Fear the Darkness: A Thriller by Becky Masterman

one of those women who has to go to the bathroom on the way to the bathroom. Not wanting to show my age, I did a few Kegels instead of asking for the powder room.
    She didn’t get anything for herself, which made sense. More beer would have looked bad, and caffeine would have spoiled the effect of the beer. She sat back down on the couch without speaking.
    “I’m here to listen,” I said. Most people talk. It is the rare person who offers to listen; usually you have to pay someone to do that. So I’ve found that line is often the best opener to a case.
    I was right this time. She was off like the Preakness. Jacquie Neilsen talked for twenty minutes, but she didn’t run straight. She had a brain like a rodent, running down one path and then being distracted by a nugget of information that she happened to spot, and running down that path, returning without warning to the topic she’d been on before. I asked questions to try to get her to focus so I could make sense out of what she was saying, but the main gist I could make out was that she loved her son very much and she really really didn’t want him to be dead.
    That and it had to be someone else’s fault besides Joey’s. Yes, as Lulu had explained, that was the crux of it. Jacquie would consider accidental homicide from horsing around with a friend who ran away when Joe was in trouble. She’d even take suicide brought about by bullying at school or his stepfather’s rejection of his sexual orientation. The only thing she couldn’t take was the thought of Joey’s senseless death due to drowning while he was masturbating off the side of the pool. Not her son. No, no, and no.
    The loops of her conversation got tighter and tighter until all she was left with was that no. Then she got up from the couch and went to a fireplace big enough to spit-roast an elk. A shrine had been set up on the mantel. All of the school photos of a fair-haired Joe, from sweetly smiling first grader through sullen eighth grader with a zit the size of a blueberry on his chin, were lined up. Surrounding them were his crafts: A fruit bowl made of glazed clay with all the little fruits painted to look realistic. A gecko-looking thing made out of seashells. A rock with a cartoon face painted on it. A framed watercolor of a house and a family of three. These things looked at odds with the tastefully understated decor of the rest of the house.
    Jacquie took a pirate-chest-looking sort of box from the mantel, brought it back to the couch, and opened it before me as if I would see jewels. “He had a happy childhood. See, look at all the cards he made for me,” she said. She pulled them out one at a time, a valentine decorated with tissue carnations, a watercolor of a prickly pear cactus with pink blossoms along the ridges. “Joey was always very creative,” she said.
    The memorabilia continued with handmade cards and little pieces of art and found objects all the way up to the time he died, continuing into the teenage years when you’d expect he would start to detach from Mom. “Do you have any practical effects?” I asked. “Wallet, photographs, calendar, cell phone?”
    She was about to answer. The house was so big you couldn’t hear the front door open, but we both heard purposeful steps on tile. Jacquie may have jumped a little when she heard it, as if we’d been caught by Dad doing something naughty. I thought of that woman in the shelter again. I made a mental note to watch Jacquie more carefully for other signs of fear. Whatever her feelings, I noticed the too-wide smile from the night before stretching her lips as Timothy strode into the room and offered his hand to me. He didn’t look at his wife to appreciate her smile.

 
    Sixteen
    “Brigid,” he said, without adding anything about what a nice surprise.
    “Dr. Neilsen,” I said.
    “It’s still Tim,” he smiled, which came across more as a grimace. He glanced at the coffee table in front of the couch, noted my empty