or something. Like he was the only kid in the history of the world to get a shiner playing ball.
But all that was beside the point. The kid got hurt. It wasn’t serious, and the bruises would be gone in a couple of weeks. In a year, Ben would either forget it completely or brag to his friends about the time he got a shiner playing ball.
Beth, on the other hand, would never forget. She’d carry that grudge around inside her for a long, long time, even if it had been more Ben’s fault than his. She didn’t understand the simple fact that all boys remembered their sports injuries with pride.
He’d known Beth would overreact tonight, but he didn’t necessarily blame her for it. That’s what mothers did, and Clayton had been prepared for that. He thought he’d handled the whole thing pretty well, right up until the end, when he’d seen the guy with the dog sitting on the porch like he owned the place.
Logan Thigh-bolt.
He remembered the name right off, of course. He’d searched for the guy for a few days without luck and had pretty much put it behind him when he figured the guy had left town. No way some dude and his dog couldn’t be noticed, right? Which was why he’d eventually stopped asking folks whether they’d seen him.
Stupid.
But what to do now? What was he going to do about this . . . new turn of events?
He’d deal with Logan Thigh-bolt, that much was certain, and he wasn’t about to be caught off guard again. Which meant that before he did anything, he needed information. Where the guy lived, where the guy worked, where he liked to hang out. Where he could find the guy alone.
Harder than it sounded, especially with the dog. He had the funny feeling Thigh-bolt and the dog were seldom, if ever, separated. But he’d figure out what to do about that, too.
Obviously, he needed to know what was going on with Beth and Thigh-bolt. He hadn’t heard about her seeing anyone since Adam the dork. It was hard to believe that Beth could be seeing Thigh-bolt, considering the fact that he always heard what Beth was up to. Frankly, he couldn’t imagine what she’d see in someone like Thigh-bolt in the first place. She’d gone to college; the last thing she wanted in her life was some drifter who rolled into town. The guy didn’t even have a car.
But Thigh-bolt had been with her on a Saturday night, and that obviously counted for something. Somewhere, something didn’t make sense. He pondered it, wondering if the guy worked there. . . . Either way, he’d figure it out, and when he did, he’d deal with it, and Mr. Logan Thigh-bolt would find himself hating the day he’d ever showed up in Clayton’s town.
15
Beth
Sunday was the hottest day of the summer yet, with high humidity and temperatures in the triple digits. Lakes had begun to go dry in the Piedmont, the citizens of Raleigh were rationing their water, and in the eastern part of the state, crops had begun to wither under the never-ending heat. In the past three weeks, the forests had become a tinderbox, waiting to be ignited by a carelessly tossed cigarette or bolt of lightning, both of which seemed inevitable. The only question was when and where exactly the fire would start.
Unless they were in their kennels, the dogs were miserable, and even Logan had been feeling the effects of the heat. He shortened the training sessions by five minutes each, and when he walked the dogs, his destination was always the creek, where they could wade into the water and cool off. Zeus had been in and out of the water at least a dozen times, and though Ben tried to start a game of fetch as soon as he got back from church, Zeus showed only halfhearted interest. Instead, Ben set up a floor fan on the front porch of the house, angling the breeze toward Zeus, and sat beside the dog while he read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of the few books by Agatha Christie that he had yet to finish. He stopped briefly to visit with Logan in a desultory fashion before going back to his book.
It was the kind of lazy Sunday afternoon Beth typically enjoyed, except that every time she saw the bruise on Ben’s face and his crudely repaired glasses, she felt a flash of anger at what