Mountain Madness (14 page)

Sissy Brown was two months younger than Beth, and her boobs had grown into full-fledged knockers. She already wore a bra size bigger than Beth’s mom, and the boys at school were all over her.

Beth took the ball from Alfred again, but this time she flung it in the opposite direction, aiming it for the small doghouse where Alfred liked to laze during the hottest part of the day. The ball came within a foot of bouncing into the doghouse door, but ricocheted off the front instead and came straight back at a fully sprinting and suddenly surprised Alfred.

Beth didn’t get too upset about the lack of attention from boys, because in her opinion most guys were jerks, but she did wonder how her breasts would feel, if they would jiggle like a couple of water balloons or be something closer to flexing muscles. She hadn’t asked Sissy or her mom, though either of them could have told her. She wanted to find out for herself. Hopefully sometime before she turned thirty.

Alfred chugged back to her no less energetically than he had after the first time she’d thrown the ball; the remaining daylight reflected off his golden fur in a way that made him look not only golden colored but actually
made
of gold, like some kind of moving statue.

He was a Labrador, more or less full bred, and had ears so floppy they almost belonged on a rabbit. Beth couldn’t remember a time when Alfred hadn’t been around. Her parents had gotten the puppy on Beth’s second birthday; the two of them had grown up together. Alfred was the closest thing to a brother Beth had ever had and the closest thing she ever would. Beth’s mom had confessed last year that she’d had her tubes tied, which meant Beth would forever be an only child.

She took the ball from Alfred’s mouth but didn’t throw it again until after she’d given the dog a good head scratching and at least a full minute’s worth of petting. Her dad was working late, and her mom had made a trip into town for some groceries, leaving Beth temporarily alone, something she wouldn’t have done a year before. Beth guessed she should have felt honored that her mom trusted her to stay by herself, but all she really felt was lonely.

Except for Alfred. She gave him a big kiss on the top of his head and ruffled the fur around his floppy ears.

Alfred accepted the attention happily, but Beth felt the tense muscles beneath his coat and knew he wasn’t finished fetching. She scratched him one last time under his chin before throwing the ball with all her strength. It sailed through the air, hit a tree limb and bounced higher, and finally dropped. Alfred had really torn after this one and almost reached it before the ball hit the ground. He caught it on the first bounce and seemed to grin when he hurried it back to his mistress.

Beth clapped for him and giggled. “Good boy,” she said and accepted the damp toy. “How bout this time you throw it to me?”

Alfred wagged his tail and continued smiling at her, but a hungry eagerness had entered his eyes.
Come on
, he might have been saying.
Ball. Throw it. Throw the ball.

Beth wondered just how long he would go on. If she stayed out here for a week straight, gave up bathing and eating in order to endlessly toss her dog his oversized ball, would Alfred ever tire? Alfred was more than ten years old—seventy in human years—and still he often acted like a great big puppy.

We must be feeding him some kind of atomic dog food
, Beth thought and threw the ball again. Alfred took off, and Beth considered going inside for a sweatshirt. The day had been warm, but the heat never lasted long up here. In another hour, full dark would arrive and she’d be shivering. It was one of the things she liked about living in the mountains. She could open her bedroom window at night and snuggle up under a pile of warm blankets, wear thick socks around the house and never get sweaty feet, or fix herself an evening cup of hot chocolate in the middle of the summer. It was great. They said you couldn’t handle the cold as well when you got older, which explained why so many fogeys ended up slinking down to Florida; Beth planned to enjoy the cool while she still could. With any luck, she’d be an exception to the fogey rule and could spend the rest of her life with thick socks and mugs of hot chocolate and mounds of cozy blankets.

Beth watched Alfred and pulled herself up from the patio. The dog stopped halfway to her, cocked his head, then dropped the ball and let out a single loud bark.

Beth said, “Oh relax, you big furball, I’ll be right back.”

Alfred barked again, louder this time, and turned his head toward the northern end of the property. His tail had stopped wagging. Beth frowned and walked across the yard to where he’d stopped. She heard what she first thought was the distant grumbling of an engine and moved right up next to her dog. He was trembling.

Not an engine, but a growl, and coming from Alfred.

Beth almost backed away but instead turned her head to see what was worrying him. The only movement came from the leaves on the trees and the clouds in the sky above.

Alfred’s growl picked up a notch, and for just a second Beth had the crazy idea that maybe he’d gone rabid, that any minute he’d foam at the mouth and bite into her face like she was nothing more than a juicy hunk of meat. But then she saw something else, a shape within the trees.

A man. Splatters of something dark covered his shirt and pants and even his face—motor oil maybe, or paint—and there was a boy who looked about her own age with him. The boy walked a step behind the dirty man and seemed to tug on his sleeve like he was trying to hold him back.

Beth touched Alfred’s neck and felt the vibrations coming off him like electricity. She thought about taking Alfred into the house and locking all the doors, but by the time the thought was fully formed, it was too late. The man ran at her, boy in tow, and she was too dumbstruck to move.

FIFTEEN

LIBBY PULLED THE
Honda into the garage and shut it off with a slow turn of the key. For a while, she simply sat there, leaning back in her seat with her eyes closed, listening to the car’s engine click as it cooled. She and Trevor had left the house that afternoon around one, and although it was just past seven now, it seemed she’d been away for days. She thumbed the button on the remote clipped to her visor and waited until the garage door had rolled all the way down to the concrete and thumped in place before letting herself out of the car.

She considered leaving her shopping bags in the trunk—she could always come out and get them later—but then she remembered the books she’d picked up and her earlier thoughts of slipping into a nice warm bath, glass of wine in one hand and a paperback in the other, maybe with some music drifting in from the stereo in the bedroom.

Yes. Throw in some bath salts and a few unscented candles, and she’d have herself the perfect evening.

Libby jammed a key into the trunk and popped it open, reached inside for her bags and pushed the lid shut again.

Except she didn’t think wine would cut it. Maybe she’d bring up a bucket of ice and beer instead. She had an untouched six-pack of Corona in the back of the fridge and thought there might also be a lime in the bottom drawer with the apples and oranges. If there had ever been a night to indulge in a little heavier-than-usual drinking, surely this was it. Although at one point during the day she’d intended to come home and put in a couple of hours of work, she’d already been second guessing the idea before she’d lost Trevor. She’d decided on the drive home that any work she did now would have been worthless anyway and that she might as well go ahead and take off the whole day.

She let herself into the kitchen through the connecting door, shut off the garage light behind her, and deposited the shopping bags on the counter beside the half-full sink of dishes. She’d have to run the dishwasher soon, but that could wait for later, too. She hung her keys on the hook beside the fridge and carried her purse with her into the living room, where the newly repositioned leather sofa waited like an open-armed lover.

Libby dropped face first onto the cushions and let out a long, tense sigh. The sofa sighed back, the cushions compressing beneath her and making a low burping sound when she turned lazily onto her side. To think, none of this mess would have happened today if she’d just let Mike come and pick up Trevor, if she hadn’t been so afraid of what he’d think of her redecorating.

Way to go
, she thought. She let her purse drop from her fingers to the floor beside the couch and reached up to give her face a slow massage.

She hadn’t turned on the living room lights. As the daylight filtering in through the windows continued to wane, the room dimmed around her. The couch was so soft and the lighting so relaxing that Libby almost fell asleep right there and then, forgoing the bath and the beer and the paperback,
would
have fallen asleep if not for a car whizzing by outside and the glare of its headlights coming in through the living room windows.

Libby groaned, pushed herself into a sitting position, and finally stood. 

On her way upstairs, she found a pair of Trevor’s action figures pushed to the edge of one of the steps. She’d told him a hundred times not to leave his things on the stairs, that someone might trip and really get hurt, but she guessed little boys just weren’t programmed to remember certain rules no matter how many times you told them. It would be one thing if he’d disobeyed her on purpose, but she was sure he’d just forgotten. Despite what had happened at the Mountain View, she knew Trevor was probably a better boy than most moms could ever expect to have, and not, as the mall security guard had suggested, an
untrained pup
.

Besides, at least he’d pushed the toys to the side, where they were unlikely to get underfoot. Libby reached down to pick them up and carried them with her to the second floor.

Trevor’s room wasn’t exactly spic and span—rumpled bed sheets covered the mattress, a pile of his clothes filled one corner, and several of his coloring books and his tub of crayons lay on the floor where he’d left them—but neither was it a total pigsty. Although she and Mike had always tried to instill a sense of cleanliness in their son, neither of them had ever been obsessive, and they hadn’t wanted to bring up Trevor like a couple of museum curators, making him afraid to touch anything and uncomfortable in his own room. They’d always believed a house was for living in, not for displaying, and if that meant the occasional coloring book on the floor or the previous day’s outfit piled in the corner, so be it.

She arranged the action figures on top of Trevor’s bookshelf, which was mostly filled with magazines and comic and coloring books, along with several first- and second-grade readers. Trevor had mastered his reading skills very early, much sooner than many of his classmates, and although he was only headed for the first grade come fall, he now read at a third-grade level. The school had talked about skipping Trevor a grade, but Libby suggested they wait at least another year. Trevor liked school, had made some good friends, and she didn’t want to push him too fast. Besides, although he’d shown a talent for reading, she knew it was something that simply came easily to him and not a sign that he was trying to surge his way through the school system any faster than the rest of the kids. She was also well aware that he still preferred the pictures in his comic books to anything Dick, Jane, and their dog, Spot, had to offer.

Libby had gotten one of the action figures into a standing position, but the other didn’t want to stay upright. After only a second try at getting the uncooperative toy to balance, Libby gave up and let the little guy rest on his back. Five minutes after Trevor came home, the thing would be in the bathtub or the laundry hamper or back on the stairs again anyway.

Smiling, she returned the coloring books and the crayons to the bookshelf, took the pile of clothes from the corner of the room, and headed for the utility room.

She came to the open door of her dark office, looked inside. Her laptop’s power light pulsed, which meant it was not off but merely asleep. Work was only the flip of a lid and a few keystrokes away, but she resisted the urge to enter the room.

Besides her website work, she also did some occasional consulting for a graphics firm based out of Denver. When helping out with one of those jobs (designing a law firm’s new letterhead or a company’s revamped logo), she often had deadlines to meet and customers to please, but none of her current projects were in any dire need of attention, and she’d already decided to let it go. At least for tonight.

She moved on to the utility room, threw Trevor’s clothes on top of the washer and promised herself she’d get to them later. Like the dirty dishes. Like her work. 

The master bathroom called to her.

She turned on a bedroom lamp and sorted through the stack of CDs on top of the dresser until she found the new Paul McCartney album, which she inserted into the stereo and set to repeat. The music came softly from the stereo’s small speakers, mellifluous and perfect for her current mood. She turned it up just a notch, loud enough to hear from the bathroom, but not so loud that it would disrupt her reading once she’d gotten into the bath.

She crossed the room, the hardwood floor cool beneath her bare feet, slipped out of her pants and tossed them gently on the unmade bed.

She smiled. A coloring book or two and a couple of action figures and she’d be worse than her son. She left her shirt on for the time being, readjusted the waistline of her bikini briefs, and moved onto the bathroom tile, which felt noticeably cooler than the hardwood.

She wasn’t normally much of a bath person, though mostly because she rarely had time for such niceties. A quick run through the shower was usually about the best she could expect, and even then she sometimes had to simultaneously brush her teeth and shave her legs to get everything done in the available timeframe. She had expected the tub to be too dirty to use, covered in soap scum and strands of shed hair, but it actually looked surprisingly clean. She gave it a quick wipe down with a hand towel, just to be sure, and then plugged the drain and started the water. After fiddling with the knobs until she’d gotten the temperature just right, Libby wiped her hands on the towel and went in search of bath salts.