Read Online The Doctor's Wife by Elizabeth Brundage - Free Book Online Page B

regulars who met each morning over coffee to discuss the morning paper while half a dozen stray dogs dozed at their feet. The Knowles’ neighbors were horse people, both rich and poor. They drove pickup trucks or Land Rovers. They walked the long roads in great hulking sweaters. Annie and Michael knew nearly everyone by sight, and everyone knew them back, and there were town gatherings where they’d meet newcomers, who were rare—the annual Fourth of July parade, the Halloween party at the fire station, and the spring pig roast, where everybody drank too much homemade wine and fell asleep under the stars on the town green. The children attended the public school, after which they spent long afternoons running through fields, up to their hips in yellow grass, or biking down dirt paths strewn with rubble, or skipping rocks in the creek, or lying on their backs in an open field, watching the sweeping drama of the sky. At night the front lawns were littered with skateboards and toppled bikes, the twisted heads of abandoned Barbie dolls. Doors were left unlocked and it was not unusual to glance at a woman’s purse left on the seat of her car, always there the next morning. In fact, there were few crimes to speak of. A group of teenagers were once caught getting drunk in an abandoned house. Three members of the Women’s Art League were fined for making tombstone rubbings in the graveyard after hours. Occasionally, a patrol car would turn down their road, easing past the scattered houses like a parade float, but it wasn’t routine. Because everybody knew that nothing ever happened in High Meadow.
     
     
    Until now.
     
     
    She doesn’t know why she drives out Valley Road. Perhaps a morbid curiosity is all. To try to understand what happened, to see the car, to put it all together in her mind.
     
     
    The road is slippery and she has to drive slowly. A fire truck rambles past her, heading back to its firehouse. Coming upon the scene, she sees orange cones lining the road. Patrol cars are parked in hasty diagonals. Several cops in high black boots, watching the tow truck pull up the burned-out Saab. Annie pulls over to the side of the road and parks. She gets out of the car and surveys the scene. Smoke haunts the air, and there’s the stink of burning rubber. Immediately, a cop comes up to her. “Sorry, ma’am, you can’t stop here.”
     
     
    “I’m Annie Knowles,” she says, her chest heaving. “That’s my husband’s car.”
     
     
    The young cop looks sorry for her. “You sure you want to see this?”
     
     
    She nods, and he takes her arm and leads her over to the other side of the road, where together they watch the car come up out of the dense ravine.
     

 
    10
     
     
    MICHAEL WAKES in a cold sweat, a black shape swooping over his head. He thinks wildly that it is a bird of some sort, a bat perhaps, and he can feel the wind of its flapping wings. But it is not a bat, he sees now, it is a gun. It is a gun in the woman’s hand.
     
     
    The cellar is dark and cold. It stinks of mildew. His body quakes and shivers and somewhere inside his head he understands that he needs to drink, he needs to get warm, but he cannot tell her. She lights a match, the wick of an oil lamp, and shadows swarm the room. I’m cold, his eyes rush at her, but she is not even looking at him. Her face is intensely familiar to him and he wonders if perhaps she is one of his patients; he cannot possibly remember now. His brain is too weary to make such connections. But still, her face. The way she has her hair pulled back, her gray eyes, the high Slavic cheekbones. The smoke billows and spreads across the ceiling and he watches it, like a net, enveloping him. For an instant he catches her profile, the way she concentrates on the cigarette, the orange glow brightening with each drag she takes.
     
     
    “You were dreaming,” she says. “Was it a nightmare?”
     
     
    He doesn’t answer her.
     
     
    “You had a dream about