Mystery
Date Published: May 17, 2017
Publisher: Tirgearr Publishing
Tucson, Arizona – Eighteen-year-old Matt Garrison is harboring two terrible secrets: his involvement in the drowning death of his 12-year-old cousin, and a night of drunken sex with his best friend’s mother, Crystal, whom he finds dead the following morning. Guilt forces Matt to act on impulse and hide his involvement with Crystal.
Detective Winston Radhauser knows Matt is hiding something. But as the investigation progresses, Radhauser’s attention is focused on Matt’s father. Matt’s world closes in when his dad is arrested for Crystal’s murder and Travis breaks off their friendship. Despite his father’s guilty plea, Matt knows his dad is innocent and only trying to protect his son. Devastated and bent on self-destruction, Matt heads for the lake where his cousin died—the only place he believes can truly free him. Are some secrets better left buried?
Redemption Lake is a novel of love and betrayal. It’s about truth and lies, friendship and redemption, about assuming responsibility, and the risks a father and son will take to protect each other.
Redemption Lake is a novel of love and betrayal. It’s about truth and lies, friendship and redemption, about assuming responsibility, and the risks a father and son will take to protect each other.
Excerpt:
For the next hour and a half, he
drifted in and out of sleep. Cradled by the night sounds of the desert outside
the open window, each time a memory emerged, his thoughts thickened and folded
back into sleep. At one point he heard water running for a bath. A little
later, he heard a car outside. Oh God,
please don’t let it be Travis. He stumbled to the window and opened the
curtains. In the street, two long rectangular taillights moved away, turning
south onto Oracle Road.
Matt leaned against the wall, staring
at the sunflower sheets on Crystal’s bed. The same bed he and Travis had jumped
up and down on when they were eight. The digital clock read 10:38 p.m. His head
throbbed. He needed to close his eyes. Crystal would wake him in time to leave
before Travis got home. He fell back onto the bed.
When he woke up again, the room was
very dark. He wore only his boxers and a white T-shirt his mother had insisted
upon—claiming his usual dark one would show through his tuxedo shirt. As if the
color of his T-shirt could ruin her perfect wedding. But he’d been ingenious
and found another way to ruin things for his mother. He turned toward the empty
space beside him. It took a few moments for him to realize where he was. He
closed his eyes, shook his aching head to clear it. Crystal was his best
friend’s mother. What the hell was he doing in her bed?
He thought he heard the sound of the
front door open, then close again. Oh
God, please don’t let it be Travis. His eyes adjusted to the darkness. One
event at a time, he remembered everything.
Fully awake now, he shot from the bed,
rocking for a few seconds before he achieved balance, then hurried to the
window. The moon hung over the mountaintop, its light silver and unforgiving.
Crystal’s driveway was empty. Whoever he’d heard, it wasn’t Travis. On the
other side of the street, an engine started. This time the taillights were
round. Definitely not Crystal’s Escort. The car turned north on Oracle Road.
Matt let out the breath he’d been
holding and glanced at the digital clock—its red letters told him it was 11:20
p.m. He needed to get dressed and leave. The dance ended in forty minutes and
Travis would head home. He grabbed his tuxedo pants and shirt from the chair.
His hands shook so hard he could barely work the fly and the button on his
trousers. He slipped into his shirt, then sat on the edge of the bed. As if he
had the flu, his head throbbed and his stomach felt queasy.
He rushed down the hallway toward the
bathroom. And when he did, he saw the puddle of blood on the floor beside the
bathtub.
He hurried across the room, jerked
open the pale green shower curtain.
Crystal lay naked in a bathtub filled
with blood-colored water. Her hair, her beautiful blonde curls, had been
chopped off, shorter in some places than others, as if a small child had done
it. Some of the curls were floating on top of the water.
For a strange moment, everything
remained calm and slow.
Her head was propped against one of
those blow-up pillows attached to the back of the tub with suction cups. The
tint of her skin was pale and slightly blue. Crystal’s eyes were open and
staring straight ahead—looking at something he couldn’t see. Blood splattered
the white tiles that surrounded the tub. It dripped down them like wet paint.
One of her hands flopped over the side of the tub. A single thick drop fell
from her index finger into the crimson pond congealing on the linoleum floor.
It covered her neck and shoulders. Tiny bubbles of frothy blood still oozed
from the gash in her neck.
An empty Smirnoff bottle sat in a
puddle of blood on the tub’s rim beside a straight-edged razor blade.
The bathroom was so quiet. Nothing but
the sound of his own breathing. He clenched and unclenched his hands. His body
grew numb. “Oh no. Oh God, no,” he said, the words thickening in the air in
front of him. His head filled with strange sounds—the drone of insects humming,
violinists tuning their strings. “What have I done?”
The contents of his stomach rose. He
crouched in front of the toilet and heaved until nothing more came up. Then he
started to rock, back and forth, muttering what he already knew was a useless
prayer. Please, just let her be okay.
He said it over and over like an unstoppable mantra. If only he could keep
saying the words, maybe he could reverse this unthinkable thing.
Maybe she was still alive. He
straightened up and stepped over to the bathtub to check Crystal’s neck for a
pulse. As he bent closer, he smelled the metallic scent of her blood as it
mixed with her perfume and the stale, metabolized smell of alcohol seeping
through her skin. He placed two fingers on her neck, searching for her carotid
and pressed. His fingers slipped into the gaping hole. It felt wet and warm. He
screamed and jerked them out. They were covered in blood.
He swiped his hand on the front of his
shirt, then checked the other side of her neck for a pulse. Please, just let her be okay. Nothing.
He shook her by the shoulders, then tried again. Still no pulse. At that
moment, he stopped his mantra.
Though he knew she was dead, he held
her hand—soft and still warm. It belonged to Crystal, who’d taught him to line
dance, who liked hot buttered popcorn with cheddar cheese grated on top.
Crystal, who was sometimes irresponsible and drank way too much. Crystal, who’d
cheered for him at bat in Little League, cheered just as loud as she had for
her own son. Crystal, who’d always be sitting in a bathtub of blood. “I’m
sorry.” He squeezed her hand, then let go. “And I swear to you, Travis will
never know what happened between us.”
Struggling to his feet, he headed for
the kitchen phone to call 911. Halfway to the bathroom door, he stopped. Blood
smeared the front of his white shirt. And there was still blood on both his
hands, drying beneath his fingernails. His body was slick with fear. He smelled
it, tasted it, and felt it coming out of his pores like sweat. His mind told
him to call the police, to tell the truth. His heart told him to keep his
promise to Crystal. It was the last thing she’d ever ask of him.
He dropped his chin and stared at his
shirt. Holy shit. If anyone saw him like this, they’d think he’d killed
Crystal. The thought stopped him. Had he? Was he capable of doing something so
heinous?
The bubble of panic in his throat got
bigger. He hurried across the bathroom to wash his hands. There were more
clumps of hair in the sink and a hardened blue streak of toothpaste. He used
toilet paper to pick up the hair clumps and dropped them into the trashcan.
Looking at the uncapped tube beside Crystal’s toothbrush, he felt as if
something had been cut out of his chest.
He grabbed the sides of the sink,
stared at himself in the mirror. The face staring back resembled no one he’d
ever seen before. Was it the face of a murderer? Had he just pushed someone
else to her death? He shook his head—breathing in short gasps, like a swimmer
gearing up for a plunge. His lungs burned as if he were being swept away by a
strong current.
When the memory of his cousin’s death
surfaced, as it often did, Matt used his fists to hammer the stranger’s face he
saw reflected in the medicine cabinet. The mirror fractured, sending out long
cracks in every direction. The face split into interlocking parts like an
abstract puzzle. One jagged sliver fell into the sink, breaking in half. It
left a black and empty space in what had once been the mirror.
He held onto the sides of the sink
again and rocked slowly in front of it, still staring at the blood on his hands
and under his fingernails. “You’re all right,” he said, but could barely hear
the words, the sounds inside his head were so loud.
In his mind he saw himself letting go
of the sink and getting as far away from this nightmare as possible. But it
would destroy Travis to come home and find his mother like this. Matt had to
intercept him.
He washed his hands, then rinsed the blood
from the sides and bowl of the sink, recapped the toothpaste and tucked it into
the medicine cabinet. He wrapped the shards of mirror in toilet tissue, careful
to avoid getting his fingerprints on the glass, and placed them in the
trashcan, jagged sides down. There were no towels in the bathroom, so he wiped
his wet hands on his pant legs. Panic rolled in, sucked him under.
What should he do? Call the police?
His father? 911? If he did, there’d be a recording of his voice and he’d have a
lot of explaining to do. The police often suspected 911 callers. They might
take his DNA. What if they found semen inside of Crystal? What if they matched
it to Matt’s DNA? If that happened, they’d know. It would be in the newspapers.
It would hurt Travis. He couldn’t let that happen.
He hurried back into Crystal’s
bedroom. Hands shaking, he sat on the edge of her bed and put on his socks and
shoes. Then, as if he were someone else, running through an obstacle course, he
went into the kitchen and gathered the empty beer bottles. He took them out
into the garage and carefully placed them in their cardboard carriers. Next he
wiped the kitchen table, closed the open drawers, loaded the dishwasher,
emptied the ashtrays, then made Crystal’s bed with fresh sheets. He tossed the
sunflower sheets into the washing machine and started the cycle, careful to
wipe his prints from the lid and dial. With the same cloth, he wiped down the
edge of the plastic shower curtain, then pulled it closed—the way he’d found
it. For the most part, his fingerprints were easily explained. He’d spent
almost as much time in Travis’ house as his own.
Matt stood in front of the coffee
table. He heard the candles guttering, smelled the wax melting. He blew them
out, then picked up the clothes Crystal had discarded in the hallway beside the
bathroom door. Folding them neatly, he then placed them on the chair beside her
window. He grabbed her red cowboy boots from the living room and set them
beneath the chair. It was the least he could do for Travis.
The clock on the stove read 11:45 p.m.
The Narrow Way didn’t allow opposite sex teenagers to spend unsupervised time
together. Jennifer’s parents would pick her up from the dance. That meant
Travis would be leaving for home soon.
If Matt hurried, he could intercept
him, convince him to spend the night with Matt and his dad. He raced into
Travis’ bedroom, jerked open the drawer where he kept his T-shirts. Surely he
had a plain black or a dark blue one somewhere. Matt lifted the stacks of
folded shirts until he found one, then ripped off the tuxedo and stained
T-shirt, slipped Travis’ shirt over his head, then grabbed his jacket from the
kitchen chair and hurried outside.
On the back deck, insects clustered
around the light fixture, high-pitched, insistent and frantic. The sound
reminded him of Crystal’s voice when she’d pleaded with him not to tell Travis.
Why hadn’t he agreed?
In the carport, Matt unlocked the
trunk of his Mustang, a restored nineteen sixty-seven Grande that had been his
mom’s first car, and dropped both the jacket and the bloodstained shirt inside.
Silence ballooned into the night air around him, a strange silence with a
ticking heartbeat. Then he remembered the cufflinks. Crystal had tucked them
into his shirt pocket. He checked. They weren’t there. He plunged his hands
into his pants pockets and then the tuxedo jacket. No cufflinks. He didn’t have
time to go back inside. He had to stop Travis from coming home.
When he climbed into the front seat,
he looked out through the windshield, but the dome light inside the car and the
darkness outside had changed the glass into a mirror. He turned away. His face
was the last thing he wanted to see.
About the Author
Susan Clayton-Goldner was born in New Castle, Delaware and grew up with four brothers along the banks of the Delaware River. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona's Creative Writing Program and has been writing most of her life. Her novels have been finalists for The Hemingway Award, the Heeken Foundation Fellowship, the Writers Foundation and the Publishing On-line Contest. Susan won the National Writers' Association Novel Award twice for her novels and her poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Animals as Teachers and Healers, published by Ballantine Books, Our Mothers/Ourselves, by the Greenwood Publishing Group, The Hawaii Pacific Review-Best of a Decade, and New Millennium Writings. A collection of her poems, A Question of Mortality was released in 2014 by Wellstone Press. Her novel, A Bend In The Willow, was published in January 2017. Redemption Lake, the first in a 3-book detective series, will be released May 17, 2017. Prior to writing full time, Susan worked as the Director of Corporate Relations for University Medical Center in Tucson, Arizona.
Susan shares a life in Grants Pass, Oregon with her husband, Andreas, her fictional characters, and more books than one person could count. In her spare time, Susan likes to make quilts and stained glass windows. She says it is a little bit like writing, telling stories with fabric and glass.
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