Chapter Twenty-Eight
Less than two years ago
Tyler was gone. Without him, the sun forgot how to rise. Helen stayed under blankets of gray all day, waiting for the weight
of it all to finally crush her lungs. But she kept on breathing, and it seemed like a cruel joke that the world moved around
her like normal, while her brain was stuck in a loop replaying the same hellish night over and over.
There had been a moment when Helen had started desperate chest compressions on Tyler, but that had just pushed incredible
amounts of blood out of his stomach wound. So in the end, all she did was hold him and wait for people to show up and start
making impersonal, official declarations about time of death and crime scene protocol.
Grief hit her so absolutely—the instant destruction of her entire universe—that in only a matter of weeks it felt as if she
had been a grieving widow all her life.
Loved ones circled and began handling things for her. Her mother, her aunt, her girlfriends—they all made “arrangements.”
Tyler’s body was an arrangement to be made.
His life insurance policy was a payment to be doled out.
His personal belongings were things to sort. Helen refused to go through his things. No, she would not give anything away! She held on to the idea that Tyler might come back and need them. She knew, logically, that wasn’t true. But she grasped
onto it anyway. She slept in one of his unwashed T-shirts. Initially, his scent lingered.
She sent Tyler text messages each day:
I miss you. I need you to come back because no one understands me like you. No one hugs me like you. No one looks at me or
loves me like you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
Some days, she opened Tyler’s phone and sent herself back a reply, imagining what he might say to her if he were still alive.
Then she opened her phone and read the message, pretending it had really come from him:
I miss you too, Helen. So much. I’ll find a way back to you. You have nothing to be sorry for. I’ll be there soon.
Every now and then, she actually believed the replies were real.
Helen would roll the details over in her mind so many times. The worst of it would break her apart, but the strangest things
would bother her too. The masked man was on the shorter side, barely taller than her. Someone who was physically smaller than
Tyler had been able to kill him that easily, that quickly, all because he had a knife. These terrible realizations lodged
in the space between her sticky mind and her spiraling heart.
All day, all night, she called out to him. Tyler, Tyler, Tyler.
At first, Helen stayed at her parents’ house in the suburbs outside Seattle, but she couldn’t sleep in her old bedroom.
Her childhood had been a time before she knew Tyler.
Sleeping in her old room would have amounted to an erasure of him.
She couldn’t explain this to anyone; she just told her mother that she’d prefer the couch.
Besides, she didn’t want to sleep in any bed, because she had reverted to her childhood fears.
Beneath the bed is where the boogeyman hid, and the masked man was
her boogeyman.
At night in the living room, she left a tableside lamp on. She rarely slept for more than an hour at a time, rarely more than
three or four hours the entire night, and her dreams were nightmares.
The days were even worse than the nights. Her boss gave her a leave of absence from work for one month (as if one month could
ever be enough!), and Helen dropped out of the history class she was taking on Thursday evenings. The idea of leaving marketing
for some romanticized job working at a museum now seemed impossible. She stumbled through the days at her parents’ house,
wondering how she’d ever managed to chop a head of broccoli or shape her eyebrows or type an email.
Simple tasks, now impossible.
One day, she saw her old bicycle in the garage, its flat tire and rusty gears staring back at her. She’d probably been seventeen
the last time she’d ridden it. She pulled it out from behind a junk heap and rolled it onto the parking slab in front of the
house. She swung a leg over it and climbed on. Her feet fumbled for the pedals and then she was coasting unsteadily down the
slight incline toward the street. She felt the leg of her loose-fitting sweatpants rub against the gears. A sharp, unpleasant
screeching sound came from somewhere on the bike. At the street, she stopped and contemplated which way to ride. It was gray
and cloudy, the street damp from last night’s rain.
“I can get that fixed up for you,” her dad said, suddenly appearing beside her. Her parents were constantly on watch, it seemed.
“You can’t really ride it like that.”
Helen looked down and realized the sound she’d been hearing was the bike rims scraping on the pavement.
She slid off the seat and let her dad take it back into the garage.
Only a few days later, the bike was ready. She had no idea what her dad had done to it and didn’t feel like asking. She just thanked him and climbed on.
“Oh!” her dad said. “I got you a helmet.” He opened the door to his SUV.
But Helen just shook her head and rode away. If she wrecked her bike, she wanted to crack her head open.
She rode south on Highway 99, pedaling on the sidewalk past taverns, greasy restaurants, and a strip mall with a faded sign.
All the businesses had bars on their windows, but she knew now that protection was a falsehood.
Helen rolled her bicycle to a stop in front of a gun range.
A familiar feeling swept through her. After a moment, she recognized it as something she used to feel in her past life, the
life when Tyler was still alive.
Motivation. An idea. A plan.
Yes, Helen was going to buy a handgun, and she was going to learn how to shoot it with perfect accuracy.
That way, when the police caught the murderer, she could kill him herself.
During initial police interviews, Helen was able to clearly recount details of the terrible night, and when they asked her
questions that required her to imagine things or conjecture—Is there anyone that would want to hurt you or Tyler?—she was able to come to logical conclusions. The short answer was no.
She also had enough clarity to recognize at one point that the police were considering the possibility that she could have
been the one who stabbed Tyler. She and Tyler had watched true crime shows on occasion, and she knew the spouse was always
the first suspect. She briefly contemplated getting a lawyer. The detectives wanted to know if she and Tyler had been having
marital problems or if either one of them had ever had an affair. No and no. Did they have money problems or debt? No and just a small amount of student loans. They wanted to know the size of the life insurance policy. Fifty thousand dollars.
The day after those questions, the head detective sat down with her. She was a tall woman named Calhoun, which sounded like
a very detectivelike name to Helen. She wished she could tell Tyler that the detective handling his case had a movie-character
name and drank coffee out of white Styrofoam cups. Helen wasn’t sure how she was going to go through the rest of her life
observing details like this and being unable to tell Tyler.
Calhoun told Helen there was a witness who had seen the masked man at the apartment complex that night. The witness was a
bartender returning home from his late shift. As the bartender was going up the stairs, a man in a ski mask with a bloody
knife had come running down them. The bartender had immediately called 911 from his apartment.
“Do you have anything more?” Helen asked. “Did anyone see him on the street? Or any cameras? His car?”
“We’re working on different angles,” Calhoun said. “We also collected some DNA that didn’t match either you or Tyler. The
knife may have nicked the intruder as he fled.”
“Blood?” Helen’s body went rigid. “His blood is in our apartment?”
“Just a tiny droplet, and we already collected it,” Calhoun said, measured and polite, but with an edge of scrutiny. “We’re
running it through our database hoping to get a hit. That can take some time.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
“It’s an active investigation, and it’s all new, so we’re trying to consider every angle.”
Every angle. Helen knew that possibly meant her. It was possible that even with the eyewitness, Calhoun suspected Helen in a murder-for-hire plot. She should stay on guard
and lawyer up.
But her innocence was not the foremost worry in her head. Worse things were killing her slowly.
Like how there’d been no sign of forced entry.
That meant that either they had accidentally left their door unlocked or the intruder was very good at picking locks.
The lock on their apartment door had been installed upside down.
To engage the deadbolt, you had to turn it clockwise instead of counterclockwise.
Tyler always double-checked the door before bedtime, to ensure neither of them had twisted the lock the wrong way, but she couldn’t remember seeing him do it that night.
He’d fallen asleep on the couch, so maybe he’d forgotten.
Helen should have checked the lock every single night herself too.
This ate at her.
At the cemetery, when she stood stone-faced next to Tyler’s family as strange men lowered the coffin into the ground, she
knew Tyler’s body was inside the casket. She knew he was dead. But she also had the sense she was living inside a twisted
fairy tale, something make-believe. She felt as if life had turned into a long tunnel she was walking through, trying not
to touch the walls.
Afterward at the wake, Helen steeled herself when she saw Evelyn weaving through guests to get to her. Evelyn’s insistence
on always keeping a stiff upper lip would be too much for a day like today. Helen reminded herself that she didn’t have to
put up with the Wicked Stepmother anymore. Evelyn hadn’t said a word to Helen at the cemetery, had just given her a quick