Chapter Fourteen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ROY SAYS GRACE with a little more feeling tonight than usual as they gather around the pine table in the farmhouse kitchen for supper. It's just starting to get dark. His wife, Susan, sits across from him, ready to begin spooning out the food as soon as he's finished, before it gets cold. He always keeps it short. Thank you, Father, for the good things you have put upon our table, and for all the good things you bring us. Amen. But the dead girl in his field is on his mind.

He looks up, Susan starts serving the food – ham and mashed potatoes and peas – and he passes his plate down. His daughter, Ellen, whose wedding is planned for Christmastime, is on his right. Across from her is where her fiancé should be sitting – he usually joins them for supper on Friday nights – but he's not here. Roy and Susan's other children, both older, have grown up and moved away. They'll all be back for the holidays, for the wedding. Ellen is their last, and the house will seem especially empty when she's gone.

He glances at her now. She's a pretty girl, with lovely skin and thick, chestnut-coloured hair – the apple of her mother's eye after two rambunctious boys. She's lighthearted by nature, but a shadow has been cast over all of them tonight. It has reached even into here, their familiar, homey kitchen, with the checked oilcloth on the table, and the dog lying in her bed in the corner.

Ellen goes past that field every day in her little car on her way into town to work at the bakery. She went by it this morning – she starts very early at the bakery – and the body must have already been there. She drove by it in the dark. It makes him sick to think of it. What if it had been Ellen, instead of the Brewer girl, lying in that field? Susan glances at him and he knows she is thinking the same thing.

She says to her daughter, ‘Maybe you shouldn't go out alone at night for a while.'

Ellen nods, pushes her food around her plate. ‘Yeah, I was thinking that too.' She looks sombre and says, ‘It's so awful. No one can believe it. Brad is really upset about it. Like I said, he knew her pretty well. She was on the cross-country team. No wonder he didn't feel up to coming to supper tonight.'

Of course Brad is upset, Roy thinks. Who wouldn't be? Roy is upset and he'd never even met the girl; he only knew her by sight. Brad must have known her quite well if he was coaching her. They need to catch the bastard who killed her, whoever he is, so they can all go about their lives again, free of fear. Roy knows he won't stop worrying about his own daughter until that happens, and he's sure he's not the only one.

There hasn't been much that's concrete in the news so far, except for the picture earlier of a man, taken from a CCTV video, who has been named a ‘person of interest'. Roy, Susan and Ellen have all seen the man's face online. None of them recognized him.

‘Maybe he's not from around here,' Susan had said.

‘It's good they have a suspect, at least,' Roy had said.

Now Ellen tells them, ‘Brad says that the man they're looking for is someone who was a customer at the Home Depot where Diana worked.'

‘How does he know that?' Susan asks.

Ellen shrugs. ‘That's what they're saying around the school. Some other kids at school worked there too. They're saying that he was harassing her at her job, that's why they're looking for him.'

‘Oh,' Susan says. Roy and his wife focus their attention on their daughter.

‘Brad says he was probably harassing her because she was such an attractive girl. He says she got a lot of attention.'

Susan says, ‘That's like blaming the girl for being beautiful. As if it's her fault somehow. You're beautiful, Ellen; you don't deserve to be murdered.'

Ellen flushes. ‘He didn't mean it that way. He says she was a nice girl. Decent. Hardworking. Of course she didn't deserve it. No one does, no matter how they look, or what they wear, or how they behave. This isn't the Dark Ages.'

Ellen is annoyed at her mother. She secretly suspects that she isn't the biggest fan of her fiancé, although she has never said so and they all pretend otherwise. She'd seemed more excited about her brothers' weddings than she does about her only daughter's, and Ellen had kind of expected the opposite. She can't help feeling disappointed. Maybe by the third wedding the novelty wears off. Or maybe it's more worrying for a mother to marry off a daughter than a son. Wives don't make their husbands unhappy as often as husbands make their wives unhappy. That's just simple statistics. She knows it's the woman who's taking the bigger risk in marrying, especially if she has kids. But Ellen graduated from college and is planning a career in early childhood education. The bakery is just temporary. She is not going to be dependent on a man.

Or maybe her mother just isn't quite ready for her last child to leave the nest. So she understands her mom might have reservations. Still, Ellen feels that her last comment was unwarranted. Brad didn't mean anything by it. He was just stating a fact.

She'd seen him after her shift at the bakery. She'd heard the news on the radio while she was in the back, making bread, rolls and pastries. The news shook her – shook all of them working that morning – even though she hadn't known, then, that the girl had been found on their farm. She had texted Brad, realizing that it was likely that he knew her, that she might have been in one of his gym classes. It took him a while to get back to her, but then he responded. I can't believe it. She was on my cross-country team. Can I see you?

She arranged to come to the high school to meet him as soon as her shift was over, at one o'clock. When she got there, she texted him to find out where he was in the school. He told her not to come into the building; he would come out to her in the parking lot.

She waited for him there, leaning against her car. The two-storey brick school seemed empty – as if they'd sent all the students home. There was a police presence, though – two state police cruisers were parked in front. Brad came out a side door of the school and walked hurriedly toward her, taking her into his arms in a tight hug. She could feel his heart pounding against hers. Finally, she pulled away and looked at him.

‘Are you all right?' she asked. Because he didn't look all right. He seemed agitated – his breathing a little disordered, his eyes blinking rapidly. There was water splashed on the front of his shirt. He usually carried himself with an air of good-natured confidence. But now he looked like he was trying not to go to pieces, and he was trembling a little. He wouldn't look her in the eye. It unsettled her. It was shocking news, certainly. She'd never seen him like this. ‘It's okay, Brad,' she said, trying to soothe him.

‘It's not okay – a girl is dead!'

‘I'm sorry,' she said immediately, chastened.

He looked at her then. ‘No, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap at you.' He took her in his arms again and they stood that way for a long while. He whispered into her hair, ‘You know I love you, right?'

‘I know. I love you too,' she whispered back fiercely. ‘Always.'

She would support him through this. Most men, she thought, had trouble expressing grief. They weren't like women, who were allowed to show their emotions, and who had strong support networks, others with whom they could easily and regularly share their feelings. And Brad was a jock, a gym teacher – he wasn't exactly the touchy-feely type. She was the only one he had to confide in. He'd probably been bottling it up inside at school all day until the moment he could be with her.

But then he hadn't wanted to talk about it – he just wanted to hold her and tell her that he loved her. He seemed to need reassurance.

Now she eats her supper with her parents, thinking about her fiancé. She'd understood that he didn't want to eat with them tonight, but she'd thought she would go to his place later, as she usually does on Friday nights. He has his own place, and she doesn't. But he'd told her no, he wanted to be alone.