The Last Widow: The latest new 2019 crime thriller from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author

by Karin Slaughter

  She nodded.

  “I’ll be right back.” Sara found a pitcher of water and filled a glass. She glanced around the room. Most of the children were sleeping. The ones who were awake watched her carefully.

  Joy tried to sit up, but dizziness immediately pulled her down to the bed. Sara helped her drink from the glass. Her jaw kept clenching in pain. Her hand was still clutching her stomach.

  There were several tests that Sara could order in any hospital that would likely tell her what was wrong with Joy, but none of them were currently at her disposal.

  “Joy.” Sara sat down on the cot beside her. “I need you to talk to me.”

  “I don’t—” Her tears started to fall in earnest. She was clearly scared. “I’m sorry I got sick on you.”

  “I’m just glad it wasn’t spinach. That’s the worst.”

  Joy didn’t smile.

  “How long have you been feeling bad?”

  “Since …” She closed her eyes as another wave of pain shot through her belly. “Since last night.”

  “You’re sure it’s not your period?”

  She shook her head.

  “Are you sexually active?”

  Joy became a study in mortification. “I haven’t—I mean, I wouldn’t. No, ma’am. The boys aren’t allowed around us and Daddy—” She vehemently shook her head.

  Sara had been lied to about sexual experience almost as many times as she’d been puked on. “I’m going to press down here, okay? Tell me if anything hurts.”

  Joy watched Sara’s hands move around. She blushed furiously when the exam moved below her bikini line. There was no speculum to do a pelvic, and as much as Sara despised Gwen, she wasn’t going to perform one without the mother’s permission.

  At least not for another half hour.

  Ectopic pregnancy was always Sara’s first concern with a girl Joy’s age. Having experienced the same disastrous complication herself, she knew the consequences of not acting quickly. Appendicitis was a close second. Ovarian cyst. Bowel obstruction. Kidney stone. Twisted fallopian tube. Tumor. All would require diagnostic tools that Sara did not have, and surgery that she was in no position to perform. “I need to talk to your mother.”

  “No!” Joy sat up, panicked. She grabbed onto Sara, light-headed from the drop in her blood pressure. “Please, let me stay here for a minute. Please.”

  She was scared of her mother, which made Sara scared for all of Gwen’s children.

  “It’s all right.” Sara gently helped Joy lie down. “Has your mother hurt you, Joy?”

  The girl’s eyes watered with tears. “She gets mad, is all. We don’t—sometimes we don’t do what we’re supposed to do, and that makes it harder for her. She has a lot of—a lot of responsibilities.”

  Sara stroked the girl’s hair. “Has your father ever—”

  “Am I—will I be all right?” Joy kept clutching her stomach. “Please, tell me. Why does it hurt so bad?”

  Sara felt her pediatrician’s instincts ringing like an alarm. In any other setting, she would be on the phone to children’s services, making sure that Joy did not go back to her parents until there was a thorough investigation.

  Unfortunately, Sara was not in a normal setting, and she had no ability to control anything but how she responded to this scared child.

  She told Joy, “You probably ate something that didn’t agree with you.”

  This was unlikely, as the girls all seemed to eat the same thing at every meal and only Joy was showing symptoms.

  “Are you—” Joy was still terrified. “Are you sure?”

  “I think what you need is some rest, and then you’ll feel better. Okay?”

  Joy relaxed into the cot, eyes closed.

  Guilt weighed on Sara. Normally, she would’ve been honest with a patient of Joy’s age. Sara would have told her that she wasn’t sure what was going on, but she was going to find out what was causing the problem and do everything she could to make it better. But this was not a normal situation and there was no way to find out what was wrong other than to wait for the bug to resolve or for more symptoms to appear.

  Sara could at least make herself useful to the other children. She told Joy, “I’ll be over here, okay?”

  “Michelle—” Joy looked like she wanted to grab the word and shove it back into her mouth.

  Sara sat down on the cot. She tried to keep the desperation out of her tone. “Did you see her?”

  “I—” Joy tried again. Her eyes closed. She turned her head away from Sara. “I’m sorry.”

  Sara had crossed a lot of lines since being kidnapped, but this one felt different. The girl was scared. She knew something important, and she knew that telling Sara would get her into a great deal of trouble.

  Sara said, “It’s okay, sweetheart. Try to sleep.”

  “She’s—” Joy stopped to swallow. “Behind the—behind here.”

  Sara tried to measure her response. “In the glass house?”

  Joy shook her head. “In the woods. Mama left her in the woods.”

  At first, Sara did not understand what she was being told. Her body reacted before her mind could. There was a shaking sensation that traveled from her heart and out to her limbs. The words “left her in the woods” echoed alongside it.

  Chained to a post? Left to scorch in a metal box? None of these scenarios seemed beneath a woman who would suffocate a young man to death.

  “Try to sleep.” Sara pressed her lips to Joy’s head. “I’m going to get some air.”

  Joy let out a heavy breath.

  Sara walked through the bunkhouse. There were two doors; one at the front, one at the rear. She opened the back door. No stairs, just a four-foot drop. She jumped down to the ground. Her spattered sneakers disappeared into the thick prairie grass. She lifted her toga and walked into the forest.

  Birds chirped. Sara looked around. No guards in deer stands. No young men with rifles, knives, pistols. The steady hum of the generator told her that the greenhouse was to the right. Sara went to the left.

  Her nose picked up on the unmistakable odor of rotting meat.

  The body of Michelle Spivey was about thirty yards behind the bunkhouse. She was lying on her left side, snarled in an overgrowth of brambles. Her spine was curved. Her left knee was bent. Her right leg jutted out behind her. She looked as if someone had tossed her into the woods. Thrown her out as if she was trash. Her right arm was draped over her head, hand clawing at the air. She was fixed in place, the muscles slowly depleting of oxygen as rigor mortis paralyzed her body. First in the eyelids, then the jaw and neck. Given her age and muscle mass, along with the extremely high temperature, Michelle had likely been dead anywhere from two to four hours.

  Sara looked back toward the bunkhouse.

  The door had closed. No one was coming. No one had even noticed that she was gone.

  Running was an option, but Sara was not going to run right now. Michelle Spivey had been broken by the time the car accident brought Sara into her world. The woman had barely spoken more than a few sentences. She had stabbed a man to death. She had served as Dash’s compliant accomplice. But she had also been a mother, a wife, a doctor, a human being. This was a time for some sort of meditation, a kind word that acknowledged Michelle’s life.

  Sara was not going to do that, either.

  She got down on her knees. She grabbed the collar of Michelle’s dress and ripped open the back. The woman’s ribs protruded like whalebone. Red welts had rubbed into the thin layer of skin covering her vertebrae. She had been carved into with a knife, punched repeatedly in the kidneys. The yellowing bruises indicated that at least a week had passed since she had been beaten. The wounds had scabbed. The burns were more recent.

  Sara knew what a cigarette burn looked like.

  She ripped the dress the rest of the way down. Michelle’s underwear was stained. She had started to leak. The intense heat was boiling the fat from her skin and oiling the ground beneath her.

  The
entire left side of Michelle’s body was such a dark, reddish purple that she looked as if she had been dipped halfway into a vat of ink. When the heart stops beating, blood always settles to the lowest point. Livor mortis was the Latin phrase used to describe the color of the skin as heavy blood cells sank through the serum. The process sped up with heat. The stain that went down Michelle’s hip and leg, up to the arm that she’d laid her head on, indicated that the woman had died exactly where she’d been lying in the woods.

  Tossed here like trash.

  Michelle was bloated from the bacteria swirling inside of her body. The heat hadn’t done the worst of the damage. Gwen had lied about giving Michelle antibiotics. Or maybe the antibiotics hadn’t worked. Either way, Gwen was responsible. Sara knew exactly who had left Michelle to die out here.

  Her passing would have been agonizing. Falling in and out of consciousness, disoriented, perhaps hallucinating, burning with fever. Sepsis had swollen her abdomen so much that the skin had cracked. Alongside the fissures, Sara could make out the faint stretch marks where twelve years ago, Michelle’s belly had expanded to accommodate the baby she was carrying inside her womb.

  Ashley.

  Sara remembered the child’s name from the newspaper article.

  She closed her eyes and turned her face up to the sun. The heat drilled open her pores. Sara tried to feel something, anything, but found herself numbed by the relentless brutality. There was no way for Sara to accurately gauge how long it had taken Michelle to die out here. The place seemed to have been chosen to maximize her suffering. Far from the Camp. Tossed onto the thorns of a bramble bush. Beaten and battered. Pain literally slicing open her body.

  Behind Sara, the bunkhouse door banged open.

  She ducked down her head. Sara was hidden by the overgrowth, but she didn’t know for how long. She worked quickly, examining Michelle as closely as she could, checking for chemical discolorations or some indication of what the scientist was doing inside the greenhouse. She smelled her hair. Looked at her fingernails. Rigor had sealed shut her jaw, but Sara checked inside her gums, her nose and ears.

  “Dr. Earnshaw?” Dash had cupped his hands to his eyes. The sunlight narrowed his field of vision. “Are you back here?”

  Sara dug into the pockets of Michelle’s dress, slipped her fingers around her bra, the band of her underwear. She was about to give up when she noticed the positioning of Michelle’s left hand. The fingers were folded in, but the thumb was straight out in a hitchhiker’s pose.

  Death grips were extremely rare. They came when a chemical reaction inside the body was triggered by abject terror. Michelle had been given ample time to contemplate her death. She had placed her hand under her bent knee, forcing the fingers to stay closed, of her own volition.

  There was something written on her palm.

  “Dr. Earnshaw?” Dash was turning his head slowly, scrutinizing the forest in sections.

  Sara leaned over Michelle’s body to get a better look at her hand. Vomit slid up her throat. The smell of rotting tissue was noxious. Sara held her breath. Up close, she thought maybe Michelle had written two words, or one really long one. Black marker. Only the bottom edges of the letters were exposed. Michelle’s fingers covered the rest.

  “Where are you, Dr. Earnshaw?” Dash’s voice was calm, but she did not trust it to stay that way.

  Sara picked at Michelle’s fingers, trying to pry them open. She was sweating too much. The fingers were too swollen. Sara couldn’t find purchase. Her only option was to break the rigor mortis in the wrist. The muscles had hardened like plastic. Sara gripped Michelle’s fist and forearm and twisted each of her hands in opposite directions.

  She was rewarded with a loud snap.

  “Lance?” Dash had heard the noise. “Hey, brother. Do you mind coming out here with me?”

  Sara clawed at Michelle’s fingers. The nails folded back, but they would not budge. She tried pressing upward with her thumbs.

  Dash jumped down from the bunkhouse door. A second set of feet hit the ground. Thirty yards away. Tall grass. Thick trees. He was talking to Lance. Sara was too panicked to understand him. Her heart was pounding. Her eyes felt shaky. She had to get Michelle’s hand open. She had to read the words. She looked around for a stick or something that she could use to force them up. There was nothing.

  Sara would have to use her mouth.

  She bit at Michelle’s clenched fingers, trying not to break open the skin.

  “Dr. Earnshaw?” Dash called. Lance coughed. They were getting closer.

  Sara caught the ball of Michelle’s first knuckle between her front teeth.

  She pulled back.

  Snap.

  Middle finger.

  Snap.

  Ring finger.

  Snap.

  “Dr. Earnshaw?”

  Dash was standing several feet behind her. His voice sounded nasal. He had pinched together his nostrils to ward off the stench. Lance was behind him. He belched once, then vomited against a tree.

  Dash’s crushed nose turned his sigh into a honk. He said her name again, “Dr. Earnshaw?”

  “She’s dead.” Sara had already folded herself over Michelle’s body. She forced out a cry, feigning grief. “You let her die. She was all alone.”

  Dash told her, “I’m sorry you’re upset. She was a flawed woman, but she redeemed herself in the end.”

  Sara tried to close Michelle’s hand. The fingers would no longer hold their shape.

  He said, “Let’s not drag this out, okay? The smell is terrible and I—I said you could stay in the bunkhouse. Let’s take you back now. It’s cool in there and you can—”

  Sara got to her feet.

  “Doctor—” Dash called, but Sara was already jogging through the overgrowth toward the bunkhouse. She pulled herself up through the door. Gwen was standing inside. She looked anxious but she was always anxious.

  Sara walked directly to the medicine cabinet. She found the rubbing alcohol. She stuffed a folded bed sheet under her arm and walked toward the front door.

  “Dr. Earnshaw.” Dash had taken off his sling so he could climb up to the floor. “If you could—”

  Sara slammed the door closed behind her. She stepped over Joy’s mess and headed straight for the outdoor shower. The latch wouldn’t cooperate. She cursed until her shaking fingers managed to close it. She draped the clean sheet over the stall. She wrenched the cap off the rubbing alcohol and poured it straight into her mouth.

  The bunkhouse door opened. Dash stood at the top of the stairs.

  “Oh, sorry.” He turned away from her, covering his eyes. “I was hoping—”

  The rest of his sentence was lost to Sara swishing the alcohol between her teeth, trying to kill whatever bacteria she had picked up from Michelle’s decaying flesh. She splashed the cool liquid onto her face, neck and hands.

  “Dr. Earnshaw?” Dash tried for the hundredth time. “If we could just discuss—”

  “Leave me alone.” Sara struggled with her toga, cursing at the knot, the wadded-up material, the pain of getting out of the damn stupid thing.

  Dash tried again. “I really must—”

  “I said leave me the fuck alone!”

  Sara turned on the water. She grabbed the soap.

  Dash scampered down the stairs. So much for his white male pride when a woman was ready to rip his fucking head off.

  Gwen opened the bunkhouse door. She glanced at Sara, then rushed after her husband.

  Sara got the water as hot as she could stand it. She tried to generate lather with the lye soap. The grit felt like a million pieces of sand.

  She waited for Lance to make an appearance, but he chose to stay inside with the children. Or with the air conditioning. Sara had caught sight of him as she’d jogged toward the bunkhouse. Lance had stared at her through heavy eyelids. His skin was pale. He had probably caught Joy’s stomach bug. Unless there was something else going around the Camp.

  Something that Michelle ha
d been working on in the greenhouse.

  Sara spat onto the floor of the shower. The rubbing alcohol still burned her gums. She opened her mouth and let the water hit the back of her throat. Her skin felt scalded. She was literally sweating underneath the spray of the shower.

  Michelle Spivey had survived unspeakable horrors. She had been raped and beaten. She had been pressed into labor inside of the greenhouse. She had been left to rot to death in the heat. The infectious disease expert would have been intimately familiar with sepsis, the most common cause of death in people who have been hospitalized. Sara imagined the doctor had monitored her qSOFA score up until the end. The quick Sequential Organ Failure Assessment was a point system that rated blood pressure, respiration and mentation. The higher the score, the higher the risk of mortality. While Michelle probably hadn’t had access to a blood pressure cuff, she could’ve monitored her own respiration and neurological symptoms. She would have known not only that death was coming, but what it would look like.

  One of her last acts had been to find a black marker and write a message on the inside of her hand.

  Two words.

  Several possible meanings.

  A coffin? A device to defeat telephone toll charges? A TV show or film? A type of experimental theater? An FDA warning? The briefcase that carried the nuclear codes?

  Sara turned around, letting the sharp spray of water needle her scalp.

  In computing, the term could be used to describe the transfer characteristics of a device whose inner workings are unknown. Or a type of software. Or a type of software engineer.

  She ran her fingers through her hair, trying to break the knots.

  In aviation, it referred to the recorder that was used to document the flight path data and the pilot’s voices. The device was painted bright orange, but the common name was exactly the same two words that Michelle had written on her hand.

  BLACK BOX.

  Sara rubbed her face with her hands. What did Michelle mean? Why had she chosen those specific words? Sara had blown her chance to run, had risked her life, her safety, and for what? She was plagued by the same maddening question from before. Except now, there was a clock winding down on her search for the answer. Dash had told her as much himself.