John Saul Read Online Free PDF Page B

what had happened and to figure out how she was going to get through the rest of her life without him.
    Live without him.
    It was a concept she had never considered since the moment she’d met Ted. Not even when the … problems had begun.
    Now, for the first time, she was going to have to think about it.
    She had no choice.
    The ten o’clock news was over. As she clicked the television in the den off, Audrey realized she hadn’t heard a single word of it. Through the entire half hour, she had sat staring numbly at the screen, vaguely aware of the images of the pretty blond woman and the plastic man who were reading from the TelePrompTers, but not absorbing so much as a syllable of what they had been saying.
    Exhaustion had overcome her. She swung her legs up onto the couch, closing her eyes for a moment in a vain hope that she might drift off to sleep.
    But all that came were images of Ted.
    Working in the forest, his shirt off, his muscular body glistening with sweat.
    Galloping across the field astride Sheika, gracefully soaring over the jumps they had set up when they thought they might get serious about riding.
    Sitting in the easy chair next to the sofa, a book open inhis lap, as he had almost every evening since they’d built the house.
    And then another image of Ted came into her mind.
    An image of her husband striking her son.
    It had only happened once. Just once, she told herself. But that once was too much. She could still remember the horror and shock of it. Two years ago, almost exactly.
    The moment Joey had come downstairs for breakfast, they had known that one of his strange moods had come over him. He was silent, barely responding even when she spoke directly to him, and after breakfast he had simply disappeared, going off with Storm to wander in the woods. He didn’t return until thirty minutes after the sun had set, by which time Audrey had been seriously worried.
    That evening, Ted had taken Joey out to the barn and beaten him with his belt. It stunned Audrey, and when she saw the look in Joey’s eyes when he came back to the house, her heart had nearly broken.
    “I won’t tolerate it anymore,” Ted had told her. “He doesn’t have the right to go off without a word to either one of us, and he’s been coddled about it long enough.”
    “But he’s only a little boy!” she’d protested.
    “He’s not that little anymore,” Ted had said, his voice taking on an unfamiliar harshness. “He’s old enough to take some responsibility for his actions!”
    “But to whip him …”
    Ted’s eyes had darkened. “A couple of smacks won’t hurt him, Audrey.”
    But it hadn’t been “a couple of smacks.” It had been a series of angry red welts across her son’s back and buttocks, which Joey had done his best to conceal from her.
    Just once, she repeated to herself now, just once. But she could not still the thought that kept creeping back into her mind.
    Had there been other times?
    Times that she didn’t know about? How many times might Ted have taken Joey out to the barn and—
    Audrey forcibly banished the image from her mind, the wounds of Ted’s death still too fresh. It seemed wrong evento think about the faults her almost perfect husband had exhibited during the last couple of years.
    Go to bed, she told herself. If you sit here, you’ll wind up crying all night, and you still have a son who needs you. You cannot simply curl up and die, no matter how much you want to!
    Determinedly, she planted her feet on the floor, then stood up and moved swiftly around the large room, switching off the lamps and locking the outside door.
    Against what?
    That was something else that had only begun over the last couple of years: a sense, once in a while at night, that there was something outside the house. Something they could never quite see, could never quite be certain was even there. And yet both she and Ted had begun to lock the house up at night. Now, she followed the habit they’d both