Left for Dead

29

6:00 A.M., Monday, April 12

Patagonia, Arizona

Phil Tewksbury didn’t exactly leap out of bed at six o’clock on Monday morning. The weekend of unaccustomed painting meant he had exercised muscles that were now mad at him. His aching right shoulder had kept him awake off and on overnight, and he felt stiff all over. Still, there was a smile on his face as he pulled on his clothes, brushed his teeth, and took some extra effort with his comb-over. Monday was the one day in the week when Ollie usually showed up, often bringing along something for a picnic. After being home with Christine all weekend long, Phil was ready.

Christine was in her bedroom, probably asleep, as he headed for the kitchen, but Phil did notice that at least one and maybe two of the remaining lights on the tree had burned out overnight. He made a mental note of their location in case the bulbs got replaced behind his back.

Now you really are being paranoid, he told himself.

He was in the kitchen by six-fifteen, making coffee and doing his usual oatmeal ritual—making the hot cereal, dividing it into separate bowls, and leaving them on the counter for Christine to find later. He had the timing down to a science. At six-thirty exactly, he picked up his wallet and keys, left the house, and headed for the garage and his aging F-150 pickup truck. That gave him an hour to have a leisurely breakfast with the guys at the café and be at the post office at seven-thirty to do the final sort of his mail. That was when Patty Patton, Patagonia’s postmistress, would give him the Priority and Express Mail packages.

After all, despite rain, snow, sleet, hail, or even living in hell on earth, the mail must go through.

Phil stopped at the garage door and shoved the key into the lock, thinking as he did so how, back when his grandparents were alive, the garage door was never locked. A week or so ago, when he had misplaced his key ring, it had been a pain. Fortunately, he’d had a spare.

That was then, he told himself. This is now.

Phil pushed the door open. As he stepped into the garage, he was astonished to find himself tripping over something he couldn’t see. Pitching forward, he fell headlong onto the concrete floor, landing hard on his elbow and whacking his shoulder on the pickup’s passenger-side front fender as he fell. His thermos bounced once and rolled out of reach under the truck while his house key ring skittered away from him, coming to rest a good five feet away.

He lay there for a moment, trying to assess the damage. What the hell just happened to me? he wondered. Did I break anything?

Phil was on his hands and knees, attempting to scramble to his feet, when something slammed into the back of his head. The shattering blow sent him sprawling once again. It also knocked him senseless. He felt the first blow, but that was it. He was unaware of a dropcloth—his own much used dropcloth, it turned out—being tossed across him to keep bits and pieces of flesh from flying up onto his assailant. When the furious barrage of blows ended, he lay there, dead or unconscious, while his unseen and totally silent attacker walked away.

Unheard by Phil, the garage door opened and closed behind him. Soon the soft whine of a battery-powered screwdriver cut through the early-morning quiet as the screws that had held an invisible length of fishing filament in place a foot off the ground were removed and the holes left behind were plugged with tiny dots of white toothpaste.

There was no way to tell if Phil Tewksbury, buried under the dropcloth, was dead or alive when the door closed the second time, but that didn’t really matter. One way or the other, it was over for him. From that moment on, whatever happened to Christine Tewksbury was someone else’s problem.