John Saul - Black Lightning

“Okay,” Anne agreed, more than willing to drop the whole subject if only she could recapture the closeness she’d felt only a few moments before. But the moment had vanished, replaced with a resurgence of that amorphous anxiety she’d felt when she came home last night — the terrible sensation that something unidentifiable was wrong. She slid off her side of the bed, grabbed her robe from the chair in the corner, and disappeared into the dressing room as Glen went into the bathroom.

By the time he was finished washing his face, she’d pulled on her jogging clothes. As she sat in the chair tying her shoelaces, she felt him watching her. When she looked up, though, his expression was unreadable, and when he offered to go jogging with her, she shook her head. “Gordy said you should be walking. He didn’t say anything about running.” But what she really meant was, I’d rather go by myself, and she could see in his eyes that he’d read her meaning as clearly as if she’d simply spoken those words instead of the excuse she’d come up with. “You’re not supposed to rush this, remember?” she added, then tried to take the sting out of her rejection with a kiss. His lack of response told her she’d failed, and for a moment she wondered if she ought to ask him to come along after all.

But she knew what would happen — they’d run in silence, trying to pretend a closeness they weren’t feeling right now, and by the time she got to work, she’d be so consumed with worrying about what was happening to them that she wouldn’t be able to concentrate. Better just to go alone, she thought, and try again tonight. “Have a cup of coffee ready for me when I get back?” Anne asked. He nodded, and she headed downstairs.

Boots was waiting by the front door, holding his leash in his mouth, looking as though his entire life would be ruined if she didn’t take him along. “Oh, all right,” she said, snapping the leash onto the little dog’s collar and opening the door. “But if you can’t keep up, don’t expect me to carry you.” She bounded off the porch and started up to the corner where she would turn left toward Volunteer Park, then turned back and glanced up at the master bedroom, intending to wave to Glen if he were watching her.

He wasn’t.

Tossing her head as if the action might rid her of the dark mood fast enveloping her, she increased her pace to a fast jog. Maybe this morning she’d just take an extra lap or two around the reservoir.

It had rained sometime before dawn. The streets glistened and the early morning air was still heavy with moisture. Anne expanded her lungs exuberantly, sucking in the fresh, cold air, and increased her pace slightly as she crossed Fifteenth Avenue and started into the park, up the gentle incline that led to the greenhouse. From there she could either go straight ahead over the crest, then start down past the tennis courts in the large lower loop that would eventually take her all the way around to the water tower, or she could turn left toward the old Art Museum, jogging easily along the level road that ran south from the greenhouse. Then, when she got close to the reservoir that surmounted the park, she could head off onto the path that led around it, level all the way, where the serious joggers always ran, pacing themselves carefully, monitoring pulse and respiration, some of them spending as much as two hours of every morning in a valiant — if inevitably doomed — effort to keep their bodies in prime condition. Though Anne had only fallen partially prey to the seductive idea that regular exercise could somehow put a stop to the aging process, she knew that after running for half an hour or so she would feel better, if not from the pheromones she only occasionally succeeded in getting high on, then at least from a feeling of virtue, misplaced though it may have been.

How many times had she and Glen observed that the country would be far better off if the population were half as interested in keeping their minds in as good condition as they tried to keep their bodies? And, so far as Anne could see, everyone kept getting older, albeit with ruined knees and ankles which, after years of unnatural abuse, were eventually only marginally capable of propelling them on their morning jogs. The Seattle addiction to coffee, she decided, was a healthy antidote to the overconditioning of the local bodies.

Opting finally for the track around the reservoir because she could do more laps with less effort than if she chose the lower circumference road, Anne started around the north side of the artificial lake, nodding to a few of the regulars she saw out here every morning. Boots, happily matching her pace with his own near-run, made halfhearted leaps at a couple of people he apparently felt had come too close to his mistress, but generally behaved himself until Anne had made the turn around the northwest corner of the reservoir. Instead of turning with her, he went straight ahead, pulling the leash until, after almost twelve feet had paid out, he was jerked to a stop.

Anne, startled by the sudden tug on the leash, broke stride and wheeled around to reprimand the little animal. But the moment he felt the leash slackening, Boots’s stubborn terrier ancestry came to the fore and he pulled the leash taut again, straining, with the stocky body he’d inherited from the bulldog branch of his family tree, toward the thick tangle of vegetation that covered the reservoir’s bank. Now he was barking insanely.

“Heel, Boots,” Anne commanded.

For just a second the little dog glanced back at her, but then he resumed his struggle against the leash. The two of them stayed in place for nearly a minute, Anne commanding the dog to heel, Boots refusing to budge. In the end, knowing she was ruining whatever minimal training Kevin and Glen might have succeeded in inculcating into the little animal’s head, Anne gave in. “Oh, all right. If it’s that important to you, pick whatever spot you want.”

Letting the dog have his head, she followed, already reaching into her pocket for one of the blue plastic bags she used to clean up after her son’s pet. But instead of sniffing madly around until he’d found the perfect place to squat, Boots pulled harder and harder, his body low to the ground as he scrambled toward the brow of the hill. Then he was over the edge of the steep embankment, disappearing from Anne’s view for a moment, but at last falling silent, his mad barking dying away as he apparently reached whatever goal he’d set for himself.

When she came to the edge of the lawn where the level area around the reservoir gave way to the slope and a tangle of brush, the dog was nowhere to be seen. Then she spotted him. He’d pushed into the mass of vegetation and was sniffing eagerly at something she couldn’t quite see.

Reaching out and pushing a branch aside, Anne looked down.

The dead, empty eyes of Joyce Cottrell gazed back up at her.

Anne’s first instinct was to be sick, but she refused to give in to the wave of nausea.

Her next instinct was to try to help the woman whom she’d instantly recognized as her next-door neighbor, but even as the urge rose in her she knew Joyce was far beyond any aid she could give her.

Her third instinct was to scream for help, and that was the instinct she finally acted upon.

“Where’s Mom?” The question was issued with a darkly accusatory tone, as if Kevin suspected his mother had been abducted, if not out and out murdered.

“She’s just jogging in the park,” Glen told him as he poured his son a glass of orange juice, then moved the Grape-Nuts from the cupboard to the kitchen table.

“She’s supposed to be back by now,” Kevin informed him.

Glen glanced at the blue-green digits on the oven clock. Though he wasn’t about to admit it to his son, he realized that Kevin was right. Before his heart attack, their jog had usually lasted no more than half an hour — forty-five minutes at the most. Unless the digital display was wrong, Anne had been gone more than an hour. He was pretty sure he knew why, but he wasn’t about to get into that with Kevin. Both he and Anne subscribed to the idea that even if their marriage wasn’t perfect — not that it was far short — they had no need to air their dirty laundry in front of the kids. Besides, even if he’d been willing to explain to Kevin what had happened between himself and Anne that morning, he wasn’t quite sure he could. The truth was, he wasn’t certain himself. When he woke up and found her looking at him, he thought she was still angry at him from the night before. But then they’d made love, and for a few minutes it seemed as though everything was back to normal. Then, when she suggested that he’d been acting “off the wall,” he’d flown off the handle. He shook his head. It wasn’t as if she was wrong — he knew perfectly well that he hadn’t been behaving very much like the man she’d married. Yet instead of confessing to the unaccountable blackouts — and that they were frightening him — he’d barked that he was just obeying his doctor’s orders and that there was nothing wrong at all. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to tell her. Indeed, in those few quiet minutes after they made love, he’d been rehearsing the words he would say.