This Secret Thing, стр. 37
She rolled her eyes and walked away. Sometimes walking away was the best thing to do.
She’d walked away from Calvin, but he wasn’t letting her go so easy. She wasn’t stupid: she knew it was her money and not her he was pursuing. She’d ignored a call from him just as that cop had rung the doorbell. It was the call she’d been expecting since she’d backed out of her driveway with her dog beside her, the back seat loaded with her belongings and a bag full of money. It had taken longer than she had expected, but he had called. She could feel the silence between them breaking like glass shattering.
She’d had to will her heart to calm down enough to open the door to the cop and appear serene and composed. It was almost a godsend that Barney had bolted when he did, effectively ending the cop’s attempt at banter. She wondered what he’d been getting at with his concerned act. How dare he stand there and pretend like he cared, when he was the one who had hauled her daughter to jail, took her granddaughter’s mother from her?
He may have smiled at her, but behind the smile had been an agenda. If Polly had learned anything in five marriages, and many more relationships besides, she’d learned what a man looked like when he was trying to hide something. She closed her eyes and steeled herself to listen to whatever voicemail her husband had left her. Tomorrow, she thought, tomorrow she would call a lawyer. Tomorrow she would figure out what to do with the cash she’d hidden. It wasn’t safe to leave it here, at a possible crime scene. That detective had warned her the first time they had talked that they could search again at any time.
Calvin’s voice blared in the quiet room, and she grabbed for her phone to turn him down so Violet wouldn’t hear, though the girl was all the way upstairs, in her room, behind closed doors, where she stayed pretty much all the time, always saying she had to study. But no one needed to study that much. Tomorrow she needed to figure out that situation, too.
Polly reached down and touched her toes ten times, something she did whenever she needed to release stress, then rewound the message to start it over. “Sugar,” said Calvin, using the pet name he’d employed to charm her when they first began dating. For a moment the term of endearment filled her with hope, but the word was just like that fake smile on that cop’s lips.
“It’s your husband. I’ve just been over to the bank and spoken with a Mr. Dwight Richards, who says he has no idea what could’ve happened to my wife or our money. He suggested that I call you and straighten out our little domestic dispute. So that’s what I intend to do.” There was a pause, and in that pause she felt the violence that lay inside Calvin, coiled like a snake, so it shouldn’t have surprised her when he hissed the next sentence. “I’m going to straighten this out however I have to.” Then the line went dead.
She looked around, fear gripping her as she scanned her surroundings, as if she were going to find Calvin there, peering in the window, figuring out a way inside. She took a deep breath and reminded herself that Calvin didn’t know where she was. He didn’t even know she had a daughter, wouldn’t possibly link the news about the suburban madam’s arrest to Polly’s disappearing act. And she’d turned off the tracking on her phone before she’d even backed out of their driveway. So he’d never find her that way. She stood still and kept on taking deep breaths, telling herself it would all be OK. When Barney came slinking into the room, looking for solace, looking for forgiveness for his escape, she offered it willingly. Not because he deserved it, but because she needed to offer it. She needed to bury her face in his warmth and give absolution, hoping that in giving it, she’d somehow receive it, too.
Violet
When she took Barney outside again, it was on the leash. She gave him the evil eye before they ventured out into the yard, and he cowered appropriately. She took that to mean he’d learned his lesson. He did his usual sniffing and walking, and she let him lead the way, allowing the leash to slacken more and more with each step until he was walking far ahead of her and she was barely holding on.
Instead of watching the dog, she was keeping her eye on Micah’s house, thinking of that mortifying exchange earlier, hearing Polly go on and on about how they must know each other. Like they were friends or something. She would never admit to Polly that she’d had more conversations with Micah Berg in the past two weeks than she’d ever had in her life. She wondered if Micah had guessed that the man in his yard that afternoon had been a cop. She’d bet that Micah felt about cops the way she did right now. At the very least, they had that in common.
Movement across the street caught her eye and, though she didn’t want to, she felt the little zing of excitement that coursed through her body whenever Micah was near. She’d felt it earlier that afternoon when he’d been standing right in front of her, hoping that it wasn’t the kind of thing you could give off, like pheromones or anxiety. Was attraction obvious to other people? Could they feel it in the air? She watched him walk out of his garage, grab the basketball, and dribble it, the sound of ball on asphalt its own kind of siren call. She smiled to herself, let herself imagine walking across the street, stealing the ball, and magically sinking