Anne, startled by the sudden tug on the leash, broke stride and wheeled around to reprimand the little animal. But the moment he felt the leash slackening, Boots’s stubborn terrier ancestry came to the fore and he pulled the leash taut again, straining, with the stocky body he’d inherited from the bulldog branch of his family tree, toward the thick tangle of vegetation that covered the reservoir’s bank. Now he was barking insanely.
“Heel, Boots,” Anne commanded.
For just a second the little dog glanced back at her, but then he resumed his struggle against the leash. The two of them stayed in place for nearly a minute, Anne commanding the dog to heel, Boots refusing to budge. In the end, knowing she was ruining whatever minimal training Kevin and Glen might have succeeded in inculcating into the little animal’s head, Anne gave in. “Oh, all right. If it’s that important to you, pick whatever spot you want.”
Letting the dog have his head, she followed, already reaching into her pocket for one of the blue plastic bags she used to clean up after her son’s pet. But instead of sniffing madly around until he’d found the perfect place to squat, Boots pulled harder and harder, his body low to the ground as he scrambled toward the brow of the hill. Then he was over the edge of the steep embankment, disappearing from Anne’s view for a moment, but at last falling silent, his mad barking dying away as he apparently reached whatever goal he’d set for himself.
When she came to the edge of the lawn where the level area around the reservoir gave way to the slope and a tangle of brush, the dog was nowhere to be seen. Then she spotted him. He’d pushed into the mass of vegetation and was sniffing eagerly at something she couldn’t quite see.
Reaching out and pushing a branch aside, Anne looked down.
The dead, empty eyes of Joyce Cottrell gazed back up at her.
Anne’s first instinct was to be sick, but she refused to give in to the wave of nausea.
Her next instinct was to try to help the woman whom she’d instantly recognized as her next-door neighbor, but even as the urge rose in her she knew Joyce was far beyond any aid she could give her.
Her third instinct was to scream for help, and that was the instinct she finally acted upon.
CHAPTER 34
“Where’s Mom?” The question was issued with a darkly accusatory tone, as if Kevin suspected his mother had been abducted, if not out and out murdered.
“She’s just jogging in the park,” Glen told him as he poured his son a glass of orange juice, then moved the Grape-Nuts from the cupboard to the kitchen table.
“She’s supposed to be back by now,” Kevin informed him.
Glen glanced at the blue-green digits on the oven clock. Though he wasn’t about to admit it to his son, he realized that Kevin was right. Before his heart attack, their jog had usually lasted no more than half an hour — forty-five minutes at the most. Unless the digital display was wrong, Anne had been gone more than an hour. He was pretty sure he knew why, but he wasn’t about to get into that with Kevin. Both he and Anne subscribed to the idea that even if their marriage wasn’t perfect — not that it was far short — they had no need to air their dirty laundry in front of the kids. Besides, even if he’d been willing to explain to Kevin what had happened between himself and Anne that morning, he wasn’t quite sure he could. The truth was, he wasn’t certain himself. When he woke up and found her looking at him, he thought she was still angry at him from the night before. But then they’d made love, and for a few minutes it seemed as though everything was back to normal. Then, when she suggested that he’d been acting “off the wall,” he’d flown off the handle. He shook his head. It wasn’t as if she was wrong — he knew perfectly well that he hadn’t been behaving very much like the man she’d married. Yet instead of confessing to the unaccountable blackouts — and that they were frightening him — he’d barked that he was just obeying his doctor’s orders and that there was nothing wrong at all. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to tell her. Indeed, in those few quiet minutes after they made love, he’d been rehearsing the words he would say.
Only when it came time to speak, something inside had stopped him, some voice inside his head had whispered to him: Do you want to go back to the hospital? Do you want her to think you’re crazy? The warning stopped him cold, even knowing he was shutting Anne out, lying to her, refusing to trust her.
Of course she hadn’t wanted him to go jogging with her, and of course she had decided to take an extra turn around the reservoir. He could almost hear her telling herself to run her anger out in the park instead of taking it home and dumping it on her family. If she could leave the bad moment in the park, the least he could do was be dressed and have breakfast ready for her by the time she got back, so she’d at least know she wasn’t married to an invalid who was planning to lie around in a bathrobe for the rest of his life.
“She’ll probably be back by the time you finish your cereal,” Glen told Kevin as Heather came into the kitchen. She poured herself a cup of coffee and started working on the crossword puzzle Glen himself had begun only a few minutes earlier. “Do you mind?” he asked his daughter. “I was planning to do that crossword this morning.”
Heather shrugged. “So far, you only put in two words, and one of them was wrong. Besides, if you don’t do it in ink, it doesn’t count.”
“Something’s happened to Mom,” Kevin announced.
Heather looked up, glancing at her brother then turning to her father. “Is she sick?”
Glen sighed exaggeratedly and retrieved the crossword from his daughter. “Nothing’s happened to her. She’s fine. She just decided to jog a little longer than usual this morning, that’s all.”
“They had a fight,” Heather instantly translated for Kevin.
“We didn’t have a fight,” Glen told her. “How come nobody around here ever believes anything?”
“Because grown-ups always lie to kids,” Kevin informed him. “Justin Reynolds told me so. And how come Mom’s allowed to go to the park by herself, when I’m not?”
“Because she’s a grown-up,” Glen replied, leaning toward Kevin and giving him a mock-fierce glare. “You can tell Justin Reynolds that that’s another thing grown-ups do.”
Kevin began to giggle, but then Heather spoke again.
“Maybe we better go look for her,” she said. “She’s never gone this long. What if something has happened to her?”
Glen felt the balance of power in the room tilt. In about five more seconds, unless Anne came walking in the door, Kevin would team up with Heather and he might as well give up. Better to offer an instant compromise rather than wind up having them late for school. “I’ll tell you what — I’ll go take a look, while you two finish your breakfast. But I suspect that your mom will come breezing in ten seconds after I’m gone, and I’ll just be on a wild goose chase.”
Before Kevin could plead with him to come along, Glen was out the back door and behind the wheel of the ten-year-old Saab he refused to part with despite Kevin’s insistence that it was a “dweebmobile.”