Page 48 of The Wrong Family

She didn’t like the look on his face.

“Okay…” Winnie said cautiously. “What are you saying? That Dakota came to my house and killed my husband because he was cheating on me? Then why did he tie me up and almost shoot me, too?”

“We think that when you didn’t appreciate what he was doing for you—”

“Come on!”

Detective Abbot held up his hand. “Give me a minute. To Dakota, it didn’t matter that you didn’t know about his scuffle with Nigel. He was the brave and chivalrous brother and you were ungrateful.”

“No. I don’t believe that.” She looked out the window to where a seagull sat briefly on the railing outside before flying away.

“Did you know that your brother had schizophrenic episodes?”

“No! Well, I didn’t want to believe it.” Winnie was horrified. Manda had been telling the truth. She’d known there was something bigger going on with Dakota, but none of the family had bothered to listen. The detective pulled a sheet of paper from a cream folder he was holding. “Dakota held a piece of broken glass to a guy’s neck at a football game, saying the guy had messed around with his girlfriend.”

“Listen, Detective, that was years ago. But I know my brother is sick. I’m not arguing with you. I just want to know that my son is safe and that Dakota is not going to come after us.”

“We’re actively working to find him. But we’re still working on two separate cases here. You know that the emails Terry Russel received were sent from an IP address in your home, and we have the phone records saying calls were placed to her home from your house line.”

“Detective Abbot, with all due respect, I am done talking about Nigel being involved in sending that woman to my house. My husband is dead and can’t answer for himself.”

A small smile turned up the corners of his mouth, though it didn’t reach his eyes, Winnie noticed. Could he hear her heart?

“I have one more thing, Mrs. Crouch, and then I’ll be out of your hair.” She highly doubted that, but she tried to arrange her face into something pleasant as she waited for him to speak. “The third set of footprints in the blood we found around Nigel—”

“Oh, this again? Are you serious right now? I was there, the whole time. There was no one else. You made out one tiny footprint in the corner of the room and now you think my psychotic brother had a child accomplice?”

“You weren’tconsciousthe whole time, though, were you?” He touched his fingertip to the center of his forehead as if he were pressing a button. Winnie sat as still as she could so nothing would betray the noise inside her own head.

“All right…all right,” he said, but his eyes continued to evaluate her. “Well, you know the drill.”

“I know it well. If I think of anything else, I’ll call you. You remember where the door is, I assume.”

Winnie made herself a cup of tea after the detective left and sat in the recliner by the window so she could see the water. Sam was at school; Nancy had gone back to work a few days ago. Winnie got it: busy was the easiest way to be right now. They’d given Winnie extended leave at work, which sometimes proved to be a bad thing, like today. She had too much time to think, and Abbot’s visit had unsettled her. She was trying to cope with her own grief while steering Sam through his, analyzing every moment of that night had nearly driven her mad the first weeks. And now it felt like a luxury with everything she had going on.

She thought again about the tiny footprint. She had heard another voice in the house, a female voice, or so she thought. But things had been confusing, and the memory of her brother chasing after someone was punctuated by Winnie floating in and out of consciousness. She’d entertained the crazy idea that it had been Josalyn’s ghost come to help her, but even in death, Josalyn would never help Winnie after what she’d done. Winnie put the voice to rest because it seemed like the only thing she could do.

She’d put the Turlin Street house on the market the week before, and there was already an offer on it. Not that she was getting market value for the house—the gruesome things that had happened there made it a tough sell, though not tough enough for someone not to take advantage of a discounted house on Greenlake Park, it seemed. As soon as the sale went through, she planned on moving to Portland with Sam—a fresh scene for healing. She was barely talking to anyone in her family anymore. They’d made it abundantly clear that it was Manda and Winnie who’d driven Dakota to what he’d done. They didn’t dare blame Nigel; the dead couldn’t defend themselves.

As for Terry Russel, Winnie supposed she’d never know why Nigel had sent Terry Russel the information that brought her to the Crouches’ doorstep. How could he? Nigel had helped her that night, as she clung to him crying, her arms wrapped around his waist. He’d gone to the car and taken the baby’s body out, put it somewhere no one would ever find it. That’s what he promised her:No one will ever find him. I put him somewhere safe.He’d put her in the shower, scooping her bloody clothes from the bathroom floor as he went, and come back a few minutes later with a sleeping pill and glass of water. Winnie had let him dress her and put her to bed all in a semicatatonic state. How could he help her this way and then bring Terry to her doorstep? And how could he do it without implicating himself? Though what other possibility could there be? Abbot had said that the emails had come from the IP address in their own home.

The morning after the baby had died, she’d woken up and gone downstairs to find Nigel drinking coffee in the kitchen, freshly showered. When he looked up and their eyes met, she saw something different inside them, something…gone. She knew she had ruined their lives that day. Had it been enough for Nigel to finally snap and incriminate them both, after all these years?

She’d been so distraught at everything that had happened, she’d almost talked herself into confessing to the crime she’d committed fourteen years ago. In the end, she’d decided she couldn’t help that little boy anymore, but she could help her own son by being around.Let the dead deal with the dead, Winnie thought. And that’s the last she thought about it for a while.

EPILOGUE

They’d been living in the new house for a month before they smelled it. It was terrible, wet and rotting. When George caught onto it, he’d gone around the house, sniffing, crawling on his hands and knees in the kitchen at one point, sure he’d find a dead rat behind the fridge. But there wasn’t a dead rat, just the permeating smell of death.

“It’s an animal, it’s died in the house…oh my God, what if it had babies in the walls?”

His wife was always the negative Nelly, but George had heard weird noises at night, and at night was when the sneaky animals came out.She may not be wrong, he thought.

The smell was thicker on the main level; it was a sizable animal, he decided. He grabbed a handful of thick, industrial garbage bags from under the sink. He wished he had a mask to put over his mouth and nose—wherever that smell was coming from, it was only going to get worse as he got closer. There was a mask shortage, go figure, some virus people were shitting their pants about. George found a bandanna from his wife’s accessory drawer and wrapped it around his nose and mouth, and then he went downstairs to the foyer, wearing the gloves he used for yard work.

The entrance to the crawl space was in the front closet, the left one, if you were facing the front door. He’d had to pull the plans out to find the entrance to the thing, but he knew old houses like this one had them. He yanked open the closet door, eyeing the floor carefully. It was carpeted. New-looking, from what he could see. He might even have to pull the whole thing up. He dropped to his knees, looking for a seam, and found it: a trapdoor lay beneath a rectangle of carpet. George held his makeshift mask tighter across his face. Yep, that’s where it was coming from. The door was an original fucking piece of wood, if ever he’d seen one. It was easier pulling it up than he expected, and as soon as he did, a gust of god-awful drifted up and George gagged.Too far to turn back now, he thought.

He lowered his flashlight into the hole, hoping to God something wasn’t going to jump out of the darkness and eat his face.Rat babies, he thought. No—bigger—possum babies, maybe. But as the beam from his flashlight spun around the darkness in quick, manic jerks, he saw no obvious movement. The bottom wasn’t far off, so he lowered himself down, landing in a crouch. Here he could see that some parts of the dirt floor were uneven, making the space a roller coaster of high and low spaces. Like caves. He chose a direction at random and got to searching.

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