27
Jodie loaded the gun the way she’d seen Ethan do it: finger-checking the rounds so they were lined up flush, then smacking the magazine up into the grip.
Her jittery hands almost fumbled the manoeuvre. She clenched them steady, then racked the slider back to chamber the first round.
Clack-snap.
Nine bullets loaded, but she’d only need two.
One for Ethan.
The other one for herself.
She flashed on her husband’s face; on his fixed stare, and the twisted mind-games shape-shifting behind it. Sweat prickled down her spine. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe it would take more than one bullet to kill Ethan.
Fireworks hissed and crackled outside the car, and the sky exploded into a weeping willow of light. Jodie peered through the windscreen, scanning the strobe-lit crowds that lined the lake perimeter. Ethan was out there somewhere, masquerading tonight as Mister Nice Guy, a back-slapper and hand-shaker for the Fourth of July celebrations.
She slid the gun into her bag, then reached out to the drawing pad that lay on the seat beside her, lifting it onto her lap to leaf through it one last time.
The paintings were childlike but imaginative, showing uncomplicated feelings rather than copies of objects: the tangle of scribbly black for the cranky family cat; the sunshine-yellow splodge for the spring picnic; bursts of colour splattered from a height, paint squeezed straight from the tubes to the page.
‘Look what I can do, Mommy!’
Jodie brushed her fingertips across the rounded letters marking the bottom of every page: Abby McCall Age 3.
Her throat constricted. She swallowed against it, but the ache intensified, crushing her chest, choking her, smothering her, sending her spinning.
Breathe!
She bowed her head, took deep, shuddery breaths. Found a dead, flat place somewhere inside her and invited the numbness back in.
Slowly, Jodie straightened up. Touched a hand to the drawing pad. Turned a page.
Blob-figures. The family unit. Abby holding Badger, the black snarl of a cat, flanked by Jodie and Ethan. Wide curves for mouths, vibrant red and yellow clothes. Finger-daubed by Abby.
The next few pages were the same. But by the last set of drawings, the colours had muted: faded blues, dull browns. With each painting, Ethan’s blob-figure stood further apart from the others, the mouth growing straighter, the features fainter, until finally he had no face at all.
Jodie shivered. Even little Abby had seen it.
She closed the pad, cradling it in her lap before setting it back on the seat. Then she lifted her chin, shouldered her bag and clambered out of the car.
The night air was cool against her skin. Volleys of rockets sizzled skywards, erupting into starbursts over the lake. Her eyes raked the spectators by the water’s edge, hunting for her husband’s lean, elegant frame.
She threaded through the crowds, the air dry and flinty with the smell of burned-out fireworks. She pushed closer to the shoreline, where the water, normally tea-coloured, looked black and oily in the dark.
Up ahead, her gaze snagged on a familiar figure: the plump silhouette of Nancy Adams. Jodie went still. For an instant, she caught the other woman’s eye, then Nancy glanced away.
Something small tugged at Jodie’s chest. Even Nancy was avoiding her now. But she wasn’t surprised. People had been talking, saying Jodie had gone over the edge. For ‘people’, read Ethan.
She and Nancy had settled in Hillsborough County around the same time, Jodie as Ethan’s Irish bride, Nancy as the new proprietor of Attic Corner, a quirky little café tucked into an art gallery in Peterborough. It was Nancy who’d pitched Jodie’s paintings to the gallery and made them see her potential.
‘Us blow-ins got to stick together in this godforsaken place,’ Nancy had said once, hefting a pan of cinnamon rolls from her oven. ‘Especially in the winter. All these blizzards and power outages, snowdrifts barricading your front door. Talk about isolated. Drive you five kinds of crazy.’ She’d given Jodie a probing look, the scent of brown spices billowing from her in waves. ‘Especially way out in the wilderness where you are.’
Jodie had smiled, shrugging off the concern, her mind skittering away from her own growing misgivings. It was only later she’d admit that the backwoods had turned oppressive.
The whirr of crickets pulsed from the lakefront.
Slowly,