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

were no old wounds for those who’d lost a child. There were just wounds, forever open and festering, with no promise of even a crusty scab, much less any real healing.

So he drove out to the Benners’ place on this day of cold and snow, a day of such quiet he felt as if he were navigating the lunar landscape, desolate in its isolation, painful in its beauty.

Colin didn’t know what he was going to ask them. Maybe he wouldn’t ask them anything. Maybe he’d just tell them he was someone with information about their son and preferred to remain anonymous. Perhaps he’d tell them what he suspected about the Yates family and then just slip away, leaving them to their own devices.

That kind of thing would get him fired, no doubt.

But moreover, it was just wrong. He only knew what he knew, and all that knowledge stopped short of certainty. Maybe Cora Yates was just unfortunate in that she was one of the last to see Caleb. Perhaps the floor repairs Logan Yates rushed to complete the day after Caleb disappeared had been needed for years. Maybe Rose Yates truly mourned the death of her husband, who died accidentally when his desire for deep sleep outweighed his common sense.

But when Colin thought about it, really thought about it, it wasn’t information he wanted to impart to the Benner family. He wanted advice.

How do you do it?

How do you push on, day by day, with such blackness covering your every thought? Does laughing make you feel guilty? Were you ever intimate again after your son disappeared, and if so, was that an act of love or just sheer desperation for touch, a need to feel something?

Colin knew a lot about survivors and their coping mechanisms… You couldn’t be a detective and not know such things. But all he’d learned couldn’t reconcile how he felt, which was that he didn’t think he could last another week.

So maybe the Benners could tell him how they did it. How they lasted. Or just how to make it that one more week.

Whether or not he’d even summon the strength to knock on their door remained to be seen. All he knew was some invisible and indefinable source had told him to come here. Whatever unfolded would be unplanned, as were the best and worst things that happen to anyone.

As he neared their house, his attention was drawn to the curb at the end of the Benners’ driveway. A Suburban idled in front of the house, its exhaust rising into the air like ghosts escaping into the wild.

Colin slowed, squinted his eyes. Focused on the license plate.

He knew that plate. Knew it by heart.

It was the car Rose Yates drove. Registered to Logan Yates.

“Holy hell,” Colin said, crouching over his steering wheel.

He pulled up alongside the Suburban. Through his snow-streaked tinted window, he saw her.

Rose Yates.

Parked in front of the Benners’ house.

Colin had been so sure something was going to happen today. And whatever that something was, it was going to happen now.

Right now.

He rolled down his window.

Sixty-Six

I roll my window down, because what else is there to do?

I don’t have to explain anything. I’m not doing anything wrong. I don’t have to say a word.

But I want to tell him everything.

“Detective Pearson,” I say. I try to say it with the ease of meeting an old friend, but I can barely hear my words over the sound of the blood pumping through my head.

“Rose,” he says.

“You’re back.”

“I am.”

“Are you following me?”

He shakes his head. “No. I believe this is one of those strange moments in life when things just line up.”

“Do you believe in such things?”

“I do now,” he says.

He’s a hundred years older than when I last saw him, and it’s not just the heavy weariness on his face. It’s his soul. His energy. It’s 10 percent of what I saw just a month ago, an EKG close to flatlining.

“I’m sorry about your wife,” I say. “And your…your baby.”

“Thank you.”

There’s nothing thankful about any of this.

“Why are you here?” I ask.

He thinks about this a moment, taking his time. “Well, I suppose I came to see you. And then, in the moment, I thought I’d come to see them.” He nods at the house. “But I guess I’m really just doing what you did. Running away after tragedy. Back to Bury.”

Back to Bury. How that phrase hits me in the moment. I did come here to bury things, mostly my past. But the past doesn’t lie six feet underground. It’s a zombie, relentless in its need to feast.

“I’m not running away,” I say. “I’m going back to Milwaukee. Driving there today.”

“That so?”

“It is.”

“Still, we should talk. Long as I’m here.”

I look back at Max, who’s staring at me with wide eyes. The back windows of the Suburban are tinted so dark I doubt Pearson even sees my son.

“Who is he?” Max whispers.

I roll up my window. “No one to be concerned about,” I say. I hate dismissing his question, but I don’t really know how else to answer. “Someone I know,” I add.

I see him processing, and then all his calculations get stuck as his mouth hangs open half an inch and his gaze goes out to the beyond. Max is having one of his moments, one of his fugues.

“You in there?” I ask.

He doesn’t reply, just stares out the windshield. Three months ago, this would have concerned me. Now, after a number of these spells, I know he’ll snap out of it in a moment or two. Were we at home, I’d sit next to him until he became responsive again.

Now I don’t. Now I have to talk to Pearson. Max will be fine.

I tell him to wait in the car and I’ll just be a few moments.

I get out, leaving the ignition running, heat blowing.

The Jeep is only feet away, and after I close the door of my car, I open the passenger door of Pearson’s.

Now I’m sitting next to