sure isn’t.”

We reach the front door, a curved and heavy slab of maple reinforced with iron hinges and bands. My father told me when I was a little girl that a door like ours conveyed wealth and strength. That we needed a thick door, like a castle, because it sent a sign to all who tried to enter. I asked him who we needed to protect ourselves from, and I’ll never forget his answer.

Everyone.

For a moment, I have the impulse to ring the bell of the house where I spent my childhood. I try the door. It’s locked, so I press the doorbell and hear the muffled ring of the familiar chime inside.

I’m surprised when my father himself opens it. He stares at me, then offers a smirk that never blossoms into a smile.

The air of the house leaks out and crawls over me. Smells of the past. The aroma of time, of long-ago fear. My father is one of the reasons I left this town and never looked back. He’s also one of the reasons I’m back. Now, in this moment, a time when I need to be here but am dying to be anywhere else, my past threatens to scoop me up and wash me out to sea.

Perhaps this is how it all ends.

Maybe I was always meant to drown in Bury.

Two

When I was seventeen, my father showed me a BusinessWeek article about him. It was a profile of his private equity firm, Yates Capital Partners, and the reporter quoted anonymous sources labeling my father “cold-blooded” and “ruthless.” My father considered those terms high praise.

Now as I look at him boxed by the mammoth doorframe, he doesn’t look all that different from his picture in the decades-old magazine. Just as bald, equally wiry and lean. If you asked a stranger what color my father’s eyes were, they’d probably guess wrong, because his eyes are largely hidden within a perpetual