The Wife He Buried Alive novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Behind the Oak
Linnea watches her husband bury her empty coffin, then watches his phone ring and him walk away again.
On the morning the city buried me, I stood behind an oak tree with my hand over my mouth.
It was raining.
Hundreds of people stood on the wet grass in black coats.
Three television vans were parked on the cemetery road.
A white coffin sat on straps above the grave, and my photograph stood on an easel beside it.
The coffin was empty.
The river had never given my body back, so the city had decided to bury a box.
I had been alive for nine days.
A night nurse had found me on the bank, taped my cracked ribs, and told me to stay in bed.
I had not stayed in bed.
I had put on a stranger's raincoat and a hood and taken a bus to my own funeral.
My husband stood at the head of the grave.
Winston Garrick wore a black suit and no pocket square.
In its place a yellow paper ticket stuck out of his breast pocket.
He never went anywhere without a pocket square, so I thought he must have dressed in the dark.
His mother stood close at his elbow.
Harriet Garrick had a silver chignon, pearl earrings, and a gloved hand on his sleeve.
A reporter held a microphone toward her.
"Mrs. Garrick, was there anything wrong with the car?"
"Nothing," Harriet said. Her voice cracked, and she steadied it.
"I took it in for a full service myself, the Tuesday before. It was our anniversary gift to them."
That was true.
She had driven it to her own mechanic and brought it back washed, with a ribbon on the wheel.
I had hugged her in the driveway and told her she spoiled me.
A step behind Winston stood Juliet Carrow, in a black coat and a short veil.
She was his first love.
She had walked out on their wedding six weeks before the day, years before I met him.
Then she had come back as his oldest friend, and I was the wife who said that was fine.
The minister finished, and so did the mayor.
Winston stepped to the microphone and looked at the coffin for a long time.
"I told my wife I would be home by nine," he said.
People started crying on the lawn.
I almost laughed.
He had said those exact words to me on every anniversary for five years.
He had not once been home by nine.
On our fifth anniversary, I had sat at a candlelit table for two and watched the second chair stay empty.
In my coat pocket was a pregnancy test with two pink lines.
I had planned to slide it across the tablecloth with the dessert menu.
He came at twenty to ten, soaked, and kissed my forehead and blamed the traffic.
I did not tell him.
I wanted to say it in the car, where nobody could hear us.
We were halfway home, on the steep road above the river, when his phone rang.
He looked at the screen and asked me to pull over.
"Juliet can't breathe," he said. "I'm sorry, Linnea. Drive home, I'll take a cab."
He got out at a curb in a storm and left me with the engine running.
Four minutes later, my brake pedal went to the floor on the Ridgeline curve.
I pumped it three times and nothing happened.
I hit the guardrail and went out through the window onto the bank, and then the river took my car.
Now I stood behind a tree and watched my husband say goodbye to a box.
I had come here to walk across the grass and put the test in his hand.
He laid his palm flat on the coffin lid, and his mouth moved.
Nobody heard what he said.
Then he looked up, and his eyes landed on the oak.
I stopped breathing and pulled my hood lower.
His phone rang.
The ringtone was loud in the quiet, over my grave, and a few people turned their heads.
Winston looked at the screen, and his face changed.
"I'm coming," he said into the phone.
He walked away from the grave.
He did not hurry and he did not look back.
The crowd parted for him.
At the cemetery gate, Juliet reached him first and took hold of his sleeve.
They went out together while the minister was still holding his book.
He had stayed at my funeral until somebody called.
I put my hand in the pocket of the stranger's raincoat.
The test was there, where I had moved it from my own wet coat.
So I stayed dead.
I walked out through the back gate, where nobody was waiting for me, and Winston Garrick never found out he had a child.
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