“Good point,” Mack said. “And what would that take, I wonder.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “When you think about it, most women want revenge or to get something for being left behind.”
“Like you?”
“I’m the opposite, apparently,” she said. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with him.”
“Well, we’ll see what my brother says this weekend.”
Chapter 25
Wednesday Early Afternoon …
Doreen couldn’t let go of the missing husbands coincidence. It seemed to be an interesting added fact that connected four of these women. Or at least two of them. Two dead husbands, two missing husbands. Was it that common for husbands to go missing? She assumed that, in some cases, it meant he had run off with a younger woman, but it made her feel odd to consider it.
In her case, she had been the one who had left and not necessarily by choice either. She’d been pinched out. If she’d known that her husband had been running off with another woman too, Doreen would have taken off a long time ago. But her husband wouldn’t let her go then either. She frowned as she considered the truth of that matter. He’d been very controlling, and everything happened in his time frame. And, for the first time, she was wondering, looking at meeting Mack’s brother this weekend with a little bit more joy. It’s not that she wanted to get back at her husband, but she wanted to have her life free and clear.
A yawn caught her by surprise. It was already early afternoon, and she hadn’t done anything. She had lazed the day away. The walk had helped, but even now she was sitting here doing nothing. And that was mostly because it had been such a rough weekend with people upon people around.
The result of all those people’s work had been absolutely stunning, but it didn’t change the fact that she had a lot of work still to do. And that she’d have to do it herself, like moving some of that gravel. Calling the animals to her, she stepped into her backyard, found the wheelbarrow, grabbed her gardening gloves, and moved out to the front. She slowly filled the wheelbarrow with gravel to the point where she could still push it and moved it to the backyard.
As she did so, her mind was buzzing on the vegetable gardening and on the missing husbands. It didn’t make any sense. It would help if she had an image of them. Maybe that would assist her to sort out where these men had disappeared to. She couldn’t pinpoint why it was important to the case. Just that another thread dangled, and she didn’t like dangling threads. She wanted her Ts crossed and her Is dotted. Who knew she would be such a stickler for details? But every untied thread like this just left open for interpretation what really happened—and even the tiniest answer could make a major difference to the actual mystery.
When she got the wheelbarrow around to the backyard, she stopped and studied where it should go and decided the easiest was to start way down at the farthest end of the sidewalk. The creek was already trickling upward, as the water rose in the evening, then dropped again in the morning, so that some of the edges on the path alongside the creek were filling with water. She grabbed her edger, cutting the grass back along her sidewalks, so she had about four inches cut away from the concrete and four inches deep, and then slowly shoveled the new trench full of gravel. That should give her enough of a good crisp and deep edge to put in the gravel.
The wheelbarrow load of gravel went a lot farther than she thought too. With that emptied, she went and refilled it, then came back with the edger and her shovel and worked on another deep trench all along the side until she could fill it up again with gravel. By the time she’d done one side, she stood, admiring the look. “What do you think, Mugs?”
He walked along the edge, sticking his paws into the gravel and shifting it around underneath his paw. He immediately switched over to the grass and walked on it instead. “I get you,” she said, “but this is interesting. I like the look of that.” She filled the wheelbarrow up again and again, until she had done all the edges of the concrete leading from the creek up to the patio, and then she had to decide what to do on both sides of the house. When she filled the wheelbarrow the next time, she filled in some of the missing places along the driveway to the back, up to and along the house. Then she did the same on the far side. She had a little bit of gravel left, but it was not a ton. She looked at it and realized that pretty well, to keep the same look, she needed to do an edge of gravel around the outside of the patio too. That would take a little more cutting work though.
With her nifty edger, she went to work on another big trench all the way around her patio. It took longer than she thought, but most of that was because the shoveling itself was also that much slower for her. By the time she’d done the left side of the patio, she only had one side remaining and another three estimated wheelbarrow loads of gravel available. She stopped and wiped her forehead. “You know what? We’ll need dinner after this. Won’t we, guys?”
Mugs woofed, but he was lying on his back and trying to scratch his head in the grass, his feet skyward. He was enjoying a chance to be outside playing.
She managed to get the last part of the patio edged all the way around to where the patio joined the sidewalk to go around the house,
