Read Online Fear Itself by Duffy Prendergast - Free Book Online Page A

know baby. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I asked you, but I had to know.”
    And as I held her there, I still wasn’t one-hundred percent sure that she hadn’t killed Catherine. All I knew is that I hadn’t. And I knew that eventually I would be indicted. I would be publicly disgraced as the murderer of my wife; a letch; a woman killer. I would be tried and convicted in the press. I would lose my job. My neighbors would point at me and talk about me under their muffled breaths. I knew that it would not be long before I would be locked in jail, separated from Sarah forever. The lie detector test was not going to set me free. The police had my fingerprints on the decanter. They had my fingerprints on the wine glass and the bottle of antifreeze. They had Amber. They had Uncle Henry, whoever he was.
    Uncle Henry! “Sarah baby?”
    “What daddy?” she was still trembling and whimpering from my interrogation. I laid her back on my arm as I would an infant and looked down at her.
    “It’s okay honey.” I wanted to calm her;
    to let her know that my forth-coming questions were not a continuation of the former brow- beating.
    “I’m not mad honey. I’m done talking about the freeze, okay?”
    “Okay.” She quietly croaked, not quite convinced of my sincerity.
    “Do you know Uncle Henry?”
    Her eyes shined back at me in wide silence; her little lids with tiny blond lashes almost pinned themselves to her eyebrows. Her eyeballs, speckled with red hair-line tributaries, were punctuated with dilated black spheres amid grey-blue sunrays. I sat her up on my knee and I held her shoulders again. The whites of her eyes grew larger. I had asked a question she had been dreading for a long time; a box she had hoped would never be opened; a secret she had been warned about, and sworn an oath to keep.
    “It’s okay. I’m not mad about it. Is it a secret?”
    “Yes.” Her expression was serious. She knew the weight of the question.
    “Is it a secret you had with mommy?” “Yes.”
    “Do you know Uncle Henry?”
    “Mommy said not to talk about Uncle
    Henry. She said you would get mad.”
    My stomach knotted up and tears once again began to fill my eyes. There really was an Uncle Henry. Sarah was not my flesh and blood. I looked into her eyes again, this time though I was not searching for guilt. I was searching for me. I had loved her since she was born. Since before she was born. I loved her still, flesh of my flesh or not. And no one, not Uncle Henry, not the police, not Catherine’s parents; no one was going to take her away from me.
    “It’s okay. Mommy’s dead now. She won’t care now if you talk about Uncle Henry. She can’t hear you.”
    Sarah’s eyes turned up and then rolled to the side as she sucked on her bottom lip,
    “Uncle Henry was mommy’s friend.” She stingily volunteered.
    “When did you see him?” I tried to make my voice sound cheerful and fretless but
    I heard my voice quiver.
    “He used to come and see us sometimes while you were at work.”
    “Where did you see him?” My voice slipped as a single tear slid down my cheek and I averted my head in time to catch the tiny bead of saline with my fingertip before I returned to her studied gaze.
    “Here, at our house.” Her voice grew more trusting; more casual.
    “Did he go into the bedroom with mommy?” My heart was breaking. I felt the piercing intrusion of pain in my chest as though a knife had been thrust into my ribcage. I could almost feel my bleeding heart as the imaginary shank penetrated my flesh and my heart pumped like a fountain.
    “No daddy. He was just her friend. He said he was really coming just to see me, not mommy.” Her eyes were sincere. She began to gush with words, like a river through a burst dam. “He just started to visit us a little while ago. At first he said that he was my daddy, but I told him that he wasn’t and that I already had a daddy, and mommy gave him a dirty look, like when I say something wrong and