The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch

Author:Tom Sweterlitsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

TWO

Another crime scene had twinned within her.

Cricketwood Court with her past, this house in Buckhannon with her future. A false future, she told herself.

I failed her. The failure was real, the finality of Marian’s death was leaden, suffocating.

Too late to save her, I was too late.

She tarried on the front porch, alone, the expansive lawn a lake of darkness. Do you believe in the resurrection of the body? Nestor had asked. Across the shadowy lawn shone the garish interior of an ambulance. Moss watched as EMTs tended to Nestor. His right bicep had been torn in the firefight, the bullet passed through. They removed his shirt, revealed bruising across his sternum, purple welts where bullets had struck his vest, lumps swollen red at the edges. He would be taken to St. Joseph’s, examined for internal bleeding.

Nestor, why would you live here? Of all places.

She studied his face in the ambulance light as he laughed with the paramedic who checked his bandages—so much younger now. This wasn’t the same man she had known, this was only a shade of him, younger even than she was. And he was innocent now, innocent of whatever threads would one day stitch him to this place. She had confronted Nestor in the moments following their discovery of Marian—out near the pear tree, she’d asked if he knew this house, but no, Nestor had never been here, he’d never been to Buckhannon before.

But you would have known about Marian then, Moss thought, when we were together. All their nights together here, he would have known that Marian’s blood was in the soil. Ill at her memories of him, humiliated. He had been beautiful then, their brief life together, serene, but it had come to this: six corpses in a Ryder truck.

Nestor’s ambulance pulled from the property, and she watched its sirens spark red, recede. A trick she’d learned as a child: someone had told her she would never fold a sheet of paper more than eleven times, no matter how large the sheet. She’d tried wispy leaves of newsprint, giant rectangles, folding, but never past eleven, the last folds minuscule and difficult, the paper compressed into a small brick. The seams of her life were folding in on themselves, Nestor’s house and the house where Marian had died, Courtney’s house and the house where Marian’s family had died, her emotions roiling and overwhelming, so she envisioned her life as those sheets of paper folding, as large as white sails folding, until her emotions compressed into a small brick without folds, diamond-hard in her heart.

A tense several hours followed the discovery of the mass killing, the forensic technicians and investigators anxious for access to the crime scene, the state and county medical examiners instructed to remain on hand and wait. There had been some initial confusion over what chemicals were inside the barn, stored in plastic drums, some questions, too, about the purpose of the lab equipment, so Brock had cleared the area as a precaution. On

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.