Page 57 of Call Off the Dark

“No, I’m not. None of this is okay.”

As she sat there on the ground, catching her breath, it occurred to her that she didn’t really know her husband. He’d lied to her, told her that he was an only child, never made mention of a tragic accident. Behind his silences, secrets lurked.

As she looked into his eyes, she realized that if Tyler had ever told her they needed to flee because a man that appeared as flesh and blood was a ghost, she would have immediately followed him out the door.

“Everything all right out there?” Isaac was leaning against the frame of the open door to the farmhouse.

Wade’s voice was tight with anger. “Fine, Isaac. Just fine.”

Helen suddenly wanted to know which brother would win in a fight. Wade was burlier than Isaac, but she’d seen Isaac with his shirt off and saw that he was strong too. Longer-limbed and lean, but solid. A man who’d survived a fight with a tractor.

Wade touched her arm, soft and apologetic now, and spoke low so Isaac wouldn’t hear. “Let’s just go to a motel for the night. We can come back tomorrow.”

She wiped at the sheen of sweat on her brow. “I’m not going anywhere with you. You aren’t in your right mind.”

Wade lowered his head. He couldn’t argue with her on that point, and he wouldn’t force her. “I can’t leave you here with him.”

“Then I guess you’re staying too.”

Helen stood and brushed herself off. She knew the seat of her dress had dirt on it. She had felt the give of the earth beneath her as she’d fallen. This dress had been perfectly clean when she’d put it on this morning, and now she needed to wash the damn thing by hand again.

She looked to the farmhouse where Isaac still stood and wondered if he’d lingered there in the doorway and watched them struggle before he’d called out.

Helen turned to Wade. “Are you coming inside?”

In the bedroom, Helen leaned against the dresser and crossed her arms. “Do you want to tell me about the accident?” she asked Wade.

Her left arm throbbed a little from the struggle, but she hadn’t told him that and she wouldn’t.

Wade sat down on the bed. He looked defeated, as if the events of the night had wrung everything out of him.

His shoulders sank. He knew there was no getting around it. Finally he said, “There’s something I haven’t told you. But I’m afraid of what you’ll think of me if I do.”

“It’ll be okay. Just tell me,” Helen said, as if it were that simple, even though she knew from her own experience it wasn’t. If Wade knew what she’d done in Seattle the day she’d walked three blocks with a gun in her right pocket and hate spilling out of every other pocket, he might feel differently about her.

“Isaac and I didn’t get along,” Wade said. “We fought, and I can’t deny that. But I’d never intentionally hurt him. Not bad. Not in any real way.”

“Of course not. I know,” she said in a soothing tone, but she actually found Wade’s words worrying instead of reassuring.

“That day, we were on the tractor—a real big one—and an old net got stuck on the blades. We were having one of our arguments. Shouting at each other. Isaac got out to pull it free, and when I started it up again, I thought he was done. His feet got caught in the net and he got pulled in front of the tractor. It happened so fast.”

The image swept into Helen’s mind. It was a horrifying thought, and she was an authority as far as those things went. She cringed for both Wade and Isaac, and a little bit for Tyler too.

Wade dropped his head into his hands. Then he said the awful thing she had already imagined. “It was too late. I was already driving forward, and he was pulled into the blade.”

“Wade. I’m sorry,” she said softly. “That must have been horrible.”

“It was.” His voice was muffled against his hands. “It was.”

“I wish you would have told me this before.”

He lifted his head. “I know. I just never wanted to think about it again. I couldn’t stick around and work the farm, see the very spot he’d died every day. So I put it up for sale and left.”

Exhaling heavily, he turned his hands palms up, as if that’s all there was to it.

Helen exhaled heavily too. There was so much to talk about. “After the accident, what happened? Was he taken to the hospital?”

Wade rubbed his temple in silence for several moments before he finally said quietly, “No. There was nothing the hospital could do.”