Fear Itself Read Online Free

innocence of what? Murder? Was it true that Catherine was murdered? The thought was absurd. I was with her the entire night. She may have slipped out of bed for a glass of water but how would she have gotten back into bed and nestled me if she were dead? There was no sign of an intruder. No broken window-glass; no loud startling noise; no busted lock. Besides, who would sneak into our house and quietly kill my wife while ignoring the other lives in the house? What had they gained?
    And there was no way, absolutely no way, that Amber came all the way to Cleveland Ohio, tracked me down, and killed my wife. Our connection was intimate but we shared the mutual understanding that our families were more important than our relationship was. Amber understood that our amalgamation was noncommittal; almost pretend. We never planned to actually meet. Neither of us had anything to gain by abandoning our families and uniting. Besides, Amber was not the sort of person who would take a life. We role- played and as we did we also got to know each other quite well. Amber was a nice young woman in her mid thirties stuck in a droll marriage to a man who paid little attention to her. She was a mother; a house-wife. She lived on a five acre parcel in the sticks of Kansas. She had once been a striptease dancer so her moral character could be called into question if one were a prude, but she was just a child at that time, a victim of a molesting father out on her own at the age of sixteen. She did what she had to do to survive. She was not psychotic. She was not in Cleveland. That made no sense. The detective was reaching; trying to bait me. He must have thought I was as guilty as a vice.
    No, I could not be taken alive; or at least not lying down. Sarah needed me. It was bad enough that she would have to spend the rest of her life without her mother; knowing that her mother had been murdered; knowing that I was a prime suspect.
    Would Sarah someday wonder if I had done it?
    I had heard of and read so many newspaper stories about falsely accused and convicted individuals; innocents with the wholesome misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or who were ill-fated enough to so closely resemble the actual perpetrators of a crime that the jury was convinced of their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I never thought that I’d be one of them.
    Up to that point in time I had been a major proponent of the death penalty for all but the most accidental of murders. Fry the bastards ! An eye for an eye! Only when I realized that I was in danger of being the scapegoat for a crime that I had not committed did I change my point of view. I knew that I might soon be Sparky’s next subject.
    But how does one prove that one didn’t do something? I didn’t have much of an alibi. I was at the scene of the crime. But there was no contrivance. No weapon. But how was
    Catherine killed? What sort of instrument would there have been? There were no marks on her body. I would have noticed if someone had hit her in the head; there would have been blood. Poison perhaps? But how and who? And how would the cops have jumped to that conclusion so quickly? They knew something that I did not. They had a weapon of some sort; or knew that there was a weapon; knew that she did not die of natural causes. But what could it have been?
    A dull headache gradually gripped my head like a steel vice and I reached up with my index fingers and massaged my temples and closed my eyes and tried to blank my mind and to forget for a while where I was and why I was there.
    The hotel room was like many I had stayed in. Not high class, but not quite dumpy; no cockroaches or bed-bugs but few amenities. The linens smelled clean enough. The quilt was the kind of neutral beige you find in such places with a red royal pattern. The quilt, though, was slightly damp. Not damp from being to quickly removed from the dryer, but rather musty from too much exposure to the moisture in the air. The