Our Wicked Lies by Gledé Kabongo (story read aloud TXT) 📗

the truth. Tonight. I will text you tomorrow morning to confirm. Then we can move on to my demands.

Eliot shoved back his swivel chair and slammed the phone down on the desk. He picked it up again and began composing a response to the text. He stopped midway, deleted the message, and tossed the phone across the room. It ricocheted off the door and landed on the floor near a leather armchair.

He had awakened early with a massive headache hammering away at his skull. After taking two aspirins, he got an early start to his day once the headache subsided. He had yet to tell Alicia that Arnie had, effectively, suspended him, so he’d been holed up in his study since six a.m., unable to concentrate on work.

The story had created a media firestorm, and his phone wouldn’t stop ringing, another reason he was on edge. He just yelled at a reporter who had asked him how it felt to turn his wife into a killer. How dare they? And then the text had come in right on the heels of that call. His pulse wouldn’t stop racing. Every little sound made him jumpy. Who was he kidding? He was unraveling.

Marston and Lily had slept at their friends’ houses so they could get to school without tripping all over reporters who’d staked out their street, waiting to ambush anyone with the last name Gray.

On top of all the chaos swirling around him, Eliot’s stomach churned at the thought of how much the anonymous stalker knew. Where was he or she getting the information from? Had Katalina confessed to Richard before she died? But Richard would not accuse Eliot of killing her when Richard was the one who had been home, on the floor above, when she died. Why was McBride casting suspicion on him and Alicia, when he should be worried about that old concussion at the back of Katalina’s head and how it got there?

He left the study in desperate search of caffeine. Not a good idea since he was already tense, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t sit in that room, alone with his thoughts, any longer. As he leaned against the kitchen island, coffee in hand, he observed Alicia whose back was to him at the kitchen table. She hadn’t acknowledged him when he entered the room. It was like he wasn’t even there. Their home had become a ghost town. His daughters wouldn’t look him in the eye, let alone speak to him. The house echoed with the absence of joy. No laughing, teasing, and ribbing during family dinners.

He walked over and pulled out a chair and placed the mug on the table. The move startled Alicia, and she glanced up at him.

“Harry Meyers is coming over later to discuss strategy,” he announced. “Preliminary findings from the toxicology reports came back. The information will cast significant doubt on McBride’s case, if not completely demolish his theory that Katalina’s death was a homicide.”

He rushed through his words, suddenly feeling nervous around her. Alicia didn’t look at him, anymore. She looked through him. She was there, in physical reach, but she was slipping through his fingers. He’d already lost her respect. Her dazzling smile had vanished, the sparkle gone from her eyes.

She no longer took care of him as she had in the past. She didn’t compliment him and barely registered his presence when he came home. He recalled the many nights in the past when she’d waited up for him, worried about him. The times she’d picked out his suits, told him how amazing he was, and how proud she was to be his wife. It was all gone.

He had stubbornly refused to move out of their bedroom when she’d asked him to, after she discovered he cheated on her with Katalina.

“You have no shame,” she had shouted at him. “I’m not leaving this bedroom, so you can just go. I don’t care where.”

“I’m not leaving either,” he’d countered. “We’ve hardly slept apart in twenty years except for when I went away on business. I’m not going to start now.”

He’d done it to annoy her, get under her skin. He knew moving out would have been the right thing to do, but he wanted to punish her for what she had done to their son. So, they slept with plenty of space between them in the massive, king-sized, albeit cold, marital bed.

Last night, however, he had been at his lowest point since his life imploded. Truth be told, he was feeling sorry for himself. He’d become the villain in this story it seemed. He’d reached for Alicia. She always knew how to comfort him.

But she brushed him off with a harsh, impersonal, “Don’t touch me!” Then she’d gotten out of bed and disappeared for an hour, slipping under the covers only after she thought he was asleep.

He wasn’t. The humiliation of being rejected by his wife felt like a Mack truck had run him over. What did you expect, a parade?

He forced the memory to dissolve and refocused on the present.

Ignoring his comment, as if he hadn’t spoken, Alicia said, “The girls are having a hard time at school. It makes them uncomfortable, the not-so-subtle whispers that either of their parents could be a killer. The fallout is huge. The only upside is that the school year is almost over.”

This is partially McBride’s fault, Eliot thought. The media nightmare was his doing. “McBride’s not convinced it was an accident, and he tried the case in the court of public opinion before he had one shred of evidence that this was anything other than an accident. Sloppy detective work. I expected better from him.”

He explained the results of the toxicology report that Delia, his investigator, had shared with him, as well as the coroner’s report that uncovered the existence of an old concussion Katalina had suffered. He omitted the pregnancy.

She listened without saying a word.

“I must warn you though,” he added.

Although she didn’t move, he knew he had