What You Don't Know(95)
It’ll never be over.
SAMMIE
Dean wasn’t there when she got home, the house was empty and cold, and it had that smell a place gets when no one has been there all day. Like dust, she thinks. The flat mineral smell of water standing in toilet bowls. The furnace whooshed to life when she opened the front door, and she screamed in surprise, then laughed at herself, a little too loudly. It was unnerving, to hear all the sounds of life around her, even when she was still. The humming of the fridge, the slow drag of the wind against the siding. And a clicking sound, it reminded her of Dean clipping his toenails, and she spent an hour wandering through the house, trying to catch up with that sound before it finally disappeared.
She tried to call Dean’s cell phone, but he never answered. She didn’t know who else to call, or what to do. If your husband goes missing, what do you do? Search for him? She almost did that, walked out to her car with her key in her hand, and then turned around and went back inside. Denver was a big city, and he could be anywhere. She had no idea where to begin. There were hundreds of places to hide in the city, thousands, and it would’ve been a waste of time. Dean was angry, he was hurt, and maybe it was best to let him be that way, to wait until he came home. He knew how to find her.
So she went to bed. The sheets were ice-cold and she couldn’t seem to warm up until she lay on her stomach and crossed her hands under her belly, with her face toward the big numbers on the digital clock. She fell asleep that way, and when she woke up she was sure it was morning, but only ten minutes had passed. She tried to call Dean again, but it had stopped ringing altogether, and went straight to voicemail.
“Goddammit,” she said after the beep. “I know you’re angry, but don’t do this. Come home so we can talk about it.”
Twenty minutes later:
“I’ve seen Hoskins a few times, but it was only because of this stuff I’m doing for the paper. But nothing’s happened, Dean. I swear. Nothing happened.”
And then, later:
“Go fuck yourself.”
She doesn’t get out of bed until the watery gray sunlight is peeking through her blinds, even though she’s been awake for hours. There’s no sound of a car in the driveway, or a key in the door. She pads to the bathroom and sits down on the cold toilet. Lowers her head down to her knees. Almost. She’s not as flexible as she used to be.
She starts the coffeepot, sits on the sofa. The Christmas tree is still in the box, pushed halfway under the coffee table, winding pieces of packing tape holding it all together. She nudges it farther under the table with her toe. They usually put up the tree on Thanksgiving, opening up the boxes of ornaments they’ve collected over the years and snapping the plastic branches together, but somehow they’d forgotten it this year. They’d eaten their turkey and stuffing, and the can of cranberry sauce with the ridges still cut into the jellied sides, the same as they always did, but instead of putting up the tree they’d gone to bed, and a few days had passed before Sammie remembered what they’d forgotten. It’s hard to start a tradition, to create a thing you come back to every year, but it’s so easy to let it go. To give up and let it disappear, like it’d never existed at all.
She picks up the phone, calls Dean. No answer. Calls the art gallery, following up on her lead. It goes straight to voicemail. Calls the county jail and police department and Hoskins’s cell, wanting an update, but there’s either no answer or no one will cooperate. There’s nothing more frustrating than sitting in your own home, punching numbers on the phone and expecting results and getting stonewalled. She doesn’t have anything else to do but sit and wait; she can’t leave because Dean might come back, but she should go, she still needs a piece to turn in to Corbin and there’s no story here in the four walls of her own home.
All of it pisses her off, Dean and Corbin and Weber and Hoskins and the whole situation, and the tree’s still in its box, just to top it all off. If Dean were here they could put it up right now, but he’s not, because he’s angry at her for something she didn’t even do.
A text comes in, makes her phone beep and she lunges for it, snatches it up. It’s from Dean.
I’M MARRIED TO A WHORE, it says, and that’s all, because Dean knows it would hurt her, that single word, he’d called her that once before, during their weekly session of couples therapy, and she hadn’t cried but she’d been upset, and now it makes her furious, because she didn’t do anything and she can’t even explain herself; she knows that if she tries to call or text him she’ll be ignored.
The coffee machine beeps to let her know it’s done, but she ignores it and goes back to the bedroom, yanks on a pair of jeans and boots, a sweater. She’s not thinking of the Secondhand Killer or Hoskins or Corbin or how she needs to head to work soon—she’s so angry that everything else has been booted from her head, she can’t focus on anything else except that one word, whore, that’s what her husband thinks she is, and maybe she’ll have to prove him right, so he can see that she doesn’t care what he thinks, she’ll show him.
HOSKINS
He’d spent the night in a cell at the jail, lying on a thin cot that’s hanging from a freezing concrete wall, and dreamt of Sammie. This isn’t unusual, because he dreams about her a lot, but it’s never like this—usually Sammie is laughing or fighting with him, or holding his dick, sliding it slowly into her mouth—but this time Sammie is dead, she’s on the floor and her skull is smashed in on one side, so her head has the misshapen look of a deflated basketball, and it’s not just blood oozing out of her head but yellow stuff too, and when he sees that several of her fingers have been cut away Hoskins opens his mouth to scream, but then there’s a hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake, and it’s the same cop who apologized for arresting him, Craig, and his eyebrows are drawn together over his hawk nose, worried.