All the Things You Are Read Online Free PDF Page A

a gulp than a swallow. Finding she can’t continue to speak, she ends the call.
Where are you?
    She feels a mounting panic now, her breath coming in short gasps. Her feet are wetter than they should be, as if she’s stepped in muddy ground, or apples that have started to rot. She moves her feet, and one of her sandals comes loose, and her bare foot plunges into something marshy, sticky even, not apples, not grass. Twigs there, maybe, twigs and straw, and something thicker, like resin, like sap. She looks down, using the face of her phone for light. First she sees red, on her foot, on the ground, not flashes behind her eyes, red stains, and not on the ground; she’s standing on fur, on flesh; she’s standing on the torn-apart carcass of a dog, a springer spaniel,
her
springer spaniel, her beautiful Mr Smith. His body has been gutted, eviscerated, spatchcocked, his poor head half severed but still attached, still intact.
Make it not be, make it not be, make it not be
, she prays, the prayer that is never answered. Claire falls to her knees and holds the dog’s heavy head in her hands, his wide snout, his beautiful, beseeching eyes staring into nothing. She opens her mouth to howl, to scream, but nothing comes except a high-pitched keening sound, and then the tears, a child’s brimming, boiling tears, tears overflowing until she can barely breathe, wracking sobs that convulse her until she can cry no more, and then a whimpering sound not unlike the sound Mr Smith used to make when he wanted a treat, or a walk, or to nestle in her arms. She brings her wet face down to Mr Smith’s head, still warm, her fingers chucking his chin, her lips, her nose, deep in his hair, just as she had every single day of his life, and breathes in his precious musky scent for as long as she can bear.

Where Are You?
    C laire is five miles on the road to Cambridge before she even knows she’s in motion. A quick call to Donna first, but the phone goes straight to voicemail. Seconds later Claire’s in the car; minutes after, she’s on the Beltline, the lakes to either side like dark glass, like black mirrors, opaque, implacable. It feels a bit like a row with a boyfriend, back in her drinking days, when rage would overtake her and she’d up-end a bar table and be halfway down the street, her body doing the thinking for her overloaded brain. Look at her now, frightened, shaking, blinking back tears, blazing down the 12-18 trying to get ninety out of the Pacifica without the old heap collapsing in steel ribbons all over the highway.
    Barbara and Irene, Barbara and Irene, Barbara and Irene. As soon as she saw poor Mr Smith’s body, any solace she found in the signs she thought Danny had left was swept away. Something bad has happened. Please let it not have happened to the girls. If they’re not at Donna’s, then God knows where they are. Neither Danny nor Claire have any other family in the area, and Donna is their only steady babysitter. Claire can’t think of anywhere else Danny might have stowed the girls before taking off. Unless he’s taken them with him. Either choice works better than the alternative: that they’ve been taken against their will.
    Not for the first time, Claire’s hand hovers over her cell, ready to call 911. Not for the first time, she tries to talk herself down. Danny ran out with the girls, knowing the bad guy or guys – meaning whoever killed Mr Smith – were on their way. That’s as much as Claire can cling to for the time being. Never mind that the entire house had been stripped of furniture and belongings, suggesting a certain amount of forward planning. Never mind the question of why bad guys could possibly be after her husband, a suburban bar and grill owner with no criminal record or major gambling or drug addictions. The girls were with their father, and he would never let anything bad happen to them. Don’t think about their coming to