Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

peering at her over the newspaper. When she shook her head, he said, “You’re mumbling a lot lately.”
    She couldn’t tell from his expression whether he was annoyed or concerned. Did he know that today was the day? Was he ready to get it over with?
    Richard had always been an impatient man. Twenty-one years in an eight-by-ten cell had drilled some of that out of him. He’d learned to still his tapping hands, quiet the constant shuffling of his feet. He could sit in silence for hours now, staring at the wall as June slept. She knew he was listening to the pained draw of breath, the in-and-out of her life. Sometimes she thought maybe he was enjoying it, the audible proof of her suffering. Was that a smile on his lips as he wiped her nose? Was that a flash of teeth as he gently soaped and washed her underarms and nether regions?
    Weeks ago, when she could still sit up and feed herself, when words came without gasping, raspy coughs, she had asked him to end her life. The injectable morphine prescribed by the doctor seemed to be an invitation to an easy way out, but Richard had recoiled at the thought. “I may be a lot of things,” he had said, indignant, “but I am not a murderer.”
    There had been a fight of sorts, but not from anything June had said. Richard had read her mind as easily as he could read a book.
    He’d as good as killed her two decades ago. Why was his conscience stopping him now?
    “You can still be such a bitch,” he’d said, throwing down a towel he’d been folding. She didn’t see him for hours, and when he came upstairs with a tray of soup, they pretended that it hadn’t happened. He folded the rest of the towels, his lips pressed into a thin line, and June, in and out of consciousness, had watched his face change as if she were looking at it through a colored kaleidoscope: angry red triangles blending into dark black squares.
    He was an old man now, her husband, the man she had never bothered to divorce because the act would be one more reason for her name to appear beside his in the newspaper. Richard was sixty-three years old. He had no pension. No insurance. No chance of gainful employment. The state called it compassionate probation, though June guessed the administrators felt lucky to get an old man with an old man’s medical needs off their books. For Richard’s part, June was his only salvation, the only way he could live out the rest of his life in relative comfort.
    And she would not die alone, unattended in a cold hospital room, the beep of a machine the only indication that someone should call the funeral home.
    So the man who had robbed her of her good reputation, her lifelong friendships, her comfort in her old age would be the man who witnessed her painful death. And then he would reap the reward of the last thing, the only thing, they could not take away: the benefits of her tenure with the public school system.
    June chuckled to herself. Two birds with one stone. The Harris County Board of Education would remit a check once a month payable to Richard Connor in the name of June Connor. They would be reminded once a month of what they had done to June, and once a month, Richard would be reminded of what he had done to her.
    Not just to her — to the school. To the community. To Grace. To poor Danielle Parson, who, last June had heard, was prostituting herself in order to feed her heroin addiction.
    June heard a loud knocking sound, and it took a few seconds for her to realize the noise was conjured from memory, something only she could hear. It was Martha Parson banging on the front door. She’d pounded so hard that the side of her hand was bruised. June had later seen it on television; Martha held the same hand to her chest, fist still clenched, as she talked about the monster in their midst.
    Grace had been dead less than a month, and the police were back, but this time they were there to arrest Richard.
    Whenever June heard a child make a damning statement against an adult, her default position was always disbelief. She could not be blamed for doing this at the time. This was not so many years removed from the McMartin preschool trials. False allegations of child abuse and satanic sexual rituals were still spreading through schools like water through sand. Kern County. Fells Acres. Escola Base. The Bronx Five. It was a wonder parents didn’t wrap their children in cellophane before sending them into the world.
    More girls stepped up for their moments in the