The Good Son by Carolyn Mills (free e reader txt) 📗

a grunt and a huff of impatience. “Okay, so now do you, like, have to move around slowly or something?”

“No, no, not at all. But I won’t be running any marathons!” Mom tried to laugh, but it came out all wrong, like a strangled cry instead of a light-hearted chuckle. “Things have just been …” She paused. “A little stressful lately.”

She meant because of what happened to Amy. I looked at Ricky, but his face didn’t give anything away. And I knew in that moment that it was up to me to protect Mom so that her heart didn’t break the rest of the way.

CHAPTER TWO

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I CAN’T SIT UP ALL night watching the news, so after another twenty or thirty minutes I drag myself to bed. Burrowing into the comforting warmth of my duvet, I do my best to ignore the seeds of anxiety drifting through my veins and rooting in my bones. My whole body aches. How I manage to fall asleep is a mystery, but eventually I do, because I am jerked awake at five thirty by the insistent beeping of my alarm clock.. I might have slept, but I didn’t sleep well. Drifting in and out of consciousness, I spent a good chunk of the night rehashing all the details from the days and weeks following Amy’s murder — what I knew and what I thought I knew. All night, my mind circled and circled around certain truths before finally collapsing like a tired spinning top. As soon as I lift myself to a sitting position, I feel a familiar pressure building in my sinuses and a faint pulsing above my ears.

I’m almost afraid to look at my phone, but there’s nothing from Mom. Nothing from Ricky. The last person who called me was Jason and I remember ignoring my phone when it rang last night. I make myself a coffee, but when I take my first sip, it’s like swallowing liquid ash. Maybe I should call in sick. Except I’m not really sick, I tell myself.

My interview is only three days away. And after that, I’m going to tell Jason that despite what I said on Sunday, I am ready for us to move in together. I cannot come undone again, not like before. I am going to pull myself together and get ready for work and act like everything is normal. I shoot Jason a quick text, promising to call him tonight. I have no idea what I’m going to say to him. I’m still trying to figure out what to tell myself.

I manage to choke down two pieces of toast and half an apple. I move through the kitchen sluggishly, washing and drying my plate, wiping the crumbs from the table, focusing on going through the familiar motions of getting ready for work. When I step outside, the grass is laced with frost and the cold air hits me like an icy slap in the face. As I drive across the bridge toward the plant, the sun is only just starting to creep above the horizon. Normally, I enjoy taking in the muted colours of the sunrise, but as the pressure behind my eyes continues to build, my attention is hijacked by the streaks of pain shooting through my head.

When I meet the junior operator assigned to the night shift for the hand-off, I take a minute to wish I could spend the entire day in the warmth and quiet of the control room. The steady hum of the computers might serve as a soothing backdrop to my roiling thoughts, although monitoring the SCADA screens requires a level of awareness I’m not sure I possess at the moment. In fact, I don’t have a lot of faith in my ability to concentrate on anything other than the news about Amy Nessor’s case being re-opened. After a short recap detailing the night shift’s operations, which lasts less than fifteen minutes, I’m back in the bowels of the plant, where it’s cold and damp and loud.

As I make my rounds, I think back to Roger’s insistence when he was training me that if I didn’t record every single action I took in the various log books scattered around the plant, whether it was adjusting a valve, or taking a reading, or turning a dial, it would be tantamount to committing a crime.

“If you go to the bathroom, you better write it down,” he joked.

“Why is it so important to record everything?” I asked, thinking it sounded a bit ridiculous. I mean, obviously, I understood the need to record certain things, but every single miniscule adjustment made in the course of a shift?

“There are a lot of regulations around water quality,” Roger explained. “If something goes wrong, they want to know exactly how and when it happened. And who’s responsible. Things got a little fussy after Walkerton.”

I thought being at work today would help keep my mind busy, but moving around only makes my head feel like it’s doubled in size. My left eye has started to water and my aching limbs scream for a break. I push my earplugs in deeper, but the roar of equipment is only slightly muffled by the flimsy foam inserts. I fight to concentrate while I’m calculating alum levels, but my mind stubbornly returns over and over to the re-opened investigation and I can’t shake the certainty that everything is about to fall apart. That my tentative hold on happiness was, once again, only an illusion.

THE NESSORS DIDN’T STAY IN Dunford after Amy’s murder. Sometime after Christmas they moved to New Brunswick, where Mrs. Nessor’s sister lived. I probably couldn’t have pointed to New Brunswick on a map back then, but I knew enough to understand that it was far away from Dunford. It made sense to me, this running away. Every time I walked past Amy’s house, I remembered her doing something outside of it: skipping on the sidewalk, having a tea party, jumping in piles of leaves. It must