Barbara Sissel - Safe Keeping

The drama, Roy meant, the horrible way it had ended—in Miranda’s murder of all things. Emily picked at her thumbnail. She and Roy had welcomed Miranda Quick when Tucker first began dating her in high school; they’d grown fond of her. They knew her family from church, knew her to be a sweet girl, the very sort of girl Emily could imagine as a daughter-in-law, but after graduation Miranda changed, becoming restless and unhappy. She went out nights alone. Tucker had had no idea where she was or what she was doing, and when he found out, it devastated him. But he loved her, and he was determined to stay with her even after she proved herself unworthy of his devotion.

He remained faithful, while Miranda broke his heart over and over. Emily had never felt so helpless and frustrated. Then, just when she thought it couldn’t get worse, Miranda went missing and Tucker was the one who found her body. A day later, the police came for him. They questioned him for hours. His picture was everywhere in the media; he was labeled a person of interest—in a murder investigation. How? Emily still couldn’t wrap her mind around it, how her son had become involved in something so horrifying. She blamed Miranda. Miranda was the cancer who had gotten her hooks into Tucker. She was the blight of their lives, and if it was possible, Emily believed she hated Miranda more now that she was dead, and she truly didn’t care if she went to hell for it.

Switching off the bedside light, she felt the mattress give when Roy sat down to put on his shoes, felt the heat from his palm when he flattened it on her back. He said he would make the coffee. “I’ll bring it up to you with some toast and that marmalade you like. How about it?”

Ordinarily, she would have been delighted. Roy wasn’t the sort of man who was comfortable in the kitchen. A construction site was more his domain; hard physical labor was his refuge, and providing a good living for his family was his contribution, his source of pride. Or it had been until last fall when he retired. Emily encouraged it. She imagined they would do things together, finish building the lake house, plant a vegetable garden. She’d dreamed of more exotic possibilities, traveling on the Orient Express or learning ballroom dancing, but in a very not-funny way, there was just something about having your son’s name—their own Lebay family name—linked to a murder investigation that caused such visions to lose their luster.

Pushing aside the bed linen, she told Roy she would make the coffee, that she needed to get up, to be busy. But then she was sorry not to have accepted his invitation, because when they came downstairs, he didn’t accompany her into the kitchen. Instead, he disappeared into his office.

Emily heard the door close, the click of the lock, and she sighed. Standing at the counter, she parted the checked curtains at the window over the sink. The view was as familiar to her as the image of her own face. Her great-grandfather had built this house, and it had come down to her through the generations. She grew up here and could recall the very year her parents remodeled the old carriage house to accommodate two cars and the workshop, where, like her dad, Roy would go to putter. Beyond it, there was an alley. Closer in, a huge old elm tree centered the bit of backyard, housing a picnic table that Roy built and a wood-seated swing. After they were married in the spring of 1972, on his good days, Roy had pushed her in that swing.

“Higher!” she hollered at him, laughing. “Higher!” she shouted.

And later, he pushed her while she held their children as infants in her arms.

They had been happy, hadn’t they? They weren’t different from other families in the neighborhood. They shopped and vacationed and participated in community events. They attended church. And like their neighbors, they’d had their share of good times and bad.

Emily started the coffee, and while she waited for it to brew, she collected the Monday editions of the two newspapers they read from the front porch. Their small-town newspaper, the Hardys Walk Tribune, was lighter in weight and folksier in tone than the Houston Chronicle. On her way back to the kitchen, she paused at Roy’s office door, and putting her ear against it, she listened and heard nothing. Only the sound of the tall grandfather clock on the landing in the front hall. The rhythmic tock tock was magnified like heartbeats in a row. Gunshots fired in evenly spaced salute.

She straightened. In her mind’s eye, she could see Roy sitting at his desk, and on the wall opposite him, she saw the gun case that housed his collection. The glass front would hold a faint reflection of his image, doing whatever it was he did in there these days. She hoped he wasn’t brooding. The guns worried her. She didn’t like thinking it, and perhaps it was only a temporary effect of retirement, but there was something in his demeanor in recent weeks that was beginning to remind her of the wounded man he was when he came back from the war in Vietnam. He’d tried hard to hold in the horror, closing himself off from her, not wanting to burden her, he said. They’d worked through it eventually, but it had taken a near-tragedy to bring him around.

She tapped on the door. “Coffee’s ready,” she said through the panel, and she was relieved to hear his acknowledgment, to hear the leather creak as he rose from his chair. He followed her into the kitchen, and she thought the drag of his step sounded more uneven than usual. She wanted to turn and look, to ask if his pain was worse, but he didn’t like her fussing over him.

She unsheathed both papers from their plastic wrappers and set them, still folded, on the table, and that’s when she saw it—a piece of the missing girl’s, Jessica Sweet’s, face. It was looking out from the front page of the Chronicle. Above it, Emily glimpsed two words: found and dead, and her heart slammed into the wall of her chest. Any moment now, Roy would see it, too.

She brought the toast to the table and sat across from Roy. She was aware of the newspaper between them and was seized by a sudden, heated and irrational urge to tear it to shreds. She imagined Tucker coming through the door. He would put his arms around her; he would say how sorry he was to have caused her such concern. She would tell him about the dead girl, show him her picture, and he’d be sorry for her, too. But he wouldn’t know her. He wouldn’t have loved her or shared a messy, emotional history with her the way he had with Miranda Quick.

Emily picked up her slice of toast and then set it down, thinking if she had to sit here through another day without word from Tucker, or about him, she would come out of her skin.

She caught Roy’s glance.

“What?” he said.

“Why don’t we ride out there?”

“Where?” he asked, but she was certain he knew.

“Indigo Lake.”

“What for? There’s nothing to see,” he said. “A slab, pipes, a frame. I ought to get Evan to send a crew out there to pull it down. I’ll sell the land.”

Evan had worked for Roy in the family construction business long before becoming Lissa’s husband. Evan and Lissa ran the company now since Roy’s retirement. Tucker would have had a share in running it, too, if he was in the least reliable.

Emily touched Roy’s hand. “I think you should finish the house. It would take your mind off—” She didn’t want to say Tucker, so she said, “Things, you know. You need a project. Once it’s finished, if you don’t want to keep it, you can always sell it then.”

“Why the sudden interest? You’ve already said you won’t move out there.”

“I could change my mind.”

“Why would you?”

Emily looked into her coffee cup. For you, she thought. But if she were to say that, he’d think it was out of pity. “A change of scenery,” she said softly. “I think we need a change of scenery.”