Carla Neggers - The Widow

The new house, with its blue-gray clapboards and black shutters, was supposedly smaller and more restrained, but Linc, who’d never even seen pictures of the Garrison’s original Maine home, had never liked it.

He had always loved playing on the steps as a little kid, if only because no one noticed him out there. His uncle Ellis considered the house his own, but, in reality, the deed belonged to Linc’s father, Jason Cooper.

Everything, Linc thought, was in his father’s name. His father was clever, responsible and ruthless. His younger half brother, Ellis, was passive by nature and gentle in temperament, not unambitious but more measured in his wants and needs.

“I don’t give second chances. Don’t make the mistake of thinking I do.”

Chris’s voice. When he had jumped out of the dark and clamped a hand on Linc’s shoulder, Linc had wet his pants. Chris hadn’t relented.

Thirteen years old, and Linc had never felt such shame as when he looked into his idol’s eyes and saw that he knew everything.

“You have nothing to prove to anyone, Linc. Not to me. Not to your father or to your sister.”

He’d wanted to be like Chris Browning. It didn’t matter that Chris was so much older. Linc wanted to be self-reliant, capable. Chris had no family money to fall back on. His parents had died when he was a baby. He’d made his own way in the world.

“What kind of man do you want to be?”

Linc sat on a stone bench on a narrow landing on the steep steps. How many times had he thought about finding Abigail Browning and telling her everything he knew about the night before she was attacked, before her husband was killed?

Telling her what he’d done seven years ago as a stupid kid.

He heard footsteps above him on the steps and looked up just as Mattie Young came into view. Chris’s friend, the Coopers’ yardman, the local drunk. A creep.

Mattie jumped the last two steps onto the landing. “Hey, Linc, my boy.” He grinned, smug, sarcastic. “Fancy meeting you here.”

There wasn’t any “fancy” to it, and Mattie knew it-he’d provided the when, where, the why. And the consequences of not showing up.

Deliberately, just to rub Mattie’s nose in the disparities between them, Linc had put on an expensive sweater and khakis for their little meeting, and he’d shaved. Mattie had come down the steps from working in Ellis’s gardens, but he would have been a mess, regardless. He’d tied his stringy, greasy hair into a ponytail and wore a stained T-shirt and torn, frayed jeans that sagged on his scrawny frame.

He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and tapped one out. “Your crazy uncle has me moving a rhododendron. He doesn’t think it’s thriving where it is. It looks fine to me.” He stuck the cigarette between his lips. “What the hell about me? I’d like to thrive.”

“Then stop smoking. That’d help.”

“Sarcastic little shit, aren’t you, considering the spot you’re in?”

Linc felt his jaw set hard. “I hate your guts.”

Mattie laughed. “Feeling’s mutual, kid. You got my best friend killed-”

“Your best friend? You didn’t even go to his wedding. You were in a ditch somewhere sleeping off a couple bottles of cheap booze.”

“So I was.” Using a small disposable lighter, Mattie lit his cigarette, inhaling deeply before returning lighter and pack to his pocket. “Do you have my money?”

“A thousand. I can’t get my hands on ten grand at once without drawing attention to myself. I told you-”

“Show me the thousand.”

Linc reached into his day pack, dropped at his feet, and withdrew a sealed envelope. His stomach rolled over. Sweat erupted on his back. He couldn’t believe what he was doing, but what choice did he have? Especially now, with his sister Grace’s State Department appointment in the works.

He handed the envelope to Mattie. “Go ahead and count it if you want. It’s all there.”

“I don’t need to count it. If you’re lying, I know where you live, don’t I?”

“You’re scum. I don’t know what the Brownings ever saw in you. They were good guys. You’re a piece of shit.”

Mattie didn’t react with his usual anger and defensiveness. “Chris and his grandfather looked past my mistakes. They saw the real me. I’m getting back into my photography.” He folded the bulging envelope, squeezing it into the palm of his hand as if it held all his answers-as if it wasn’t just money. “Your money’s going for a good cause. Think of it as your penance and my new beginning.”

Linc snorted. “The real you is a bottom-feeding lowlife. It always has been. It always will be.”

“I never stole from the people who cared about me.”

Shame rippled through Linc, and his legs weakened under him. “If you’re so good, why don’t you tell the police what you know? About me. The burglaries. Why blackmail me?”

“A guy like me doesn’t get many second chances.”

“Why did you wait until now?”

“I wasn’t going to put the squeeze on a teenager. And now-the timing’s right. You’re not going to the police, not with your sister’s big appointment hanging in the balance.” Mattie grinned, the sarcasm-the pleasure he took in what he was doing-back. “What do you think Grace would say if she could see her baby brother now?”

Linc couldn’t bear to think about Grace’s disappointment. Eighteen years older, more like an aunt than a sister, she was the only child of their father and his first wife, a marriage that had ended the summer Doe Garrison had drowned. He and Grace had no other siblings. It was just the two of them.

Mattie blew cigarette smoke out of his nose. “Relax, kid. I’m not greedy. Once I have my ten grand, we’re square.”

He was forty-two but looked older. Grace said she remembered when he was a talented, promising photographer. But Mattie Young had hit the self-destruct button a long time ago.

“I returned all the items I stole,” Linc said, hating the meekness in his voice. “Why punish me?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” Mattie gave him a knowing look. “Don’t you punish yourself?”

Linc didn’t answer.

“And you didn’t return everything, did you? Abigail’s necklace is still missing.”

“I told you. I didn’t steal it. I didn’t attack her. I didn’t kill Chris.”

“Who’ll believe you without proof of who did steal the necklace and attack her, of who did kill Chris?” Mattie dropped his half-smoked cigarette onto the stone and crushed it under his cheap work boot. “I need to get back to your uncle’s rhodie. Work on the rest of my money. I want it within the next few days. All of it.”

“I’ll get it just to watch you piss it away.”

“All that anger. It’ll eat you alive if you let it.”

“I hope you choke on your own vomit.”

Mattie shrugged. “You’re not alone.” He squatted down, picked up the crushed cigarette and tucked it into a front pocket as he rose. “Best to cover my tracks. Your uncle doesn’t let me smoke on the grounds. If he or your father or sister finds out about the money, what will you tell them? Do you remember your cover story?”

Linc didn’t want to argue with him anymore. “I’ll tell them I bought some of your old photographs.”

“Very good,” Mattie said, then smiled. “See you soon.”

After his blackmailer left, Linc turned and faced the water, looking down at the near-vertical hillside. Juts of exposed granite ledge, moss, bare roots of trees-spruce, pine, fir, a few beeches and birches-clung to its thin, acidic soil.

“I’m on my honeymoon, Linc. You and your shenanigans aren’t even on the list of things I want to be thinking about this week.”