Third Degree

Chapter 4

Laurel was in the middle of her seventh conference when her vision started to go. The rapt face of the mother across the table wavered as though fifty yards of broiling asphalt separated them; then the center of Laurel’s visual field blanked out, leaving a void like a tunnel through the world.

“Oh, God,” she said, in utter disbelief. “Oh, no.”

She had lied to Diane Rivers about having a migraine; now the lie was coming true. Already the blood vessels were dilating, pressing on the cranial nerves, interfering with her vision. Soon those nerves would release compounds that would drop her to her knees in unremitting agony.

“What is it?” asked Rebecca Linton, a woman of fifty with a mildly retarded daughter. “Are you all right?”

Could the pregnancy be causing it? Laurel wondered. She’d read that some women’s migraines worsened during their first trimester, but in other women they improved. It’s probably the shock of finding out I’m pregnant, on top of all the other stress. Ultimately, the cause didn’t matter. But coming on the heels of the positive pregnancy test, the incipient migraine made her feel she was being pursued by furies intent upon delivering retribution for her moral transgressions. A wave of nausea rolled through her, which might be part of the prodrome or merely fear of the crippling agony that would soon lay her low. A shower of bright sparkles burst like fireworks beside Mrs. Linton’s right ear. “Jesus,” Laurel breathed, pressing her fist into her eye socket.

“You’re covered in sweat!” cried Mrs. Linton. “Are you having a hot flash? I mean, you’re too young for it, but that’s what happens to me when I get them.”

Laurel gripped the edge of the table, trying to get her mind around the situation. Best case, she had forty-five minutes before the headache hit. Worst case, fifteen. Just enough time to make arrangements for the kids and get home to her dark and silent bedroom. “I’m afraid I need to cut our meeting short.”

“Of course. Is there anything I can do?”

“Could you wait here and tell my last appointment I had to leave? I’m about to have a migraine headache.”

“Of course I’ll wait, darling. Who’s coming next?”

Laurel looked at her schedule sheet. A blank spot like a bull’s-eye hovered in the middle of it. “Mrs. Bremer.”

“You go on, sweetheart. I’ll call Mary Lou. All us moms are like family now.”

“Thank you so much,” Laurel said, grateful for the graciousness of Southern women. “I don’t get these much, but when I do, they’re severe.”

“Say no more. Go, go, go.”

She picked up her purse and computer case and hurried across the driveway to the elementary building’s office. She told the secretary that she had to leave, then walked down to Diane Rivers’s classroom and poked her head through the open door. Twenty-nine third-graders looked up as one. Diane looked over from her desk and saw instantly that Laurel was in distress. She got up and walked out into the hall, her face lined with concern.

“Migraine worse?”

“Deadly. I have to go home. Do you think you could drop my kids off after school?”

“You know I will. It’s right on the way.”

Laurel squeezed Diane’s hand, then walked to the door at the end of the hall. She was crossing the drive to her car when her aide called out from the playground behind the school, where the children of the parents Laurel had been meeting were playing. Erin Sutherland was a local girl in her early twenties, an education major from USM. Laurel didn’t want to stop-if her students saw her, some would come running-but Erin waved both hands as she jogged to the fence, so Laurel walked over and forced a smile.

“Hello, Erin. Is something wrong?”

“I wanted to tell you one thing. Early this morning, Major McDavitt came out and sat with his son for a while. I figured it was okay since you and he are friends, and I know how much he does for all the kids.”

Laurel nodded warily, then cringed as another wave of nausea hit her.

“The thing is,” Erin went on, “he looked really upset. I think maybe he was crying. Michael definitely was.”

Laurel had known Danny was upset, but crying was totally out of character for him. She looked past Erin, scanning the playground until she found Michael. He was sitting alone on a motionless swing, a small, dark-haired boy with his hands floating before him as he rocked forward, then back, again and again. “Did Major McDavitt say anything to you?”

“No. I went up and asked if everything was all right, but he just kind of waved me away. You know, like, mind your own business.”

“And then he left?”

Erin nodded as though worried Laurel would scold her. Laurel was about to reassure the girl when her cell phone vibrated against her left thigh. It had been so long since Danny had texted her that she ignored it at first. Then she remembered that her clone phone was in her left pocket, and her legit one in her right. The clone was registered to a friend of Danny’s, and Danny paid the bill in cash. Danny also carried a duplicate phone, so that he could speak to Laurel without Starlette finding out about it. This message could only be from Danny.

Laurel patted Erin’s arm, then turned and walked briskly to her Acura, flipping open the Razr as she went. Danny’s text read, Sorry about today. Please call. Star gone to Baton Rouge for the day.

Laurel shut the phone without typing an answer, then climbed into her car and drove quickly out to Highway 24. In her mind Michael still sat on the motionless swing, endlessly rocking. With a stab of maternal guilt, she forced the image from her mind. She needed to drive to Warren’s office and get a shot of Imitrex. But Warren was the last person she wanted to see right now. He rarely noticed when she was angry or upset, but he would have to be brain-dead not to see that she was on the ragged edge of a breakdown today. Besides, she was pretty sure that her old Imitrex injection kit was still at the house, in the back of Warren’s medicine cabinet.

Only…there was Danny’s message to consider. Her pride told her to ignore it, but she had been praying for just such a message for more than a month. And now she’d gotten it. Danny was waiting to hear from her right now. Waiting in his lovely old cypress house on fifty acres at the end of Deerfield Road-less than five miles from where she stood. That was where they’d spent most of their extended time together, except for a couple of overnight trips they’d managed to take last summer. Starlette frequently left town, usually driving to Baton Rouge to shop in the upscale stores there, or to have her hair and nails done in a “real” salon. Her expensive habits had given Danny and Laurel hundreds of hours to get to know each other over the past year, so that instead of a frenetic affair that consisted of hurried sex in cramped and inconvenient places, they’d enjoyed long afternoons taking walks, swimming, riding horses, and even flying together.

The temptation to turn north on Highway 24 was strong. All Laurel had to do was send a reply, and Danny would be waiting in the clearing he had cut out of the forest just for her. Ostensibly a “feed plot” designed to attract deer, the clearing was a circular opening in the trees about fifty feet across, covered with clover a foot deep. Laurel had often lain in that fragrant green lake with Danny inside her, watching the clouds drift from one edge of the sky to the other. To get to the clearing, she used a small gate in the barbed-wire fence that lined Deerfield Road. Danny had given her a key, which she kept in the inside zip pocket of her purse, but whenever he knew she was coming, he unlocked the gate, so that she could nose her Acura through it without even getting out. Thirty seconds later, she would be in the clearing, where Danny sat on his four-wheeler, waiting to chauffeur her up to his house.

Sometimes, sitting behind him, she would open his belt and squeeze him as he drove along the trail. On rainy days, he’d let her drive and cup her breasts to protect them as the four-wheeler bounced along the deep ruts like a tractor crossing rows in a cotton field. If he sensed that she was in the mood, he would rub gentle circles around her nipples as she drove, so that by the time they reached the house, she was well and truly ready.

Laurel shifted on the seat as she stopped for a traffic signal. Five weeks without Danny had given her a constant low-grade ache down low, and sex with Warren had done nothing to alleviate it. The stoplight was a Robert Frost moment: a left turn would take her home; a right would carry her toward Danny’s property. Even with blank spots floating before her eyes, she felt compelled to turn right. Two or three shattering orgasms might just nip her migraine in the bud. But then where would she be? Back in an affair with a man who wouldn’t leave his wife-or his son, rather. Whichever, the result was the same: the second-class citizenship of Other Womanhood.

Laurel turned left and angrily gunned the motor, her mind on the Imitrex waiting at home. As she neared the stately new homes of Avalon, the seemingly idyllic sameness of the place began to close in on her: perfectly manicured lawns, oceans of pink azaleas, well-placed magnolias, brick border walls, wrought-iron gates, and cookie-cutter Colonials that held every antique armoire, top-end deer rifle, and flat-screen television that the upper crust of Athens Point could buy on credit. Much of it had been purchased to distract the owners from marriages in various states of decomposition, or so it seemed to Laurel, who heard the inside story on every couple in the teachers’ lounge at school.

As she turned onto her street, Lyonesse Drive, instinct suddenly got the better of her pride. She took out her clone phone and texted Danny without taking her eyes off the road. She had sent so many text messages in the past year that she could work the keypad as effortlessly as any high school girl at Athens Country Day.

Give me 30 mins, she typed.

Driving as swiftly as she dared between the mountainous speed humps, she slid the Razr back into her pocket. She needed Imitrex in her system as fast as she could get it, but she needed Danny just as bad. Images of past lovemaking fragmented into another shower of sparkles, and she clenched her shoulders against what could be the first hammer blow to the side of her head.

Why am I going to Danny’s place? she wondered. To pour out my heart to him?

So what if she was pregnant? Would Danny abandon his autistic son to take care of a child that only might be his? What if he suggested that she get an abortion? She’d probably kick him in the balls-something to hint at the pain she would have to endure on an abortionist’s table. There was no equivalent analog of the emotional loss she would endure in that case, not for a man.

With that thought, Laurel’s father popped into her mind. This was strange, because she hadn’t seen him for more than three years. God, would he rant if he knew about her situation. At least she didn’t have to worry about that. The “Reverend” Tom Ballard was off on a “missionary trip” in Eastern Europe, an endless one, apparently. He’d tried to explain his goals before he left, but the more he’d told Laurel, the more it had sounded like recruitment for some sort of Christian cult, so she’d tuned out. Her father was a lay minister who’d spent more time and money on other people’s children than he ever had on his own. Nominally Baptist, but really more of a roving tent show built around his own unconventional beliefs, Tom’s ministry was based in Ferriday, Louisiana, forty miles up the river from Athens Point. This one-horse town had also produced Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Lee Lewis, and Tom carried the spirits of both men within him. Itinerant by nature, he traveled ceaselessly to spread his version of the Good News, which always included music and sometimes involved an intimate laying on of hands.

Laurel’s clearest and most embarrassing childhood memories were of squatting on the shoulders of highways in half the states in the union, while her father tried to repair whatever broken-down junker he happened to be driving at the time. Laurel would wait in mute rage, sweating or freezing as the case might be, while her mother implored her father to let her flag down a passing motorist (translation: a man with more practical sense than the one she’d entrusted her future to). Tom wasn’t a bad man, but he was a poor father. About the only two benefits Laurel had derived from his peripatetic lifestyle were world travel and books. Their rickety old house in Ferriday contained more books than many of the big houses by the country club in Athens Point. She had spent her preteen years reading a moth-eaten Cambridge History of the Ancient World-all fifteen volumes-and vowing to marry a man opposite from her father in almost every way.

In Warren Shields, she had found that man. Warren was so organized that at twenty, he’d kept meticulous records of his mileage and car maintenance. In hindsight, that should have signaled a seriously anal-retentive personality, but to Laurel Ballard, those records were flags marking a safe harbor. Warren hadn’t come from a rich family, but during his first year of medical school he was already buying bargain stocks and calculating which specialties would allow him to retire soonest. (Only later did she begin to see the dark side of these traits, such as being kept on a strict household allowance, one that barely allowed her enough money to buy decent clothes.) Warren also attended a real church with hardwood pews and stained glass, not a one-room saltbox with an aluminum steeple clapped on top with baling wire. In Warren’s church, the congregation spoke softly and needed hymnals to follow the hymns. The minister always acted with great rectitude, and no one ever-ever-danced or fainted in the aisles.

By marrying Warren, Laurel got exactly what she’d thought she wanted. And then she’d begun the long, slow realization that financial security could be expensive to the soul. Warren, too, discovered that life didn’t unfold according to even the best-laid plans. During the second year of his surgical residency-in Boulder, Colorado, which Laurel had loved-Warren’s mother had been diagnosed with a progressive nerve disease. Warren’s father, a school principal who’d preached “toughness” his whole life, had proved unequal to the task of caring for his wife as she moved toward death. And because Warren’s mother refused to move to Colorado for palliative care (she claimed she had to take care of her husband while she could), Warren decided to “take a sabbatical” from his residency to return home and care for his mother. Laurel understood his motives, but she had taught special ed for years to put Warren through medical school, and she finally had a year of architecture school under her belt. She didn’t think either of them should stop their educations, even for one year. But when Warren pressed her, she gave in, and they returned to Athens Point.

When Mrs. Shields lived longer than her doctors expected, the “temporary” sabbatical slowly became permanent, like a mining encampment becoming a town. Warren took a position in a local family practice, and real money began flowing in. Then Mrs. Shields let it be known that the one thing that might bring some joy to her last days was to see a grandchild born. This time Laurel dug in her heels, her eyes on the receding horizon of their former future. But how could she deny Warren’s mother’s last request? After some terrible arguments, she relented, and nine months later Grant was born. Mrs. Shields lived ten months after that, and Grant certainly brought her joy. But less than a month after her funeral, as Laurel was prodding Warren to get everything in order for their return to Colorado, Warren’s father had a crippling heart attack. Thirty seconds after they got the call, Laurel realized that they would never go back to Colorado.

She’d tried to make the best of her life in Athens Point. Since there was no four-year college in town-much less a school of architecture-she’d joined the clubs that medical wives were expected to join to further their husbands’ careers: the Junior Auxiliary, the Medical Auxiliary, the Garden Club, the Lusahatcha Country Club. She went to church every Sunday, and even taught Sunday school, an immense personal sacrifice, given her background. But all this frenetic social networking did nothing to replace the dream she had given up; rather it created an emotional tension that fairly screamed to be released. For years Laurel had tried the traditionally accepted outlets: step aerobics; Tae Bo; reading groups (invariably chick lit, which made her want to slash her wrists in frustration at the heroines’ actions, or lack of them); she’d even circulated through various walking groups, in the hope of finding a friend who shared her frustrations with Martha Stewart Land. But in none of those clubs and groups had she discovered a single kindred spirit.

Her ultimate solution had been to go back to work. Teaching solved several problems at once. It gave her life a single focus, one that excused her from the wearisome club duties she was accustomed to taking on. She really cared about her students and felt she was giving them help that might otherwise be denied them in a small town. Teaching also brought her money that she could spend on whatever she wanted, without the auditing glance Warren always gave her when she made a purchase of even minor extravagance. Finally, teaching had given her Danny McDavitt, the kindred spirit she had been searching for all along. Moreover (an unexpected lagniappe), this kindred spirit came with an anatomically correct, fully functioning penis. And that, she thought bitterly, is what got me where I am now.

At least I hope it was his, she thought, passing the Elfmans’ flower-lined driveway. Her own house appeared on a gentle rise farther on, but the sight gave her no pleasure. It was a contemporary version of a Colonial, at six thousand square feet, twice the size of the homes that had inspired it. Laurel had wanted to design their home herself, in conjunction with a professional architect-her year of architecture school had made her proficient with the top CAD programs-but Warren had been against it. He’d marshaled a half dozen excuses for his opposition: teaching wouldn’t allow enough time for her to adequately supervise the project; time spent dealing with contractors would steal hours from the children; but the real reason was simpler: Warren knew that if she designed their home, it would look nothing like the rest of the houses in Avalon. His instinct toward conformity was so strong that he could not bear what the neighbors might say about something that broke the carefully established pattern of the development. And so Laurel lived in a house much like those of her neighbors, one her mother thought perfect, but which she herself saw as one more cell in the suburban hive called Avalon. She swung into her driveway and hit the brakes.

Warren’s Volvo was still parked in the garage.

She sat with her foot heavy on the brake, unsure what to do. Something told her to back out and leave; but there was no rational reason to do that. Besides, Warren might have seen her pull up. The kitchen had a direct line of sight to the driveway.

Why is he still home? she wondered. Did he come home early for lunch? No. He was running late when I left for school this morning. If he skipped hospital rounds and went straight to the office, he would have had to make rounds at lunch. He wouldn’t be here. Has he been here all morning? No…that’s impossible. Warren didn’t take off from work unless he was seriously ill; it took the full-blown flu to hold him down. A paralyzing thought surfaced in the swirling sea of speculation: What if he found the e.p.t carton? The used test strip from the pregnancy test?

“No,” Laurel said aloud. “No way.” Not unless he went behind the shrubs under the bathroom window…and why in God’s name would he do that? There’s no garden hose or anything else back there. There’s only-

“Mrs. Elfman.”

Could the old busybody have seen her drop the box from the bathroom window? Doubtful. Even if she had, why would she give it to Warren? Not even Bonnie Elfman was idiotic enough to congratulate her doctor on something he might not yet know himself. But she might be malicious enough to do it…

Laurel and Mrs. Elfman had once quarreled over the boundary line of their lots (a dispute resolved when a second survey proved Laurel correct). Was the woman still bitter enough to take her revenge in such an extreme way?

No, Laurel decided. Warren’s still here because of the IRS audit.

The situation was probably worse than he’d admitted. Warren never burdened her with business worries, and he also knew that Laurel had never trusted Kyle Auster, his senior partner, not even during the honeymoon years of the partnership. Auster’s smile was too broad, his patter too slick for a physician with his priorities in line, and he spent far too much money. For the first few years, Warren had defended his older partner-only ten years older, but that was sufficient to engender a little blind hero worship-but in the last couple of years, some of the shine had rubbed off of the statue in Warren’s mind. He had seen Auster’s human side too many times, and he’d revised his opinion accordingly. She recalled the wild look in Warren’s eyes as he’d searched the bookshelves this morning. It took a great deal of stress to make her husband betray any emotion at all. Given his mental state this morning, she wondered whether Auster might have gotten them into serious legal trouble. That must be it, she decided, worried for Warren, but also relieved for a distraction to keep him occupied during her present crisis.

She eased her foot off the brake and idled toward the garage, wondering what she could do to soothe his nerves. She was putting the car in park when she remembered the note in her pocket, the one she’d meant to give Danny this morning. A note saying I’M PREGNANT might give Warren a stroke today, even if he thought the child was his. Laurel considered stashing the note in her car, but something told her not to take any chances. Depressing the cigarette lighter with her thumb, she rolled down her window and switched the AC control to MAX. Then she fished the yellow Post-it from her pocket and touched the red-hot lighter to its corner. The glue-coated back of the note caught first, then the draft from the air conditioner stoked the flame. Soon the note was burning in the ashtray. Laurel leaned out of her window to keep the smoke out of her hair. When nothing remained but ash, she grabbed her purse and computer and walked up to the house just as she would have on any other day.

Squeezing past Warren’s Volvo, she remembered that she still had both Razrs in her slacks. Habit was a strong force. It would probably be better to leave the clone in the car, but Danny was liable to text her with more information about their meeting, and she needed to stay abreast of the situation, so that she could tell Warren whatever would get her the most free time. She took out the clone Razr, switched it to SILENT, then slid it into her back pocket on the opposite side from the legit phone in front. At least Warren wouldn’t see the flat bulges of two phones from any angle.

As soon as Laurel entered the pantry, she knew something was wrong. Moving into the kitchen, she sensed that things were out of place, as though they had been moved and then put back by someone who didn’t know exactly where they went. She heard nothing, but there seemed to be a residue of anger in the air, as though the house itself were disturbed. She thought she smelled alcohol, a faint trace coming from deeper in the house…and maybe burnt food. Yes-there was a microwave carton in the sink, with something black leaking out of it. Warren had never been much of a cook. He didn’t care about food.

She left the kitchen and stepped down into the great room with its two-story windows and oversize fireplace. Several seconds passed before she realized that she was not alone. Warren was sitting so still that he didn’t seem to be alive. But his eyes were open, and they were watching her. Warren was hunkered down on the ottoman of Laurel’s Eames lounger, which he had dragged up to their thick glass coffee table. He was still wearing yesterday’s clothes.

“Warren?” she said. “Are you all right?”

The eyes blinked slowly, but he said nothing.

She took a step closer, then stopped, still five yards from him.

“Come sit down,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

He motioned toward the sectional sofa that half surrounded the coffee table. Laurel started forward, then checked herself. Something in his voice had set off an alarm in her head. Or maybe something lacking from it. That was it. All the life had gone out of his voice.

“Warren, what’s the matter?” she asked gently. “Is it something to do with the tax audit?”

He pointed at something on the coffee table. A piece of paper. “I want to know about that.”

Laurel leaned forward and looked down, and an explosion of panic detonated at the base of her brain. Now she understood everything. The frantic searching she’d witnessed this morning had nothing to do with the IRS. Warren had somehow discovered the sole handwritten letter Laurel had kept from her relationship with Danny. She’d recognized it instantly, because Danny had written it in green ink. The block-printed letters shrieked up at her like an accusation of adultery. When did Warren find that? she thought frantically. Since he hadn’t come to bed last night, it was possible that he’d found the letter many hours ago. Found it, read it, and then begun tearing the house apart looking for more evidence. Probably the only reason he hadn’t snatched her out of bed and confronted her last night was because the letter wasn’t signed (except for the word “Me,” which on the day Laurel had received the letter made it sound like a note from a junior high school boy, but which she now thanked God that Danny had done).

“I’m surprised you kept that,” Warren said. “You’re usually such a detail person. I guess that letter means a great deal to you.”

Laurel stood frozen, her eyes on the letter. Other than outright panic-squashed by survival instinct-her mind was blank. She gazed at the green letters, trying to keep the muscles of her face motionless. She felt Warren staring relentlessly at her, not blinking, and blood rushed into her cheeks. Nothing could stop that. She could blame it on Warren’s confrontational posture, but that would only postpone the inevitable. From the moment Warren found that letter, the truth was bound to come out.

“Well?” he prompted, his voice exquisitely controlled. “Are you going to stand there and lie to me?”

Laurel knew what his exaggerated control signaled: rage. Danny had always warned her to be prepared for this moment. For getting caught. Anyone might have seen them on any day, without their even knowing it. Danny had told her that people who had affairs behaved as though they were invisible, as though passion created some sort of force field through which common people couldn’t see. But this was a chemical illusion, and it took only a single unexpected glance to destroy it. Danny’s letter was much more than that. It was as deadly as a shot fired through the heart, and it had probably destroyed Warren to read it. Worse, that shot had triggered an avalanche from the frozen heights above their marriage. Even now, mountains of denial and repression were hurtling down upon them at two hundred miles an hour. The silence in the room was the prelude to the roar of being buried alive.

“You’re not going to say anything?” Warren demanded.

Her mind grasped at the nearest concrete detail. “I’m getting a migraine. That’s why I came home early.”

“You poor thing.”

“Whatever,” she said, turning away. “I’m going to try to find the Imitrex.”

“Don’t try to walk away from this.”

As she looked back at him, Danny’s voice spoke softly in her mind: Never admit anything. No matter what he confronts you with, deny it. Deny, deny, deny. It may seem ridiculous, but he’ll be desperate for any excuse to believe you. If you admit cheating on him, you’ll regret it later. Think before you act. She knew Danny was right, but looking at Warren now, and knowing what was in the letter, she saw how impossible that advice was. She had no option but to tell the truth, even if it meant living alone forever. But first she needed the Imitrex. She couldn’t complete the destruction of her marriage while having a migraine.

“I’m going to find the Imitrex,” she repeated firmly, and walked away before Warren could respond. “Will you give me the injection?”

“Come back here!” he shouted. “Don’t walk away from me! Laurel!”

She waved acknowledgment but kept walking, her eyes brimming with tears.

“I said turn around, goddamn it!”

It was his tone that turned her, not the “goddamn.” There was something in it she had never heard before, a fury that bordered on madness, and she could imagine nothing more alien to Warren Shields than madness.

Facing him again, she saw that he’d gone pale. His right hand gripped the edge of the coffee table like that of a drowning man clinging to the gunwale of a lifeboat. The sight triggered something deep within her, something far deeper than thought, an impulse concerned with her survival alone. And then she saw why: Warren’s other hand was holding a gun. A black revolver, pressed against the outside of his thigh. Only part of the gun was visible, but there was no mistaking what it was.

“My head is about to explode,” she said, her eyes locked on to his by force of will alone. “Whatever that piece of paper is, I’ve never seen it before in my life.”