Her Final Confession

Chapter Twenty-Five

JANUARY 1994

Seattle, Washington

The pottery wheel lay in pieces on the table in front of Kristen. It wasn’t fixable. She didn’t know that much about pottery, but she knew she’d broken the wheel beyond repair. With a sigh, she shuffled the detritus around. Darryl was going to be pissed. He’d bought her the wheel and turned their mudroom into a full-blown pottery studio to keep her from getting bored. All because once when they first started dating she’d told him she always wanted to try pottery. She didn’t even want to know how much he’d spent on all the equipment and clay and the kiln.

“Oh my God,” she muttered under her breath. “The kiln.”

It must have cost over $1,000. So, she’d come clean about the wheel, get him to buy her another, and try again. Or maybe she could just get pregnant and be done with the whole thing. That had been the original plan after the restaurant she’d waitressed at closed down. “Stay home,” Darryl had told her. He was making a fortune as a salesman for BMW. They didn’t need her paltry waitressing income. Never mind that she had made a killing in tips. A family was the next step in the evolution of Kristen and Darryl Spokes. But then they’d needed a new roof and the transmission in her car had crapped out. Then Darryl’s mom got sick, and the plan to start their family receded. But Kristen was still stuck at home. When she’d started looking for a job, Darryl had come up with the idea of the pottery studio.

Except she sucked at pottery. Badly.

“Babe, you okay?”

His words startled her. A glance at the clock on the wall showed it was after eleven. He was late coming home from work again. Well, not work, but the after-work drinks he insisted were absolutely necessary to keep him on the good side of his boss.

“Don’t come in here,” she called, but it was too late. There he stood in his shirtsleeves, tie undone and loose around his neck, a five o’clock shadow stubbling his jaw. One eyebrow cocked.

“What happened?”

Kristen sighed and wiped her clay-covered hands on her jeans. “What happened is I’m not very good at this pottery thing, Darryl.”

He smiled. “You’ll get there.”

She was too tired to argue. He took a step farther into the room and pointed to the table next to her broken pottery wheel. “Is that—?”

“It’s my attempt at a mug.”

He walked over to the table and picked it up. “This is great, Hon.”

Kristen laughed weakly. “Please, don’t.”

It was gray, unglazed, and one side of it slumped as though it had melted. The handle of it hung limply as though it had started to dissolve.

“I’m going to take this to work,” Darryl said, the corners of his mouth twitching.

Kristen slapped his arm. “Stop,” she said, but laughed anyway.

He caught her in his arms and kissed her. “Come to bed,” he told her. “Tomorrow you can make me coffee for my new mug.”

Giggling, she slapped at him again but let him lead her into their bedroom. Clothes dropped to the floor as they moved toward the bed.

Darryl stumbled, falling away from her and catching himself on the bed.

“Are you drunk?” Kristen asked.

“Turn on the light,” he said.

She snapped on her bedside lamp as he came up from the floor with a brown wallet in his hand. He opened it, and his eyebrows kinked upward. “Kristen, who the hell is Travis Green, and why is his wallet on our bedroom floor?”

She was about to tell him that she had no idea, that she’d never heard of Travis Green and had no idea why his wallet was on their bedroom floor. But the light blinked off and there was the sound of a loud hum dying—all the power in the house was out.

“Kristen,” Darryl said.

“What the hell is going on?” Kristen said.

Then a bright light arced across the room, shining first in Darryl’s face and then blinding Kristen. A male voice said, “Yeah, Darryl, what the hell is going on?”