And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(15)

“The phone still has a charge, so she didn’t leave it behind because the battery was dead.”

“She could have charged it in the car if she needed to. If she walked to the corner to meet him, she would have been looking at her phone the whole way there. Or at least while standing there and waiting for him.”

“Maybe she forgot it and didn’t want to risk getting caught going in and out of the house again.”

Susan shrugged.

“Another thing…a phone can store a history of where you’ve been if the GPS is recording. You can leave a trail of cell-tower pings even if you’re not actively using the phone. Maybe they were going somewhere and didn’t want to leave a record. Or be tracked.”

Susan drank her wine. “You’re not going to convince me she ran away from home and left her phone behind. Her diabetes kit? Maybe, but I find that almost as implausible. Whatever they were doing, they were supposed to be gone for an hour or two max. She could live without her phone that long if she had to. Something happened to them.”

Packard sat and stared at the phone. Being in Susan’s house was reminding him of all the ways he hadn’t been there for her after Tom died. He’d called a couple of times after the funeral and left messages that Susan never returned. Was offering help when it wasn’t wanted its own kind of burden? He didn’t know. It was different when Marcus died. Their relationship had been a secret. He’d been alone in his grief by default. Susan seemed to have chosen the isolation. After a certain amount of time went by, Packard had felt awkward reaching out to her again, so he didn’t.

Jenny’s phone suddenly buzzed with a text message, causing both of them to jump. Susan picked up the phone and read the message. “It was Carrie. She saw Jenny was on Snapchat twenty minutes ago. That was us looking at her account.”

Packard got up to leave. “I’ll call you first thing in the morning, news or no news. Call me anytime tonight if you hear anything.”

Susan sat there and said nothing. Packard waited for a moment, then assumed he was getting another one of Susan’s goodbye-less goodbyes. She spoke just as he got to the door. “You asked me this morning how concerned I was on a scale from one to ten. I’m at an eleven now,” she said.

“I am too,” Packard said.

This time he wasn’t lying.





Chapter Six


Sometimes Emmett Burr had pain the pills couldn’t touch. Usually, when he was fully loaded, they dropped a shroud between him and the things hurting him, so that he felt like a boat lost in fog, and the pain was a ringing bell that he could hear but couldn’t locate the source of.

It was nearly 11:00 p.m., and the pills he’d been taking all day hadn’t done anything for his back. Something had gone fwaaapp when he’d tried to help move the boy’s body earlier that morning. Now he was barefoot and shirtless, leaning on the deck railing. It hurt to sit, and standing always hurt because of his enormous weight. Leaning on his forearms allowed his pendulous belly to hang like a swollen udder, which helped relieve the pressure in his back. It was the best he’d felt since blasting those kids with the shotgun.

The night air chilled his bare skin as he smoked. He heard a cough and turned to look through the leafless trees that separated his property from his neighbor’s. The red eye of a cigarette burned on Ruth Adams’s front porch. Ruth had been the town librarian for the last hundred and forty years. The two of them shared this shallow, muddy part of the lake. He could have called out and said hello, but Ruth had been Myra’s friend, and Emmett hadn’t spoken a word to Ruth since Myra left him almost twenty years ago.

Emmett blamed Myra for the mess he was in, just like he blamed her for all the ones before. He wouldn’t have a dead body in the garage and a girl in the pink room again if Myra had stuck around. Yeah, they’d made each other miserable, but goddamn…wasn’t that what a marriage was?

Their union had been the product of overbearing mothers who knew each other from bridge club and who saw no hope for their awkward, misshapen spawn—Emmett with hips and breasts and the pink complexion of a woman; Myra flat as a new road with a man’s height and jaw and hands. They conspired to push Emmett and Myra together, one Sunday supper at a time. Ernestine did her best to convince her son that Myra was his best and only option. I don’t exactly see the ladies ah…lining up for a date, Son. You’re doughy and shifty and the only thing you can do for yourself involves your hand in your pants. You could do a lot worse than Myra, Emmie. You get a job after your apprenticeship, and she’ll keep you a good home. You could be happy together.

When the time was right, Ernestine had all but proposed on his behalf. “Listen, Myra. Emmett has something to ask you. Go ahead, Son. Say it like we practiced.”

Once married, he found that the sex with a real live woman he’d dreamed of having all his life couldn’t have been more disappointing. Even while horizontal, it was no easy feat climbing Mount Myra. The physical act left him stunned at the end, more like a sudden collision than the warm pistoning he’d always imagined. Who knew what Myra had imagined? The way she squeezed her eyes shut and turned her head away while he was on top of her, like she was trying not to smell something bad, said plenty. They quickly set aside the sex that neither one of them enjoyed and focused on their roles inside their Jack Sprat marriage. Myra’s interests were gardening, canning, and tuneless humming. Emmett’s welding business paid the bills with enough leftover that he could submerge himself to the eyeballs at the end of the day in alcohol and mail-order pornography.