at the problem. Hours, he knew, didn’t simply disappear. If he thought about it long enough, he knew, he would figure out what had happened during those hours, and know why he didn’t remember them.
The back door slammed, and Marsh looked up from the medical journal he was reading in time to see Alex come in from the kitchen. “Hi!”
Alex stopped, then turned toward Marsh. “Hi,” he replied.
“Where you been?”
Alex shrugged. “Nowhere.”
Marsh offered his son a smile. “Funny, that’s exactly where I always was when I was your age.”
Alex made no response, and slowly the smile faded away from Marsh’s face as Alex silently left the room, drifting upstairs toward his own room. A few months ago, before the accident, Alex’s eyes would have lit up, and he would have asked where, exactly, nowhere was, and then they would have been off, the conversation quickly devolving into total nonsense on the subject of the exact location of nowhere and just precisely what one was doing when one was doing nothing in the middle of nowhere.
Now there was nothing in his eyes.
For Marsh, Alex’s eyes had become symbolic of all the changes that had come over him since the accident.
The old Alex had had eyes full of life, and Marsh had always been able to read his son’s mood with one glance.
But now his eyes showed nothing. When he looked into them, all he saw was a reflection of himself. And yet, he had no sense that Alex was trying to hide anything. Rather, it was as if there was nothing there; as if the flatness of his personality had become visible in his eyes.
The eyes, Marsh remembered, had sometimes been referred to as the windows to the soul. And if that was true, then Alex had no soul. Marsh felt chilled by the thought, then tried to banish it from his mind.
But all afternoon, the thought kept coming back to him.
Perhaps Ellen’s feeling on that awful night in May had been right after all. Perhaps Raymond Torres had not saved him at all.
Perhaps in a way Alex was truly dead.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Kate Lewis listened to the hollow ringing of the phone long past the time when she knew it was going to go unanswered. For the fourth time in the last hour, she told herself that her mother must have taken her father to the hospital. But if she had, why hadn’t she left a message on the answering machine? Why hadn’t the answering machine even been turned on? Worried, she hung up the phone at the back of Jake’s and returned to the table she and Bob Carey had been occupying throughout the long Sunday afternoon.
“Still nothing?” Bob asked as Kate slid back into the booth.
Kate tried to force a casual shrug, but failed. “I don’t know what to do. I want to go home, but Mom said to call first.”
“You’ve been calling all afternoon,” Bob pointed out. “Why don’t we go up there, and if they’re still fighting, we can leave again. We don’t even have to go in. But I’ll bet she took him to the hospital.” He reached across the table and squeezed Kate’s hand reassuringly. “Look, if he was as drunk as you said he was, she was probably so busy getting him out of the house and into the car that she didn’t have time to turn on the machine.”
Kate nodded reluctantly, though she was still unconvinced. Always before, her mother had left a message for her, or if her father was really bad, not even tried to take him to the hospital. Instead, she’d called an ambulance.
And this morning, her father had been really bad. Still, she couldn’t just go on sitting around Jake’s. “Okay,” she said at last.
Ten minutes later they pulled into the Lewises’ driveway, and Bob shut off the engine of his Porsche. They stared first at the open garage door and the two cars that still sat inside it. Then they turned their attention toward the house.
“Well, at least they’re not fighting,” Kate said, but made no move to get out of the car.
“Maybe she called an ambulance, and went with it,” Bob suggested.
Kate shook her head. “She would have followed it, so she wouldn’t have to call someone for a ride home.”
“You want to stay here while I go see if they’re home?” Bob asked.
Kate considered a moment, then shook her head. Her hand trembling, she opened the door of the Porsche and got out. With Bob behind her, she started up the walk to the front door.
When she found it unlocked, she breathed a sigh of relief. One thing she was absolutely certain of — her mother would never leave the house unlocked. She pushed the door open and stepped inside.
“Mom? I’m home!” she called out. An empty silence hung over the house, and Kate’s heart began beating faster. “Mom?” she called again, louder this time. She glanced nervously at Bob. “Something’s wrong,” she whispered. “If the door’s unlocked, Mom should be here.”
“Maybe she’s upstairs,” Bob suggested. “You want me to go look?”
Kate nodded silently, and Bob started up the stairs. A moment later he was back. “Nobody up there,” he told her. “Let’s look in the kitchen.”
“No,” Kate said. Then, her voice quavering, she spoke again. “Let’s call the police.”
“The police?” Bob echoed. “Why?”
“Because I’m scared,” Kate said, no longer trying to control the fear in her voice. “Something’s wrong, and I don’t want to go into the kitchen!”
“Aw, come on, Kate,” Bob told her, starting down the hall toward the closed kitchen door. “Nothing’s wrong at all. She probably just called an ambulance and—” He fell silent as he pushed open the kitchen door. “Oh, God,” he whispered. For just a moment he stood perfectly still. Then he stepped back and let the door swing closed. He turned unsteadily around, his face ashen. “Kate,” he whispered. “Your mom — I think … She looks like she’s dead.”
Kate stared at him for a moment while the words slowly registered in her mind. Then, without thinking, she started down the hall, pushing her way past Bob and into the kitchen. Wildly, she scanned the room, and then found what she was looking for.
Her knees buckled, and she sank sobbing to the floor.
Roscoe Finnerty glanced up at Tom Jackson. “You okay?”
Jackson nodded. “I can handle it.” He stared at Marty Lewis’s body for a moment, trying to get a handle on what he was feeling. It wasn’t at all like last spring, when he’d almost fallen apart at the sight of Alex Lonsdale’s broken body trapped in the wreckage of the Mustang. No, this was different. Except for the look on her face, and the pallor of her skin, this woman could be sleeping. He knelt and pressed his finger to her neck.
She wasn’t sleeping.
“What do you think?” he asked, getting to his feet once more.
“Until I talk to the kids, I don’t think anything.” A siren sounded, and a few seconds later an ambulance pulled into the driveway. Two medics came into the room and repeated the procedure Finnerty and Jackson had gone through when they’d arrived a few minutes earlier. “Don’t move her,” Finnerty told them. “Just make sure she’s dead, then don’t do anything till the detectives get up here. Tom, you get outside and make sure none of the rubberneckers try to come inside, and I’ll have a talk with the kids.”
Finnerty left the kitchen and went back to the living room, where he found Kate Lewis and Bob Carey still sitting on the sofa where he’d left them, Kate sobbing softly while Bob tried to comfort her.
“How’s she doing?” Finnerty asked. Bob looked dazedly up at him.
“How do you
