lost her balance.
But who would have pushed her? The most obvious answer, of course, would be her husband, Mike Frome. And Debra knew that wasn’t possible.
Her boyfriend, Rutledge, worked for Mike. Mike was one of the good guys.
At least she had always thought he was….
She moved away from the window. None of that. She needed to fill this house with good vibes, with optimism and promise. She spied an empty cachepot beside the bed. Yes, that’s what it needed. Flowers. Nothing said “home” like flowers fresh from your own garden.
She grabbed a basket and a pair of gardening shears from the mudroom just beyond the kitchen, and then she wandered out into the yard. Richie hadn’t been kidding. It really was swampy. But it was as if the rain had intoxicated the flowers, eliminating their inhibitions, making them dress in gaudier colors, spread their lush, ripe petals wider than was prudent.
The larkspurs were the most spectacular. They dominated a multicolored patch of blooms down near the cliff edge, flanking the small stairway that led to the beach. Debra decided she had time to go that far and still wash her shoes when she got back to the house. So she settled the basket over her arm and made her way down the sloping lawn, enjoying the way the sun warmed her hair and painted lime-gold patches on the grass.
Once she stood among the larkspurs, the muddy ground giving underfoot, the lake was so close its sunny sparkles almost blinded her. When a motorboat went puttering by, someone called and waved, though she couldn’t identify the shadowy figure. Was everyone around here that friendly? She didn’t live on this lake. She couldn’t begin to afford such a snazzy address.
She squinted into the sun, wondering if it might be Rutledge, who was supposed to be doing some bookwork at Mike’s office today but who always preferred to be out on the water if he had a choice. She sure hoped he hadn’t ditched work again. There were limits even to nice Mike Frome’s patience.
When the boat curved and turned away, for several minutes she could still hear the lake lapping against the shore in nervous eddies.
She went back to cutting flowers, long purple-blue stalks that were going to look gorgeous in the white bedroom. She filled her basket to overflowing, and then stepped carefully through the mud to the other side of the stairs. She didn’t want to leave the garden lopsided.
Over here the rain had really pummeled things. The mud had run down, out of the bed, onto the grass beyond. She wasn’t sure she could find many stalks that weren’t bruised and spattered with dirt.
She bent, searching, sifting with her fingers….
Suddenly she straightened and backed up a step, her blood running cold, shrinking in her veins.
What the hell was that?
She made herself look again. She made herself stand there, her feet sinking into the cool mud. She reached out numbly and parted the tall stalks of larkspurs. She must have been mistaken.
But she wasn’t wrong. There, half-exposed by the spring glut of muddy rain, were the elegant and bony fingers of a human hand.
“SO…YOU FEEL LIKE maybe taking the boat out this afternoon?” Mike looked at Gavin, who was slumped on the passenger seat, fiddling with the strap of his backpack. “Ledge is minding the office, so I could get free if you’re in the mood.”
Gavin shrugged. He had hardly spoken ten words since Mike had picked him up from a birthday-party sleepover at Hugh’s house.
Well, okay. He didn’t have to talk. It was okay if he wanted to just stare out the window, watching the roadside flowers rush by in a smear of color.
Mike wasn’t usually the hovering type. He allowed his kid the right to a few grumps and sulks, and he didn’t try to jolly him out of them. Sometimes life just sucked, and he wanted Gavin to learn to fight his own way clear of a crummy mood.
Gavin had been blessed with a cheerful nature, and so he usually did just fine.
But this felt different. The air in the truck was dark, though it was a bright spring Sunday. And Gavin’s face, caught in a stream of light from the window, looked oddly pale. Mike had even felt his forehead, a real no-no since Gavin had been about six.
But no fever.
Then he’d probed gently into the usual suspects…teachers, tests, girls, playground scuffles.
But no hits.
He wondered whether Gavin might have wet the bed at Hugh’s, which would naturally have been mortifying. Why would Gavin have reverted to that, though? He’d wet the bed for about six months after Justine’s disappearance, but not lately.
Still…something about this mood reminded Mike of that terrible time.
Shit. His hands tightened on the steering wheel, his heart aching.
He’d thought Gavin was doing so well. But maybe that had been naive. It had been two years, a long time in a ten-year-old child’s life, but maybe not long enough. Gavin seemed fine most of the time, but their psychiatrist had warned Mike that losing Justine this way might function like post-traumatic stress disorder. Despair and grief could strike without warning, with the slightest of triggers.
Especially since there had never really been any closure. Mike knew why Gavin was always jumping up to answer the phone, or the door. He knew why, when Gavin saw a blue Mercedes like Justine’s, he went rigid and followed it with his eyes until it disappeared.
He thought every car might be the car that brought his mother back to him.
Mike didn’t. In his heart, Mike knew Justine had to be dead. She’d been a bitch on wheels, and he wasn’t going to sugarcoat it—he’d hated her. But she had loved Gavin in her way. If she’d been alive, she would have been in touch with her son.
Mike parked the truck in front of the boathouse office and killed the engine. Gavin started to open his door.
“Gavin, wait.”
Mike fought the urge to put his hand on that silky gold head. “Buddy, I’m sorry, but you’re making me nervous. Please give me a hint what’s going on here.”
Gavin might look like his mother, but he had a much softer heart. He obviously heard the anxiety in his dad’s voice. He frowned, took a deep breath, then let it out heavily.
“It’s nothing, really, Dad. It’s just—”
Mike forced himself not to push. If Gavin only knew how many demons could run through his dad’s mind during even a three-second pause. What? Had someone told Gavin that his mom ran away because she didn’t love him? Had they told him that Mike himself must have killed her? Had they invented ghoulish fictions about what happened, just to see if they could make him cry?
If the little bastards had done any of that, Mike would go over there and shake them until their pea-brains rattled.
“We’re having this thing at school,” Gavin said finally. “Lunch With Mom Day, they call it. It’s super dumb, really. But it’s this Tuesday, and…”
Mike’s first thought was, thank God. That was all? Just Lunch With Mom Day?
But then he saw the tears shining in Gavin’s blue eyes, and he realized how dense that was. Lunch With Mom Day mattered. The tough stuff, the nasty, bullying stuff, Gavin could probably handle. He could punch out a bully. He could fight back.
But how did you fight back against Lunch With Mom Day? How did you fight back against the thousands of little losses, the subtle moments in every day when you were simply different? When you were somehow…less?
Mike felt himself getting mad all over again. What insensitive Volunteer Mommy had thought up this stupid idea? In any elementary school classroom, there would be kids whose moms had jobs they couldn’t leave. Moms who had divorced daddy, or even moms who were dead.
But in this particular elementary school, everyone