Free A Welcome Grave by Michael Koryta Page B

deaths. And if I believed those deaths were unconnected incidents, and unconnected incidents that you know absolutely nothing about, I’d tell you to ignore the talk and go on with your life.”
    “But you don’t believe that,” she said slowly.
    I shook my head. “I don’t believe it, because it’s not true.”
    “I don’t know what’s true, either, Lincoln. I really don’t.”
    “You know more than me.”
    “And you want to hear it?”
    “I’ve got cops trying to pin a murder charge on me, Karen. Yes, I damn well want to hear it.”
    She stood up from the couch and walked into the kitchen. I stayed in my chair and watched while she took a bottle of wine from the rack on the counter. She lifted it free, hesitated, and put it back before crossing to the refrigerator and returning with a bottle of mineral water. I waited while she sipped it, her eyes on the floor.
    “There’s something very wrong with this family,” she said.
    I almost laughed. No shit, Karen? Something wrong with this family? Where in the last week of torture killings and bizarre suicides did you get that idea?
    “I met Alex through work—”
    “I know,” I interrupted, and I couldn’t keep the cutting quality out of my tone. I knew awfully well how she’d met Alex Jefferson, though, and I didn’t need to be told again. Karen had been working in records with the district attorney’s office when she’d made the switch to the private sector and taken a nice salary boost to work as a paralegal for Cleveland’s most prestigious business law firm. Yes, I remembered that well, indeed. I’d splurged on champagne the night she took the job, bought a bottle of Dom on a cop’s salary, and toasted to her future success with Alex Jefferson.
    She looked at me with sad eyes. “If you want to hear what I can tell you, you’ll have to listen to me talk about Alex. I can’t sit here and give you facts, because I don’t know any. All I can tell you are the changes I saw in my husband.”
    I didn’t realize I was grinding my teeth until I had to loosen them so I could speak.
    “Tell me, then.”
    She took another drink of the mineral water, then put the top back on the bottle and set it on the table beside her.
    “I met Alex when I began working with his firm. He was kind, and he paid attention to me. He took me to lunch my first week with the company, and then that became a regular pattern. I remember thinking how busy he was and being surprised that he’d make time for me every week. He asked about you a lot, and at first I thought that was just his way of reassuring me that his interest wasn’t romantic. Then I began to get the idea that it was just the opposite, that he was feeling me out to see how serious we were.”
    To see how serious we were. Apparently, the word “engaged” hadn’t meant a lot to Jefferson. Maybe in his world, though, an engagement—or even a marriage—was no indication of how serious a relationship was at all.
    “I know you don’t want to hear this, and I’ll spare you the details. I still feel awful, Lincoln. You probably don’t believe that, and maybe you never will. Butthe reason I’m telling you this is because I have to explain what I saw happen to my husband.”
    I was leaning forward, elbows on my knees, eyes on the floor. I reached out and ran my hand through my hair as she spoke, squeezing it until the roots pulled hard at my scalp.
    “You, and everyone who knew us, probably had a lot of theories as to what attracted me to Alex. I’m sure everyone talked about the money, though I’d hate to think they truly believed I was so shallow. I’ll tell you what the attraction really was, though—he
needed
me. He seemed desperate for me. He used to joke about how much he enjoyed my youth and innocence, but after a while I saw that they weren’t all jokes. That I represented something that he thought he needed very badly. He told me once that I healed him, and he said that seriously. As seriously