his pajamas with the little yellow college pennants.
“Roger. Roger!”
Roger opened his eyes, blinked, looked at the Travel-Ette clock.
“Hey, Vic, it’s the middle of the night.”
“Roger . . .” He swallowed and something clicked in his throat. “Roger, it’s midnight and Tad and Donna still aren’t home. I’m scared.”
Roger sat up and brought the clock close to his face to verify what Vic had said. It was now four past the hour.
“Well, they probably got freaked out staying there by themselves, Vic. Sometimes Althea takes the girls and goes over to Sally Petrie’s when I’m gone. She gets nervous when the wind blows off the lake at night, she says.”
“She would have called.” With the light on, with Roger sitting up and talking to him, the idea that Donna might have just run off with Steve Kemp seemed absurd—he couldn’t believe he had even indulged it. Forget logic. She had told him it was over, and he had believed her. He believed her now.
“Called?” Roger said. He was still having trouble tracking things.
“She knows I call home almost every night when I’m away. She would have called the hotel and left a message if she was going to be gone overnight. Wouldn’t Althea?”
Roger nodded. “Yeah. She would.”
“She’d call and leave a message so you wouldn’t worry. Like I’m worrying now.”
“Yeah. But she might have just forgotten, Vic.” Still, Roger’s brown eyes were troubled.
“Sure,” Vic said. “On the other hand, maybe something’s happened.”
“She carries ID, doesn’t she? If she and Tad were in an accident, God forbid, the cops would try home first and then the office. The answering service would—”
“I wasn’t thinking about an accident,” Vic said. “I was thinking about . . .” His voice began to tremble. “I was thinking about her and Tadder being there alone, and . . . shit, I don’t know . . . I just got scared, that’s all.”
“Call the sheriff’s office,” Roger said promptly.
“Yeah, but—”
“Yeah but nothing. You aren’t going to scare Donna, that’s for sure. She’s not there. But what the hell, set your mind at rest. It doesn’t have to be sirens and flashing lights. Just ask if they can send a cop by to check and make sure that everything looks normal. There must be a thousand places she could be. Hell, maybe she just tied into a really good Tupperware party.”
“Donna hates Tupperware parties.”
“So maybe the girls got playing penny-ante poker and lost track of the time and Tad’s asleep in someone’s spare room.”
Vic remembered her telling him how she had steered clear of any deep involvement with “the girls”—I don’t want to be one of those faces you see at the bake sales, she had said. But he didn’t want to tell Roger that; it was too close to the subject of Kemp.
“Yeah, maybe something like that,” Vic said.
“Have you got an extra key to the place tucked away somewhere?”
“There’s one on a hook under the eave on the front porch.”
“Tell the cops. Someone can go in and have a good look around . . . unless you’ve got pot or coke or something you’d just as soon they didn’t stumble over.”
“Nothing like that.”
“Then do it,” Roger said earnestly. “She’ll probably call here while they’re out checking and you’ll feel like a fool, but sometimes it’s good to feel like a fool. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” Vic said, grinning a little. “Yeah, I do.”
He picked the telephone up again, hesitated, then tried home again first. No answer. Some of the comfort he had gotten from Roger evaporated. He got directory assistance for Maine and jotted down the number of the Castle County Sheriff’s Department. It was now nearly fifteen minutes past twelve on Wednesday morning.
Donna Trenton was sitting with her hands resting lightly on the steering wheel of the Pinto. Tad had finally fallen asleep again, but his sleep was not restful; he twisted, turned, sometimes moaned. She was afraid he was reliving in his dreams what had happened earlier.
She felt his forehead; he muttered something and pulled away from her touch. His eyelids fluttered and then slipped closed again. He felt feverish—almost surely a result of the constant tension and fear. She felt feverish herself, and she was in severe pain. Her belly hurt, but those wounds were superficial, little more than scratches. She had been lucky there. Cujo had damaged her left leg more. The wounds there (the bites, her mind insisted, as if relishing the horror of it) were deep and ugly. They had