Safe Keeping. Barbara Taylor Sissel

said, “I’m not passing judgment, Em. You know that, don’t you?”

      Emily said she did, although Anna’s opinion of Roy always seemed faintly condemnatory to her. She toyed with her teaspoon, feeling Anna’s concern, and she was sorry for it. She regretted being the cause, and when Anna asked, “What is it?” she hesitated a long moment, drawing in a breath, before admitting that she was worried about Roy.

      “He’s so quiet and withdrawn since he retired, and this morning, he talked to Lissa about tearing down the lake house.” She caught Anna’s gaze. “What if it’s coming back, all that old post-traumatic stress business?”

      “You don’t think he’s drinking.”

      “No.” Emily was definite.

      “But you think he might—what? Hurt someone, himself? Is it that bad again?”

      “I don’t know. I’m afraid to talk to him about it.” She paused. “He’s really had it with Tucker this time. I’m not sure what will happen when he comes home. I kind of dread it, actually.”

      “Oh, Em.”

      She stood up in the silence that fell and went to Anna’s kitchen sink to look out the window. “I was foolish to think that because Miranda was dead the craziness would be over. I so wanted to believe Tucker would come to his senses, but he hasn’t. He still associates with those people, her friends. Other women like her. It’s as if she’s still manipulating him, even from the grave.”

      “They were together a long time.”

      “I should have put my foot down at the very beginning. They were too serious about each other. But Roy said if we argued, if I made a thing of it, it would only make them more determined. How I wish I had listened to my own intuition.”

      “You can’t blame yourself, Em. Miranda was a sweet girl growing up, remember? No one, not even her parents, knew why she went so far off the track. Tucker only wanted to help her.”

      “For all the good it did him, and still, he persists. If he’s so determined to rescue the downtrodden, I’d much rather he’d become a missionary and render aid in some third-world country. It would be safer.”

      When Emily sat down again, Anna patted her arm, and they shared a look deepened by years of familiarity and affection.

      “The girl who was missing,” Emily said, “Jessica Sweet, did you hear they found her?”

      Anna nodded, and Emily sensed that Anna had been biding the time, waiting until Emily brought it up.

      “I’m so worried she’ll have some connection to Miranda. They were found in the same patch of woods.”

      “I heard that on the news.”

      “I need for him to come home, Anna. I need to look into his eyes, then I’ll know—”

      “Know?”

      “Whether he—” Emily hesitated. Whether he is a murderer. She wanted to say it—to test out the possibility of it being true with Anna, her dearest friend in all the world—but even if she could have brought the words past the knot in her throat, they wouldn’t be accurate. She couldn’t really tell anything about Tucker by looking at him anymore. Now that he was grown, he was as much of an enigma to her as to anyone. All smoke and mirrors. Mercurial. Here and gone. All his life she’d sought answers, the key to understanding his nature. Had he come with a different temperament, one that was more tightly wired? Was it the fault of genetics, or had he been marked by early childhood trauma, that handful of years when Roy had been so unstable? She didn’t know.

      Like Roy, Tucker suffered from night terrors. When he was a child, Emily had gone to him on those nights when he’d wakened, flailing and shouting out, and she had comforted him as best she could until he fell back asleep. But she no longer did that. He was a man now, and she imagined the man’s fear exceeded the scope of her ability to reassure him; by now, its boundaries would be much larger than the mother-size shelter of her embrace. Or so she assumed.

      He got his comfort elsewhere, in places she didn’t want to think about. And that was the worst part of it for her. That in the wake of his random disappearances she was left to form assumptions based on nothing of substance, the fallout from a single childhood trauma, the failure to properly parent versus the heritability of a hotter temper. What, of any of it, was valid?

      “Em?” Anna urged. “You can talk to me. You know that, right? You know nothing you tell me—”

      A knock came on the back door, a sharp rapping, and they both turned to look in that direction. Anna went to answer it, and when she reappeared, Emily was alarmed to see that Roy was behind her. He was white-faced, and a muscle that might be rage or fear or both was darting like a minnow under the skin at the corner of his jaw.

      Emily’s heart closed as tightly as a fist. Her breath stopped. “Tucker?” she said faintly. “Has something happened to him?”

      “The cops are questioning a suspect about that girl’s murder,” Roy said. “It was just on the news. It’s Tucker, Em. They’ve got him.”

      She felt her knees weaken. Anna’s palm slid under her forearm. Their eyes met. “Do you want me to call Joe?”

      Emily’s face warmed. Joe Merchant was a Houston homicide detective now, but once, while Roy was away fighting in Vietnam, Joe had worked as a security guard for her mother, and she and Joe had very briefly been lovers. The affair ended; the friendship didn’t. Emily had needed for it not to end. When Roy came home from the war, he’d been so damaged in every possible way, and out of her grief for him, and feeling unable to cope with the magnitude of his injuries, she relied on Joe for his strength, his advice. Once Roy healed, the bond persisted, even though they would go months without speaking. Anna knew of their relationship, but Emily wasn’t sure about Roy. He didn’t ask, and it didn’t feel wrong to her, keeping it for herself.

      But Anna’s mention of Joe’s name now worried her. Not because of her history with Joe, but because of the legal bind Tucker had gotten himself into last November that Joe had helped her to resolve. Wanting to spare Roy the stress, she had said nothing to him about it, and she’d been afraid ever since of the consequences if he were to find out. She looked at him, but if he was aware of her gaze, her anxiety, he gave no sign. He was informing Anna sharply that since it was a Lincoln County case, he doubted they’d want interference from Houston.

      “Is Tucker all right?” Emily knew her question was ridiculous, but she wanted Joe, the whole idea of him, banished, gone from the room.

      “Oh, sure, Em. He’s great. Jesus Christ.” Disgust rimmed Roy’s tone, but remembering Anna, he worked his mouth into something that was meant to resemble a smile, and taking Emily’s elbow, he said, “We need to get home.”

      Leading her from Anna’s kitchen, his gait was unsteady, and when he staggered, if it hadn’t been for Emily, that she was somehow able to keep him upright, he might have fallen. She knew he knew it, too. She felt his humiliation, the blow leaning on her, even for a moment, was to his pride.

      “Call me,” Anna said after them, and Emily heard the apprehension in her voice.

      “I talked to Lissa,” Roy said once they were out of Anna’s house and out of her earshot. “She and Evan are on their way to the sheriff’s office to see what they can find out.”

      “Has Tucker been arrested?”

      “I guess we’ll know soon enough.”

      They climbed the back porch stairs, and going into the kitchen, Emily’s gaze fell on the abandoned mixing bowl with the ingredients for a chocolate cake scattered around it; her apron was discarded over the back of a kitchen chair. The sight was so ordinary, and she felt out of place somehow, as if given all the brewing calamity she had no right to be here, to even think of baking a cake. And yet, it was all she wanted to do. “They shouldn’t be the ones who have to go after Tucker every time,” she said to Roy.

      “You