Chapter Nine

The priest gave a choking cough. Curtis blew a regretful sigh and didn’t speak. Brooke simply nodded, appearing unperturbed at the accusation. The widow set her cup on the table at her elbow and lifted deep blue eyes to Meredith. For the first time, she noted puffiness below the woman’s eyes, covered expertly with makeup. She felt a twinge of guilt at her harsh words. For the first time, she wondered whether she was mistaken.

“Thank you.” Brooke spoke quietly. “I appreciate your bringing this to me.”

The woman’s poise was impressive. Defensiveness or anger, maybe even a run for the door, would be expected, but not this calm gratitude. “Why would he accuse you? He was very upset, and very sure.”

Brooke didn’t blink, her expression gentle as if talking to a recalcitrant child. “As I said, Jacob lost his job a while ago. When he couldn’t find another job, he became very depressed and started acting strangely. Anxious. Angry. The last few months, he wasn’t the same man anymore. It was as though I’d lost my husband already.”

Silence descended on the room. The priest paled and his fingers fidgeted at a rosary he’d drawn from his pocket. Meredith glanced sideways at Curtis, but he stood stock-still next to her. His mouth was set in a line, lips unmoving, offering her no assistance. Perspiration formed at her upper lip, but she couldn’t stop herself. Brian and Jacob. Jacob and Brian. Her heart jumped in her chest. “You told Jacob you fixed the brakes on his car, but the mechanic said they weren’t touched.”

“Stop it.” The statement came from the kitchen doorway, the words dripping with venom. “Everyone knows who you are,” Caro said. “You don’t belong here.” She took a step forward and then strode across the room to stand next to Brooke.

Curtis put a steadying hand on Meredith’s shoulder. “This is an emotional time, for everyone. Let’s remember that. There’s no point in making this worse.”

Caro hadn’t finished. “Your husband’s murder was big news,” she said. “Everyone knows about you, your family. Don’t drag those city lifestyles up here.”

It wasn’t fair. She’d been vindicated. Besides, murder wasn’t a city lifestyle. These words were on the tip of her tongue, but Curtis gripped his hand under her elbow and tugged her up and off the sofa. “We need to go now.” His tone indicated there would be no debate.

Father Michael stood as well, his face stern and reproaching. The chilly atmosphere took her back to the previous spring when she was the accused, a murderess. Brooke watched coolly as they went to the door. “Forgive me if we don’t walk you out,” Brooke said, rooted to her seat. One of her hands clutched the priest's, the other held Caro’s. The three remained riveted in place.

Curtis and Meredith were at the doorway, then out the door. He led her to his truck. “Get in,” he ordered.

****

He drove around the corner, out of sight of Brooke’s house. She waited for him to blast her and so prepared her arguments for why she confronted Brooke. They drove up a hill, the snow crunching under the tires and his hands squeezed the steering wheel. His knuckles squeezed and released, and she wished he’d yell at her and get it over with.

“I have to pick up Jamie soon.”

“Hmmm.”

“Curtis. Say something.”

“Look up there. By God, that’s a beautiful sight.”

She gazed up to where he pointed at a bald eagle high in a pine, its white head shimmering as though snow-capped. As they watched, the huge bird lifted its wings and with a weighty flap soared off over the trees.

“Where are we going?”

“Don’t you trust me?” His tone was jesting although his expression remained serious.

Meredith twisted in her seat to face him. Her gaze traced his lips, chapped in the cold, and over his solid jawline, covered with his ever-present two-day stubble. His profile was so familiar and dear to her now.

She recalled their hike—was the outing just a few days back? —when he started to say something to her: “You know I’m here for you and…” Jamie had interrupted to point out a herd of elk, then Curtis’s phone rang to alert him to Jacob’s death. It was the moment everything went wrong. She wondered what he was going to say next and what would have happened if he had a chance to say it. His expression was warm as he gazed down at her and her heart had quickened. Only two others before affected her the same way: Brian and a boy in high school years ago.

The boy in high school was skinny and his ears stuck out, but he’d been sweet and shared her circumstance of being in the group teachers categorized as “disadvantaged.” His name was Sam.

A smile crept to her lips in recollection. They’d been best friends for a year before he gathered the nerve to kiss her. Then her mother got sick and there was no time for school, or Sam, or anything. When she returned to classes after her mother died, Sam was gone. A note in her locker explained his family planned a move to Tennessee. There was no forwarding address. Neither of them was the type of people who stayed anywhere long enough to have permanent addresses. This was understood.

Then there was Brian, and their marriage didn’t end well. Maybe she was fated to be unlucky in love, attracting men who would leave her. Maybe she was doomed to repeat her mother’s life of drifting and poverty, and never having a place to call home. Her life wasn’t like Jacob’s, who loved his wife since grade school. Not like this sheriff sitting next to her, who lived in the same town nearly his entire life.

Curtis cleared his throat, halting her musings. “I thought we both needed a bit of a drive. To reset our thoughts.”

“I needed to see her,” she explained. “After what Jacob told me.”

“Meredith, my hands are tied. There’s no evidence of murder. The doctor confirmed a heart attack, did an autopsy. I don’t have a murder investigation without a murder. Trust me, I believe what you’ve told me, about what Jacob said. I believe he said those things to you, but a man’s fear isn’t evidence.”

He turned the steering wheel hard onto another road which angled them back toward Twin Lakes. “I’m more worried about you right now,” he added, glancing at her. “Just so you know, I didn’t sign the death certificate before visiting Brooke, but now I have no choice. This is how my job works.”

His words made sense. Of course, there was no murder. There’d just been a sick man obsessed with murder fantasies, leaving a grieving widow. Jacob’s anxiety was the last straw for an already stressed heart.

Meredith gave a short laugh. “I’m a little crazy, right? Showing up out of the blue?”

He kept his gaze on the road in front of them and she took his silence as agreement. Crazy. Yep. “I’m not sure there’s a normal for all you’ve been through,” he finally said. “My impression is you’re handling it all pretty well. Definitely not crazy.”

They rounded a corner and parked in front of the library, next to her car. The windshield was covered in a sheet of white, and its tires were frozen against the pavement. She didn’t want to get out of the truck, a foot away from a man she was more than half in love with.

“Be careful driving down the mountain. Remember to turn the wheel into a slide if you start slipping. It’s the cardinal rule of driving out here.”

She couldn’t help but smile at him. “You’ve told me already, a few times.”

Curtis returned her smile, and then his gaze dropped. “Like I said, I worry about you.”

It took everything she possessed inside not to throw herself into his arms. Instead, she opened the door and stepped into the cold.

****

Honey’s head poked deep into Meredith’s refrigerator as she examined the expiration dates of mayonnaise jars and milk cartons. “How long are you going to keep your husband in a box?”

Meredith nearly spat out her coffee.

“It’s high time you buried him,” her friend continued, as she stacked containers with remnants of moldy cottage cheese and old leftovers on the counter. “It’s not healthy to keep those ashes sitting around.”

Brian’s ashes were in a plain cardboard box, the cheapest container offered, which was the only affordable option at the time. She had no money for a cemetery plot, a stone, or a niche in a wall to place his ashes. Now she had a small sum in the bank, enough to do something modest and more respectful with his remains. The other woman was right. Certainly, it would be better than having them in the back of her closet, where Jamie and Atticus could come across them. The idea made her wince.

Meredith blew out a breath and set down her coffee cup. “I’ve been thinking about burying him back by the tree in our yard. Where the kids can visit him.”

Honey made an exasperated sound and closed the refrigerator door with a thud. “You absolutely, positively are not.” Her tone was firm. “You want to frighten your kids? Having their daddy buried in the back yard?”

She still wondered if her friend was behind Brian’s murder, even in some subtle way. Even though Honey’s long-ago ex-husband readily confessed to the murder, Meredith continued to get the vibe someone prodded him into killing Brian. Shorty, who scarcely knew the family he treated poorly so many years ago, didn’t have enough reason to murder someone hurting a granddaughter he barely knew. Her friend, though. The unshakeable woman was someone who would do anything to protect her family…even, she suspected, encouraging her off-kilter ex-husband to murder someone.

Honey plucked up their coffee cups from the table and set them in the sink. Her plump grandmotherly face was in sharp contrast to her stubborn nature. “Get up,” she ordered. “We’re going to the city cemetery. That’s where I buried my Milt. You’re going to get something appropriate, where Brian’s kids can visit when they’re older. Whatever that man did, he’s still their daddy.”

She rose obediently. In the few days since confronting Brooke, she’d learned one lesson. Her obsession with Jacob’s death most certainly was connected to her inability to let go of her past. It was time to bury her past, literally and figuratively. It was time.

****

She chose a simple niche halfway down a wall and paid for a small plaque etched with Brian’s name, along with his birth and death dates. It struck her for the first time how young he'd been when he died, even though he always seemed so much older than her in life. Thirty-three was much too young to die. How long would it take her to forgive him for all he did in the few years they’d been together. Was forgiveness even important or necessary? Her book on meditation instructed to let the past go and to focus on the present. Her past haunted her and invaded her present; it would be a relief to be able to let it all go. Meredith recalled the scene at Brooke’s house. She closed her eyes.

“…joint niche?” the man was asking.

Her eyes flew open. “What? I’m sorry.”

The man at the cemetery was all sympathy and understanding, tilting his head to one side with a practiced frown. “This is a difficult hour,” he intoned. “Take your time. I was just asking if you wanted to pre-pay for a joint niche, so you can join your husband when the time comes.”

She shook her head. “I won’t be joining him.” She fumbled in her purse for her wallet. “How much?”

****

Finished with the details, she strode outside where Honey strolled with Atticus and Jamie by the memorial wall. The cemetery grounds were sparse, with fewer than a hundred flat stones and a few older upright markers set into an acre of close-cut yellowed lawn. The wall, rising up six feet, was down a brief sidewalk from the office building.

“I explained to Jamie her daddy’s ashes will be right here, so she can come talk to him whenever she wants,” Honey said.

Jamie studied the blank niche with a frown. “I don’t think so. My daddy’s dead now.”

The five-year-old clutched the tail of her lion costume to her chest as she stared at the wall, full of dead people. She’d refused to take off her Halloween costume for anything except a bath for days. After wearing it to school, serving as pajamas at night, and absorbing various spills at meals, Jamie would eventually have to relinquish the costume to the washing machine. Heaven help us all if the mane unravels or the tail comes off, Meredith thought.

Honey heaved a sigh, her shoulders rising and falling heavily. “Come with me.”

Not looking back, she marched across the grass to a small flat stone at one edge of the cemetery, weaving among the markers. They followed her, Jamie first, then Meredith hand-in-hand with a toddling Atticus, his chubby legs pumping up and down. There was no path so they walked across the dying lawn and likely, Meredith imagined, on top of people’s caskets and bones. Cremation made so much more sense to her than burying one’s dead. She’d read of one cemetery, so crowded the caskets were buried on top of one another. Someday, those coffins would rot away, raining bones down on others below, all sinking deeper into the earth together. There was no guarantee at some far-off future date, a stranger wouldn’t be buried above her. She’d rather blow away in the wind.

Her friend stopped before a stone and tapped the marker with one foot, like she was knocking on a door. “Hi-ya Milt,” she called out. “You have visitors.”

They stared down at the stone, etched with “Milton Jackson Stohler, Sprouted 1947, Replanted 2015.” Honey’s second marriage was idyllic, and the woman truly mourned Milt’s loss to cancer. People called them “Milk and Honey,” the story went, because they fit so well together as a couple. Even the road they lived on was named “Ham and Eggs Road” because the couple raised pigs and chickens on their small farm.

“Death is a mystery, for sure,” the woman explained to Jamie. “We don’t know if your daddy can hear you or not. But I talk to my Milt all the time and I think he hears me. If there’s even a chance he can hear me, I don’t want him wondering why I’m ignoring him. It’s good enough reason for me.”

Jamie bit her lip. “I can tell my daddy about school,” she started in a hesitant voice. “He’d want to know about Karin and the princi-pess. And my rabbit being pregnant. And Laf being a boy chicken, not a girl chicken.”

“Exactly,” Honey encouraged. “There’s a lot to tell him.”

Jamie nodded. “Okay,” she agreed, the subject settled. “I’ll come and talk to him.”

Meredith appreciated how the older woman could talk so easily to her kids. Both of them adored her and the woman soaked in the adoration like a thirsty sponge gone too long without water.

“You can give a hello to Milt too whenever you stop by,” said Honey. “He was always a talker and he’s a great listener now.” Meredith wondered if she was making a morbid joke, but her friend was blinking back tears. The older woman spoke as though to herself. “Milt has a very forgiving nature. I’m not sure I ever deserved him.” Honey shook her head as though conveying herself back to the present and smiled at Jamie. She nodded toward the car. “I always eat some cookies after my visit. Oatmeal or ginger snaps?”

****

Jamie ran into the master bedroom that night and jumped into her bed. Her daughter tugged at the blankets, burrito-ing herself inside them until Meredith possessed nothing but a sheet on her side. Within minutes, Jamie began to snore in a soft rhythm.

Rain pounded the roof, causing a steady drumming above their heads. Meredith rose. She checked on Atticus, who had one thumb firmly stuck in his mouth, and then she wandered through the living room and into the kitchen. The house was taking a beating but the roof Curtis patched for her appeared to be holding and all was dry and snug. It was small and shabby…maybe a shade below shabby…but the house was all hers. Outside, there was a garden, a tree swing and a walking path cutting through the fields to the tall eastern mountains.

My house. My home. Two healthy children. I have a job and I’m taking a college class.

They were getting by, but just barely. Was it wrong to be happy with so little? There had to be more to life than money in the bank. Curtis told her there was no normal for what she’d been through—the years of living with Brian’s cruelty and betrayal, then his murder. She felt safe here in Hay City, with a growing sense of belonging, and this seemed like everything. With Jacob’s death settled once and for all as a natural occurrence, she could return her focus to her own life.

She checked on Jamie again who by now had rolled her mound of blankets to the middle of the bed, taking the rest of the sheet with her. She sighed and then went to Jamie’s room, stepping gingerly over dolls and shoes, before climbing in her daughter’s narrow bed. A lump at her feet made her grope under the blankets and she plucked out a stuffed rabbit Brian gave to Jamie one Christmas. One ear was missing as well as most of the fur on the front legs, but since Brian’s death, Jamie wouldn’t go to bed without it. She dropped the toy to the floor and then, reconsidering, stretched over and retrieved it. She hugged the rabbit to her chest and listened as the pitter-patter of rain on the roof softened and then disappeared.

She closed her eyes and slept, without dreams.