The Unremarkable Heart and Other Stories

  And June had thought of her words, long ago, to Grace. ‘Which is more possible,’ she had asked. ‘That every single person in the world is conspiring to make you seem a fool, or that you are only fooling yourself?’

  June had left the prosecutor’s office without a word to anyone. She drove straight to the school administration offices, where they gladly accepted her temporary leave of absence. She went to the dollar store and bought a packet of underwear, a toothbrush and a comb. She checked into a hotel room and did not go home until the newspaper headlines told her that Richard would not be there.

  He had left the heat on eighty, a man who had fastidiously turned off hall lights and cranked down the thermostat on the coldest days. The seat was up on all the toilets. All the bowls were full of excrement. Dirty dishes spilled over in the sink. Trash was piled into the corner of the kitchen. The stripped mattress held the faint odor of urine.

  ‘Fuck you, too,’ June had mumbled as she burned his clothes in the backyard barbecue.

  The school board couldn’t fire her for being married to an imprisoned sex offender. Instead, she was moved to the school in the worst part of town where routinely she was called to testify in court cases concerning students who’d been accused of armed robbery, rape, drug trafficking, and any other number of horrors. Her social life was non-existent. There were no friends left for the woman who had defended a pedophile. There were no shoulders to cry on for the principal who had called the students who’d been raped by her husband a pack of lying whores.

  Over the years, June had considered giving an interview, writing a book, telling the world what it was like to be in that room, sitting across from Danielle Parson, and knowing that her husband had just as good as killed them both. Each time June sat down to write the story, the words backed up like bile in her throat. What could she say in defense of herself? She had never publicly admitted her husband’s guilt. June Connor, a woman who had relished the English language, could find no words to explain herself.

  She had shared a bed with Richard for eighteen years. She had born him a child. She had lost their child. They had loved together. They had grieved together. And all the while, he was a monster.

  What kind of woman didn’t see that? What kind of educator, what kind of principal, lived in a house where a fifteen-year-old girl was brutally sodomized and did not notice?

  Pride. Sheer determination. She would not explain herself. She did not owe anyone a damn explanation. So, she kept it all bottled up inside of her, the truth an angry, metastasizing tumor.

  ‘Another story about the weather,’ Richard said, rustling pages as he folded the paper. ‘Umbrellas are suggested.’

  Her heart fluttered again, doing an odd triple beat. The tightness in her chest turned like a vise.

  ‘What is it?’ Richard reached for the mask hanging on the oxygen tank.

  June waved him away, her vision blurring on her hand so that it seemed like a streak of light followed the movement. She moved her hand again, fascinated by the effect.

  ‘June?’

  Her fingers were numbing, the bones of her hand slowly de-gloved. She felt her breath catch, and panic filled her – not because the time was here, but because she still had not asked him the question.

  ‘What is it?’ He sat on the edge of the bed, his leg touching hers. ‘June?’ His voice was raised. ‘Should I call an ambulance?’

  She looked at his hand holding hers. His square fingers. His thick wrists. There were age spots now. She could see the blue veins under his skin.

  The first time June held Richard’s hand, her stomach had tickled, her heart had jumped, and she’d finally understood Austen and Brontë and every silly sonnet she’d ever studied.

  Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.

  This was the feeling she wanted to take with her – not the horror of the last twenty years. Not the sight of her daughter lying dead. Not the questions about how much Grace knew, how much she had suffered. Not Danielle Parson, the pretty young girl who could only make it through the day with the help of heroin.

  June wanted that feeling the first time she had held her child. She wanted that bliss from her wedding day, the first time Richard had made love to her. There were happy times in this home. There were birthdays and surprise parties and Thanksgivings and wonderful Christmases. There was warmth and love. There was Grace.

  ‘Grace,’ Richard said, as if he could read her mind. Or perhaps she had said the word, so sweet on her lips. The smell of her shampoo. The way her tiny clothes felt in June’s hand. Her socks were impossibly small. June had pressed them to her mouth one day, kissing them, thinking of kissing her daughter’s feet.

  Richard cleared his throat. His tone was low. ‘You want the truth.’

  June tried to shake her head, but her muscles were gone, her brain disconnecting from the stem, nerve impulses wandering down vacant paths. It was here. It was so close. She was not going to find religion this late in the game, but she wanted lightness to be the last thing in her heart, not the darkness his words promised to bring.

  ‘It’s true,’ he told her, as if she didn’t know this already. ‘It’s true what Danielle said.’

  June forced out a groan of air. Valentine’s Day cards. Birthday balloons. Mother’s Day breakfasts. Crayon drawings hanging on the refrigerator. Skinned knees that needed to be kissed. Monsters that were chased away by a hug and a gentle stroke of hair.

  ‘Grace saw us.’

  June tried to shake her head. She didn’t need to hear it from his mouth. She didn’t need to take his confession to her grave. Let her have this one thing. Let her have at least a moment of peace.

  He leaned in closer. She could feel the heat from his mouth. ‘Can you hear me, wife?’

  She had no more breath. Her lungs froze. Her heart lurched to a stop.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ he repeated.

  June’s eyes would not close. This was the last minute, second, millisecond. She was not breathing. Her heart was still. Her brain whirred and whirred, seconds from burning itself out.

  Richard’s voice came to her down the long tunnel. ‘Grace didn’t kill herself because she caught me fucking Danielle.’ His tongue caught between his teeth. There was a smile on his lips. ‘She did it because she was jealous.’

  Read on for an extract from Karin Slaughter’s new bestseller, available now …

  Broken

  When the body of a young woman is discovered deep beneath the icy waters of Lake Grant, a note left under a rock by the shore points to suicide. But within minutes, it becomes clear that this is no suicide. It’s a brutal, cold-blooded murder.

  All too soon, former Grant County medical examiner Sara Linton – home for Thanksgiving after a long absence – finds herself unwittingly drawn into the case. The chief suspect is desperate to see her, but when she arrives at the local police station she is met with a horrifying sight – he lies dead in his cell, the words ‘Not me’ scrawled across the walls.

  Something about his confession doesn’t add up and, deeply suspicious of Lena Adams, the detective in charge, Sara immediately calls in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Shortly afterwards, Special Agent Will Trent is brought in from his vacation to investigate. But he is immediately confronted with a wall of silence. Grant County is a close-knit community with loyalties and ties that run deep. And the only person who can tell the truth about what really happened is dead …

  CHAPTER ONE

  Fortunately, the winter weather meant the body at the bottom of the lake would be well preserved, though the chill on the shore was bone-aching, the sort of thing that made you strain to remember what August had been like. The sun on your face. The sweat running down your back. The way the air conditioner in your car blew out a fog because it could not keep up with the heat. As much as Lena Adams strained to remember, all thoughts of warmth were lost on this rainy November morning.

  ‘Found her,’ the dive captain called. He was directing his men
from the shore, his voice muffled by the constant shush of the pouring rain. Lena held up her hand in a wave, water sliding down the sleeve of the bulky parka she had thrown on when the call had come in at three this morning. The rain wasn’t hard, but it was relentless, tapping her back insistently, slapping against the umbrella that rested on her shoulder. Visibility was about thirty feet. Everything beyond that was coated in a hazy fog. She closed her eyes, thinking back to her warm bed, the warmer body that had been wrapped around her.

  The shrill ring of a phone at three in the morning was never a good sound, especially when you were a cop. Lena had woken out of a dead sleep, her heart pounding, her hand automatically snatching up the receiver, pressing it to her ear. She was the senior detective on call, so she in turn had to start other phones ringing across south Georgia. Her chief. The coroner. Fire and rescue. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, to let them know that a body had been found on state land. The Georgia Emergency Management Authority, who kept a list of eager civilian volunteers ready to look for dead bodies on a moment’s notice.

  They were all gathered here at the lake, but the smart people were waiting in their vehicles, heat blasting while a chill wind rocked the chassis like a baby in a cradle. Dan Brock, the proprietor of the local funeral home who did double duty as the town coroner, was asleep in his van, head back against the seat, mouth gaping open. Even the EMTs were safely tucked inside the ambulance. Lena could see their faces peering through the windows in the back doors. Occasionally, a hand would reach out, the ember of a cigarette glowing in the dawn light.

  She held an evidence bag in her hand. It contained a letter found near the shore. The paper had been torn from a larger piece – college ruled, approximately eight and a half inches by six. The words were all caps. Ballpoint pen. One line. No signature. Not the usual spiteful or pitiful farewell, but clear enough: I WANT IT OVER.

  In many ways, suicides were more difficult investigations than homicides. With a murdered person, there was always someone you could blame. There were clues you could follow to the bad guy, a clear pattern you could lay out to explain to the family of the victim exactly why their loved one had been stolen away from them. Or, if not why, then who the bastard was who’d ruined their lives.

  With suicides, the victim is the murderer. The person upon whom the blame rests is also the person whose loss is felt most deeply. They are not around to take the recriminations for their death, the natural anger anyone feels when there is a loss. What the dead leave instead is a void that all the pain and sorrow in the world can never fill. Mother and father, sisters, brothers, friends and other relatives – all find themselves with no one to punish for their loss.

  And people always want to punish someone when a life is unexpectedly taken.

  This was why it was the investigator’s job to make sure every single inch of the death scene was measured and recorded. Every cigarette butt, every discarded piece of trash or paper, had to be catalogued, checked for fingerprints, and sent to the lab for analysis. The weather was noted in the initial report. The various officers and emergency personnel on scene were recorded in a log. If a crowd was present, photographs were taken. License plates were checked. The suicide victim’s life was investigated just as thoroughly as with a homicide: Who were her friends? Who were her lovers? Was there a husband? Boyfriend? Girlfriend? Were there angry neighbors or envious co-workers?

  Lena knew only what they had found so far: a pair of women’s sneakers, size eight, placed a few feet away from the suicide note. Inside the left shoe was a cheap ring – twelve-karat gold with a lifeless ruby at the center. The right shoe contained a white Swiss Army watch with fake diamonds for numbers. Underneath this was the folded note.

  I want it over.

  Not much of a comfort for those left behind.

  Suddenly, there was a splash of water as one of the divers surfaced from the lake. His partner came up beside him. They each struggled against the silt on the lake bottom as they dragged the body out of the cold water and into the cold rain. The dead girl was small, making the effort seem exaggerated, but quickly Lena saw the reason for their struggle. A thick, industrial-looking chain was wrapped around her waist with a bright yellow padlock that hung low, like a belt buckle. Attached to the chain were two cinder blocks.

  Sometimes in policing, there were small miracles. The victim had obviously been trying to make sure she couldn’t back out. If not for the cinder blocks weighing her down, the current would have probably taken the body into the middle of the lake, making it almost impossible to find her.

  Lake Grant was a thirty-two-hundred-acre man-made body of water that was three hundred feet deep in places. Underneath the surface were abandoned houses, small cottages and shacks where people had once lived before the area was turned into a reservoir. There were stores and churches and a cotton mill that had survived the Civil War only to be shut down during the Depression. All of this had been wiped out by the rushing waters of the Ochawahee River so that Grant County could have a reliable source of electricity.

  The National Forestry Service owned the best part of the lake, over a thousand acres that wrapped around the water like a cowl. One side touched the residential area where the more fortunate lived, and the other bordered the Grant Institute of Technology, a small but thriving state university with almost five thousand students enrolled.

  Sixty percent of the lake’s eighty-mile shoreline was owned by the State Forestry Division. The most popular spot by far was this one, what the locals called Lover’s Point. Campers were allowed to stake tents. Teenagers came here to party, often leaving behind empty beer bottles and used condoms. Occasionally, there would be a call about a fire someone had let get out of control, and once, a rabid bear had been reported, only to turn out to be an elderly chocolate Labrador who had wondered away from his owners’ campsite.

  And bodies were occasionally found here, too. Once, a girl had been buried alive. Several men, predictably teenagers, had drowned performing various acts of stupidity. Last summer, a child had broken her neck diving into the shallow waters of the cove.

  The two divers paused, letting the water drip off the body before resuming their task. Finally, nods went around and they dragged the young woman onto the shore. The cinder blocks left a deep furrow in the sandy ground. It was six-thirty in the morning, and the moon seemed to wink at the sun as it began its slow climb over the horizon. The ambulance doors swung open. The EMTs cursed at the bitter cold as they rolled out the gurney. One of them had a pair of bolt cutters hefted over his shoulder. He slammed his hand on the hood of the coroner’s van, and Dan Brock startled, comically flailing his arms in the air. He gave the EMT a stern look, but stayed where he was. Lena couldn’t blame him for not wanting to rush into the rain. The victim wasn’t going anywhere except the morgue. There was no need for lights and sirens.

  Lena walked closer to the body, carefully folding the evidence bag containing the suicide note into her jacket pocket and taking out a pen and her spiral-bound notebook. Crooking her umbrella between her neck and shoulder, she wrote the time, date, weather, number of EMTs, number of divers, number of cars and cops, what the terrain was like, noted the solemnity of the scene, the absence of spectators – all the details that would need to be typed exactly into the report.

  The victim was around Lena’s height, five-four, but she was built much smaller. Her wrists were delicate, like a bird’s. The fingernails were uneven, bitten down to the quick. She had black hair and extremely white skin. She was probably in her early twenties. Her open eyes were clouded like cotton. Her mouth was closed. The lips looked ragged, as if she chewed them out of nervous habit. Or maybe a fish had gotten hungry.

  Her body was lighter without the drag of the water, and it only took three of the divers to heft her onto the waiting gurney. Muck from the bottom of the lake covered her head to toe. Water dripped from her clothes – blue jeans, a black fleece shirt, white socks, no sneakers, an unzipped, dark blue warm-up jacket wi
th a Nike logo on the front. The gurney shifted, and her head turned away from Lena.

  Lena stopped writing. ‘Wait a minute,’ she called, knowing something was wrong. She put her notebook in her pocket as she took a step closer to the body. She had seen a flash of light at the back of the girl’s neck – something silver, maybe a necklace. Pondweed draped across the victim’s throat and shoulders like a shroud. Lena used the tip of her pen to push away the slippery green tendrils. Something was moving beneath the skin, rippling the flesh the same way the rain rippled the tide.

  The divers noticed the undulations, too. They all bent down for a better look. The skin fluttered like something out of a horror movie.

  One of them asked, ‘What the—’

  ‘Jesus!’ Lena jumped back quickly as a small minnow slithered out from a slit in the girl’s neck.

  The divers laughed the way men do when they don’t want to admit they’ve just soiled themselves. For her part, Lena put her hand to her chest, hoping no one noticed that her heart had practically exploded. She took a gulp of air. The minnow was floundering in the mud. One of the men picked it up and tossed it back into the lake. The dive captain made the inevitable joke about something being fishy.

  Lena shot him a hard look before leaning down toward the body. The slit where the fish had come out was at the back of the neck, just to the right of the spine. She guessed the wound was an inch wide, tops. The open flesh was puckered from the water, but at one point the injury had been clean, precise – the kind of incision that was made by a very sharp knife.

  ‘Somebody go wake up Brock,’ she said.

  This wasn’t a suicide investigation anymore.

  Read on for an extract from Karin Slaughter’s new novel, coming soon …