Spencerville

He smelled the rain before he heard it, and heard it before he saw it. A lot of memory circuitry — sights, sounds, smells — were deeply imprinted before a person turned eighteen, Keith thought. A lot of who you were in middle age was determined before you had a chance to manipulate, control, or even understand the things around you. It was no mystery, he thought, why some old people's minds returned to their youth; the wonder of those years, the discoveries, the first experience with the dirty secret of death, and the first stirrings of lust and love were indelible, drawn in luminous colors on clean canvas. Indeed, the first sex act was so mind-boggling that most people could still remember it clearly twenty, thirty, sixty years later.

Annie.

So, he thought, his journey of discovery had led home. On the way he had seen castles and kings, golden cities and soaring cathedrals, wars and death, starvation and disease. Keith wondered if old Pastor Wilkes was still alive, because he wanted to tell him that he'd actually met the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and knew more about them than their names; he knew who they were, and obviously they were us.

But Keith had also seen love and compassion, decency and bravery.

And here, alone with himself, sitting in his place at the table, he felt the journey was not ended, but was about to get interesting again.

So here it was, twenty-five years since he'd stepped off his front porch into the world, and he'd put a million miles on his trip meter since then, and he'd had so many women he couldn't remember half their names if his life depended on it. Yet, in the dark times, in the mornings and in the evenings, on long plane rides to scary places, in the jungles of Asia, in the back streets of Eastern Europe, and in those moments when he thought he was going to die, he remembered Annie.

Chapter Four

Annie Baxter lay sleepless on her bed. Brief, incandescent flashes of lightning lit the dark room, and thunder shook the house to its foundations. A burglar alarm, triggered by the storm, wailed somewhere, and dogs barked in the night.

The dream she'd had crept into her consciousness. It was a sexual dream, and it disturbed her because it was about Cliff, and it should have been about Keith. In the dream, she was standing naked in front of Cliff, who was fully dressed in his uniform. He was smiling — no, leering at her, and she was trying to cover her nakedness with her hands and arms.

The Cliff Baxter in her dream was younger and better built than the Cliff Baxter she was married to now. More disturbing still was that, in the dream, she was sexually aroused by Cliff's presence, and she'd awakened with the same feeling.

Keith Landry and the other men she'd been with before Cliff were more sensitive and better lovers in the sense that they were willing to experiment and to give her pleasure. Cliff, on the other hand, had been, and still was, into sexual dominance. She had been turned on by this initially, she admitted, like in the dream; but Cliff's rough sex and selfishness now left her feeling unsatisfied, used, and sometimes uneasy. Still, she remembered a time when she was a willing and aroused partner.

Annie felt guilty that she'd once enjoyed that sado-sexual relationship with Cliff and guilty that she still thought and dreamed about it with no revulsion or loathing. In fact, it was quite the opposite, like now, awakening from that dream, moist between her legs. She realized she had to kill that dream and those thoughts once and for all.

She looked at the clock beside the bed: 5:16 A.M. She rose, put on her robe, went down to the kitchen, and poured herself an iced tea. After some hesitation, she picked up the wall phone and called police headquarters.

"Sergeant Blake speaking, Mrs. Baxter."

She knew that her phone number, name, and address appeared on some sort of screen when she dialed, and that annoyed her. Cliff wasn't comfortable with a lot of new technology, but he intuitively recognized the possibilities of the most sinister, Orwellian gadgets available to the otherwise Stone Age police force of Spencerville.

"Everything okay, Mrs. Baxter?"

"Yes. I'd like to speak to my husband."

"Well... he's out making the rounds."

"Then I'll call him on the car phone. Thank you."

"Well, hold on, let's see, he might be... I had some trouble raising him before. The storm, you know? I'll try to get him on the radio and tell him to call you. Anything we can do?"

"No, you've done enough." She hung up and dialed his car phone. After four rings, a recorded voice said the call could not be completed. She hung up and went into the basement. Part of the basement was the laundry room, another part was Cliff's den, carpeted, and finished in pine paneling. On his escorted house tours, he liked to point to the laundry room and say, "Her office," then to his den and say, "My office."