hasn’t been able to tell us exactly what happened. Would you like to tell me?”
“My husband and Karl were standing in the kitchen with my niece’s friend, Rory,” I said wearily, staring out the squad car window at the frozen fields. To me, it was an alien landscape. The cold sun made it gleam like the white linoleum in the Granberrys’ kitchen. I saw the blood against it, heard Luke moaning again like an animal.
I got through the account of what had happened, yet again.
I could tell the sheriff had a hard time believing I’d started Margaret down the stairs. I was a librarian, for God’s sake. I reached up and touched the dreadful bruise and swelling on my forehead. I’d gotten a good look in the Granberrys’ bathroom mirror. Even touching as delicately as possible, my head rang with pain.
“You need to get checked out at the hospital,” the sheriff said. He was a big man, wide faced and heavy.
“After I see Martin,” I said, and didn’t speak again until we were there.
“I just want you to know, ma’am, that the deputy that questioned the Granberrys last night… well, he won’t go without an official reprimand.”
I shrugged. It didn’t matter anymore.
Somehow I was in a wheelchair going down corridors freshly painted in a glossy beige. The rubberized flooring was a dark chocolate brown. The place smelled like a sure-enough hospital, the sharp odors of disinfectants and medicine and the bland smell of hospital food vying for supremacy.
Through the doors marked ICU we went, the nurse pushing me not offering any comment no matter how many questions I asked her. The tiny ICU unit had room for six patients, and Martin and Karl were the only two.
Cindy was in Martin’s glass-sided room, and she stepped out when she saw me coming. She started to say something to me and then thought better of it. Her eyes were red.
The nurse wheeled me right up to Martin’s bed. I looked at him in horror. His face had lost all its normal color, and everything that could be hooked up to a tube was. He looked twenty years older.
“He hasn’t said much,” the young man in the shadows of the room told me, and I saw that it was Barrett.
I knew then that Martin was going to die.
“Sweetheart,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “I’m here.” I stood and took his hand.
His eyes flickered open. He took in the bruise. “You got hurt,” he said faintly. “That’s why you didn’t come.”
“Yes.”
“I knew it.”
“Miss me?” I said, trying to smile, having no idea what to say.
“Oh, yes,” he breathed, almost smiling.
“I missed you, too,” I said, choking on the words. My eyes brimmed and welled over. I kissed him on his cheek, and wished with all my heart I was alone with him. But I couldn’t tell his son to leave.
That meant Barrett was there when Martin gave a rattling breath five minutes later and alarms went off, and Barrett was there when the technicians hustled us out in the hall and worked over my husband, and Barrett was there when the old doctor came out minutes later to tell me that my husband had died.
I became a widow the same week as Regina, the same week Luke Granberry became a widower.
Regina had been deprived of both of the men she’d cared for; I’m not going to assume she loved them. Her mother had returned and promised to help her raise the baby, whom Barby claimed was the spitting image of a Bartell. I never held Hay-den in my arms again. Somehow I never wanted to.
Regina faced only nominal charges in the death of Margaret Granberry, since Luke himself attested they had held Regina and me prisoner. Without Margaret, Luke seemed to lose all his resolve, to become indifferent to his own life. But he recovered from his bullet wound to face three charges of kidnapping (Regina, Hayden, and me), two counts of murder (Craig and Rory), one count of assault with a deadly weapon (Karl). Since Luke pled guilty, I didn’t have to return to Corinth for the trial.
I would never go there again.
Two weeks after Craig’s funeral, Craig’s older brother Dylan charged Regina with being an unfit mother, citing her plan to sell her baby to the Granberrys. He and his wife Shondra wanted to raise Hayden along with their little girl.
But Regina and Barby together had too much Bartell determination for the judge. He ruled the baby should stay with his mother, but the judge did order Regina to take parenting classes.
She met an older man at the first session, a divorced thirty-year-old ordered to take the class after he’d slapped his child in a grocery store, and the next thing I knew, they were married. Regina seemed to slip into marriage easily, not seeing it as so different from any other state of being.
Of course that was months after I had brought Martin back to Lawrenceton for the funeral. Cindy had hinted that there was room in Martin’s parents’ plot, and Barby had done more than hint. But I can be mighty deaf when I feel like it. It was none of Cindy’s business; ex was ex. And Barby had never been a favorite of mine.
Poor Mother. She had to try to tone down her joy at her husband John’s complete recovery from his heart attack, and he was twenty years older than Martin. I saw her efforts and pitied her in a remote way.
Poor John stood by the graveside trying not to look guilty. John was a rock to me, and his children, too. I’d always resented them a little, maybe, having been the sole child of my mother until she remarried, but his two sons and their wives were so kind and tactful that my petty irritation seeped away.
I was still in the stunned shell of numbness when the letter came. I’d stopped at the mailbox on my way back from work, and I shuffled through its contents indifferently. Bills, catalogs, occupant mail. But there was one personal letter, hand-written, no return address.
I slit it open when I got into the house.
I glanced at the signature. It was from Luke Granberry.
I dropped it as if it were a loathsome spider. But seconds later, I picked it back up.
