“Help him,” she yelled.
“What am I going to do?”
“A knife.” Elise sprinted toward the kitchen.
Michael tried to pick up Andrew again, to keep the maneuver going, but Andrew rolled to the side and slipped his grasp. Andrew’s thrashing slowed. His fingers were wet with blood and his neck was scratched in bloody strips like he had been whipped. His chest jumped, and his body convulsed, his eyes never closing—just staring, staring up at him for relief that would not come. After a few more jerking motions, the boy grunted, grasping for nothing in particular. His head dropped back against the floor and his body became still.
Elise came into the room, a knife in hand, and stopped midway. The room hung with silence as the shock sunk in. The boy stared at the ceiling, one eye wide open and the other half-closed. His limbs were loose and unmoving. “Holy shit,” Michael said, standing and lacing his fingers around the back of his head.
Elise took in a rapid succession of breaths while covering her mouth. Tears ran down her cheeks and between her fingers. She set the knife, shaking in her hand, on the coffee table. She reached her other arm behind herself without looking, searching for a place to sit. When her hand met a cushion, she lowered herself onto it. “Is he dead?”
Michael reached out and pressed his fingers onto Andrew’s bloody neck and felt for a pulse. Nothing. He nodded and sat on the backs of his legs. “There wasn’t anything in there big enough to choke on,” he said.
“It could have been a big chunk of meat,” Sean said.
Elise said, “The Heimlich should have worked.”
“Holy shit,” Michael said, wiping his bloodied fingers on a nearby napkin. “He’s really dead.” The kid wasn’t even eighteen, and he was laying on the floor in front of him. No more life. No more dreams. There was nothing in his eyes but a cold, distant stare. He closed the kid’s eyelids and bowed his head. “What just happened?”
Sean hadn’t moved a muscle. “Maybe he was allergic to something.”
Elise looked beside herself. “I didn’t put anything new in the soup.”
“At all?” Michael said.
“I’ve made the same soup half a dozen times by now.”
Michael caught Sean’s eyes, but Sean looked away. The sudden shock gave way to an emerging boiling in Michael’s chest. He had no evidence, and he couldn’t prove it, but a feeling so powerful he couldn’t deny struck him in the gut. “Sean.” Sean looked back at him and blinked a couple times. Then he knew. Shit. The kid was dead, and it was all his doing. “Did you—?” Michael said.
Sean looked confused.
But Michael knew better. “Sean,” he said.
“What?”
“Don’t try to back out of this.”
“Back out of what?”
“How did you—? Why?”
Sean shook his head. “Will you calm down for a second?”
“It was you, wasn’t it?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“It was. Holy shit. It was you.”
“What was me?” he yelled.
Elise jumped up from the couch and put her hands out toward Michael. “Stop it.”
Michael shot a look over to his sister. “Stop it? What do you think just happened here?”
She waved both of her hands. “Whoa, let’s back up.”
“Think about it. He’s always hated the kid.”
“Are we really having this discussion right now?” Sean said.
“Why’d you do it?”
“Stop, Mike,” Elise said.
“Couldn’t stand that Molly actually loved him? And that he got to stay in your house?”
“Come on.”
“You thought you’d make things even.”
Elise shouted, “Michael, stop it!”
Michael turned and paced, rubbing his scalp with his palm. He pointed at the body. “Elise, for God’s sake, the kid’s dead.”
“We don’t know what happened,” she said, crying.
“Yes, we do. The one day that Sean serves the food, someone eats it and dies. How does that not register with you?” His hands returned to his head. “Ah, shit,” he said. “No, no. Shit.”
“I didn’t cook the soup, Michael,” Sean said.
“Just because I can’t explain it, doesn’t mean you didn’t do it.”
“Listen to yourself.”
“You must have,” he pointed at the bowls, “you must have put it in the bowls or something. You must have—” Michael froze, his finger pointing at Andrew’s bowl, his thoughts lingering there. Like the teeth of a gear catching into place, the thought clicked in his brain. He covered his mouth and rubbed his lips. “You put it in the bowl.”
Sean forced air out of his nostrils. “Will you stop this? For God’s sake, I don’t—”
“It was meant for me.”
Nobody spoke for a moment. Elise said, “What do you mean?”
“The bowl. The one he gave to me. I gave it to Andrew.”
Sean said, “This is crazy.”
“Then eat his soup.”
“What?”
Michael grabbed Andrew’s bowl from the coffee table and thrust it toward Sean. “Then eat the soup.”
“I have no idea what happened here. I’m not going to put myself at risk just to satisfy your delusions.”
“Did you poison him?”
“What are you talking about?” Sean yelled. “Dear God, Michael, I don’t want to die too if something was in his soup.”
Michael stared the man down, the bowl shaking in his hand. After a few seconds that seemed to last minutes, he tossed it aside. “You son of a bitch,” he said.
“You need to calm down. I didn’t do anything.”
“You want me dead?” he said. “Pull out that gun you keep on your belt. Come on. I know it’s under your clothes. Pull it out. Be a man about it.”
Elise cried, “Stop this. Both of you.”
Michael rubbed the back of his neck. He could not understand how she didn’t see it. It was plain. Sean would never allow Andrew to keep eating his food while his daughter lay under a pile of frozen dirt in the backyard. No way.
He looked at her. “He’s not going to stop, Elise. He’s not going to stop.”
Elise, tears in her eyes, said nothing.
Sean had no devilish smirk or admission of guilt on his face. But Michael knew. He could see it. Something was happening, something intangible, something behind Sean’s eyes he couldn’t quite place, as if he were declaring a victory over his enemy.
Michael then understood fully what he didn’t want to accept before: that he would have to do something about it. He would have to do something about Sean.
Chapter 32
THE DOOR SHUT, and the image of Andrew’s body, wrapped in a tarp, being dragged outside, went with it. When she heard the lock click, she turned to look at the blood streaks smeared into her carpet. Nothing would get the stain out. The carpet was now infested with ash and blood intermingled.
Her gaze rose. Michael stood there with his arms crossed. The seeds Michael had planted came back with a frightening pungency, filling her head like poison, making every move that Sean made and every word he spoke seem suspicious. She knew it wasn’t true. Sean may have done questionable things in the past few months—he was a flawed man—but he wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer. Every life he took was out of a sense to protect his family. That was his primary goal. There was no need to think he was acting otherwise.
“Elise.”
“Unless you’re going to apologize, save it.”
He sighed. “Elise, there has to be some small part of you that knows I’m right.”
She approached him. “There’s a big part of me that wants you to shut up.”