With nothing else left to do, she stood in front of her easel, looking at the unfinished painting. The path that led through the open moon gate curved to accommodate a lush floral border planted with clumps of Japanese irises, foxgloves and lobelia before losing itself at the edge of a meadow that faded into a summer sky. The air felt alive, effervescent. The drone of bees was audible. But the light was wrong in the foreground, where it was closest to the viewer. She had worked hours on that aspect of the work without success, but she realized now that the trouble wasn’t the light but the murkier depth of the shadows.
She saw how to fix it, and going through her tubes of paint, she selected the colors she needed, squeezing them onto her palette. She chose a brush from the collection she kept in an old, crazed milk pitcher and set to work. The world and her thoughts telescoped to include only her field of vision. It was what painting had always been for her, a means of transporting herself from her life to her field of dreams. When she was finished, she stood back, wiping her fingers on a rag, looking at the result, and she was satisfied. She would show it to Evan, she thought.
Evan, who had said he was leaving. Following Tucker, who was already gone.
She bent her head. How long had she been working? How many hours had she spent lost here, in her painted reality? She left the bedroom, walking through the dark, quiet house. In the kitchen, she checked the time. After ten. She thought of eating, but she wasn’t hungry. She tried calling Tucker’s cell phone. No answer. It was the same when she dialed Evan’s number. She could call her mother, but if Tucker wasn’t there, she would only worry. Lissa leaned against the counter, pressing her fingertips to her eyes that burned with the hours of work and lurking heartbreak. Her back ached, too, from standing at the easel, and her head hurt. She thought of taking Advil, but knowing it would be bad for the baby, she didn’t, and it surprised her to feel pangs of concern, of defense. Instead, she took a shower and washed her hair, not knowing what else to do, and then got into bed. After a while, lying there, sleepless, she remembered something her daddy used to say when she woke up terrified from a bad dream: that life would look better to her in the light of a new morning.
She did finally doze off only to waken sometime later, unsure why. She lay for a moment, listening, hearing nothing more than the sound of her heart, her pulse in her ears, and then she got up and went through the house to the study. She knew Evan was there before she reached the doorway, and relief loosened her knees when she saw him lying prone on the sofa, one arm flung over his eyes, head resting on the old floral bolster.
“What’s wrong?”
The sound of his voice startled her, but she came into the room a little way. “I can’t sleep.”
He said he couldn’t, either, and he scooted over and patted the coverlet she’d brought him the night before as if to indicate she should join him. But remembering earlier when he said he would leave her, she didn’t go to him. She pulled out the desk chair instead. “I thought you were gone.”
“I was,” he said.
“Why did you come back?”
“I need to be here for you. With you,” he added, and her heart shifted. “I don’t mean I’ve changed my mind about our baby,” he said after a moment.
Lissa pulled up her knees and rested her cheek on them. She had unbraided her hair, and it fell around her, making a dark curtain. “I really haven’t decided about it, Evan.”
He made no response.
“He told me what happened the day Daddy broke down.”
Evan propped himself on his elbow. Moonlight iced his cheekbones, the blade of his jaw. His eyes were dark pools. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
She did, and when she was finished, she only realized she was crying when Evan came to her and brushed her cheeks.
“I don’t know how to stop caring for him or about him.” Lissa’s voice was muffled against Evan’s chest. “How am I supposed to do that? I can’t abandon him. If our positions were reversed, if it were me charged with murdering those women, Tucker wouldn’t abandon me. He would fight. He would fight with everything he had.”
“I know,” Evan said.
“He can’t go to prison. He’ll die if he’s confined to a cell. After what Daddy did, locking him in that closet? He couldn’t take it. There’s no way.”
“We’ll work it out,” Evan said. He swung her into his arms and carried her to the sofa, laying her down. Settling beside her, he cradled her against him, and her throat tightened with her gratitude and her love. She thought maybe it would be all right between them, after all. She thought maybe they really would find the way to work it out.
It was still dark when Evan rose later and, taking Lissa’s hand, led her into the bedroom and lay down with her in their bed. She thought they must have dozed. When they wakened and reached for each other, pale light was seeping through the blinds, a glow the color of opals, the color of dreams, she’d think later in all the unrelenting madness. They began without words, their movements coming from the music of shared memory and mutual need. She twined her legs with his, closing her eyes, giving herself to him, giving herself to the touch of his hands on her breasts and in the hollow where her rib cage dipped into the curve of her waist. His palm slid along the smooth contour of her thigh. His gaze was locked with hers when he came into her, moving slowly, waiting, she knew, to see that she was with him, that they were together, and she loved him for it, for his care of her.
When they were spent, they lay facing each other. He brushed the heavy weight of her hair over her shoulder, running his fingers along its length. “I don’t want to lose you,” he said.
She set her fingertip on his mouth, and he seemed to understand her wish to have this time, this hour before dawn, untroubled by fear or anger or worry. But when he fell asleep, as much as she wished to, she could not. She couldn’t fight the whirl of her thoughts, her anxiety over Tucker, and she slipped quietly from their bed.
In the kitchen, she started a pot of coffee and turned on the television, a morning talk show. She didn’t register which one, didn’t pay any attention, not until they cut to the local news, and she heard a reporter say something about a woman who was missing. Now Lissa looked at the screen; she upped the volume.
“A witness has come forward,” the commentator was saying, “one who believes he saw the missing woman, Suzette Bowers, late last night, in the company of Tucker Lebay. As you might recall from previous newscasts, Lebay was recently arrested for the murder of—”
“Oh, no, no, no.” Lissa tented her fingers over her mouth. Her blood rushed in her ears.
“Lissa? What’s wrong?” Evan asked from the doorway.
She found her cell phone, dialed her mother. No answer. She tried her dad’s phone and then Tucker’s. Nothing.
“Lissa?”
She turned to Evan, mind reeling. “Another woman has turned up missing. We need to go to my parents’ house, Ev. I’m afraid for them.”
26
MORNING WASN'T MORE than a silver thread of light on the horizon when Emily heard Roy in the bedroom overhead—Tucker’s bedroom. She glanced at the kitchen ceiling. What was he doing in there—again? Turning off the fire under the teakettle, she went to the bottom of the stairs. “Roy?” she called. “What are you doing?”
No answer.
If she’d had a choice, she wouldn’t have gone up, not that it would have changed anything. As it was, when she reached Tucker’s doorway and looked in, she was shocked by what she saw, the signs of disturbance, even of frenzy, that confronted her. The dresser drawers she’d closed so carefully yesterday after Lissa packed Tucker’s clothes were emptied of their contents, and his bed linen was in a heap on the floor. Clothing from his closet had been flung from the hangers.
Roy looked up from where he sat in the midst of the turmoil on his knees. His eyes were heated w
ith some fevered intensity, not in the way of a night terror or a post-traumatic stress episode, but in the way of a man obsessed, a man who was panicked, one who had thrown reason and caution to the wind.
“There is something here, something to tell if Tucker did this, Em. I know it,” Roy said. “I can feel it, and I have to know. I don’t want to wait for a trial, to hear from some jury that doesn’t know Tucker from fucking Adam that he’s guilty.” He finished rolling the dhurrie and shoved it against the bed frame. “There’s a loose board here somewhere. Do you remember it?”
Emily did. Tucker had kept his treasures there, an Indian arrowhead he’d found, a baseball signed by Nolan Ryan, a small gold nugget on a chain that had belonged to Emily’s father, the set of transformers that McDonald’s had put into their Happy Meals once upon a time. She didn’t know when or how the floorboard had come to be loose, but they’d left it because it was important to Tucker, having this secret place. “It’s nearer the center of the room,” she said, “but he cleared all the things out of there, I think.” Her heart was faltering, beating an uncertain rhythm in her chest. She brought her hand there, watching as Roy worked his way on his knees toward the center of the room, where her direction had guided him. He ran the tips of his fingers along the floorboards, studying the path they made intently, hunting, she guessed, for the single board with the missing nails.
“Here, this is the one.” The wooden slat lifted easily, but Roy only raised it an inch or so and then lowered it back into place, glancing at her. The look in his eyes seemed to question her, to ask for her permission. She felt cold and, crossing her arms, hugged herself, shrugging. “There’s nothing there,” she said.
But she was wrong, and she knew it in that last final moment of relative sanity and hope, knew it in some prescient way before Roy lifted the small wooden box from its hiding place. They recognized it at the same time. Handmade out of walnut, and lined in emerald-green velvet. The box had been her wedding gift to Roy. He had used it to hold his jewelry. How had it come to be here? Her eyes collided with his.
“What the hell?” he asked, as if she could explain, as if she were even capable of speech. If she could have uttered a word, she would have forbidden him to open it. She would have reminded him of Pandora and her box of horrors.
“I wondered what had happened to this,” Roy said. He was bearing the burden of the box across both palms now, staring at it. “I thought you put it away.”
He hadn’t kept much of anything inside it. He wasn’t the sort of man who wore a lot of jewelry. He wore his wedding band, almost never taking it off, and he left his watch on top of his bureau nights before going to bed. Emily honestly couldn’t remember what the contents of the box had been. She didn’t want to know what they might be now.
She gestured vaguely and said, “Maybe it’s only your stuff in there. Maybe he wanted to keep it, who knows why.”
Roy stood up; he carried the box to Tucker’s bed and, shoving aside a pile of clothing, sat down. Emily sat next to him. They looked at each other, sharing their bewilderment, their terrible reluctance. Panic snapped in the air between them. It was as if they knew, already knew. Roy lifted the lid, and they saw the contents—the locks of hair, the turquoise earring, the lipstick and the two driver’s licenses that had belonged to Miranda Quick and Jessica Sweet.
“Ah, Jesus,” Roy cried out, and Emily moaned softly.
“No...” She tore the box from Roy’s hands and flung it across the room, shouting, “No! No! No!” Turning to him, she hurled herself against his chest, sobbing, “Oh, Roy, please...”
He did his best to comfort her. She felt his hands smoothing her back. He half carried her from Tucker’s bedroom into their own and sat her down on their bed. Then he sat next to her.
“Our son could not have done this,” she said.
“But he did,” Roy said.
Emily looked at him. “You knew, didn’t you? You’ve known since Miranda—”
“He’s never been right, Em. Not since that day, after what I did. Ah, Christ.” The words came out, a half sob. “I held a gun to his head. How could I do that, to my own kid?” Roy picked up her hand, bringing it to his mouth. “I am so sorry, so, so sorry.”
She felt the words, his breath damp and warm against the flesh of her palm. “No, it can’t be only that. There must be some other reason.”
“It twisted him, Em, in worse ways than we knew.”
She wasn’t convinced or maybe she didn’t want to be.
“What other reason is there?” Roy asked, desperately looking to her for an alternative, a last-minute reprieve from the burden of his guilt, even as he knew there wasn’t one. That knowledge sat deep in his eyes, too.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Genetics? Some brain anomaly? Oh, God...” She caught her lip, rocking her head back. The pain in her heart was fierce, searing. She prayed she would die of it.
“It doesn’t really matter now why or how it happened.”
She jerked her glance to his.
“He has to be stopped, Em.”
You wouldn’t keep a dog you couldn’t trust in your house, would you? You would put that dog down. Roy’s voice, his statement from a few days ago, ran through Emily’s mind, and she flinched from it, not wanting it there. “We have to talk to him, Roy, don’t we? We have to give him a chance to explain before we turn him over to the police.”
“Who said anything about the cops? I don’t think I could do that. What would be the point, anyway? They’ve already said they want to execute him, and we’d be there with him, too, every goddamn step. Could you stomach that? Could you watch them kill our son?”
Emily looked into her lap, feeling tears bite the undersides of her eyelids. How could one set of parents make two so very different children? Was it possible that a single traumatic event could have so much impact? She remembered their last visit with the child psychologist that he had said Tucker seemed to have come to terms with the terrible thing that had happened. He seemed able to separate the actual event from the man who was his father. The psychologist had said Tucker understood his dad hadn’t meant to hurt him. The doctor had claimed he’d done all he could, that he didn’t believe Tucker would benefit from further counseling.
So, they had come home and put it behind them, far behind them. They had resumed life as usual, assuming Tucker was fine when he wasn’t. Had she known that he wasn’t? Emily hugged her knees. How could she accept this, the terrible facts, the ineluctable proof of what Tucker had done, of what he’d become? What had she missed? Her fear of her own culpability was like a hot coal burning in the center of her chest. Were these women dead because of her refusal to see the truth and to act on it? What if there were others as Lissa insisted, as Emily herself believed?
The questions cried out for answers she couldn’t give. Her mind was sluggish with grief and the fatigue of so much unrelenting calamity. She wanted it to end; she was ready for that.
“Mom? Pop? You awake?” Tucker’s voice, sounding agitated, rose from the landing.
Emily heard his step on the stairs and got to her feet, fumbling to button her robe. She was aware of Roy, standing beside her. She felt the tension in him; she felt his fear, a force not separate from her own.
“What the hell happened in here?” Tucker’s voice boomed, and Emily knew he was looking at the chaos in his bedroom.
“Tucker?” Roy called. “We need to talk. We can work something out, son. Okay?”
He came into their bedroom, and his eyes, when he brought them to Emily’s, were torn with misery.
“I thought you were at Lissa’s,” she said.
“She’s pregnant, Mom. Did you know?”
“That doesn’t concern you,” Roy answered before Emily could.
“It goddamn sure does.” Tucker didn’t sound angry so much as hurt and bewildere
d. “She’s getting an abortion because of the shit I’m in. Did she tell you?”
“What else would you expect?” Emily’s voice rose. “She believes in you, in your innocence, but you aren’t innocent, are you?”
Tucker stretched out his hands. “She can’t do it, Ma. You have to stop her.”
Emily stared at him. She loved him and yet was sickened by the sight of him, and now, in spite of herself, she was frightened for him and of him. Her own son. A murderer. How? How could it be true? And yet it was. This wasn’t a nightmare, or the hideous calamity you might watch unfold on the news from your sofa, while congratulating yourself that it wasn’t happening to you. No. She would never waken from this, she thought. The terrible sound, a cry she could feel breaking from her core, some interior and bottomless well of sorrow, climbed into her throat, and she bit down on it, holding it in with her teeth.
Roy said, “We found the box, the evidence. We know what you did, that you murdered those girls.”
“Momma?” It was a child’s appeal, thin with anguish.
“Oh, Tucker, what have you done?”
Time seemed to stop and the silence that filled the room was punctuated by the sound of the grandfather clock on the landing, each separate tick swelling and detonating, a bullet fired from a gun.
Tucker folded onto the side of the bed; he held his head in his hands.
Emily fisted her hand and pressed it to her stomach.
“All I ever wanted was to make a life with Miranda. I know you hated her and thought she was trash, but she wasn’t. She was the one for me, the only one. We could have had a life together, you know? Like Lissa has with Evan. We could have been happy.”
Safe Keeping Page 24
