The Night Before My Wedding: Your Husband Is Alive · Mira Lang

Chapter 2: Kettle Falls

Kettle Falls has one hardware store, two churches, and a diner that closes at three.

We got there on the Sunday afternoon after twenty-two hours and one motel, and I sat in the passenger seat outside a hardware store on a Sunday when nothing was open, holding a photograph of a dead man on a phone, and understood that I had driven fifteen hundred miles on the strength of a stranger's text message.

"It's Sunday," Nell said. "You said Thursdays."

"I know."

"So we wait four days?"

"I don't know."

"Cass." She turned in her seat. "I'm going to say this once and then I'll shut up and be here. If we sit outside a shop in Idaho until Thursday and a man comes out who is not Elias — what happens to you?"

I looked at the shuttered forecourt.

"Then I go home," I said, "and I've done something insane and been jilted at my own wedding by myself, and I live with that. And if I don't come, Nell, I live with the other thing, and the other thing is that I said yes in eleven seconds in a room with a strip light."

My sister was quiet for a moment.

"Okay," she said. "Then let's find the house."

* * *

We found it on the Monday, and it took four hours and a woman at the feed store, and it was almost insultingly easy.

"Tall fella, grey coming in, keeps to himself?" She rang up Nell's chocolate bar without looking up. "That'd be Eli out on Weatherby Road. He put a roof on my sister's porch in the fall. Doesn't say much."

Eli.

The house was fourteen miles out, a low place with a metal roof and a truck outside and a woodpile stacked with the neurotic precision of a man who has to fill his hours.

Nell stopped a hundred yards short.

"Do you want me to—"

"No."

I walked up that road on my own, and every single step of it I was composing the apology I would make to a stranger.

He came round the side of the house with a coil of hose over one shoulder — the right shoulder — and stopped dead in the middle of his own yard.

Four years.

He had lost about twenty pounds and gained ten years. There was grey at his temples and a beard he'd never have worn and a scar through his eyebrow that was new, and he stood in that yard with a hose over his shoulder and looked at me, and the coil slid off and hit the dirt.

Neither of us said anything for a long time.

"Cassie," Elias Ward said.

And then, before I could take one more step, he put both hands up, palms out — not in welcome. To stop me.

"Don't come any closer," he said. "Please. I need you to stand exactly there."

* * *

He put me in a chair on the porch and stood eight feet away with his back against the rail and would not sit down.

"Whatever they told you to get you here," he said, "you have to understand that it's cost me everything I've got, and I need to know who sent you before I can say one single thing that matters."

"Nobody sent me. I got a text."

"From who?"

"An unknown number. Saturday night." My voice was doing something I couldn't control. "At 11:40 the night before I was going to marry Grant Sadler."

He closed his eyes.

"Right," he said. "Of course."

"Elias—"

"Cassie, listen to me very carefully, because in about forty seconds you're going to start asking me questions I can't answer and I'd rather give you the parts I can." He gripped the rail behind him. "I have been in this house for three years and eight months. Before that I was in two other places. There are two people in the world who are supposed to know where I am and one of them is a federal marshal named Ruiz."

The world went quiet in a strange way, the way it does before you understand something.

"You're in a programme," I said.

"I'm in a programme."

"They told me you drowned. I identified you—"

"You identified a body that had been in the water for eighteen hours with my ring on a tray beside it," he said, and his voice cracked for the first time. "Cassie. I know what they did. I have thought about that room every day for four years."

I stood up.

"Sit down. Please."

"Elias, I buried you." I was shaking so hard the chair moved. "There were a hundred and forty people. Your mother collapsed at the crematorium. I sold the house. I sat in a church hall on Tuesdays with a woman called Doreen and I said, out loud, my husband is dead, and they made us say it in the present tense—"

"I know."

"You let them."

"Yes," Elias said.

That word landed harder than anything else that happened that week.

"Say why," I said.

He looked out at his own yard for a long moment.

"On the sixth of February, four years ago, I gave a sworn statement to the FBI about the movement of eleven containers a year through the Marrow Point yard," he said. "Not fish. I'd been keeping a book since the previous summer. Names, dates, plate numbers, two photographs." He turned and looked at me. "The night I signed it, they told me the case would take three years to build and that I would not survive it in place."

"And you didn't tell me."

"I was told not to tell anyone. Including you. Especially you." His jaw worked. "And I want to be honest, because you deserve it and because you'll work it out anyway — I would have. I was going to tell you on the Sunday. The boat went down on the Saturday."

"So it was real?" My voice went up. "The storm — the boat—"

"The boat going down was real and two men died in it," Elias said, "and I was supposed to be on it and I wasn't, because Ruiz had pulled me in for a proffer session in a hotel in Bellingham that morning. And when the news came through, somebody in that room looked at somebody else and said, out loud, this is the cleanest exit we're ever going to get."

The wind moved in the pines.

"And you said yes," I said.

"I said no," said Elias Ward. "I said no for eleven hours. And then Ruiz put a photograph on the table of you coming out of the pharmacy on Kestrel Street, taken that morning, by them, from a car — and he said, this arrived in our office two weeks ago, Mr. Ward, and it was not taken by us."