He didn’t finish. The officers nudged him toward the car, opened the door, and put him in the back. The door slammed shut, and Susan could no longer see his face, just his silhouette behind the tinted glass.
“Mrs. Miller,” the captain was beside her again. “There’s something you need to see. If you feel up to it, of course.”
She nodded, though she wasn’t sure she was up for anything. They led her over to the bus. A mechanic was already at work—an older man in greasy coveralls with a gray mustache and calloused hands. He was lying on the ground, shining a flashlight at something underneath, his face grim.
“Lord have mercy,” he muttered to himself. “To think someone would do something like this.”
“What have you got, Mike?” the captain asked.
The mechanic slid out from under the bus, grunting as he got to his knees.
“The brake line’s been cut. Not just hacked at—it was done smart, I’ll give ‘em that. It’s a small slice, so the fluid leaks out slowly. On a flat road at low speed, the brakes would feel almost normal. But the second you have to brake hard, or on a steep grade—that’s it. The pressure drops, the pedal goes to the floor, and you’ve got a runaway bus.” He nodded toward the downhill slope. “See that turn? That’s a good forty-degree grade, maybe more. The driver would’ve hit the brakes, and there’d be nothing there. He’d have gone off the road on the very first curve. It’s a fifty-foot drop down there. Bus is full, twenty-five people.” He shook his head. “I don’t even want to think about what would have happened.”
Susan’s legs gave out. The captain caught her by the elbow and helped her sit on the steps of the bus.
“Deep breaths,” he said. “That’s it. Again.”
She did as he said, but the air wouldn’t fill her lungs. An image flashed in her mind: the bus careening down the winding road without brakes, the screams of the passengers, the impact with the trees and rocks below, the twisted metal, the blood. The blood the woman had warned her about.
“And my husband?” she whispered. “He was on the bus, too. What was he planning to do?”
The captain exchanged a look with the mechanic.
“The fourth stop,” he said. “That was the last stop before the descent. Our information suggests he planned to get off there. Say he was feeling sick, something like that. It’s about two miles from there to the start of the hill. He would have had plenty of time to get to a safe distance.”
Susan closed her eyes. It had all been planned. Every detail, every step. He was going to get off early, leave her on a bus that was set to crash minutes later. And then what? Go home, play the grieving husband, collect the inheritance?
“The cabin,” she whispered. “It was because of the cabin…”
“We know,” the captain nodded. “The property is in your name, correct? Purchased with the money from your mother’s condo?”
“Yes…”
“If you had died, as your legal spouse, he would have inherited everything. But that’s not all.” The captain motioned to an officer, who brought over a clear evidence bag containing the tool and gloves from Susan’s tote. “The lab will confirm, but preliminarily, the gloves are covered in the same type of brake fluid that was leaking from the bus. The wrench is the right kind for this model’s brake system. And all of it was found in your bag.”
Susan stared at the bag, unable to believe what she was seeing.
“He wanted to… frame me?”
“It looks that way. If you died, the evidence would point to you. A disturbed woman commits a murder-suicide, taking innocent people with her. And if by some miracle you survived, you’d be charged with mass murder. Either way, he walks away clean.”
The world tilted and swam before Susan’s eyes. Twenty years. For twenty years, she had lived with a man capable of this. She had shared a bed with him, cooked his breakfast, washed his shirts. And all that time, he was… Who was he? Who had she been loving all these years?
“We found something else,” the captain continued. “On his phone. Text messages with a friend, from a few weeks ago. He was discussing the plan. Asking about how brake systems work, how to make it look like an accident. He mentioned the bag, and which stop he was going to get off at. It’s all documented.”
Susan suddenly started to laugh. It was a hysterical, terrible sound, more like a sob.
“He’s an idiot,” she choked out between laughs. “My God, what an idiot! All of this for a cabin? For a little wooden house and an apple tree?”
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