Free Cold Lake by Jeff Carson Page B

and then started yelling at me. Telling me I’m raising a slut, and how she’s going to turn out being a hooker, and… he just lost it.”
    “You say, the room . Can you please tell me what you mean by that?” Wolf’s father asked.
    Katherine took a sip of coffee again.
    A tell, Wolf thought. What exactly it was telling about her, he didn’t know yet.
    She set it back down and smoothed her shirt. “For the last few years, my husband started exhibiting … symptoms.”
    “Symptoms?”
    “Yeah. First he was hearing things. He’d come up to me and ask, ‘Did you hear that?’ and I’d have no clue what he was talking about. Then after a while I finally realized he was hearing voices. He never told me it was voices he was hearing, but one day I listened to him when he was in an empty room, answering questions that nobody asked. I put two and two together.
    “Then I could tell he was seeing things. Horrific things, I think, because he would go rigid. Sometimes he would sit there frozen and stare at the wall as if he was looking at a tarantula or something. Only nothing would be there.”
    Katherine took another sip of coffee, then exhaled and closed her eyes.
    “What is it?” Wolf’s father asked.
    She opened her eyes. “We have rodent traps around the house. Have to for the garden we plant every year. One day I saw a dead squirrel out in back of our house. But it was,” she brushed her hair behind her ear, “decapitated. The body was sitting next to the head, and it was slit from top to bottom, on the underside.”
    Katherine took another sip of coffee.
    “I knew that Parker had done it. And then later I saw his fishing knife, down in the shed by the lake. It was covered in blood, but not fish blood. There was fur on it.”
    Another sip.
    “Did you speak to your husband about it?” Wolf’s father asked.
    She nodded. “I did.”
    “And what did he say?”
    “First he said he was cleaning it for meat, and forgot about it. But I just got a bad feeling about it. After a while I pressed him and he admitted that’s not what happened. Turns out he had just killed it, and did what he did to it, because he had to. He said that. He had to.
    “Then he told me everything, about the voices, the hallucinations, the way he was becoming paranoid, afraid of social situations. He said it had been going on for years and years. And I started thinking about our situation, and of course it all made sense to me at that point. We moved from Tennessee to the lake, from a commune with over two thousand people up to a lake in the middle of nowhere, Colorado. The new life had always been his idea. It was my husband’s idea to homeschool Kimber. And when I disagreed, he insisted. It was his idea to live this life. He was secluding us, cutting us off from society, because he desperately needed to. It was his sickness.”
    Her voice trailed off and she stared into nothing.
    “What happened after he killed the squirrel?”
    She nodded. “When he killed the squirrel, I’d never been so scared in my life. I’d never felt something like that before. The fear was so paralyzing. So I put the twenty-two pistol we have in my pants and went and talked to him. Told him how scared I was. Told him that I wanted him to get help. He was,” she exhaled, “good about it. He went to a doctor, and got some medicine, and started taking it.”
    “And did the medicine help?”
    “Yes. Yes, it did. I never caught him hearing voices again. Never saw him looking at things, and I didn’t find anything else, you know, dead.”
    “Do you know who his doctor was? The name? Where?” Wolf’s father asked.
    “I know he went to Grand Junction. The first time. For a psychiatrist. But he didn’t tell me who when I asked. And that’s what was strange. The paranoia seemed to still be there … it was better, he was better, he acted so nice and normal after that, but the paranoia was still there. And it was like that, the way he evaded the question of