Fatal Deceptions by Joe Sharkey

Author:Joe Sharkey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504047197
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-06-14T04:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

A Decision

No one on Harvest Road would remember the exact date, but it was late on a Friday night, Saturday morning actually, well along in the New England summer—August, most likely, but cool enough that everybody’s windows were open at night for sleeping—and there was a battle royal raging at the Stuart house. Neighbors recalled it for two reasons: Except for the occasional angry word here and there, the Stuarts were not known for having loud fights in their home. And this one, happening as it did around two o’clock in the morning, was enough to wake the neighborhood.

“You just don’t care!” Carol could be heard screaming through tears. “Do you! Do you!”

In reply, a window thumped down.

“I am pregnant, and you stay out half the night with your friends? This cannot continue!”

More windows banged down shut, one after the other.

“This cannot continue after the baby is born!”

“Fuck you!”

“Don’t you care?”

A crash was followed by a muffled shout, and then crying that lasted for some time as the neighbors set about closing their own windows. The next morning, some of them noticed that Carol’s face was red and puffy when she came outside to tend her flowers.

Through the rest of the summer, however, Chuck kept up appearances, presiding at several pool parties with his wife, hosting her parents and friends, bragging about the son they now knew she was carrying. “I got her pregnant the first time we tried,” he crowed to male acquaintances. But in Revere, the few intimates among his friends sensed that Chuck had become a very unhappy man. There, several other friends heard him use a new term to describe his wife. “That fat wop,” he called her.

In Revere, that summer, Chuck swore out Carol’s death warrant.

First he tried sounding out his brother Michael. At twenty-seven, Mike was closest to Chuck in age and, since he was the only other of the boys who was married, in experience. One night in late August, Chuck took Mike aside and told him that things weren’t working out between him and Carol. He asked for help in getting rid of her.

Mike brushed this off. “I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about, but I’m not getting involved in any sort of crazy thing you’re talking about,” he said with an astonished laugh.

Chuck didn’t miss a beat. His face broke into the crooked half-grin that people found disarming.

“Hey, I’m kidding,” Chuck said in a tone that accused his brother of taking life too seriously. “Come on!”

Mike soon put the conversation out of his mind. Chuck had been under a lot of pressure lately, and he was always joking around. For a while, Mike thought nothing more of it.

Chuck, on the other hand, brooded for days about the rebuff. Had he ever been a tough guy from Revere, as he sometimes liked people to think he had been once, it would have been no problem to find someone. For days, he mentally worked through the names of people he knew, searching for a candidate.

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