The Bitter Season

by Tami Hoag

  She came to the door, her hair down in a wild tangle that tumbled over one shoulder, her makeup streaked with tears, mascara and lipstick smudged.

  “I don’t want you here, Charlie,” she had said, but she stepped back and let him in anyway. Typically Diana, a walking contradiction.

  Her apartment was its usual mess, looking like it might house half a dozen refugees from some war-torn Third World country—clothes discarded everywhere, dirty dishes and glasses in the sink and on the counter, open bags and boxes of junk food sitting around. It smelled like she had forgotten to take the garbage out for a couple of days and then smoked a lot of weed to cover the smell.

  “I can’t believe you attacked Ken that way,” she said.

  “All he’s ever done is use you, Di. How can you not see that?”

  “He loves me.”

  “I love you. I told you not to go to the house, and I was right. It only upset you.”

  “I’m upset because of you.”

  “I broke in through a door for you. You were on the floor sobbing—”

  “I’m in mourning!”

  “For what? You hated them both!”

  “How can you say that? She was the only mother we ever had!”

  “That wasn’t my choice or yours.”

  “She picked me, Charlie,” she said, tearing up again. “She came to the orphanage and picked me. And now she’s dead! And Daddy loved me, too. We didn’t get along, but he loved me.”

  “Don’t rewrite history, Diana. He loved himself,” Charlie argued. “The rest of us were just there to amuse him or annoy him—you most of all.”

  She struck him so fast his cheek was stinging before he realized she’d slapped him.

  “It’s my story,” she said, eyes narrowed as she leaned over him. “It can be whatever I want it to be. They’re gone now. I can remember them any way I like.”

  “It doesn’t change who they were,” Charlie said.

  “Yes, it does!”

  In the dark labyrinth of Diana’s mind it made sense. Her perception was her reality, as fluid as quicksilver, and just as toxic.

  “You were always a problem, Charlie,” she said with disdain.

  “Me?! I’ve spent my whole life trying to save you!”

  “Well, sorry for wasting your time,” she said, sneering. “Why don’t you go save yourself and leave me the hell alone? I don’t need you anymore. I have Ken. He’s a real man, unlike you, Charlie. You could never make me happy.”

  “Don’t say that!” Charlie cried. “I’d do anything for you. You know that!”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” she said, her expression knowing and mocking.

  Tears filled Charlie’s eyes. The pain was worse than a knife in his heart.

  “Di, don’t!” Charlie begged as she turned away from him and started toward her bedroom. For all he knew, Ken Sato was on the other side, waiting to take his sister away from him forever. He would be left with no one. All he had ever wanted was to be loved and accepted, to belong. Fear froze hard in his chest. He reached out to grab her. “Di, please!”

  She spun on him, elbow raised, and caught him hard high on the cheekbone, snapping his head to the left. The second blow exploded against his mouth, the taste of blood like copper on his tongue.

  Charlie staggered backward. Diana rushed him, jumping, hitting him in the chest with a knee that knocked the wind from him. He fell hard, the back of his head bouncing off the floor. Colors burst inside his brain, and his vision dimmed.

  His sister was on him in an instant, sitting on his stomach, making it impossible for him to get a breath. She hit him again and again, using her fist like a hammer. Charlie raised his arms to block her blows. He begged her to stop, spitting blood and choking on his tears.

  Her fury burned out like a flash fire. She got up off him and stood looking down at him as he cried, her eyes as cold and hard as marble. Charlie rolled onto his side and curled into a ball. The pain was unbearable—not from the physical beating, but from within, from his heart. He wanted to die right there.

  “You’re so weak,” she sneered, and walked away, leaving him on the filthy carpet that reeked of old cat piss.

  She didn’t love him. After all he’d done for her all their lives, that was the truth: She didn’t love him. She wasn’t capable of loving him the way he loved her.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d beaten him. But somehow Charlie felt with terrible dread that it was the last time. He always felt that way, he reminded himself. Every time Diana said she was through with him, he believed her. Then her mood would change like the wind, and she’d accept him as if nothing had ever happened.

  It wouldn’t be that way this time, he thought as he came back to the present and stared at himself in the mirror. The common cause that had bound them to each other was gone. Their common enemy was dead. He could feel the last of the bolts loosening as the shuddering vehicle that had held the family hurtled toward the inevitable crash.

  With their parents gone, there was no reason for their alliance. Diana didn’t need him. She was no more capable of loving him than their father had been—which was ironic, considering she and Lucien shared not one drop of blood. Perhaps she had been Lucien Chamberlain’s perfect daughter after all.

  Charlie felt as if his heart had been crushed inside his chest. He tried to tell himself he was wrong, that he always plunged into the darkest depths of depression after one of these fights with Diana. But the panic was stronger than the logic. He was shaking with it. This was the end.

  They would be connected by the funeral, by the disbursal of the estate. Then what? Then nothing. Diana had already begun to plaster over their past in her mind. She would erase him, spin out of his orbit, and abandon him. The story of his life.

  He had been her anchor, the hand brake on her recklessness. She wanted to be free of him now. She would destroy herself or be destroyed without him to protect her, and he would be left without the one person he had ever loved. Their family would cease to exist.

  The idea terrified him, and yet, in the deepest, darkest corner of his heart he had to acknowledge what he had always secretly believed: They never should have existed in the first place.

  They were four random individuals who had been brought together by whatever unseen force ruled the universe, thrown together by fate or karma; a social experiment in cruelty and mental illness staged for the amusement of some sadistic deity.

  And now it was over. Now it would end. They would end.

  He didn’t want to live to see it.

  29

  Alice: How long is forever?

  White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.

  How terrible and true that was, Jennifer thought, even if it wasn’t really a quote from the book.

  She had spent the latter part of her afternoon helping a twelve-year-old girl search for the origins of the lines she had read in a Facebook meme. The lines had been attributed to Lewis Carroll, but only on social media, which the girl’s teacher would not consider a real source. She was working on an art project that had to reference a literary work, and she had chosen Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as her inspiration. Even though Jennifer knew of several verifiable references to time in the novel, the girl stubbornly wanted the one they couldn’t corroborate.

  When Jennifer suggested that the girl actually read the book first, she was very rudely dismissed.

  I hope your teacher makes you read it and it gives you nightmares, you nasty little bitch, Jennifer had thought, in no mood to be dealing with the public. Her visit from the police detective had rattled her and set her nerves on edge.

  She didn’t want to think about her childhood or her father’s murder, or anything else from that time. She had worked too hard to pull herself out of the dark place she’d struggled in for too many years. It should have been over by now. People should have left it alone. Twenty-five years later, what did it matter? No one could bring him back to life. No one should have to pay for his death. T
hat was how she felt.

  How long is forever?

  Sometimes, just one second . . .

  One second was all it took to change everything. One second to see the wrong thing. One second to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. One second to discover that your deepest-held truth was the darkest kind of lie. Her childhood had been shattered in a series of one-second increments. The second it took to open a door. The seconds it took to overhear a conversation. The second it took for a bullet to end a life.

  How long is forever?

  One second after the next, after the next, after the next . . .

  Her mother had quickly lost patience with Jennifer’s mental fragility after the murder. She believed the mourning period should end as soon as the dirt was thrown on the grave and the last solicitous friends and relatives left the church basement reception. Her mother was not a sentimental person. Daddy was hardly cold in the ground when she officially started dating Uncle Duff. Life moved on for Barbie Duffy. She didn’t understand why it wasn’t the same for her oldest daughter, who was just a child.

  She didn’t understand, and Jennifer would never explain it to her. The things she knew, she held inside. The caustic nature of those memories continuously ate away at her. No one tried hard enough or cared deeply enough to pry them out. It took her years to let go, to forgive herself, to climb out of the depression and anxiety that gripped her, and move on with her life. Tonight she felt like she had fallen all the way back to the bottom of the mountain.

  She had come home at the end of her workday agitated and upset. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t concentrate enough to lose herself in a book—her lifelong method of escape. She turned the television on, but couldn’t settle to watch anything. All the local news stations wanted to talk about was the double homicide of the U of M professor and his wife, and the man wanted for questioning. All the news was bad. Violence, hatred, racism, bigotry—everyone was angry, everyone was outraged. The world was a terrible place full of terrible people doing terrible things.

  She changed the channel to a decorating show and was immediately confronted by the phony drama and staged arguments of a real estate agent trying to convince his clients to sell their home while a decorator tried to convince them to spend thousands remodeling the dump. Even that was too much conflict to deal with.

  Her arms wrapped around her as if she was freezing, she paced her apartment. Her mind was racing. Even earlier in the evening she had been dreading the night. Eventually, she would need to sleep, and sleep would bring the nightmares. Not even sleeping pills would keep them at bay . . . unless she took one too many.

  The thought slipped itself into her consciousness surreptitiously, like a snake slipping through a crack in a wall. As she recognized it, it frightened her. She hadn’t thought that way in a long time. She shouldn’t be thinking that way now. People who had never experienced suicidal thoughts didn’t understand the seductiveness, the insidiousness of those thoughts. Her immediate, instinctive response was to distract herself with physical pain. She wanted to go to the kitchen and get a knife and cut herself to relieve the pressure and clear her mind.

  Tears welled in her eyes. She had so many scars from cutting in her teens and her twenties that she would never change clothes in a gym locker room or allow a sales associate to see her in a department store fitting room. She didn’t want more scars. She wanted to be free—and that thought took her straight back to the idea of the sleeping pills. The ultimate freedom was death.

  The endless loop of destructive thoughts had begun, fueling itself from her fear and despair.

  Maybe if she took another Valium.

  Maybe if she took three . . .

  How long is forever?

  Sometimes, just one second . . .

  The phone on the breakfast bar rang, startling her. She let the call go to voice mail and then dialed out and picked up the message.

  “Ms. Duffy, this is Detective Liska. I’m sorry to bother you, but I need to ask you a couple of additional questions. If you could, please call me back at your convenience . . .”

  More questions. As if the questions she had already asked hadn’t caused Jennifer enough upset, awakening memories and stirring up emotions like stirring up the sediment at the bottom of a still pond. When she closed her eyes, she could see the faces of her past: her father, Angie, Jeremy . . . She had very deliberately not thought of them in years. Now here they were, come to haunt her. They would be waiting for her in her dreams, and they would be angry and accusatory and threatening.

  You can never tell, Jennifer . . .

  How long is forever?

  The tears she had been struggling to hold back burst forth at that thought, like water from a crumbling dam, taking all resistance, sweeping away everything in its path. Sobbing, she hurried into the kitchen, pulled a paring knife from the knife block, shoved her left sleeve up, and . . . hesitated.

  Her hand was trembling, the sharp blade a hair’s breadth above her soft white flesh. She shouldn’t. She had gone a long time without resorting to this. If she started again, she might not be able to stop. Just once always led to just once more to this is the last time . . . The rush of endorphins, the relief of releasing that inner pain was so tempting.

  The pressure and the anxiety were just so terrible.

  Just this once.

  She’d been taken by surprise by the renewed interest in her father’s murder. It was only natural that she was upset. She’d been doing so well. If she could just relieve the pressure now, she’d right herself, and that would be all. She was stronger now than she had been before. She wouldn’t need to do it again.

  The sense of pain was clean and sharp as the blade sliced the delicate skin of her inner arm. The sense of relief followed immediately, followed by a quick, brief high as the endorphins were released in her brain. Then the high bottomed out, and the sense of shame welled up inside her like the line of blood rising on her skin.

  Jennifer dropped the knife in the sink and turned the water on. Doubled over, lying against the edge of the sink, she stuck her arm beneath the ice-cold flow and cried and cried and cried.

  She cried for her adult self, for the carefully constructed person she had become falling so easily back to the past, for losing all the ground she had fought so hard to gain. She was Alice falling down the rabbit hole and into an old familiar nightmare.

  She cried for the nine-year-old girl she had been, the lonely, innocent girl who lived inside books, who witnessed something unspeakable, who listened to a murder . . . who never told anyone anything. The keeper of terrible secrets.

  How long is forever?

  Every day of her life.

  30

  They didn’t find the gun.

  Nikki was disappointed but undaunted. What she had found was potentially more important: the photos of Angie Jeager/Evi Burke. She knew Donald Nilsen had owned a .243 hunting rifle. She had a photograph of him wielding the weapon as he shouted at his neighbors and threatened to shoot their dog.

  He’d had the means to shoot Ted Duffy. He’d had the opportunity to shoot Ted Duffy—if they discounted the statement of his long-missing wife. He wasn’t lacking motive. The two had had run-ins. The discovery of the pictures hidden under Jeremy Nilsen’s mattress, however, may have added a new dimension to the picture.

  In her confrontation with Nilsen on his front lawn, she had thrown out the idea that Angie Jeager had somehow ruined or tainted his son. She’d done it just to get a rise out of him, but the more she thought about it, the more the idea appealed to her as an extra layer of motive.

  Murder was a solution arrived at by different means, depending on the motive. In the heat of passion or rage, there was no forethought. It was an act triggered from a part of the brain where emotion and instinct lived. In other cases, the motivation for murder was built one step, one transgression, one insult at a time, layer by layer, until the mind could make an argument for a violent solution to an untenable situation.


  Donald Nilsen didn’t get along with his neighbors. By his reasoning, they encroached on his privacy and trampled on his personal world order. He was the kind of man who would keep score, remembering every little affront. He had deemed the Duffys’ foster daughters a threat to his sense of decency. Ted Duffy had gone head to head with him on the subject of the girls. If Nilsen had found out Angie Jeager was tempting his son, or even that his son had a crush on her, that could have been the last straw. It only had to make sense to Donald Nilsen.

  In need of movement and coffee, Nikki left her office and crept up the stairs to check on the boys. They had all been asleep in the living room when she got home—Kyle, R.J., and her cousin Matt—sprawled on the sofa and the floor like gunshot victims. One by one, she woke them and sent them off to their respective beds.

  Kyle, her artist, had painted the door of his room red, black, and white, with a life-size samurai warrior—a fierce mask, a raised sword—warning the faint-of-heart not to cross this threshold. She cracked the door open and peeked in at him, sleeping soundly. He was her quiet one. He had broken up with his first girlfriend before Nikki even knew he had one.

  She imagined Jeremy Nilsen the same way: quietly living his own life beneath his father’s radar. Donald Nilsen would not have been an understanding parent. Knowing that, and knowing how he felt about his son now, would Donald Nilsen have killed someone because of his son?

  Seley had been calling homeless shelters, looking for Jeremy Nilsen, hoping against hope that they would find him and that he would be able to fill in the blanks of the story. So far, he seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth after leaving the VA hospital.

  Nikki couldn’t imagine not knowing where her boys were, let alone not caring. She would have dug up every corner of the earth to find them, would have sacrificed everything she had to save them.