Page 110 of Wicked Promises

Nothing.

Up here, I couldn’t even hear Mom moving around downstairs.

I steeled myself and pushed the door open.

It was stupid. He was going to be coming out of the bathroom or dozing in the chair they kept in the corner of the room for reading. A chair neither of them used for anything except not-clean-not-dirty clothes.

But my imagination told me that he’d be in that chair, and there he was.

Except his eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling, and…

“Dad?”

Silence.

So much silence, it reverberated in my ears.

I stared and stared, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

He was covered in blood, but it wasn’t bright red like in the movies. It didn’t pump out of the hole in his neck or abdomen, between his fingers that were over his stomach.

It was dark. Still. Like it had flowed and then stopped when his heart finally gave up.

I couldn’t blink. Couldn’t move from the single step I had taken into the bedroom.

“Honey, did you find—” Mom grabbed me, pulling me backward. “Oh my God.”

She covered my eyes, holding me to her chest.

My body was already wooden.

Dad was dead, or it was a trick. An awful trick.

I tried to get away from her, but I had lost my chance to check him. To shout,Joke’s on you, Dad! I’m not falling for it. She held me fast.

It was ketchup smeared across his face, that had run in rivers down the chair. It was soaked into the carpet, even, around his feet.

So much blood.

A whole body’s worth, spilled out of him.

“Don’t look,” Mom whispered into the top of my head.

My eyes were burning, but I couldn’tnot.

“I’m sorry, Caleb.”

A groan worked its way out of my chest. The first noise, but certainly not the last.

She picked me up, grunting with the effort, and carried me downstairs. I was starting to come back alive then, the puppet cutting his strings and becoming a real boy.

My eyes were on fire, but I didn’t cry. I just sat at the breakfast bar, turned toward Margo’s house, and wished on every stupid thing I could think of that she’d be home soon.

She would understand, even if she didn’t go through this kind of thing. She hadn’t lost a parent, but she would know what to say to make it better.

“We have a chef,” Mom told a detective behind me. “She and her family live in our guest house. Her husband and her have always had some marital problems, but we tried to offer support as best we could…”

I glared at Mom. She was forgetting the part where Dad’s version ofsupportwas his?—