floor, on top of a white plastic tarp spread by one of the ambulance attendants. The medical examiner moved forward to have a look, crouching down on one knee and opening his black bag.
'I was just talking to him last week,' a man said. 'After school got out.'
Doug looked to his right, to the source of the voice. It was Ed Montgomery, the coach. The portly man's natural hangdog expression had been intensified and cemented with shock. He shook his head slowly back and forth, talking to no one in particular. 'He was saying how he was going to get a part time job at the post office this summer to help pay for his schooling in the fall. His scholarship didn't cover books and rent, only tuition.'
Doug's ears pricked up at this, and he felt a familiar chill creeping down his back. He moved next to the coach. 'He was going to get a job where?'
Ed looked at him blankly. 'At the post office. He'd already okayed it with Howard.' He shook his head. 'I can't understand why he'd do such a thing. He had everything going for him.' The coach stopped shaking his head and looked into Doug's eyes, his troubled gaze focused, as if he'd just thought of an idea. 'You think maybe he was murdered?'
'I don't know,' Doug said. And he didn't. He suddenly wanted very badly to see what was written on that note pinned to the boy's chest. He took a step forward.
'Stay back please,' the policeman warned, holding his hand palm-up in Doug's direction.
'I have to see something. I was his teacher.'
'Only official personnel and family members are allowed near the body.'
'Just for a second.'
'Sorry,' the policeman said.
Doug turned away from the gym and pushed his way out the door, into the fresh air, needing more room, more space in which to breathe. The blood was pounding in his temples.
Bernie Rogers had been planning to work part-time at the post office.
The post office.
It didn't make any logical rational sense, but in some twisted way it fit, and it scared the hell out of him.
He moved through the small crowd and leaned against a tree, gulping in the fresh air. He looked up, toward the road, and thought he saw, through the pines, a red car moving slowly away from the park toward the center of town.
14
Tritia sat alone on the porch, feeling uncharacteristically depressed.
Both Doug and Billy were gone, Doug to his meeting and Billy off somewhere with Lane, and she was all alone. Usually she liked being by herself. She so seldom had time alone anymore that, when the opportunity presented itself, she was grateful. But today she felt different, strange.
The cassette player was next to her on the slatted wooden floor of the porch. It had been barely working the last time she'd used it, but she'd scavenged three batteries from one of Billy's old remote-controlled cars and had found a fourth in a drawer in the kitchen, and now it was playing perfectly. She had the tape player turned loud. George Winston. Ordinarily, she liked to match the music to the day, choosing sounds to complement her feelings, but today the music seemed totally inappropriate for a sound track to her life. The soothing impressionistic piano, the deliberate spacing of clear notes and silences, went perfectly with the summer sky and green forest, but she herself felt hopelessly out of sync.
She stared out at the trees, at the hummingbird-feeders hanging from the branches, seeing them but not seeing them, her eyes using the feeders as a focal point, though her mind was off in space somewhere, thinking about something else.
Thinking about the mailman.
She had not told Doug about seeing the mailman last night, nor about her nightmare afterward, although she was not sure why. It was not like her to be secretive, to keep things from him. They'd always had a close, honest relationship, had always confided in each other, shared their hopes, fears, thoughts, opinions. But for some reason, she could not bring herself to talk to him about the mailman. She had made excuses, rationalized, tried to convince herself, and all of her excuses sounded logical, reasonable -- Billy was awake and listening, Doug had left too early and she'd had no time to talk to him but the truth was that she didn't want to talk to him, didn't want to tell him what had happened. She had never felt that way before, had never experienced anything like it, and it scared her more than she was willing to admit.
Doug had not picked up the mail this morning before he left, and she'd been too afraid to go out to the mailbox and retrieve it herself, so she'd sent Billy out to get it, watching him from the porch to make sure he was all right.
He came back with three letters: two for Doug, one for her. The letter was sitting next to her right now, on the small table on which she'd put her iced tea. She hadn't wanted to open it right away, though it was from Howard and she had no real apprehension about its contents, and she'd set it aside until she felt like looking at it. Now she picked it up, tearing open the envelope. The letter was addressed to her, but the first line of the message read, 'Dear Ellen.' She frowned. That was strange. But then Howard had been under a lot of stress lately, a lot had happened to him. It was bound to show up in some way or other. She continued reading:
Dear Ellen, Sorry I couldn't come by Saturday night, but I was forced into dinner at theAlbins '. What a horrible time. The food was awful, the kid was a brat, and Albinand his wife were as boring as ever. That phony bitch Tritia . . .
She stopped reading, feeling as though all of the air had been sucked out of her lungs, a sudden emptiness in the pit of her stomach. She looked at the letter again, but the words were blurry, liquid, running. Her eyes brimmed with tears. She was surprised by the vehemence of her reaction. She had never been an overly sensitive person about either herself or her cooking, had never really minded constructive criticism, but this type of cruel betrayal, particularly in regard to her family, particularly coming from a friend like Howard, hurt a lot.
A hell of a lot. She wiped the tears from her eyes angrily, refolding the letter and putting it back in the envelope. Howard had obviously intended to send a letter to both her and Ellen Ronda and had unthinkingly placed the letters in the wrong envelopes.
Ellen was no doubt reading about the lovely time and dinner Howard had had.
She was not usually this emotional, this easily hurt, butdammit , she had been trying to help Howard through a difficult period, and this backhanded backstabbing cut deep. She and Doug had always considered him a friend. Maybe not a close friend, but a friend nonetheless, a man whose company they both enjoyed. Why would he do something like this? And how could he be so two-faced?
He had never been a deceitful or duplicitous man. Outspoken honesty had always been his greatest strength and greatest weakness. He had never hesitated to speak his mind, no matter what the consequences. It would be one thing if he had just come out and said he didn't want to come over for dinner or didn't enjoy their company or didn't like the food they served him, but to sit there and lie to them, to The phone rang. Tritia dropped the letter on the small table, pushed herself out of the butterfly chair, and hurried across the porch into the house.
She caught the phone on the fifth ring, clearing her throat to purge the emotion from her voice. 'Hello?'
'He's after me!' The whisper on the other end of the line Was frantic and borderline hysterical, and Tritia did not at first recognize it. 'He's here now.'
'Excuse me?' Tritia said, puzzled.
'I think he's in the house now,' the woman whispered.
Now she recognized the voice. Ellen Ronda. She was shocked at how different Bob's wife sounded. Gone was the cool-as-ice voice Tritia had heard for as long as she could remember; gone, too, was the grief-stricken wildness she'd heard on the day of the funeral. In its place was fear. Terror.
'Who's after you?' Tritia asked.
'He thinks he's being tricky, but I can hear his footsteps.'
'Get out of the house,' Tritia said. 'Now. Go someplace and call the police.'
'I already called the police. They refused to help me. They said --'
Ellen's voice was cut off, and a man's deep baritone came on the line.
'Hello?'
Tritia 'sheart leapt to her throat. It took all of her courage, all of her inner strength not to hang up the receiver. 'Who is this?' she demanded in the most intimidating voice she could muster.
'This is Dr. Roberts. Who is this?'
