If he moved, he’d choke himself. The poor thing was in desperate straits. No telling how long he’d been hung up like this.
Then, she spied the sign so bold, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it right away. Posted on the fence in neon orange letters: beware of dog.
And on the blue plastic water bowl, a name.
cujo.
Clenching her hands, she sucked in oxygen. It took everything she had to force her feet in the direction of that fence.
Briefly, she thought of just going to the front door, and telling whoever answered that their dog was in trouble, but she knew once that door opened and whoever was behind it got a good look at her, things would quickly spiral out of control.
Besides, the dog was up on the tips of his paws. If he even so much as sat, he’d cut off his air supply and strangle to death. He needed help and he needed it now.
The dog’s eyes pleaded with her.
Save me.
All right. Maybe she was anthropomorphizing him, but there was desperation in his gaze.
“Hey boy,” she cooed in a shaky voice.
He tried to lunge, but his collar slipped, sliding farther down the T-post, tightening the noose. The dog made a strangled, gargling noise.
If she didn’t do something now, the dog would choke to death in front of her. Galvanized, Amelia raced toward the fence and the beware of dog sign.
The Doberman’s head was so close to hers, his long sharp teeth bared. His upper lip curled back in a snarl, spittle foamed from his mouth, and his eyes bugged from his head. The collar twisted so tightly his neck veins engorged.
She hesitated, panic ripping through her. Compartmentalize, compartmentalize, compartmentalize.
Yes, it sounded good, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to touch the dog. Don’t think—dear God, did she overthink things—do. Act. Go, go, go.
Gritting her teeth, and quivering from head to toe, Amelia faced her long-held phobia, experienced the dog’s hot breath against her skin in a moment that stretched out like millennia as she reached to unfasten the collar.
Her fingers hesitated at the buckle. Once she freed him what if the Doberman turned on her? What if he attacked?
Her heart pole-vaulted into the middle of her throat and anchored there. Maybe that’s how her life would end. Not a slow withering away from renal failure but mauled to death by the dog she’d tried to save.
Amelia let out a short, jolting chortle. There it was again, that fat, juicy slice of irony.
But death by dog might not be all bad. At least she wouldn’t have to knock on that door, stare into the face of the identical twin sister she’d never set eyes on, and say, “Um, you don’t know me, but could you spare a kidney?”
Chapter Three
Anna
The Housewife
Inside the house, Anna stood at the ironing board, spray-starching her husband’s crisp white dress shirt.
Laundry surrounded her. It was piled on the floor and waiting to go into the washing machine, stacked on the folding table ready for dresser drawers, and wrinkled in baskets next in line for the iron.
Items of summer were scattered about the mudroom: Logan’s water wings and flip-flops on the floor by the back door, sun hats and caps hung from the hooks mounted above the sink, a dark yellow tube of sunscreen, float toys, and a pair of cymbals that Allie had brought home from band the last day of school.
And then Anna spied a stubborn dark orange-red stain embedded near the second button of the shirt’s cotton fabric.
Her stomach dropped. Not again!
“Kev!” she yelled so that he could hear her in the master bedroom where he was packing to go out on the road again. A late-season tornado had wiped out a big swatch of a small Oklahoma town. He would be processing insurance claims for weeks.
“Yeah?” he yelled back.
She ran a finger over the stain. “Have you been eating Toad’s chili again?”
Kevin mumbled something she couldn’t hear.
Scowling, she shook her head. She understood that her husband was a red-blooded, chest-thumping carnivorous male, and naturally resistant to the plant-based meal plan she struggled to keep him on.
Dammit, they’d talked about this after his last physical when his cholesterol count came back over two fifty. Toad’s Diner, the place that served triple-meat chili and chicken-fried everything, was off his diet permanently. Anna wanted to keep Kevin around for a long, long time. She loved her sexy, noncompliant beast.
Kevin wandered into the mudroom looking slightly shamefaced, holding a black leather loafer in one hand and