The Girls in the Cabin by Caleb Stephens

Author:Caleb Stephens [Stephens, Caleb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Six

CLARA

1997

It took over an hour to drive to Rifle, the blacktop a blurry, yellow-line smudge through Clara’s tears. The taste of warm salt filled her mouth, and she struggled to keep the car pinned to the right side of the road, questions raining through her head like lightning strikes:

Would John really do this to her, after all they’d been through together?

Could he actually betray her so soon after Kinley? After the miscarriages?

Was he cruel enough to father a child with another woman . . . this Ashley Morgan? Had she married that kind of man?

No, she decided, that was not whom she’d married, the man with the soft smile and kind heart who’d pulled her from the wreckage of her life, where she’d been stuck drowning beneath the weight of Mother and Father’s cruelty. The man whose very presence had once filled her like helium and sent her spinning for the stars.

He wouldn’t . . . couldn’t do something like that to her. It had to be a mistake, the photo, a picture of a friend, or a distant cousin, maybe an old co-worker who’d been overly excited to share the news of her pregnancy with anyone who’d listen.

Not John, she assured herself.

Never John.

* * *

The house was dark when she arrived, a bricked-over craftsman planted on a cheap, five-acre lot overrun with pockets of sagebrush and scrub oak. The front yard was more dirt than lawn with two cedar planter boxes near the porch full of weeds and a mailbox planted in the corner with the flag half-cocked like it couldn’t decide if it held mail or not.

Clara saw none of it, her eyes grazing the property in search of one thing: John’s truck. She breathed a sigh of relief when all she spotted was empty gravel and cracked cement, no F-150. She’d been paranoid, she decided, her mind still reeling from Kinley’s death. John was no doubt down at Shooters, getting drunk with Steven Lewis and Bret Savage. He’d stumble home sometime after midnight like usual, Clara told herself, and fall into bed smelling of whiskey and ashtrays.

Feeling better now, she reached for the keys and was about to leave when something gave her pause. It took a moment to place exactly what it was. The front door, she realized. It was hanging wide open. A gaping mouth that gave view to a long, dark throat. There was something about the sight that hypnotized her, pulled at her, almost like she’d been here before, in this very moment. It was that feeling that caused her to draw a flashlight from the glove box and ease from the car and then across the street, up the spalling and cracked driveway, and toward the first few sun-cracked steps.

There she stood, unsure, blinking into the somehow-familiar home drenched in black, not a single light on in any room. In the distance, the first few fireworks crackled and hissed, painting the sky in blooms of pink and green and phosphorescent purple.

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