Liam’s chest hurt, as if he couldn’t get enough air. “Barbara, I just can’t—”
Before he could finish the sentence, there was a stir in the group nearest the door. Liam heard Molly said, “Oh my god!” and saw Nina’s face turn so white, she might have seen a ghost.
Fearing that something had happened to Davy, Liam pushed his way through to the front, only to see a sight so unexpected, it made the room spin in dizzying circles for one insanely long moment as his brain tried to process the impossible. His pulse pounded in his ears and his heart raced, skipping a beat erratically in the process.
Peter Callahan stood in the doorway, a triumphant sneer on his patrician face. Next to him, an ethereally lovely, very pale, rail-thin redhead in a demure white sundress looked at the neighbors she hadn’t seen in over two years. Her pointed chin was held high and delicate wisps of hair escaped her tidy bun to curl coyly around the heart-shaped face he used to love.
“What’s the matter, Sheriff?” Callahan asked archly. “I thought for sure you’d be happy to see your wife.”
TWENTY-FOUR
LIAM WAS A lot of things, but happy didn’t enter into it.
After they’d buried Hannah’s tiny body in an obscenely small casket, nothing had been the same. Melissa blamed herself for the baby’s death, and in some irrational twist of a sorrowing brain, also blamed Liam for not being there. That he could understand, since he blamed himself.
But what he couldn’t understand was how his once beautiful, caring wife had turned cold and remote, slicing him to the bone with every slantwise accusatory glance, shying away from his touch as though it burned like acid.
He’d tried to comfort her—tried to have them comfort each other. But she’d found her comfort first in alcohol, then in drugs, and then in the arms of every man in town who would have her. There were many. So many, he eventually lost count. She’d wander the hills for hours, coming home late at night with twigs in her hair and empty wine bottles rattling around in the backseat of her car. People turned their heads away when they passed him on the street, not wanting him to see the pity in their eyes.
He saw it anyway.
And then, about a year after little Hannah’s death, Melissa simply disappeared. He awoke to an empty bed, and waited all the next day for her to stumble in, stoned or high or drunk, reeking of tawdry sex and some other man’s cologne. But she never came home. Not that night, nor any after.
No one ever saw her again. A small circus had been in town that week; two shows a day in a tattered big top, with a few acrobats and a depressed-looking elephant. People started to say she’d run away with the circus, a clichéd joke that only a vicious few actually found amusing.
But Liam figured it was probably true. She’d been saying for months that she couldn’t stand to be there, living in the haunting shadow of their once beloved daughter, mocked by the memories of happier days. Grief and drug use ate away at her soul and her body until only a thin wraith with dry, cracked lips and unwashed red hair remained in the place where beauty had once captured his attention from across a crowded high school lunchroom.
After Melissa disappeared, Liam looked for her for six months straight, calling in favors with law enforcement across the state, checking on every report of an OD or a Jane Doe’s body that showed up in a hospital or morgue. He’d finally broken down and hired a private detective, but the man couldn’t turn up a trace—not even any evidence that she’d ever been seen with the circus after its last night in Dunville.
Eventually, Liam had given up the search, almost relieved when he didn’t find her, and tortured by guilt because he was relieved. Life had become all about work and doing his best to save everyone else, because he couldn’t save the two people he had loved the most. Until lately, when it suddenly seemed like he couldn’t save anyone at all.
He’d never expected to see Melissa again; he sure as hell hadn’t expected to see her under these circumstances, looking pale and almost as unhealthy as the day she’d left, although considerably cleaner and better put together, her fragile beauty shining through like the sun behind misty morning fog.
And how the hell did she get involved with Maya and Peter Callahan?
*
BABA’S BODY WENT rigid with shock as she heard Callahan refer to the delicate redhead as Liam’s wife. She knew she should be paying attention to Maya, but all she could focus on was the word wife echoing in her ears. Liam had a wife. Not an ex-wife. A wife.