The Coworker Who Knew My Wife

And under all of it, always, the same cold stone at the bottom of everything: if she said the name Rae Ann out loud, anywhere, to anyone, and it got back to Boyd, he had promised her what would happen. And even though Danny was a grown man now, even though decades had gone by, that promise still ran her life. She had drowned herself to keep a lunatic away from her little brother, and she was not about to undo it just to ease her own conscience with her husband.

“I was going to take it to my grave,” she said to me. “I really thought I would. I am so sorry, Tom. I am so sorry you had to find out like this. But I am not sorry I lived. I am not sorry I am here. Everything after that river is the only real life I ever got, and all of it is you.”

I did not say anything for a long time. I am not a fast man with words. I got up, and I went around the table, and I put my arms around my wife and I held her while she shook, and over her shoulder I looked at her brother, who I had hired, who had eaten lunch on my tailgate, who had thought his sister was twenty years dead, and I said, “Danny, I think you better tell us how in the world you ended up in Delford.”

What Danny came for

Here is the part that put the ice back in my stomach.

Danny had not found Delford by accident.

He had never fully believed the river. He was seventeen when it happened, and he had loved his sister more than anyone on earth, and something about it had never sat right with him. He had spent his twenties angry and his thirties looking. He had used the little money their mother left to hire a skip tracer once, who found nothing, because there was nothing to find, because Rae Ann Colter really had ceased to exist.

But in the spring of that year, everything changed, because Boyd Rickert got arrested.

Not for anything to do with Rae Ann. Boyd, it turned out, had married again after his first wife drowned, a woman named Sherry, and he had done to Sherry what he had done to Rae Ann, only Sherry had a brother of her own who was a deputy in the next county, and when Sherry finally showed up at that brother’s door, the brother did not walk her back home. He built a case. And in the building of that case, in the digging that a real investigation does, some old questions about the first wife, the one who drowned so conveniently right after a hospital stay, came back up.

The sheriff down there, a new one, not the old one who had believed everything Boyd said, reopened the file. And a detective started making calls, and one of the calls was to Danny Colter, now Danny Vane, asking him some questions about his late sister that suggested to Danny that the law was no longer sure she was late at all.

Danny said it lit a fire in him he thought had gone out years ago. If there was a chance, any chance, that Rae Ann had not died, then she was out there somewhere, and she did not know their mother was gone, and she did not know Boyd was finally in a cage.