No One Will Miss Her(52)

The gun was in my hands as I stepped out of the car. I don’t remember what I said to him; I do remember that he pointed toward the house and said, “She’s in the bedroom,” and I went running through the open door not knowing what waited for me inside. Knowing only that it must be bad, beyond bad, for my husband to admit that he needed me.

Adrienne was curled up on the edge of the bed with both feet still on the floor, so slow and sleepy that I knew right away she was stoned. An overdose, I thought. Had she found Dwayne’s drugs? Had he given them to her? Why else would he be so panicked—and how could he be so stupid? I put the gun aside and screamed for him, demanding to know how much she’d taken, how much he’d given her, whether he’d called an ambulance. If they got here in time, they could hit her with Narcan. I knelt down, grabbed her by the shoulder, and shook her, hard. She gazed back at me with slack lips, her pupils huge and dark. There was a smudge of dried blood in the pit of her elbow, deep red and perfectly round, and a length of rubber tubing lying on the floor at her feet. Her eyes were glassy.

“Hey!” I yelled in her face. “Stay with me! Stay awake!”

She flinched at that. Her big blue eyes opened wide as she looked over my shoulder, focusing on Dwayne.

“I,” she said, and took a deep breath before letting out the rest of the sentence as a long, slow sigh, “am soooooo fuuuuuuuucked.”

Her eyes flicked in the direction of the deck outside. I stood and turned to look at Dwayne, who was bent at the waist with his hands braced against his knees, breathing hard.

“Dwayne?” I said. “I don’t understand, is she—did you—what the fuck is happening?”

Adrienne took another deep breath, exhaled again with a soft whisper.

“He’s outside,” she said. Her breath smelled sour; I wondered if she was going to vomit, or already had.

“Dwayne’s right here,” I said, and both she and Dwayne shook their heads in unison. He stood and gestured at me to follow.

“Not me,” he said. “Him. The husband.”

Adrienne pressed her hands against the bed—already made up with the high thread-count sheets I’d ordered just for her, after she complained that the linens at the lake house were too scratchy—and sat up with a grunt. Her lips peeled back from her teeth as she turned her head to look out the window, grimacing with the effort.

“Ethan,” she said. She blinked, so slowly that it took several seconds for the movement to complete: heavy lashes descending downward, then opening only to half-mast. She pursed her lips, and her tone turned hopeful. “Maybe he’s not dead anymore.”



Ethan Richards was halfway down the long stairs that started at the deck, descending steeply down the wooded coastline to the lake. He’d fallen headfirst, and while there was no blood, the utter stillness of his body against the busy landscape, the movement of the water and the trees gently creaking in the breeze, left no room for doubt. One of his legs was bent unnaturally beneath him, and there was a dark splotch on the front of his pants where his bladder had let go. His head was the worst part: it was hanging over the edge of one step at a hideous angle, dangling, as though his neck bones had shattered so completely that only his skin was still keeping it attached. His eyes were open, unseeing, facing the lake. The last thing he would have seen, if he was still alive when he landed, was the fiery blush of the changing trees on the opposite bank and the bright ripples of sunlight on the cold, dark water.

Even with a dead body sprawled awkwardly in the foreground, it was beautiful. Breathtaking. It was true, what I’d told Adrienne: this was my favorite time of year.

I had a creeping feeling that this was the last time I would ever enjoy it.

“How did it happen?” I said quietly. I was still praying even then that maybe it had been an accident, even though every instinct I had was telling me it was something so much worse. Adrienne was a mess—she would need several hours and a nap before I could expect any answers from her—but Dwayne wasn’t stoned at all, and the expression on his face was pure horror: a grown-up version of the way he’d looked all those years ago, on the day he killed Rags. He kept flicking his eyes toward the bedroom, and it occurred to me that he must have helped Adrienne inject the drugs before preparing his own. Ladies first.

“I fucked up,” he said. His eyes were red, and he kept pushing his hands into his hair, gripping the sides of his skull like he was trying to keep it from coming apart. I stepped forward to peer more closely at Ethan’s body. Even from high above, twenty feet away, I could see a discoloration on the curve of his jaw, the barest beginnings of a bruise. There was a matching one on Dwayne’s cheek.

“He hit me first,” Dwayne said. I whirled to face him.

“So you pushed him down the fucking stairs?”

“No, I—” he began, then shook his head furiously. “I didn’t mean it. I was defending myself. I just wanted him to back off. I didn’t think he’d die.”

“But why? Why were you fighting in the first place?”

Dwayne’s eyes slid sideways, and Adrienne’s syrupy voice answered instead.

“Ethan doesn’t like it when I try new things,” she cooed. She’d managed to get off the bed and was leaning against the frame of the sliding door that opened onto the deck, one bare knee tucked behind the other. “He wasn’t supposed to know. He was supposed to be in the boat. He likes the boat.” She lifted a hand in slow motion, raised a finger to point at Dwayne, the most languid of accusations. “You said he was in the boat.”