Apprehended Read Online Free PDF Page B

Lilly’s mother exactly because she had tried to trick him into marrying her by getting pregnant. He might as well have said, “ Let that be a lesson to you .”
    When he finished graduate school, Joseph told Kaylie that he had decided against having any more children. He had a vasectomy not long after he made that announcement. She was twenty-one then, and didn’t object very strongly; it was a disappointment, but she could understand Joseph’s point of view. She told herself that they would have more time to do the things they wanted to do. And even every other weekend, Lilly was a handful.
    But somewhere around thirty-five, it became more than a disappointment. It was a bruise that wouldn’t heal. Every time her mind touched upon it, it hurt.
    By then, their isolation was nearly complete. They were estranged from her family and most of the people she knew before her marriage. Their few friends were his friends; their hobbies, his hobbies; their goals, his goals. He reserved certain pleasures for his own enjoyment. Infidelity was one of them.
    Her own private pleasures were far less complicated. Four years ago, she had planted a garden, perhaps needing to give life to something . Joseph never liked what she chose to plant there, but otherwise, he ignored it.
    Jim Lawrence, on the other hand, had liked the garden. One day when he was driving his patrol car past the house, he had seen her trying to lug a big bag of fertilizer to the backyard. He had stopped the car and helped her. When he saw the garden, he smiled and said, “Well, Kaylie, I see Professor Darren hasn’t taken all of the farmer out of you yet.” He spent time talking with her about what she had planted, complimenting her without flattery.
    For a while, after he had left that afternoon, she felt a sense of loss. But as she continued to work in the garden, that passed, and she began to mentally replay those few moments with Jim Lawrence again and again. She began to think of them as a sort of infidelity. She took pleasure in that notion.
    That brief, never repeated encounter made the garden all the more valuable to her. She had spent a long time in the garden late this afternoon, watering it, trying to protect it from the heat. She had gone out to it again in the early evening, after supper but before the summer sun was down, letting its colors and fragrances ease her mind, cutting flowers for her table.
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    Jim Lawrence parked the patrol car next to the curb in front of the Darren house, allowing himself the luxury of a sigh as he pocketed the keys. This had been one helluva night, the worst he had faced since becoming a sheriff’s deputy, and it was far from over. He had been glad to let the high muckety-mucks take over at the refinery. He had no desire to try to juggle the demands of firefighters, OSHA, oil company men and every kind of law enforcement yahoo between here and God’s forgiveness. Let the sheriff handle it himself.
    The task he had been given that night was bad enough. He had spent the last four hours getting in touch with families who lived outside of town, out on farms, and bringing someone from each family to the temporary morgue at the junior high school. Mothers, fathers, wives, husbands—brought them into town to help identify the bodies (“No, Mrs. Reardon, he wasn’t fighting anybody. His fists are up because . . . well, that’s just what happens to the muscles in a fire.” How could you say that gently?) For some, all they could do was give some needed information (“Who was his dentist, Mr. Abbot?”) to the harried coroners.
    Emma, the woman who worked dispatch, did her best, but she was fairly new on the job and ill-prepared for a disaster of this magnitude. In the midst of the chaos that came with the refinery fire, she had managed to log a call from Kaylie Darren, asking Jim to come by, no matter how late, whenever