The Beast of Barcroft Read Online Free PDF Page A

teeth.
“Please.”
    She stepped away from the threshold into the shady end of the room and touched his cheek. “Maybe if you could’ve said that without looking at me with such bitterness. Or if the words sounded like they weren’t fighting through venom.” He looked away and she withdrew her hand. “I’m truly sorry about all of this, Ben, but you’re not the man I fell in love with anymore. And I can’t build a life with whoever you are now.”
    On her way back to the door, she stopped beside the dog. He lifted his head toward her, ears up. She cupped his long muzzle in her hand and kissed it. “Take good care of him, Bucky,” she said through fresh tears. “Be a good boy.”
    Ben felt tears of his own coming but would not give her the satisfaction. “If you’re going, then go,” he said. “We don’t need you.”
    She rose from Bucky’s side and walked through the door without breaking stride or looking back.
    “I don’t need you!” he yelled after her.
    The echo of his voice snapped him back to the present. He realized he had just yelled at the empty doorway. He ran his hand through his rumpled hair—brown flecked with a few remaining strands of red from boyhood—and sighed.
    “That can’t be good,” he muttered to himself.
    Ben had respected Rachel’s wishes and left the house the day she came to collect her remaining things. When he returned that night, emptiness suddenly filled the spaces once occupied by her furniture. It was jarring enough to see, but even the acoustics were affected. Sounds traveled farther with nothing to interrupt them, then rattled back into the gaps and bounced off the naked hardwood floors. In the first few days after she left, it seemed overwhelming to fill those holes, to start over, but after a week he went online to order cheap, modular furniture just to stop the strange echoes. By the time he had assembled everything and filled the largest gaps, even her scent had faded.
    But he still had Bucky.
    When he did not want to get out of bed, when the idea of simple grocery shopping seemed like a herculean task, there was his dog. Nudging Ben out of bed with a cold, wet nose, ever ready for a walk. Jumping in place, thrilled to see him at the end of the workday, ready for still more walks. And sitting beside him, taking up too much room, while Ben ensconced himself on his couch, watching his extreme nature shows. The dog provided him not just companionship but also the necessary structure when Ben felt like he did not have the backbone to take another step.
    Ben understood that Bucky was more than a friend. The dog was his last bulwark against something more terrifying to him than any mountain lion creeping in the darkness at the edge of his property: total depression. The strange, new echoes of Bucky’s nails clacking on the hardwood floors in the aftermath of Rachel’s departure were bad enough. But their absence would be even worse.
    Ben fled the house without bothering with coffee.
    It was still dark when he stepped outside. He took a few steps, then stopped in his tracks. He looked in every direction and, satisfied that there was nothing ready to leap out at him, walked quickly to his car. Half an hour later, he settled into his cubicle five miles away with an extra-large coffee he had bought on the road. He worked for a defense contractor in the Crystal City section of Arlington, and thankfully, his tasks on Monday did not require much concentration or interaction. He put in earbuds and lost himself in an Excel spreadsheet until the early afternoon, when he began to feel flulike symptoms. Lightheadedness. Nausea. He thought about going home, but under the circumstances, he decided that feeling sick at work was preferable to feeling sick at home. He stuck it out until the end of the day.
    It was twilight when he left for home and was greeted with a familiar sight: Jim, at the top of their block, trying to get his boxers to play fetch. It usually ended up as a