Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen

William

I swallowed hard, trying to swallow down the fear that had gripped my stomach. I had nothing to fear. On a rational level, I knew that. It was on the cops, or the lawyers, or someone somewhere to prove I had killed Candy before I could be thrown into prison for it, and they couldn’t prove it because it hadn’t happened.

That didn’t stop the fear gnawing at me, though. It had begun when the nurse had come into the room with a warrant. She had handed it to me, and a quick scan of it told me she was here to take a cheek swab for a court-ordered DNA test. In theory, being that I had done nothing wrong, the DNA test should prove my innocence.

But there was still that little voice in the back of my head. The one that whispered to me asking me what happened if I was wrong? What if they found my DNA somewhere that made me look guilty?

I shook away the thoughts and closed my eyes. It was only six thirty in the morning, and I figured if I could fall back to sleep for a while, it would pass some time, and maybe I would even wake up with a clearer head.

I didn’t really think I would be able to sleep, but the accident had taken its toll on my body, and before I knew it, I was drifting back to sleep.

I'm standing beside the bed, Carlotta mirroring me on the other side of it. Candy stands in the doorway, looking first at Carlotta and then at me. She steps into the room, the shadows falling away. She has one hand raised, and I feel my ass clench when I see what she’s clutching in her fist.

It’s a knife, the blade long and serrated. It looks like the sort of knife that could do some real damage.

“Candy, what are you doing here?” I ask, trying to keep my voice soft and calm.

I really want to yell at her, to tell her to get the hell out of my house and out of my life but looking at that knife and at the hollow-eyed expression on Candy’s face, the last thing I want to do right now is anger her further.

She takes a step closer to me and smiles. It’s not her normal smile. Her normal smile lights her face up and makes her look radiant. This smile makes her eyes look even more sunken in. It’s a sick smile, the smile of a person who has lost their grip on reality.

“Aren’t you pleased to see me, William?” she asks in a low voice, so unlike her own.

Her voice is as hollow as her eyes, like there’s no life left in her. I glance at Carlotta, willing her to snap out of her stupor and call the damned cops. It’s a mistake. Candy is no longer dead looking. She comes to life, full of bristling anger.

“Don’t fucking look at her. Look at me. Look at the mother of your child, William,” she says.

“The mother of my ... ? Have you lost your damned mind?” I snap. “We don’t have a child.”

“No, I haven’t lost my mind.” She smiles. “For the first time in a long time, I think I’m in my right mind. See, William, we don’t have a child yet. But we will soon enough. I’m pregnant. And now we can be together forever. We can be a family.”

She says all of this with another of those sick looking smiles on her face, her eyes full of pent-up hysteria.

I am done trying to reason with Candy. Some people don’t understand a simple no. They need more convincing. I need Candy to see that what we had was just a fling, that it meant nothing to me and neither does she.

“I’ll pay for an abortion,” I say, resigning myself to the argument I know is going to implode between Carlotta and me once Candy is gone.

Again, I made a mistake. Candy’s anger explodes out of her like a rainstorm bursting from the sky.

“I don’t want a fucking abortion. I want us to be a family. You, me, and our baby. How can you just write our baby off like this?” She pauses and smiles knowingly. “Is it because Carlotta is here? You can drop the act, William. Just tell her you love me, and we can start our life together.”

“For the last time, Candy, he doesn’t love you. He loves me. He wants nothing to do with you. Or your bastard child,” Carlotta snaps.

Candy’s attention snaps to Carlotta, a manic gleam in her eye.

I woke up in a puddle of sweat, the sheet tangled around my legs. My breath was coming in short pants, my heart racing. That was some dream.

I sat bolt upright, ignoring the pain in my arm. Suddenly, I knew with certainty that it was no dream. It really happened. Candy was in our bedroom. She had a knife and she was screaming at me about a baby. My baby.

I felt the color drain from my face. The DNA test. They knew about the baby. They were going to think I killed Candy to keep her quiet.

I jumped out of bed, no longer caring that my arm was screaming in pain or that the room spun dizzily around me for a second. I went to the cabinet and pulled out a pair of pants and a shirt. I dressed myself as quickly as I could and then threw my things into a bag. I left the room in a daze. I didn’t get far before a nurse stopped me in the hallway.

“Mr. Alden, what’s going on? You shouldn’t be out of bed. Come on, let’s get you back to your room,” she said, reaching up to steer me back toward the room I had just escaped from. I ducked beneath her groping hand.

“I’m not going back to my room. I’m leaving,” I said firmly.

The nurse’s eyes landed on my bag and she frowned.

“You’re not due for discharge, Mr. Alden. Please, come back to your room and I’ll get the doctor to come and talk to you. You could be suffering from a concussion. ”

“I’m fine,” I insisted. “And I’m leaving. This isn’t open to debate. I have a right to sign myself out of the hospital if I wish to do so, and that’s what I wish to do.”

Something in my tone of voice must have convinced the nurse I was deadly serious because she didn’t even try to talk me out of it. Instead, she nodded her head.

“As you wish, Mr. Alden. I just need a signature from you to confirm that you’re leaving the facility of your own free will against the advice of a medical professional,” she said.

“Fine,” I agreed. “But make it quick. I’m calling an Uber, and if it gets here before you bring the form to me, then I won’t be here.”

She scuttled away, glancing back at me over her shoulder as she went. I called an Uber and paced the hallway nervously. The nurse came back within a matter of minutes, and I scrawled my name on her form. I hurried to the elevators and made my way downstairs and outside. I didn’t have long to wait before my Uber pulled up. I got in and sat there stupidly for a moment with no idea where to go.

“Where to, mate?” the driver asked.

“Anywhere. Just get me out of here,” I said .

He looked at me in his mirror and raised an eyebrow. I sighed.

“The airport,” I said.

He held my gaze a moment longer as though he was going to question me, but then he shrugged his shoulders and pulled away. I watched out the window as the familiar scenery zoomed by. I wondered where I should go. I could only take domestic flights without my passport, but I could still get a long way away from here. I could go to Alaska. No one would think to look for me there.

I nodded my head, the decision made. I leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes for a moment, trying to shut out the world. We had been driving for about twenty minutes when I opened my eyes again. We were almost out of town. We should be reaching the airport soon.

What the fuck are you doing, William? a voice asked inside my head. I tried to ignore the voice, but then I started to really think about what I was doing. Running away like this was only making me look guilty. The only thing that DNA test could prove was that I had lied about how well I knew Candy. And that was easy enough to explain away. I could just say I didn’t want to hurt Carlotta by having her find out about the affair and the baby. I nodded to myself, calming down slightly.

“Driver? There’s been a change of plans,” I said.

I gave him my address and told him to take me there instead. He was still looking a little wary, like he was unsure whether to take me there or not, but he sensibly kept his mouth shut and turned the car around.

I called Carlotta and told her I had signed myself out of the hospital and that I was on my way home. She raised holy hell about my discharging myself from the hospital, but I calmed her down, explaining that I was fine, and my broken wrist could heal just as well at home as it could in the hospital. She still sounded a little unsure, so I tried a different tack. I told her I was sorry about the way I had bitten her head off yesterday and that I missed her. It worked, and she told me she would have breakfast waiting for me when I got home.

I ended the call and began to consider how I was going to handle this with Carlotta. I had seen enough in my dream or memory or whatever it was to know that the knife Candy had been holding wasn’t one of ours. And it hadn’t been in the bedroom when I woke up. I didn’t think it had been found at all because I’m damned sure the police would have had plenty of questions about it if they’d found it in the garden with Candy’s body.

I wish I knew exactly what Carlotta had done, but I was only getting the events in snippets. She had to have killed Candy, though. And then she had taken the knife and hidden it. I had to find out where she’d put it so that I could make sure it was somewhere it couldn’t be found.

But why would she have hidden it in the first place? Surely, a knife that could be traced to Candy and not us would have been useful to Carlotta. It would have left an opening for her to say that Candy came at her with the knife and she pushed her away in self-defense. Hell, maybe that’s what did happen. But no, Carlotta wouldn’t have hidden the knife if that had happened. She had killed Candy because she was angry about the baby, angry about me.

I couldn’t keep thinking about this, going around in circles like this. I was driving myself crazy. By the time we eventually arrived at my house and I paid the Uber driver and approached the door, I was no closer to knowing how to broach this with Carlotta than I had been when I asked the driver to turn around .

I stepped into the house greeted by the smell of food. True to her word, Carlotta had prepared a delicious-looking breakfast. She had even put a candle on the table. I would have said I was sorry sooner if I had known she would start treating me like this.

I smiled at her as she appeared from the kitchen with two steaming mugs of coffee in her hands. I kissed her cheek as she set them down on the table.

“This looks great, love.” I smiled.

“Well, sit down and eat up then.” She laughed.

We sat down and began to eat. For a few moments, I allowed myself to believe that we were just a normal couple having a normal breakfast with no dark cloud hanging over us. It didn’t last long, though. I had to know what had happened to that knife.

“I had a dream earlier,” I said, finally broaching the subject. “Only it wasn’t really a dream. It was a memory. I think what happened the night Candy died is coming back to me.”

Carlotta’s head flew up and her eyes met mine for a half-second before flitting away again. She looked awfully nervous all of a sudden. She reached for her coffee cup, her hand shaking enough to make the surface of the coffee appear wavy. She sipped the coffee and put the cup back down.

“What do you remember?” she asked me, seeming to choose her words carefully.

I shrugged, playing it cool.

“I don’t remember everything. But I know Candy had a knife. What happened to the knife, Carlotta?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember anything about that night, remember?” she said. “The police probably have it.”

“Don’t you think they would have mentioned it if they’d found a knife?” I said.

“I don’t know. You’re the one who suddenly remembers everything. Why don’t you tell me what happened to it?” she said.

“Dammit, Carlotta,” I shouted. “This isn’t a fucking game. What did you do with the knife?”

“I didn’t do anything with the stupid fucking knife,” Carlotta shouted back.

She stood up abruptly.

“Where are you going?” I demanded. “What about your breakfast?”

“I just lost my appetite,” she snapped.

She practically ran from the room, and I sat eating in silence, my mind ticking over again. She soon jumped from saying she didn’t remember anything to denying moving the knife. She was lying. It was obvious to me that she was guilty. She must have had something to hide or she wouldn’t have run out like that.

I debated my next move as I finished up my breakfast. I tried to convince myself that the police learning I had gotten Candy pregnant meant nothing. But if Carlotta had killed Candy for revenge, what if she decided to get her revenge on me by pretending she remembered something and blaming all of this on me? I didn’t want to drop her in it for the murder if it wasn’t going to come to that, but I knew I had to cover my bases.

I thought for a moment, and then I picked up my cellphone and called the precinct. I asked for Detective Del Rey, but I was told he was out. The lady on the phone asked me if I wanted him to call me back, but I decided against that. It would actually be easier to get this message to the detective without having to actually speak to him. He might hear something in my voice that raised his suspicions of me.

“No, thank you. Could you please just get a message to him? Can you tell him William Alden called to report to him that my wife, Carlotta, is acting strangely? He’ll know who we are. Don’t worry.”

I hung up before she could answer. Perhaps the best-case scenario for me now would be if the woman forgot to pass on the message. If Carlotta did try to pin this all on me, then I had myself covered to say that it was her and I’d tried to report it sooner. And if she didn’t, well then, there was no harm done.