Echoes in the Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page A

quiet and reserved, but strong."
    Still, the word "mousy" couldn't be avoided in any discussion about Susan Reinert. She had a high-pitched voice, and squeaked like a rodent when she got excited.
    Susan Reinert was thirty-three years old when William Bradfield and Sue Myers were settling in their apartment near Phoenixville, and Jay Smith was enjoying his new title of "doctor."
    Susan was even more petite than Sue Myers, and was definitely not attractive. She wore oversized glasses with dark plastic rims, an effect that accentuated a large blunted nose. Her lower lip protruded, pushed out by big gapped incisors. Her dark hair was always worn in short sensible styles. Her clothes were conservative and sensible. She was a quiet, sensible English teacher at Upper Merion Senior High School, but she was a woman living in a liberated era in a most liberated school wondering what was missing in her life.
    Susan's marriage had been unsatisfactory for quite a while, and if she never wrote a letter to Ann Landers, she did write painfully and intimately to herself. She began keeping a secret diary, and it was full of loneliness, confusion, guilt and regret:
    To use sensitivity jargon I'm going to try to get in touch with my feelings. I feel like I'm losing my mind. I need help and I can't find it. I don't know what I want to dol
    Susan Reinert was trapped between duty and uncertain desire at a time when American women were attacking every male bastion from the firehouse to the boxing ring.
    In that same diary she asked and answered various questions:
    Why do I keep plugging away at this marriage? Answer: Because I'm afraid it's the only one I'll ever have, and if I cannot live with Ken, who really is not all that bad, then there must be something wrong with me.
    In the early years of their marriage, Ken Reinert had served as a navigator on a B-52 bomber, and his bride lived with him at air force bases. Susan and Ken had a baby girl and a year later a boy. It was not a particularly easy life with two babies, but they were busy and young and didn't mind.
    The former air force captain later said of those times, "There was a lot of killing in Vietnam and I know I caused some of it, but I honestly can't say I hated my tour of duty. It wasn't like being a marine and risking your life in some rice paddy. Up there in that B-52, I was, well, just so far above the killing. I have to say death didn't mean a lot to me then. But when I was finished I wanted to settle down somewhere and live quietly and watch my children grow and never think of killing, not ever again."
    All her life Susan had revered her father, William Gallagher. Some of her intimates wondered if any man could live up to her father's image. Prior to his untimely death, William Gallagher had run a small-town newspaper in western Pennsylvania where Susan grew up with her older brother, Pat. Their mother had been a schoolteacher, and young Susan had been the kind of girl who always knew where she was going. It was a natural and inevitable progression from the Future Teachers of America to a master's degree at Pennsylvania State University. She hadn't given serious thought to any other profession.
    Upper Merion was one of the wealthiest school districts in Pennsylvania with the advantage of being a suburb of Philadelphia. It wasn't that the students were as affluent as those in the nearby Main Line prep schools and academies, but the district had an excellent tax base and there were prosperous business interests within the Upper Merion boundaries. It seemed like a good place to teach, and it was only a short drive to their home on The Main Line.
    It was a very active time for the young Reinert family The growing children and Susans duties in the English department kept her extremely busy, and Ken got himself a good position with a Philadelphia bank.
    The kids were a happy surprise. Though no one had ever called Susan Reinert pretty, her kids were very handsome. They were also bright and