GREG ILES
Third Degree

Bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.

Genesis 2:23

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Books By Greg Iles

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

Floating in the half-world between sleep and wakefulness, Laurel reached down and slipped her hand into the crack between the mahogany bed rail and the box springs, searching … searching for her connection to life. The cool metal of the Razr pricked her nervous system enough to make her freeze; a millisecond later she was fully awake and turning her head slowly on the pillow—

Her husband’s side of the bed was empty. In fact, it looked as though Warren had not come to bed at all. Resisting the compulsion to check the Razr for a text message, she slipped the cell phone back into its hiding place, then rolled out of bed and padded quickly to the bedroom door.

The hall was empty, but she heard sounds from the direction of the den. Not kid sounds … something else, a strange thumping. Laurel whisked down the hall and peered into the great room. Across the vast open space she saw Warren standing before a wall of bookshelves in his study. Half a dozen medical textbooks lay at his feet, more on the red leather sofa beside him. As she watched, Warren stepped forward and with an angry motion began pulling more books off the shelves, six or eight at a time, then piling them haphazardly on the couch. His sandy blond hair spiked upward like bushy antennae, and unless she was mistaken, he was wearing the same clothes he’d worn to work yesterday, which meant that he really hadn’t come to bed last night. On any other day this would have worried Laurel, but today she closed her eyes in gratitude and hurried back to the master suite.

When she entered the bathroom, her throat clenched tight. She had put this decision off for days, praying in vain for deliverance, but now she had no choice. Only now that she was set up to go through with it, something in her rebelled. The mind would do anything to deny certain realities, she thought, or at least to postpone them.

Kneeling before her washbasin, she reached into the cabinet, removed a Walgreens bag, and carried it into the private cubicle that surrounded the commode. Then she latched the slatted door, opened the bag, and took out a large tampon box. From this box she removed the small carton she’d concealed inside it yesterday afternoon. The side of this carton read e.p.t. With shaking fingers she removed a plastic bag, ripped it open, and took out a testing stick not much different from the one that had struck terror into her heart as a nineteen-year-old. Remarkably, she felt more fear in this moment than she had as an unmarried teenager.

Holding the stick between her legs, she tried to pee, but her urine wouldn’t come. Had someone walked into the bathroom? One of the kids? Hearing no breath or footfall, she forced her mind away from the present, to the parent/teacher conferences she had scheduled today. As she thought of the anxious mothers she would have to deal with later on, a warm rush of fluid splashed her hand. She withdrew the stick from the stream, wiped her hand with tissue, then closed her eyes and counted while she finished.

She wished she’d brought the Razr in with her. It was crazy to leave that phone in the bedroom with Warren home, crazy to have it in the house at all, really. The cell phone Laurel called her “clone” phone was a second Razr identical to the one on their family account, but registered in someone else’s name, so that Warren could never see the bills. It was a perfect system for private communication—unless Warren saw both phones together. Yet despite the danger, Laurel could no longer stand to be apart from her clone phone, even though it hadn’t brought her a single message in the past five weeks.

Realizing that she’d counted past thirty, she opened her eyes. The testing stick was fancier than the ones she remembered from college, with a tiny screen like the ones on cheap pocket calculators. No more trying to judge shades of blue to see if you were knocked up. Before her eyes, written in crisp blue letters on the gray background, were the letters PREGNANT.

Laurel stared, waiting for a NOT to appear before the other word. It was an infantile wish, for part of her had known the truth without even taking the test (her too tender breasts, and the seasick feeling she’d had with her second child); yet still she waited, with the testing company’s new slogan—We call it the Error Proof Test—playing in her mind. She must have heard that slogan twenty times during the past week, chirped confidently from the television during inane children’s sitcoms and Warren’s overheated cop melodramas, while she waited in agony for her period to begin. When the letters on the stick did not change, she shook it the way her mother had shaken the thermometers of her youth.

PREGNANT! the letters screamed. PREGNANT! PREGNANT! PREGNANT!

Laurel wasn’t breathing. She hadn’t exhaled since the letters first appeared. Had she not been sitting on the toilet, she might have fainted, but as it was, she sagged against the nearby wall, her face cold. The sob that broke from her chest sounded alien, as though a stranger were wailing on the other side of the door.

“Mom?” said Grant, her nine-year-old son. “Was that you?”

Laurel tried to answer, but no words came. As she covered her mouth with shaking fingers, tears streamed down her face.

“Mom?” asked the voice behind the door. “Are you okay?”

She could see Grant’s thin silhouette through the slats. No, I’m not, sweetheart. I’m going insane sitting right here on the toilet.

“Dad!” called Grant, staying put. “I think Mom’s sick.”

I’m not sick, baby, I’m watching the goddamn world end … “I’m fine, sweetie,” Laurel choked out. “Perfectly fine. Did you brush your teeth already?”

Silence now, a listening silence. “You sound funny.”

Laurel felt herself gearing down into survival mode. The shock of the positive pregnancy test had caused a violent emotional dislocation; from there it was only a small step to full-blown dissociation. Suddenly her pregnancy became a matter of academic interest, one small factor to be weighed in the day’s long list of deceptions. Eleven months of adultery had schooled her well in the shameful arts. But the irony was shattering: they had ended the affair five weeks ago, without a single moral lapse since; and now she was pregnant.

She shoved the stick back into the e.p.t carton, carefully fitted the carton back into the tampon box, and stuffed it into the Walgreens bag. After stashing the bag on the floor behind the toilet, she flushed the commode and stood.

Grant was waiting beyond the door. His face would be alert for any sign of anxiety in his mother. Laurel had seen that watchful face many times in the past few months, and every time she did, a blade of guilt sliced through her. Grant knew his mother was in emotional turmoil; he knew it better than his father did, being far more perceptive when it came to such things.

Laurel carefully wiped away her tears with tissue, then gripped the doorknob, willing her hands to stop shaking. Routine, she thought. Routine will save you. Play your usual role, and no one will notice a thing. It’s June Cleaver time again—

She opened the door and smiled broadly. Wearing nothing but a Tony Hawk skateboard T-shirt, Grant stood looking up at her like a nine-year-old interrogation specialist, which he was. He had Laurel’s eyes in his father’s face, but the resemblance grew less marked every day. Lately, Grant seemed to change at the rate of a fast-growing puppy.

“Is Beth awake?” she asked. “You know we need to go over your spelling before we leave.”

Grant nodded irritably, his eyes never leaving her face. “Your cheeks are red,” he noted, his usually musical voice almost flat with suspicion.

“I did some sit-ups when I woke up.”

He pursed his lips, working through this explanation. “Crunches or the real thing?”

“Crunches.” Laurel used his preoccupation to slide past him and head for her closet. She slipped a silk housecoat over her cotton nightie and walked down the hall toward the kitchen. “Can you make sure Beth is up?” she called over her shoulder. “I’m going to start breakfast.”

“Dad’s acting weird,” Grant said in a jarring voice.

Sensing something very like fear, Laurel stopped and turned, focusing on the slim figure framed in the bedroom door. “What do you mean?” she asked, walking back toward her son.

“He’s tearing his study up.”

She remembered Warren pulling books from the shelves. “I think it’s just the tax thing we told you about. That’s very stressful, honey.”

“What’s an audit, anyway?”

“That’s when the government makes sure you’ve paid them all the money you’re supposed to.”

“Why do you have to pay the government money?”

Laurel forced a smile. “To pay for roads and bridges and … and the army, and things like that. We talked about that, honey.”

Grant looked skeptical. “Dad says they take your money so lazy people won’t have to work. And so they get free doctor visits, while working people have to pay.”

Laurel hated it when Warren vented his professional frustrations to the children. He didn’t understand how literally they took everything. Or maybe he did.

“Dad told me he’s looking for something,” said Grant.

“Did he say what?”

“A piece of paper.”

Laurel was trying to stay tuned in, but her plight would not let her.

“I told him I’d help,” Grant went on in a hurt voice, “but he yelled at me.”

She squinted in confusion. That didn’t sound like Warren. But neither did staying up all night in yesterday’s clothes. Maybe the audit situation was worse than he’d led her to believe. However bad it was, it was nothing compared to her situation. This was disaster. Unless …

No, she thought with desolation, even that would be a disaster. She knelt and kissed Grant on the forehead. “Did you feed Christy?”

“Yep,” he replied with obvious pride. Christy was the children’s increasingly overweight Welsh corgi.

“Then please go make sure your sister is awake, sweetie. I’m going to start breakfast.”

Grant nodded, and Laurel rose. “Egg with a hat on it?”

He gave her a grudging smile. Two?”

“Two it is.”

Laurel didn’t want to look Warren in the eye this morning. On any given day, she had about a 70 percent chance of not having to do it. Half the time, he left early to put in between five and fifty miles on his bicycle, an obsessive hobby that consumed huge chunks of his time. To be fair, it was more than a hobby. During his early twenties, Warren had been classed as a Category One rider, and he’d turned down slots on two prestigious racing teams to enter medical school. He still completed Category Two races, often against men fifteen years his junior. On mornings when he wasn’t training, he sometimes left early to make morning rounds at the hospital while she was getting the kids ready for school. But today, since he obviously hadn’t showered, he was likely to be here until after she left.

Her mind jumped to the Walgreens bag sitting under the commode. The odds were one in a million that Warren would even notice it, much less look inside. And yet … their commode sometimes spontaneously began to run water and wouldn’t stop unless you jiggled the handle. Warren was compulsive about things like that. What if he rolled up his sleeves and got down on the floor to fix it? He might move the bag out of his way, or even knock it out of his way in frustration—

It’s the little things that kill you, Danny had told her, enough times for it to stick. And he was speaking from experience, not only of extramarital affairs, but also as a former combat pilot. After a moment of doubt, Laurel went quickly back to the bathroom, opened one of the windows, then took the bag from beneath the toilet and dropped it out the window. She leaned out far enough to watch it fall behind some shrubbery; she’d retrieve it before she left for school, then toss it in a Dumpster at a gas station somewhere.

As she closed the window, she looked across her lawn, a vast dewy expanse of Saint Augustine grass dotted with pecan trees greening up for spring. There was almost no chance of her little disposal mission being seen; their house stood on a ten-acre lot, with their nearest house on this side—the Elfmans’—almost two hundred yards away, with much foliage between. Now and then Laurel saw the husband cutting grass where the property line ran near her house, but it was early for that.

Before the full psychic weight of the pregnancy could crash back into her thoughts, Laurel pulled on some black cropped pants and a white silk top, then applied her makeup in record time. She was putting on eyeliner when she realized she was avoiding her own gaze as much as she might her husband’s. As she stepped back from the mirror for a final appraising glance, a wave of guilt hit her. She’d put on too much makeup in a vain attempt to hide that she’d been crying. The face looking back at her belonged to what more than a few women privately accused her of being—a trophy wife. Because of her looks, they discounted her education, her work, her energy, her devotion to causes … all of it. Most days she didn’t give a damn what people thought, especially the women who gossiped nonstop about her. But today … the pregnancy test had confirmed every savage insult those witches had voiced about her. Or it almost certainly had, anyway.

“How the hell did I get here?” she whispered to her reflection.

The reproof in the large green eyes staring back at her was enough. She pulled down a curtain of denial in her mind, then turned and hurried down the hall to face her family.

The kids had almost finished breakfast before Warren looked out of the study. Laurel had just washed the skillet and was turning back to the granite counter where the kids were eating the last of the biscuits when she caught Warren’s deep-set eyes watching her from the study door. He hadn’t shaved, and the shadow on his chin and jaw gave him a look of unusual intensity. His eyes looked hollow, and his expression gave away nothing, except perhaps a sense of malice, but she wrote that off as hatred of the IRS. She raised her eyebrows, silently asking if he needed her to walk over for some private words, but he shook his head.

“If the earth keeps getting hotter,” asked Beth, her six-year-old, “will the oceans boil like when you boil eggs for tuna fish?”

“No, punkin,” Laurel assured her. “Although it doesn’t take much of a temperature change to melt a lot of ice at the north and south poles. And that can have very serious consequences for people living at the beach.”

“Actually,” Warren said from the study door, his deep voice carrying easily across the great room, “the oceans will eventually boil.”

Beth knit her brow and turned on her barstool.

Warren said, “The sun will eventually heat up and grow into a massive ball of fire, and the oceans will bubble away just like water in a pot on the stove.”

“Seriously?” asked Beth, her voice filled with concern.

“Yes. And then—”

“Daddy’s talking about millions of years from now, punkin,” Laurel cut in, wondering what the hell had got into Warren to be telling Beth that kind of thing. She would worry about it for days. “Your great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughters won’t even have been born by then, so it’s nothing to worry about.”

“Supernova!” cried Grant. “That’s what they call that, right? When a star explodes?”

“Right,” said Warren with obvious satisfaction.

“That’s so cool,” Grant said.

“It’s a boy thing,” Laurel explained to Beth. “The end of the world sounds really cool to boys.”

Despite her predicament, Laurel was tempted to give Warren a chiding glance—it’s what she would have done had things been normal—but when she looked up again, he had gone back into the study, and she could no longer see him. More thumping sounds announced that he was still searching for something. On any other day, she would have gone in and asked what he was looking for and probably even helped him. But not today.

Grant slid off his stool and opened his backpack. Now Laurel felt some satisfaction. Without a word from her, he had begun reviewing his spelling words for the day. Beth went to a chair at the kitchen table and started putting on her shoes, which always had to be tied with equal tightness, a ritual that occasionally caused paroxysms of obsessive-compulsive panic, but on most days went fine.

Laurel sometimes felt guilty when other mothers complained what a nightmare it was to get their kids off to school in the mornings. Her kids pretty much did their preparations on autopilot, running in the groove of a routine so well established that Laurel wondered if she and Warren had some sublimated fascist tendencies. But the truth was, for someone who spent her days teaching special-needs students, handling two normal children was a no-brainer.

Should I go into the study? she wondered again. Isn’t that what a good wife would do? Express concern? Offer to help? But Warren didn’t want help with things like this. His medical practice was his business, and his business was his own. He was obviously preoccupied with the audit. And yet that prolonged stare from the door had disturbed her on a deep level. It seemed months since Warren had given her even a long look. It was as though he were intentionally giving her the space she had silently requested. He never looked too deeply, because she didn’t want to be seen, and he didn’t want to see. It was a conspiracy of silence, a mutual denial of reality, and they had become expert at it.

“We’re going to be late,” Grant said.

“You’re right,” Laurel agreed without looking at the clock. “Let’s move.”

She helped Beth get her backpack on, then picked up her own computer case and purse and walked toward the door to the garage. With her hand on the knob—almost out!—she glanced back over her shoulder, half expecting to find Warren gazing at her, but all she saw was his lower legs. He had climbed a small ladder to search the top shelves of his custom bookcases, ten feet up the wall. She breathed a sigh of relief and led the kids out to her Acura. Grant called shotgun—Beth never thought of it in time—but Laurel motioned for him to get in back, which earned a smile from her daughter and an angry grunt from her son.

After they were belted in, Laurel mock-slapped the side of her head and said, “I think I forgot to turn off the sprinkler last night.”

“I’ll check it!” cried Grant, unbuckling his seat belt.

“No, I’ll get it,” Laurel said firmly, and quickly got out of the car.

She hit the button on the wall and ducked under the rising garage door as soon as it was four feet off the concrete, then trotted around to the back of the house. She would retrieve the Walgreens bag, crush it into a ball, then slip it into her trunk and dispose of it sometime during the school day, at a gas station or convenience store. (She’d done the same with a valentine card and roses and a few actual letters during the past year.) She was making for a gap in the shrubbery when a woman’s voice called out, “Laurel? Over here!”

Laurel froze and looked toward the sound. Just twenty-five yards away, almost obscured by some boxwoods, knelt a woman wearing a straw hat and bright yellow gloves. Bonnie Elfman was about seventy, but she moved like a woman of forty, and for some reason she had chosen this morning to beautify the western boundary of her considerable property.

“I’m just adding some nasturtiums to this bed!” Bonnie called. “What’re you up to?”

Retrieving a positive pregnancy test so my husband won’t find it. “I thought I left the sprinkler on,” she called back.

“That’ll sure kill your water bill,” Bonnie said, standing and walking toward Laurel.

Laurel felt a flutter of panic. To compound her troubles, Christy came tearing around the corner of the house, desperate for someone to play with her. If Laurel picked up the bag from behind the shrubs, the corgi might just leap up and rip it out of her hands. She gazed along her own line of shrubs with exaggerated concern, then waved broadly to Mrs. Elfman. “I guess I got it after all! I’ve got to run, Bonnie. The kids are waiting in the car.”

“I’ll find your sprinkler and make sure,” Bonnie promised.

Laurel’s heart thumped like a bass drum. “Don’t trouble yourself! Really. I thought I’d left it out here, but I took it back to the storeroom. I remember now. Don’t you get too hot, either. It’s been really warm for April.”

“Don’t worry about that, it’s going to rain,” Bonnie said with the confidence of an oracle. “It’s going to cool off, too. By the time you get back from school, you’ll need a jacket.”

Laurel looked up at the sun, clear and bright in the sky. “If you say so. See you later.”

Bonnie looked miffed over Laurel’s escape. She would have much preferred to stand around gossiping for a half hour. Laurel knew from past experience that like most gossips, Bonnie Elfman was as quick to repeat stories about her as she was to confide in Laurel about others.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Laurel cursed, as she hurried back around to the garage. The Walgreens bag would have to wait until after school. Christy was trotting at her heels, so the dog was no problem. But Mrs. Elfman wasn’t going anywhere soon. Laurel prayed that the old busybody would stay on her own property until school was out.

TWO

Laurel pulled her Acura up to the elementary-school door, leaned over, and kissed Beth on the cheek. Mrs. Lacey had door duty today, and she helped Beth out while Grant sprang out of the backseat like a monkey escaping from a zoo cage and darted into the school building to find his buddies.

After Mrs. Lacey escorted Beth through the door, Laurel drove around the elementary school and parked in her reserved space beside the Special Students building. It was a small brick box, two classrooms with a unisex bathroom and an office, but it was better than nothing, which was what Athens Country Day had had for the past fifty years. A generous endowment by a local geologist had made the building possible. He had a niece in New Orleans who was mildly retarded and so understood the need.

Laurel looked down at her computer and purse, which had lain under Beth’s feet during the drive over, but she didn’t reach for them. The engine was still running; she made no move to switch it off. She wasn’t sure she could face what lay ahead. Her students could be trying enough, but today she had parent conferences, and her first was with the wife of her former lover.

The prospect of facing Starlette McDavitt while pregnant by the woman’s husband was almost unendurable. If Starlette weren’t the first appointment, Laurel would have tried to cancel the meeting. But it was too late for that.

She didn’t know she was crying until she tasted tears in her mouth. It wasn’t the impending appointment, she realized. It was that she didn’t know for sure whose baby she was carrying. The odds were, it was Danny’s. They had ended their affair five weeks ago, but in the three weeks prior to that—the three weeks after her last period—they had made love at least a dozen times. She’d only had intercourse with Warren twice since her last period, both times after she and Danny had ended it. She hadn’t even wanted sex with Warren, but how else could she make an honest try? And what alternative did she have but to try, given Danny’s decision? Walk out on Warren to live alone in some lonely apartment, surrounded by other divorcées and waiting for a man who couldn’t come to her for another fourteen years, if ever? Not an attractive option even before she was pregnant. Now …

Laurel wasn’t even sure whether a fetus conceived while you were on the pill was viable or not. She would have to look it up on the Internet. She should already have done it, but that kind of practical act didn’t square with her strategy of intense denial. She still couldn’t believe she was pregnant. She was on the pill, for God’s sake! Ninety-eight percent effective! How could she be in the unlucky 2 percent? She’d had some bad luck in her life, but never the worst luck. It was the rotavirus, she knew. Last month, she had somehow contracted the same gastrointestinal virus that had required the quarantining of major cruise ships. CNN had said the virus was sweeping the country: people were simultaneously puking and pooping from coast to coast. Three to five days of that, Laurel had learned, could eject from the system the progestin contained in a woman’s birth control pills. Since she’d had sex almost every other day last month, pregnancy must have been a near certainty.

She laid her forehead against the steering wheel and allowed herself a single sob. She’d always believed she was a strong woman, but now fate had colluded with chance—and stupidity—to make the prospect of raising an illegitimate child in her husband’s house a reality.

And that she could not face.

There are probably women doing it, said a rebellious voice in her head. Right here in this town. Desperate to avoid thinking of her impending meeting with Starlette, Laurel spun through the possibilities. If you were going to be stuck in a loveless marriage for the rest of your life, that “love child” might be your only link to sanity, or at least to the life that might have been. But could she live a lie for the rest of her life? She had found it difficult enough to lie about even small things over the past year, to bring off the thousand tiny deceptions that an extramarital affair required. The thrill of the forbidden had lasted about three weeks for her, and after that, the lies had begun to produce a sort of psychic nausea. Every lie generated the need for a dozen others—lies and sub-lies, Danny called them—sprouting like heads on an endlessly replicating Hydra. Yet she had worked hard to maintain the charade of normalcy. She’d even become good at it—so good that lying had become automatic. She felt the dishonesty corroding her soul, yet still she lied, so desperately did she need the love that Danny McDavitt gave her.

Yet what she was contemplating now was no simple deception. She wouldn’t be the only one lying. She would be forcing her unborn child into a lie from the moment of its birth. Its very life would be a lie. And what about Warren? He would try to love this baby, but would he actually feel love? Or would he sense something alien in the little interloper in his house? Something inexplicably but profoundly wrong? A disturbing scent? A genetically dissonant sound? A shiver at the touch of skin or hair? And of course, the baby wouldn’t look like Warren—it couldn’t—except by the merest chance.

Laurel actually knew one woman who had done it. Kelly Rowland, a sorority sister at Ole Miss who had become pregnant by a one-night stand while engaged to the boy she had been dating for three years. Kelly’s fiancé had been a good, stable, somewhat bland boy of medium attractiveness and excellent financial prospects; in short, the ideal husband for a sorority girl at Ole Miss. Kelly had always insisted that her fiancé wear condoms religiously during sex, so it struck Laurel as odd when Kelly allowed one of the houseboys—a devastatingly hot soccer player—to screw her brains out sans protection one night after a candlelight ceremony for one of the other sisters. But when Kelly learned she was pregnant, she had simply moved up her wedding date, scheduled her own candlelight ceremony, and never looked back. That was thirteen years ago, and the couple were still married and living in Houston.

Laurel drew no inspiration from this memory. But what was the alternative? Abortion? How could she abort the child of the man she truly loved? And even if she convinced herself she could bear that, how could she tell her husband she wanted an abortion? You get the abortion without telling him you’re pregnant, said a cold, Darwinian voice. With dread she pictured herself running a gauntlet of antiabortion protesters to sit alone in the waiting room of some distant women’s clinic. She’d have to go at least three states away to avoid any possibility of being recognized, and even then the physician might—

A fist rapped on the window beside Laurel’s head.

She jerked away from the noise like a woman being carjacked, then looked back to see Diane Rivers, the third-grade homeroom teacher, mouthing her name with obvious concern. Diane was a big-haired Southern belle with a heart of gold, almost a throwback to Laurel’s mother’s generation, though she was only forty-three. Laurel had seen pictures of Diane in a glittering sequin unitard as she twirled two batons at a national college competition. Diane made a cranking motion with her hand, meaning that Laurel should roll down her window, though almost no cars had window cranks anymore, at least not in the parking lot of Athens Country Day.

Laurel wiped her tears on the shoulder of her blouse, smearing mascara on the white silk, then pressed the window button. The glass sank into the door with a low whir.

“What’s the matter, honey?” Diane asked. “Are you all right?”

Do I look all right? Laurel silently responded. But what else was someone supposed to ask when they found you crying in a parking lot? Some teachers would have derived savage ecstasy from finding her in this state, but Diane wasn’t one of them. She really meant well.

“I think I’m getting a migraine,” Laurel said. “I’m getting that aura, you know?”

“Christ on a crutch,” Diane said with empathy. “Seems like a long time since you had one.”

“Over a year.” Since before Danny and I got together, Laurel realized.

“Do you think you can handle your conferences? If it was just classes, I’d sit with your kids, but I wouldn’t know what to tell special-ed parents.”

“I’ll be all right,” Laurel asserted, leaning down to lift her purse and computer off the floor. “Sometimes I just get the aura but not the headache. They call that a silent migraine. I’m hoping this is one of those.”

Diane shook her head. “Oh, honey, I don’t know. You don’t have one of those shots with you? The stuff that heads it off?”

“Imitrex? It’s been so long since I had a migraine that I stopped carrying the kit.”

Diane gave her a look of maternal reproach.

“I know,” Laurel said, getting out of her car. “Stupid.”

“You should run to Warren’s office,” Diane suggested. “Get that shot, you know? What’s the use of having a doctor for a husband if you don’t take advantage now and then? I could cover for you till you get back. My homeroom knows I’ll skin them alive if they misbehave.”

Laurel almost laughed. Diane had a glare that could paralyze a mischievous boy from a hundred paces. After locking the Acura, Laurel started toward the Special Students building. “I’ll be all right, Di, seriously. I saw some spots, that’s all.”

“You were sobbing in pain, girl.”

“No … I was just overwhelmed. I really believed I might be over them. That’s why I was crying. Facing reality.”

“Reality’s a bitch, all right,” Diane said under her breath. Then she giggled like a 1950s wife who’d accidentally said shit.

She squeezed Laurel’s wrist as she left the door of the Special Students building. Her touch was oddly comforting. Laurel felt an irrational urge to pour out her heart to the older woman, but she didn’t say a word. Diane couldn’t possibly help with her predicament, even were she so inclined. And Diane was unlikely to feel sympathy for the deranged slut who was cheating on her husband—Diane’s personal physician—and was stupid enough to get pregnant while doing it. Laurel nodded once more that she was okay, then walked down the short hall to her classroom, easily found by the raucous chatter of special-needs kids in the grip of their morning energy.

After an aide escorted her students to the playground, Laurel sat at the round table she used for parental meetings. Sitting across a desk made parents feel they were being lectured to; the round table made them feel like partners in educating their children. Laurel had eleven special-needs children in her program, almost too many, given that she had only limited help from an aide. But Athens Point was a small town, and parents had few options. She hated to turn anyone away. Her kids’ problems ran the gamut from ADD and oppositional/defiant disorder to mental retardation and autism. Handling such a broad spectrum was hard work, but Laurel relished the challenge.

To insure that parental meetings went as smoothly as possible, she kept meticulously organized records during the year, and none was more detailed or better organized than the file on Michael McDavitt. The way to get through this, she thought, is to focus on my second meeting. That way I can keep Starlette at arms’ length—psychologically speaking—until I’m actually facing her across this table.

It was a nice idea, only Laurel couldn’t manage it.

Even when she closed her eyes, she saw the former Tennessee beauty queen sweeping into her classroom wearing her latest catalog purchases, her bleached hair perfectly coiffed, her nails flawlessly painted, her waist pathologically thin, her fancy cowboy boots (which must surely be passé by now) shimmering. Laurel’s negative feelings toward Starlette McDavitt had not begun during the affair. That happened during their first meeting, when it became clear that Mrs. McDavitt saw her autistic son as a burden dumped on her by an unjust God. Starlette had run on for half an hour about how some parents claimed that autism was caused by mercury in government-mandated vaccinations, but deep down she knew it was a divine punishment. Something so deeply destructive simply had to be God’s will, she believed. And it wasn’t necessarily anything you’d done. It could be retribution for some sin committed far back down the ancestral line, rape or incest or something you didn’t even know about. In less than an hour, it had become clear that Michael McDavitt’s primary caregiver was his father, Daniel, who was fifteen years his wife’s senior.

Danny McDavitt was a soft-spoken man a year shy of fifty. He looked younger, but his eyes held a quiet wisdom that bespoke considerable experience. It wasn’t long before Laurel learned that McDavitt was a war hero, an Athens Point native who had left town at eighteen and returned as a prodigal, thirty years down the road. All he’d told her during the first weeks of Michael’s assessment was that he’d flown helicopters in a couple of wars, that he was now retired due to wounds received, and that he was giving “fixed-wing” flying lessons out at the county airport. Laurel soon decided that either flying or combat experience must be good training for men dealing with special kids, because in nine years of teaching, she had never seen a father work harder to connect with a developmentally challenged son than did Danny McDavitt.

The problem was his wife.

The only mystery about Starlette McDavitt was why Danny had married her. This single act betrayed a serious lapse of judgment, which seemed uncharacteristic in him. Of course Laurel had noticed that even brilliant men could be out-and-out fools when it came to picking women. They were like little boys at a Baskin-Robbins. I’ll have some of THAT. Hmm, that tastes good, I want some more. Pretty soon, they bought the whole bucket of ice cream, to keep a steady supply. But once they had access to that bucket all day every day, they didn’t like the taste so much. That ice cream didn’t even look the same as it had behind the frosted glass with the big silver scoop stuck in it.

Starlette looked tasty enough, and her looks matched her name. She was a former Miss Knoxville or something, not quite a Miss Tennessee, but something higher up than a Soybean Queen. Yet her TV spokesmodel beauty was offset by bitter eyes that told you she’d already learned the lesson that pageant victories only take girls a short way down the road of life. The real irony was that in Starlette’s view, Laurel had won the marital lottery. She’d married a doctor—count your blessings and keep your mouth shut, honey (and your legs open, if you know what’s good for you). Starlette had never verbalized any of this per se, but it had seeped out between her little digs at other doctors’ wives (none present to defend themselves) and in her limited observations on her own lot in life.

Danny had married Starlette seven years ago, a year before he’d planned to retire from the air force. First marriage for both of them. He’d waited a long time to make that mistake, he told her, but the waiting hadn’t made him any wiser. After nineteen years in the service, he’d flown to Nashville to buy a house in anticipation of working as a songwriter in his retirement, something he’d always done during downtime in the air force. To protect his savings, he’d lined up a job with a local flying service. The owner was a big admirer of Danny’s war record, and one job perk was flying country music stars around the state. Starlette had been working for a real estate agency, and she’d showed Danny a couple of houses in Franklin. His songwriting aspirations hadn’t impressed her; in fact she’d questioned his ability to buy in that neighborhood. But his upcoming gig flying country music stars had the glamour she’d come to the city to find. Danny still had a year left at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida to round out his twenty, but he was soon commuting to Nashville on every leave, to shop his songs and to spend time with Starlette. When she turned up pregnant, they decided to marry, and six months later, their daughter, Jenny, was born—beautiful and healthy.

Danny was only two weeks from retirement when the World Trade Center was attacked. After that, he’d refused to consider quitting, despite Starlette’s protestations. She didn’t have to wait long for his return. He deployed to Afghanistan but was shot down three months later, in an incident he was lucky to survive. He took this as a hint from fate and returned to Nashville with his discharge papers in hand. Soon he was dividing his time between flying singers, selling songs, sleeping with his new wife, and raising his daughter. The only problem in paradise was that he quickly tired of being a flying chauffeur. Jet-set hillbillies were getting on his nerves. Some were truly wonderful people, but others were real jerks. With the fans they were warm and sincere, but as soon as they hit the chopper, they were bitching about the hassles of dealing with the public. After six months without selling a song, Danny was ready to bail out. He hadn’t returned to Mississippi except for funerals and one high school reunion he’d enjoyed, but ever since he hit forty-five, he’d had an inexplicable itch to head back South. The next time a singing cowboy millionaire said the wrong thing, Danny told him off, and that was that. It took some talking, but he finally convinced Starlette to give his hometown a try, promising that if it didn’t work out, they could move back to Tennessee.

Laurel set aside Michael McDavitt’s file and forced herself to stop thinking about his father. Her strategy had been to focus on the conference after Starlette, and all she had done was rewind to the beginning of her relationship with Danny. God, was she messed up.

She pulled out her file on Carl Mayer, her most serious ADD case, and tried to focus on the words and numbers on the page. Mean, median, stanine … no matter how hard she stared, the data wouldn’t coalesce into anything coherent. And why should it? In less than five minutes, she would be face-to-face with a woman she had willfully betrayed for almost a year. A woman who had never liked her, probably out of anxiety about being judged a bad parent. There was no way to avoid making those kinds of judgments, but Laurel always tried to keep them out of her eyes. The problem was, she didn’t respect Starlette McDavitt. Most of the mothers Laurel worked with bordered on sainthood when it came to dealing with their children; Starlette was on the opposite end of the spectrum. Laurel didn’t think she could have betrayed a woman she respected, although that might just be wishful thinking. As Danny had often said, you never knew what you would do until life tested you.

A soft knock sounded at the door, which should have given her a moment’s warning, but she was so busy putting up her defenses that she forgot Starlette always made grand entrances. So Laurel was totally unprepared when Danny McDavitt stepped into her classroom looking like a man hovering in some netherworld between life and death.

THREE

“I’m sorry,” Danny said, closing the door behind him. “Starlette wouldn’t come.”

“Why not?” Laurel almost whispered.

Danny shrugged and shook his head. You know what she’s like, said his eyes.

“She found an excuse not to come.”

He nodded. “I had to cancel a flying lesson to get here.”

Laurel studied him without speaking. She hadn’t laid eyes on Danny for a week, and then she’d only caught a glimpse of him in his beat-up pickup truck, dropping Michael at the front door. The pain of not seeing Danny was unlike anything she had ever known, a hollow, wasting ache in her stomach and chest. She felt purposeless without him, as though she’d contracted an insidious virus that sapped all her energy—Epstein-Barr, or one of those. She was glad she’d been sitting down when he opened the door.

“Should I come in or what?” he asked diffidently.

Laurel shrugged, then nodded, not knowing what else to do.

She watched him walk toward the rows of miniature chairs near the back wall. He’s avoiding the table, she realized, giving me time to adjust. Danny moved with an easy rhythm, even when he looked as if he hadn’t slept or eaten for days. He stood an inch under six feet, with wiry muscles and a flat stomach despite his age. With his weathered face and year-round tan, he looked like what he was: a workingman, not a guy who had grown up privileged, moving from private school to college fraternity to whatever professional school he could get into. The son of a crop duster, Danny had gone to college on a baseball scholarship but quit after his second season to join the air force. There he’d aced some aptitude tests and somehow gotten into flight school. He was no pretty boy, but most women Laurel knew were attracted to him. His curly hair was gray at the temples but dark elsewhere, and he didn’t have it colored. It was his eyes that pulled you in, though. They were deep-set and gray with a hint of blue, like the sea in northern latitudes, and they could be soft or hard as the situation demanded. Laurel had mostly seen them soft, or twinkling with laughter, but they sometimes went opaque when he spoke of his wife, or when he answered questions about the battles he’d survived. Danny was in every respect a man, whereas most of the males Laurel knew, even those well over forty, seemed like aging college boys trying to find their way in a confusing world.

He turned one of the little chairs around and sat astride it, placing the back between them, as if to emphasize their new state of separation. His gray-blue eyes watched her cautiously. “I hope you’re not angry,” he said. “I wouldn’t have come, but it wouldn’t have looked right if one of us hadn’t.”

“I don’t know what I am.”

He nodded as though he understood.

Now that she was over the shock of seeing him here, need and anger rose up within Laurel like serpents wrestling each other. Her need made her furious, for she could not have him, and because her desire had been thwarted by his choice, however noble that choice might have been. The only thing worse than not seeing Danny was seeing him, and the worst thing was seeing him and being ignored, as she had been for the past month. No covert glances, no accidental brushes of hands, no misdirected smiles … nothing but the distant regard of casual acquaintances. In those crazed moments the hollowness within her seemed suddenly carnivorous, as though it could swallow her up and leave nothing behind. To be ignored by Danny was not to exist, and she could never convince herself that he was suffering the same way. But looking at him now, she knew that he was. “How could you come here?” she asked softly.

He turned up his palms. “I wasn’t strong enough to stay away.”

Honesty had always been his policy, and it was a devastating one.

“Can I hold you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Because there are people around? Or because you don’t want me to?”

She regarded him silently.

“I’m sorry for how it’s been,” he said haltingly. “It’s just … impossible.” His eyes narrowed. “You look really thin. Good, though.”

She shook her head. “Don’t do this. I’m not good. I’m thin because I can’t hold down any food. I have to pretend to eat. I’m barely making it, if you want to know. So let’s just stick to Michael and get this over with. There’ll be another parent outside my door in fifteen minutes.”

Danny was clearly struggling with self-restraint. “We really do need to talk about Michael. He knows something’s wrong. He senses that I’m upset.”

Laurel tried to look skeptical.

“Do you think he could?” Danny asked.

“It’s possible.”

“All I’m saying is, when I’m not okay, he’s not okay. And I think you come into it, as well.”

“You mean—”

“I mean when you’re hurting, he knows it. And he cares. A lot more than he does about his mother.”

Laurel wanted to deny this, but she’d already observed it herself. “I don’t want you to talk like that anymore. There’s no point.”

Danny looked at the wall to his right, where clumsy finger paintings of animals hung from a long board he had attached to the wall last year. While he drilled the holes, he’d confided to her what he thought the first time he saw the pictures: that the kids who’d drawn them were never going to design computers, perform surgery, or fly airplanes. It was a shattering realization for him, but he had dealt with it and moved on. And though Laurel’s students were unlikely ever to fly a helicopter, every one of them had ridden in one. With their parents’ joyful permission, Danny had taken each and every child on spectacular flights over the Mississippi River. He’d even held a contest for them, and the winner got to fly with him on balloon-race weekend, when dozens of hot-air balloons filled the skies over Natchez, thirty-five miles to the north. This memory softened Laurel a little, and she let her guard down slightly.

“You’ve lost weight, too,” she said. “Too much.”

He nodded. “Sixteen pounds.”

“In five weeks?”

“I can’t hold nothing down.”

Improper grammar usually annoyed Laurel—she had worked hard to shed the Southern accent of her birthplace—but Danny’s slow-talking baritone somehow didn’t convey stupidity. Danny had that lazy but cool-as-a-cucumber voice of competence, like Sam Shepard playing Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. It was the pilot’s voice, the one that told you everything was under control, and made you believe it, too. And when that voice warmed up—in private—it could do things to her that no other voice ever had. She started to ask if Danny had seen a doctor about losing so much weight, but that was crazy. Danny’s doctor was her husband. Besides, it didn’t take a doctor to diagnose heartbreak.

“I wish you’d let me hug you,” Danny said. “Don’t you need it?”

She closed her eyes. You have no idea … “Please stick to Michael, okay? What specific changes have you noticed in his behavior?”

While Danny answered, slowly and in great detail, Laurel doodled on the Post-it pad on her table. Danny couldn’t see the pad from where he sat; it was blocked by a stack of books. After covering the first yellow square with spirals, she tore it off and started on the next one. This time she didn’t draw anything. This time she wrote one word in boldface print: PREGNANT. Then, without knowing why, she added I’M above it. As soon as she wrote the second word, she realized she meant to give the note to Danny on his way out. She wasn’t going to tell him out loud—not here. There would be no way to avoid a tense discussion, or maybe something far less controlled.

The note would work. He could dispose of it on the way home, the same way she had disposed of the scrawled missives hurriedly passed to her at her classroom door. Like the e.p.t box she would ditch later today. All the detritus of an extramarital affair. Like that baby you’re carrying, said a vicious voice in her head.

The thing was, she couldn’t be sure the baby was Danny’s. She certainly wanted it to be, as absurd as that was, given their situation. But she didn’t know. And regardless of what Kelly Rowland had done in college, Laurel needed to find out who the father was. Only a DNA test could determine that. She was pretty sure you could analyze the DNA of an unborn child, but it would require an amniocentesis, another thing she’d have to go out of town to have done, if she was going to keep it from Warren. She would have to get some of Warren’s DNA without him knowing about it. Probably a strand of hair from his hairbrush would be enough—

“So, what do you think?” Danny concluded. “You’re the expert.”

For the first time in her life, Laurel had not been listening to what Danny was saying about his son. For more than a year, Michael McDavitt had been her highest priority in this classroom. It wasn’t fair, but it was true. She loved Danny, and because Michael meant everything to him, she had let the boy far inside her professional boundaries. Not that he was more important than the other kids; but until last month, she had believed she would one day become his stepmother, and that made him different.

“Danny, you’ve got to go,” she said with sudden firmness.

His face fell. “But we haven’t talked. Not really.”

“I can’t help it. I can’t deal with us right now. I can’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That doesn’t help.”

He stood, and it was clear that only force of will was keeping him from crossing the classroom and pulling her close. “I can’t live without you,” he said. “I thought I could, but it’s killing me.”

“Have you told your wife that?”

“Pretty much.”

A wave of anxiety mingled with hope swept through Laurel. “You told her my name?”

Danny licked his lips, then shook his head sheepishly.

“I see. Has she changed her mind about keeping Michael if you divorce her?”

“No.”

“Then we don’t have—”

“You don’t have to say it.”

She could see that he hated his own weakness, which had brought him here despite having no good news. Nothing had changed, and therefore nothing could change for her. He put his hands in his jeans pockets and walked toward the door. Laurel quietly tore the I’M PREGNANT Post-it off the pad and folded it into quarters. When Danny was almost to the door, she stood.

“Are you sleeping with Starlette?” she asked in a voice like cracking ice.

Danny stopped, then turned to face Laurel. “No,” he said, obviously surprised. “Did you think I would?”

She shrugged, her shoulders so tight with fear and anger that she could hardly move them. The thought of Danny having sex with Starlette could nauseate her instantly. Though he’d sworn he wouldn’t do it, her mind had spun out endless reels of pornographic footage in the lonely darkness before sleep: Danny so desperate from going without Laurel that he screwed his ex-beauty-queen wife just for relief—and found that it wasn’t so bad after all. Laurel was sure that Starlette would be trying extra hard to make Danny remember why he’d married her in the first place. Midnight blow jobs were her specialty. Laurel had dragged this out of Danny one night when he’d drunk more whiskey than he should have. Apparently, Starlette would wait until he was sound asleep, then start sucking him while he slept. Sometimes he wouldn’t wake until the instant before orgasm, and his expression when he’d told Laurel about this said all she needed to know about how much he enjoyed this little ritual. Once or twice she had thought of trying it herself, but in the end she decided it was better not to compete with Starlette at her game; better to stick to her own bedroom tricks or invent some new ones—and she had.

“We’re broken up,” Laurel said. “She’s your wife. I just assumed …”

Danny shook his head. “No. What about you?”

“No,” Laurel lied, hating herself for it, but too afraid of giving him an excuse to make love with Starlette to tell him the truth. Besides … if she admitted to sleeping with Warren—even just twice, which was the truth—the pregnancy would become a nightmare of doubt for Danny.

Danny was watching her closely. Then, as he so often did (and Warren almost never), he read her mind and did exactly what she wanted him to do. He marched up to her and smothered her in his arms. His scent enfolded her, and the strength in his arms surprised her, as it always did. When he lifted her off her feet, she felt herself melting from the outside in. The note stayed clenched in her hand, for until he let go, there was no way to slip it into his pocket. When he finally let her down, she would squeeze his behind, then slide the folded square into his back pocket. She could text him later and tell him to look in his pocket.

He was murmuring in her ear, “I miss you … Jesus, I miss you,” but she felt only the moist rush of air, which sent bright arcs of arousal through her body. As he lowered her to the floor, he slid her crotch along his hard thigh, and a shiver went through her. She would be wet in the time it took him to slide his hand past her waistband. She was thinking of helping him do just that when she saw a dark flash at the window in the door, as though someone had looked in and then jerked suddenly out of sight. She clutched Danny’s arm with her right hand and dragged it away from her stomach.

“Keep hugging me,” she told him. “You’re an upset parent.”

“What?” he groaned.

“There’s someone at the door. I think they saw us.”

Danny’s body went limp, and Laurel patted his back as though comforting him. Then she pulled away and assured him that everything was going to work out eventually, that Michael might make surprising progress before the school year ended. Danny stared back like a lovesick teenager, deaf to her words, his eyes trying to drink in every atom of her being.

“I love you,” he said under his breath. “I think about you every minute. I fly over your house every day, just hoping to get a glimpse of you.”

“I know.” She had seen the Cessna he taught lessons in buzzing over Avalon several times in the past five weeks. The sight had lifted her heart every time, in spite of her vows to forget him. “Please shut up.”

“It’s better that you know than not. I don’t want you thinking there’s anything between me and Starlette other than the kids.”

She felt a surge of brutal honesty. “But what’s the point? Either you talk some sense into your wife, or you may as well start sleeping with her again. This is the last hug we’ll ever have. I mean it.”

He nodded soberly.

“Danny?” she said, realizing that she had not yet given him the note.

“What?”

She moved forward, but now there was a face at the door, and this time it did not retreat. It belonged to Ann Mayer, mother of Carl, the severe ADD case. Ann was staring at Danny with undisguised curiosity.

“To hell with her,” Danny whispered, stepping between Laurel and the door. “What were you going to say?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

“It was important. I could tell.”

Laurel waved Mrs. Mayer in, and the door opened immediately. “Michael’s going to be fine, Major McDavitt,” Laurel said, using Danny’s retired rank to put some distance between them.

“I appreciate you saying so, Mrs. Shields,” Danny replied, a note of surrender in his voice. “I’m sorry I got upset like that.”

“Don’t give it another thought. It’s tough raising a special boy. Especially for fathers.”

Mrs. Mayer nodded encouragingly to Danny; at last she thought she understood what she’d witnessed.

“Good-bye,” Laurel said, and then she turned and led Mrs. Mayer over to the round table, not even looking up when Danny closed the door.

“Is he all right?” Mrs. Mayer asked, her eyes hungry for details.

“He will be.”

“Lord, he really lost it, didn’t he? Looked like he flat broke down to me.”

Laurel frowned. “I’m sure he wouldn’t want anyone to know.”

“Oh, of course not. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m just surprised, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Well, my husband told me Major McDavitt killed dozens of Al Qaeda terrorists over there in Afghanistan. He flew with some kind of commando unit. That’s what the newspaper said, anyway.”

This local legend was partly true, Laurel knew, but in some ways a gross exaggeration. “I think he saved more people than he killed, Mrs. Mayer.”

Her eyes flickered. “Oh, really? Did he tell you that?”

Laurel pulled Carl Mayer’s file from her stack. “No, Major McDavitt taught my husband to fly last year. He doesn’t like to talk about his war experiences, but Warren dragged a few things out of him.”

“Oh, I see,” said Mrs. Mayer, relieved—or bored—to hear the word husband brought into the equation. Laurel could plainly see that in Mrs. Mayer’s eyes, she and Danny made far too natural a couple to spend any innocent time alone.

Laurel felt precisely the same.

FOUR

Laurel was in the middle of her seventh conference when her vision started to go. The rapt face of the mother across the table wavered as though fifty yards of broiling asphalt separated them; then the center of Laurel’s visual field blanked out, leaving a void like a tunnel through the world.

“Oh, God,” she said, in utter disbelief. “Oh, no.”

She had lied to Diane Rivers about having a migraine; now the lie was coming true. Already the blood vessels were dilating, pressing on the cranial nerves, interfering with her vision. Soon those nerves would release compounds that would drop her to her knees in unremitting agony.

“What is it?” asked Rebecca Linton, a woman of fifty with a mildly retarded daughter. “Are you all right?”

Could the pregnancy be causing it? Laurel wondered. She’d read that some women’s migraines worsened during their first trimester, but in other women they improved. It’s probably the shock of finding out I’m pregnant, on top of all the other stress. Ultimately, the cause didn’t matter. But coming on the heels of the positive pregnancy test, the incipient migraine made her feel she was being pursued by furies intent upon delivering retribution for her moral transgressions. A wave of nausea rolled through her, which might be part of the prodrome or merely fear of the crippling agony that would soon lay her low. A shower of bright sparkles burst like fireworks beside Mrs. Linton’s right ear. “Jesus,” Laurel breathed, pressing her fist into her eye socket.

“You’re covered in sweat!” cried Mrs. Linton. “Are you having a hot flash? I mean, you’re too young for it, but that’s what happens to me when I get them.”

Laurel gripped the edge of the table, trying to get her mind around the situation. Best case, she had forty-five minutes before the headache hit. Worst case, fifteen. Just enough time to make arrangements for the kids and get home to her dark and silent bedroom. “I’m afraid I need to cut our meeting short.”

“Of course. Is there anything I can do?”

“Could you wait here and tell my last appointment I had to leave? I’m about to have a migraine headache.”

“Of course I’ll wait, darling. Who’s coming next?”

Laurel looked at her schedule sheet. A blank spot like a bull’s-eye hovered in the middle of it. “Mrs. Bremer.”

“You go on, sweetheart. I’ll call Mary Lou. All us moms are like family now.”

“Thank you so much,” Laurel said, grateful for the graciousness of Southern women. “I don’t get these much, but when I do, they’re severe.”

“Say no more. Go, go, go.”

She picked up her purse and computer case and hurried across the driveway to the elementary building’s office. She told the secretary that she had to leave, then walked down to Diane Rivers’s classroom and poked her head through the open door. Twenty-nine third-graders looked up as one. Diane looked over from her desk and saw instantly that Laurel was in distress. She got up and walked out into the hall, her face lined with concern.

“Migraine worse?”

“Deadly. I have to go home. Do you think you could drop my kids off after school?”

“You know I will. It’s right on the way.”

Laurel squeezed Diane’s hand, then walked to the door at the end of the hall. She was crossing the drive to her car when her aide called out from the playground behind the school, where the children of the parents Laurel had been meeting were playing. Erin Sutherland was a local girl in her early twenties, an education major from USM. Laurel didn’t want to stop—if her students saw her, some would come running—but Erin waved both hands as she jogged to the fence, so Laurel walked over and forced a smile.

“Hello, Erin. Is something wrong?”

“I wanted to tell you one thing. Early this morning, Major McDavitt came out and sat with his son for a while. I figured it was okay since you and he are friends, and I know how much he does for all the kids.”

Laurel nodded warily, then cringed as another wave of nausea hit her.

“The thing is,” Erin went on, “he looked really upset. I think maybe he was crying. Michael definitely was.”

Laurel had known Danny was upset, but crying was totally out of character for him. She looked past Erin, scanning the playground until she found Michael. He was sitting alone on a motionless swing, a small, dark-haired boy with his hands floating before him as he rocked forward, then back, again and again. “Did Major McDavitt say anything to you?”

“No. I went up and asked if everything was all right, but he just kind of waved me away. You know, like, mind your own business.”

“And then he left?”

Erin nodded as though worried Laurel would scold her. Laurel was about to reassure the girl when her cell phone vibrated against her left thigh. It had been so long since Danny had texted her that she ignored it at first. Then she remembered that her clone phone was in her left pocket, and her legit one in her right. The clone was registered to a friend of Danny’s, and Danny paid the bill in cash. Danny also carried a duplicate phone, so that he could speak to Laurel without Starlette finding out about it. This message could only be from Danny.

Laurel patted Erin’s arm, then turned and walked briskly to her Acura, flipping open the Razr as she went. Danny’s text read, Sorry about today. Please call. Star gone to Baton Rouge for the day.

Laurel shut the phone without typing an answer, then climbed into her car and drove quickly out to Highway 24. In her mind Michael still sat on the motionless swing, endlessly rocking. With a stab of maternal guilt, she forced the image from her mind. She needed to drive to Warren’s office and get a shot of Imitrex. But Warren was the last person she wanted to see right now. He rarely noticed when she was angry or upset, but he would have to be brain-dead not to see that she was on the ragged edge of a breakdown today. Besides, she was pretty sure that her old Imitrex injection kit was still at the house, in the back of Warren’s medicine cabinet.

Only … there was Danny’s message to consider. Her pride told her to ignore it, but she had been praying for just such a message for more than a month. And now she’d gotten it. Danny was waiting to hear from her right now. Waiting in his lovely old cypress house on fifty acres at the end of Deerfield Road—less than five miles from where she stood. That was where they’d spent most of their extended time together, except for a couple of overnight trips they’d managed to take last summer. Starlette frequently left town, usually driving to Baton Rouge to shop in the upscale stores there, or to have her hair and nails done in a “real” salon. Her expensive habits had given Danny and Laurel hundreds of hours to get to know each other over the past year, so that instead of a frenetic affair that consisted of hurried sex in cramped and inconvenient places, they’d enjoyed long afternoons taking walks, swimming, riding horses, and even flying together.

The temptation to turn north on Highway 24 was strong. All Laurel had to do was send a reply, and Danny would be waiting in the clearing he had cut out of the forest just for her. Ostensibly a “feed plot” designed to attract deer, the clearing was a circular opening in the trees about fifty feet across, covered with clover a foot deep. Laurel had often lain in that fragrant green lake with Danny inside her, watching the clouds drift from one edge of the sky to the other. To get to the clearing, she used a small gate in the barbed-wire fence that lined Deerfield Road. Danny had given her a key, which she kept in the inside zip pocket of her purse, but whenever he knew she was coming, he unlocked the gate, so that she could nose her Acura through it without even getting out. Thirty seconds later, she would be in the clearing, where Danny sat on his four-wheeler, waiting to chauffeur her up to his house.

Sometimes, sitting behind him, she would open his belt and squeeze him as he drove along the trail. On rainy days, he’d let her drive and cup her breasts to protect them as the four-wheeler bounced along the deep ruts like a tractor crossing rows in a cotton field. If he sensed that she was in the mood, he would rub gentle circles around her nipples as she drove, so that by the time they reached the house, she was well and truly ready.

Laurel shifted on the seat as she stopped for a traffic signal. Five weeks without Danny had given her a constant low-grade ache down low, and sex with Warren had done nothing to alleviate it. The stoplight was a Robert Frost moment: a left turn would take her home; a right would carry her toward Danny’s property. Even with blank spots floating before her eyes, she felt compelled to turn right. Two or three shattering orgasms might just nip her migraine in the bud. But then where would she be? Back in an affair with a man who wouldn’t leave his wife—or his son, rather. Whichever, the result was the same: the second-class citizenship of Other Womanhood.

Laurel turned left and angrily gunned the motor, her mind on the Imitrex waiting at home. As she neared the stately new homes of Avalon, the seemingly idyllic sameness of the place began to close in on her: perfectly manicured lawns, oceans of pink azaleas, well-placed magnolias, brick border walls, wrought-iron gates, and cookie-cutter Colonials that held every antique armoire, top-end deer rifle, and flat-screen television that the upper crust of Athens Point could buy on credit. Much of it had been purchased to distract the owners from marriages in various states of decomposition, or so it seemed to Laurel, who heard the inside story on every couple in the teachers’ lounge at school.

As she turned onto her street, Lyonesse Drive, instinct suddenly got the better of her pride. She took out her clone phone and texted Danny without taking her eyes off the road. She had sent so many text messages in the past year that she could work the keypad as effortlessly as any high school girl at Athens Country Day.

Give me 30 mins, she typed.

Driving as swiftly as she dared between the mountainous speed humps, she slid the Razr back into her pocket. She needed Imitrex in her system as fast as she could get it, but she needed Danny just as bad. Images of past lovemaking fragmented into another shower of sparkles, and she clenched her shoulders against what could be the first hammer blow to the side of her head.

Why am I going to Danny’s place? she wondered. To pour out my heart to him?

So what if she was pregnant? Would Danny abandon his autistic son to take care of a child that only might be his? What if he suggested that she get an abortion? She’d probably kick him in the balls—something to hint at the pain she would have to endure on an abortionist’s table. There was no equivalent analog of the emotional loss she would endure in that case, not for a man.

With that thought, Laurel’s father popped into her mind. This was strange, because she hadn’t seen him for more than three years. God, would he rant if he knew about her situation. At least she didn’t have to worry about that. The “Reverend” Tom Ballard was off on a “missionary trip” in Eastern Europe, an endless one, apparently. He’d tried to explain his goals before he left, but the more he’d told Laurel, the more it had sounded like recruitment for some sort of Christian cult, so she’d tuned out. Her father was a lay minister who’d spent more time and money on other people’s children than he ever had on his own. Nominally Baptist, but really more of a roving tent show built around his own unconventional beliefs, Tom’s ministry was based in Ferriday, Louisiana, forty miles up the river from Athens Point. This one-horse town had also produced Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Lee Lewis, and Tom carried the spirits of both men within him. Itinerant by nature, he traveled ceaselessly to spread his version of the Good News, which always included music and sometimes involved an intimate laying on of hands.

Laurel’s clearest and most embarrassing childhood memories were of squatting on the shoulders of highways in half the states in the union, while her father tried to repair whatever broken-down junker he happened to be driving at the time. Laurel would wait in mute rage, sweating or freezing as the case might be, while her mother implored her father to let her flag down a passing motorist (translation: a man with more practical sense than the one she’d entrusted her future to). Tom wasn’t a bad man, but he was a poor father. About the only two benefits Laurel had derived from his peripatetic lifestyle were world travel and books. Their rickety old house in Ferriday contained more books than many of the big houses by the country club in Athens Point. She had spent her preteen years reading a moth-eaten Cambridge History of the Ancient World—all fifteen volumes—and vowing to marry a man opposite from her father in almost every way.

In Warren Shields, she had found that man. Warren was so organized that at twenty, he’d kept meticulous records of his mileage and car maintenance. In hindsight, that should have signaled a seriously anal-retentive personality, but to Laurel Ballard, those records were flags marking a safe harbor. Warren hadn’t come from a rich family, but during his first year of medical school he was already buying bargain stocks and calculating which specialties would allow him to retire soonest. (Only later did she begin to see the dark side of these traits, such as being kept on a strict household allowance, one that barely allowed her enough money to buy decent clothes.) Warren also attended a real church with hardwood pews and stained glass, not a one-room saltbox with an aluminum steeple clapped on top with baling wire. In Warren’s church, the congregation spoke softly and needed hymnals to follow the hymns. The minister always acted with great rectitude, and no one ever—ever—danced or fainted in the aisles.

By marrying Warren, Laurel got exactly what she’d thought she wanted. And then she’d begun the long, slow realization that financial security could be expensive to the soul. Warren, too, discovered that life didn’t unfold according to even the best-laid plans. During the second year of his surgical residency—in Boulder, Colorado, which Laurel had loved—Warren’s mother had been diagnosed with a progressive nerve disease. Warren’s father, a school principal who’d preached “toughness” his whole life, had proved unequal to the task of caring for his wife as she moved toward death. And because Warren’s mother refused to move to Colorado for palliative care (she claimed she had to take care of her husband while she could), Warren decided to “take a sabbatical” from his residency to return home and care for his mother. Laurel understood his motives, but she had taught special ed for years to put Warren through medical school, and she finally had a year of architecture school under her belt. She didn’t think either of them should stop their educations, even for one year. But when Warren pressed her, she gave in, and they returned to Athens Point.

When Mrs. Shields lived longer than her doctors expected, the “temporary” sabbatical slowly became permanent, like a mining encampment becoming a town. Warren took a position in a local family practice, and real money began flowing in. Then Mrs. Shields let it be known that the one thing that might bring some joy to her last days was to see a grandchild born. This time Laurel dug in her heels, her eyes on the receding horizon of their former future. But how could she deny Warren’s mother’s last request? After some terrible arguments, she relented, and nine months later Grant was born. Mrs. Shields lived ten months after that, and Grant certainly brought her joy. But less than a month after her funeral, as Laurel was prodding Warren to get everything in order for their return to Colorado, Warren’s father had a crippling heart attack. Thirty seconds after they got the call, Laurel realized that they would never go back to Colorado.

She’d tried to make the best of her life in Athens Point. Since there was no four-year college in town—much less a school of architecture—she’d joined the clubs that medical wives were expected to join to further their husbands’ careers: the Junior Auxiliary, the Medical Auxiliary, the Garden Club, the Lusahatcha Country Club. She went to church every Sunday, and even taught Sunday school, an immense personal sacrifice, given her background. But all this frenetic social networking did nothing to replace the dream she had given up; rather it created an emotional tension that fairly screamed to be released. For years Laurel had tried the traditionally accepted outlets: step aerobics; Tae Bo; reading groups (invariably chick lit, which made her want to slash her wrists in frustration at the heroines’ actions, or lack of them); she’d even circulated through various walking groups, in the hope of finding a friend who shared her frustrations with Martha Stewart Land. But in none of those clubs and groups had she discovered a single kindred spirit.

Her ultimate solution had been to go back to work. Teaching solved several problems at once. It gave her life a single focus, one that excused her from the wearisome club duties she was accustomed to taking on. She really cared about her students and felt she was giving them help that might otherwise be denied them in a small town. Teaching also brought her money that she could spend on whatever she wanted, without the auditing glance Warren always gave her when she made a purchase of even minor extravagance. Finally, teaching had given her Danny McDavitt, the kindred spirit she had been searching for all along. Moreover (an unexpected lagniappe), this kindred spirit came with an anatomically correct, fully functioning penis. And that, she thought bitterly, is what got me where I am now.

At least I hope it was his, she thought, passing the Elfmans’ flower-lined driveway. Her own house appeared on a gentle rise farther on, but the sight gave her no pleasure. It was a contemporary version of a Colonial, at six thousand square feet, twice the size of the homes that had inspired it. Laurel had wanted to design their home herself, in conjunction with a professional architect—her year of architecture school had made her proficient with the top CAD programs—but Warren had been against it. He’d marshaled a half dozen excuses for his opposition: teaching wouldn’t allow enough time for her to adequately supervise the project; time spent dealing with contractors would steal hours from the children; but the real reason was simpler: Warren knew that if she designed their home, it would look nothing like the rest of the houses in Avalon. His instinct toward conformity was so strong that he could not bear what the neighbors might say about something that broke the carefully established pattern of the development. And so Laurel lived in a house much like those of her neighbors, one her mother thought perfect, but which she herself saw as one more cell in the suburban hive called Avalon. She swung into her driveway and hit the brakes.

Warren’s Volvo was still parked in the garage.

She sat with her foot heavy on the brake, unsure what to do. Something told her to back out and leave; but there was no rational reason to do that. Besides, Warren might have seen her pull up. The kitchen had a direct line of sight to the driveway.

Why is he still home? she wondered. Did he come home early for lunch? No. He was running late when I left for school this morning. If he skipped hospital rounds and went straight to the office, he would have had to make rounds at lunch. He wouldn’t be here. Has he been here all morning? No … that’s impossible. Warren didn’t take off from work unless he was seriously ill; it took the full-blown flu to hold him down. A paralyzing thought surfaced in the swirling sea of speculation: What if he found the e.p.t carton? The used test strip from the pregnancy test?

“No,” Laurel said aloud. “No way.” Not unless he went behind the shrubs under the bathroom window … and why in God’s name would he do that? There’s no garden hose or anything else back there. There’s only—

“Mrs. Elfman.”

Could the old busybody have seen her drop the box from the bathroom window? Doubtful. Even if she had, why would she give it to Warren? Not even Bonnie Elfman was idiotic enough to congratulate her doctor on something he might not yet know himself. But she might be malicious enough to do it …

Laurel and Mrs. Elfman had once quarreled over the boundary line of their lots (a dispute resolved when a second survey proved Laurel correct). Was the woman still bitter enough to take her revenge in such an extreme way?

No, Laurel decided. Warren’s still here because of the IRS audit.

The situation was probably worse than he’d admitted. Warren never burdened her with business worries, and he also knew that Laurel had never trusted Kyle Auster, his senior partner, not even during the honeymoon years of the partnership. Auster’s smile was too broad, his patter too slick for a physician with his priorities in line, and he spent far too much money. For the first few years, Warren had defended his older partner—only ten years older, but that was sufficient to engender a little blind hero worship—but in the last couple of years, some of the shine had rubbed off of the statue in Warren’s mind. He had seen Auster’s human side too many times, and he’d revised his opinion accordingly. She recalled the wild look in Warren’s eyes as he’d searched the bookshelves this morning. It took a great deal of stress to make her husband betray any emotion at all. Given his mental state this morning, she wondered whether Auster might have gotten them into serious legal trouble. That must be it, she decided, worried for Warren, but also relieved for a distraction to keep him occupied during her present crisis.

She eased her foot off the brake and idled toward the garage, wondering what she could do to soothe his nerves. She was putting the car in park when she remembered the note in her pocket, the one she’d meant to give Danny this morning. A note saying I’M PREGNANT might give Warren a stroke today, even if he thought the child was his. Laurel considered stashing the note in her car, but something told her not to take any chances. Depressing the cigarette lighter with her thumb, she rolled down her window and switched the AC control to MAX. Then she fished the yellow Post-it from her pocket and touched the red-hot lighter to its corner. The glue-coated back of the note caught first, then the draft from the air conditioner stoked the flame. Soon the note was burning in the ashtray. Laurel leaned out of her window to keep the smoke out of her hair. When nothing remained but ash, she grabbed her purse and computer and walked up to the house just as she would have on any other day.

Squeezing past Warren’s Volvo, she remembered that she still had both Razrs in her slacks. Habit was a strong force. It would probably be better to leave the clone in the car, but Danny was liable to text her with more information about their meeting, and she needed to stay abreast of the situation, so that she could tell Warren whatever would get her the most free time. She took out the clone Razr, switched it to SILENT, then slid it into her back pocket on the opposite side from the legit phone in front. At least Warren wouldn’t see the flat bulges of two phones from any angle.

As soon as Laurel entered the pantry, she knew something was wrong. Moving into the kitchen, she sensed that things were out of place, as though they had been moved and then put back by someone who didn’t know exactly where they went. She heard nothing, but there seemed to be a residue of anger in the air, as though the house itself were disturbed. She thought she smelled alcohol, a faint trace coming from deeper in the house … and maybe burnt food. Yes—there was a microwave carton in the sink, with something black leaking out of it. Warren had never been much of a cook. He didn’t care about food.

She left the kitchen and stepped down into the great room with its two-story windows and oversize fireplace. Several seconds passed before she realized that she was not alone. Warren was sitting so still that he didn’t seem to be alive. But his eyes were open, and they were watching her. Warren was hunkered down on the ottoman of Laurel’s Eames lounger, which he had dragged up to their thick glass coffee table. He was still wearing yesterday’s clothes.

“Warren?” she said. “Are you all right?”

The eyes blinked slowly, but he said nothing.

She took a step closer, then stopped, still five yards from him.

“Come sit down,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

He motioned toward the sectional sofa that half surrounded the coffee table. Laurel started forward, then checked herself. Something in his voice had set off an alarm in her head. Or maybe something lacking from it. That was it. All the life had gone out of his voice.

“Warren, what’s the matter?” she asked gently. “Is it something to do with the tax audit?”

He pointed at something on the coffee table. A piece of paper. “I want to know about that.”

Laurel leaned forward and looked down, and an explosion of panic detonated at the base of her brain. Now she understood everything. The frantic searching she’d witnessed this morning had nothing to do with the IRS. Warren had somehow discovered the sole handwritten letter Laurel had kept from her relationship with Danny. She’d recognized it instantly, because Danny had written it in green ink. The block-printed letters shrieked up at her like an accusation of adultery. When did Warren find that? she thought frantically. Since he hadn’t come to bed last night, it was possible that he’d found the letter many hours ago. Found it, read it, and then begun tearing the house apart looking for more evidence. Probably the only reason he hadn’t snatched her out of bed and confronted her last night was because the letter wasn’t signed (except for the word “Me,” which on the day Laurel had received the letter made it sound like a note from a junior high school boy, but which she now thanked God that Danny had done).

“I’m surprised you kept that,” Warren said. “You’re usually such a detail person. I guess that letter means a great deal to you.”

Laurel stood frozen, her eyes on the letter. Other than outright panic—squashed by survival instinct—her mind was blank. She gazed at the green letters, trying to keep the muscles of her face motionless. She felt Warren staring relentlessly at her, not blinking, and blood rushed into her cheeks. Nothing could stop that. She could blame it on Warren’s confrontational posture, but that would only postpone the inevitable. From the moment Warren found that letter, the truth was bound to come out.

“Well?” he prompted, his voice exquisitely controlled. “Are you going to stand there and lie to me?”

Laurel knew what his exaggerated control signaled: rage. Danny had always warned her to be prepared for this moment. For getting caught. Anyone might have seen them on any day, without their even knowing it. Danny had told her that people who had affairs behaved as though they were invisible, as though passion created some sort of force field through which common people couldn’t see. But this was a chemical illusion, and it took only a single unexpected glance to destroy it. Danny’s letter was much more than that. It was as deadly as a shot fired through the heart, and it had probably destroyed Warren to read it. Worse, that shot had triggered an avalanche from the frozen heights above their marriage. Even now, mountains of denial and repression were hurtling down upon them at two hundred miles an hour. The silence in the room was the prelude to the roar of being buried alive.

“You’re not going to say anything?” Warren demanded.

Her mind grasped at the nearest concrete detail. “I’m getting a migraine. That’s why I came home early.”

“You poor thing.”

“Whatever,” she said, turning away. “I’m going to try to find the Imitrex.”

“Don’t try to walk away from this.”

As she looked back at him, Danny’s voice spoke softly in her mind: Never admit anything. No matter what he confronts you with, deny it. Deny, deny, deny. It may seem ridiculous, but he’ll be desperate for any excuse to believe you. If you admit cheating on him, you’ll regret it later. Think before you act. She knew Danny was right, but looking at Warren now, and knowing what was in the letter, she saw how impossible that advice was. She had no option but to tell the truth, even if it meant living alone forever. But first she needed the Imitrex. She couldn’t complete the destruction of her marriage while having a migraine.

“I’m going to find the Imitrex,” she repeated firmly, and walked away before Warren could respond. “Will you give me the injection?”

“Come back here!” he shouted. “Don’t walk away from me! Laurel!”

She waved acknowledgment but kept walking, her eyes brimming with tears.

“I said turn around, goddamn it!”

It was his tone that turned her, not the “goddamn.” There was something in it she had never heard before, a fury that bordered on madness, and she could imagine nothing more alien to Warren Shields than madness.

Facing him again, she saw that he’d gone pale. His right hand gripped the edge of the coffee table like that of a drowning man clinging to the gunwale of a lifeboat. The sight triggered something deep within her, something far deeper than thought, an impulse concerned with her survival alone. And then she saw why: Warren’s other hand was holding a gun. A black revolver, pressed against the outside of his thigh. Only part of the gun was visible, but there was no mistaking what it was.

“My head is about to explode,” she said, her eyes locked on to his by force of will alone. “Whatever that piece of paper is, I’ve never seen it before in my life.”

FIVE

“You’re lying,” Warren said, still clutching the gun beside his leg. “I have to say, that’s the last thing I expected from you.”

Laurel refused to acknowledge the gun’s existence, yet it filled her mind with terrifying power. Where had Warren gotten a pistol? He owned a rifle and a shotgun, but so far as she knew, there wasn’t a single handgun in the house. Yet he was holding one now. Should she acknowledge it? Was it riskier to pretend the gun wasn’t there? Would that reinforce the idea that she was lying? Warren was almost hiding it from her, though. For now, she decided, she would pretend she hadn’t seen it.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said in a level voice. She pointed at the letter on the coffee table. “What is that?”

He slid the letter toward her. “Why don’t you read it?”

She picked up the note and scanned the words she knew by heart, her eyes swimming.

“Aloud, please,” Warren said.

“What?”

“Read the letter aloud.”

She looked up. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Do I look like I’m kidding? It’ll be so much more powerful that way.”

“Warren—”

“Read it!”

“Will you give me the injection when I’m done?”

He nodded.

She’d read Danny’s last letter so many times that she could recite it from memory. She reminded herself not to glance away from the paper as she read, a mistake she might pay for with her life. She began reading in a lifeless monotone: “‘I know the first rule of this kind of relationship is Never Write Anything Down. But in this case I feel I have to. A—’”

“You skipped the salutation,” Warren said coldly.

She sighed, then backed up and gave him what he wanted. “‘Laurel,’” she said. “Blah, blah, blah. ‘A transient wisp of electrons won’t do it. There’s no need to go over the facts. We’ve both done that until we’re almost insane. But before I say what I want to say, let me remind you that I love you. I feel things for you that I’ve never felt before—’”

She looked up and spoke sharply, “Warren, this is bullshit. Where did you get this?”

He looked back at her without speaking.

“Did someone give you this?”

An odd smile touched his lips. “I actually found it in your copy of Pride and Prejudice. But then you know that already, don’t you?”

“I told you, I’ve never seen this before in my life.”

He shook his head. “Deny till you die, huh? I really expected more from you than this. Where’s the woman of principle who’s always criticizing people? Why can’t you tell me the truth? Because this guy dumped you? Are you scared to leave me without another man to run to?”

The words rolled right over her. She couldn’t get past the gun. It seemed unreal in Warren’s hand, a mockery of everything he stood for. He had never liked guns. He knew how to shoot, of course, like any man raised in a small Southern town. But he wasn’t like a lot of the men she knew, who had fetishes about guns. Many homes in Athens Point held half a dozen firearms, and some forty or fifty. A couple of doctors actually carried guns on their person and had built pistol ranges on their property. She’d heard Warren make disparaging comments about those men, something to the effect that they used the idea of self-defense to justify the macho feeling that guns gave them. Laurel agreed, but Warren’s take on things had surprised her, because unlike most people, he had actually used a gun to defend his family.

When he was fifteen years old, a prowler had broken into his parents’ house, looking for anything he could steal to buy drugs. Warren had awakened, crept down the hall, and found a hopped-up teenager pointing a gun at his father’s chest and demanding money. Without thinking, Warren rushed to his parents’ room and grabbed his father’s loaded .45 from the top shelf of the closet. Then he ran back to the front room and shot the yelling prowler in the back. He didn’t yell out a warning or call 911. He saw his parents in mortal danger, and he responded with deadly force. The police saw things the same way, and within hours, Warren Shields was a local hero. A week later, the NRA sent a reporter to town to get the story, to run it in their “The Armed Citizen” column in American Rifleman. Warren and his parents declined this celebrity. As it turned out, the boy Warren had shot was only three years older than Warren himself. Warren had played baseball against him when he was still in high school. As far as Laurel knew, Warren had never fired another pistol since that day.

Yet now he was holding one in his hand.

Don’t look at the gun, she told herself. “Somebody’s screwing with your head, Warren. That’s the only explanation for this.”

Another faint smile, as though he could appreciate her efforts to deny the obvious, the way Grant tried to deny peeing on the toilet seat. “Then it shouldn’t bother you to keep reading,” he said. “Maybe together we can figure out who wrote this.”

“Warren—”

“Read!”

She closed her eyes for a few moments, then continued. “‘I think of you in everything I do. You’re as much a part of my being as I am. This emotion feels unselfish, but it’s not, because you are my salvation. And not only mine, as you know. No lesser thing could keep me from coming to you. I know you know that, and that’s not why I’m writing you. I’m writing to tell you something else you already know, hopefully to give you the last push you need.

“‘You deserve more than I can give you, and that’s why we’re not together. But you also deserve more than Warren can give you. Much more. You have to leave him, Laurel. He can never make you happy, and you know it. He doesn’t even know you. If he did, he would never have let you give up so much to come here.’”

Over the top of the letter, she saw Warren’s mouth tighten into a grimace of hatred. She stopped, but he motioned for her to go on.

“‘You and Warren are complete opposites. He is cold, logical, held-in, almost sterile. You’re warm, vibrant, creative, sensual, all the things you’ve shown me this past year. I’m not trying to denigrate him. I know he has good qualities. He’s an honest man, a good provider. I don’t care much for his parenting style, but I’m not sure we have much choice in that. We’re all victims of our fathers that way. But your needs are so deep. Emotionally, sexually, intellectually … while his seem so limited and concrete. You’ve told me that yourself. He doesn’t really want a wife, but a beautiful servant. That role will never be enough for you, and the sooner you admit that, the better off you’ll be. Warren will be, too. The only way you could stay with him is by becoming a lifelong martyr to your children. I’ve known women who did that. Zoloft for the daytime, sedatives at night, a vibrator in the drawer, and too many glasses of wine at parties. They all regret it later.’”

Laurel paused for breath. Too afraid to look up, she pushed forward on autopilot.

“‘Please don’t choose that life. Don’t sell yourself short. The simple truth is that you married too young. Should you pay for that mistake for the rest of your life? I know, I know … Do as I say, not as I do. But we’re in very different situations. Grant and Beth will be all right. No matter what you choose, I’m going to abide by our agreement. I never thought of myself as weak until I was inside you. Now I know how weak I truly am. I’ll never get myself out of you, and I’ll never get you out of me. I’m sorrier than you’ll ever know.’” She paused, trying to blot Danny from her mind, as though not thinking of him might somehow protect him. “It’s signed, ‘Me.’”

“How convenient,” Warren said acidly. “Don’t you think? And the writer seems to have his finger on the pulse of our marriage, doesn’t he? Or he thinks he does, anyway. Who do you think might know us that well?”

She kept staring at the paper, wishing harder than she had as a child forced to sing in front of her father’s congregation that she could magically be transported elsewhere. As she stared, the periphery of her vision shrunk and went dark, until she was staring at the letter through a round window. Her dread of pain returned with enough force to take her out of the moment—almost.

“Just tell me the truth,” Warren said softly. “Please. I won’t be angry.”

Glancing up at his slitted eyes, she felt she had just heard a rattlesnake hiss, Just step right here on my tail, I promise I won’t bite you.

“I have told you the truth. You don’t want to hear it.” She dropped the letter on the floor. “I got a migraine aura thirty minutes ago. If I don’t get that injection, I’ll be flat on my back all afternoon, unable to speak. You won’t be able to continue this ridiculous interrogation.”

He regarded her coolly. Withstanding his scrutiny as best she could, she tried to make a plan of action. Given the as-yet-unmentioned gun, she should probably get out of the house as fast as possible. But that wasn’t as simple as it sounded. She couldn’t outrun Warren, and no one could outrun a bullet. It seemed inconceivable that he would actually shoot her, but if someone had asked her whether Warren would threaten her with a gun, she would have declared that impossible, too. No … she was going to have to talk her way out of this. Talk and bluff.

“Is that a gun in your hand?” she asked in a neutral voice.

He lifted the pistol into plain sight. “This?”

“Yes, that.”

“It is.”

“Is it loaded?”

“Of course. An unloaded gun is useless.”

Oh, boy. “Where did you get it?”

“I bought it a couple of months ago. Some punks hassled me one night when I was riding my bike on the south end of town. I carry this in my seat bag now. I’ve got a permit for it.”

Warren was still an obsessive cyclist; he’d won dozens of regional races, and even a couple of nationals a few years ago. He rode countless miles in training, but she’d heard nothing about any gun, or any incident where he’d needed one.

“You keep that in the house, with our children?”

She’d tried to sound suitably shocked, but Warren ignored her apparent concern. “I have a lockbox for it in the storeroom. Top shelf. It’s kidproof, don’t worry.”

It’s not the kids I’m worried about right now. “That doesn’t mean it’s Grant-proof.”

A smile crossed Warren’s face as he thought of his mischievous son.

“Why are you holding it now?” she asked.

“Because I’m very angry. And this makes me feel better.”

Oh, God—

“Apparently,” he went on, “you don’t want to tell me the truth. But you should know this: you’re not leaving this house until I know who wrote that letter.”

“I don’t want to leave the house, Warren. I want a shot of Imitrex.”

He frowned as though he were being greatly inconvenienced. “Give me your cell phone.”

A shiver of panic went through her, until she remembered she was carrying both phones. There had been days when she’d only had her clone phone in her pocket.

“Hand it over! Your car keys, too.”

She slid her hand into her right front pocket and drew out her legitimate Razr. Warren reached out and took it, then laid it on the coffee table.

“I’ve already gone over your cellular records online. I’ve got a couple of questions for you.”

She shrugged. There was no danger there. She had always used her clone phone to call Danny.

“The keys, come on.”

She drew her car keys from her left front pocket and passed them to Warren, who shoved them into his own pocket. She hated to give them up, but she couldn’t risk him searching her and finding the clone phone in her back pocket. Danny was probably trying to call her right now. He would be sitting in the clearing on his four-wheeler, expecting to see her Acura come rolling between the big oak trees. He’d wait awhile, thinking she was only running late. Then he would start to worry. She had to contact him. A sickening wave of nausea hit her, and she tensed against it. As it passed, she got an idea about how to text Danny.

“I want your computer, too,” Warren said. “Where is it? In the kitchen?”

The blood drained from her face. There were things in her computer that could destroy her. Danny, too. “I’m going to throw up,” she groaned.

She ran for the master bathroom.

“Goddamn it!” Warren cursed, jumping up and rushing after her.

She ran all the way to the toilet cubicle, hoping that Warren would stop in the bedroom, but he didn’t. He stood over her as she fell to her knees and put her face in the toilet bowl. She had no choice now. Retching loudly, she stuck her finger down her throat and brought up what remained of her breakfast.

Warren didn’t flinch. He’d seen things in his medical career that made a little vomit look like a picnic. She was terrified that he would notice the flat, rectangular bulge of the second Razr in her back pocket, but he suddenly walked out of the cubicle. She heard him rummaging in the medicine cabinet on his side of the marble-floored bathroom. Could she risk texting Danny now?

“Is the Imitrex in there?” She coughed. “Did you find it?”

“I’ve got it. Come lie on the bed, and I’ll give you the shot. Stay away from the bathroom windows. I noticed Mrs. Elfman nosing around out there this morning.”

Laurel’s throat constricted in terror. She prayed that the e.p.t box still lay behind the hedge beneath the bathroom window.

“Hurry up!” Warren said irritably, suddenly standing above her again. “You’re done, aren’t you?”

“I’m still nauseated.”

“The sooner the better, then.”

He grabbed her pants right above the pocket that held the Razr. As she screamed and tried to protect the phone, he yanked down her waistband and jabbed a needle into her hip. After what seemed a savage twist, he yanked it out again.

“Ow!” she cried. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Me? I’m ‘cold, logical, held-in, almost sterile.’” He slapped the spot where he’d injected her, something nurses did to distract patients from the pain of injections—usually before the needle went in—but his slap was hard enough to bruise. “Tell me who wrote that shit. Tell me who else has been looking at that ass.”

His voice had a proprietary edge. “No one! I told you.”

“When was the last time you fucked him?”

Laurel tried to stand, but Warren seized her neck and pressed her back down. In twelve years of marriage he had never laid a hand on her in anger. Fresh fear twisted her insides. “Warren, that hurts! Please think about what you’re doing.”

“You want to talk about pain? That’s funny. I don’t need to think about this.”

“Yes, you do. I haven’t cheated on you. I’d never do that to you!”

“You’re a liar.” He shoved her against the toilet, then walked away again.

She scrambled to her feet and ran to her side of the bed. There was no point in trying to flee the house unless she could slow him down first. Pulling back the comforter and sheets, she crawled under them and pulled them up to her neck.

“Get up,” Warren said from the foot of the bed. “I want to check your computer.”

“Go get it, then. I’m going to lie here until the aura goes away.”

“If I leave you here, you’ll climb out the window.”

Damn right I will. “Ten minutes in the dark, Warren. Please. If the aura stops, I’ll do whatever you want.” She closed her eyes. “You can lie here with me, if you want to.”

“I don’t,” he said, but he flicked off the light switch. “The windows are locked, by the way. All of them.”

She shifted under the covers, then slid her hand into her back pocket and eased out the clone Razr. In one continuous motion, she opened the phone and slipped it into her front pocket. Warren was a black silhouette in the dark, leaning on his bureau.

“When I read that letter,” he said hoarsely, “I felt like someone had stabbed me in the heart.”

She slid her thumb lightly over the Razr’s keypad. Keying in a message was child’s play, but blindly pressing the proper sequence of buttons to put the phone into text mode wasn’t. She turned her head and looked at Warren as she worked her thumb over the faintly tactile buttons, trying to keep his eyes focused on her face.

“I’m not having an affair,” she said softly. “I haven’t had one in the past, either. I would never do that to Grant and Beth.”

Warren flipped out the cylinder of his revolver and spun it. “I wouldn’t have thought you could.” The cylinder snicked home. “But the letter says different.”

“That letter is bullshit.” Laurel had the Razr in text mode. She began keying her message to Danny, her eyes never leaving her husband’s face. “Someone faked it to mess with your head.”

To her surprise, Warren seemed to be considering her suggestion. “Who would fake something like that?” he asked, as though talking to himself.

“Somebody who wants to drive you crazy. And it’s obviously working. Warren, if you lift a hand to me again, I’m calling the police and hiring a divorce lawyer.”

This was pure bravado. Even in near darkness, she could see his neck and jaw muscles tightly flexed. Danny’s letter had utterly transformed him. With an infinitesimal movement of her right thumb, she pressed SEND and slid her hand out of her pocket.

“I still have the aura,” she said with genuine anxiety. “My arms are tingling, and I’m craving ice cream.”

“Imitrex only shortens the headache, you know that.”

She closed her eyes again.

“You’ve got to get up,” Warren said. “I want to see your computer. You can lie on the sofa in the great room.”

Laurel prayed that Danny was already reading her message. She’d risked a lot to send it, and she hadn’t sent the message Danny would have wanted her to. But she still had the phone, and in her heart she still believed she could talk Warren down from this flight of rage—so long as her computer concealed its secrets. At bottom, the idea that Warren Shields, M.D., might shoot the mother of his children was preposterous. But what he might do to a man who had fornicated with and impregnated her was another matter.

“Get up, goddamn it!” Warren snapped, kicking the side of the mattress.

The violence of his anger was what worried her, for it was wholly new. Laurel stood slowly, gathered the comforter around her shoulders, and padded into the hall that led to the kitchen. Run, Danny, she thought. For Michael’s sake, run.

SIX

Danny McDavitt was lying on his back in a sea of clover when his cell phone chirped, signaling the arrival of a text message. He hadn’t heard that sound since the day he’d told Laurel that he couldn’t leave his wife and watched her crumble before him.

Danny didn’t reach straight for his phone. He knew the true worth of lying in sun-drenched clover, waiting for the touch of a woman who loved him. There had been more than a few moments in his life when he’d been certain that he wouldn’t survive into the next minute, much less live to lie in a fragrant bower like this one, waiting for a beauty like Laurel Shields. In the air force, Danny had been known as an even-tempered guy, even among pilots. But falling in love with a woman he could not possess had rewired part of his brain. An emotional volatility was loose in him, and it frightened him sometimes. The chirping phone, for example. Laurel’s reply to the text message he’d sent after their “parent-teacher conference” had lifted him from depression to blissful anticipation in the span of four seconds. But this time the chirp had sent a tremor of fear through him. Laurel was already late, and a new text message was likely to tell him she’d decided not to meet him after all.

He couldn’t blame her. It had been unfair of him even to ask. Nothing had changed in his marital situation. He’d simply reached a point of such desperate longing that he’d been unable to keep from begging. He hated himself for the weakness he’d shown this morning. It was true that Starlette had bailed on the teacher conference; that was par for the course. But the second she’d started making excuses, Danny’s heart had soared. Her avoidance would give him an excuse to see Laurel—in private—and even though he’d known she would be upset, he’d gone to her classroom anyway.

Danny dug his hand into the deep clover and found his phone, but still he didn’t read the text message. He didn’t want to shatter his dream yet. Twenty-one years of military service had taught him to let good things linger while he could, even if they were illusory. Danny had seen the world from the cockpit of an MH-53 Pave Low helicopter, starting with the original bird in antidrug operations out of the Bahamas in 1982 (not the dream duty it sounded like), and winding up in the futuristic Pave Low IV in Afghanistan, where in late 2001 he was shot down and finally retired. In between, he had served on almost every continent, with Bosnia and Sierra Leone proving particularly memorable. Pave Lows from Danny’s group, the elite Twentieth Special Operations Wing, had opened Gulf War One by crossing the desert in pitch blackness and taking out Iraq’s air defenses, opening the skies for the army’s better-known AH-64 Apaches. Danny still remembered the unparalleled rush of flying a massed formation of birds into what everyone knew was going to be the first real war since Vietnam (his own personal Apocalypse Now moment). His sound track, rather disappointingly in hindsight, had been Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” rather than Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” Though Desert Storm had ended faster than anyone expected, there’d been no shortage of adrenaline-charged missions to follow. But they paled in comparison to what he’d endured in the hellish mountains of Afghanistan, a land that bred warriors the way America now bred lawyers.

“Give me some good news,” he murmured, raising the cell phone at last. He held the device far enough from his aging eyes to read the tiny letters on the screen and pressed READ. Laurel’s message materialized almost instantly.

WARREN KNOWS GETMICHAEL LEAVETOWNASAP NO HEROICS

Danny stopped breathing. This was the last thing he’d expected. After all the times they might have been caught—and there had been some close calls—he’d thought the danger had finally dropped to zero. He reread the message as he got to his feet, trying to work out what might have happened.

Some sort of confrontation, obviously. But why was she telling him to run? Did she think he was in danger? That was difficult to imagine. Danny had given Warren Shields flying lessons for four months, and he’d come to know the doctor as a quiet, restrained, methodical man, just what you wanted in a physician, and indeed in a pilot. The idea of Warren Shields harming his wife seemed silly, and the possibility of him coming after Danny even more farfetched. And yet … Danny had seen enough men under severe stress to know they were capable of wildly unpredictable behavior. He’d seen soldiers do things in battle zones that no one back home would have believed—some good things, but more of them bad.

There was no question of taking Laurel’s advice. If she was in danger, he wasn’t about to cut and run. The question was, what could he do to help her? If he shed his anonymity as her lover, he would bring about the very thing he was trying to avoid by remaining with Starlette: he would lose custody of Michael. But if Laurel was truly in danger …

He started to text her back and tell her that she wasn’t alone, that he would solve whatever problem had come up. But she was alone, at least in the sense that he wasn’t with her. And fighting with Warren, almost certainly. One call or text message from Danny might give away everything or hurt her in some way that he couldn’t guess at.

He trotted to his four-wheeler, cranked the engine, and wrestled the Honda onto the track that led up to the house. His chest thrummed with nervous energy. The shock of her message had been profound. He’d been dreaming of the moment that Laurel would rush into his arms. After five weeks apart, she would melt under his hands. Hell, she’d started melting in her classroom. To be ripped from that fantasy into this reality had disconcerted him. But Danny knew how to shift neural gears in a hurry. Countless times he’d been roused from dreams by a klaxon calling him to battle, or to rescue men barely clinging to life, their limbs shredded, guts puddled in their laps like bowls of pasta. His ability to adapt quickly was one reason he was still alive.

He jiggered the Honda into his garage, hit the kill switch, and jumped off. First he needed to know where Laurel was. The school? Home? Warren’s office? He started to get his car keys from the kitchen, but stopped at the door. Danny drove a 1969 Dodge Charger he’d restored himself. Warren knew the car well, so it was useless in this context. Climbing back onto the Honda, Danny drove down to the shed where he kept his lawn equipment. He’d bought an ancient Ford pickup to make runs to the hardware store and to the nursery. He and Michael used it to tool around the property together. Michael had steered it from Danny’s lap several times, an experience akin to flying over Baghdad on a bad night. Danny parked the four-wheeler, jumped into the cab of the truck, backed out of the shed, and drove across his lawn toward Deerfield Road. As he passed his house, he considered stopping to get his nine-millimeter from the bedroom. But that would be plain crazy, he decided. Serious overkill.

“Hold on, babe,” he said, pushing the old truck toward the paved road. “I’m coming.”

Laurel lay silently on the great room sofa, her comforter pulled up to her neck. Warren was sitting on the ottoman he’d dragged over to the coffee table and staring at Laurel’s Sony Vaio, which hummed in front of him like a willing informer. His forefinger slid steadily over the computer’s trackpad; he was working methodically through her file tree in Windows Explorer.

Laurel’s computer posed several risks, some minor, others grave. She kept some files on it that, while they would not implicate Danny directly, would certainly make Warren suspicious. There were stored AOL messages that could cause her trouble, but he was unlikely to see them as significant unless he cross-referenced everything he found against a calendar. But there was one thing she absolutely could not afford for him to discover—the digital equivalent of an atomic bomb.

Laurel maintained a secret e-mail account that Warren knew nothing about. Ostensibly, they both used AOL as their mail server, and Laurel did use AOL for her “official” e-mail life: notes to friends, school announcements, and the like. But her correspondence with Danny was run through a free Hotmail account protected by a password. Laurel’s Hotmail username was misselizabeth2006@hotmail.com. Corny, perhaps, cribbing a digital alias from Jane Austen, but what else was she going to choose? Agent 99? Hester Prynne? The Sony was programmed to “forget” her username and password every time she logged off, but she knew that these keys to her secret life must reside somewhere on the hard drive, as did her past e-mail messages. A forensic computer expert would doubtless be able to call up that data like a boy rubbing a genie’s lamp. What Warren could accomplish on his own was open to question. He knew how to operate most mainstream Windows programs, but he was no wizard. He was patient, though. And if he was willing to hack at the Sony for hours, who knew what he might uncover? If he stumbled onto that Hotmail account or, God forbid, somehow guessed her password, her secret life would be served up on a platter—a poisonous platter that would kill Warren even as he devoured it.

His eyes glowed with feral hunger as his fingers flew over the keys, and his orbits, almost black from lack of sleep, gave him a desperate mien. Danny had said Warren would want to believe that she’d been faithful despite evidence to the contrary, but she saw no such desire in his face now. Warren wanted only one thing: the identity of the man with whom she had betrayed him. As he punched at the keys, she noticed how unhealthy he looked. Competitive cycling had sculpted Warren into a figure of toned muscle, prominent veins, and limber tendons, but in the past couple of months, she’d noticed an unusual puffiness in his face, his neck, and even on his body. He still had heroically defined leg muscles, but he was looking soft around the edges, with a womanly sort of fat accruing around his hips and upper back. She’d assumed this was due to age, or maybe even depression, but the truth was, she’d been too self-absorbed to ask about it. Besides, Warren had always been touchy about his body, and a question like that might offend him. Looking at him now, she saw a depth of fatigue that could not be explained by a single night of sleep deprivation.

It’s got to be work, she decided. Kyle Auster must have finally gotten the practice in bad trouble. Kyle was capable of anything, in Laurel’s estimation. He’d made it clear from the outset of the partnership that he would dearly love to sample her physical charms. And Warren stayed so busy with his patients that he might easily be duped into anything. But what exactly? Warren wouldn’t get this bent out of shape over some tax penalties. What was the next step? Prison? Surely that was impossible. You had to commit outright fraud to go to jail, and Warren would never have let Kyle go that far. She wondered, though, if the senior partner could have committed fraud without Warren’s knowledge. If so, then today’s manic persecution made at least some sense. Warren might be displacing the anger he felt at his former mentor and venting it on her. What was Warren looking for when he found Danny’s letter? she wondered. Should I ask him? Or is it safer to lie here with my mouth shut and pray that my digital secrets remain inviolate?

With a giddy rush Laurel realized that the blank spots in her visual field were gone. The Imitrex was working. She still had the dislocated feeling of a migraine aura, but the aura wasn’t metastasizing into a headache. That could still happen, of course, and at any moment. She wondered if the imminent danger, rather than the Imitrex, had shut down her headache. Get back on point, said a voice in her head. You’re drifting. The kids will be home before you know it, and then you’re looking at a real nightmare. Even the thought made her breath go shallow.

It was well after noon already. She couldn’t know exactly how late it was without checking her cell phone, which was what she used for a watch these days, and that was buried in her pocket. She considered asking Warren the time, but asking questions would only emphasize that she wasn’t free to get up and walk into the kitchen. Trying to gauge elapsed time was tricky under stress (she remembered that from her labor with Grant), but she figured that in two hours, more or less, Diane Rivers would drop Grant and Beth off at the end of the sidewalk. The children would race up to the front door, unaware that their father was waiting inside with a loaded gun.

I can’t wait for that, she decided. I can’t bank on talking Warren around to reason before the kids get home. Because I might not be able to talk him down. She stole another look at his eyes, which tracked across her computer screen with laserlike precision, sucking up every character on the screen. He’s not going to stop until he finds out what he wants to know. And he’s not going to accept innocence until he’s turned over every goddamned rock he can find. Even then, will he believe me? Once somebody begins to doubt your honesty, wiping away suspicion is almost impossible. That’s why people never survive public investigations. Some of the mud always sticks, justified or not. And in my case, it is. I’m guilty, and on some level Warren knows that. If he gets deep enough into my Sony, he’ll have the proof he’s starving for. Or what if he doesn’t? What if he finds my Hotmail account but not my password? Would he use the kids as leverage over me? Searching for a crack in the mask of jealousy that was Warren’s face, she began to wish she’d sent Danny a very different message. I should have dialed 911 the second I saw the gun. I’m like one of those stupid babysitters in a slasher movie. TSTL. Too stupid to live.

She still had her clone phone, of course. She could dial 911 right now, if she wanted. But Warren had once explained to her that there was no autolocation system in place for cell phones yet—not in Mississippi, anyway. If you didn’t tell the 911 dispatcher where you were, it could take a long time for help to reach you, if ever. What if she called 911 and simply left the line open? The dispatcher might eventually hear enough of Warren’s threats to realize a dangerous situation was in progress, but again—how would they find her? If she dialed 911, it would have to be from the house phone. They knew where you were the second you dialed in from a landline. Laurel had already taught Grant and Beth this. If she could get close enough to one of the home extensions, she could definitely bring the police to the house, even if she simply opened the line and said nothing. And yet …

Calling the police might be the most dangerous action she could take. Athens Point was a small town: sixteen thousand people. Avalon was outside the city limits, in Lusahatcha County, home to another ten thousand souls. That meant it was policed by the Sheriff’s Department. Laurel didn’t know how much training local deputies had, but she was pretty sure there was no state-of-the-art crisis management team or hostage negotiator. An image of the local sheriff standing outside her house yelling into a bullhorn came into her mind. What were the odds that this situation could peacefully be resolved by a man like Billy Ray Ellis? He’d been a petroleum land man before winning the post of sheriff, and he was a patient of Warren’s. How long would he wait before ordering an all-out assault on the house? His deputies would probably be ex-highschool jocks with an excess of testosterone. Warren could easily wind up dead or locked in Parchman Farm for the rest of his life. And even if he chose not to punish her for calling 911, she might be killed by a stray bullet or tear gas canister. She’d seen that kind of thing enough times on CNN. Such thoughts might be extreme, but he had threatened her with a gun. No … she needed to resolve this situation herself, and soon.

Before the kids got home.

I can text Diane! she thought with dizzying relief. Tell her to take the kids home with her rather than drop them here. Laurel was about to slip her hand into her pocket when she realized the risks that such a move would entail. She’d be texting from her clone Razr, which was registered to Danny’s helpful friend. The unfamiliar number might confuse Diane enough to make her call the house. Or what if Diane had something else to do after school? What if she tried to call back? Laurel’s Razr was set to SILENT, but if Diane got no answer, she might call the house phone. Warren would answer, and in less than a minute he’d learn that Laurel had just texted Diane from a cell phone. Game over. Laurel slid her hand away from her pocket. She couldn’t risk losing the clone phone yet.

I’ve got to get out of here, she thought. Could she hit Warren hard enough to disable him? If so, she could take back her car keys, which would seriously shorten the distance she had to run. She looked around the great room for a heavy object. A thick blown-glass vase on the console table against the far wall might do. But she’d have to choose her moment perfectly. If she tried to hit Warren and missed, there was no telling how he might react. At the very least he would tie her up, and then she’d be truly helpless when the kids walked into this horror show. With that thought came the first ripples of true panic, fluttery jerks in the heart muscle that made her swallow hard even as the saliva evaporated from her mouth.

Don’t give in to panic, she told herself. The phrase made her recall her days as a counselor at a girls’ summer camp, where she’d taught lifesaving to young teens. Panic will kill you. So do everybody a favor, remain calm, and focus on safety, even if you’re partying— “Safety,” she said softly.

“What?” asked Warren, looking over at her with red-rimmed eyes.

“Nothing. I’m out of it. My head’s starting to hurt bad.”

“The Imitrex will kick in. It’s working on those vessels now.”

Warren was talking on medical autopilot. She’d heard that robotic voice thousands of times, when nurses called the house at night for instructions. But Laurel wasn’t listening now. She was thinking about a room that she’d insisted be added to the house before they moved in. Some people called it a panic room, but the architect they’d worked with had simply called it the safe room. Located under the staircase, it was a windowless, eight-by-ten-foot cubicle with steel walls, a reinforced door, and an electronic lock that operated from the inside. The safe room also had a dedicated phone line that ran underground to a box at the street. Warren had stocked the safe room with canned food and water for use during hurricanes, and also with blankets and pillows for comfort. Grant and Beth had “camped out” in the safe room a couple of times; they called it their “fort,” the place they’d run to if “bad guys” broke into the house. Laurel had never imagined a day when the “bad guy” she would need to escape would be her husband. But that day had come.

She knew she could reach the safe room before Warren stopped her. He was so deep into her computer files that she could be halfway there before he got up off the ottoman—

Wait, she thought, already flexing her calf muscles beneath the comforter. Think it through. So I get to the safe room. Then what? Call 911? No. Call Diane and tell her to take the kids to her house without telling anyone else about it. If I say “family crisis,” Diane will handle it, no questions asked.

Once the kids were safe, Laurel could call the police. Or better yet, a lawyer she knew who was friendly with the sheriff. He would get a more serious hearing. And when the law arrived at the house, Warren would have no hostage to threaten. He would effectively be alone with his gun and his wife’s computer.

The most likely risk at that point, Laurel realized, would be suicide.

She closed her eyes, wondering if Warren could really be that far gone. He seemed more angry than depressed, but more was going on inside him than she knew. There had to be. But now wasn’t the time to question him about it.

Leave that to the TSTL girls …

She flexed her fists beneath the covers, then her forearms. When she felt the blood flowing, she tensed her biceps, shoulders, and abdomen. Then her thighs. Flex, release, flex, release. It was like warming up for one of those classes at Curves, only her life might depend on this little exercise. She wasn’t about to spring up off her sofa like a lioness and then collapse in a heap because her feet were asleep.

Should I grab the computer? she wondered. That would be a tacit confession of guilt. Plus, Warren might tackle her before she could get clear with it. She could wait until he walked farther away to make her move, but that might not happen for hours. Warren could go for most of a day without urinating, and he might well be expecting her to try to damage the machine.

While she debated when to run, Warren stood without a word and walked away from the Sony. Laurel didn’t follow him with her eyes. She flexed her calves but maintained the illusion of a woman at rest. His footfalls stopped, then started again. She risked cutting her eyes to the left. Warren had walked most of the way to the door that led to the master bedroom, but now he’d stopped again. He was watching her with obvious suspicion.

What the hell is he doing? she thought.

As if in answer, he muttered something, then took the blown-glass vase off the sideboard, unzipped his pants, and began to urinate into the vase. He looked straight at Laurel as he did this, a cloud of self-disgust over his features. See what you’ve brought me to? he seemed to be saying. Laurel didn’t give a damn. She used his primitive act as an excuse to sit up. Then she gave him a withering glare.

“That’s gross,” she said, listening to the steady splash of piss in her expensive vase. “Can’t you use the toilet?”

“I didn’t think you’d want to get up.”

She shook her head as though this were beneath contempt. Warren often peed for more than a minute, but she wasn’t counting on that. As though battling nausea, she hung her head between her knees. Then she exploded off the couch, snatched the Sony off the coffee table, and raced for the front stairs.

The AC cord nearly jerked the computer out of her hands, but it popped free as Warren screamed. The urine-filled vase rang against the maple floor as she reached the first door and cut left. Warren roared with anger, and heavy footsteps pounded after her.

“Go, go, go!” she cried, darting through the foyer and snatching open the wooden closet door that concealed the steel entrance to the safe room. Joy flooded through her as she grabbed the handle and pulled—

And almost ripped her shoulder out of its socket.

At first she thought Warren had yanked her arm back, but the truth was simpler: the safe room was locked. A racking sob burst from her throat as she wrenched the handle once more, but it was no use. Then she realized what was wrong. There was a child-protection mechanism to keep children from inadvertently getting locked inside the safe room: a three-digit code that could seal the safe room from outside but not override the master lock, which was controlled from the inside. Laurel frantically punched 777, then jerked the handle again. It didn’t budge.

Horrified, she whirled to try for the front door, but Warren was already standing outside the little closet, staring at her with a malevolence she had never suspected in him.

“I changed the code,” he said.

She felt tears on her cheeks.

“You’re like a five-year-old caught in a lie,” he went on. “Totally predictable.”

Nothing he could have said would have enraged her more.

“Give me the computer,” he demanded, holding out one hand.

She lifted the lightweight Vaio and hurled it at the floor with all her strength.

Warren’s foot shot out to deflect the computer, and the machine hit the carpet with no more force than her cell phone did when she dropped it at the market. Laurel balled her hands into fists and screamed at the top of her lungs. She didn’t know what she was saying, but whatever it was, it was the wrong thing. Warren raised the gun, aimed at her face, and pulled the trigger.

Fire spurted from the muzzle, and something stung her face. She reeled back in shock, her ears ringing from the blast in the confined space. Her left cheek hurt badly, but she didn’t think she’d been hit by a bullet. The pain was in her skin. Warren must have aimed just to the right of her ear. She wanted to slap him, but she didn’t dare risk it.

“That shut you up,” he said, his eyes like blue ice. “And don’t think the police will come running because of that shot. Not even the Elfmans heard it, and they’re the closest to us. Now, pick up that computer and hand it to me.”

She blinked away tears of impotent rage. “No.”

He stepped forward and laid the hot barrel flush against her forehead. She jerked away from the scalding steel and stared back at the man she had slept with for more than a decade and saw no one she recognized. She bent at the waist, picked up the Sony, and handed it to him.

“What now?”

Warren smiled like a wolf at cornered prey. “Let’s see what you’re hiding.”

Danny McDavitt turned his pickup truck east off of Highway 24 and rolled into Avalon. He drove as fast as he could without drawing attention to himself. In this neighborhood, in this truck, everyone would assume he was coming to cut someone’s grass or to fix a faucet.

Danny had been to a few parties in these palatial houses. Some moneyed folk in Athens Point didn’t mind mixing with the common people, and he had actually been making some pretty good money himself for the past year. He’d sold two songs before March, but that was chicken feed compared to what he was making on his oil deals with John Dixon. The geologist had invited Danny to buy into a couple of wildcats he felt good about, and one had come in with twelve feet of pay. At $60-a-barrel oil, even Danny’s one-eighth interest was worth real money. But the timing was bad, maritally speaking. That oil well—plus the four others they were working over now—was the main reason Starlette wanted to stay married to him.

Danny turned left onto Lyonesse Drive and slowed down. The Shields house was a big Colonial set well back from the road on a wooded lot. If the garage door was shut, he wouldn’t be able to tell a thing. But three seconds later, Danny saw Laurel’s midnight blue Acura parked behind her husband’s gray Volvo, which stood halfway out of the open garage.

They’re both at home, he thought. In the middle of the day.

He knew from experience that this almost never happened. For one thing, Laurel should still be at the school. For another, Dr. Shields didn’t usually get home until after his evening rounds, unless his kids had an athletic event scheduled. Danny could hardly believe that he’d coached soccer with Warren Shields only last year, but he had. Their daughters were the same age, and since Danny had been teaching Shields to fly, the doctor had suggested that they coach a team together. All in all, the experience had been good, but Danny had discovered that Warren Shields approached everything with deadly seriousness, even soccer for five- and six-year-old girls.

Danny drove to the end of Lyonesse, then executed a three-point turn and rode back by the house. Nothing had changed, of course. He felt like a high school boy cruising past the home of a girl he had a crush on. As a teenager he’d swing past a girl’s house five or six times a night, just on the off chance of catching a glimpse of her. Stupid, and yet as primal as the mating rituals of Cro-Magnon man.

“Jesus,” he muttered, pulling to the curb. “What the hell am I supposed to do now?”

Laurel’s message had been too vague. Warren knows. How about a little detail with that, lady? Warren knows what, exactly?

Did he know that his wife had recently had an affair? Or did he know she’d had an affair with Danny McDavitt? Danny had to assume the latter; otherwise, why would she warn him to get out of town? And to take his son with him? That was the worrisome part. Why the hell would Laurel think Michael was at risk? Maybe she knew Danny wouldn’t leave town without his son, so she’d named Michael in the message. But then again … maybe things were worse than Danny was letting himself believe.

He craned his neck over his shoulder and looked at the house. Worst case, what could be happening in there? Shields could be beating the hell out of his wife. He might even be threatening her with a weapon. Truth be told, Danny thought, he could have killed her already. But that was nuts. Warren Shields was no killer. Danny hated to make assumptions, but Shields wasn’t going to shoot the mother of his children—not for screwing somebody on the side. Maybe if he’d walked in on Danny doing her doggy-style in the conjugal bed … maybe. But certainly not based on hearsay evidence, which was all he could possibly have, barring a confession. Someone must have seen Danny and Laurel together somewhere. It could have been the hug they’d risked this morning. And that was easily deniable. Danny had coached Laurel on what to say in this type of situation; she knew to deny everything, no matter what.

He didn’t envy her having to bluff it out with her husband. Warren Shields was smart, and not just regular-doctor smart. Danny had known doctors who couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel. But Shields wasn’t one of them. He was obsessive about everything he did. He had only been flying for a year, but he probably knew more aerodynamics than Danny did after thirty years in the cockpit. If Warren really suspected that Laurel was cheating on him, he’d tear at it like a bulldog until he was satisfied. On the other hand, he was like any other man. Deep down, he didn’t want to believe that his wife would open her legs for anyone but him. It just went against the grain of the masculine mind. If Laurel stuck to the plan and denied everything, she would be fine.

Danny wondered if he should risk sending a reassuring text message. If Warren had possession of Laurel’s secret cell phone, it was all over anyway. He would already have seen Danny’s message about “Star” going to Baton Rouge for the day. From that alone he could figure out everything. Even if Laurel had deleted that message as soon as she read it, Warren could trace the phone to Danny’s obliging friend. So where was the additional risk in texting her? Another possibility was that Laurel’s clone phone was stashed safely in her car, as it should be. But Danny knew from experience that she sometimes risked taking it into the house with her. At least on those occasions she always set it to silent. His only other option—the only one that didn’t involve losing Michael—was reporting a Peeping Tom at the Shields house. Or better yet, a bomb threat. The Sheriff’s Department would have to go inside, then. But if Laurel had things under control, that kind of intrusion would only make things worse. Best to leave it at sending a reassuring text message.

“Hey there!” called a scratchy male voice in the upper register. “You lost or something?”

Danny looked across the passenger seat at the sunburned face of a bald man in his late seventies. “No, sir. Just sitting for a minute.”

“You making a delivery out here?”

“Nope.”

“I thought you might be bringing me my crossties.”

“Pardon?”

The man spread his arms as far as they would go. “Railroad ties! To border my garden, shore up the bank.”

Danny smiled. “No, sir. But I’ve used some of those myself, now and again.”

The man stared at him as though awaiting an explanation of what Danny was doing on this street.

“Well,” Danny said, grinding the truck into gear. “I guess—”

“Do I know you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Sure! I saw you in the newspaper. Something about the war. Iraq or somewhere. You won some medals over there, right?”

Military fame is a funny thing. You can leave a town as a pimply faced teenager and not come back for anything but funerals, but as long as you have a living relative there, or somebody still remembers you, your picture will pop up in the Sunday paper above an announcement of your latest promotion or, rarely, an item trumpeting the receipt of a medal for bravery under fire.

“No, sir,” Danny lied. “I’m over from McComb, checking out sites for cellular towers.”

The man’s face scrunched into a near parody of suspicion. “Cell towers? Here in Avalon? Now listen, we got restrictive covenants against that kind of thing.”

“Is that right?”

“Damn straight we do! That’s why these lots are so expensive. You need to just drive on down to Lake Forest or Belle Rive, mister. Ain’t gonna be no cell towers round here.”

“I reckon not,” Danny said, smiling. “My mistake. Thanks again.”

“Don’t thank me. You get on out of here.”

Danny drove off, wanting to make a last pass by Laurel’s house, but knowing he was already late for a flying lesson with a lady lawyer. He wondered if the old man had noticed that his truck had Lusahatcha County plates.

Warren held the barrel of his revolver against Laurel’s right ear as he searched a pantry drawer with his free hand. His motions were jerky, his breath bad. He hasn’t brushed his teeth since yesterday, Laurel realized. Her left cheek stung as though someone had poured acid over it, and when she ran her fingers over the skin, she felt hard particles embedded in her flesh. Gunpowder. The idea was too surreal to fully accept. Then Warren lifted a heavy roll of duct tape from the pantry drawer.

He’s gone over the edge, she thought. I’m in serious fucking trouble here.

“Get back into the great room,” Warren said, shoving her ahead of him, driving her through the kitchen and back down to the sectional by the coffee table. When Laurel reached the sofa, he forced her down onto it.

“Lie on your back,” he ordered.

“Warren—”

“Shut up!” He ripped a long strip of tape off the silver-gray roll and wrapped it tight around her ankles.

“Why are you doing this? I don’t understand.”

“You understand, all right. It’s because I can’t trust you. You’ve proved that.” Another long strip of tape tightened around her ankles. “All that remains is to find out how deeply you’ve betrayed this family.”

“Warren, you don’t have to do this. Can’t we just talk?”

“Sure we can.” A false smile split his lips. “Tell me why you’re so afraid of me looking into your computer, and I’ll send you on your way right now.”

Send me on my way? What the hell does that mean? Freedom? Or death?

“More love letters?” Warren asked. “Pictures? What? Just tell me where the files are, and you can sit with me and have a glass of pinot noir while we look at them together.”

She couldn’t think of a thing to say.

He nodded slowly, as though settling something in his mind. “Every word that comes out of your mouth is a lie.” He wrapped two more lengths of tape around her calves. “I ought to tape your goddamn mouth shut. Hold out your arms.”

Laurel began to cry. She didn’t want to, but the realization that she was now helpless was overwhelming. Not in her deepest troughs of guilt had she imagined something like this. Warren bound her wrists with the thick tape, then pulled her into a sitting position.

“Don’t move unless I tell you to.”

He dropped the tape roll onto the coffee table and retrieved her Vaio from the kitchen, where he’d left it. He set it up on the coffee table again, carefully plugging in the AC cable, which looked as though it had suffered minor damage when Laurel ripped the computer loose. “Let’s see if this baby survived your little escape attempt.” He pressed the power button, avidly watching the screen.

Laurel prayed that the Sony’s hard drive had been smashed, but a moment later she heard the halting mechanical sounds of the computer booting up. Then the clicking stopped. Prematurely, she thought. Warren’s face was taut. He unplugged the Sony, removed its battery, shook the computer, then reinserted the battery and plugged the AC cord back in. This time the Vaio booted normally.

“You just dazed it,” he said with a smile.

Laurel smelled adhesive as her skin warmed the duct tape. When she moved her wrists farther apart, the tape tugged painfully at the hair on her arms.

“You may as well come clean now. I know there’s something on this computer, or you wouldn’t have tried to stop me from looking at it.”

“You’re wrong,” she said in a shaky voice. “That’s my computer. Mine. Those are my things on it. My personal things. I have a right to my own things, you know. My own thoughts. You don’t own me. I’m your wife, not your property.”

He shook his head. “I’ve treated you like a queen for twelve years. And this is how you repay me.”

She closed her eyes, trying to find some way to break through to him. “Warren, what were you looking for when you found that letter? Will you please tell me that? You were awake all night. You must have been looking for something related to the IRS audit, right?”

The skin around his eyes tightened. “What do you know about that?”

“I know what you’ve told me, which is almost nothing. As usual.”

His stare intensified.

“Why won’t you tell me what’s really going on?” she asked.

“You’re the only one in this room who knows what’s really going on.”

Laurel shook her head in frustration. “I know nothing. Please tell me what you were looking for last night.”

He was studying the computer screen again. “The letter. That’s what I was looking for.”

“Why would you be looking for a love letter?”

His gaze came back to her, and his eyes smoldered with fury. “Because someone in this world actually cares about me. A lot more than you do, obviously.”

This floored her. “Are you saying someone told you to look specifically for a letter in this house?”

Warren snorted. “You don’t get it, do you? I already know who wrote the letter. And I already know who you’re fucking behind my back.”

Cold sweat popped out on her neck. Had someone spotted her and Danny together after all? Maybe. Because no one—not even Danny—knew she had kept that letter. Laurel paid a cleaning lady to come in once a week, but it seemed unlikely that her maid would flip through her collection of Jane Austen. Cheryl Tilley had got married in the eleventh grade and, by her own admission, had read nothing since her graduation two decades earlier but Star magazine, which she bought religiously after her weekly grocery shopping at Wal-Mart. Even if Cheryl had accidentally found Danny’s letter, would she have told Warren about it? The two had hardly spoken to each other since she began working at the house, nor was Cheryl a patient of Warren’s.

“I see goose bumps,” Warren said, his eyes glinting. “Piloerection.”

“Who told you I was having an affair?” Laurel asked. “Whoever it is, they’re lying to you.”

“Does it matter? It’s someone who’s offended by adultery, unlike you and your lover. And half this goddamn town, I think sometimes.”

“Warren, I didn’t—”

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” he shouted, his eyes blazing. “Did you really think that?”

She drew back from the force of his fury.

“Right in my fucking face, both of you! You’ve lied every single day. Him, too! Every day! Smiling and acting like a friend … goddamn him. Both of you!”

Laurel sat stunned, trying to puzzle out Warren’s words. Him, too? Acting like a friend? Warren didn’t see Danny every day. Not even when Danny had taught him to fly. Could Warren be referring to the time they’d spent coaching together?

“Who are you talking about?” she asked softly.

“Don’t insult my intelligence!” Warren screamed.

She squinted against the roar of his voice. “Please, Warren. Tell me.”

He leaned over her and spat the words like a priest naming a demon. “Kyle Auster.”

Her mouth fell open. Did Warren really believe she was sleeping with his partner? “Kyle?” she asked, still in shock.

Warren raised his hand as though to strike her, but then he turned away and muttered, “All those times you told me he came on to you when he was drunk … Christmas parties, weekends at the lake. You told me he repulsed you. Lies, every damn bit of it.”

He turned to face her again, disgust etched into his tired face. “Do you know how many nurses that bastard has slept with? It’ll be a miracle if you don’t have every STD in the book. Me, too, by now. Jesus.”

Laurel felt hysterical laughter rising in her throat, but she didn’t dare release it. “Why in God’s name would you think I’m involved with Kyle Auster?”

Warren picked up his revolver and pointed it at her face. “I don’t think it,” he said with certainty. “I know.”

SEVEN

Nell Roberts hibernated the insurance computer and looked over at her sister, Vida, who was talking to an angry patient at the reception window. This morning had been hell, mainly because Dr. Shields hadn’t shown up for work. Nell couldn’t remember Dr. Shields missing a single day because of sickness, and he always called ahead if he got hung up at the hospital. Dr. Auster had instructed the sisters to call every number they had for Dr. Shields, but Warren remained unreachable. Even his wife’s cell phone went unanswered. Vida was so surprised by this that she’d called the ER to find out if Dr. Shields had been in a car accident. Unlike Vida and Dr. Auster, Nell was not surprised by Warren Shields’s uncharacteristic absence. She had a pretty good idea why he hadn’t shown up for work this morning.

Two days ago, Nell had overheard Dr. Auster and her sister talking about their recent business problems, in the coffee room after work. They thought she’d left the office already, but Nell was in the storeroom, culling some old files. Problems was actually a mild word for what had been going on around the clinic for the past ten days. First had come the letter from the IRS. The agency was doing an audit of the Auster/Shields medical partnership. This had sent both physicians into a barely controlled frenzy, Dr. Shields because he deeply resented the government’s intrusion into every sphere of medicine, and Dr. Auster for darker reasons. For the past three years, Kyle Auster had been defrauding the government in various ways, some of which Nell knew about, while others were known only to her elder sister.

Nell kept her emotions under tight rein, but she was easily the most frightened person in the office. Dr. Auster’s scams were only possible because she and Vida made them so, and Nell was deathly afraid of prison. Twenty-seven years old was too young to live behind bars, especially if you were white and pretty and basically innocent. Looking back now, she couldn’t quite believe she’d done the things she had, but it was like Pastor Richardson used to say: a slippery slope. You started small, looking the other way while your sister did this or that, fudging a couple of small things because she asked you to, and pretty soon you were outright lying to help steal from the Medicaid program. It was easy to justify if you tried, like cheating on your taxes. The government did so much to screw doctors out of fees, and Vida made it sound as if they were only getting Dr. Auster his due. But if that was the case, why were she and Vida getting a big cut of the money?

And the IRS letter was only the beginning. Next had come a phone call, informing Dr. Auster that an IRS investigation was under way. That ratcheted things a little tighter and pushed the doctors closer to panic. Then came the call from a friend of Dr. Auster’s in Jackson, a school friend who worked in the state government. This friend had apparently tipped Dr. Auster that the Medicaid Fraud Unit was investigating his practice. No announcement, no courteous letter filled with legalese to give them plenty of time to cover their tracks. Just a late-night warning that someone had made Kyle Auster a target. And why? Because somebody—probably a pissed-off patient—had called the Medicaid office and told them that Dr. Auster was lying to the government. Presto, an investigation began. A secret investigation. That was all Nell knew, and more than she wanted to know.

The scariest thing was that Vida had started it all. Nell had been working in New Orleans when her sister called and told her there was a job waiting for her in Dr. Auster’s clinic, no experience required. To someone making decent money as an assistant manager at an uptown hotel, working as an insurance clerk in Athens Point sounded like a step backward. But Vida had cryptically promised that she was likely to earn double what she’d been making in New Orleans—and Vida hadn’t exaggerated. She had omitted to say exactly what Nell would be doing for the money.

According to Vida, the scams started this way: she’d been skimming a little money from Auster’s till—on cash payments only—and fudging the books to cover it up. Just enough to cover essentials while her husband missed some work at the paper mill, certainly no more than she deserved. But there was a blue-haired lady working as Auster’s insurance clerk, an old battle-ax named Bedner who should have retired years before, and she hated Vida. After catching on to Vida’s scheme, she had gone straight to Dr. Auster. At this time, Dr. Shields was only an associate; he hadn’t yet bought into the practice and so had no involvement in the business side of things.

Dr. Auster confronted Vida after work one day, armed with evidence supplied by Mrs. Bedner. He told Vida he was letting her go but wouldn’t press charges if she left immediately and without a fuss. True to her nature, Vida denied all wrongdoing and claimed she was being framed. Dr. Auster said that if Vida believed she was being framed, she could explain her side of the story to the police. Vida sat quietly for a few moments, then asked Dr. Auster whether, in exchange for a first-class blow job, she could explain her side of things to him instead. Vida had always been pragmatic about sex; she’d been shocking people with her frankness for years. She knew that Kyle Auster had screwed a couple of hospital nurses, and she’d caught him looking down her top whenever he thought he could get away with it. After he heard her offer, Auster told her he’d decide what to do about the embezzlement after evaluating how good a job she did.

Apparently, she’d done pretty well, because Dr. Auster gave her plenty of time to talk afterward, and Vida used her time well. She’d spent her adult life working in medical offices, and she’d learned some sweet accounting tricks. Though Vida only had a year of junior college, she’d always been quick with numbers. When Auster heard how easy it was to hide cash, he decided to listen to the rest of Vida’s ideas on increasing his income. She sold him in half an hour. The key to it all, she told him, was having control of the front office. You couldn’t have church ladies like Mrs. Bedner looking over your shoulder while you were up-coding Medicaid claims. Two weeks later, Dr. Auster called a puzzled Mrs. Bedner into his office and told her she’d been mistaken about Vida, and that she couldn’t continue working for him after making that kind of accusation.

Nell replaced Mrs. Bedner the next day.

That was the beginning. The crest of the slippery slope. Once the money started rolling in, Dr. Auster only wanted more. He was that kind of doctor. Cars, motorcycles, gambling trips to Vegas, wild investments, big charity donations, expensive medical equipment … he wanted everything bigger than life, and his wife wanted the same. Of course, he and Vida went full-time after the scams started. She stayed late almost every day, working on the second set of books, the one the government would see if it ever came to an audit (which it finally had). Dr. Auster stayed late about half the days and on most others stopped by for a quickie before going home after evening rounds. Nell liked to leave right at five thirty, so as to witness as little illegality as possible (and none of the illicit intimacy between Auster and her sister). That had bothered her from the beginning, and nowadays she couldn’t stand the thought of it. It was too pathetic.

Because as pragmatic as Vida could be about life, she actually believed that Dr. Auster was going to leave his wife and marry her.

Nell figured the chance of this happening was about the same as the chance of Toyota building an automotive plant in Athens Point. But her sister believed, and without that faith, Nell knew, Vida would have nothing in her life but two high-school-dropout sons and an ex-husband on the dole.

The strange thing was, Nell now believed she’d been wrong about Auster. He was willing to leave his wife—only not for Vida. Two days ago, Nell had overheard him talking on his cell phone to someone whose name she hadn’t picked up. She’d only heard a few seconds of the call, but Auster’s tone had definitely been intimate, and he’d been talking about getting married. Nell didn’t know how a married man could remarry without getting divorced first, but then she realized that Auster was talking about down the road. She was pretty sure he’d said, “I just have to keep you-know-who on my side until Warren takes the fall. After that, I can leave and we can be together.” There’d been a pause while the woman replied (a tinny sound with a cadence Nell was strangely certain she’d heard before), and then Auster said in a bitter tone, “I’m so tired of servicing that little redneck, I could kill myself. She scares me. But she’ll have too much at risk to retaliate.” He’d ended the conversation with a whispered “I love you, too,” then crossed the hall and walked back into his private office. Nell stood shaking in her tracks for almost a minute, then put on a fake smile and went back to the front desk, where her sister sat working diligently to protect the man she loved from the law.

I’m so tired of servicing that little redneck … She scares me.

One overheard conversation had split open Nell’s world. She and Vida had been living in a dream. Auster was cheating on his wife and his mistress. And just as disturbing to Nell, he was planning to blame Dr. Shields for everything that had been going on in the office. Auster was obviously counting on Vida to back this story up in court, if necessary. Nell couldn’t believe her sister would be willing to do that, but when she thought about all that was at stake, she realized that Vida would probably see the situation as a case of straight survival. Him or us. If somebody had to go to jail, better it be Warren Shields than the man she loved. Vida would solemnly swear that every illegal act she had committed was at the express order of Dr. Shields, and that Kyle Auster had known nothing about it.

Nell couldn’t live with that.

The truth was so different. Warren Shields was not only innocent of fraud, he was also a good and conscientious physician. Moreover, he’d always treated Nell with respect. He’d never even remotely crossed the line into inappropriate behavior with her, which made him different from almost every other man she’d ever worked with. Dr. Shields had a beautiful wife at home, but in Nell’s experience that wasn’t enough to keep a man faithful, especially after twelve years of marriage. She figured Dr. Shields really loved his wife, and that made Nell sad for reasons she couldn’t quite understand. She was only three years shy of thirty, and though most men found her attractive, her faith that she would find a husband like Warren Shields—a good provider and father who would truly love her for herself—was almost gone. She had held out a long time for her Prince Charming, turning down two proposals of marriage from decent men. She felt intensely jealous of Laurel Shields, and yet also protective of her. Nell had enough generosity of spirit to wish another woman well, if that woman had indeed found happiness.

With all this in mind, Nell had called Vida at home last night, after Leno’s monologue. She’d been on the verge of telling Vida about Auster’s shady phone call when Vida warned her that there were likely to be some “big doings” at the office over the next couple of days. When Nell asked why, Vida told her that the less she knew, the better off she’d be. Vida also said that if she or Nell was arrested, they shouldn’t say a world until they met with a lawyer. “Kyle” would arrange for that. When Nell heard the word arrested, she’d almost peed in her pants. After getting up the nerve, she asked why they would be arrested. Vida took some time, then said softly, “There’s something in Dr. Shields’s house, honey. And if someone searches, they’re going to find it. I hate that it’s come to this, but things are worse than you know. A lot worse. We have to think about ourselves now. Do you understand?” Nell had mumbled that she did, then told Vida she’d see her at work the next morning.

After hanging up, she’d sat hunched over the phone for several minutes, regretting every dollar she’d ever taken from Dr. Auster and wishing she’d never left the quiet old hotel on Tchoupitoulas Street. She cried for a while, then petted her cat and cried some more. Then she’d put on her coat and gone out for a walk. She did a lot of thinking during that walk, and when she got back, she sat down at her computer and typed a brief e-mail to Dr. Shields. She’d never sent him anything before, but she knew his AOL address from work. She used her Hotmail address, which not even Vida knew, and which had no obvious connection to her real name. After she was sure the message had gone through, she took two lorazepam copped from the samples room, washed them down with a glass of white zinfandel, and crashed so hard that she was an hour late getting to work this morning.

When Dr. Shields failed to show up, Nell had felt a quiet, somewhat nervous satisfaction. She assumed that he’d found whatever had been planted in his house, and that he would know what to do with it. Smart guys like Dr. Shields always knew what to do. For most of the morning, Nell had been expecting the FBI to come crashing through the door with Dr. Shields behind them, ripping computers off the desks and confiscating files. It would almost be a relief at this point.

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