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He was raging at someone.
April froze, then scrambled out of the car. I flew past her, thinking he was screaming at the girls. The bulb in the garage popped, and April yelped as the room went black.
I slipped through the crack in the door and stood facing him.
He’d heard the garage door and was already halfway down the stairs.
The girls’ bedroom door, a little ways down the hall, was closed. He wasn’t yelling at them. He was talking to somebody on the phone.
He lowered his voice as he disappeared down the stairs, but I caught up to him easily. “You’ll be hearing from my lawyer. Don’t call me again. I already told you everything I know, which is nothing,” he hissed.
I moved closer to him, so I could hear the response on the other end of the line.
“So to be totally clear, you have never met Meghan—”
He hung up the phone and threw it.
The phone cracked hard against the wall and landed face up on the carpet. Salt Lake City Police was still displayed on the screen.
Someone in Salt Lake suspected him. Enough that they were pursuing the lead to Idaho.
I backed away from him and stood in the doorway, glancing around the basement den. It was the first time I’d set foot inside since we’d moved three weeks ago.
The room was more man-cave than office. There was a PlayStation hooked up to a TV on one wall and a desk at the other, with a plush brown recliner in one corner. He picked up the phone from where he’d thrown it and shoved it into his hoodie pocket. Then he sat down in the chair and turned on the PlayStation.
My eyes settled on a Daily Grind coffee cup poking out of the trash can next to the chair. “Hot chocolate” and the name “James” were written in careful cursive with a little smiley face at the bottom of the cup.
I’d never seen him—or April—drink coffee before. I’d sort of been under the impression that it was against their religion.
I stood in the hallway, still staring at the smiley face. It wasn’t one of the scribbled, hastily drawn ones. It was a whole, cute little face. With eyelashes and everything.
I told myself it meant nothing. It was a coffee cup.
I moved my gaze to the computer. Its screen was black. If the police were questioning him, maybe he was lying low. Staying off MatchStrike. Maybe they’d even catch him for what he did to Meghan. And to me.
There was a creak from the basement stairs. April was coming down. He made an exasperated noise and scanned the room. Then he plucked the empty coffee cup from the trash can and shoved it into a desk drawer, out of sight.
I backed into the hallway. April was hovering at the bottom of the stairs. She appeared to be trying to decide whether to ask him about the yelling. She must have heard the phone hit the wall.
Instead, she padded back upstairs and peeked inside the girls’ room. When she saw that they were sleeping soundly, she closed her eyes and let out a sigh of relief.
Then she scooped Oscar up from the floor, made her way to the master bedroom, and tucked the covers around herself.
I generally didn’t pay much attention to what April did with her phone. The few times I’d looked, she was arranging playdates for Kimmie or Emma, playing KandyKlash, or scrolling through her endless Instagram feed. But tonight, the look on her face—as she glanced toward the bedroom door, then peered at her screen with a furrowed brow, made me slide over to see what she was looking at.
She’d pulled up a news article about Meghan’s murder.
With her thumb and forefinger, she was zooming in and out on a grainy, black-and-white image of her husband.
I watched in disbelief as she opened a new browsing window and typed in, “Can childhood trauma lead to violence.”
She stared at the search results without clicking on any of them. A quote from a research article was displayed at the top of the results:
It is widely accepted that childhood trauma increases the likelihood of violent behavior.
After a few seconds, April opened up a text thread from three weeks earlier—right before they’d moved. It was a message from someone named Nina that had been left unread. The message was long: it filled up almost the entire screen. It was an apology. Nina thought that the man in the newspaper article looked just like James. She’d “mentioned it” to the Salt Lake Police. It was probably nothing. She should have told April first before contacting the police. She was so sorry. But she couldn’t stop thinking about how similar they looked. Maybe he had a brother?
I had no idea who Nina was. At the end of the text she mentioned seeing the girls on Sunday, so I assumed she was a fellow church member.
