John Saul (7 page)

Logan looked as if he were about to cry. “B-But who’s going to take care of us? Can’t we go with you?”

MaryAnne reached out and brushed a lock of blond hair out of her son’s eyes. “I’m afraid not, honey. But I won’t be gone very long.” She shot Alan a glance over Logan’s head. “And while I’m gone, Daddy’s going to take care of you. He’s going to move back in this morning, after he takes me to the airport. In fact, if you and Alison get dressed, you two can go along with us, then stop and get
some of Daddy’s things on the way back. How does that sound?”

Logan brightened immediately. “Really?” he demanded. “Daddy’s going to live here again?”

“Well, who else would take care of you while I’m gone?” MaryAnne countered, unwilling to answer his question directly. Logan darted back to the room he shared with his sister, but Alison stayed behind.

“Is
Dad coming back?” she asked, glancing from one parent to the other. “Are we all going to be together again?”

Feeling both her daughter’s and her husband’s eyes on her, MaryAnne frantically searched for some kind of an answer, but found none. “I don’t know,” she finally said as the silence in the room grew strained. “I can’t tell you right now, darling. We’ll just have to see what happens, all right?”

Alison hesitated, then nodded and left the room, and a moment later MaryAnne and Alan heard their daughter sending Logan to the bathroom while she got dressed.

“It’s my room, too!” Logan protested. “You can’t just kick me out!”

“I can as long as I’m bigger than you,” Alison reminded him. There was a slam as Logan stamped out of the shared bedroom, then another slam as he went into the bathroom to sulk.

Silently, feeling Alan’s eyes on her, MaryAnne went back to her packing.

“We’re going to have to work this out, honey,” Alan said, finally starting to help her fold the clothes she’d laid out on her bed. “When you come back, we’re going to have to decide what to do. If we get back together, and I can get rid of my apartment, we’ll be able to afford a room for Logan. He’s ten years old now. He should have a room of his own.”

MaryAnne put the last of the clothes in the suitcase, closed it, and snapped the locks. “When I get back,” she said firmly. “I won’t talk about any of this until I get back. And then—” She hesitated, then shrugged helplessly. “Then we’ll see.”

Alan opened his mouth to speak, but MaryAnne held up a hand to stop him. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t ask me any questions, and don’t ask for any more explanations of why I’m going. I don’t owe you any explanations at all, but you still owe me plenty.”

By the time she got out of the car at the airport, she and Alan were, once more, barely speaking to each other.

“H
ow come you and Mom keep fighting?”

Alan emerged from the closet in the bedroom of the furnished apartment he’d rented after the break-up with Eileen Chandler, his three suits and a few shirts—still on their hangers—draped over his left arm. Though Alison appeared to be concentrating on packing his clothes into the battered suitcase on the bed, he could sense the tension in her body as she waited for his answer.

“It just happens that way sometimes,” he said. And your mother’s being pigheaded about giving me another chance, he didn’t add, though the words were on the tip of his tongue.

“Did Little Miss Blondie really kick you out?” Logan piped.

“Logan,” Alison groaned. “You’re not supposed to call her that! We’re not even supposed to know that’s what Mom and Susan—” She clapped her hands over her mouth and turned to look at her father.

“Little Miss Blondie?” Alan echoed, not certain whether to laugh or be angry at the appellation his wife had assigned to his former girlfriend. But then, seeing the fear of a blow-up in both his children’s eyes, he chuckled. “Well, Eileen
is
small, and she
is
blond, and she
is
still single, so I guess it fits, doesn’t it?” As the children relaxed, and he began laying the suits and shirts into the suitcase, he tried to dismiss his transgression with a shrug. “And I guess the whole thing was just a stupid mistake. Anyway, it’s over, and all I want to do now is make things right with your mother, and move back home so everything can be like it used to be.”

“Then why don’t we just move all your stuff?” Logan suggested. “That way, when Mom comes home, you’ll already be there. I mean, you’re going to be there anyway, aren’t you?”

Alan reached out and tousled his son’s hair. “I wish it were that simple,” he replied. But as he glanced around the dingy room he’d been sleeping in for almost a month, he began to wonder. Why not? September’s rent was almost due. It made far better sense simply to move out now, than to stay in this depressing place. The furniture in the living room, great sagging masses upholstered in some coarse green fabric that threatened to peel the skin off his fingers every time he touched it, should have been relegated to a Dumpster years ago, and the sagging bed wasn’t any better. There was no real kitchen—only a converted closet barely big enough for one person, in the living room, which he suspected had been the dining room of a much larger apartment, back when the building was new, decades ago.

So why not just move back in? Even if MaryAnne kicked him out again when she got home, he could certainly find someplace better than this to stay until she came to her senses.

Besides, hadn’t MaryAnne herself suggested it? What was he supposed to do for the next few days, come over here every time he needed something?

“You know, you’re right, Logan,” he declared, his mind suddenly made up. “Let’s go down to the basement and find some boxes and pack everything up.”

With the prospect of their father moving home permanently, the mood of both the children immediately lifted from the silent tension of the ride to and from the airport to one of noisy joy. Twenty minutes later the job was done, the few things Alan had acquired in the months since he’d walked out on MaryAnne barely filling two large cardboard cartons. After they’d stowed the two boxes and his suitcase in the car, Alan left a note for the manager, announcing that he’d left, stuffed the note and his key into an envelope, and slid it under the manager’s door.

Twenty minutes later he was back in his own house, the suitcase open on the bed. His suits slung over his arm, he
went to the large closet that had always been roomy enough to hold both his and MaryAnne’s clothes, and slid some of his wife’s dresses down to make room.

And found himself staring at an unfamiliar sport shirt, at least two sizes too large for himself.

“Alison?” he called. “Alison!”

A second later his daughter appeared at the bedroom door. The look on her face as her eyes focused on the shirt clutched in his hand made the message clear.

“What the hell’s been going on around here?” he demanded. “What did your mother do, move her boyfriend in the minute I was gone?” As Alison stood frozen in the doorway, her younger brother hovering behind her, Alan hurled the shirt to the floor, then kicked it against the wall. Reflexively, Alison scurried across to pick it up.

“I-It’s Bob’s,” she stammered. “I guess he …” Her voice trailed off as she saw the fury in her father’s eyes.

“Who the hell is Bob?” Alan demanded. “What’s been going on around here, anyway?”

Logan fearfully clutched Alison’s hand, and her eyes glistened with tears. “H-He isn’t anybody, Dad,” she said. “He’s just a guy Mom went out with a few times, that’s all.”

“A few times?” Alan repeated, his voice crackling. “If she just went out with him a few times, what the hell is his shirt doing in my closet?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Alison was suddenly shouting, the tears of a second before giving way to anger. “Maybe he just left it, Dad! Maybe he was helping Mom out with the yardwork, so she washed his shirt for him!”

“Yeah, sure!” Alan spat the words out bitterly, his rage ballooning. “How dumb do you think I am?”

Alison recoiled almost as if she’d been slapped, but held her ground. “Well, so what?” she shot back. “So what if he even spent the night with Mom? What were you doing? Why is what she was doing when you weren’t even here any of your business? Come on, Logan. Maybe Mom’s right! Maybe she shouldn’t let Dad move back in!” Still grasping her brother’s hand, Alison half dragged the little
boy out of the room. A second later Alan heard her slamming the door of the room the children shared.

His fury only inflamed by his daughter’s outburst, he snatched up the offending shirt and ripped it up the back.

What the hell kind of tramp
was
MaryAnne, anyway? And how many men had there been since he’d been gone? She’d probably had one waiting all the time. No wonder he’d fallen for Eileen Chandler, with MaryAnne ignoring him while she flirted with every man in town! It would serve her right if he didn’t move back in at all. And trying to make him feel guilty over one lousy mistake! He ripped the shirt again, yanking one of the sleeves loose, then wadded the remains up and hurled them against the wall. What else had this guy left around the house?

He began jerking the drawers of the bureau open, pawing through them, then abandoned the chest in favor of the bathroom. He threw open the medicine cabinet, searching for anything MaryAnne’s boyfriend might have stored away.

But all he found were his own things.

His shaving brush, still on the shelf where he always kept it.

His toothbrush, hanging in the rack, just where it always was.

His Right Guard was still there and his shaving cream; even the antibiotics Dr. Weinberg had prescribed two years ago when he’d come down with a bronchial infection. All exactly where he’d left them.

His rage began to drain away. As he stood gazing at the array of his things, things that hadn’t even been moved aside while he was gone, a feeling of shame began to creep over him.

What the hell had he been thinking of? Alison was right—what business was it of his if MaryAnne had seen someone else while he was sleeping with Eileen Chandler? Maybe he should just count himself lucky that she hadn’t actually divorced him. Leaving the bathroom, he went to the kids’ room, and tapped softly.

“Go away,” Logan said, his voice muffled by the closed door.

Alan knocked again, then turned the knob and opened the door a crack. “Kids? Hey, look, what I said just now—well, I guess it was pretty stupid. Anyway, what do you say we start over, huh? Let’s pretend I just got here, okay?”

Alison and Logan glanced uncertainly at each other, then Alison spoke for both of them. “You’re not mad at Mom anymore?”

Alan took a deep breath, then let it out in a sigh that was half resignation, half defeat. “No,” he agreed. “I’m not mad at your mom anymore. But I guess she’s still pretty mad at me.”

Logan scrambled off his bed, grinning. “It’ll be okay,” he declared. “She gets real mad at me sometimes, but she still loves me. And I bet she still loves you, too!”

A few minutes later, as Alan resumed putting away the few things he’d taken with him when he left, Logan’s words echoed in his mind.

What if MaryAnne didn’t still love him? Then what would he do?

Bleakly, he realized he didn’t have the slightest idea.

“Mrs. Carpenter? MaryAnne Carpenter?”

MaryAnne, her large purse slung over one shoulder and her single suitcase clutched in her right hand, had just stepped through the door into the gate area of Boise Municipal Airport. She instinctively ran her free hand through her hair, certain that she must look even worse than she felt. But the rugged-looking man striding toward her, arm outstretched to take her suitcase, seemed not to see the exhaustion she was feeling.

“I’m Charley Hawkins,” he said, his deep voice resonating in the nearly empty waiting area. He looked to be about sixty, with salt-and-pepper hair and a craggy face that MaryAnne found oddly reassuring. “I’m sorry we have to meet under these circumstances.” His voice trailed off, but then he plunged on. “But anyway, it seemed like I should be the one to come down and pick you up. I’m—I was Ted and Audrey’s attorney. Or, anyway, their attorney up here.
Of course, Ted had a firm in San Francisco that handled most of his affairs, but for the ranch, he pretty much always used me. This all the luggage you brought?”

Taken aback by the sudden change of subject, MaryAnne managed a nod, then let herself be steered along by Charley Hawkins’s firm grip on her elbow.

“My car’s right outside. It won’t take more than a couple of hours to drive up to Sugarloaf.” He kept up a steady patter of innocuous talk until MaryAnne’s suitcase was in the backseat of his Cadillac, she was settled in the front next to him, and they were well away from the airport, heading northeast on Highway 21 toward Stanley.

“What happened?” MaryAnne finally asked when she felt ready to hear the details of her friends’ deaths. “I can hardly believe they’re both …” She left the sentence unfinished, even now knowing that if she said the final word, she might well lose the little control she still had over her emotions.

Charley Hawkins shook his head sadly. “Accidents, so far as anyone can tell,” he began. For the next few miles, as the big car hurtled through the bleak landscape around Boise, the lawyer explained what details he knew of the tragedies that had befallen Ted and Audrey Wilkenson the day before. But all the time he spoke, the words of his first sentence hung in MaryAnne’s mind.

“You said they were accidents ‘so far as anyone can tell,’ ” she repeated when he was finished. “Is there any question about it? Is there some possibility that—well, that someone might have killed them?”

Charley Hawkins glanced over at her, but for a long moment said nothing. When he did finally speak, though, the timbre of his voice had changed slightly, and MaryAnne knew she was now listening to a lawyer, not merely a friend of Audrey and Ted’s. “Like I said, as far as we know, they were both accidents. But there’s a question about what could have spooked that animal. Sheika’s always been the steadiest, gentlest horse around. Almost more like a dog than a horse, if you know what I mean. And as for Audrey, well, there weren’t any witnesses, and it wasn’t like she didn’t know exactly where she was. With
the moon last night, it had to be almost as bright as day up there, and Audrey wasn’t the kind to take many risks. So I guess you could say there’s a question of what made her fall. Not that we’re ever likely to find any answers, but …”