The patrol car moved up the street, and Annie walked into the large living room. She sat in an armchair and listened to the grandfather clock ticking. Her son, Tom, had gone back to Columbus early, ostensibly to find a part-time job before school started, but in reality because Spencerville, and Williams Street in particular, had nothing to offer him for the summer, or for the rest of his life, for that matter. Her daughter, Wendy, was up at Lake Michigan with the church youth group. Annie had volunteered to be one of the chaperons, but Cliff had remarked smilingly, "Who's gonna chaperon you, darlin'?"
She looked around at the room that she'd decorated with country antiques and family heirlooms. Cliff had been both proud and sarcastic regarding her taste. She came from a far better family than he did, and at first she'd tried to minimize the dissimilarities in their backgrounds. But he never let her forget their social differences, pointing out that her family was all brains and good manners and no money, and his family had money even if they were a little rough around the edges. And brainless, Annie thought.
Cliff liked to show off the furnishings, show off his stuffed and mounted animals in the basement, his shooting trophies, his press clippings, his guns, his trophy house, and his trophy wife. Look but don't touch. Admire me and my trophies. Cliff Baxter was the classic collector, Annie thought, an anal compulsive personality who couldn't differentiate between a wife and a mounted deer head.
Annie recalled with amazement how proud she'd once been of her husband and her house, and how much hope and optimism she'd had as a young bride, building a life and a marriage. Cliff Baxter had been an attentive and courtly finance, especially in the months preceding their marriage. If Annie had any second thoughts about the engagement — which, in fact, she had — Cliff had given her no reason to break it off. But early in her marriage, she'd noticed that her husband was just going through the motions of marriage, keying off her in what he did and said. One day she realized with a sinking feeling that Cliff Baxter was not a charming rogue who was eager to be domesticated by a good woman, but was in fact a borderline sociopath. Soon, however, he lost interest in his halfhearted attempt to become normal. The only thing that kept him in line, kept him from going completely over the edge, she knew, was his official capacity as guardian of law and order. Spencerville had made the bad boy the hall monitor, and it worked for Spencerville and for the bad boy, but Annie lived in fear of what might happen if Cliff became a private citizen, without the prestige and accountability of office. She swore that the day he retired or was asked to step down, she'd run.
She thought of his gun collection: rifles, shotguns, pistols. Each and every weapon was locked in a rack the way a good cop would do. Most cops, however, probably all cops, gave their wife a key just in case there was an intruder. Cliff Baxter, though, did not give his wife a key. She knew how he thought: Cliff feared his wife would shoot him at four A.M. one morning and claim she mistook him for an intruder. There were nights when she stared at the locked weapons and wondered if she would actually put a pistol to her head or his head and pull the trigger. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the answer was no; but there had been moments...
She tilted her head back in the chair and felt the tears roll down her eyes. The phone rang, but she didn't answer it.
She gathered the dinner scraps in a piece of newspaper and took them out to the kennel. She opened the wire gate and threw the scraps inside. Three of the four dogs — the German shepherd, the golden retriever, and the Labrador — attacked the food. The fourth dog, a small gray mongrel, ran to Annie. She let the dog run out of the kennel and closed the gate.
Annie walked back to the house, the gray mongrel following her.
In the kitchen, she fed the dog raw hamburger, then poured herself a glass of lemonade, then went out to the big wraparound porch and sat in the swing seat, her legs tucked under her, the gray mongrel beside her. It was cooling off, and a soft breeze stirred the old trees on the street. The air smelled like rain. She felt better in the fresh air.
Surely, she thought, there was a way out, a way that didn't pass through the town cemetery. Now that her daughter was about to start college, Annie realized that she couldn't put off making a decision any longer. If she ran, she thought, he'd probably grab her before she got out of town, and if she did manage to slip away, he'd follow. If she went to a lawyer in Spencer County, he'd know about it before she even got home. Cliff Baxter wasn't particularly liked or respected, but he was feared, and she could relate to that.
The patrol car passed again and Kevin Ward waved to her. She ignored him, and the dog barked at the police car.
Still, she thought, this was America, it was the twentieth century, and there were laws and protection. But instinctively, she knew that was irrelevant in her situation. She had to run, to leave her home, her community, and her family, and that made her angry. She would have preferred a solution more in keeping with her own standards of behavior, not his. She would like to tell him she wanted a divorce, and that she was moving in with her sister, and that they should contact lawyers. But Police Chief Baxter wasn't about to give up one of his trophies, wasn't about to be made a fool of in his town. He knew, without a word being said, that she wanted out, but he also knew, or thought he knew, that he had her safely under lock and key. He put her in a pumpkin shell. It was best to let him keep thinking that.
This summer night, sitting on the porch swing made her think of summer nights long ago when she was very happy and deeply in love with another man. There was a letter in her pocket and she pulled it out. By the light from the window behind her, she read the envelope again. She had addressed it to Keith Landry at his home address in Washington, and it had apparently been forwarded to someplace else where someone had put it in another envelope and mailed it back to her with a slip of paper that read: Unable to forward.
Keith had once written to her saying that if she ever received such a message, she should not try to write to him again. She would be contacted by someone in his office with a new address.
Annie Baxter was a simple country girl, but not that simple. She knew what he was telling her: If a letter was ever returned to her, he was dead, and someone in Washington would call or write to her regarding the circumstances.
It had been two days since the letter had been returned to her sister's address in the next county, where Keith sent all his letters to Annie.
Since then, Annie Baxter had feared answering her phone and feared seeing her sister's car pull up again with another letter, an official letter from Washington with a line or two beginning with, "We regret to inform you..."
But on second thought, why would they even bother with that? What was she to Keith Landry? A long-ago girlfriend, a sometimes pen pal. She hadn't seen him in over twenty years and had no expectation that she'd ever see him again.
But perhaps he'd instructed his people, whoever they were, to tell her if he died. Probably he wanted to be buried here with the generations of his family. He might, at this moment, she suddenly realized, be lying in Gibbs Funeral Home. She tried to convince herself it didn't matter that much; she was sad, but really how did it affect her? An old lover died, you heard the news, you became nostalgic and dwelled on your own mortality, you thought of younger days, you said a prayer, and you went on with your life. Maybe you went to the funeral service if it was convenient. It struck her then that if Keith Landry was dead, and if he was going to be buried in Spencerville, she could not possibly go to the service, nor, she thought, could she expect to sneak off to his grave someday without being seen by her constant police chaperons.