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  "Love you, Mom."

  "Love you, too."

  She hung up, feeling good again. Smiling. But as she stood there, leaning against the counter, the smile faded.

  A clunk.

  There had been a clunk when she pushed the box of catalogues back under the workbench. Not a clatter, as if the box had struck a dropped tool, but a clunk. Sort of hollow-sounding.

  I don't care.

  Unfortunately, this was not true. The clunk felt like unfinished business. The carton did, too. Were there other magazines like Bondage Bitches stashed in there?

  I don't want to know.

  Right, right, but maybe she should find out, just the same. Because if there was just the one, she was right about its being sexual curiosity that had been fully satisfied by a single peek into an unsavory (and unbalanced, she added to herself) world. If there were more, that might still be all right--he was throwing them out, after all--but maybe she should know.

  Mostly... that clunk. It lingered on her mind more than the question about the magazines.

  She snagged a flashlight from the pantry and went back out to the garage. She pinched the lapels of her housecoat shut immediately and wished she'd put on her jacket. It was really getting cold.

  - 4 -

  Darcy got down on her knees, pushed the box of catalogues to one side, and shone the light under the worktable. For a moment she didn't understand what she was seeing: two lines of darkness interrupting the smooth baseboard, one slightly fatter than the other. Then a thread of disquiet formed in her midsection, stretching from the middle of her breastbone down to the pit of her stomach. It was a hiding place.

  Leave this alone, Darcy. It's his business, and for your own peace of mind you should let it stay that way.

  Good advice, but she had come too far to take it. She crawled under the worktable with the flashlight in her hand, steeling herself for the brush of cobwebs, but there were none. If she was the original out-of-sight, out-of-mind girl, then her balding, coin-collecting, Cub Scouting husband was the original everything-polished, everything-clean boy.

  Also, he's crawled under here himself, so no cobwebs would have a chance to form.

  Was that true? She didn't actually know, did she?

  But she thought she did.

  The cracks were at either end of an eight-inch length of baseboard that appeared to have a dowel or something in the middle so it could pivot. She had struck it with the box just hard enough to jar it open, but that didn't explain the clunk. She pushed one end of the board. It swung in on one end and out on the other, revealing a hidey-hole eight inches long, a foot high, and maybe eighteen inches deep. She thought she might discover more magazines, possibly rolled up, but there were no magazines. There was a little wooden box, one she was pretty sure she recognized. It was the box that had made the clunking sound. It had been standing on end, and the pivoting baseboard had knocked it over.

  She reached in, grasped it, and--with a sense of misgiving so strong it almost had a texture--brought it out. It was the little oak box she had given to him at Christmas five years ago, maybe more. Or had it been for his birthday? She didn't remember, just that it had been a good buy at the craft shop in Castle Rock. Hand-carved on the top, in bas-relief, was a chain. Below the chain, also in bas-relief, was the box's stated purpose: LINKS. Bob had a clutter of cufflinks, and although he favored button-style shirts for work, some of his wrist-jewelry was quite nice. She remembered thinking the box would help keep them organized. Darcy knew she'd seen it on top of the bureau on his side of the bedroom for awhile after the gift was unwrapped and exclaimed over, but couldn't remember seeing it lately. Of course she hadn't. It was out here, in the hidey-hole under his worktable, and she would have bet the house and lot (another of his sayings) that if she opened it, it wouldn't be cufflinks she found inside.

  Don't look, then.

  More good advice, but now she had come much too far to take it. Feeling like a woman who has wandered into a casino and for some mad reason staked her entire life's savings on a single turn of a single card, she opened the box.

  Let it be empty. Please God, if you love me let it be empty.

  But it wasn't. There were three plastic oblongs inside, bound with an elastic band. She picked the bundle out, using just the tips of her fingers--as a woman might handle a cast-off rag she fears may be germy as well as dirty. Darcy slipped off the elastic.

  They weren't credit cards, which had been her first idea. The top one was a Red Cross blood donor's card belonging to someone named Marjorie Duvall. Her type was A-positive, her region New England. Darcy turned the card over and saw that Marjorie--

  whoever she was--had last given blood on August sixteenth of 2010. Three months ago.

  Who the hell was Marjorie Duvall? How did Bob know her? And why did the name ring a faint but very clear bell?

  The next one was Marjorie Duvall's North Conway Library card, and it had an address: 17 Honey Lane, South Gansett, New Hampshire.

  The last piece of plastic was Marjorie Duvall's New Hampshire driver's license. She looked like a perfectly ordinary American woman in her mid-thirties, not very pretty (although nobody looked their best in driver's license photographs), but presentable. Darkish blond hair pulled back from her face, either bunned or ponytailed; in the picture you couldn't tell. DOB, January 6, 1974. The address was the same as the one on the library card.

  Darcy realized that she was making a desolate mewing sound. It was horrible to hear a sound like that coming from her own throat, but she couldn't stop. And her stomach had been replaced by a ball of lead. It was pulling all of her insides down, stretching them into new and unpleasant shapes. She had seen Marjorie Duvall's face in the newspaper. Also on the six o'clock news.

  With hands that had absolutely no feeling, she put the rubber band back around the ID cards, put them back in the box, then put the box back in his hidey-hole. She was getting ready to close it up again when she heard herself saying, "No, no, no, that isn't right. It can't be."

  Was that the voice of Smart Darcy or Stupid Darcy? It was hard to tell. All she knew for sure was that Stupid Darcy had been the one to open the box. And thanks to Stupid Darcy, she was falling.

  Taking the box back out. Thinking, It's a mistake, it has to be, we've been married over half our lives, I'd know, I would know. Opening the box. Thinking, Does anybody really know anybody?

  Before tonight she certainly would have thought so.

  Marjorie Duvall's driver's license was now on the top of the stack. Before, it had been on the bottom. Darcy put it there. But which of the others had been on top, the Red Cross card or the library card? It was simple, it had to be simple when there were only two choices, but she was too upset to remember. She put the library card on top and knew at once that was wrong, because the first thing she'd seen when she opened the box was a flash of red, red like blood, of course a blood donor card would be red, and that had been the one on top.

  She put it there, and as she was putting the elastic back around the little collection of plastic, the phone in the house started to ring again. It was him. It was Bob, calling from Vermont, and were she in the kitchen to take the call, she'd hear his cheery voice (a voice she knew as well as her own) asking, Hey, honey, how are you?

  Her fingers jerked and the rubber band snapped. It flew away, and she cried out, whether in frustration or fear she didn't know. But really, why would she be afraid? Twenty-seven years of marriage and he had never laid a hand on her, except to caress. On only a few occasions had he raised his voice to her.

  The phone rang again... again... and then cut off in mid-ring. Now he would be leaving a message. Missed you again! Damn! Give me a call so I won't worry, okay? The number is...

  He'd add the number of his room, too. He left nothing to chance, took nothing for granted.

  What she was thinking absolutely couldn't be true. It was like one of those monster delusions that sometimes reared up from the mud at the bottom of a person's min
d, sparkling with hideous plausibility: that the acid indigestion was the onset of a heart attack, the headache a brain tumor, and Petra's failure to call on Sunday night meant she had been in a car accident and was lying comatose in some hospital. But those delusions usually came at four in the morning, when the insomnia was in charge. Not at eight o'clock in the evening... and where was that damned rubber band?

  She found it at last, lying behind the carton of catalogues she never wanted to look in again. She put it in her pocket, started to get up to look for another one without remembering where she was, and thumped her head on the bottom of the table. Darcy began to cry.

  There were no rubber bands in any of the worktable's drawers, and that made her cry even harder. She went back through the breezeway, the terrible, inexplicable identity cards in her housecoat pocket, and got an elastic out of the kitchen drawer where she kept all sorts of semi-useful crap: paper clips, bread ties, fridge magnets that had lost most of their pull. One of these latter said DARCY RULES, and had been a stocking-stuffer present from Bob.

  On the counter, the light on top of the phone blinked steadily, saying message, message, message.

  She hurried back to the garage without holding the lapels of her housecoat. She no longer felt the outer chill, because the one inside was greater. And then there was the lead ball pulling down her guts. Elongating them. She was vaguely aware that she needed to move her bowels, and badly.

  Never mind. Hold it. Pretend you're on the turnpike and the next rest area's twenty miles ahead. Get this done. Put everything back the way it was. Then you can--

  Then she could what? Forget it?

  Fat chance of that.

  She bound the ID cards with the elastic, realized the driver's license had somehow gotten back on top, and called herself a stupid bitch... a pejorative for which she would have slapped Bob's face, had he ever tried to hang it on her. Not that he ever had.

  "A stupid bitch but not a bondage bitch," she muttered, and a cramp knifed her belly. She dropped to her knees and froze that way, waiting for it to pass. If there had been a bathroom out here she would have dashed for it, but there wasn't. When the cramp let go--reluctantly--she rearranged the cards in what she was pretty sure was the right order (blood donor, library, driver's license), then put them back in the LINKS box. Box back in hole. Pivoting piece of baseboard closed up tight. Carton of catalogues back where it had been when she tripped on it: sticking out slightly. He would never know the difference.

  But was she sure of that? If he was what she was thinking--

  monstrous that such a thing should even be in her mind, when all she'd wanted just a half an hour ago was fresh batteries for the goddarn remote control--if he was, then he'd been careful for a long time. And he was careful, he was neat, he was the original everything-polished, everything-clean boy, but if he was what those goddarn (no, goddamned) plastic cards seemed to suggest he was, then he must be supernaturally careful. Supernaturally watchful. Sly.

  It was a word she had never thought of in connection to Bob until tonight.

  "No," she told the garage. She was sweating, her hair was stuck to her face in unlovely spikelets, she was crampy and her hands were trembling like those of a person with Parkinson's, but her voice was weirdly calm, strangely serene. "No, he's not. It's a mistake. My husband is not Beadie."

  She went back into the house.

  - 5 -

  She decided to make tea. Tea was calming. She was filling the kettle when the phone began to ring again. She dropped the kettle into the sink--the bong sound made her utter a small scream--then went to the phone, wiping her wet hands on her housecoat.

  Calm, calm, she told herself. If he can keep a secret, so can I. Remember that there's a reasonable explanation for all this--

  Oh, really?

  --and I just don't know what it is. I need time to think about it, that's all. So: calm.

  She picked up the phone and said brightly, "If that's you, handsome, come right over. My husband's out of town."

  Bob laughed. "Hey, honey, how are you?"

  "Upright and sniffin the air. You?"

  There was a long silence. It felt long, anyway, although it couldn't have been more than a few seconds. In it she heard the somehow terrible whine of the refrigerator, and water dripping from the faucet onto the teakettle she'd dropped in the sink, the beating of her own heart--that last sound seeming to come from her throat and ears rather than her chest. They had been married so long that they had become almost exquisitely attuned to each other. Did that happen in every marriage? She didn't know. She only knew her own. Except now she had to wonder if she even knew that one.

  "You sound funny," he said. "All thick in the voice. Is everything okay, sweetie?"

  She should have been touched. Instead she was terrified. Marjorie Duvall: the name did not just hang in front of her eyes; it seemed to blink on and off, like a neon bar sign. For a moment she was speechless, and to her horror, the kitchen she knew so well was wavering in front of her as more tears rose in her eyes. That crampy heaviness was back in her bowels, too. Marjorie Duvall. A-positive. 17 Honey Lane. As in hey, hon, how's life been treatin you, are you upright and sniffin the air?

  "I was thinking about Brandolyn," she heard herself say.

  "Oh, baby," he said, and the sympathy in his voice was all Bob. She knew it well. Hadn't she leaned on it time after time since 1984? Even before, when they'd still been courting and she came to understand that he was the one? Sure she had. As he had leaned on her. The idea that such sympathy could be nothing but sweet icing on a poison cake was insane. The fact that she was at this moment lying to him was even more insane. If, that was, there were degrees of insanity. Or maybe insane was like unique, and there was no comparative or superlative form. And what was she thinking? In God's name, what?

  But he was talking, and she had no idea what he'd just said.

  "Run that past me again. I was reaching for the tea." Another lie, her hands were shaking too badly to reach for anything, but a small plausible one. And her voice wasn't shaking. At least she didn't think it was.

  "I said, what got that going?"

  "Donnie called and asked after his sister. It got me thinking about mine. I went out and walked around for awhile. I got sniffling, although some of that was just the cold. You probably heard it in my voice."

  "Yep, right away," he said. "Listen, I should skip Burlington tomorrow and come back home."

  She almost cried out No!, but that would be exactly the wrong thing to do. That might get him on the road at first light, all solicitude.

  "You do and I'll punch you in the eye," she said, and was relieved when he laughed. "Charlie Frady told you that estate sale in Burlington was worth going to, and his contacts are good. His instincts are, too. You've always said so."

  "Yeah, but I don't like to hear you sounding so low."

  That he had known (and at once! at once!) that something was wrong with her was bad. That she needed to lie about what the trouble was--ah, that was worse. She closed her eyes, saw Bad Bitch Brenda screaming inside the black hood, and opened them again.

  "I was low, but I'm not now," she said. "It was just a momentary fugue. She was my sister, and I saw my father bring her home. Sometimes I think about it, that's all."

  "I know," he said. He did, too. Her sister's death wasn't the reason she'd fallen in love with Bob Anderson, but his understanding of her grief had tightened the connection.

  Brandolyn Madsen had been struck and killed by a drunk snowmobiler while she was out cross-country skiing. He fled, leaving her body in the woods half a mile from the Madsen house. When Brandi wasn't back by eight o'clock, a pair of Freeport policemen and the local Neighborhood Watch had mounted a search party. It was Darcy's father who found her body and carried it home through half a mile of pine woods. Darcy--stationed in the living room, monitoring the phone and trying to keep her mother calm--had been the first to see him. He came walking up the lawn under the harsh glare of a full wint
er moon with his breath puffing out in white clouds. Darcy's initial thought (this was still terrible to her) had been of those corny old black-and-white love-movies they sometimes showed on TCM, the ones where some guy carries his new bride across the threshold of their happy honeymoon cottage while fifty violins pour syrup onto the soundtrack.

  Bob Anderson, Darcy had discovered, could relate in a way many people could not. He hadn't lost a brother or sister; he had lost his best friend. The boy had darted out into the road to grab an errant throw during a game of pickup baseball (not Bob's throw, at least; no baseball player, he'd been swimming that day), had been struck by a delivery truck, and died in the hospital shortly afterward. This coincidence of old sorrows wasn't the only thing that made their pairing seem special to her, but it was the one that made it feel somehow mystical--not a coincidence but a planned thing.

  "Stay in Vermont, Bobby. Go to the estate sale. I love you for being concerned, but if you come running home, I'll feel like a kid. Then I'll be mad."

  "Okay. But I'm going to call you tomorrow at seven-thirty. Fair warning."

  She laughed, and was relieved to hear it was a real one... or so close as to make no difference. And why shouldn't she be allowed a real laugh? Just why the heck not? She loved him, and would give him the benefit of the doubt. Of every doubt. Nor was this a choice. You could not turn off love--even the rather absent, sometimes taken for granted love of twenty-seven years--the way you'd turn off a faucet. Love ran from the heart, and the heart had its own imperatives.

  "Bobby, you always call at seven-thirty."

  "Guilty as charged. Call tonight if you--"

  "--need anything, no matter what the hour," she finished for him. Now she almost felt like herself again. It was really amazing, the number of hard hits from which a mind could recover. "I will."

  "Love you, honey." The coda of so many conversations over the years.

  "Love you, too," she said, smiling. Then she hung up, put her forehead against the wall, closed her eyes, and began weeping before the smile could leave her face.