The Last Widow

The door was open. Will stood in the middle of the room. His palms were pressed to the top of the workbench as he stared out the window. There was a stillness to him that made Sara wonder if she should interrupt. Something had been bothering him for the last two months. She could feel it edging into almost every part of their lives. She had asked him about it. She had given him space to think about it. She had tried to fuck it out of him. He kept insisting that he was fine, but then she’d catch him doing what he was doing now: staring out a window with a pained expression on his face.

Sara cleared her throat.

Will turned around. He’d changed shirts, but the heat had already plastered the material to his chest. Pieces of grass were stuck to his muscular legs. He was long and lean and the smile that he gave Sara momentarily made her forget every single problem she had with him.

He asked, “Is it time for lunch?”

She looked at her watch. “It’s one forty-six. We have exactly fourteen minutes of calm before the storm.”

His smile turned into a grin. “Have you seen the shed? I mean, really seen it?”

Sara thought it was pretty much a shed, but Will was clearly excited.

He pointed to a partitioned area in the corner. “There’s a urinal over there. An actual, working urinal. How cool is that?”

“Awesome,” she muttered in a non-awesome way.

“Look how sturdy these beams are.” Will was six-four, tall enough to grab the beam and do a few pull-ups. “And look over here. This TV is old, but it still works. And there’s a full refrigerator and microwave over here where I guess the horses used to live.”

She felt her lips curve into a smile. He was such a city boy he didn’t know that it was called a stall.

“And the couch is kind of musty, but it’s really comfortable.” He bounced onto the torn leather couch, pulling her down beside him. “It’s great in here, right?”

Sara coughed at the swirling dust. She tried not to connect the stack of her uncle’s old Playboys to the creaking couch.

Will asked, “Can we move in? I’m only halfway kidding.”

Sara bit her lip. She didn’t want him to be kidding. She wanted him to tell her what he wanted.

“Look, a guitar.” He picked up the instrument and adjusted the tension on the strings. A few strums later and he was making recognizable sounds. And then he turned it into a song.

Sara felt the quick thrill of surprise that always came with finding out something new about him.

Will hummed the opening lines of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire”.

He stopped playing. “That’s kind of gross, right? ‘Hey little girl is your daddy home?’”

“How about ‘Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon’? Or ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’? Or the opening line to ‘Sara Smile’?”

“Damn.” He plucked at the guitar strings. “Hall and Oates, too?”

“Panic! At the Disco has a better version.” Sara watched his long fingers work the strings. She loved his hands. “When did you learn to play?”

“High school. Self-taught.” Will gave her a sheepish look. “Think of every stupid thing a sixteen-year-old boy would do to impress a sixteen-year-old girl and I know how to do it.”

She laughed, because it wasn’t hard to imagine. “Did you have a fade?”

“Duh.” He kept strumming the guitar. “I did the Pee-wee Herman voice. I could flip a skateboard. Knew all the words to ‘Thriller’. You should’ve seen me in my acid-washed jeans and Nember’s Only jacket.”

“Nember?”

“Dollar Store brand. I didn’t say I was a millionaire.” He looked up from the guitar, clearly enjoying her amusement. But then he nodded toward her head, asking, “What’s going on up there?”

Sara felt her earlier weepiness return. Love overwhelmed her. He was so tuned into her feelings. She so desperately wanted him to accept that it was natural for her to be tuned into his.

Will put down the guitar. He reached up to her face, used his thumb to rub the worry out of her brow. “That’s better.”

Sara kissed him. Really kissed him. This part was always easy. She ran her fingers through his sweaty hair. Will kissed her neck, then lower. Sara arched into him. She closed her eyes and let his mouth and hands smooth away all of her doubts.

They only stopped because the couch gave a sudden, violent shudder.

Sara asked, “What the hell was that?”

Will didn’t trot out the obvious joke about his ability to make the earth move. He looked under the couch. He stood up, checking the beams overhead, rapping his knuckles on the petrified wood. “Remember that earthquake in Alabama a few years back? That felt the same, but stronger.”

Sara straightened her clothes. “The country club does fireworks displays. Maybe they’re testing out a new show?”

“In broad daylight?” Will looked dubious. He found his phone on the workbench. “There aren’t any alerts.” He scrolled through his messages, then made a call. Then another. Then he tried a third number. Sara waited, expectant, but Will ended up shaking his head. He held up the phone so she could hear the recorded message saying that all circuits were busy.

She noted the time in the corner of the screen.

1:51 p.m.

She told Will, “Emory has an emergency siren. It goes off when there’s a natural disast—”

Boom!

The earth gave another violent shake. Sara had to steady herself against the couch before she could follow Will into the backyard.

He was looking up at the sky. A plume of dark smoke curled up behind the tree line. Sara was intimately familiar with the Emory University campus.

Fifteen thousand students.

Six thousand faculty and staff members.

Two ground-shaking explosions.

“Let’s go.” Will jogged toward the car. He was a special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Sara was a doctor. There was no need to have a discussion about what they should do.

“Sara!” Cathy called from the back door. “Did you hear that?”

“It’s coming from Emory.” Sara ran into the house to find her car keys. She felt her thoughts spinning into dread. The urban campus sprawled over six hundred acres. The Emory University Hospital. Egleston Children’s Hospital. The Centers for Disease Control. The National Public Health Institute. The Yerkes National Primate Research Center. The Winship Cancer Institute. Government labs. Pathogens. Viruses. Terrorist attack? School shooter? Lone gunman?

“Could it be the bank?” Cathy asked. “There were those bank robbers who tried to blow up the jail.”

Martin Novak. Sara knew there was an important meeting taking place downtown, but the prisoner was stashed in a safe house well outside of the city.

Bella said, “Whatever it is, it’s not on the news yet.” She had turned on the kitchen television. “I’ve got Buddy’s old shotgun around here somewhere.”

Sara found her key fob in her purse. “Stay inside.” She grabbed her mother’s hand, squeezed it tight. “Call Daddy and Tessa and let them know you’re okay.”

She put her hair up as she walked toward the door. She froze before she reached it.

They had all frozen in place.

The deep, mournful wail of the emergency siren filled the air.

2

Sunday, August 4, 1:33 p.m.

Will Trent took his hand off the lawn mower to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. The task was not without complications. First, he had to shake the sweat off of his hand. Next, he had to rub his fingers on the inside of his shirt to get the grit off. Only then could he squeegee the liquid from his eyebrows with the side of his fist. He used the momentary reprieve from near-blindness to check his watch.

1:33 p.m.

What kind of idiot mowed three hilly acres in the middle of an August afternoon? He guessed the kind of idiot who’d spent the morning in bed with his girlfriend. As sweet as that had been, he really wished he could go back in time and explain to Past Will how fucking miserable Future Will was going to be.

He turned the corner, angling the mower through a dip in the rough terrain. His foot caught in a gopher hole. Gnats snarled in front of his face. The sun felt like the lash from a belt on the back of his neck. The only reason he hadn’t sweated his balls off was because a thick paste of dirt, clipped grass and sweat had glued them to his body.

Will glanced up at Bella’s house as he made another pass. He could not get over how massive it was. Money practically dripped from the gables. There was actually a book on the design that Bella had loaned him. The stained glass in the stairwell was made by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The plaster moldings had been shaped by craftsmen shipped over from Italy. Inlaid oak floors. Coffered ceilings. An indoor fountain. A mahogany-paneled library filled with ancient tomes. Cedar lining in every closet. Real gold on the gaudy chandeliers. A toilet in the basement for the help that dated back to Jim Crow. There was even a man-sized safe behind a hidden panel in the kitchen pantry that was meant to hold the family silver.

Will felt like Jethro Bodine every time he came up the driveway.

He grunted, putting his shoulder into bulldozing through a clump of cat’s claw that was bigger than an actual cat.

When Will had first met Sara, he’d figured out pretty quickly that she was well off. Not that she acted differently or spoke differently, but Will was a detective. He was a trained observer. Observation one: her apartment was the penthouse unit in a boutique building. Observation two: she drove a BMW. Three: she was a doctor, so his detective skills were not really needed to figure out that she had money in the bank.

Here’s where it got tricky: Sara had told him that her father was a plumber. Which was true. What she’d failed to add was that Eddie Linton was also a real estate investor. And that he’d brought Sara into the family business. And that she had made a lot of money renting out houses and selling houses and her medical school loans had been paid off, plus she’d sold her pediatrician’s practice in Grant County before moving to Atlanta, plus, she had money from her dead husband’s life insurance policy and his pension, and as the widow of a police officer she was exempt from state taxes, so financially speaking, Sara was Uncle Phil to his way less cool Fresh Prince.

Which was actually okay.

Will was eighteen years old the first time someone put money in his pocket, and that was for bus fare to the homeless shelter because he’d aged out of the foster care system. He had qualified for a state scholarship to go to college. He had ended up working for the same state that had raised him. As a cop, he was used to being both the poorest guy in the room as well as the guy most likely to get shot in the face while doing his job.

So the real question was: Was Sara okay with it?

Will coughed out a clump of dirt that had launched like a Trident missile from the rear wheel of the lawn mower into his face. He spat on the ground. His stomach grumbled at the thought of lunch.

Bella’s mansion was bothering him. What it represented. What it said about the disparity between him and Sara because the place Will had lived in while he’d attended college had been condemned because of asbestos, not listed on the National Registry of Historical Homes.

Sara’s aunt was a whole other level of loaded—in more ways than one. Will guessed by the smell coming off her iced tea that she was a fan of day drinking. As far as he could tell, she had made her money by marrying up. And up. And up. Which wasn’t his business until her incredible generosity had made it so.

Last week, Bella had given Will a trimmer that was worth at least two hundred bucks. The week before, she’d noticed him admiring one of her dead husband’s record collections and foisted a boxful into Will’s hands as he walked out the door.

Queen’s original A Night at the Opera. Blondie’s Parallel Lines. The 12-inch maxi single of John Lennon’s “Imagine” with a pristine green apple on the label.

Will could mow this damn lawn for the next two thousand years and not even come close to repaying her.

He stopped to wipe his forehead with his arm. He ended up smearing sweat into sweat. He took a deep breath and inhaled a gnat.

1:37 p.m.

He shouldn’t even be here.

At this very moment, there was a huge, big shot meeting happening downtown. These meetings had been happening for the last month, and bi-monthly before that. The GBI was coordinating with the Marshals Service, the ATF and the FBI on the transfer of a convicted bank robber. Martin Novak was currently residing in an undisclosed safe house as he awaited sentencing at the Russell Federal Building. The reason he wasn’t biding his time in jail was because his fellow bank robbers had tried to blast a Novak-sized hole in the side of the building. The attempt had failed, but no one was taking any chances.

Novak wasn’t a typical convict. He was a legit criminal mastermind who ran a team of highly trained bad guys. They killed indiscriminately. Civilians. Security guards. Cops. It didn’t matter who was on the other end of the gun when they pulled the trigger. The team moved through the banks they targeted like the hands of a clock. Every indication was that Novak’s group was not going to let their leader die in the bowels of a federal prison.

As a cop, Will despised these kinds of criminals—there was nothing worse, or more rare, than a really smart bad guy—but as a human being, he longed to be in on the action. Will had accepted a long time ago that the part of the job that appealed to him most was the hunt. He could never shoot an animal, but the thought of lying in wait, rifle trained on the center mass of a bad guy, trigger finger itching to remove their miserable souls from the world, was an incredible high.

Which fact he would never tell Sara. He had it on authority that her husband had been the same way, that Jeffrey Tolliver’s love of the hunt was probably what had gotten him killed. Will’s fight or flight was similarly stuck on fight. He didn’t want Sara to be terrified every time he walked out the door.

He glanced up at the house again as he mowed the next row.

Rich, drunk aunts aside, he felt like things were going well with Sara. They had settled into a routine. They had learned to accept each other’s faults, or at least to overlook the worst of them, as in two examples: a lack of desire to make the bed every morning like a responsible human being and a stubborn unwillingness to break the habit of throwing away a jar of mayonnaise even when there was enough in the bottom to make half a sandwich.

For Will’s part, he was trying to be more open with Sara about what he was feeling. It was easier than he’d thought it would be. He just made a note on his calendar every Monday to tell her something that was bothering him.

One of his biggest fears had disappeared before a Monday confessional had rolled around. He’d been really worried when Sara had first started working with him at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Things had smoothed out, mostly because Sara had made them smooth. They each stayed in their own lane. Sara was a doctor and a medical examiner, the same job she’d had back in Grant County. Her husband had been chief of police, so she knew how to be with a cop. Like Will, Jeffrey Tolliver probably hadn’t been in line for any promotions. Then again, what promotion would the man get when he was already at the top of the food chain?

Will pushed this out of his brain, because as dark as his thoughts were, letting them dip into that pool would be fairly treacherous.

At least Sara’s mother seemed to be coming around. Cathy had spent half an hour last night telling him stories about the first few years of her marriage. Will had to think this was progress. The first time he’d met her, Cathy had basically spit nails in his direction. Maybe his Sisyphean battle against her drunk sister’s lawn had persuaded her that he wasn’t such a bad guy. Or maybe she could see how much Will loved her daughter. That had to count for something.

He stumbled as the mower jammed into another gopher hole. Will looked up, shocked to find that he was almost done. He checked the time.

1:44 p.m.

If he hurried, he could grab a few minutes in the shed to hose down, cool off, and wait for the dinner bell.

Will pushed through the last, long row of grass and practically jogged back to the shed. He left the mower cooling on the stone floor. He would’ve kicked the ancient machine but his legs were basically silly string.

He peeled off his shirt. He went to the sink and dunked his head under the ice-cold stream of water. He washed all the important areas with a bar of soap that had the texture of sandpaper. His clean shirt skidded across his wet skin as he put it on. He went to the workbench, pressed his palms down, spread his legs, and let everything air dry.

His cell phone showed a notification. Faith had texted him from the big shot meeting that Will was not invited to attend. She’d sent him a clown with a water gun pointing at its head. Then a knife. Then a hammer. Then another clown and, for some reason, a yam.

If she was trying to make him feel better, a yam wasn’t going to pull him over the finish line.

Will looked out the window. He wasn’t given to navel-gazing, but there was nothing to do but think as he stared at the expertly tended lawn.

Why wasn’t he in that big shot meeting?

He couldn’t begrudge Faith the opportunity. Or the nepotism. Amanda, their boss, had started out her career partnered with Faith’s mother. They were best friends. Not that Faith was skating on her connections. She had worked her way up from a squad car to the homicide division at the Atlanta Police Department to special agent status at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. She was a good cop. She deserved whatever promotion came her way.

It was what came next for Will that would be the real humiliation. Setting aside having to tell Sara that Faith had moved up while he treaded water, Will would have to break in a new partner. Or, more likely, a new partner would have to break in Will. He was not good with people. At least not with fellow cops. He was very good at talking to criminals. Most of Will’s youth had been spent skirting the law. He knew how criminals thought—that you could lock them in a room and they would come up with sixteen different ways to break out, none of them involving just asking someone to unlock the door.

The point was that Will closed cases. He got good results. He was a crack shot. He didn’t suck up all the air in the room. He didn’t want a medal for doing his job.

He wanted to know why he wasn’t asked to be in the meeting.

Will looked down at his phone again.

Nothing but yam.

He stared out the window. He sensed that he was being watched.

Sara cleared her throat.

Will felt his bad mood lift. He couldn’t stop the stupid grin that came to his face every time he saw her. Her long, auburn hair was down. He loved it when her hair was down. “Is it time for lunch?”

Sara looked at her watch. “It’s one forty-six. We have exactly fourteen minutes of calm before the storm.”

He studied her face, which was beautiful, but there was a streak of something above her eyebrow that looked suspiciously like the smeared entrails of a dead bug.

She gave him a curious look.

“Have you seen the shed?” Will offered her the grand tour, but only as a ruse to get her onto the couch. He was exhausted from the mowing. He was starving. He was worried that Sara was only fine with a poor cop as long as that poor cop had ambitions.

He asked, “It’s great in here, right?”

Sara coughed at the dust that huffed up from the couch. Still, she looped her leg over his. Her arm rested along his shoulders. Her fingers stroked the wet ends of his hair. He always felt a sudden calm when Sara was with him, like the only thing that mattered was the connection that tethered them together.

Will asked, “Can we move in? I’m only halfway kidding.”

Sara’s curious look turned guarded.

Will stopped breathing. The joke had landed wrong. Or maybe it wasn’t a joke, because they had been dancing around this subject of moving in together for a while. He was basically living with Sara now, but she hadn’t asked him to properly move in, and he couldn’t figure out if that was a sign, and if it was a sign, was it a stop sign or a go sign or was it the kind of sign she was beating him over the head with, only he was missing it?

He desperately searched for a change in subject. “Look, a guitar.”

Will fiddled with the strings. His teenage self had had the patience to learn exactly one song in its entirety. He started out slow, humming the tune so that he could remember the chords. And then he stopped, wondering why he’d ever thought “I’m on Fire” was The Song that would persuade a girl to let him touch her breasts. “That’s kind of gross, isn’t it? ‘Hey little girl is your daddy home?’”

“How about ‘Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon’? Or ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’? Or the opening line to ‘Sara Smile’?”

He plucked at the guitar strings, hearing Daryl Hall singing in his head—

Baby hair with a woman’s eyes …

“Damn,” Will murmured. Why was every soft rock jam from his teenage years a Class A felony? “Hall and Oates, too?”

“Panic! At the Disco has a better version.”

Will loved that she knew this. He’d initially been alarmed by the number of Dolly Parton CDs in her car. Then he’d seen her iTunes list, which featured everything from Adam Ant to Kraftwerk to Led Zeppelin, and known that they were going to be okay.

She was smiling at him, watching his fingers move along the cords. “When did you learn to play?”

“High school. Self-taught.” He stroked her hair back so he could see her face. “Think of every stupid thing a sixteen-year-old boy would do to impress a sixteen-year-old girl and I know how to do it.”

That, at least, got a laugh out of her. “Did you have a fade?”

“Duh.” He listed all of his pathetic accomplishments, which had worked with exactly zero girls. “You should’ve seen me in my acid-washed jeans and Nember’s Only jacket.”

“Nember?”

“Dollar Store brand. I didn’t say I was a millionaire.” He couldn’t ignore the dead bug anymore. He nodded toward the streak of bug guts above her eyebrow. “What’s going on up there?”

Sara shook her head.

Will returned the guitar to the stand. He used his thumb to wipe away the bug. “That’s better.”

For some reason, she started kissing him. Really kissing him. He let his hands run down her waist. Sara moved closer. Kissed him deeper. She used her fingertips to press down his shoulders. Then she pushed him down with her hands. Will was on his knees thinking he would never get tired of the taste of her when the ground started to shake.

Sara sat up. “What the hell was that?”

Will wiped his mouth. He couldn’t joke about making the earth move for her because the earth had literally moved. He checked under the old couch to see if it was falling apart. He stood up and knocked at the beams, which was probably stupid because the whole shed could fall down on them.

He asked Sara, “Remember that earthquake in Alabama a few years back?” Will had been on a stakeout in north Georgia. The car had shimmied away from the curb. “That felt the same, but stronger.”

Sara was buttoning her shorts. “There was a sound. The country club does fireworks displays. Maybe they’re testing out a new show?”

“In broad daylight?” Will found his phone on the workbench. The screen gave the time.

1:49 p.m.

He told Sara, “There aren’t any alerts.” She worked at the GBI, too. She knew that the state had an emergency contact system that pinged all law enforcement phones in case of a terrorist attack.

Will considered where they were standing, what kind of cataclysmic event could be felt at these coordinates. He recalled attending a seminar given by an FBI agent who’d been at Ground Zero. Even over a decade later, the man could not find the words to describe the awesome kinetic energy dissipated into the ground when a skyscraper fell.

Like an off-the-scale earthquake.

The Atlanta airport was seven miles from downtown. More than a quarter of a million passengers flew in and out every day.

Will returned to his phone. He tried to check his messages and emails, but the wheel just spun on the screen. He called Faith but couldn’t get through. He tried Amanda and got the same. He dialed the main office number at the GBI.

Nothing worked.

He held up the phone so Sara could hear the three tones, then the operator saying all circuits were busy. He dropped the phone onto the bench. It might as well be a brick.

Sara’s expression was filled with anxiety. She said, “Emory has an emergency siren. It goes off when there’s a natural disast—”

Boom.

Will almost lost his footing. He ran into the yard and looked up at the sky. A plume of dark smoke curled up behind the tree line.

Not fireworks.

Two explosions.

“Let’s go.” Will started running toward the driveway.

“Sara!” Cathy called from the back door. “Did you hear that?”

He watched Sara dart into the house. She was probably looking for her keys. He wanted her to stay inside but knew she wouldn’t.

Will darted across the sloping front yard. The police would set up roadblocks. There would be nowhere to park a car and Will could probably run there faster. He thought about his gun locked in the glove box of Sara’s BMW, but if the local cops needed him for anything, it would be crowd control.

Will’s foot hit the road just as the wail of an emergency siren filled the air. Bella’s house was on a straight stretch of Lullwater Road. There was a curve fifty yards ahead that followed the contours of the Druid Hills golf course. Will kept his arms tight to his body, legs pumping hard, as he closed the gap to the curve.

He was almost at the bend when he heard another sound. Not an explosion, but the weird pop that two automobiles make when they smack into each other. There was another pop. He gritted his teeth as he waited through the ensuing silence. A car horn started to whine along with the emergency siren.

It wasn’t until Will had finally rounded the curve that he saw what had happened: two cars had marshmallowed a blue pickup truck between them.

A red Porsche Boxter S was at the front. Older model, naturally aspirated flat-six, a third radiator behind the opening in the lower front fascia. The trunk had popped open. The driver was slumped at the wheel, pressing the horn with his face.

A Ford F-150 truck was behind it. The doors must’ve crumpled on impact. One man was trying to climb out the open window. The other was leaning against the hood, blood dripping down his face.

A four-door, silver Chevy Malibu brought up the rear. Driver in front, two passengers in back, none of them moving.

The cop in Will immediately assigned blame. The Porsche had stopped too quickly. The truck and Malibu were following too closely, probably speeding. Whether or not the Porsche driver had antagonized the guy in the truck by tapping the brakes was a puzzle for the accident investigator to figure out.

Will looked past them to the roundabout at North Decatur Road. Parked vehicles filled the circle. A minivan. A box truck. Mercedes. BMW. Audi. They were all abandoned, doors hanging open. Drivers and passengers stood in the street looking up at the smoke curling into the blue sky.

Will’s hard run downshifted to a jog, then he, too, came to a standstill.

Birds chirped in the trees. The smallest of breezes rustled the leaves. The smoke was coming from the Emory campus. Students, staff, two hospitals, the FBI headquarters, the CDC.

“Will.”

He startled. Sara had pulled up alongside him. Her BMW X5 was a hybrid. The engine worked off a battery at low speeds.

She said, “I can triage them, but I need your help.”

He had to clear his throat to bring himself back into the moment. “The driver in the Porsche looks bad.”

Sara got out of the car. “Gas is leaking under the engine.”

She ran to the Porsche. The driver was still collapsed over the steering wheel. The windows were up. So was the convertible top.

Sara tried the door to no avail. She banged her fist on the window. “Sir?” The horn kept blaring. She had to raise her voice. “Sir, we need to get you out of the car.”

The smell of gasoline burned Will’s eyes. There were any number of ways the electricity flowing to the horn could spark and ignite the fuel under the car.

Will told Sara, “Stand back.”

He had a spring-loaded knife in his pocket that he’d used to cut ivy off Bella’s trees. He gripped the handle with both hands and stabbed the four-inch blade into the soft convertible roof. The knife was partially serrated. He tried to saw into the material, but the canvas and insulation were too thick. Will pocketed the knife and used his fingers to pry open a gap wide enough to reach in and release the clamps so he could push the top out of the way.

He turned the key in the ignition.

The horn stopped.

Will unlocked the door. Sara took a few seconds before she started shaking her head. “His neck’s broken. He wasn’t wearing his seat belt, but it’s weird.”

“Weird how?”

“They weren’t going fast enough for this kind of injury. Unless he had some kind of underlying medical condition. Even then—” She shook her head again. “It’s not making sense.”

Will looked at the skid marks on the road. They were short, indicating the Porsche had been going at a slower rate of speed. He rubbed his thumb on his shirt. The ignition key had been sticky with blood. So was the inside door handle, though there wasn’t much blood anywhere else. Papers were scattered in the front seat.