Chapter 3 - The Unopened Box
Boyd stared at her, the hum of the lab's refrigeration unit filling the quiet room. "Clay asked you? Clay died two years ago."
"I know when he died, Mr. Gaines," Roz said, her voice cracking. She walked over to the lab door, turned the deadbolt, and pulled down the blinds over the interior window facing the hallway. "I know every single second of the day he died. I count them."
She sat down heavily on a wooden stool beside the counter, her hands clutching the brass key so hard her knuckles turned white.
"If you know what people are saying about you, why haven't you defended yourself?" Boyd asked, sitting on the edge of a nearby workbench. "Why let Trudy ruin your reputation?"
"Because the truth would kill her," Roz said simply. She looked up at him, her dark eyes filled with a hollow, haunted pain. "Trudy lost her husband to cancer twenty years ago. Clay was all she had left. Her entire world, her entire identity, is built on the belief that Clay was a perfect, saintly son who died because a heartless woman broke him."
"And he wasn't?"
Roz let out a dry, bitter laugh. "Clay was wonderful. He was kind, he was hard-working, and he loved his mother more than life itself. But Clay had a secret, Mr. Gaines. A secret he kept hidden from everyone in this town—especially Trudy."
Boyd leaned forward. "What secret?"
Roz gripped the key tighter. "Three years ago, Clay started getting sick. Severe stomach pain, chronic fatigue, night sweats. He didn't want to go to the doctor in Dothan because he knew everyone at the clinic and didn't want Trudy to worry. So he went to a specialist in Tallahassee."
She paused, taking a deep, shuddering breath.
"It was stage-four pancreatic cancer," Roz whispered. "By the time they found it, it had already spread to his liver. The doctor gave him six months. Maybe eight if he did aggressive chemo."
Boyd felt a cold chill run down his spine. "Trudy never said anything about cancer."
"Because Clay never told her!" Roz exclaimed quietly, tears finally spilling over her lashes. "He begged the doctor not to put it in his local records. He paid for his treatments in cash so the insurance paperwork wouldn't go to Trudy's house. He didn't want his mother to watch him wither away the same way she watched his father die."
Boyd remembered the long, agonizing months he had spent beside his wife Lee's hospital bed, watching the illness strip away her strength day by day until there was nothing left. The quiet horror of that helpless waiting was something he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy.
"He chose to suffer alone?" Boyd asked softly.
"No," Roz said, wiping her face with the back of her lab coat sleeve. "He chose to suffer with me. For five months, I drove him to Tallahassee every Tuesday for chemotherapy. I held his head over the toilet while he threw up blood. I bought his medication, I cooked his food, and I lied to his mother every single weekend when she asked why he looked so tired."
"My God," Boyd breathed.
"The five thousand dollars Trudy thinks I stole?" Roz continued, her voice trembling. "That was Clay's savings. He withdrew it to pay for his final rounds of palliative care when his cash ran out. He didn't want Trudy mortgaging her house to pay for treatment that wasn't going to save him."
Boyd looked at the small woman sitting before him. The pieces were beginning to fit together, but the picture they formed was far darker than he had imagined. "Then why break off the engagement? Why leave?"
"Because Clay made me promise," Roz said, her head dropping into her hands. "A month before he died, the pain got unbearable. He knew he didn't have much time left. He told me that if he died in a hospital bed, skin and bones, Trudy would spend the rest of her life suffocating in grief, knowing she failed to save him."
She swallowed hard, looking up at Boyd with raw, devastating honesty.
"He wanted her to be angry instead of broken," Roz said. "He told me, 'If she hates you, Roz, she'll have something to focus on. She'll have energy. Anger will keep her alive. But if she knows I was dying and kept it from her, the guilt will kill her.'"
Boyd was speechless. The sheer, tragic madness of Clay Odum's sacrifice hung in the air like heavy smoke.
"So we staged a fight," Roz whispered. "I packed my bags. I pretended to be a greedy, heartless monster. I moved to Montgomery. Two weeks later... Clay didn't die in a car accident because he was drunk, Mr. Gaines. He took a heavy dose of his prescription pain medication, got behind the wheel, and drove into that tree. He ended it on his own terms before the cancer could finish him off."
Boyd closed his eyes, his chest aching with a familiar, crushing weight. "He committed suicide."
"The coroner was an old friend of the family," Roz said. "He listed it as an accidental crash to preserve Clay's life insurance for Trudy. Everyone in town believed he died of a broken heart. And Trudy got her scapegoat."
"And you let her blame you," Boyd said, horror creeping into his voice. "For two years, you let an entire town treat you like a villain."
"It was what Clay wanted," Roz said quietly. "I loved him enough to do it."
"Then why come back, Rosalyn?" Boyd asked, stepping closer to her. "Why subject yourself to this torment now?"
Roz looked down at the brass key in her hand. "Because three months ago, I got a letter in the mail. It was a pre-scheduled delivery from a legal firm in Tallahassee. Clay set it up before he died."
She held up the brass key.
"Clay left a safety deposit box at First National Bank," Roz said. "In the letter, he told me that inside the box is a recorded tape and a letter addressed to his mother, explaining everything. He said I was supposed to open it two years after his death, on the first-roast Tuesday of August."
Boyd glanced at the clock on the lab wall. It was nearly four o'clock.
"Today is the first-roast Tuesday of August," Boyd realized.
"Yes," Roz whispered. "Clay said two years was enough time for Trudy to heal. He wanted me to give her the letter so she'd finally know the truth, and so I could finally clear my name. But when I got back to Dothan... when I saw how frail Trudy has become, how much she relies on her hatred of me to get through the day..."
Roz pulled her knees up to her chest, her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs.
"I can't do it, Mr. Gaines," she wept. "If I give her that letter, I destroy her memory of her perfect son. She'll realize he lied to her every day for a year. She'll realize he died alone in agony while she was making him boiled peanuts. It will ruin the only thing she has left."
May you like
Boyd stood in the silent lab, looking at the brass key. He realized then that the secret in that safety deposit box wasn't just about a dead man's cancer or a stolen savings account.
It was a bomb. And Rosalyn Carter had been holding the detonator for two agonizing years, burning her own life to ash just to keep an old woman from feeling the blast.