Read Online John Saul by Guardian - Free Book Online Page A

while he was sleeping with Eileen Chandler? Maybe he should just count himself lucky that she hadn’t actually divorced him. Leaving the bathroom, he went to the kids’ room, and tapped softly.
    “Go away,” Logan said, his voice muffled by the closed door.
    Alan knocked again, then turned the knob and opened the door a crack. “Kids? Hey, look, what I said just now—well, I guess it was pretty stupid. Anyway, what do you say we start over, huh? Let’s pretend I just got here, okay?”
    Alison and Logan glanced uncertainly at each other, then Alison spoke for both of them. “You’re not mad at Mom anymore?”
    Alan took a deep breath, then let it out in a sigh that was half resignation, half defeat. “No,” he agreed. “I’m not mad at your mom anymore. But I guess she’s still pretty mad at me.”
    Logan scrambled off his bed, grinning. “It’ll be okay,” he declared. “She gets real mad at me sometimes, but she still loves me. And I bet she still loves you, too!”
    A few minutes later, as Alan resumed putting away the few things he’d taken with him when he left, Logan’s words echoed in his mind.
    What if MaryAnne didn’t still love him? Then what would he do?
    Bleakly, he realized he didn’t have the slightest idea.
    “Mrs. Carpenter? MaryAnne Carpenter?”
    MaryAnne, her large purse slung over one shoulder and her single suitcase clutched in her right hand, had just stepped through the door into the gate area of Boise Municipal Airport. She instinctively ran her free hand through her hair, certain that she must look even worse than she felt. But the rugged-looking man striding toward her, arm outstretched to take her suitcase, seemed not to see the exhaustion she was feeling.
    “I’m Charley Hawkins,” he said, his deep voice resonating in the nearly empty waiting area. He looked to be about sixty, with salt-and-pepper hair and a craggy face that MaryAnne found oddly reassuring. “I’m sorry we have to meet under these circumstances.” His voice trailed off, but then he plunged on. “But anyway, it seemed like I should be the one to come down and pick you up. I’m—I was Ted and Audrey’s attorney. Or, anyway, their attorney up here.Of course, Ted had a firm in San Francisco that handled most of his affairs, but for the ranch, he pretty much always used me. This all the luggage you brought?”
    Taken aback by the sudden change of subject, MaryAnne managed a nod, then let herself be steered along by Charley Hawkins’s firm grip on her elbow.
    “My car’s right outside. It won’t take more than a couple of hours to drive up to Sugarloaf.” He kept up a steady patter of innocuous talk until MaryAnne’s suitcase was in the backseat of his Cadillac, she was settled in the front next to him, and they were well away from the airport, heading northeast on Highway 21 toward Stanley.
    “What happened?” MaryAnne finally asked when she felt ready to hear the details of her friends’ deaths. “I can hardly believe they’re both …” She left the sentence unfinished, even now knowing that if she said the final word, she might well lose the little control she still had over her emotions.
    Charley Hawkins shook his head sadly. “Accidents, so far as anyone can tell,” he began. For the next few miles, as the big car hurtled through the bleak landscape around Boise, the lawyer explained what details he knew of the tragedies that had befallen Ted and Audrey Wilkenson the day before. But all the time he spoke, the words of his first sentence hung in MaryAnne’s mind.
    “You said they were accidents ‘so far as anyone can tell,’ ” she repeated when he was finished. “Is there any question about it? Is there some possibility that—well, that someone might have killed them?”
    Charley Hawkins glanced over at her, but for a long moment said nothing. When he did finally speak, though, the timbre of his voice had changed slightly, and MaryAnne knew she was now listening to a lawyer,