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

came here to escape my life, not be suffocated by it.

But I don’t say anything, because there’s a rope still tethering me to social convention. The rope is well frayed and may only have the tensile strength of dental floss, but for now, it holds.

“He’s just closing out the case on my late husband,” I say, jaw tensed, voice monotone, offering no more. I’ve never told John my backstory, but I’m assuming he knows about Riley. I simply assume everyone knows because this is Bury.

John nods. “I see.” Assumption confirmed. “Well, I suppose that’s good,” he adds. “But…he came all the way here just to close out a case?”

“Everything’s fine,” I tell him.

“Okay.” Based on the fact that he doesn’t leave, I’m guessing it’s not really okay to him. He just hovers around a few more seconds until I finally reach out and put a hand on his arm.

“John, everything’s good. I appreciate your concern, but this is a private matter. If it’s all the same to you, I don’t want to talk about it. Things have been hard enough.”

He nods, the mustache twitches a little more, and he gives me another nod before turning and walking back down the aisle.

I exhale, as if I could simply breathe out all the things that are eating me from the inside out.

But those things stay inside, burrowing and devouring, until there is nothing left to be had.

Twenty-Six

I make it as far as the front seat of my car before I search Clara Thompson on my phone.

The first Google result tells me she was a prominent psychoanalyst who died in the 1950s. I look at the Wikipedia page and see nothing about her being a mystery writer.

I return to my search, scroll down, and realize I had the last name wrong. It’s Tomson, not Thompson. I find a link for her website.

International Bestselling Novelist

I click on it and scour through all her titles, none of which are familiar. That’s hardly surprising; I don’t read many cozy mysteries. Her bio page shows the face of an elderly woman, coiffed brunette hair, striking blue eyes, and an expression that conveys a mild displeasure at having her picture taken.

The bio is long but hardly revealing. Born in Norway just before World War II, moved to Sweden as a child. Started her writing career in her twenties, and her work mostly consists of light, cozy mysteries and includes what appears to be a very successful series featuring a character named Victoria Landon. And cats. Lots of cats.

The final bit of her bio states she’s been an evangelical Christian for over forty years. I try to find some significance in that, some tie-in to Pearson’s interest in me, but come up empty.

Back to Google, type the name in properly. First entry is her website again, but the second is what I was hoping to find. A Wikipedia page for Clara Tomson. If there’s something about her that Detective Pearson wants me to know, I’ll find it here.

The page loads, and the first thing I notice is a table of contents on the left side of the entry.

The next thing I notice is the second heading in that table of contents, the one immediately following Early Life.

It says Murder and Trial.

I thumb the hyperlink and jump to this part of her bio. A part not mentioned at all in her official website.

“Holy shit,” I say, my own voice startling me.

In dry language, Wikipedia tells me that Tomson (born Elsa Holm), committed murder when she was only sixteen. In Gothenburg, Sweden, she and her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, Liam Persson, killed Clara’s father, with Clara claiming he’d raped her numerous times from ages twelve through fifteen.

If I’m still breathing, I’m not aware of it.

They stabbed him while he slept and the mother was out of town. The worst sentence is this: The attackers presumed one blow would kill him but it took more than twenty.

Oh my god. Oh my god.

Pearson just casually dropped the name of a mystery novelist who committed murder as a teenager.

I furiously read the rest of the page, then a second time. It never states who actually did the stabbing. Maybe Tomson was just complicit but didn’t commit the act. It didn’t make a difference because both went to prison in Sweden. Tomson for just over three years, Persson for five. When they got out, Elsa Holm changed her name to Clara Tomson and started writing books. Now, she has more than thirty of them.

This woman is highly successful.

But she paid her debt to society. She never had to keep a secret. She might not detail this part of her past on her own bio, but she knows it’s not a secret.

I don’t have that luxury, if you want to call it that. I have a weight that gets heavier every day, as all secrets do.

And Pearson.

He suspects something.

Write what you know, he said.

This is about more than Riley.

This is about Bury.

Twenty-Seven

Colin walked at a slow pace as he left the grocery store, as if Rose Yates might still rush out and tell him she’d changed her mind. That she did want to talk after all. Clear the air.

But he knew that wasn’t going to happen, and his pace had less to do with a hope of talking to her and more with a reluctance to return to Milwaukee just as clueless as when he’d arrived. He’d shot the moon getting permission to come here, and his sergeant’s expectation was he’d return with evidence to either arrest or exonerate her.

Colin had neither.

He barely even had a sense of Rose Yates. Before the trip, he found as much as he could about her online. There had been a handful of blogs by and about her, a couple of podcast interviews, and even a brief local TV news interview from a few years ago when her second book had come out.

Colin thought he had a good picture of the woman. How to approach her. How to act to