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She went to the front door and looked out the leaded glass into the street. A Spencerville police cruiser rolled by and she recognized the driver, a young man named Kevin Ward, one of Cliff's favored fascists. She fantasized now and then about inviting Kevin Ward in for coffee, then seducing him. But maybe Cliff had someone watching Kevin Ward, probably in an unmarked car. She smiled grimly at her own paranoia, which was becoming as bad as her husband's. But in her case, the paranoia was well founded. In Cliffs case, it was not. A
The patrol car moved up the street, and A
She looked around at the room that she'd decorated with country antiques and family heirlooms. Cliff had been both proud and sarcastic regarding her taste. She came from a far better family than he did, and at first she'd tried to minimize the dissimilarities in their backgrounds. But he never let her forget their social differences, pointing out that her family was all brains and good ma
Cliff liked to show off the furnishings, show off his stuffed and mounted animals in the basement, his shooting trophies, his press clippings, his guns, his trophy house, and his trophy wife. Look but don't touch. Admire me and my trophies. Cliff Baxter was the classic collector, A
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She thought of his gun collection: rifles, shotguns, pistols. Each and every weapon was locked in a rack the way a good cop would do. Most cops, however, probably all cops, gave their wife a key just in case there was an intruder. Cliff Baxter, though, did not give his wife a key. She knew how he thought: Cliff feared his wife would shoot him at four A.M. one morning and claim she mistook him for an intruder. There were nights when she stared at the locked weapons and wondered if she would actually put a pistol to her head or his head and pull the trigger. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the answer was no; but there had been moments...
She tilted her head back in the chair and felt the tears roll down her eyes. The phone rang, but she didn't answer it.
She gathered the di
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In the kitchen, she fed the dog raw hamburger, then poured herself a glass of lemonade, then went out to the big wraparound porch and sat in the swing seat, her legs tucked under her, the gray mongrel beside her. It was cooling off, and a soft breeze stirred the old trees on the street. The air smelled like rain. She felt better in the fresh air.
Surely, she thought, there was a way out, a way that didn't pass through the town cemetery. Now that her daughter was about to start college, A
The patrol car passed again and Kevin Ward waved to her. She ignored him, and the dog barked at the police car.
Still, she thought, this was America, it was the twentieth century, and there were laws and protection. But instinctively, she knew that was irrelevant in her situation. She had to run, to leave her home, her community, and her family, and that made her angry. She would have preferred a solution more in keeping with her own standards of behavior, not his. She would like to tell him she wanted a divorce, and that she was moving in with her sister, and that they should contact lawyers. But Police Chief Baxter wasn't about to give up one of his trophies, wasn't about to be made a fool of in his town. He knew, without a word being said, that she wanted out, but he also knew, or thought he knew, that he had her safely under lock and key. He put her in a pumpkin shell. It was best to let him keep thinking that.
This summer night, sitting on the porch swing made her think of summer nights long ago when she was very happy and deeply in love with another man. There was a letter in her pocket and she pulled it out. By the light from the window behind her, she read the envelope again. She had addressed it to Keith Landry at his home address in Washington, and it had apparently been forwarded to someplace else where someone had put it in another envelope and mailed it back to her with a slip of paper that read: Unable to forward.
Keith had once written to her saying that if she ever received such a message, she should not try to write to him again. She would be contacted by someone in his office with a new address.
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It had been two days since the letter had been returned to her sister's address in the next county, where Keith sent all his letters to A
Since then, A