Sandra Field - After Hours

She was going to read all the novels she’d bought in the last year that had been stashed on her shelves because she hadn’t had time to get at them. She’d experiment with some new pasta recipes. She’d watch the shows she always missed on TV because something needed doing at the lab. She was going to have a great time.

Marcia got lost twice trying to follow the penciled squiggles on her sister’s map; Lucy wasn’t blessed with a sense of direction. But finally the little side road she had been following forked in two just as it was supposed to. When she took the right fork within three hundred yards she saw a wooden gate with a plaque attached to the post. “Richardson” it said. That was the name of Quentin’s friends, the ones who owned the cottage.

Marcia got out, opened the gate, drove through and closed it behind her. Her car bumped down a lane overhung with newly leafed beech trees and red-tasseled maples. Then she emerged into a clearing and braked.

Through the lacy fretwork of the trees the lake sparkled and danced. A carpet of white trilliums patterned the forest floor. And the cottage—the cottage was beautiful.

It was a house more than a cottage, a cedar house with a wood-shingled roof and a broad stone chimney; it merged with its surroundings perfectly. Smiling fatuously, Marcia drove to the circle of gravel at the end of the driveway and parked her car.

Over the deep silence of the woods she could hear the ripple of the lake on the shore and a chorus of bird song. The front of the house, which faced the lake, was made of panels of glass set in thick beams reaching to the peak of the roof. The tree trunks and the blue of the sky were reflected in the glass.

Like a woman in a dream she walked up the stone path to the front door. The key turned smoothly in the lock. She stepped inside and gave a gasp of dismay.

What had Lucy said? Something about Quentin not being a model housekeeper?

That, thought Marcia, was the understatement of the year.

Clothes were flung over the furniture, books, newspapers and dirty dishes were strewn on the tables and the floor and an easel and a clutter of painting equipment decorated the corner with the most light. She wrinkled her nose. Over the smell of turpentine and linseed oil was a nastier smell. From the kitchen. Bracing herself, she stepped over an untidy heap of art magazines and discovered on the counter the remains of Quentin’s supper: a wilting Caesar salad over which three houseflies were circling. The anchovies were the source of the odor.

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