The Bewildered Wife. Vivian Leiber

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СКАЧАТЬ the candles were safely tucked in the dining room hutch, waiting for dinner parties that hadn’t been given since the mistress of the house had died.

      She disengaged herself from the children enough to shove her hand into Chelsea’s toy box. Rooting around, she pulled out the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle flashlight. She flicked it on, shooting out a small but comforting speck of light.

      “Calm down, all three of you. The Bear family survived a storm much worse than this without a single tear.”

      Henry was the first to catch on. He gulped down his sobs and wiped his runny nose with his sleeve.

      “They did? Not a single tear?”

      “It was a much bigger storm than this one,” Susan said, guilty that she was going against her employer’s wishes but certain he would understand. Just this once.

      She hustled them back into the safe bed, opening her arms wide enough to encompass them all. Even Henry, who sometimes considered himself too old for her embraces.

      She started another tale, a story she made up as she went along, cuing her words to the reactions of her charges. She had described the storm, the bears, their bravery and was winding things up, when they heard the first anguished yelps.

      “It’s Wiley!” Henry shrieked.

      “Oh, no!” Susan cried.

      The children leapt from the bed to the window, Susan behind them. Illuminated by the lightning, the pitiful, wet, sobbing Wiley stood in the court-yard—pulling at the chain that tied him to the steel shed out in back of the Radcliffe oak trees.

      “The landscape service must have forgotten to let him loose after they mowed the lawn,” Susan said.

      “Bring him back in!” Chelsea demanded.

      “Yeah, get him!” Henry begged.

      Susan stared in horror at the poor dog and then at her charges. If she did nothing, Wiley’s pain and terror would be unbearable—for all of them.

      But if she went downstairs and left the three children on their own…

      “I’ll go down there, but you have to stand right here,” she said. “And don’t move. And take care of Baby Edward. Chelsea, you’re in charge.”

      She left them the flashlight and some comforting kisses. In the hall, she felt her way, hand over hand, along the walls of the night-shrouded house. Down the steps, through the cavernous pitch-black dining room. At last she reached the kitchen. She flung open the back door, then fell back as the wind slammed it right back against her. She landed hard.

      She scrambled up, grabbed the door handle and shoved with all her might. A sudden vacuum created by the unruly wind sucked the door outward, and she lurched onto the back porch. Downed branches and ripped leaves, slathered to the porch with rain, made it slippery going.

      Out past the courtyard, Wiley moaned for her, his eyes pleading for relief.

      Woman and dog jumped as the sky cracked in two with a bang and a burst of light.

      That was close, Susan thought. Must have hit right near the orchard behind the formal Radcliffe gardens. Swallowing the tight lump of fear, she charged down the steps and across the courtyard.

      She looked back once through the sheets of rain to see three ghostly faces pressed against the window of the second-floor back bedroom. Then she reached for Wiley and he lapped her hand as she fumbled with the chain at his neck.

      “It’s all right, Wiley, you’re safe now,” Susan comforted. She found the grip, and released him. He raced for the back door, slipping once but recovering as if the very hounds of hell were chasing him.

      Susan felt a gentle tap on her shoulder and, still holding the metal chain, she turned around. She looked down at the bracelet Dean Radcliffe had given her—its little charms twinkling in the eerie storm light. She hadn’t wanted to wear it, hadn’t wanted to admit it meant something to her to receive a gift from him. But she wore it now—always, long after they grew up, the children would be in her memories. She hoped she would get over Dean.

      A quivering light burst from the shed and slithered up the chain to the twinkling bracelet. She felt fire squeezing her wrists. And then came the roar of thunder, close against her ear.

      “Daddy, you gotta come home.” Henry gulped, then choked on a sob. “Daddy, it’s just like the night Mommy…”

      Dean Radcliffe picked up the receiver on the speaker phone and with a single silencing glance at the executives around the conference table, leaned back in his chair.

      “What’s just like—” He hesitated and took a deep breath. “What’s just like that night?”

      “The lightning!” Henry cried.

      Dean glanced out his sixty-fourth-floor office window to the black sky. Clouds hung low, so low it seemed he could grab their swollen mounds. There was a crack of lightning in the distance.

      It all came back to him—even now the memory was as sickening as it had been two years ago.

      Nicole’s body, her car at the bottom of the ravine where the Radcliffe property line met the street, the car radio still playing the heavy-metal music she loved so much, her blond hair thrown forward across her still, frozen face.

      “Henry, get Susan on the phone,” he ordered his son, more curtly perhaps as he struggled to squelch his own emotions.

      “That’s the problem,” Henry said. “Susan’s outside.”

      Unbidden, the scent of sugar and vanilla came to him. He batted it away with a surge of anger. She was clearly negligent, leaving the frightened children to fend for themselves. He’d have to talk to her.

      “What’s she doing outside?”

      He stood up, his tall frame making the office look as if it had been furnished with treasures from a dollhouse. He raked a callused hand through his hair. Savvy executives knew he was fighting off a headache—they had seen that gesture many times during tense negotiations. And nothing in recent years had been more tension filled than the attempted purchase of the Eastman Bear Company.

      Indistinct sobs crackled from the speaker phone.

      “Henry!” Dean yelled.

      Someone else came on the line.

      “Daddy, it’s Chelsea. Please come home.”

      “If Susan’s outside, get me…” He thought for a minute, and then remembered the terrible truth. There wasn’t a housekeeper who would stay in the isolated and gloomy Radcliffe house. There wasn’t a maid who had lasted longer than a day. And he had fired the groundskeeper two days after Nicole’s death; as he remembered that man, his jaws clenched in suppressed rage.

      The problem was there was no one to care for his children except Susan.

      Dependable, responsible, nearly invisible Susan.

      If she wasn’t there…

      “There’s СКАЧАТЬ