Available Darkness: Chapter 42

“Hope?”

She surfaced from a stew of memories to see John in front of the bed, one hand on the blond wood of their sleigh bed, the other buttoning the top button on his black shirt. He worked just three days a week, but one was Saturday, which meant a dozen or so straight hours of hell at the restaurant. John would leave at 10 in the morning and be lucky to beat midnight home.

She glanced at the clock – 8:14 a.m.

“Going in early?”

“Yeah, Jerry asked if I could come help get things ready for the Dresdin banquet. They booked it last minute, as always.”

“Oh,” Hope said, eyes slightly off to the side and fingers roaming in a circle around John’s rumpled absence.

“What are you doing today?” John asked.

“I dunno. Maybe I’ll call Michelle, see if she wants to do something.”

“Okay,” John said.

He was standing at the edge of the bed, but barely in the room. She wondered if he were worried at all, leaving her home alone after last night and what happened with the police this morning. Or maybe his mind was on the police for another reason? Something in her stomach soured the rest of her for letting a cobweb of doubt settle in a corner of her mind.

She looked back up, reminding herself that the man she loved was incapable of killing.

“I’ll be okay,” she said.

His face thawed. Dancing eyes pulled his face into a grin that seemed somehow… off.

Doubt turned like a screw, deeper in her brain. She thought about John’s inability to sleep and the occasional late night jogs he insisted he needed to burn his energy.

She thought about the trunk.

John’s trunk—the lone belonging he had moved from his world into theirs’, other than the clothes on his back and few worn books —flickered in her mind’s eye. The trunk had sat in the back of their closet since they day he brought it into their house. She’d never seen him open it, nor had she seen what was inside it.

When asked about the trunk, he said it was mostly junk from his past. However, junk didn’t usually invite so many excuses. Bad memories he didn’t care to revisit was the most regular one. Given the bits of his history she’d culled together from scraps of conversation or odd comments, she suspected he’d been abused by a few of his foster families. But she never pushed it.

Or asked him why the trunk was secured by a thick padlock.

“Good; go out and have some fun,” he said. “I’m sure everything will be fine. If you need me, I’ve got my phone. I’ll rush right home.”

Hope followed John to the threshold and kissed him goodbye. She closed the door, turned the lock, and then slid against the wood until she was ass down, staring at the ceiling. She would’ve liked to believe she was lost in thought, but her mind was wandering up the stairs and to the back of the closet and the trunk sitting beneath a folded pea coat.

Slapped by a sudden memory, Hope shot to her feet, glanced out the window to make sure John was gone, and then headed straight for the change jar on his nightstand, where he made regular deposits of pocket treasure rubber bands, paper clips, and keys.

Guilt gnarled her insides with every step. Her fingers curled into the banister.

John was the kindest, most honest, genuine man she’d ever met. The first to treat her with respect and the first to care more about her than her bed. She was his everything. Never in a million years could she imagine he would lie to her.

Nor would he ever spy on her and search through her belongings.

She hedged at the lip of the closet, and then reached inside to flick on the light. A spark of static electricity shot through her hand and she snapped it back quickly. The closet was packed with clothes, boxes of her junk and small mountains of things they didn’t have room for but weren’t ready to toss.

The trunk sat there, a bulwark between their separate pasts.

Don’t do it, she told herself—even as she grabbed the change jar and dumped its contents onto their unmade bed.

Leave it alone.

Her hand waved through the cool sea of silver and copper until it found what she was looking for. A single brass-colored key that looked as if it had never been used. She went back into the closet.

Don’t do it.

The voice was insistent, but not very convincing.

She inserted the key. A latch clicked inside.

TO BE CONTINUED … Next Friday

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