An Unthinkable Thing

by Nicole Lundrigan

Genres: Women's Fiction; Historical Thrillers; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 CRIME WRITERS OF CANADA AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL

A tragedy brings a young boy into the home of a "perfect" family—one whose dark secrets begin closing in, until a horrifying moment changes everything.

Tommie Ware’s life is turned upside down the summer of 1958, just after his eleventh birthday. When his beloved aunt—the woman who raised him—doesn’t return after her shift as a night nurse and is later found murdered, there is only one place left for Tommie to go: “home” to the mother who handed him over the day he was born.
     All is not as it seems behind the hedgerow surrounding the lavish Henneberry estate where Tommie’s mother, Esther, works as live-in housekeeper. Her employers have agreed he can stay until she “sorts things out,” but as she's at the family’s beck and call around the clock, Tommie is mostly left on his own to navigate the grounds, the massive house, and the twisted family inside.
     Soon he is enmeshed in the oppressive attentions of matriarch Muriel, who is often heavily medicated, and of fifteen-year-old Martin, who treats Tommie sometimes like a kid brother, sometimes like a pawn in a confusing game. While Dr. Henneberry mostly ignores Tommie, he also seems eager for him to be gone. Then there’s the elderly neighbour, who may know more about the family's past than anyone else will say.
     By summer's end, the secrets and games tighten around Tommie and his mother, until a horrific crime is discovered and we are faced with an unthinkable question: could an eleven-year-old boy really have committed cold-blooded murder?

Release date: April 12, 2022

Publisher: Viking

Print pages: 352

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

On June 14, 1958, my worst problem was the smoke in my eyes. Wally and I were on the fire escape of my apartment using his wood-burning kit. He’d brought me a thin board, and I was moving the hot metal point to form the letters of my name. The Twas squiggly, but the o was turning out better. When it was finished, I planned to hang it on the bedroom door, even though it wasn’t just my room. I shared it with my aunt. If I had time, maybe I’d burn her name, too. Tommie and Celia.

I was about to begin the first m but Aunt Celia was screaming. Again. “Tommie? Get in here! Quick, quick!”

“What’s she on about?” Wally said. He rubbed the fuzz on top of his head. The day before, Wally’s mother gave both of us identical end-of-school haircuts with her black clippers. Wally’s hair was now a shadow of orangish blond and mine was plain brown. He had freckles and a gap between his front teeth. I had neither.

“Probably a bug,” I said.

“She cuts people open and she’s scared of a few more legs?”

I laughed and handed him back the wood burner. “Nurses don’t cut people open, Wally. They sew them up.”

I stepped over the electric cord and climbed through the kitchen window. Sure enough, when I got to the bathroom, I found my aunt standing on the toilet seat, her fists pressed into her chest, and an enormous orange earwig in the bottom of the sink.

“It crawled right up the drain,” she said.

It was trying to escape, but it kept slipping. I reached in and cupped it inside my hands.

My aunt shuddered as she stepped off the toilet. “You always take care of me, Tommie.”

I did, or I tried to, anyway. As much as I could. Scraping the dishes or bringing her breakfast when she woke up after her shift, or brushing the dirt off her best shoes with the silver buckles.

She turned back to the bathroom mirror. “Now can you get rid of it? And tell Wally he needs to go. Your mother’ll be here soon, and you still haven’t scrubbed your face. Or behind your ears.” She leaned in close to her reflection and dotted lipstick on her mouth. Then she wiped it off with toilet paper. “I look old, don’t I?”

“You’re only thirty-three.”

“Shush, Tommie. Twenty-nine. No, I’ll be twenty-eight. Twenty-nine sounds like such a fib.”

“Okay,” I said, though I didn’t get it.

She applied her lipstick again and then glanced at me. “You’ve got a ring around your neck, too.”

The earwig’s legs were tickling my palms and my stomach knotted up. I frowned.

“Why that face? Don’t you want to be clean for your mother? With your birthday tomorrow, I know she’s excited to see you.”

I doubted that very much. My mother was a stranger to me. When I was only two hours old, she’d given me to my aunt and gone right back to work at the Henneberrys’. They all lived together in an enormous house in Upper Washbourne, and I heard they had a pool and a beach and plenty of woods for roaming. More grass than a whole park. Barely Twenty-minutes away by bus.

When I was smaller, I spent a lot of time dreaming about that place. In my head, it was like a picture out of a magazine. The Henneberrys even had a son who was a few years older than me, and I was certain he’d show me around. But in my almost eleven years, my aunt and I had gone to visit exactly zero times.

Aunt Celia got closer to me. Her mouth was moving. Then I heard her say, “I swear sometimes I’m talking to air.”

“Sorry.” I couldn’t help it. I got distracted a lot. Like my teacher said.

I carried the earwig outside to the fire escape and opened my hands to show Wally. Instead of running away though, it stayed on my palm. Never budged. I think it was staring at us. Or maybe it was stunned. Going from a gunky drain to all that sunshine had to be a shock.

“He’s jumbo,” Wally said, and backed away. “Good thing your aunt’s got us men around to protect her.”

“Sure is.” Wally didn’t like bugs either, but I wasn’t afraid. And even if I was, I’d never show it. I shook the earwig off and it skittered away.

“Hurry up, Tommie,” Aunt Celia called from the bedroom. Then she peeked around the doorframe. “And goodbye, Wally.”

Wally packed his kit into the box and climbed down the metal stairs to the street. He crossed the street and disappeared through the glass front doors of his building. His apartment was also on the third floor, but it had three bedrooms because he had a little sister named Sunny. If we caught each other at the right time, Wally and I would wave from our windows. Aunt Celia and I were on a waiting list for the next two-bedroom available, but when we moved, I was really going to miss waving at Wally.

As I went back inside, Aunt Celia was changing her blouse again.

“Why are you fussing so much?”

“Because I want to fuss.” She fixed a pink scarf around her neck. “What’s wrong with looking nice for my sister?”

I knew Aunt Celia’s efforts had nothing to do with my mother and everything to do with her new boyfriend. He was the worst one yet. Whenever they had plans, Aunt Celia waited on the front stoop. I often spied on her from the fire escape. She just stood there, hands clasped, even when it was raining. And when the man finally drove up in his dark car, he barely slowed down. He would sound his horn and she’d dash off the bottom step, her skirt swishing back and forth. Sometimes as he drove away, he’d hang his arm out the window. I always stared at his hand. His fingers. White and fat and ugly. I worried they’d made those five tiny bruises I’d seen on the top of Aunt Celia’s arm. I counted them while she was asleep.

“Tom?”

I’d bet a nickel she was going out to see him once my mother had gone.

“Tommie? Can you hear me?”

“Huh?”

“Get ready, I said, and then go downstairs and greet her.”

“Greet?”

“Say hello when she arrives. You know. Look sharp.”

I’d never done that before. Gone outside to wait. I brushed my teeth and swiped a soapy facecloth on my neck. Then I walked down the three flights of stairs. I had to squeeze past Mr. Pober who was sitting on the stoop of our building. He was the tenant from the bottom floor and he was there every single day, even when it was storming. My aunt told me he’d “gotten unhinged” during the war and he didn’t have any family to care for him. He couldn’t even hold a job bagging groceries. Aunt Celia said he was forty-four, but I would’ve guessed he was a hundred and ten. His bald head was covered in spots and his chin needed a shave. There were yellow stains in the armpits of his shirt. I had to hold my breath as I waited because the hot day made him smell even worse.

In the street some kids were playing hopscotch and others were drawing with chalk. I wished I could join them. Mrs. Pinsent said I was the best artist in her class. When we’d made self-portraits with colored pencils, everyone else’s were the same, but I made my face with triangles. My mouth and eyes and the bones in my cheeks. Even my hair was all skinny triangles. I’d seen the whole thing in my head like a snapshot and I just copied it down. A few of my classmates snickered, but Mrs. Pinsent told them it was the most creative of the lot. “Demonstrates an advanced distortion of concept,” she’d said. I had no idea what she meant, but it sure shut everyone up.

When a lady from another building strolled past our stoop, I could hear Mr. Pober muttering dirty things. About her legs. Her panties. What he’d do if he caught hold of her. She hurried past and brought her purse close to her stomach. I turned around and saw his white tongue poked out between his lips. Whenever he said nasty stuff, which he did constantly, it always made me feel squeamish. And angry. So many times, I imagined grabbing his tongue with my fingers, yanking and yanking until the whole slippery muscle came loose. It would curl and twitch in my fist, and Mr. Pober wouldn’t be able to say another filthy word ever again.

“We really ought to feel sorry for him,” Aunt Celia had said when I complained. “Think about it. He’s got no one to love. No one who loves him. Nothing to fill him up. I’d guess he’s an empty sort of fellow, don’t you?”

“Not even close,” I’d said. He wasn’t empty. His entire skull was full of blowflies and moldy garbage. When he called me “a little bastard” because I didn’t have a father, my aunt told me to ignore him. She said I was too special to have a father. She said I’d just appeared in the world in a big sploosh. I used to believe her, but then I learned the facts. There was no sploosh. Wally and I discovered a book in his apartment, hidden on the top shelf behind all the other books, with drawings of men and women. And it clearly showed babies required a father. That meant mine hadn’t wanted me. Same as my mother.

Just then the kids started moving off the pavement. A sparkling mint-green convertible was making its way down the street, swerving left and right to avoid the deep ruts. It pulled up outside our building. Two men were in the front, and my mother was tucked in the back, a polka-dotted kerchief tied over her head. The man in the passenger side hopped out and flipped his seat forward. He was tall and thin and tanned.

“Delivered without a hitch,” he said as he offered his arm to my mother. She stepped onto the road. Then he reached into the back and lifted out a stuffed paper bag. She took it from him.

“Thank you, Mr. Fulsome. And thank you, Dr. Henneberry. I hope it wasn’t too far out of your way.”

“Of course it’s out of my way,” the driver said. His fingers opened and closed around the steering wheel. “But you’re here now.”

My mother lowered her head.

“You’re such an old grump, Ray,” the other one said. He smoothed his wind-ruffled hair back in place. “Ignore him, Esther. We’re happy to be of service.” He grinned at me as he clambered back into the car. Sunlight bounced off the side of it. The chrome was spotless; not a speck of dust or a splash of muck.

I heard my aunt’s voice from above me. “Yoo-hoo!” she yelled out. “Yoo-hoo!”

She was leaning out our bedroom window, one arm stretched high in the air and she was waving. I felt a jolt of fear she might topple over the brick ledge. The pink scarf was knotted on top of her head now, and the color of her lipstick was brighter, redder.

My mother never seemed to notice. She shuffled toward me with the paper bag in her arms. She was shorter and heavier than my aunt, and there were streaks of gray in her brown hair. Even though my aunt worked all night long, it was my mother who had shadows beneath her eyes.

“It’s nice to see you, Thomas,” she said.

“You, too.”

“You’ve grown.”

“Have I?” I guess I had. Unless my pant legs were shrinking.

The car began driving away. The kids circled back to their hopscotch and drawing. A few of them clustered together, deciding who would be cops and who would be robbers. As we climbed the steps past Mr. Pober, Aunt Celia was still hanging out the window and waving. At somebody. I searched up and down the sidewalks, but I couldn’t see anyone there.

EXCERPT

Testimony of Dr. Arnold Norton, Greenlake Family Practice

Direct Examination by Prosecutor Clay Fibbs

Q. Dr. Norton, can you tell us where you were last year, on August 19th at 4:00 p.m.?

A. Arriving at the Henneberry residence. For my weekly appointment with Muriel Henneberry.

Q. Weekly?

A. Yes. Muriel worked especially hard to stay on top of her health.

Q. Can you describe what happened as you were coming down Roundwater Heights? Before you reached the Henneberry estate?

A. I was driving slowly.

Q. Why?

A. Mrs. Henneberry valued punctuality, and I was early. So I was lingering a little. When I was about halfway down the street, I heard a loud sound. Several sounds, actually.

Q. Can you describe the sounds?

A. Three bangs, sir. Like large branches cracking, one after the other. It startled me at first, but I assumed an automobile was backfiring.

Q. Please carry on, Dr. Norton.

A. Exactly a minute before four, I drove in and parked. As I got out with my bag, I saw Esther Ware, their housekeeper, dashing up over the lawn at the side of the house. She had an armload of clothing.

Q. What did you do next?

A. I took a few steps and peered down over the slope. I wanted to see why she was running like that. And then I saw them.

Q. Saw who, Dr. Norton?

A. The Henneberrys, Muriel and her husband. Down by the pool. I thought it was a trick of the light, all that red. I called out, but neither of them got up from their chairs. I hurried down to them. The top of Mrs. Henneberry’s dress was soaked with blood. She had this—a bullet wound in her neck. Dr. Henneberry was slumped forward. I could see the back of his skull, and part of it wasn’t there, Mr. Fibbs. It simply wasn’t—

Q. Please continue, Dr. Norton.

A. Then I realized young Martin was on the bottom of the pool. There was a cloud of blood in the water around him.

Q. Was anyone else present?

A. That boy. Right there.

Q. Let the record show Dr. Norton has indicated the defendant, Thomas Leon Ware. Can you describe what Mr. Ware was doing?

A. At first he was standing stock-still beside the pool. Then as I approached, he went over to Mrs. Henneberry. Started nudging her, as though he were trying to wake her up.

Q. What was he wearing?

A. Not much. Just a pair of blue briefs. At first I thought he’d been injured as well, because he had so much blood on him. But his eyes were clear.

Q. Did you speak to the defendant?

A. No, sir. I was too concerned with Muriel. I took off that hat she was wearing and checked for a pulse. I checked Dr. Henneberry, too. I wanted to get Martin out of the pool, but I can’t swim, you see. I can’t swim. I searched for the gun.

Q. And did you find one?

A. No.

Q. Thank you, Dr. Norton. Now, both Mr. Ware and his mother made statements to the police that they’d witnessed a man arriving in a black car. They both claim this mystery person was the one who shot the Henneberrys.

Defense Counsel: Objection, Your Honor. Is Mr. Fibbs testifying?

The Court: Just ask your questions, Mr. Fibbs.

Q. Sure. Thank you. Dr. Norton, did you see a man leaving the property?

A. No, sir.

Q. Did you encounter anyone on your drive down Roundwater Heights?

A. Well, yes, I did. James Fulsome drove past me as I was making my way. He and Dr. Henneberry were friends, I believe. But that was definitely before I heard those bangs. Beyond him, there was no one else. It was notably quiet.

Q. What happened next, Dr. Norton?

A. I told that child to stay put, and I hurried up to the house to alert police.

Q. After calling police, did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary?

A. Yes. Water splashing. I found the housekeeper in the laundry, and she was leaning over a bucket. ...