Spilled Blood by Brian Freeman Read Free Book Online

personality better. That was true. Hannah had keen eyes for trouble, and she dove into situations without fear and with wicked strength. To her neighbors, though, she was Hannah Grohman, living in the house where she’d been born. She was a hero in St. Croix, because she hadreturned home after years away. She’d rejected the city and gone back to the country. She’d brought her daughter with her. No one did that.
    Chris parked outside the Grohman home at an intersection immediately across the street from the church. He saw lights inside the two-story house and caught a glimpse of someone moving behind the curtains. He recognized her silhouette, and his heart seized. It was too early to go inside. Too early to see her.
    He got out of the car and took big strides into the middle of the lawn, which was muddy from rain. Lots were large here; there was plenty of space. Trees were spread far apart, casting large pools of shade and leaving other patches for sunshine. The house itself had white wooden siding and a sprawling front porch, furnished with four Adirondack chairs. The black roof had a sharp angle above the second-floor windows. The house had stood in this place for nearly a century.
    The winding branch of the Spirit River flowed immediately behind the house, so close that Olivia probably could have jumped to the water from the window in her upstairs bedroom. It felt like a river out of
Huckleberry Finn
, with evergreen trees leaning over the sides of the bank and dipping their branches in the lazy current. With no leaves on the trees yet, he could see the brown water shouldering toward a gray metal railway bridge two hundred yards away. On the other side of the stream, dormant tracts of corn fields awaited the spring thaw.
    Chris stood alone on the bank, motionless, watching the quiet town of St. Croix as night fell. Above the moldy dankness of the water, he smelled the aromas from town kitchens. Roast chicken. Cookies. Two dozen types of hot dish. A few people had left up their holiday lights to blink in white rows on the roof lines. Eventually, he heard chimes in the bell tower of the church. It was eight o’clock. When the bells tolled for the eighth time and went quiet, silence fell over the town like a shroud. He didn’t see a soul.
    This was what Hannah had left him for. This lonely scene stripped from a Christmas card.
    He knew he was being unfair. A fifteen-year marriage didn’t end in a heartbeat, and it didn’t end without both of them forgetting to care for it. Back then, he’d felt blindsided when his amazing, beautiful wife had turned her back on him and taken away his daughter. He’d worked for years to make a life for the three of them, to keep them safe in a world that offered little security. He’d assumed that was what she wanted, and instead she’d said:
I can’t be that woman anymore.
    That woman. His wife.
    It began with the death of Hannah’s mother. Josephine Grohman, iron-willed like her daughter, had founded the Grohman Women’s Resource Center in Barron to address what she called an appalling inattention to the health and social service needs of rural women. She’d spent decades as a lightning rod for controversy, and her death had left a gaping void in the politics of southwestern Minnesota. During her slow decline, she’d made it clear that she wanted Hannah to fill that void. To come home and continue her legacy.
    Chris had never believed his wife would go; she would never leave him. He was wrong. She’d been silent for a year as she wrestled with her destiny, but then she came out of the shower, crying, took his hands, and told him she was going home. Just like that. It took him a long time to give up his bitterness. It took him two years to realize that the end of their marriage hadn’t begun with Josephine’s death. It had begun much earlier, as they led a slow march away from each other and watched it happen like spectators, doing nothing to stop it.
    Not her fault. Not