Behind the Fire: A Dark Thriller, Page 2

  You’d think she’d set the court on fire by the uproar that instantly followed. The judge banged his gavel against his desk like he was killing some small creature up there. The guard moved toward her, both hands reaching to his right side, presumably for his gun. Bobby’s attorney looked at her as though she had gone stark raving mad (this close up she could see he’d spilt something on his sleeve). Smarty Pants cried, “Your Honor!” or “You’re upon her!” She wasn’t sure which because something happened when their skin touched.

  A jolt traveled from her fingertips into the core of her body, stopping her flat. Her legs felt rooted to the ground, as though invisible hands had risen from the scuffed linoleum floor and clasped her ankles. The breath stole from her body and she struggled to breathe.

  That simple touch changed everything.

  Maybe it was because she knew if they failed today, they might never touch again and being this close to him, a feeling so deep, so pure, overwhelmed her. Suddenly she didn’t want anyone thinking he was crazy or an alcoholic or anything else he wasn’t, except the bravest man she had ever known.

  Even if Bobby would be angry with her later for changing the plan, she couldn’t dwell on that now. In a burning flash of certainty she made a decision.

  She would tell the truth.

  Reluctantly, she pulled back from his touch, and turned toward the witness chair. The guard moved back to his spot by the wall. The judge sat back, scowling, but at least he’d stopped banging his gavel. The crowd in the courtroom grew silent again.

  With each step the decision embedded itself deeper into her like a burrowing worm.

  Whether they could handle the truth or not, they were going to get it.

  Chapter 2

  Emily settled herself into the witness chair and clasped her hands together, the sweat already beginning to form between her palms. The room felt stifling despite the air-conditioning.

  Even with her head bowed, Emily felt the eyes of the spectators and jury boring into her. She pulled at the annoying hangnail jutting from her cuticle. The flap of skin peeled away leaving a stinging, red strip.

  Her chipped nails and dry, cracked hands were almost as unkempt as her short, stringy, brown hair, now streaked with gray. She no longer cared about her appearance, a by-product of the past few months.

  Emily scanned the courtroom. Everyone looked so much smaller from here. The spectators stared at her and whispered to each other, their hands half covering their mouths. Those simple actions dug into her confidence.

  She recognized a few television news personalities in the back. Even they were wide-eyed, like they’d never seen a person give testimony before. Her sister sat two rows from the front, holding one hand to her mouth, the other flattened against her chest. Her red, swollen eyes fixated on Emily. Then there were the others she’d labeled “Snoopy Dogs,” people who hadn’t missed a day of the trial. They were voyeurs who reveled in other people’s woes.

  The torn quick beside her fingernail throbbed. The stress of the past few months had activated some kind of determined plucking-at-her-skin impulse, as though she could save herself by picking her way out of her own body.

  Smarty Pants cleared his throat as he walked toward her, smiling like they were best friends; he hadn’t smiled at Bobby. No doubt he figured she was the soft little woman he could break. He probably thought she would turn against Bobby to save her own neck.

  Miss Prissy had been at her about that.

  “Let’s say Bobby forced you to help him. You feared for your life. He beat you.” And the kicker: “Say he was abusive. An alcoholic.”

  Miss Prissy had promised if Emily would just do that—throw Bobby at them like he was disposable—then she could go home to her kids or, at the worst, receive only a few months in prison. Good behavior would have her out quickly, and then she could pull her life together.

  According to Miss Prissy, Bobby was going away for a very long time and Emily could do nothing about it. No words from her would save him. He was done.

  The prosecutor threw out a few friendly lines like they had met in line at the post office and were just killing time. Small, simple questions about the kids and her life. She felt the big ones coming like a killer wave on the horizon.

  Sure enough they came, springing from Smarty Pants’ lips, which seemed held in a permanent smile.

  “Mrs. Jessup, were you originally aware of your husband’s escapades?”

  He put his hand up as though stopping traffic.

  “Let me be more precise. Did you know he was wantonly destroying property and putting innocent lives at risk?”

  Emily opened her mouth to answer, but he continued.

  “Did you in fact know he had been running around for over six months committing these shocking and callous crimes?”

  Emily sucked in a deep breath, her chest expanding as air rushed into her lungs. Her throat felt tight and dry. She suddenly wished she’d taken one more gulp of water before she’d come up.

  She couldn’t look at Bobby. Instead she fixed her stare on Mr. Smarty Pants’ sky blue tie sprinkled with tiny, white flowers. The tie seemed too cheery for the prosecutor, who’d now stopped his peacock strutting and stood only a few feet from her, his arms crossed.

  “No, I didn’t know. Not in the beginning.”

  He swung toward Bobby, and then back to her.

  “So he deceived you. Breached your trust, would you say?”

  “Yes, I guess, at first.” She hesitated, “But he had his reasons.”

  “Oh, can you enlighten the court as to those reasons?”

  “He was protecting me.”

  “Ah, protecting you. Then presumably at some point he stopped protecting you and enlisted you, or forced you to accompany him. Then you left your children in the care of various strangers and joined him in his exploits. Have I got that right?”

  The prosecutor walked over, leaned his elbow on the edge of the witness box, and stared straight at her, his face no more than a foot from hers.

  “He did force you, didn’t he?”

  Force her?

  That was a funny way of wording it. If you call having no other choice forced, then, yes, she was forced. In fact, they were both forced if you put it that way.

  Emily took another deep breath and counted to three. She’d watched Bobby take those deep breaths on a regular basis these past few months. He said they calmed him, filled him with certainty.

  She took one more breath, so deep her chest hurt. Then her mind traveled back to that night, the one that changed her life, the night, which began with her not knowing and ended with her wishing she didn’t know.

  Emily had done what anyone who ran out of alternatives would do. She ran head-on into crazy town. Ready or not. Coming out of it, alive or not.

  She didn’t answer a “yes” or “no” like her attorney had instructed her, because they wouldn’t understand without the whole story.

  Instead, Emily said, “He didn’t force me. The black things did.”

  Chapter 3

  Emily hadn’t set out to follow Bobby. He just looked so harassed, like he had so much on his mind if you tapped him gently with your little finger he’d explode like one of those little New Year’s Eve party poppers.

  He left his baseball cap, the one with Man of the House written across the front. He never went anywhere without it since the little bald spot appeared at the back of his head. She ran out after him, waving it in her hand, but he was gone, his taillights blinking at the end of the street before disappearing into the dark.

  Bobby went out quite often lately. The reasons for his absence seemed credible at first, but gradually they had devolved into niggling doubts. She told herself she was being silly. The stress of the kids had caused her to imagine things that simply weren’t there. As hard as she tried to ignore her suspicions, this little nagging itch just wouldn’t disappear.

  Turning back to the house, she saw Marianne’s lights on next door. An innocent idea poppe
d into her head, and her footsteps turned toward her neighbor’s home instead of her door. The kids were already in bed, and it would only take fifteen, thirty minutes at the most to find him.

  She was reasonably certain she knew where he’d gone. Although he never voiced it, she understood his meaning when he said he needed to “shake off the day.”

  That decision was the first of many leading her down the path of no return.

  He wasn’t at the Stag Hotel, or the Beef-Eater Grill, and his car wasn’t outside his best friend Phil’s (who’d been quite cold to her when she knocked on his door, like she had no right to go looking for her husband). Her thirty minutes—at the most—stretched into an hour. She knew she should go home, but now a determination had gripped her.

  Emily drove around the darkened streets, crisscrossing through town and then back to her house to check if he’d come home. She thought to call him, but if she did, what would she say? How would she know if he was truly where he claimed to be? As each possibility turned to a negative, her stomach wound tighter.

  Now she was parked outside Clementine’s Pool Hall, her hand resting on the door handle, as she worked up the courage to enter. After eleven it wasn’t a place for women, but she needed to cross it off her mental list.

  Then it struck her where he could actually be.

  Work.

  It made a kind of sense. He’d said they’d been crazy busy recently, and it would be like him to return there and work through whatever was eating into his peace. Burdening his wife with his day’s pressure was not his way. He was too proud a man to admit he couldn’t handle everything. One of his most frustrating and most endearing qualities.

  Then if it was work, why wouldn’t he tell her? Who lies about overtime?

  She could face the pool hall boys later if necessary, she thought, as she started the engine and took off for the other side of town.

  Emily drove slowly, even though her heart raced to get to him. This mining outpost, the hub of one of the richest deposits of coal in the country, still wasn’t enough of a town to warrant lighting every ten feet like they did in the City. Kind of rude most townsfolk thought, considering the wealth coming in from Karlgarin probably paid for half the City streetlights. This was a poke of a mining town. It may not have great streetlights but it did have things more valuable: friendship and a feeling everyone was a valuable cog in the wheel of the town.

  The moon occasionally peeked through the clouds, shedding silvery light on the otherwise darkened roads. As Emily approached the fenced gates of Kelly’s Truck Rental, it occurred to her Bobby would think her crazy for driving all over town just to deliver his cap. She wondered if it was a credible excuse.

  She imagined the startled look on his face as she walked toward him brandishing the hat. Maybe he’d think she didn’t trust him. Still, she would sell her excuse for all she was worth.

  “You’d do it for me, Bobby. Someone’s got to look after you.” She’d give him a big smile, a kiss on the cheek, and hightail it out of there before he had a chance to question why she had really bothered.

  Emily slowed, turning off her car beams before she neared the gated driveway, well lit by the bright white halogen glow of overhead security lights. If he didn’t see her coming, she figured it’d be more of a surprise, enabling her to make a quicker getaway. After all, she was only here to give him his hat, and satisfy her wifely curiosity. Nothing wrong with that, right?

  The fence around the complex was rusted red. White paint peeled from the support poles like flecks of dandruff. Inside the fence, the trucks looked white and mostly clean—well, as white as anything could be with the red dust that coated the town, sprinkled over everything like paprika on a dish.

  Emily was about twenty feet from the gates when she saw him. She recognized Bobby’s red plaid jacket as he pulled out of the yard in one of the small high-top, flat-deck trucks. She called them pickups, but Bobby often corrected her. “Pickups are smaller, Em. It’s the difference between a Hot Wheels car and a Tonka truck.”

  As his truck turned out of the lot, Emily went to wave, flash her lights, let him know she was there, and give him his cap. That darn curiosity, though, had embedded in every fiber of her being. She hesitated.

  Of course, he could be simply driving home. If he was, he certainly took the wrong turn to get there. It looked to her like a small dirt bike lay in the bed of the truck, too. Where would he be riding at this time of night? More puzzling, when did he start dirt biking?

  What to do?

  Should she really trail after him?

  The longer she followed him, the less reasonable her baseball hat excuse sounded. He’d probably see through the ruse. Now, though, she wondered if he was up to something so bad he couldn’t tell her. A cold tingle ran through her chest.

  Emily shook away the thought even as the idea he might be cheating, embedded like a prickle into her mind. How she hated those kind of prickles.

  She’d ducked beneath the dashboard as he drove out, but Bobby didn’t see her. He seemed intent on the road ahead like a man who’d been ordered to drive like every second counted.

  Emily knew she shouldn’t follow him. She should just turn the car around and drive back home. Bobby didn’t have the look of a man who wanted to be followed, least of all by a wife waving a baseball cap. She had to know what he was up to, so she followed.

  The farther they drove, the farther the prickle wended itself in, embedding so deeply it wasn’t coming out until she knew the truth. Time had taught her ignored prickles fester and become different things altogether.

  Fifteen years together, fourteen as Bobby’s wife, and they’d promised no secrets, even inserted the oath into their wedding vows. She’d had enough of secrets to last her a lifetime.

  Yet, here was her husband, clearly with a secret.

  This smelled like bad news, maybe for her, maybe for him, maybe for both of them. Now her mind was off racing with the possibilities. She wanted to turn back, but the curiosity had mixed with dread. Knowing a secret’s existence without knowing the secret could possibly damage their relationship even more than knowing the answer.

  So Emily followed her husband, even though every rational cell in her brain told her she was making a big mistake.

  Chapter 4

  In a town like Karlgarin, which only existed to wrest coal from the ground, it only took five miles of travel before wilderness claimed the land. Yet, even this version of nature struggled to be more than an accumulation of half-alive stunted trees and ugly gray-green shrubs.

  Emily drove cautiously, staying a safe distance behind Bobby’s taillights. Thanks to the flat landscape, they were visible for quite some distance.

  Three songs played through in their entirety on the radio and Emily still hadn’t passed a single car. She couldn’t shake the eerie feeling she and Bobby were the only two people left in the world, survivors of one of those movie apocalypses.

  Bobby’s truck slowed, turned, and then continued. When she arrived at the spot a minute later, she realized he’d turned into Old River Road. The road led to a camping ground, which had closed long ago due to lack of business. Some crazy businessmen had thought he’d make a killing there by housing overflow workers. The mining company, though, had built their own airstrip in the end, and the extra workers simply flew in and out from the City.

  Now the grounds were an illegal dump for the locals, filled with old cars, fridges, and anything the trash yard would charge extra to take. The local joke was Old River Road was as far from a river as the town was from a five-star restaurant. The only place it led was a river of trash.

  Was Bobby dumping stuff?

  A seed of hope snuggled into her chest. No one’s heart was ever broken from offloading trash. Maybe he was dumping the bike tonight. That could easily explain it.

  As the foliage on the side of the road grew thicker, Emily increased her concentration as Bobby’s headlights flashed and winked along the twisting dirt road. She eased her
foot down on the accelerator wanting to keep his vehicle in sight. Her twin beams fluttered up and down as the car dipped and rose in the rutted, compacted dirt. The lights turned her surroundings into an eerie gray cavern.

  As she rounded a bend, the flashing lights ahead turned into a solid red glow. She estimated Bobby to be about a half a mile away from her now. Then, in a second, the glow of his lights disappeared, as he must have turned again.

  Emily slowed the car and rolled down the window. She craned her neck outside to listen for sounds of his truck. The noise of scrunching gravel under her car’s tires caused her to wince. In the silent landscape it echoed like a thousand blocks of ice cracking.

  As the car crept along, the red dust from the road invaded the interior cabin. The air smelled old and dry, with every ounce of moisture sucked from it. It was pointless, she couldn’t hear his truck, and the dust made her cough. She rolled up the window. The manual mechanism groaned a loud complaint.

  A new car would be nice, or even just a newish car with electric windows. Since the kids, most things were a luxury. She hoped whatever Bobby was doing wouldn’t cost him his job. They needed the money.

  She couldn’t be positive, but she didn’t think he’d stopped at the usual dumping ground. The idea he was out on a trash run at this time of night faded rapidly.

  At least she had one comfort: no way his secret involved another woman. This was not date-night terrain. More like body-dumping terrain. A chilling thought, which she brushed away.

  Again, ahead of her, his taillights glowed red, their reflection turning the surrounding wilderness magenta-brown. Emily slowed her car to a crawl, then eased it to a stop and waited, her foot hovering above the accelerator.

  Bobby’s lights didn’t move again.

  Emily turned off her car’s lights and instantly she was immersed in shadows. Fortunately, the moon shed enough light for her to see ahead. She inched the car slowly along.