The Witch of the Wood Read Online Free PDF Page B

sense to know that bugs didn’t just sting and curl back into the home fold. With contact like this there would have been live ones transferred, eggs. And he would have been able to see them, since the “stingers” were big enough to draw out with his fingernails. No, he wasn’t going to go to some emergency room, explaining first to the receptionist, then the nurse practitioner, next the “fellow” organizing the charts, and finally the doctor, with his female graduate assistant taking notes because they were a “learning facility,” that he got quills, or barbs, or stingers, or splinters from a woman they’d advise he contact at his earliest convenience.
    He got his beard trimmer and shaved off the entire triangle of hair, put the toilet seat down and a set a towel over it, poured the rubbing alcohol in the drinking glass and got out his tweezers, the sharp ones with the needle points. An hour and twenty minutes later, he had seventy-nine bloody barbs in a dish. The bathroom stank of sweat and pain and intensive finite exertion, his T-shirt soaked through under the arms and down the back of the neck.
    He’d gotten them all.
    Time to confess.
    But he didn’t confess, and this decision finally came from the same place inside him that had campaigned for home surgery. He was in the parking lot of South Detectives in the Visitors Section with the engine running, next to the handicapped slot and a sandwich board advertising both the hours for license photo I.D.’s, and a raffle that would make one eligible for a membership this summer at the Bala Swim Club, and he just couldn’t make himself go in and say it.
    And it wasn’t the rash, his own self-loathing, nor even a fear of actual incarceration, at least he didn’t want to think so. It was the possibility that it was not rape at all that stayed his hand here. What if the crying was part of the game for her, a release after the bait and catch? What if she had a husband who was away on a business trip? What if the babysitter upstairs had petered herself out on quadratic equations and fallen asleep in the lamplight? Yes indeed, what if this was all that it had seemed from the beginning, a fantasy played out, now sealed tight with the unspoken expectation that Rudy would keep his mouth shut and be an adult about it as they both went back about their lives? Would April Orr really want to admit to some detective, a reporter, a jury, her family, the world that she fucked some guy doggie style against the banister in the living room with her kid awake in the crib just upstairs?
    And if she really wanted to make a federal case out of this, he’d have gotten that knock on the door by now, flashers in his rearview. Right?
    Rudy’s crotch area had gone from pinpricks and fire to a gnawing kind of ache that ebbed and pulsed, and his responsibilities became suddenly clear. He didn’t look forward to it, but medicine didn’t always taste like cherries. He was a bit hesitant in terms of possible inappropriate workplace suspicion, but the guise of casual vocation was fairly solid armor here. He backed out of his parking spot and wondered if Bravo Pizza was open yet. He wanted an Italian hoagie, no cheese, extra hot peppers and oregano. Then he had to make a stop at the drugstore for some gum, and back home to iron a set of dress clothes. Though he’d lucked out with the scheduling this semester leaving his Fridays free and clear, Rutherford University was open for business, all rattle and hum.
    Uncomfortable, yes, but federal case, no.
    Time to visit the Continuing Education Offices.
    He had a couple of questions for the Materials and Support specialist.

    Rudy Barnes had been nervous at different key points in his life, sure: coming to bat as a nine-year-old in a pressure cooker against the South Marple Little League Red Sox . . . playing a junior high school Battle of the Bands in the gymnasium in front of a crowd of a thousand . . . asking Lisa McFee to the senior prom in