My Husband Dead Four Years Returned—So Who Did I Bury

After watching my husband die with my own eyes, I didn't call the police.

Instead, I sealed his body into the pigsty back at our old home.

All I had to do was wait out the full four years, then legally inherit his fortune worth tens of millions.

With my superb acting, I fooled everyone.

On the very day the lawyer came to the house to handle the inheritance, the doorbell rang.

I opened the door, and there stood my husband, who had been dead for four years!

He hugged me, tears brimming in his eyes.

He said he'd lost his memory in a car accident, which was why he'd been missing so long, and now he'd finally come home.

Looking at the man before me, the one swearing he'd live a good life with me.

Every hair on my body stood on end.

1.

"Honey, you've suffered all these years on your own."

"Now that I'm back, I'll take care of everything at home from here on out."

When Saul finished speaking, he dove into the kitchen and washed the dishes I'd left from breakfast.

My hand found the fruit knife on the table, and cold sweat spread across my back.

How could this be?

I sealed him into that wall with my own hands...

Snapping out of it, I slowly walked up behind him with the knife:

"Where have you been all these years? I reported you to the police and they still couldn't find you."

Saul turned around with a smile and casually pinched my cheek.

"For the first three years I couldn't even remember my own name. I was working off the books in a factory out in the countryside."

"It's only lately that I got some of my memory back and remembered I have a wife I've loved for years."

Hearing that, I gripped the knife even tighter.

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

After I helped Saul build his business from nothing, he became a completely different person.

There was an endless string of women, endless fights.

I'd already talked myself into letting it go.

Men go bad once they have money. As his first wife, all I needed was to keep my hands on the money.

But then Saul got a sudden second wind and fell for Bianca Fox, a new intern at the company.

Besides money, Bianca also wanted the position of Mrs. Dickerson.

Saul not only felt nothing for what we'd had, he schemed against me again and again.

He wanted to saddle me with enormous debts and then kick me aside.

He even slipped drugs into the water cooler, trying to poison me.

I couldn't accept it. I planted this tree with my own handswhy should another woman sit back and enjoy the fruit?

After a huge fight, I followed Saul when he went out to a business dinner.

While he was drunk and out of his mind, I drove a knife into his heart.

Thinking back to that day, a sudden chill ran through me.

If he really were Saul, the first thing he'd do after cheating death would be to call the police and have me arrested.

Yet he hid for four years and showed up right when I was about to inherit the estate.

Or maybe he wasn't Saul at all...

I hid the knife up my sleeve and said, as if nothing was wrong:

"Take a shower first, wash off all that bad luck from outside."

He agreed readily, and even turned back to joke as he headed into the bathroom:

"I get itI have to be clean before I can get into my wife's bed."

Soon the sound of running water filled the bathroom.

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

The year we first got married, a fire suddenly broke out in the basement where we lived.

As Saul shielded me and ran for the exit, his back was burned by the scorched, collapsing doorframe.

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

That scar had once been Saul's get-out-of-death card in my mind.

One look at it, and I'd be able to tell whether he was a fake.

I stood outside the door struggling with myself for a long time.

Finally I took a deep breath and forced myself to calm down.

The moment I pushed the door open, the sight before me made my mind explode with a roar.

Steam billowed under the showerhead.

Saul stood with his back to me.

He was washing his hair, humming a song off-key.

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

Soaked in the hot water, it had turned red and swollen.

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

So many times I'd thought about divorcing him, and every time I saw that scar I forced the thought back down.

But I had bricked him into that wall with my own hands.

Afraid it would start to smell over time, I'd even troweled on two extra coats of cement!

A dead manhow could he turn up alive and well at my door four years later?!

My foot slipped, and I nearly dropped to my knees in the bathroom.

"Honey, what's on your mind?"

Saul turned and saw me, steadying me with a wet hand.

My mind went blank, and I shoved the towel at him.

"Nothing. Just bringing you a towel."

Suddenly he was all interest, and he wrapped an arm around my waist.

"Carolyn, I missed you so much."

"The whole ride home with the police, all I could think about was holding you."

His skin was scorching.

But that skin-to-skin touch made my knees go weak.

Before I got married, I'd worked three years as a nurse.

I'd been around dozens, hundreds of dead bodies.

I was certain Saul had completely stopped breathing back then.

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

I had to go back to my hometown.

I had to see with my own eyes whether Saul's bones were still in the pigpen!

"Get some sleep first. Something urgent came upI have to go out."

I pushed Saul away, grabbed only my phone, and hurried out the door.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, the feeling of being watched made me look up without thinking.

Saul stood at the window, smiling and waving at me.

I couldn't even manage a fake smile.

In a panic, I rushed straight to the train station.

My hometown was a small village with a dwindling population; now only a few elderly people living alone were left.

Afraid of being seen, I wandered around the village entrance until nightfall.

It wasn't until late at night that I stood in front of the pigpen with a shovel.

My heart was pounding.

A few shovelfuls in, a metallic gleam showed through the red brick.

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

Under the quiet moonlight, a sliver of a ring peeked from the gaps in the reddish-brown brick.

It was the ring I'd picked out myself when we married.

Four years ago, Saul had still worn it on his hand when he died.

He was right here in this wall! He hadn't gone anywhere!

I didn't dare dig any further.

As I stood there frozen, my phone suddenly rang.

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

"Honey, it's so latewhy aren't you home yet?"

"Where are you? Should I come pick you up?"

That familiar voice came through the receiver, and I was so terrified I dropped to the ground.

"It's fine, go to sleep."

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

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

I did my best to make my voice sound completely normal.

"Something urgent came up at work. I'll come home as soon as I've handled it."

The other end went silent.

After a few seconds came a caring reminder.

"You need to eat on time, even when you're by yourself."

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

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

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

What did he mean by that?

He wasn't Saul at all!

What was he trying to cover for me?

I hastily smoothed over the hole in the wall.

Under cover of night, I hurried back to the city.

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

Every one of them was concern.

Honey after honey.

But to me they were like needles.

Stabbing until my head felt ready to split open.

Saul's body was clearly still in the pigpen.

So who was this man strutting around my home right now?

It was already eight in the morning when I got back to the city.

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

Instead, I turned and went to the police station.

Saul had said an officer had brought him home, so I decided to take a gamble and go looking for clues.

I'd rather take the risk than share a room with a man whose background I couldn't place.

The moment the policewoman at the front desk heard my name, her eyes lit up.

"I know you. I'm the one who closed your husband's missing-persons case."

"At the time, my coworkers joked that your husband was such a hopeless romanticfour years of amnesia, and the first person he remembered was still you."

I gave an awkward laugh.

I hesitated for a while before I finally worked up the courage to ask:

"May I askhow did you confirm that he's my husband?"

The policewoman kept working on the papers in front of her, not even looking up.

"For missing persons like this, we have professional verification procedures."

"There's no way we'd match someone by mistake."

"Is there some kind of problem?"

I hesitated again and again, then came up with a vague answer.

"Just curious."

"With so many missing persons every day, how do the police tell who's real and who isn't?"

She giggled, her voice bright and crisp.

"In this day and age, finding a person is easy."

"He came in and reported it himself, said he only remembered your name."

"We found that you'd filed a missing-persons report before, and we compared him against the photo in the ID database."

Hearing that, I couldn't stop myself from blurting out:

"But so many people look alike. Isn't it possible to make a mistake just from a photo?"

The policewoman stopped what she was doing and glanced up at me.

"Besides the photo, we also compare fingerprints."

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

I stared at her, my eyes going wide with shock.

"My husband's fingerprints are in the database too?"

She nodded, her gaze turning more scrutinizing.

"His aren't the only ones in the fingerprint databaseyours are in there too."

"When you apply for a national ID card, they record your fingerprints."

"What, are you worried you've got the wrong husband?"

Even now, a sliver of hope still lingered in my heart.

"Could someone forge fingerprints?"

"After all, technology is so advanced these days."

She fell silent, staring hard at me, her tone wary but controlled.

"Ma'am, the fingerprint verification equipment at the police station is very advanced."

"What we scan is the subcutaneous fingerprint. If someone tried to fake it, the alarm would go off immediately."

"Are you in some kind of trouble?"

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

It felt like a ball of fire was lodged in my throat, with nowhere to let it out.

I could hardly tell her that the husband I'd killed had come back.

As I left the police station, the policewoman's parting words still echoed in my ears.

"Don't worry, all the information was compared."

"He's definitely your husband."

But I knew better than anyone.

Even if the photos matched and the fingerprints were identical

this man absolutely could not be Saul Dickerson!

Because the real Saul Dickerson had been killed by me four years ago!

I wandered through the streets in a daze.

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

Could it be that Saul's ghost had come back to take revenge on me?

But soon the cold wind blowing in my face scattered that ridiculous notion.

If ghosts were real, Saul should have come for his revenge four years ago

not waited four years, and then bothered to invent some excuse about amnesia.

The question came right back to where it started.

Just who was the man in my house now?

I climbed the stairs with a heavy heart, only to find someone I never expected at my door.

Bianca stood in the doorway, dressed to the nines.

My heart lurched.

Once I was certain the Saul in my home was a fake, the first person I suspected was Bianca.

After all, this little mistress was the one person in the world who understood Saul better than anyone, except me.

Could Bianca be plotting with someone on the inside to make off with Saul's inheritance?

Just as I was fretting over it, the door opened.

Saul didn't even glance at Bianca. Overjoyed, he pulled me back inside.

"Carolyn, dinner's just ready."

"Wash your hands first, and I'll get you some soup."

Bianca panicked and jammed her body against the doorframe.

"Saul! What's the meaning of this?"

"You were the one who said just looking at that plain old wife of yours made you want to throw up. Now the two of you are back together, is that it?"

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

I wasn't in the mood to argue with Bianca.

And I knew arguing was useless.

Every time I'd fought back before, all I got from Saul was an even bigger retaliation.

But Saul's face darkened.

He tucked me protectively against him and shoved Bianca out the door.

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

"Disrespect my wife again, and I'll be done with you!"

With that, he bolted the door, leaving Bianca to cry and carry on outside.

I sat on the sofa, utterly bewildered.

I couldn't begin to figure out what Saul was up to.

While I was still at a loss, he suddenly dropped to his knees in front of me with a thud and slapped himself twice.

"Carolyn, even though I can't remember what I did to hurt you in the past."

"I swear, from now on I'll be devoted only to you."

"Every mistake I made before, I'll spend the rest of my life making up for it."

Watching that earnest look on his face, I nearly went mad.

Beyond fear, what I felt most was hatred.

If Saul had only kept it in his pants back then and hadn't cheated.

If only he'd bowed his head and admitted his mistake sooner.

I never would have gone so far as to kill him.

And I never would have spent four years living in fear.

But I had bricked him into the wall with my own hands, so why had another Saul appeared, swearing over and over that he was devoted to me?

The relentless shocks of these past two days had completely shattered my mental defenses.

I didn't want to guess anymore.

So I just came straight out and asked:

"My husband died a long time ago."

"Who exactly are you?"

He stood up, stunned, and pulled me into his arms.

"Carolyn, I know I was wrong."

"Hit me, curse me, whatever you want, just don't say things in anger."

I pushed him away, and just as I was about to tell him the truth, the doorbell suddenly rang.

Saul went to open the door, and a team of fully armed officers stood outside.

"Ms. Gilbert, based on a public tip, we found the body of a man dead for four years in the abandoned pigsty on your property."

"According to our investigation, you bought a train ticket back to your hometown yesterday."

I was in a daze for a moment.

Then, in the end, I stood up calmly.

Just as I stretched out my hands to turn myself in, one of the officers took out a photo.

"This is the deceased. Take a look and identify him."

When I saw that photo, my mind went completely blank.

All the doubts and confusion finally strung themselves together.

I understood.

I finally knew what was going on!