The Narrows(34)

“Up to you,” he said, moving to the coffee pot on the counter. He touched the pot and frowned when he found that it was cold.

“I can make a new pot,” she offered.

“I’ll just heat it in the microwave.” He filled a mug, put it in the microwave, and punched the buttons with the knuckle of his index finger. The appliance hummed to life as an orange light blossomed behind the tempered glass door.

She attempted to engage him several times in casual conversation. Finally, drinking his coffee while leaning against the kitchen counter, Evan Quedentock laughed.

“What? What’s so funny?”

“Being so nice to me all of a sudden. Makes a guy worry.”

“I’m always nice to you.”

He snorted. “Yeah. Sure you are.”

At some point during the rest of the evening, she fell back into her normal state of complacency. Evan busied himself in the basement while she prepared dinner and did a load of wash. The incident on Full Hill Road could have been nothing more than a waking nightmare, a bad dream. The same as what had happened with Tom Schuler—their rendezvous at Crossroads and the clumsy, wild, drunken sex at his house on the edge of town. Yes. All of it—a dream.

It wasn’t until she received a text message from Tom Schuler that the reality of it all came rushing back to her. She was unemployed, had been since the bank shut down eight months ago. She relied solely on Evan to take care of her. What if he found out about Tom and kicked her out of the house? Where could she go? She tried to imagine herself moving in with Tom on the outskirts of town, but the concept was so foreign and preposterous that she couldn’t do it.

She took her cell phone into the bathroom and read the text.



Had gud time last nite. More pls!



She shuddered, feeling disgusted. She quickly deleted the text then considered flushing the damn thing down the toilet.

Don’t be stupid.

She thought, More pls!

“Maggie!”

The bathroom door shook at the booming of Evan’s voice. A second later, she heard the back door slam.

“Maggie! Get out here!”

Oh, Christ…

“Just a minute,” she called back. Bending down and opening the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink, she wedged her cell phone beneath two towels. Then she stood and caught her reflection in the mirror.

What have you done, you selfish bitch? What have you done?

“Goddamn it, Maggie! Come here!”

He was standing in the entranceway of the living room in work boots and a backward baseball cap. He had a checkered flannel shirt on over his ribbed undershirt. As he stood there he tugged off a pair of work gloves. He had just come in from outside.

“Yeah?” she said, deliberately pausing several feet away from him. He’d struck her on a number of occasions and she had developed a sense about such things. She didn’t want to get close.

“What the hell happened to the goddamn car?”

Stupidly, she said, “What car?”

“The f*cking Pontiac, genius.”

“Oh.” She blinked repeatedly. “Oh.” She felt like a record player stuck in a groove.

“You hit something with the goddamn car?”

“Me?” Oh, she was digging in deep now…

“No, the goddamn Muffin Man. Of course you. Who else?”

At that moment, she made the decision to lie to him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t do anything to the car.”

Evan chewed at his lower lip as he examined his wife across the room. He had the work gloves in one fist now, the fingertips protruding like the stubby tentacles of some undersea creature.

He hooked a finger at her. “Come take a look,” he said, turning and stomping out the door.

Timidly, Maggie followed. In bare feet, she descended the patio steps and crossed the overgrown lawn to the dirt turnabout. The VW and the Pontiac sat side by side. Evan marched around to the front of the Pontiac, tugging his work gloves back on. He eyed her from beneath a downturned brow. Something about his gaze reminded Maggie of the gorillas she’d seen in the Baltimore Zoo when she was just a young girl.

“Take a look at this,” he growled.

She went around the car and paused in front of it, a few feet away from Evan. Experience told her his hands could be quick and close a distance of several feet in a matter of a millisecond. She would take no chances.

“There,” he said, pointing to the crumpled grille. “And there,” he added, his index finger gliding up to address the sizable dent in the hood of the car. “You telling me you didn’t hit nothing?”

“I didn’t hit anything,” she said, looking at the car and not at him.

“I know what a car looks like when it hits something.”

“I didn’t hit anything,” she repeated, glancing up at him. “I swear.”

He stared at her. She found she couldn’t look away. In an instant she became convinced that he could read her thoughts, every single one of them, just by looking into her eyes. Frightened, she blinked and looked back at the car.

“So you’re saying you have no f*cking idea what happened here,” he said, not phrasing it as a question.

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“So…what? Someone came back here and smashed up my car?”