Читать книгу Cause Of Fear - Robert Ross - Страница 8

“What a dream I had last night,” she tells Megan. “I woke up in the morning and my sheets were drenched.”

Linda reaches for a towel to wrap around herself as they step into the sauna. The heat momentarily troubles her, taking her back to the dream.

“I dreamed I was burning to death. It was hideous. Worst dream I’ve ever had in my life.”

“I told you to go slow on those margaritas at the party,” Megan chides. “Birthday or not, sweetie, you ought to know your limit.”

“I only had two,” Linda tells her. She leans back against the cedar wall, letting the dry heat fill her lungs. “I would never drink too much in front of Geoff. I need to prove I’m a fit mother, after all.”

“Were you surprised when he gave you the ring?” Megan grabs her hand. “Let me see it again. What a rock!”

“You bet I was surprised,” Linda says, the diamond sparkling on her ring finger. “What a birthday present, huh? I can’t believe how lucky I am!”

Little Linda Leigh. That’s what everyone’s always called her, and not only because she’s short. Linda has had one of those lives that just lends itself to the term “little.” Nothing very glamorous ever happens to her. Born on a farm in the Midwest, moving to Boston for college, she’d graduated and found a routine job at an insurance company. Until Geoff, she’s never dated anyone spectacular. All the other guys in her life had been average joes, working the same kind of nondescript jobs she has. They haven’t been unattractive, but neither have they really been handsome—which Linda figured was the best she could get, since, after all, she’s hardly Jennifer Aniston herself. Her hair is mousy brown, her face is small, she gets too many freckles if she stays out in the sun too long. Her figure is okay but nothing great, which is why she’s here at the gym, toning her thighs, sweating off those extra pounds. Ever since meeting Geoff she’s been trying to remake herself into something more worthy of him, because Geoff—well, Geoff could be a movie star.

And he practically is, striding across the Coats-worth College campus with all those students following him around. Dr. Geoffrey Manwaring, tall and broad shouldered, with his cleft chin and iron jaw, is the darling of his department, an eminent scholar of ancient history. It seems incongruous in some ways: Geoff is only thirty-seven, yet he’s a leading authority on vanished civilizations and forgotten religions. Linda always smiles when she hears him speak at symposiums, going on about the pharaohs of Egypt or the hanging gardens of Babylon, because he looks so young, younger even than his years, with only a slight frosting of gray at his temples lending him an air of distinguished seniority.

And now he’s asked her to marry him. As soon as his divorce is final, they’ll be wed in his hometown of Sunderland, in the rolling hills of western Massachusetts, in a white chapel where all his ancestors have been married, dating back to the seventeenth century. It is a dream come true for Linda. Everything is perfect.

Everything except—

“What’s the kid gonna say?”

Linda withdraws her hand from Megan’s grip. “Oh, I dread telling him. Geoff thinks we ought to do it together. I suppose he’s right. Josh is going to have to get used to me sooner or later.”

“I don’t get it, Linda,” Megan says. “You are a likable girl. You are sweet. You are kind. You have practically gotten down on your knees to beg the brat to like you. You have bought him gifts, you have taken him to the circus, you have done everything you can. You have been wonderful to him!”

“But I’m not his mother.” The heat is getting a bit too intense in the sauna for Linda. She stands, making sure her towel is tucked securely around her. “I’m going to shower, Megan. Can I give you a lift home?”

“No, sweetie, Randy’s meeting me. You going out to Sunderland with Geoff this weekend?”

Linda nods. “Yeah. We thought we’d tell Josh when we’re out in the country. He’s always in a better mood out there.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

She heads out of the sauna and hangs her towel on a hook. She steps into the shower stall, adjusting the water. Her nightmare still troubles her. If she believed in the symbolism of dreams, she’d say it has less to do with too many margaritas than her constant anxiety about Josh. The one glitch in her happiness is that Geoff’s eight-year-old son despises her.

His eight-year-old son—for whom the sun rises and sets! Geoff completely adores the boy, and the feeling is mutual. They’re forever wrestling on the floor or tossing balls in the park, or laughing at this joke or that comedian, or making goo-goo eyes at each other through the rearview mirror in the car. Josh is Geoff’s “best buddy,” and the boy looks at his dad with stars in his eyes.

Except when he sits next to Linda, and then it’s daggers.

Oh, Josh is polite to her if his father is around—but behind Geoff’s back, the boy will stick his tongue out or call her names like “shrimpy” or “munchkin.” He knows she won’t say a word because a scolding from Geoff would only further drive a wedge between Linda and the boy.

“You’ll see,” Josh has told her on more than one occasion. “My mother is going to come back, and my father will forget all about you.”

It’s terribly sad. Josh’s mother left them nearly four years ago. The boy’s memory of her is dim but beatific. He doesn’t remember the scenes Geoff has described for Linda: Gabrielle throwing tantrums, mood-swinging from ice princess to manic monster, threatening to kill Geoff with a kitchen knife. Once he’d come home from class to find her in bed with the paperboy, a sixteen-year-old kid with acne, and it took a great deal of negotiation to keep the boy’s parents from bringing a charge of statutory rape against Gabrielle. Josh doesn’t know about any of that. He just remembers his mother as a beautiful angel, which Linda supposes is a good thing. But that means he’ll forever see Linda as a she-devil intent on taking his mother’s place.

She towels herself dry and gets dressed. She’s meeting Geoff for dinner at a fancy restaurant downtown with two of his colleagues. She’s met them before: Jim and Lucy Oleson, nice enough people, but both are professors and very smart, and around them Linda’s always felt a little self-conscious. They use words like “paradigm” and “egregious” and “deconstructing.” They write books and give lectures on theory for a living. Linda enters claims for auto accidents, and punches a time clock at the end of her workday.

Gabrielle was brilliant, she thinks, looking at herself in the mirror as she applies her lipstick. She would have become a great scholar and author herself. She was a student of Geoff’s when he first came to the college, and he thought she was the most fascinating woman he’d ever met. Absolutely brilliant. She knew as much about ancient Babylon as he did. Sometimes more.

And she was beautiful. Linda has seen the photographs. The ones of her wedding to Geoff are burned into her brain. Blonde and ethereal, Gabrielle was statuesque, elegant, and assured in her white satin wedding dress. Who knew what demons lurked behind that stunning façade?

Josh looks like her, Linda thinks as she hurries out of the gym to her car. More like her than Geoff, to be honest. Blond, already tall for his age, with Gabrielle’s same crystal blue eyes.

“He’ll come to love me,” Linda tries to convince herself as she starts her ignition. “He’s got to.”

“You’ve always been good with children,” her mother had told her over the phone. “You were the favorite baby-sitter of all the kids in the neighborhood when you were in high school.”

“That’s because I was their only baby-sitter, Mom, since I never had any dates.”

“That is not true, Linda. What about Andy Hecker?”

“Yeah,” Linda had replied, laughing. “What about him?”

Andy Hecker wasn’t exactly boyfriend material. He was a gangly, pimply kid who preferred building monster models to practically anything else. Geek with a capital G. And all the rest of the letters in caps, too.

Still, her mother had a point. The kids in the neighborhood had liked her. She did fun things with them when she baby-sat. They played Twister. They made pizza from scratch, putting everything from peanuts to marshmallows on top. They stayed up late watching slasher videos.

“The boy will come to love you,” Mom said, “once he realizes his mother isn’t coming home.”

“I hope so.”

“I know so. If his father loves you as much as you say he does, the boy will come around.”

Linda heard the rooster crow on her parents’ farm and felt a little homesick. “If he gives me a ring as I think he will, you will come out here to Massachusetts for the wedding, won’t you? You and Daddy both?”

“Of course we will, Linda, honey. Would we miss our baby girl’s trip down the aisle? And to a man as successful as Geoff?”

They thought I’d never get married, Linda thought. They thought I’d be their old maid daughter. Hadn’t I always been the plain one, “little Linda”? Oh, won’t Mom and Dad be impressed with Geoff’s house, his car, his four published books?

Geoff was even more successful than Dennis Gunderson, the man Linda’s sister Karen had married. Dennis owned the largest chicken-feed supply business in their home state, and Karen had thought she’d made quite the catch when she snared him. Karen hadn’t gone on to college like Linda had; she’d never even left the state for so much as a day trip. But she was the beauty in the family, dark and sultry, busty and hippy. Everyone predicted she’d do better than Linda, and until Geoff had come along, Linda had believed them.

Linda remembered that day at the lake when she and Karen had been teenagers, both in high school. She would never forget it.

How could she? It was burned onto her brain.

Karen was one of the popular girls, with her dark hair and small features and delicate hands. “Cute as a button,” everyone called her. Linda was just small and blunt. Nobody called her anything.

“Oh, come now, Linda, don’t be a spoilsport,” Karen insisted.

But Linda didn’t want to go out with Karen and her friends to the lake. She knew what it would be like—Karen and the girls giggling over boys, Linda lagging behind, no one paying her even the slightest notice.

“Mary Ann and Jessica asked for you especially,” Karen pleaded.

“Right,” Linda said. “So I could lug the cooler.”

“They enjoy your company,” Karen said.

Her mother piped in, scolding Linda for being a “stick in the mud.” So Linda relented, heading upstairs to change into her bathing suit.

“You’re not wearing that, are you?” Karen asked.

Linda had slipped into a striped red-and-blue one-piece. “Why not?”

“Never wear horizontal stripes,” her sister told her. “Especially not across your butt. They make you look fat.”

Linda crossed her arms across her chest. “I am not changing.”

“Have it your way.”

Of course, at the lake, she did feel like a fat troll. She sat with her towel wrapped around her waist, a big floppy hat on her head, her eyes hidden behind large sunglasses. Karen and the girls laughed and chatted, practically ignoring her. When Jake Gandolfini—the hottest boy in the senior class, dark hair and cleft chin and muscles—stopped by their blanket, he kept his back to Linda the whole time, flirting with Karen and her friends.

“I don’t want you girls to burn out here in the hot sun,” he teased.

Silly little Mary Ann dissolved into giggles. Behind her sunglasses, Linda rolled her eyes.

Jake was grinning now with a devilish idea. “Maybe I ought to put some more lotion on all of you,” he said.

The girls squealed. Linda knew “all of you” didn’t include her. To Jake, she was just some maiden aunt. Worse: she didn’t even exist.

So, one by one, the three of them—Mary Ann, Jessica, and finally Karen—peeled down their shoulder straps so that Jake could slather their backs and shoulders and arms with Number 15 sunblock. Just before it was her turn, Karen looked over at Linda and seethed, “Not a word of this to Mom.”

Linda watched from behind her dark glasses, and the image has never left her. It summed up, perfectly symbolized, completely illustrated her life before meeting Geoff: the one outside, watching as the pretty girls exposed their skin, lined up for the handsome jock to touch them, each worthy in a way Linda would never be.

Until now.

“Congratulations, Linda,” Lucy Oleson tells her, clasping her hand in greeting.

“Thank you so much.”

“I thought ol’ Geoff here would never again take that matrimonial plunge, but you must have worked your charm,” Jim says, laughing.

Geoff kisses her warmly. How good it feels to be in his arms. He smells great, as usual: that heady scent of aftershave and man sweat.

“Hello, darling,” he says to her.

“Sorry I’m late. Traffic—”

“No problem,” he says, holding out her chair for her as she sits down. “We were just talking a little shop.”

“I just don’t see Ronnie Simms getting the position,” Lucy says, continuing whatever conversation they had been having before Linda’s arrival. “Not with his views of historical revisionism.”

“Well, he doesn’t view the construct in that way, Lucy,” her husband tells her. “He’s a revisionist with a proclivity for obduracy. Really, I would think that…”

Linda feels Geoff reach under the table and take her hand. They exchange small smiles. Is it any wonder she fell in love with him?

They met cute, as they say in the movies. She was getting into a taxi from one side, he was getting in from the other.

“Uh, I was here first,” she insisted.

“I flagged him down,” Geoff replied.

“No, you didn’t. I flagged him.” She leaned in toward the driver. “Who did you stop for?”

“Me, I don’ know, I just pull over.” The Pakistani cabdriver just shrugged his shoulders.

“Look, miss, I distinctly held up my hand and—”

She hated being called “miss.” She folded her arms across her chest. Linda guesses now she was showing, in that moment, a “proclivity for obduracy.” She wasn’t going to budge.

“I have a flight to catch,” she told him in no uncertain terms.

A broad smile spread across Geoff’s face, revealing dimples that made her melt. “Well, as it happens, so do I,” he said. “Since we’re both going to the airport, maybe we can share the ride?”

Funny how fate works. They learned, sitting in traffic outside Logan, that they were both going to Chicago, Linda to rent a car to drive to her hometown of Dowagiac, Michigan, to attend Karen’s wedding, Geoff to deliver a talk on ancient religious practices at some seminar. Though Geoff was in first class and Linda was in coach, they managed to find an empty row somewhere over central Connecticut and sat together, finishing their conversation. They agreed to meet for a drink in Chicago on their way back.

But when Linda showed up at his hotel, eager to get away from Karen’s reception and all her aunts asking her when she—Linda—was going to tie the knot, Geoff was no where to be found. What an idiot I’ve been, Linda told herself. To think a smart, successful college professor is going to be interested in me. What a fool.

“I’m sorry, but is this seat taken?”

She looked up. It was Geoff.

“Did you think I was standing you up?” he asked. “I apologize for being late. Some dreary academic types insisted on challenging my analysis of Zoroastrianism.”

“Well,” she said, laughing, “I hope you told them.”

He ordered a scotch and water. Linda was drinking white wine. She learned he was married—of course, she thought at first—but then found out his wife had left him over two years ago and he hadn’t heard from her since.

“I can’t say I was surprised,” Geoff admitted. “Gabrielle was ill. I think she has some kind of mental illness.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Linda said.

“Well, she began acting strangely….” He seemed unwilling to talk about that time. Linda suspected it had been very painful for him. Her heart melted for this handsome, gallant stranger.

“So of course, I’ve been concerned for her safety. I’ve hired private detectives to try to find her, and the police have combed dozens of states for some clue to her whereabouts. But no luck.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said again.

“Well, things hadn’t been good between us.” Geoff smiled wanly at her over his glass. “Of course, that made the police suspect foul play. When a wife disappears, there’s something like a 85 percent chance the husband knows something about it.”

Is this man a murderer? Linda suddenly thought. Is he playing with me?

“It’s true,” Geoff said. “So I was hauled down to the police station for a long interrogation and one detective kept giving me the evil eye. But eventually they came around to concluding that I was as clueless as they were.”

Linda studied him, just to make sure.

“I have a young son,” Geoff told her, and immediately Linda saw the anguish in his eyes. She saw he was no murderer. Even if he’d stopped loving his wife, his son meant the world to him. That was obvious from the look on his face when he spoke of him. “He misses his mother terribly. She wasn’t a particularly attentive mother, but since she’s been gone, he’s kind of romanticized her.”

“I suppose that’s only natural,” Linda said. “Every child wants a mother.”

Geoff shook his head and sighed. “You know, as sick as she was, I just can’t imagine how she could walk out on her own son.”

“What’s his name?” Linda asked.

“Joshua. He’s a good kid.” His eyes grew sad. “But he needs a mother.”

“So what’s Josh going to say about the wedding plans?”

Linda is startled back to the present. Lucy is grinning at her across the table, having asked a perfectly appropriate question, but one that rattles Linda every time she hears it.

“We’re going to tell him this weekend,” Geoff answers for her. “Out at the house in Sunderland.”

“Well, I’m sure he’ll handle it well,” Lucy says. “After all, I’m sure he adores Linda.”

Linda says nothing.

“Will you get married in Sunderland, too?” Lucy asks. “I remember so well your marriage to Gabrielle out there—”

“We haven’t decided yet,” Geoff says, looking over at Linda.

“Oh, but you must,” Lucy says, reaching across the table to tap Linda’s hand. “The chapel out there is so quaint. Get married in the spring, when the forsythia is in bloom. That’s what Geoff and Gabrielle did. Oh, my, it was so lovely. The church was decorated with daffodils and white lilacs…”

“Well,” Linda says, finally speaking up, “it might be nice to do something original to us.”

“And a date?” Lucy’s asking, not listening. “Have you set a date?”

“Well, the divorce won’t be final until the fall,” Geoff says.

Jim leans in to rest his chin in his palm. “Why’d you wait so long, buddy? Gabrielle’s been gone for a long time, and you can file for divorce one year after desertion.”

Linda looks over at Geoff to see how he’ll answer. She believes him when he says he fell out of love with Gabrielle long before she left. Still, she had been brilliant and beautiful, two things Linda finds difficult believing about herself.

“She’s the mother of my son,” Geoff says simply. “And he’s never stopped talking about her since the day she left.”

They all nod.

“Besides,” Geoff adds, smiling and reaching over to squeeze Linda’s hand. “There was no great motivator until this little lady came along.”

She smiles. She feels her cheeks start to burn. At first she assumes she’s blushing. She often blushes when Geoff pays her a compliment. It’s something that goes back to grammar school, when she’d turn beet red when the teacher called on in her in class. But then she realizes it’s more than mere blushing: her face actually begins to hurt. It feels the way it does when she occasionally holds the hair dryer too close to her skin. It feels the way—

—the way it did in her dream last night.

She looks up. The restaurant is suddenly in flames.

Her companions at the table are engulfed in a ferocious conflagration, their skin melting. She sees first Jim, then Lucy, wither and crumple under the flames, as if they were nothing more than cardboard. Then Geoff, too: the man she loves, the man she thought she’d never find, with his handsome face caught on fire.

That’s how it is, the thing in the flames tells her. That’s how it will be.

Linda screams.