Too Close to Home by Maureen Tan

to speculate about the price that local farmers would be getting for a bushel of corn this season, then got down to our usual argument. He thought that my doughnut and coffee should be on the house. I told him, as I often did, that I wouldn’t come by anymore if I couldn’t pay.
    “I’d sure miss your coffee,” I added. Then I patted my waist, which was made considerably thicker by my bulletproof vest. “But I could probably do without the doughnuts.”
    I won as I sometimes did, handed Ed a couple of dollars and got back change. As I left the store with coffee mug and doughnut bag in hand, it occurred to me that not only had I managed to pay for my purchases, but I’d actually just had a conversation with Ed where he didn’t have the last word.
    I congratulated myself too soon.
    The door hadn’t quite swung shut behind me when I heard his voice.
    “You be sure to say ‘hey’ to Chad for me. He’s a real nice boy. ’Bout time you two got back together.”
    I raised my hand in a wave, but didn’t look back. As I climbedback into my SUV, I was still shaking my head and laughing. Mostly at myself. How could I have believed, even for a moment, that my personal life wasn’t everyone else’s business?
     
    A quarter mile down 146, I pulled into a used-car lot at the northeast edge of town, tucking my SUV in between a rusted El Camino that I doubted had ever seen better days and a once-blue Chevy truck with oversize tires and a jacked-up frame that I doubted was street legal. The curb in front of me was fairly low, and the location put my radar gun in the right place to catch early-morning commuters speeding toward the ferry.
    I spent the next hour making money for the city treasury and keeping the roads safer for the good citizens of Maryville. It was the kind of task I usually enjoyed because it gave me time to think. Today was no exception. And, like so many of my thoughts lately, I couldn’t help thinking about Chad. But today, I thought not of us and the immediate past, but of the circumstances of his mother’s murder.
     
    The trial had been such a popular topic around town that sometimes I felt as if I’d actually witnessed it rather than simply eavesdropped on adult conversations. Like everyone else in Maryville, I knew that Chad’s father was a mean-tempered drunk. And the night he murdered his wife and tried to do the same to his son, he’d been drinking heavily. That was something he’d admitted in court, prompted by a defense lawyer who wanted to blame the alcohol, rather than the man, for what had happened. When the bars along Dunn Street closed at 2:00 a.m., he drove his battered pickup back home.
    It was storming that night. Figuring that the thunder had muffled the sounds of his arrival, he’d taken the opportunity to peer in through the tattered curtains of his home and spyon his wife. As always, he expected to catch her with another man. Instead, he saw her talking on the phone that she was forbidden to use except to reach him in an emergency. She hung up when she heard him come in, thus confirming his paranoid suspicions.
    Chad’s father had always questioned the parentage of his only child. That’s what the lawyer told the jury. It didn’t matter that his wife swore she’d never been with another man. Or that even the most casual observer could see a strong resemblance between father and son. What mattered was that, in his alcohol-poisoned mind, Chad’s father thought he finally had proof of his wife’s infidelity. So he dragged the sleeping boy from his bed, then forced the child and his wife at knife-point through the rain and into the truck.
    With his family held captive in the cab of the old pickup, Chad’s father sped northward along Big Creek Road. As he drove, he raged at his wife, screaming about adultery and betrayal and brandishing a razor-sharp skinning knife in her direction. He told her he was going to kill her and the boy and leave their bodies out in the forest for