the corner. Fred, looking strangely unnatural, was sprawled on the bottom of the cage. She knelt, opened the cage, and picked him up. As she realized he was dead, an involuntary sound escaped her lips.
“What’s wrong?” she heard Jason asking from behind her. She turned to see her son sitting up in bed, sleepily rubbing his eyes. “Is something wrong with Fred?”
“He’s dead,” Sally breathed, fighting off the terrible emotions that were welling up inside her. It’s only a guinea pig, she told herself. It’s not Jason, it’s not Julie, it’s only a damned guinea pig.
But still, it was too familiar. Bursting into tears, she dropped the dead animal and fled from the room. Behind her, she heard Jason’s voice.
“What happened to him, Mommy? Did the same thing happen to Fred that happened to Julie?”
Chapter 10
SALLY MONTGOMERY SAT IN her living room, a small pool of light flooding the book she was trying to read.
The words on the pages made no sense to her. They kept drifting away, slipping off the pages, and over and over again she realized that she had read a paragraph but had no memory of it.
When Steve had come back from taking the sitter home, and Sally had told him about the guinea pig, all he had done was tell her to forget about it, then gone upstairs, brought the dead rodent down, and taken it outside to bury it in the backyard. By morning, he assured her, both she and Jason would have forgotten about it.
But would she?
She kept hearing Jason’s words echoing in her head.
“Did the same thing happen to Fred that happened to Julie?”
What had happened to Julie?
Involuntarily, images of her son began to flit through her mind.
Jason, standing at the door of the nursery, staring at her as she held Julie’s body.
Jason at the funeral, watching as his sister’s offin was lowered into the ground, his eyes dry, his expression one of—what?
It had been, she admitted to herself now, an expression of disinterest.
As the long night wore on, she had twice gone upstairs to check on Jason. Each time she had found him sleeping peacefully, his breathing deep and strong, one arm thrown across his chest, the other dangling over the side of the bed. If either the loss of his sister or the loss of his pet was bothering him, it wasn’t keeping him awake. Twice she had stood at the foot of his bed for long minutes, trying to drive horrible thoughts from the edges of her mind. And both times she had at last forced herself to leave his room without waking him just to prove to herself that he was all right.
Or to ask him questions she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to voice.
Now, as she tried once more to concentrate on the book of childhood diseases that lay in her lap, she found herself once more thinking of Jan Ransom’s words.
“Never wanted a baby in the first place …”
“Maybe the baby senses that the mother doesn’t want it …”
Finally, heedless of the time, she picked up the phone book and flipped through it.
There it was:
RANSOM, JANELLE 504 ALDER ESTBY 555–3624
The phone rang seven times before a sleepy voice answered.
“Miss Ransom? This—this is Sally Montgomery. I was at the meeting tonight?”
Instantly the sleepiness was gone from the voice at the other end of the line. “Sally! Of course. You know, I had the strangest feeling you might call tonight I—well, I had the feeling I hit a nerve.”
Sally wasn’t sure what to say, and as she was trying to decide how to proceed, she suddenly felt as if she was being watched. Turning, she saw Steve standing in the doorway. She swallowed hard, and when she spoke into the phone, her voice sounded unnaturally high.
“I—I thought perhaps we could have lunch next week.”
“Of course,” Jan Ransom replied immediately. “Any particular day?”
“Whatever’s good for you.”
“Then let’s not wait for next week,” Jan suggested. “Let’s say Friday at noon. Do you know the Speckled Hen?”
They made the date, and Sally slowly put the phone back on its cradle, still not sure why she wanted to talk further to Jan Ransom. All she knew was that she did.
Steve came into the room and sat down beside her. “Can I ask whom you were talking to?”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” Sally said uncertainly.
Steve hesitated, then, seeing clearly the strain and exhaustion in Sally’s whole being, decided not to press the issue. He stood up and switched off the light. “Come on,