A Welcome Grave

just the opposite, that he was feeling me out to see how serious we were.”

To see how serious we were. Apparently, the word “engaged” hadn’t meant a lot to Jefferson. Maybe in his world, though, an engagement—or even a marriage—was no indication of how serious a relationship was at all.

“I know you don’t want to hear this, and I’ll spare you the details. I still feel awful, Lincoln. You probably don’t believe that, and maybe you never will. But the reason I’m telling you this is because I have to explain what I saw happen to my husband.”

I was leaning forward, elbows on my knees, eyes on the floor. I reached out and ran my hand through my hair as she spoke, squeezing it until the roots pulled hard at my scalp.

“You, and everyone who knew us, probably had a lot of theories as to what attracted me to Alex. I’m sure everyone talked about the money, though I’d hate to think they truly believed I was so shallow. I’ll tell you what the attraction really was, though—he needed me. He seemed desperate for me. He used to joke about how much he enjoyed my youth and innocence, but after a while I saw that they weren’t all jokes. That I represented something that he thought he needed very badly. He told me once that I healed him, and he said that seriously. As seriously as anything anyone had ever told me. And it was attractive. Compelling, somehow. Here was this man who seemed to have everything, and yet what he thought he needed was a twenty-five-year-old girl who worked in his office and had aspirations of law school.”

She went quiet. I didn’t want to lift my head and look at her, but eventually I did. I sat there with my elbows on my knees and my hands clasped together and looked at her while she said, “I know you loved me, Lincoln. But I never felt like you needed me.”

For a moment silence filled the room, the ticking of the wall clock audible again. Karen looked uncomfortable. I probably didn’t look particularly at ease myself.

“You’re a very strong person,” she said. “You’re so comfortable with your abilities, so . . . assured. That’s probably the right word. Self-assured, I guess. And independent in a way that most people aren’t, either. Those are wonderful qualities, Lincoln, really they are, but . . . maybe they make you seem distanced. I knew I was important to you, I knew you loved me, but I just never had the sense that I was necessary. I never—”

“I thought you were going to talk about your husband.”

She froze with her mouth half open, another thought about ready to spill out, and then she nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“Okay. That’s fair. I’m sorry.” She leaned back into the couch and pulled her legs up beside her. “There was always something beneath the surface with Alex. Something that intensified how he felt about me, but that I never really understood. I thought it had to do with his family, with his son. He told me only that Matthew and he were no longer close. It wasn’t a subject Alex was comfortable with, and I didn’t push. Not until we were making the wedding plans. Then I told him I wanted his son to be there, that it was important to me. He told me Matthew would never come, and he refused to talk about the circumstances at length. That was the hardest I ever pushed him for details, and it was utterly unsuccessful.

“Once we were married, the topic almost never came up. I knew it was sensitive for Alex, and, to be perfectly honest, I never thought about his son. Why would I? I’d never met him, and he’d never been any sort of factor in my relationship with Alex. Every now and then something would remind me of him, and I’d wonder, but that was it. I was happy—we were happy—and Alex seemed at peace.”

“Until recently?”

She nodded. “A few weeks ago, something happened. The change in Alex was sudden, and profound. He was scared, Lincoln, and he wouldn’t tell me of what. He didn’t sleep; I’d find him sitting at his desk or out on the deck at two in the morning, just staring off into space, mostly. He became secretive and guarded. I know you want more details, but I just don’t have them. All I saw was the change in his personality. All I saw was his fear.”

“What was the response when you asked him about it?”

“He denied it at first,” Karen said. “Told me I was crazy, that he was fine, just busy. This went on for a while. Until Matthew called.”

“When was that?”

She frowned, considering. “The first call was two weeks ago, almost exactly. The phone rang very late, almost midnight. Alex was downstairs, and I was upstairs. I came down to see who’d been on the phone, and he said it was his son. He looked more scared than anyone I’ve ever seen, Lincoln. I asked him what was wrong and he just shook his head. Told me that it didn’t involve me and that the most important thing for him was seeing that it stayed that way. Obviously, I was furious, because now he was scaring me, and I didn’t even understand what was going on. I started yelling at him, demanding he tell me what was going on, and he got up and left the house. He didn’t leave in anger, though. He was robotic. Silent.”

She stared at the front door as if she were watching him walk out of it again.

“He left, and he was gone for hours. It was about four in the morning when he came back. I was still awake. He got into bed next to me, and I didn’t say anything, but he knew I was awake. He just lay there for a few minutes, and then he told me that he was sorry for upsetting me but that he was thinking of my best interests. He told me that someone wanted to make him accountable for something he’d done a long time ago. ‘For an old sin’ was actually how he put it.”

“There were no other details? No throwaway reference to something you didn’t understand?”

She started to shake her head, then stopped. “Actually, there was one. He said something like ‘When the phone rings at two in the morning, you know it’s either a wrong number or a prank or that it’s about to change your life. For me, it was the latter.’ ”

“He was certainly right about that.”

“But that’s the problem—he couldn’t have been talking about the call from Matthew. It was midnight when Matthew called. I was home, I heard the phone ring.”

“Maybe he misspoke. By the time you had that conversation it was, what, four in the morning?”

“Yes.”

“It probably seemed like the call had come in later than it did. But I suppose there’s nothing to lose by checking some phone records, seeing if there was a call that you missed some night.”

“I already looked, and so did the police. There weren’t any other calls that late. Not to the house or to his cell phone or his office.”

“That was the first time that they’d spoken in how many years?”

“Five years. Alex told me that the night of the call. We were done talking, both of us trying to sleep, and he said, almost to himself, ‘That’s the first time I’ve heard his voice in five years.’ ”

“But the specifics of this old sin? They weren’t given?”

“No. He just said he was going to handle it.”

“He didn’t handle it,” I said, thinking of what Targent had told me about the razor cuts and the burns.

“No,” Karen said, and her voice was faint. “It doesn’t look like he handled it.”

“Did you tell the police all of this?”

“Everything except Matthew’s call.”

I frowned. “Why leave that out? It sounds like he knew something, Karen. Something that could have been valuable.”

“I know. That’s why I wanted to talk to him first. Before the police.”

I stared at her, puzzled for a second, and then I got it. She was worried about what her husband had done. Worried about his image, maybe. And hers.

“You wanted a chance to do damage control before the cops and the media got to it. Wanted to make sure the right buried secrets stayed buried.”

Her eyes flashed. “That wasn’t it. I just wanted to know what happened. I just wanted to talk to him first.”

I shook my head. “Well, it was a hell of a bad idea, Karen. Because now Matt Jefferson’s not going to be telling anyone anything. If you’d played it right, and been honest with the cops, they would have gone down there and grabbed him before he had a chance to blow his head off. And, yes, I mean that they would have handled it better than me. Of course, I would’ve handled it differently if you’d been honest with me, too.”

“You think I don’t regret that? You think I’m not feeling guilty?”