Page 70 of Nothing Ever Happens Here

SHELBY

Three Months Later

The snow is beginning to melt. Spring is coming. I wave at Mack when I push through the doors of her cafe, and she waves back. She looks like a different person with her hair swept up and a smile on her face for the first time in as long as I can remember. She’s packing boxes and getting ready to move everything out for the new owner.

“Looks like you’re making progress,” I say as she stops pushing boxes around and sits at the counter, pouring us both a cup of coffee.

“Almost done.”

“So how long do you think you’ll stay?” I ask.

“Well, I’m moving Row into an apartment after graduation in a few weeks, and I don’t know. I’ll stay there until…”

“Until you know,” I say, and she smiles.

“I just want to be with her. She needs me after all this. I mean,at least I got to give her closure—no more always wondering, always hoping. She gets to move on with the rest of her life now, so I’m happy for that. I just don’t really know what to do with myself now,” she says just as Billy walks through the front doors.

“The mugs are in the pantry,” she says and he comes over and gives me a side hug and kisses her on the cheek.

“Thanks. I’ll be back in a bit,” he says, grabbing a box and exiting back out the front doors again into the sunny afternoon. I raise my eyebrows at her.

“Just donating some things to the bar,” she says.

“Uh-huh. So does Billy have any plans on visiting Boston?” I ask with a smirk.

“Actually, he’s driving me up on Friday. We’re gonna eat clam chowder and go whale watching and do all the cliché things, and then…”

“You don’t know yet,” I finish for her.

“I just don’t know yet,” she says.

“And that’s totally okay.” I stand and give her a hug. “We’re off fishing for the weekend, just the four of us, so I might not see you, but I’ll call. You’re getting out of here just in time. Carolyn Walterman is bringing her Jell-O salad to the annual potluck next week.”

“She’ll force that shit on you and hover until you’re forced to eat it and say it’s good,” she says.

“She will. And you can’t gag.”

“You cannot,” she says.

“I love you,” I say, hugging her one more time, and then I walk out and drive the two-lane roads past the thickets of pines, melting in the spring sun, and head to pick up the Disney Princess custom fishing poles Clay ordered for the girls. He really wants them to like fishing. He really wants to mend what’s broken and help me heal, even though he didn’t have the privilege of killing that bastard himself.I think about that a lot—that what-ifs.

When the news started unfolding the story of Evan Carmichael, it turned national pretty quickly. It started as a local suicide under unusual circumstances and then they unearthed his mental health records, the money he was stealing from the Oleander’s, the shared history between Otis and Leo and their business dealings. Although there is still no way to prove any of the three deaths were murders—although everyone has come to accept they are—there is also no way to prove his death was a murder.

The locals are beside themselves that a killer was in plain sight all this time. They’ve all forgotten I was treated like a madwoman only a short time ago and now I’m almost a local hero—the woman who escaped the grips of a serial killer and lived to tell the tale. I’m called brave and fearless…and lucky. I’m given free meals at restaurants and have doors opened for me wherever I go. People nudge one another and point at me in public, and I try not to hate every single person in this town for turning on me when I needed someone to believe in me. I tell myself it’s human nature—it makes more sense to believe I’m traumatized and lashing out in all the wrong ways than that there is a mass killer in our small town. I can give them that, I suppose. Some days anyway, when I’m notasangry. Some days, maybe I’m even…grateful.

I tell myself he was so brilliant at crafting every single moment of this nightmare that of course people questioned me. He made them. How could they not.

Sometimes I want to leave like Mack is doing—just drive, just go. The memories of my daughter’s hand disappearing under black water and the tape around my wrists, and running and crawling for my life, and his face—it all lives here, and I can never really escape it.

But a whole life before that lives here too—my girls running through the sprinkler in bare feet,sledding down Buck Hill, growing tomatoes in pots on the back porch, sewing mermaid costumes for the school play, sitting under the lights on the baseball fields at night, and the corner Dairy Queen and the church potluck and soaking in the gossip at the Cut & Curl. Our whole lives that I don’t think I can leave behind for him.

I wish I felt a sense of guilt sometimes for what we plotted—what we did. But I don’t. I have to live with the toll that keeping a secret like this takes on a marriage. We all have to live the rest of our lives looking over our shoulder, even though he’s gone. There’s not a day that will go by for the rest of my life that I won’t harbor some fear that the truth could be uncovered, and even though maybe some would say it’s justified, the law won’t.

We’re all outlaws now.

34

FLORENCE

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