The Man She Married

by Cathy Lamb

“You mean who we’re dealing with.”

  “Yes.”

  “But why would she ask about your parents?”

  “I don’t know. She’s a detective. They ask about everything.”

  “It’s an odd detail. There’s no reason for it.”

  “They’re trying to see if there are holes in our stories.”

  “Are there? Are there holes?” I heard the sharpness of my words.

  “No. Natalie, I’m the husband. In cases like this, they always suspect the husband, we’ve talked about this already. They’re wondering if I did this to you. If I paid someone to hit you with a van, bring in a Barbie, send in a dead bird, and shoot through a window. They’re looking at me.”

  “But why are they asking these kinds of questions now? Why weren’t they asking about your family, which is still bizarre to me, at the beginning of the investigation?”

  “I don’t know, honey.”

  He looked exhausted. I was exhausted. My brain still feels like it blows circuits sometimes and I have to sleep.

  “I made spaghetti. I tried to make meatballs, but they fell apart. I don’t know what I did wrong.”

  We ate dinner together.

  “It’s delicious, Natalie.”

  * * *

  That night I woke up about four, the rain lashing at the windows, the wind howling around the corner of our apartment. My arms were around Zack, as usual.

  Something was going to happen in this investigation. I could feel it. It would be soon. I heard it in the detective’s tone. Zack wouldn’t tell me what it was, I knew that for sure.

  I didn’t want to wait and find out, but I didn’t have a choice.

  I tilted my head to look at my husband. He was wide awake, his face somber, intense.

  * * *

  Chick called. All of my necklaces had sold. “I put them on a rack right by Ellie Kozlovsky’s pillows. I also put them by each checkout stand. They are gone, baby. Gone. I had Zeddy send you a check. Send more.”

  “Did they really sell?” I asked. “Or are you pretending that they sold and buying them yourself?”

  “Look, Natalie. I love you. You and Justine are my best friends for life. We’re the Moonshine and Milky Way Maverick Girls, capable of getting arrested for putting dish soap in the town’s fountain and riding our horses into the school’s hallways to protest racial injustice. But I am a businesswoman, I own a hardware store that sells pillows and curtains, and I have six extremely odd kids. Not a normal one in the bunch. My food bill alone is well over a thousand a month for the rebels and rug rats.

  “Ellie was doing a science experiment in her room. She caught her bed on fire. I had to use the fire extinguisher and toss the mattress out the window. Hudson found three baby mice and brought them home. Now I am raising mice because he wants to start a mice breeding company. Who would buy them? A lab? A snake farm? Joshua wants me to buy him burgundy-colored pants. Burgundy. In Lake Joseph. I might as well put a sign on him that says ‘Beat Me Up.’

  “Ally is determined to be a ballet dancer. She tripped over her own feet the other day at school and smashed her head. She should swim with those feet flippers, not dance. This is not a dancer. This is a klutz. I’m sorry to say that about my own child.

  “Timmy and Tessie escaped again. They brought their wagons with them and took off when I was taking a bath. It was naptime. They were asleep. The next thing I know my phone is ringing and Gail Shurgood is calling me telling me the twins are at her house chasing the cats.

  “I don’t know how I got sidetracked onto my strange offspring. Oh yeah. They’re frickin’ expensive. All of them. So I’m not buying the necklaces. I don’t have the money for that, Natalie. Do you know what college is going to cost me? I’m going to have to take on a second job as a stripper to pay tuition.

  “Anyhow, the women are buying your necklaces. One woman bought eight. Christmas presents. And a few men. I had a separate rack for the men, for your Stud Man Line. I had all the cashiers wearing them. I had them leave the price tags on. They have flown out the door, Natalie. Send more. We’re raising the prices.”

  “Okay. But you’re taking a cut. We have to have a business discussion. . . .”

  And we did. It was like Justine and I when I sold my business to her. It was calm, it was fair. We both felt like we got a fair shake.

  By that afternoon, I had another box full of necklaces to send to Chick ready to go. They were a combination: Some I made with rocks, others with beads and crystals, and my dad’s metal art, and others were made with the fun brooches, faux jewels, etc., that I found at garage sales and Goodwill and took apart from their original necklaces.

  I giggled. Yes, I, a grown woman, giggled. It would have been an embarrassment except that I was so happy. I missed being an accountant. It was like a part of who I wanted to be from the time I was a kid to now had been ripped out of my gut by a maniac.

  But I had something else now. I sold jewelry. I was an official jewelry maker. I put a few of my creations over my head and giggled yet again.

  * * *

  I sent my dad yet another check for all the work he did for my jewelry business. He didn’t want to take money from his daughter, I knew that, but I also knew he needed it. The artist he worked for had moved; he could not ever roof again. I knew he was a saver, but the savings would not last forever.

  He sent it back.

  I called him and told him to cash the blankety-blank check.

  He refused. “My hummingbird, I am doing this for you.”

  “Cash the check.”

  He laughed. “Tell me about your day, butterfly.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I will not tell you about my day ever again unless you cash the checks I keep sending you.”

  “I could not do that, my lightning bug.”

  “Then, good-bye.” And, for the first time in my life, I hung up on my dad.

  He called back. “Now, honey.”

  “Are you going to cash the checks?”

  “My sweet wiggle worm, I can’t do that. . . .”

  I hung up again.

  He called back.

  “Dear Rainbow, don’t do that to your dad, you’re hurting my feelings.”

  “Will you cash the checks?”

  It was a long series of hang-ups.

  Finally, he agreed.

  “Love you, Dad.”

  “Love you, too. You stubborn old goat.”

  I laughed. Never in my life had he called me a stubborn old goat. I had an idea. “Dad, can you make me some goats for my necklaces? I think there are some quirky buyers out there. . . .”

  He could.

  I did not tell him about my husband sneaking off in the middle of the night like a sneaky Billy Goat Gruff to take phone calls he refused to talk about or about Detective Zadora asking about Zack’s dead parents.

  Chapter 17

  I glanced outside my apartment window on a soggy, blustery Friday afternoon, the trees bare, their branches sharp and tangled. I was hoping that Zack would come home early. About six feet away from the door was a man with a baseball hat on. He was about forty-five, white, small-eyed, fleshy-faced, and heavy like a tank.

  Where had I seen him before?

  He stared right at me. Intent. Still. Watching.

  A cold shiver danced up my back, wrapping around my spine.

  He smiled. His teeth were crooked, like a picket fence. He was missing a few.

  I did not smile back.

  He waved, slow, deliberate. Like a predator playing with his prey.

  I did not wave back.

  He scowled, but he kept staring at me, as if in challenge.

  I did not back down.

  He turned to leave. When he was almost to the street he turned and met my eyes again. This time, he laughed, dark and rumbling. The laugh was familiar to me.

  He mimicked shooting me with a rifle.

  I was frozen with fear. It rattled down my body until I couldn’
t move, could hardly breathe. It was as if fear was a living thing within me, paralyzing my every cell.

  He was the man from my recurring nightmare. He was the man who brought the twisted Barbie to my hospital room.

  He was the man driving the van that hit me.

  As my brain opened up, as if a concrete wall broke around it, as if the terror I felt brought all the iron curtains down around my lost memories, I remembered.

  I remembered everything.

  I remembered that morning.

  I remembered my fight with Zack.

  I remembered the accident.

  I remembered the lies the man I married told me.

  * * *

  “Don’t lie to me anymore, Zack. Not one more lie.”

  We sat at the kitchen table that evening, the blinds closed. He had brought me white daisies, which I angrily tossed on the counter.

  He studied his clasped hands, then stared at me, those green eyes bright. “You remembered.”

  “Yes. Maybe not everything about the morning of the crash, but most of it. I know your name is not Zack. It’s Devon Walton. I know you lied to me. I know you said you killed a man.”

  “That’s right, honey.”

  I took a deep breath, shaky, but so angry at him. Lies, all of it. And he had killed a man. Why? Why? “Why did you lie about your name and your life, and why did you kill a man?”

  He took a deep breath, too. “I killed a man named Willie Hotchkiss, who was beating a woman up outside of a restaurant one night in a parking lot. I didn’t mean to kill him, but I did.” He ran his hands over his face, as if he were trying to wipe away the memory. “He was slamming her head against the hood of a truck, presumably his truck, and I thought he was going to kill her. She was almost limp, hardly fighting.”

  I exhaled. And there it was. That’s why he killed a man. He was defending a woman. Zack would do that. But was he telling the truth? Could I trust him amidst all the other lies?

  “I pulled Willie off of her, and we fought. I knocked him to the ground, and his brother, Ronnie, came at me. I knocked him to the ground, too. Willie charged at me again and pulled a knife. The scars on my face and on my ribs that I told you I got on the fishing boat in Alaska are from his knife. I knocked the knife away, pummeled him, and he fell straight back on my last punch, his head hitting the edge of the truck on the way down.

  “Willie was passed out, I thought, but Ronnie was on the ground, glaring at me, moaning, blood pouring out of his head. I told him if he got up I’d lay him out, too, and I went to help the woman. She was slumped on the ground, leaning against the tire. She could hardly move. Her face was all bashed up, nose broken, jaw broken, one eye swelled up, blood all over. I wanted to take her to the hospital, but she told me not to move her. She was holding her neck with both hands, and I knew her neck might be broken. She was crying hysterically.

  “We could hear the sirens. Someone had obviously called the police. She told me to go, she told me to run. She said that the guys on the ground were brothers and their father was the police chief and their uncle was the district attorney and they were really rich and they would put me in jail for years for beating those two up.

  “I told her I wouldn’t leave her, and I tried to steady her head with my hands. She told me that the police were coming, an ambulance would come and she’d be okay. She told me again that I would go to jail if they caught me, and to run.

  “I was nineteen years old. I was scared. My parents were dead. I had been working in construction about an hour up the road because the pay was better up there, and I was headed home for the weekend. I had stopped in that restaurant for a hamburger. One of the guys on my shift said that a lot of construction workers stopped there because they made the best burgers.

  “I was planning on going to college. My mother had a small life insurance policy for me, but it wasn’t enough for college. My father had not been able to get a policy because he’d had a heart problem in high school, which was fixed, but it excluded him from any policy in the future. I wasn’t ready to go to college, anyhow. I was trying to get through life, I was trying to survive. The grief still came at me in waves. I still couldn’t believe they were gone.”

  “Zack.” I reached for his hand.

  “I waited until I saw the lights of the police car so I knew she would get help, then I ran back through an alley, around the block, and got in my truck and took off. I didn’t know I’d killed Willie then. I thought I’d knocked him out. It was only the next morning, on the news, at home, that I heard about it, and I heard that the police were looking for me. There was a manhunt, and I was the man.

  “I couldn’t believe that I’d killed him. I had never meant to kill Willie. I wanted to protect the woman, and myself, when he came at me with a knife. I didn’t want to die. I panicked. I didn’t trust the legal system in Tallie Springs, Arkansas.”

  “Tallie Springs?”

  “Yes. I’m not from South Carolina.”

  “Okay.” I shook my head. “Keep going.”

  “The legal system in Arkansas then, especially for people like me, with no money, no family, up against powerful police chiefs and district attorneys, two of whom were the father and uncle of Willie and Ronnie, wouldn’t have worked in my favor. I suspected that the chiefs and attorneys were all friends with one another. Hell, their grandparents were probably friends. It was all rigged. I figured I had no chance, even if the woman told everyone that I was protecting her.

  “When I was younger, in our small town, a man was falsely accused of raping the mayor’s daughter. He was developmentally disabled. He admitted to raping her when he was grilled by three detectives. He didn’t even know what the word rape meant. He was jailed for ten years. Another man, an African American man whom my parents were friends with, was also falsely accused of attacking a white woman. He went to jail for five years until they found the real criminal. Even then it took a year to get him out. A woman went to jail for shooting and killing her husband. Everyone knew he beat her and the kids all the time. But she went to jail. For protecting herself. I had no reason to believe, in that circumstance, that I would get anywhere near a fair trial. And remember, I was nineteen years old. A kid. I was scared to death I was going to prison forever.

  “Ronnie, beat up, was interviewed on TV. I saw the interview. He said that I had interfered in a little spat his brother was having with his girlfriend and I had continued to beat his brother even after his brother was laid out on the ground not moving. He said that he jumped in to save his brother from being killed by me and then I beat him up and wouldn’t stop punching him, either. He said I was vicious, a murderer, that I had almost killed him, too, and that I should get the death penalty. He said he thought I was on drugs.

  “He lied about everything. Obviously the woman wouldn’t have been interviewed at that time. She was probably in surgery. Or knocked out from medication. I’ve never seen anyone that beat up before. I thought that she would tell the police what really happened. That she would tell the truth. But maybe she wouldn’t. I didn’t know her. Maybe she loved Willie and would lie to defend her dead boyfriend and back up what Ronnie said. Maybe she would be too scared to testify at all. Maybe she would take off when she was better and disappear. But the lies that Ronnie was already telling on TV, along with his father and uncle, were what I was up against.”

  “What did you do after that?”

  “I packed up and left Tallie Springs. I left the home that we moved to when I was seven. We moved there from Connecticut because my mother, a nurse, had a calling to help people who were poor in rural Arkansas. My father wanted to help build them homes. It’s why I don’t have a southern accent, which you asked about when we met.

  “I didn’t take my truck. I took my mom’s car in case someone had my license plate. I knew that when I didn’t show up to work that it would look suspicious, so I called my boss and told him that I was moving home to work with my uncles. I had no uncles. He believed me, said he was sorry
to see me go. I wanted to get as far away as I could.”

  “And that’s when you went to Alaska?” I was awed by his courage.

  “Yes. I withdrew all my money from the bank, took a few things from home, and headed out.”

  “You took off across the country and headed to Alaska. At nineteen.” That poor, scared kid.

  “Yes. I snuck in by boat. Paid a man. I did not go through the Canadian border patrol because I didn’t want them to have a record of my being there. I went to a small fishing village and started asking around for work, and I ran into Captain Drake Knutson.

  “He asked me my name. I had one in mind already: Zack Shelton. My mother used to talk to me about her grandfather whose first name was Shelton. He was from Scotland. And I chose the name Zack because I had a football coach named Zack. The captain asked me for ID so he could report my income to the IRS, but I told him I lost it. He asked me a few more questions. I was shaking, desperate, and he stared at me, evaluating the situation.

  “He knew I was running, I could tell. It must have been blatantly obvious. But he needed an extra pair of hands, the ship was leaving soon, and I think he felt sorry for me. I climbed aboard. I had no idea what I was in for, on a fishing boat in Alaska. The relentless work, the danger, the storms, the waves. It was sometimes terrifying. But nothing was as terrifying to me as believing I’d go to jail. Then I got used to it. I liked working on the boat.

  “The other fishermen watched over me, made sure I didn’t fall over, didn’t give me the most dangerous jobs. I was a kid to them. A kid on his own. The captain told me one night, after a storm that we weren’t sure we’d survive, that he had a past he wasn’t proud of, either. He eluded to making mistakes as a young man and coming up to Alaska. When I knew him he’d been married for twenty years and had three kids.

  “One day the captain said to me, ‘Son, do you need some help with some new ID? Hard to get a new license sometimes.’

  “I knew what he was talking about. And I said yes, thank you, and he got the license and a social security card for me. I don’t know how. He knew a lot of people, though. There were some tough men on that ship, and maybe they helped. But I had the right paperwork. I worked for the captain for five years, rented a studio above a grocery store, saved my money, then came down to Oregon to work in construction again and to go to college. I wanted to build homes, like my father.”