Читать книгу Don't Scream - Wendy Corsi Staub - Страница 12

“Whoa!” Garth, dressed in khakis and a cream-colored T-shirt under a lightweight brown blazer, stops short in the doorway. “Brynn, I didn’t know we were having company at breakfast this morning!”

Startled, she looks up from the pancake she’s about to flip on the hot skillet.

Oh. Her husband is just teasing, of course. The only other occupants of the kitchen are their two sons.

Brynn manages a faint smile as Garth feigns confusion, asking, “Who is that big schoolboy at the table? And where’s Caleb?”

“Daddy! It’s me!” Caleb, dressed in a button-down and khakis, his hair neatly slicked to one side, pipes up proudly. “I’m the big schoolboy!”

Wide-eyed, Garth says, “No, you can’t possibly be Caleb. He’s just a little guy, like this.” He ruffles Jeremy’s hair.

“It is me, Daddy. Really!” Caleb shoots a glance at Brynn, one that says, Poor Daddy is clueless!

Normally she gets a kick out of playing along with Garth’s antics, but today, she simply doesn’t have the energy or inclination for anything beyond the basic requirements. It was all she could do to get the boys dressed and hurriedly go through the motions of taking a shower herself, not even bothering to blow-dry her hair. She’ll regret it later when she tries to get a comb through the still-damp waves hanging loosely around her face.

She was about to dole out cold cereal when Caleb reminded her that last night she promised them pancakes this morning. Right. That was before she opened her mail and her world turned upside down.

But mommy guilt set in and here she is, dishing up a hot breakfast when all she wants to do is crawl back into bed and hide.

“No way,” Garth is persisting as he takes down a mug and pours himself a cup of coffee. “You can’t be Caleb.”

“Yes way! I go to school now, remember?” Caleb asks earnestly.

Brynn flips another pancake and sees that the bottom is scorched. She turns down the burner, then looks over her shoulder and sighs in dismay.

In his booster seat, Jeremy is finger painting the table with maple syrup.

Oblivious to the mess, Garth scratches his head, studying his older son. “Hmm…can it be?”

“Mommy! Tell him!”

“It really is Caleb, Daddy,” Brynn obliges as she grabs a sponge from the sink and descends on Jeremy’s sticky masterpiece. “He’s in kindergarten now, remember? He rides the bus and everything.”

Yes, and thanks to his mom, he’s got exactly five minutes to finish his breakfast before he has to be down at the bus stop.

Brynn, who wakes with the sun daily and never bothers to set an alarm, overslept. She’s been scrambling to catch up for the last forty-five minutes.

What a way to start the second day of school…

And Caleb’s imminent departure is the least of her worries today.

“Did you want pancakes?” she asks Garth, realizing she’s scorched three of the four on the skillet.

“Do you have pancakes?”

“I was making these for you, but…” She shrugs and indicates the smoking pan. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’ll just stick with coffee. I’ve got to take off a few pounds anyway.”

No, he doesn’t.

Tall and lean, with hair and eyes the warm shade of a well-loved baseball mitt, Garth Saddler looks the same as he did the first time Brynn laid eyes on him.

Not that she recalls much about their first official connection. It wasn’t love at first sight, or even remote interest at first sight. She walked into the lecture hall on the first day of her final semester at Stonebridge, and there he was, standing quite unremarkably down in front, passing out copies of the syllabus.

He had a professorial beard back then, obscuring enough of his handsome face that it took awhile for Brynn to notice him. Really notice him.

It was Tildy who pointed out his masculine appeal one brisk day as they were crossing the campus and spotted him jogging past. “Look, there’s Dr. Saddler. Wow, how hot is he?”

Brynn checked him out and saw that her sorority sister had a point. He looked a lot different with his muscular legs bared in running shorts, his sweat-dampened hair standing on end, than he did buttoned-up and intellectual in front of the class.

“I have him for that morbid Soc course I’m taking,” she told Tildy.

“‘Death and Dying’? I took it last semester. It was awesome. And so is he.”

It wasn’t long afterward that Brynn realized Garth Saddler was, indeed, pretty awesome. She even got the feeling the attraction was mutual.

But he didn’t ask her out until the semester was over and she had her diploma in hand.

That, he told her, would have violated the rules.

“College rules?” she asked.

“No, mine.”

She didn’t expect to fall in love with him that first night. Nor did she plan to stay on in Cedar Crest that summer instead of returning home to the Cape.

But she did stay.

Not just for the summer. For…

Ever.

Things just fell into place for them, and she never looked back.

She worked nights as a desk clerk at the Amble On Inn nearby. So much for her newly minted bachelor’s degree in English. And so much for returning home to the Cape.

Any potential postgraduation plans she had in mind—and she didn’t have many—evaporated the moment Garth told her he loved her and wanted her to stay. By the time the fall semester began, she had moved into his apartment just off campus.

“Do you think things are happening too fast between us?” she asked him, more than once. Just to be sure this was all as much his idea as it was hers.

“No,” he said, but she wondered if he meant it.

Sometimes, he seemed taken aback at the way their lives had melded so swiftly and completely. But she never doubted that he loved her, or that she loved him. They belonged together.

They were married in July, a little over a year into their relationship.

When the Amble On Inn abruptly shut down that fall, Garth found her a secretarial job in the registrar’s office.

She quit that when Caleb came along eighteen months later, followed by Jeremy.

And the years have flown by, and here I am.

Here we are.

Living happily ever after…

Until now.

No, don’t start thinking that way, she warns herself, watching Garth stir Splenda into his coffee, and Caleb munching his pancakes, and Jeremy licking maple syrup from his fingers. Everything is going to be fine.

Which is precisely the same thing she assured herself fifteen years ago, when a routine X-ray showed a suspicious shadow on her mother’s lung.

Mom didn’t even smoke and Dad gave it up years ago, so it couldn’t be cancer…

But it was cancer.

Well, Brynn wasn’t going to let it rob her of her mother…

But it did, in the space of a few months.

It robbed her as well of the jovial, loving family man who loved chocolate with nuts, the Red Sox, doo-wop music, and his wife and children. Not in that order.

Her father’s heart and soul died with her mother, leaving in his outer shell a brooding, often-angry stranger. The house was silent and dusty, the fridge filled with expired condiments, no dairy or fresh vegetables.

That stage lasted only a few months, and was replaced with one that was, in Brynn’s opinion, far more disturbing.

At first, though, she was grateful whenever Sue Learner, her mother’s longtime friend from her women’s bowling league, came around with the proverbial casseroles and condolences. Sue was a former nurse practitioner; she had a nurturing, maternal air that Brynn welcomed. She poured out her grief to Sue, along with a flood of adolescent angst.

She finally figured out that Sue was hanging around the house not to comfort her late friend’s motherless children, but to seduce their widowed father.

Mom could never convince Daddy to go bowling, but somehow, Sue did. One of Brynn’s friends spotted them together late one night at Lucky Lanes. Brynn didn’t believe it, but she questioned her father—and he confessed.

That bombshell struck Brynn about twenty-four hours before he threw a far more explosive one: he was getting remarried. To Sue.

“It’s what your mother would want,” he said—so often that Brynn wondered if he was trying to convince himself.

Personally, she doubted her mother had drawn her last breath fervently hoping that her good friend would move into her house, and her bed, before the granite slab was even laid over her grave.

Brynn, who, until that tumultuous loss, had wondered how she would ever go away to college without becoming terribly homesick, lived for the day when she could leave.

Once she did, she rarely looked back.

“Are you okay, Brynn?” Garth asks, and she looks up to see him watching her over the rim of his coffee cup.

“Fine. Just tired.” For emphasis, she tacks on a yawn that starts out forced, but winds up the real thing.

“You didn’t sleep well?”

She shakes her head at the understatement. But then, Garth wouldn’t know she tossed and turned all night behind their closed master bedroom door.

A lifelong insomniac, he rarely joins her in bed before dawn. Some nights—like last night—he stays on campus working on his book until the wee hours. Others, he doesn’t reach the bedroom at all, presumably sitting up in the den either writing or watching television, occasionally snoozing in his easy chair there when she emerges in the morning.

Early in their marriage, Brynn got up often to check on Garth or coax him to bed. Whenever he obliged, she felt like she was trying to sleep alongside a restless animal desperate to escape its cage. She gave up, years ago, the notion of climbing into bed beside her husband every night.

“I guess it’s not surprising that you couldn’t get much sleep last night. After all, yesterday was a major milestone.” Garth tilts his head toward Caleb.

“Definitely a milestone,” she agrees. And not just in the way you think.

Last night, she should have climbed into bed warmed by the afterglow of her son’s big, successful day.

Instead, she was tormented by visions that jabbed like icy fingers into her consciousness, keeping sleep at bay, forcing her to relive in horrifying detail the unthinkable events that unfolded exactly a decade before…

It was Brynn who unwittingly set things in motion.

“Did you notice how bummed Rachel was at dinner tonight?” she asked Fee as they left the library at dusk after a scant ninety minutes of studying.

“Not really,” Fiona returned predictably, her thoughts most likely on her boyfriend—or herself. “Why?”

“She just seemed down, even when Puffy brought out the cake and we were all singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her.”

Puffy Trovato was the sorority housemother, a warm, maternal woman whose nickname came from her round physique. Nobody knew her real name, and she didn’t seem to mind.

Her specialty was triple-layer Devil’s Food Cake topped with whipped-cream frosting and a spray of fresh red roses—the sorority flower. She made it for every one of the sisters’ birthdays, serving it up with a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream and a maternal bear hug.

Then everyone would serenade the guest of honor, first with the birthday song, then with the official sorority song.

Tonight, watching Rachel pick at her cake before pushing the plate away and leaving the table, Brynn wanted to ask if everything was okay. Petite Rachel, with her free-spirited gypsy style and easy smile, was usually the most upbeat, laid-back sister in the house. Last year on her birthday, she stood on her chair and laughingly conducted the Happy Birthday chorus, then followed that up with a hammy, operatic solo of her own.

Rachel, pursuing a bachelor of fine arts degree, had been taking voice lessons since childhood. She had a vague ambition to one day have a career on a concert stage; she just hadn’t decided whether it should be at the Met, backed by a full orchestra, or at the Garden, backed by electric guitars.

“Maybe Rach is just feeling old, leaving her teens behind,” Brynn decided, and Fiona rolled her eyes.

“Oh, as if. Who wants to be stuck in their teens? I can’t wait to turn legal so I can officially hang out at the Rat with Pat.”

The Rat, of course, was short for The Rathskeller, the off-campus pub where Fiona’s older boyfriend tended bar. Her fake ID was useless here in town, where the locals had known her since she was born.

“I hate to break it to you, but legal’s going to take awhile,” Brynn informed her friend. “You’ve got to turn twenty before you can turn twenty-one, remember?”

“When I do, though, I’m throwing myself one hell of a birthday party at the Rat. And I know just who I’m inviting, too.”

“Already?”

“Yup, because by that time, graduation will be right around the corner and I’m going to be networking every chance I get.”

Accustomed to retrieving conversations that had been commandeered and steered off course by the self-centered Fiona, Brynn prodded, “In the meantime, what are we going to do about Rachel? Her birthday is today, and so far it seems to suck.”

“Well…I’ve got a bottle of decent champagne Pat gave me last weekend to celebrate the new semester.”

“You didn’t drink it with him?”

“Nah, he only drinks beer and bourbon. Come on, let’s go find Tildy and Cassie and surprise Rach with a little party.”

“At the sorority house?”

“Uh-uh, then we’d have to invite everyone else.” Fiona was currently feuding with more than one of their fellow sisters, as usual.

Anyway, the five of them were the closest, ironically because of how their birthdays fell. For some reason, the college systematically grouped incoming freshmen into dorms based on when they were born. Brynn, Fiona, Tildy, and Cassie all had October birthdays. Living in close quarters on the same hall, they formed a quick, intimate bond long before they pledged the same sorority.

Rachel, whose birthday was a month earlier, lived at the opposite end of the hall, but latched on to their foursome because, as she put it, “All those September Virgos down at my end are too conservative and unemotional. You Libras are much more easy-going and social.”

Brynn often popped up to point out that she was actually a Scorpio, born on the twenty-ninth. But Rachel, who was into astrology, told her she had more Libra traits—and that strong-willed control-freak Fiona had more Scorpio ones.

“We’ll do this party for Rachel up at the Prom,” Fiona said in her usual case-closed way.

The Prom was local shorthand for promontory, and referred to an enormous, flat rock outcropping high in

the woods above the campus. Secluded despite relatively easy access via a winding trail, the sweeping vista plus a cluster of makeshift log benches made the

Prom a favorite Stonebridge party spot.

“Just so you know, I’m going to invite my sister, too, if she’s around when we get back to the house,”

Fiona added.

Brynn said nothing to that. She knew that Tildy was getting annoyed about Deirdre’s continued presence in the sorority house, and she wouldn’t be welcome tonight. She had been staying with Fee for over a week now, trying to get her life together after being thrown out of their parents’ house.

Luckily, Dee wasn’t hanging around that night to join the party and further complicate matters.

Only the five sorority sisters slipped out of the house and headed up the trail, armed with flashlights, the champagne, a portable CD player, and jackets or sweaters to ward off the autumn chill.

They gossiped and giggled as they ascended, four of them unaware that the fifth had concealed something lethal beneath her silver-gray and cardinal-red sorority sweater—and that when the night drew to its grim conclusion, only four Zeta Delta Kappa sisters would descend.

“Matilda Harrington,” Tildy says crisply into the telephone receiver.

“Good morning, gorgeous,” a low voice croons.

She quickly looks around to see if anyone is in earshot of her cubicle, lamenting as always the fact that her position as special events manager at the nonprofit doesn’t even warrant walls that reach all the way to the ceiling.

At least the coast is relatively clear this morning. It’s just past nine; most people aren’t at their desks yet. No sign of the perpetually lurking Ray Wilmington, even.

“Hey, there, gorgeous yourself,” she says, low, into the receiver. She pushes aside the yellow legal pad containing the guest list and RSVPs for her thirtieth birthday party in a few weeks. Plenty of time to go through those later. “When did you leave?”

“Oh, around three or so. I kissed you good-bye but you were snoring blissfully.”

That would be thanks to the tranquilizer Tildy had popped shortly before he showed up unexpectedly on her doorstep. Had she known he was coming, she’d have foregone the pill and relied on him instead to provide a distraction from…

From Happy Birthday…to me.

Tildy didn’t tell him about it, of course. That, or the drugs that were necessary when she grasped the full, horrifying implication of the greeting card.

Renewed uneasiness threads its way through her even as she protests lightly into the phone, “Hey, I don’t snore!”

“Oh, but you do. Delicate little snores, like a kitten taking a nap in the sun.”

If Ray said something like that, Tildy would immediately roll her blue eyes.

Funny how the difference in whether a flirtatious line comes across as hopelessly sappy or infinitely sexy lies in the speaker himself.

“So listen…What are you doing for lunch?” Tildy asks throatily, after casting another furtive glance around the office.

“You,” is his satisfying reply.

Smiling, she hangs up a moment later, then belatedly opens her date book to make sure today’s noon slot is free.

It isn’t.

She simply erases her lunch tasting meeting with the caterer who’s doing her birthday party. That can wait until tomorrow or the day after, she thinks, bending over the page to blow away the shreds of pink eraser.

Life has been so much easier ever since Tildy took to writing her appointments in pencil—a necessity when you’re living an active love life strictly on short notice.

She’s flipping through her Rolodex in search of the caterer’s phone number to cancel their lunch when a long shadow falls over her desk.

Ray Wilmington.

She knows it must be him before she even looks up to find his gaunt, black-bearded Abe Lincolnesque presence looming above her.

“What up?” he asks.

She snorts—aloud—at the ludicrous gangsta greeting spilling from the wimpiest, most white-bread human in all of Boston.

“God bless you,” he says politely.

She doesn’t bother to inform him that it wasn’t a sneeze, but a snort. Of laughter. At him.

“How are the tulips holding up, Matilda?”

Ah, the tulips.

She debates telling him that they wilted and she had to throw them away.

No, he might then decide to send her another bouquet.

Her desire to avoid that scenario is based less on the futile expense to his limited budget than it is on the inconvenience to her.

She’d have to go through the motions of thanking him again, and risk clogging the disposal with all those stems, or cutting herself on the shards of another useless glass vase.

Much less complicated to simply say, “The tulips are fine,” and resume her Rolodex perusal.

“Did your lunch meeting cancel on you?” Ray asks, and she sees that he’s peering over her shoulder at the newly erased twelve o’clock slot in her date book. “Because if you’re suddenly free, I know a great little place—”

“I’m not free,” she interrupts curtly, wishing he would just get lost.

“Then how about tomorrow?”

Presumptuous is the perfect adjective for Ray Wilmington, from his investigative interest in the details of her life to his assumption that she might be willing to share a precious free moment of it with the likes of him.

It isn’t just his looks that are off-putting—although Tildy’s certainly not the least bit drawn to him. He’s tall and dark, yes…though the handsome is conspicuously missing. Put a stovepipe hat on top of his prematurely thinning hair, and he really would be a dead ringer for old Honest Abe.

Abe Lincoln would hardly be Tildy’s type.

Especially if Abe was making a pitiful salary and living at home with his mother in Dedham.

But it’s more that Ray’s blatant interest in her, which began right from the day he started at work here in July, gives her the creeps. Her well-honed inner radar interprets him more as a potential stalker than potential suitor.

Ignoring his query about tomorrow, she tells him pointedly, “I’ve got some phone calls to make,” as she lifts the phone receiver again.

“All right, Waltzing Matilda.” Ray emits a self-satisfied chuckle at his own cleverness, apparently assuming he’s the first person ever to call her that. “I guess I’ll see you later, then.”

God, I hope not, she thinks grimly, dialing the caterer.