CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT
Chapter Nine
PAGE SIX OF SEVEN
Regardless of this, she knows she has to check, and so she moves away from Desmond back into the hall. After a moment's apprehension, Wendy takes a deep breath and proceeds to search the house. She checks the bedroom, both bathrooms, the kitchen, the office den – she even goes back downstairs to look once more, both rooms. The washing machine has finished it's cycle, but she leaves it to check the exits.
Ever since the accident she's been locking the doors, another thing that sets their household apart from the neighbourhood, but she has never really questioned why she started doing this. It has just seemed like the sensible thing to do, under the circumstances.
The doors are indeed locked good and tight, both the front and back. And she can't see any of what the T.V. Shows call 'signs of forced entry', although she's certainly not trained to detect that sort of thing. It looks fine, in any event. She steps out and looks around the back yard – nothing back here but mouldy leaves over an uncut lawn. She really needs to get the mower out, another thing to do, so many things she has to do. She has to check the front of the house. Slowly, Wendy stumbles out into the front yard, gazing around in a numb fog. Her eyes settle on the house across the street. The Thomas's home. Then she turns back to look at her own front window, at the still grey curtains, and the thought comes to her then, an unbidden flash of words: They're looking at each other.
Wendy shakes her head and turns away from the Thomas home. She has more important things to do than revisit that whole episode again. As she begins to male her way back to the house she notices a car approaching from up the street. She recognized it as Mitch Thomas returning home. Returning home to his wife.
As Wendy walks back to the side entrance she shakes her head ruefully. For not the first time she wonders if Mitch had any idea about what had gone on between Desmond and Carolyne. Most likely he'd had an idea, but certainly not enough to act. Which of course, had been all for the best.
Wendy steps through the side entrance and waits for a moment, standing in the small foyer leading into the kitchen. The house lies noiseless and still before her. She takes a deep breath and considers the situation.
So what had happened here? There were two possibilities, it seemed. The first was that someone had broken into the house and wheeled Desmond in his chair over to the window, absconding quickly before she had gotten up the stairs. For a few seconds she considers the possibility of Carolyne Thomas actually doing this. It certainly makes a perverse sort of sense, with the history that she and Desmond had once shared. And Wendy remembers the strange feeling she'd had the first time she had met Carolyne, one that had never quite gone away, not through the months of their “friendship”, or through the pain of the ridiculous drama that had followed. And it hadn't just been her own jealousy, although looking back on it she probably had sensed Carolyne's attentions towards her husband. But what she had directly noticed at the time was that there was something very strange about Carolyne Thomas.
Carolyne, then and now, has always seemed to Wendy like a woman bored by her own beauty, or at least the predictability of everyone's reactions to her. And that boredom had cultivated within her a taste for the bizarre. So it actually seems completely in character for Carolyne to actually do something like this, to actually sneak into the house, while Wendy's downstairs doing the wash – how would she know when that was? Maybe she had peeked in through the basement windows...
Wendy snaps out of her thoughts by the sound of a car door being slammed shut. Mitch Thomas, across the street. It sounds like he's mad, again. If you only knew, honey, Wendy thinks. Then she blinks her eyes and realizes that she needs to come to her own senses. As weird as Carolyne may be, it was a ridiculous stretch of the imagination to assume such a thing of her. Wendy smiles tightly. For most of her life she had always shown a lack of imagination , preferring the certainty of numbers to the insecurity that fantasy represented to her. Between the two of them it was Desmond who had been the visionary. And here she is now, going off on crazy tangents, rather than face the most obvious and likely truth.
Ever since the accident she's been locking the doors, another thing that sets their household apart from the neighbourhood, but she has never really questioned why she started doing this. It has just seemed like the sensible thing to do, under the circumstances.
The doors are indeed locked good and tight, both the front and back. And she can't see any of what the T.V. Shows call 'signs of forced entry', although she's certainly not trained to detect that sort of thing. It looks fine, in any event. She steps out and looks around the back yard – nothing back here but mouldy leaves over an uncut lawn. She really needs to get the mower out, another thing to do, so many things she has to do. She has to check the front of the house. Slowly, Wendy stumbles out into the front yard, gazing around in a numb fog. Her eyes settle on the house across the street. The Thomas's home. Then she turns back to look at her own front window, at the still grey curtains, and the thought comes to her then, an unbidden flash of words: They're looking at each other.
Wendy shakes her head and turns away from the Thomas home. She has more important things to do than revisit that whole episode again. As she begins to male her way back to the house she notices a car approaching from up the street. She recognized it as Mitch Thomas returning home. Returning home to his wife.
As Wendy walks back to the side entrance she shakes her head ruefully. For not the first time she wonders if Mitch had any idea about what had gone on between Desmond and Carolyne. Most likely he'd had an idea, but certainly not enough to act. Which of course, had been all for the best.
Wendy steps through the side entrance and waits for a moment, standing in the small foyer leading into the kitchen. The house lies noiseless and still before her. She takes a deep breath and considers the situation.
So what had happened here? There were two possibilities, it seemed. The first was that someone had broken into the house and wheeled Desmond in his chair over to the window, absconding quickly before she had gotten up the stairs. For a few seconds she considers the possibility of Carolyne Thomas actually doing this. It certainly makes a perverse sort of sense, with the history that she and Desmond had once shared. And Wendy remembers the strange feeling she'd had the first time she had met Carolyne, one that had never quite gone away, not through the months of their “friendship”, or through the pain of the ridiculous drama that had followed. And it hadn't just been her own jealousy, although looking back on it she probably had sensed Carolyne's attentions towards her husband. But what she had directly noticed at the time was that there was something very strange about Carolyne Thomas.
Carolyne, then and now, has always seemed to Wendy like a woman bored by her own beauty, or at least the predictability of everyone's reactions to her. And that boredom had cultivated within her a taste for the bizarre. So it actually seems completely in character for Carolyne to actually do something like this, to actually sneak into the house, while Wendy's downstairs doing the wash – how would she know when that was? Maybe she had peeked in through the basement windows...
Wendy snaps out of her thoughts by the sound of a car door being slammed shut. Mitch Thomas, across the street. It sounds like he's mad, again. If you only knew, honey, Wendy thinks. Then she blinks her eyes and realizes that she needs to come to her own senses. As weird as Carolyne may be, it was a ridiculous stretch of the imagination to assume such a thing of her. Wendy smiles tightly. For most of her life she had always shown a lack of imagination , preferring the certainty of numbers to the insecurity that fantasy represented to her. Between the two of them it was Desmond who had been the visionary. And here she is now, going off on crazy tangents, rather than face the most obvious and likely truth.
DESMOND CHAPTER NINE