Black Lightning

CHAPTER 29

The house no longer felt the same. Yet as she let herself in the front door late that afternoon, Anne Jeffers couldn’t have said exactly how it felt different. All her journalistic training told her that the sudden frisson she felt as she turned the key, the surge of anxiety that chilled her as she stepped into the hallway’s silence, was ridiculous: it wasn’t the house that felt different at all — it was she who felt different. It had started yesterday, when Glen made love to her and she’d felt as if a stranger had been touching her.

An exciting stranger, granted, but still a stranger. It had disturbed her, although by this afternoon she had all but assured herself that if anything truly strange had occurred, it had been mostly in her own mind. She had been worried about Glen, uncertain whether they should be making love, despite what Gordy Farber told them, and so the sheer energy Glen had shown struck her as being — well, disturbing.

Even more disturbing had been the phone call from Joyce Cottrell. From the moment she’d hung up the phone, Anne was telling herself that whatever Joyce might think she’d seen, she must be mistaken.

Assuming she’d seen anything. After all, hadn’t she and Glen been speculating for years that Joyce was a secret drinker, sitting alone in the big old house next door where both her parents had died, tippling gin in the false and empty comfort of a darkened room? It had only been speculation, of course, but if it turned out they were right, it would certainly explain the peculiar phone call Joyce had made to her. Probably nothing had happened at all. Or maybe, taking advantage of Glen’s presence at home in the middle of the day, Joyce made a pass at him, was rebuffed, and had been trying to extract some kind of warped revenge.

Now, though, all Anne’s rationales were crumbling around her in the too-silent foyer. Something had changed in this house. “Hello?” she called out. “Anyone home?”

“I’m up here.” Heather’s voice echoed from the second floor, muffled by the closed door to her room.

Dropping her gritchel onto the table by the foot of the stairs, Anne took the steps two at a time, knocked once on Heather’s door, and pushed it open at almost the same second she heard her daughter telling her to come in.

Heather was sitting at her desk, a math book open in front of her, a badly gnawed pencil clutched in her fingers.

“I thought you promised to quit chewing those things,” Anne said, sliding automatically into mother mode, and knowing even as she did that mostly it was a way to put off her half-formed anxieties for at least a minute or two.

“I’m trying,” Heather sighed. “I just don’t think about it. It’s hard to stop doing something you don’t even know you’re doing.”

“I know,” Anne agreed. “But it’s still going to ruin your teeth.” She moved farther into the room, lifting the window to let some fresh air in. “Where’s your dad?” Anne hoped the question sounded casual, and when Heather spoke without looking up from the equation she was laboring over, she thought she’d succeeded.

“Taking a nap, I guess. The door to your room was closed when I got home, and I didn’t even knock.” Finally she glanced up, her eyes falling on the clock on her nightstand. “Is it really six already?”

“It’s six.” Anne sighed. “I better go wake your father up. I assume no one’s started figuring out anything for dinner yet?” Heather shook her head. “And where’s Kevin?”

“He said he was going over to Justin’s, and he promised to be home by five-thirty.” Reading the look in her mother’s eye, which clearly said, Do I have to do everything around here? Heather got up from her desk. “I’ll call the Reynoldses and find out where he is. And why don’t I call Dino’s and order pizza for dinner? That way you don’t have to worry about it.”

Anne hesitated. It was tempting, but then she remembered Gordy Farber’s admonition about Glen’s diet. Was pizza on the recommended list for heart attack patients? Somehow she doubted it. “Let me go wake up your dad, then we’ll see,” Anne temporized, telling herself it wasn’t too late to run down to the Safeway and pick up something healthy, but suspecting that in the end they’d probably all wind up going out somewhere instead. As Heather went downstairs to call Justin Reynolds, Anne went to the closed door of the master bedroom and found herself hesitating before going inside.

But what was she expecting?

It was Glen, for God’s sake!

Abruptly feeling foolish, Anne pushed open the door and went inside. The shades were drawn and the room was stuffy, and when she switched on the lamp on Glen’s side of the bed, he immediately came awake, sat up, and shielded his eyes against the glare. For a second — no more than an instant, really — Anne had the unsettling sense that she was looking into the eyes of a stranger. Then it was over. Glen’s eyes cleared and he smiled at her — the same smile she’d known for years, the smile that had always reassured her that everything in her world was intact.

“Hey,” he said. “Come here and give me a hug, okay?”

Flopping onto the bed next to her husband, Anne slipped her arms around him, gave him a kiss, then lay her head on his chest.

“You’ll never guess who called me at the office today,” she said, suddenly certain that Joyce’s crazy tale could only have been a figment of the woman’s imagination. “Joyce Cottrell.”

“Joyce?” Glen echoed. “You’re kidding. What did she want?”

As Anne began relating the conversation she’d had with their next-door neighbor, she felt Glen’s body stiffen. All the fears that had been allayed by his smile only a few moments earlier came flooding back to her. Still, she tried not to let her voice or her body betray the questions that were ricocheting in her brain. “Crazy, huh?” she asked as she finished.

“Maybe we’ve been right all along,” Glen suggested, but his bantering tone didn’t quite cover the instant’s hesitation before he answered. “Maybe she really has been drinking over there all these years.”

Anne sat up and looked into Glen’s eyes, now openly searching for that look she’d barely glimpsed a few minutes earlier. “Then it didn’t happen?” she asked.

“How could it have?” Glen countered. With a quick hug that Anne read as an evasion, he stood and crossed to the bathroom.

Glen’s mind raced as he tried to figure out how to answer Anne’s question. He didn’t want to lie to her, but he didn’t want to worry her, either. Surely, if he’d been wandering around the backyard stark naked, he’d remember it, wouldn’t he?

But the last thing he remembered of the morning was being in the bathroom, naked. He’d showered, and was about to shave, and then—

The black hole in the day, as if lightning had come out of nowhere and struck him unconscious.

Glen’s mind was churning. Why was he even thinking of lying to Anne? Why not just tell her he was missing part of the day?

The answer came to him as quickly as the question: because she would insist he go right back to the hospital, despite what Gordy Farber had told him this afternoon. Besides, nothing had happened anyway.

Or had it? What if he really had gone outside, and Joyce Cottrell had seen him? Why on earth would he have done something like that? He’d been asleep on the bathroom floor.

Then he spotted his razor, still lying in the sink, exactly where he’d left it this morning. Except now he could see that it wasn’t his razor at all; his had been five years old, its plastic case scratched and stained.

The Norelco he was staring at now was brand-new.

Where could it have come from?

Could he have been sleepwalking? Could he have actually gone out and bought a new one? But surely he couldn’t have done that naked, could he? He would have wound up in jail! So he must have gotten dressed, gone out, and bought a new razor. But that was nuts, too! He’d been naked when he woke up!

A sharp terror closed in on him. He was losing his mind! Maybe he should call Gordy Farber again. But there wasn’t anything wrong with him — the doctor had already told him so!

“Glen?”

Anne was at the door now; he could feel her watching him, and when he glanced into the mirror, he could see the worry in her eyes. Making up his mind, he picked up the gleaming new shaver and turned around.

“I’ll bet Joyce has been fantasizing about me for years,” he began, improvising a story even as he spoke. “I suspect she saw me out there chucking my razor, poured herself another gin, and mentally stripped me naked. The wish is often father to the thought, isn’t it?”

“Your razor?” Anne asked, confused. “What on earth are you talking about?”

Now the words came more quickly. “I dropped mine. So I took it out and threw it in the garbage.” He held up the new shaver. “And I went out and bought myself a new one.”

“Stark naked?” Anne demanded. “You took it out stark naked and threw it in the trash? Then what did you do, head out shopping with no clothes on?”

“I was wearing a bathrobe,” Glen insisted. What the hell was happening? How had he gotten himself into this? And what if she went out and looked in the trash barrel? “I mean, I was wearing a bathrobe out in the yard. I was dressed when I went down to Freddy Meyer’s.” At least that part wasn’t made up! He had been dressed when he’d gone to the Broadway Market that afternoon. As Anne continued to stare at him as if he were speaking in some strange, incomprehensible tongue, he offered her the shaver. “See? New shaver.”

Anne felt totally disoriented. When she’d first told him about Joyce’s call, she knew something was wrong, and the story he’d just told sounded totally far-fetched! In the years she and Glen had been married, plenty of electric shavers had given out on Glen. And she knew what Glen did with them.

He dropped them in the wastebasket. He did not take them out to the backyard and throw them directly into one of the garbage barrels!

Saying nothing, Anne went down the back stairs of the house, out the back door, and across the yard to the trash containers. Lifting the lid of the first one, she peered down into the depths of the barrel. And there it was.

Shattered — broken into a dozen pieces — but unmistakably the remains of a ruined electric shaver. A shaver that could not possibly have been that badly broken simply from having been dropped into a sink. What was going on?

She headed back to the house, entering the kitchen just in time to hear her son’s excited voice.

“Hey, Dad,” Kevin was shouting up the front stairs. “Where’d this come from? Is it for me?”

Moving quickly through the kitchen and dining room, she found Kevin standing in the foyer, holding a fishing pole in his hand.

“Where did that come from?” she asked.

Kevin grinned mischievously. “Down in the basement,” he said. “I was stickin’ my gym clothes in the wash and I found it. Where’d it come from?”

Anne was still gazing at the fishing pole when she heard Glen speak from the head of the stairs.

“I bought it,” he said.

Anne turned to stare up at him. There was something strange in his voice, just as there had been when he told her about the razor. “You bought a fishing rod? But you—”

Glen started down the stairs, determined not to let Anne see his confusion, the panic that was creeping up on him as he searched his memory for some clue as to where the fishing rod might have come from. But there was nothing — no more memory of the new fishing rod than of the new shaver. It will come back to me, he told himself. Sooner or later, it will come back to me. Forcing a grin as he came to the bottom of the stairs, he slipped an arm around his wife and held her close. “Don’t you remember?” he asked. “Gordy Farber said I have to get a hobby. So I chose one today. I’m going to go fishing.”

Fishing. The word echoed eerily in Anne’s mind. Only a few hours ago Sheila Harrar had been telling her how her son had disappeared after setting out to go fishing.

Fishing with Richard Kraven.

And now here was Glen, saying he was taking it up as a hobby. Of course, it was nothing more than a coincidence, but even so, the thought made her shudder. It would probably be only a passing fancy, something Glen would lose interest in within a week or so. And if he didn’t, so what? Despite her perfectly rational arguments, she knew that her first instinct when she came into the house a few minutes ago had been right.

Something in this house was different.

Her husband was different.