Read Online Healing Stones by Stephen Arterburn, Nancy Rue - Free Book Online Page A

carcass like an eager trick-or-treater. The other cop fixed his eyes on me.
    â€œI’m Detective Updike,” he said. “And you are?”
    â€œDemitria Costanas—Demi,” I said, only because I couldn’t think of an alias. “The door was locked,” he said. “How did you get in?”
    My tongue thickened. “This door?” I said.
    He glanced back at it and then at me, eyebrows raised.
    I know, buddy, there isn’t any other door. I patted my coat pocket. “I have a key,” I said. “Zach—Dr.—Mr. Archer gave me one—in case I ever—”
    I let my voice trail off. Detective Updike lifted his brows again. “In case you ever what?”
    â€œNeeded to let myself in,” I said.
    You know, I wanted to cry out, because it was so dark at my house, in my heart, that I had to get to his light before I lost myself.
    â€œSo—you think something’s happened to him?” I said.
    â€œDo you?”
    His eyes, small and iron blue, bored a hole through my forehead.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “It isn’t like him to leave without saying anything to—anyone.”
    â€œYou know him well then,” he said.
    â€œYeah, well, we work together.”
    He waited.
    â€œWe’re friends.”
    He waited some more, but I pressed my lips together. Finally, he pulled a pad and pencil out of his pocket. “His employer has reported him missing,” he said. “When was the last time you saw him?”
    â€œThursday night, a little after nine.” I groaned inwardly. It sounded like I’d been rehearsing.
    â€œAnd that was where?”
    â€œHere.”
    He looked at me over the top of the pad.
    â€œI came to talk to him,” I said. “And
then I—left.”
    â€œAnd you haven’t seen or heard from him since?”
    I shook my head.
    â€œDid you expect to?”
    I jerked. My purse slid down my arm, and the blouse dropped to the wet space between us. I took my time picking it up. There was no hurry; I could already feel Detective Updike eyeing it as Exhibit A.
    â€œDid that come from here?” he said.
    â€œIt was on a hook over there. But it’s mine. I left it Thursday night.”
    I was sure that the only reason the dock did not open and let me drop through was that I was being punished for unforgivable sin. The detective visibly came to all the correct conclusions.
    â€œI’ll need your address and phone number, Mrs. Costanas,” he said. “We may want to ask you more questions.”
    There was no mistaking the emphasis on the Mrs . I gave him the information and ran like a vandal when he opened the door for me.
    By the next morning, I was still running. I went through the house like a crazy woman that afternoon, cleaning things that had never been dirty—the screws on the door handles, the inside of the dryer. I’d torn through my Zach-fraught dreams all night, trying to find him, locating him in dumpsters and fishing nets and my own downstairs closet. When the kids had, literally, stomped off to school, I raced to Central Market for organic asparagus—all with the chased feeling that someone, something, was after me.
    I couldn’t come up with a plan. Tell Rich about the police, and risk the dropping of the other proverbial shoe? Don’t tell him, and continue to live in nauseating terror that they were going to show up on the doorstep with an arrest warrant? Try to find Zach myself?
    I always stopped there in the frenetic circle of thoughts. When I landed on Zach, on his suffering face that last night aboard The Testament, the pleading in his voice even as he said, “I love you because you’re the kind of woman who will go back to her husband”—when I landed there, the fact that he had left me to face this madness alone distorted it into something I didn’t recognize as Zach.
    I didn’t know where to go from there.