Wife Dead Four Years Returned, So Who Did I Bury

After my wife cheated, we became the couple everyone in our circle knew for pure hatred.

She dropped dead right beside me, and all I did was dig a shallow spot on the hill behind my hometown and bury her.

I didn't shed a single tear.

There was no camera and no witness at the scene, and I was afraid people would think I'd killed her, so I only reported her missing.

Four years later, on the very day a lawyer came to my door to settle her estate, the doorbell rang.

I opened it, and there stood my wife, dead for four years.

She threw her arms around me, eyes brimming with tears.

She said a car crash had left her with amnesia, that's why she'd been gone so long, and now she was finally home.

I looked at this woman standing in front of me, swearing she'd build a real life with me from now on.

And every hair on my body stood on end.

1.

"You've had it so hard these years, all on your own."

"I'm back now. From here on, I'll take care of everything at home."

Rose Dickerson said it, then marched straight into the kitchen and washed the dishes I'd left in the sink that morning.

My hand found the fruit knife on the table. Cold sweat ran down my back.

How could this be?

I buried her on that hill with my own two hands.

I pulled myself together and walked slowly up behind her, knife in hand.

"Where have you been all these years? You never once got in touch."

Rose glanced back with a smile, rose up on her toes, and kissed me on the cheek.

"For the first three years I couldn't even remember my own name. I worked off the books at some factory out in the country."

"My memory only started coming back recently. That's when I remembered I still had a husband I'd loved for years."

At those words, my grip on the knife tightened.

Rose and I had been together many years, but we'd stopped loving each other a long time ago.

After I helped her build everything from nothing, she turned into a different person.

An endless string of men around her. Fights that never ended.

I'd already talked myself into letting it go.

Plenty of couples can share hardship but not success. As long as our shared assets stayed with me, I could turn a blind eye.

But then Rose found her second spring and fell for the new intern at the company, Brendan Fox.

Brendan didn't just want money. He wanted the legal husband's seat too.

Rose felt nothing for what we'd been. She schemed against me again and again.

She wanted to saddle me with crushing debt, then kick me out the door.

She even slipped something into the water cooler, trying to poison me to death.

I couldn't stomach it. I'd planted this tree with my own hands. Why should someone else sit back and enjoy the fruit?

After one big fight, I followed Rose when she went out for one of her business dinners.

And I saw it happen. She collapsed from some sudden illness and died right in front of me.

Thinking back on that day, a chill ran through me all at once.

If she really was Rose, the first thing she'd have done after cheating death was call the police and have me arrested.

Instead she hid for four years and turned up right when I was about to inherit the estate.

Or else she wasn't Rose at all.

I slid the knife up into my sleeve and said, easy as anything,

"Go take a shower first. Wash off all the bad luck from out there."

She agreed readily, and glanced back on her way into the bathroom to joke,

"I get it. Have to get clean before I climb into my husband's bed."

Water started rushing in the bathroom soon after.

I made a show of fetching a fresh towel, my heart already in my throat.

The year we got married, the basement we lived in caught fire out of nowhere.

When the burned-through door beam came crashing down, Rose threw herself over me without a second's hesitation.

It left a vicious scar running from her right shoulder down to the left side of her lower back.

That scar had once been Rose's get-out-of-jail-free card in my heart.

One look at it and I'd know whether this was the real her or a fake.

I stood outside the door and fought with myself a long time.

At last I drew a deep breath and forced myself calm.

The moment I pushed the door open, what I saw made my mind detonate.

Steam boiled up under the showerhead.

Rose had her back to me.

Humming some off-key tune while she washed her hair.

The scar that ran the whole length of her back twisted and warped with every movement.

Soaked red and swollen in the hot water.

Seven years sharing a bed with her, I knew that scar better than anyone.

Every time I'd wanted a divorce, one look at that scar and I forced the thought back down.

But I'd cleaned it all up. Perfectly. Buried her on the hill back home.

A dead woman! How could she be standing alive at my front door four years later?

My foot slipped, and I almost went down on my knees in the bathroom.

"Honey, what are you thinking about?"

Rose turned and saw me, steadied me with one dripping hand.

My mind was blank. I shoved the towel at her without thinking.

"Nothing. Just bringing you a towel."

Then something got into her, and she wrapped her arms around my waist.

"Sid, I missed you so much."

"The whole ride home while that officer drove me back, all I could think about was holding you like this."

Her skin was burning hot.

But that press of skin on skin made my knees go weak.

Before we married, I'd worked three years as a doctor.

I'd handled dozens, hundreds of dead bodies.

I was certain. Four years ago, Rose had stopped breathing. Completely.

Right then, only one thought was left in my head.

I had to go back home.

I had to see with my own eyes whether Rose's bones were still on that hill.

"Get some sleep at home first. Something urgent's come up, I have to go out."

I pushed Rose off, grabbed nothing but my phone, and rushed out the door.

Downstairs, the feeling of being watched made me look up without thinking.

Rose stood at the window, smiling, waving at me.

I couldn't even fake a smile back.

I bolted for the train station in a panic.

Home was a dying little village, only a few lonely old folks left now.

Afraid of being seen, I killed time near the edge of the village until night.

It was deep in the night before I stood in front of the hill with a shovel.

My heart was pounding.

A few strokes down, and something metallic glinted in the red-brown dirt.

I leaned closer, and my heart stopped for a full second.

Under the still moonlight, the edge of a ring showed faintly.

The ring I'd picked out myself when we married.

Four years ago, Rose had it on her hand right up to her death.

She was right here on this hill! She'd never gone anywhere!

I didn't dare dig any deeper.

I was still frozen there when my phone suddenly rang.

Afraid the neighbors would hear, I fumbled to answer it.

"Honey, it's so late and you're still not home."

"Where are you? Let me come find you."

The familiar voice came through the speaker, and I dropped down onto the ground in fright.

"It's fine. Go to sleep."

I clamped my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming.

My heartbeat was terrifyingly loud, like it would leap out of my mouth the next second.

I fought to make my voice sound like nothing was wrong.

"Something urgent came up at work. I'll come home once it's handled."

The other end went quiet.

A few seconds passed before her concern came through.

"Make sure you eat on time, even by yourself."

"If something's wrong, you tell me. We're family."

"No matter what's happened, I'll cover for you."

By the time I hung up, cold sweat had soaked through my whole body.

What did she mean by that?

She wasn't Rose at all!

What did she want to cover for me?

I patted the hole in the ground shut again, clumsily.

Under cover of night I hurried back to the city.

The whole way, Rose's messages came one after another.

Every line full of concern.

Honey, again and again.

But to me they landed like needles.

Stabbing until my head felt ready to split open.

Rose's body was still right there in the hole I'd dug.

So the woman parading around my house right now, who the hell was she?

By the time I got back into the city, it was eight in the morning.

I circled the building three times and didn't go up.

Instead I turned and headed for the police station.

Rose had said an officer brought her home, so I decided to take the gamble and dig for a lead there.

Better to risk it than to sit shut in one apartment with a woman whose story I couldn't place.

The moment the female officer at the desk heard my name, her eyes lit up.

"I know you. Your wife's missing-persons caseI'm the one who closed it."

"We joked about it around the office at the time. Said your wife was hopeless in love. Four years with no memory, and the first thing she remembers is you."

I gave an awkward laugh.

I hesitated a while before I worked up the nerve to ask:

"Can I askhow did you confirm she was my wife?"

She kept working, not lifting her head.

"For anyone claiming memory loss, we've got a full verification process."

"There's no way we'd match the wrong person."

"Are you having some kind of trouble?"

I hesitated again and again, then landed on a vague answer.

"Just curious, that's all."

"So many missing people every day. How do you officers tell who's real and who isn't?"

She laughed, a bright, crisp little sound.

"In this day and age, finding someone is easy."

"She came in and reported herself, said the only thing she remembered was your name."

"We found the missing-persons report you'd filed and compared her against the ID database photo."

That was when I couldn't help blurting out:

"Plenty of people look alike. Going off a photocouldn't that be wrong?"

She stopped what she was doing and glanced up at me.

"It's not just the photo. We check fingerprints too."

"We only notify the community to come claim the person once everything matches."

My eyes went wide with surprise.

"The database has my wife's fingerprints too?"

She nodded, and there was more scrutiny in her look now.

"Not just hers. Yours are in there as well."

"Everyone gets fingerprinted when they get their ID card."

"What's this about? Afraid you got the wrong wife?"

Even then, a sliver of wishful thinking still clung to me.

"Could someone fake a fingerprint?"

"Technology's so advanced these days, after all."

Across the desk she went quiet, fixing her eyes on me, her tone wary but held in check.

"Sir, the fingerprint equipment here at the station is very advanced."

"It reads subdermal prints. Anyone trying to forge one would trip the alarm on the spot."

"Are you running into some kind of difficulty?"

I froze, and my heart sank straight to the bottom.

Something like fire lodged in my throat, with nowhere to go.

I could hardly tell her the wife I'd buried had come back.

Walking out of the station, the officer's parting words still rang in my ears.

"Don't worry. Every piece of information was cross-checked."

"She's definitely your wife."

But no one knew better than I did.

Even if the photo matched, even if the fingerprints lined up perfectly.

This woman could not possibly be Rose Dickerson.

Because the real Rose Dickerson had been buried by my own hands four years ago.

I drifted through the streets in a daze.

Passing a fortune-teller's stall, an absurd thought even rose up in me.

Could this be Rose's ghost, come back for revenge?

But the cold wind hit my face and scattered the ridiculous idea soon enough.

If ghosts were real, Rose would have come for me four years ago.

Not waited four whole years, and then dressed it up with an excuse about amnesia.

The question circled right back to where it started.

The woman in my home nowwho exactly was she?

I climbed the stairs weighed down with dread, and at my own door I ran into the last person I expected.

Brendan Fox lounged in the doorway like he owned it.

My stomach dropped.

Once I was sure the Rose in my house was a fake, Brendan was the first name I landed on.

The kid was her lover, after all. Aside from me, no one on earth knew Rose better.

Was this his play? Get inside, work with her, walk off with the inheritance?

I was still turning it over when the door opened.

Rose didn't so much as glance at Brendan. She grabbed my hand, delighted, and pulled me inside.

"Sid, dinner's ready."

"Go wash up. I'll get your soup."

Brendan panicked and wedged his body against the frame.

"Rose! What is this?"

"You're the one who said the old man in this house made you want to throw up. Now the two of you are back together, is that it?"

"So what happens to me? I waited four years for you!"

I had no interest in trading words with Brendan.

And I knew it was pointless anyway.

Every time I'd ever fought back, Rose had only made me pay worse for it.

But her face went cold.

She hooked her arm through mine and shoved Brendan out the door.

"I was a fool before. I did things that wronged Sid."

"You disrespect my husband again and I'm done with you!"

Then she threw the bolt and left Brendan crying and pounding outside.

I sat down on the couch, completely lost.

I couldn't read what Rose was after.

While I was still floundering, she suddenly dropped to her knees in front of me and slapped herself twice across the face.

"Sid, I can't remember what I ever did to hurt you before."

"But I swear, from now on it's only ever you."

"Everything I got wrong, I'll spend the rest of my life making up to you."

The sincerity on her face nearly broke my mind.

There was fear, yes, but more than that, hatred.

If Rose had just kept her pants on and not cheated.

If she'd only bowed her head and admitted it sooner.

I would never have come this far.

I wouldn't have spent four years living scared.

But I buried her myself. With my own hands. So why was there another Rose kneeling here, swearing over and over that she was mine alone?

The last two days had hit me one after another, and my defenses were gone.

I didn't want to guess anymore.

So I asked her straight:

"My wife died a long time ago."

"Who the hell are you?"

She got to her feet, stunned, and threw herself into my arms.

"Sid, I know I was wrong."

"Hit me, curse me, whatever you want. Just don't say things like that."

I pushed her off. I was about to tell her the truth when the doorbell rang.

Rose went to answer it. A team of officers stood there, fully armed.

"Mr. Gilbert. Acting on a tip, we found the body of a woman in the abandoned pigsty at your family home. She's been dead about four years."

"Our records show you bought a train ticket back to your hometown yesterday."

For a moment everything blurred.

Then I stood up, calm.

I was reaching out my hands to turn myself in when one of the officers held up a photo.

"This is the victim. Take a look."

The second I saw that photo, my mind went blank.

Every question, every thing that hadn't added up, finally strung together.

I understood.

I finally knew what had happened.