The Wrong Family

by Tarryn Fisher

  “Who sent the email? Could it have been Dakota?” But Winnie knew the answer before it was given. Dakota wasn’t calculated enough to pull off some grand scheme; he was all impulse and anger. And besides—how could he have known about Josalyn? And when Terry had told him her story in the back rooms of the house, it was clear he was hearing it for the first time.

  “Did you know that Dakota and Nigel had words the night before he came to your house with the gun?”

  Winnie shook her head. She wished she could fast-forward through this part; he was going to say things to make her hate both her husband and her brother.

  “Your cousin, Amber, she told Dakota that Nigel was cheating on you. Do you remember having that conversation with her?”

  Winnie nodded. “Yes, but Amber didn’t tell me she’d told Dakota.”

  “Your brother threatened Nigel in the parking lot of his work. They shoved each other around before the security guard broke it up.”

  “That’s absurd. He would have told me if that happened.”

  “Are you sure...?”

  She didn’t like the look on his face.

  “Okay...” Winnie said cautiously. “What are you saying? That Dakota came to my house and killed my husband because he was cheating on me? Then why did he tie me up and almost shoot me, too?”

  “We think that when you didn’t appreciate what he was doing for you—”

  “Come on!”

  Detective Abbot held up his hand. “Give me a minute. To Dakota, it didn’t matter that you didn’t know about his scuffle with Nigel. He was the brave and chivalrous brother and you were ungrateful.”

  “No. I don’t believe that.” She looked out the window to where a seagull sat briefly on the railing outside before flying away.

  “Did you know that your brother had schizophrenic episodes?”

  “No! Well, I didn’t want to believe it.” Winnie was horrified. Manda had been telling the truth. She’d known there was something bigger going on with Dakota, but none of the family had bothered to listen. The detective pulled a sheet of paper from a cream folder he was holding. “Dakota held a piece of broken glass to a guy’s neck at a football game, saying the guy had messed around with his girlfriend.”

  “Listen, Detective, that was years ago. But I know my brother is sick. I’m not arguing with you. I just want to know that my son is safe and that Dakota is not going to come after us.”

  “We’re actively working to find him. But we’re still working on two separate cases here. You know that the emails Terry Russel received were sent from an IP address in your home, and we have the phone records saying calls were placed to her home from your house line.”

  “Detective Abbot, with all due respect, I am done talking about Nigel being involved in sending that woman to my house. My husband is dead and can’t answer for himself.”

  A small smile turned up the corners of his mouth, though it didn’t reach his eyes, Winnie noticed. Could he hear her heart?

  “I have one more thing, Mrs. Crouch, and then I’ll be out of your hair.” She highly doubted that, but she tried to arrange her face into something pleasant as she waited for him to speak. “The third set of footprints in the blood we found around Nigel—”

  “Oh, this again? Are you serious right now? I was there, the whole time. There was no one else. You made out one tiny footprint in the corner of the room and now you think my psychotic brother had a child accomplice?”

  “You weren’t conscious the whole time, though, were you?” He touched his fingertip to the center of his forehead as if he were pressing a button. Winnie sat as still as she could so nothing would betray the noise inside her own head.

  “All right...all right,” he said, but his eyes continued to evaluate her. “Well, you know the drill.”

  “I know it well. If I think of anything else, I’ll call you. You remember where the door is, I assume.”

  Winnie made herself a cup of tea after the detective left and sat in the recliner by the window so she could see the water. Sam was at school; Nancy had gone back to work a few days ago. Winnie got it: busy was the easiest way to be right now. They’d given Winnie extended leave at work, which sometimes proved to be a bad thing, like today. She had too much time to think, and Abbot’s visit had unsettled her. She was trying to cope with her own grief while steering Sam through his, analyzing every moment of that night had nearly driven her mad the first weeks. And now it felt like a luxury with everything she had going on.

  She thought again about the tiny footprint. She had heard another voice in the house, a female voice, or so she thought. But things had been confusing, and the memory of her brother chasing after someone was punctuated by Winnie floating in and out of consciousness. She’d entertained the crazy idea that it had been Josalyn’s ghost come to help her, but even in death, Josalyn would never help Winnie after what she’d done. Winnie put the voice to rest because it seemed like the only thing she could do.

  She’d put the Turlin Street house on the market the week before, and there was already an offer on it. Not that she was getting market value for the house—the gruesome things that had happened there made it a tough sell, though not tough enough for someone not to take advantage of a discounted house on Greenlake Park, it seemed. As soon as the sale went through, she planned on moving to Portland with Sam—a fresh scene for healing. She was barely talking to anyone in her family anymore. They’d made it abundantly clear that it was Manda and Winnie who’d driven Dakota to what he’d done. They didn’t dare blame Nigel; the dead couldn’t defend themselves.

  As for Terry Russel, Winnie supposed she’d never know why Nigel had sent Terry Russel the information that brought her to the Crouches’ doorstep. How could he? Nigel had helped her that night, as she clung to him crying, her arms wrapped around his waist. He’d gone to the car and taken the baby’s body out, put it somewhere no one would ever find it. That’s what he promised her: No one will ever find him. I put him somewhere safe. He’d put her in the shower, scooping her bloody clothes from the bathroom floor as he went, and come back a few minutes later with a sleeping pill and glass of water. Winnie had let him dress her and put her to bed all in a semicatatonic state. How could he help her this way and then bring Terry to her doorstep? And how could he do it without implicating himself? Though what other possibility could there be? Abbot had said that the emails had come from the IP address in their own home.

  The morning after the baby had died, she’d woken up and gone downstairs to find Nigel drinking coffee in the kitchen, freshly showered. When he looked up and their eyes met, she saw something different inside them, something...gone. She knew she had ruined their lives that day. Had it been enough for Nigel to finally snap and incriminate them both, after all these years?

  She’d been so distraught at everything that had happened, she’d almost talked herself into confessing to the crime she’d committed fourteen years ago. In the end, she’d decided she couldn’t help that little boy anymore, but she could help her own son by being around. Let the dead deal with the dead, Winnie thought. And that’s the last she thought about it for a while.

  EPILOGUE

  They’d been living in the new house for a month before they smelled it. It was terrible, wet and rotting. When George caught onto it, he’d gone around the house, sniffing, crawling on his hands and knees in the kitchen at one point, sure he’d find a dead rat behind the fridge. But there wasn’t a dead rat, just the permeating smell of death.

  “It’s an animal, it’s died in the house...oh my God, what if it had babies in the walls?”

  His wife was always the negative Nelly, but George had heard weird noises at night, and at night was when the sneaky animals came out. She may not be wrong, he thought.

  The smell was thicker on the main level; it was a sizable animal, he decided. He grabbed a handful of thick, industrial garbage bags from unde
r the sink. He wished he had a mask to put over his mouth and nose—wherever that smell was coming from, it was only going to get worse as he got closer. There was a mask shortage, go figure, some virus people were shitting their pants about. George found a bandanna from his wife’s accessory drawer and wrapped it around his nose and mouth, and then he went downstairs to the foyer, wearing the gloves he used for yard work.

  The entrance to the crawl space was in the front closet, the left one, if you were facing the front door. He’d had to pull the plans out to find the entrance to the thing, but he knew old houses like this one had them. He yanked open the closet door, eyeing the floor carefully. It was carpeted. New-looking, from what he could see. He might even have to pull the whole thing up. He dropped to his knees, looking for a seam, and found it: a trapdoor lay beneath a rectangle of carpet. George held his makeshift mask tighter across his face. Yep, that’s where it was coming from. The door was an original fucking piece of wood, if ever he’d seen one. It was easier pulling it up than he expected, and as soon as he did, a gust of god-awful drifted up and George gagged. Too far to turn back now, he thought.

  He lowered his flashlight into the hole, hoping to God something wasn’t going to jump out of the darkness and eat his face. Rat babies, he thought. No—bigger—possum babies, maybe. But as the beam from his flashlight spun around the darkness in quick, manic jerks, he saw no obvious movement. The bottom wasn’t far off, so he lowered himself down, landing in a crouch. Here he could see that some parts of the dirt floor were uneven, making the space a roller coaster of high and low spaces. Like caves. He chose a direction at random and got to searching.

  This place was creeping him the fuck out. He’d only crawled a little ways when he saw what he thought was garbage piled in a mass, in a far corner. It reeked. How the hell...? George thought. He was starting to have a very, very bad feeling. The hairs prickled on the back of his neck. In one corner, cans, bags, wrappers, and plastic gallon bottles were stacked against a wall in a neat row. Garbage enough to fill more than a dumpster. That’s when, in a panic, he began searching the ground, pausing occasionally to vomit his lunch, and then continuing on. The smell was getting stronger away from the rubbish pile, and his hand hit something wet and sticky; he kept going, though, his knees surely bleeding at this point from the little stones rolling under his palms.

  The real estate agent who had sold them this house, a real hard-ass originally from New York, had said something about the former owners. George didn’t care for women’s gossip, but his wife had latched on, asking a dozen follow-up questions. They were new to the area. Was it possible it wasn’t safe? How many families were there on the street? She’d driven the hard-ass from New York to exhaustion with her questions, but at least it gave George a break. Amber had been her name; she’d said the previous owners had moved to Portland after a family tragedy, but there was something else he was trying to remember, something important that had stood out at the time.

  He yelped when something cut his knee, stabbing sharply into the soft flesh on top of his kneecap. Glass. He pulled it out, tossing it aside. He was going too far; he should definitely fucking turn back. Turn back. The father had died, along with a woman, that’s what had happened. Killed by his brother-in-law, who then disappeared. George had seen the stories on the news, but the juicy details of people’s lives were his wife’s specialty. He’d not thought anything of that until—fuck—he could see something now. Sweatpants...hair... George panted, head hanging toward the dirt. He’d sweat through his shirt, and he could smell his own ripe smell on top of the stench. A thin line of spit hung from his mouth, swinging toward the dirt. Where had his wife’s bandanna gone? He lifted his eyes again, more slowly this time, reluctant to look but unable not to.

  There were two feet, small, like a child’s. George had to know; he hadn’t suffered all this way just to go back now. He crawled around the body so he could get a look at the face. The ground rose around the corpse in a cradle; George had to crawl upward and hold his flashlight between his teeth, pushing forward on his belly. It had a beanie on its head, pulled down low, but in the shaking light of his flashlight George saw strands of long gray hair stuck to a mottled gray face. Not a child, the opposite. In the yellow glow of the flashlight she looked almost peaceful. Where had that thought come from...? Someone dead in a crawl space—his crawl space—and they did not die peacefully. His mouth dropped open, and the flashlight rolled into the cradle with the body. George could not see to get back without it. He reached in toward the light, being careful not to touch anything—to touch it. But as he pulled the flashlight away, something came with it, roused in the dirt.

  He picked it up, horrified to be doing so and yet unable to stop himself. It was small, like a piece of chalk. George held it up to his face, panting, sweat running into his ass crack. A bone. He was sure it was the hip bone of something very small. Fuuuck! He dropped it, shaking his hand. It’s human, he thought, and very quickly unthought it. It was not human; it couldn’t be. It was too small. The shock was still present as George began his long crawl back to the trapdoor. What was he going to tell his wife? This house had been his idea of a new start for them, even with its grisly history, but the minute she found out about this—and what was “this”? George thought. He’d almost reached the front of the trapdoor again, and he shone his light back and forth as he went, scared something was going to jump out at him. And then the beam of his flashlight illuminated something else and he jumped, hitting his head on a beam and then falling backward onto his ass. But he still had his flashlight. He swept it over the darkness, panting softly. You’ve already seen one dead body, idiot, he thought. But George did not want to see another dead body, even though he was pretty sure now that there were two back there. He wanted to be sick again.

  And there it was: just five feet behind the trapdoor, lying sideways among the garbage like a bloated, gray cabbage; how had he missed it on the way in? George screamed. Dust swept into his mouth as it yawed open, and then he was coughing and crying. He sounded like a fucking dying racoon. Someone had decorated the dead man’s body with garbage, piling it around him like a tomb. There was a cardboard sign with writing propped near the feet of the corpse, and there was something wedged in his mouth between two gummy, grotesque lips.

  George shone his flashlight toward the mouth that would give him nightmares for years to come and saw the metal barrel of a gun. Someone had rammed the weapon, backward, into the dead man’s mouth so it stared with a single eye at George. His eyes went back to the sign, the writing slanting off the cardboard in a drunken scrawl. He wondered what the man had done to deserve having a gun rammed down his throat the wrong way. And who had been angry enough to do the ramming? He lunged for the trapdoor, getting one last, horrified look at the face he would later find out was the missing man, the murderer. Someone, probably the someone rotting in the ditch back there, had left a message.

  I’m sorry. I was wrong. I just wanted to do the right thing.

  * * *

  If you loved this book and you haven’t read Tarryn Fisher’s runaway bestseller The Wives, keep reading for a special excerpt. You won’t be able to put it down!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to my agent, Jane Dystel, of whom I am a complete fangirl. You are a woman to be reckoned with and you have great cheekbones. I am so grateful for you.

  My editor, Brittany Lavery, who offered so much patience and flexibility as I wrote this book and came up with Juno’s last words. You’re a class act, Brittany! My team at Graydon House, who I’m genuinely excited to be a part of—Ana, Pam, Susan, Roxanne. And at HarperCollins Canada—Karen, Leo, Cory, Jaclyn, Kaiti. Thank you for being my dream team. You make me feel so lucky. Thanks to Sean Kapitain for the great cover.

  Shannon Wylie for working through the plot with me in the early days of writing the book.

  Serena and Luke Knautz for always being available and willing to do for others
. What you’ve done for me and my career could never be repaid. I love you guys. And to Sophia and Cash, who let me borrow their mom every day—thanks, guys! She’s the best.

  Traci Finlay, to whom this book is dedicated. You were my first writing partner and first best friend. I don’t know anyone with sharper eyes for plot. Thank you for always dropping everything to help me.

  Erica Rusikoff of Erica Edits, Christine Estevez from Wildfire Marketing. Thanks to the bloggers who have included my stories in their passion to share books.

  To the PLNs who have supported me through every phase of my writing and life, I attribute much of my joy and success to you. Thank you for being a loud voice for my art. You will always be my favorites. Heathens. I hate croutons.

  Willow Aster for being my daily support, love, and mental health stabilizer. Colleen Hoover, I’m sick of loving you but I can’t stop. Kathleen Tucker, Dina Silver, Claire Contreras, Christine Brae, Cait Norman. Holly for moving to come help me when I needed it most. Bertha, I love you so, thank you for helping me keep my everyday life together. My early readers, Dez, Tobi, Amy, Lindsey, Tasara, Jaime. To the lovely Tess Callahan, who wrote one of my favorite books, April & Oliver. Andrea Dunlop for your valuable insight. Shanora Williams for your friendship. James Reynolds for your friendship and sharp ideas.

  My perfect babies, Scarlet and Ryder, who ate a lot of takeout while I wrote this book, thanks for all the babysitting hours you guys put in and for coming to hang out with me in my office for all those months I made it my crawl space. And to Avett, who ripped up my notebook outlining The Wrong Family: thanks for reminding me to be a pantser, Avett.

  Thanks, Mom, for being my forever supporter and never telling me to get a real job. You told me I could do this and I believed you. Jeff for always supporting and feeding me.

  To my husband, Joshua, who sat for hours with me in the dark while I wrote, bringing drinks and snacks and falling asleep on my office floor so I wouldn’t be in there alone. You’re all the romance I’ll ever need.