John Saul - Black Lightning

Sheila shook her head and sighed, but then a faint, rueful smile curved her lips. “You listened,” she said. “That helps. No one else listened — they didn’t even care. It’s better, just knowing someone else knows what happened to Danny, too.”

Wishing there were something she could do for Sheila Harrar, but knowing there wasn’t, Anne went back to her office and continued with the odds and ends of the day.

She called Mark Blakemoor and got the answer to the question she hadn’t asked at lunch.

“Why would there be any progress on Shawnelle Davis?” he asked, his tone clearly implying that he expected better of Anne. “She was a hooker. You know how it is around here when hookers get killed — nobody cares. If nobody cares, I can’t get very far. No time, no cooperation, hardly even any interest. I don’t like it, but I can’t change it.”

And though Anne didn’t like it, either, she understood it. It was just the way of the city, and it wasn’t Mark Blakemoor’s fault.

Still, the killing of Shawnelle Davis bothered her. Though it lacked some of the distinctive features of what Kraven had done, the similarities were still there, whether anyone in the police department wanted to admit it or not. Maybe she should write another follow-up story. If the department wouldn’t pressure itself, maybe she could pressure them.

She was just beginning the outlines of the story when the phone on her desk jangled. Picking it up, she was surprised to hear Joyce Cottrell’s voice.

Joyce was her slightly over-the-hill — and perhaps not completely sane, as far as Anne was concerned — next door neighbor.

“I’ve been trying to get you all afternoon,” Joyce told her. “And I didn’t want to leave a message because — well, you’ll understand when I tell you.”

Anne listened in silence, barely able to believe what she was hearing, as Joyce Cottrell described what she’d seen in the backyard that morning.

“I only saw him for a split second, and he hardly even looked like Glen at all! But who else could it have been? And it wasn’t just that he was naked,” Joyce finished. “It was the way he looked at me. Anne, I can’t tell you how strange it was. It was — well, I don’t know — I’ve always liked Glen, you know that. But the way he looked at me just scared me.” She was silent for a second, then her voice dropped almost to a whisper. “Anne, it was just a heart attack, wasn’t it? I mean — well, Glen’s all right, isn’t he?”

Though she assured Joyce that Glen had suffered only a heart attack and hadn’t secretly been in the psycho ward at Harborview, when Anne hung up the phone, she felt a lot more frightened than she’d let Joyce know.

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.