Harlan Coben - Hold Tight

Guy wished that he could get past that. He wished that the women could get past it too, so that they would see him. But that was how it was and so all these relationships stayed on a superficial level. The women would want more. They would try not to pressure and that just felt like pressure. Women were nesters. They wanted to get closer. He wouldn’t. But they would stay anyway until he broke it off with them.

“Everything is fine,” Guy said to her. “Sorry if I took too long.”

“Not at all.”

“The girls okay?”

“Yes. Jill’s mom came by and picked her up. Yasmin is up in her room.”

“Okay, great.”

“Are you hungry, Guy? Would you like me to fix you something to eat?”

“Only if you’ll join me.”

Beth beamed a little, and for some reason that made him feel guilty. The women he dated made him feel both worthless and superior at the same time. Feelings of self-loathing consumed him once again.

She came over and kissed his cheek. “You go relax and I’ll start making lunch.”

“Great, I’m just going to quickly check my e-mail.”

But when Guy checked his computer, there was only one new e-mail. It came from an anonymous Hotmail account and the short message chilled Guy’s blood.

Please listen to me. You need to hide your gun better.

TIA almost wished that she’d taken up Hester Crimstein’s offer. She sat in her house and wondered if she had ever felt more useless in her entire life. She called Adam’s friends, but no one knew anything. Fear built in her head. Jill, no dummy when it came to her parents’ moods, knew something was seriously off.

“Where’s Adam, Mommy?”

“We don’t know, honey.”

“I called his cell,” Jill said. “He didn’t answer.”

“I know. We’re trying to find him.”

She looked at her daughter’s face. So adult. The second kid grows up so much differently from the first. You so overprotect your first. You watch his every step. You think his every breath is somehow God’s divine plan. The earth, moon, stars, sun-they all revolve around a firstborn.

Tia thought about secrets, about inner thoughts and fears, and how she’d been trying to find her son’s. She wondered if this disappearance confirmed that she’d been right to do it or wrong. We all have our problems, she knew. Tia had anxiety issues. She religiously made the kids wear headgear when playing any sort of sport- eyewear too when it was called for. She stayed at the bus stop until they got in, even now, even when Adam was far too old for such treatment and would never stand it, so she hid and watched. She didn’t like them crossing busy streets or heading to the center of town on their bikes. She didn’t like carpooling because that other mother might not be as careful a driver. She listened to every story about every child tragedy-every car accident, every pool drowning, every abduction, every plane crash, anything. She listened and then she came home and looked it up online and read every article on it and while Mike would sigh and try to calm her down by talking about the long-shot odds, prove to her that her anxiety was unfounded, it would do no good.

Long odds still happened to someone. And now it was happening to her.

Had these been anxiety issues-or had Tia been right all along?

Once again Tia’s cell jangled and once again she grabbed it fast, hoping with everything she had that it was Adam. It wasn’t. The number was blocked.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Baye? This is Detective Schlich.”

The tall woman cop from the hospital. The fear struck yet again. You think that you can’t keep feeling fresh waves, but the stabs never make you numb. “Yes?”

“Your son’s phone was found in a trash can not far from where your husband got jumped.”

“So he was there?”

“Well, yes, we assumed that already.”

“And someone must have stolen his phone.”

“That’s another question. The most likely reason for tossing the phone was that someone-probably your son-saw your husband there and realized how he’d been tracked down.”

“But you don’t know that.”

“No, Mrs. Baye, I don’t know that.”

“Will this development make you take the case more seriously?”

“We were always taking it seriously,” Schlich said.

“You know what I meant.”

“I do. Look, we call this street Vampire Row because there is no one here during the day. No one. So tonight, when the clubs and bars open again, yes, we will go out and ask questions.”

Hours yet. Nightfall.

“If anything else develops, I will let you know.”

“Thank you.”

Tia was hanging up the phone when she saw the car pull into her driveway. She moved toward the window and watched as Betsy Hill, Spencer’s mother, stepped out of the vehicle and started toward her door.

ILENE Goldfarb woke up early in the morning and flicked on the coffee maker. She slipped into her robe and slippers and padded down her driveway to grab the paper. Her husband, Herschel, was still in bed. Her son, Hal, had been out late last night, as befits a teenager in his last year of high school. Hal had already been accepted at Princeton, her alma mater. He had worked hard to get there. Now he blew off steam, and she was fine with that.

The morning sun warmed the kitchen. Ilene sat in her favorite chair and curled her legs under her. She pushed away the medical journals. There were a lot of them. Not only was she a renowned transplant surgeon but her husband was considered the top cardiac man in northern New Jersey, practicing out of Valley Hospital in Ridgewood.

Ilene sipped the coffee. She read the paper. She thought about the simple pleasures of life and how rarely she indulged them. She thought about Herschel, upstairs, how handsome he was when they met in medical school, how they had survived the insane hours and rigors of medical school, of internship, of residency, of surgical fellowships, of work. She thought about her feelings for him, how they had mellowed over the years into something she found comforting, how Herschel had recently sat her down and suggested a “trial separation” now that Hal was about to leave the nest.

“What’s left?” Herschel had asked her, spreading his hands. “When you really think about us as a couple, what’s left, Ilene?”

Sitting alone in the kitchen, scant feet from where her husband of twenty-four years had asked that question, she could still hear his words echo.

Ilene had pushed herself and worked so hard, gone for it all, and she had gotten it: the incredible career, the wonderful family, the big house, respect of peers and friends. Now her husband wondered what was left. What indeed. The mellow had been such a slow slide, so gradual, that she had never really seen it. Or cared to see it. Or wanted more. Who the hell knew?

She looked toward the stairs. She was tempted to go back up right this very moment and crawl into bed with Herschel and make love to him for hours, like they used to too many years ago, boink those “what’s left” doubts right out of his head. But she couldn’t make herself get up. She just couldn’t. So she read the paper and sipped her coffee and wiped her eyes.

“Hey, Mom.”

Hal opened the refrigerator and drank straight from the container of orange juice. There was a time she’d correct him on this-she’d tried for years-but really, Hal was the only one who drank orange juice and too many hours get wasted on stuff like that. He was going off to college now. Their time together was running out. Why fill it with nonsense like that?

“Hey, sweetheart. Out late?”

He drank some more, shrugged. He wore shorts and a gray T-shirt. There was a basketball cropped under his arm.

“Are you playing at the high school gym?” she asked.