Excerpt of Blood Ties by Jane A. Adams

He had read somewhere that the desire to put your affairs in order is a universal one. That death has a way of focussing attention on unfinished business and that the instinct of most people is to leave behind as little trouble as possible.

That had been his initial impulse and he had lit a fire, the intent being to burn the whole damned lot. Why should another generation be troubled by the things that had haunted him for the past twenty years?

So, he had lit the fire in the kitchen, worried a little that the chimney would not be up to the job and unable to recall the last time this hearth had been used. His wife had prettied it up with displays of dried flowers and candles and would never have dreamed of using the grate for its original function, but she wasn’t around any more to tell him what he should and shouldn’t do and it felt oddly cathartic, tossing the dusty bouquet aside and chucking the candles into the flames. Catharsis aided by the now half empty bottle of single malt he had purchased just for this occasion.

He stacked up all his prospective fuel. Twenty years worth of birthday cards written to a girl who’d never aged since her seventeenth, never celebrated any of those anniversaries. Twenty years of Christmas cards and tiny, carefully wrapped gifts. His wife had opened a few of them and accused him of having an affair when she’d seen what they contained. Pretty pendants and slender gold bracelets, one year a Hermes scarf, though the teenager who had died would never have worn such a thing. Once, a pink diary, covered in shaggy fuchsia fur and complete with a tiny lock then a key ring, shaped like a small silver teddy bear. He planned to burn the lot, along with the newspaper clippings and the photographs and those letters. All of the letters.

Then, when it came to it, he was unable to do anything. He poured the final glass and stared at the sad little piles of possessions she hadn’t lived to possess and he came to a decision. Bugger leaving nothing behind, sod being tidy and thoughtful and cleaning up after himself. What had that cost him so far?

Later, when the police attended the scene and the smell of alcohol was so strong even on his dead body that they were left in little doubt as to the cause of the crash, the wonder would be that he could have actually even made it into the car. Blood alcohol, the Post Mortem told them, was so far over the limit he was lucky to have been able to stand up.

“The only good thing,” the attending officer said privately to his colleague, “is the bastard just hit a wall and not another vehicle.”

But then, there was no way he could have known that the wall had been selected so very carefully. The distance from home was so short, the road so straight, the street so likely to be deserted. Oh, in that respect he had planned and set everything in order with the minimum of mess behind, but the stacks of cards and letters and tiny presents would tell their own tale for those that found them and the ending to that story would not be nearly so decisive or so clean