Off Season Read Free Page A

hand, gesturing him to stop. Automatically, Ben did.
    Hugh turned to Ashenbach. “Don’t move a fucking muscle,” he said, “or we’ll cuff you, too.” Then the sheriff started toward Ben.
    “Ben,” he said slowly, as he approached, “how’re you doin’ tonight?”
    Something about Hugh’s words or his walk or the way his face was masked in the shadow from the floodlight sent a sharp surge of warning up Ben’s spine. “I’ll be better once you’ve told me what the hell’s going on.”
    Hugh turned again, as if to be certain Ashenbach had not moved. Then he looked at Ben. “Let’s go inside.”
    Something had definitely happened.
    Jill
. Quickly Ben shook off the thought. He had, after all, just talked to his wife. But Amy? Had something happened to her?
    Oh, God
, he thought suddenly, a chilling numbness slithering down his arms to his hands. Maybe it was not about Jill’s daughter, maybe it was about
his
. Maybe something had happened to Carol Ann … or to one of his grandkids.…
    He didn’t move. He couldn’t move, as if someone hadpoured cement into his socks. “Say what you have to say right here, Hugh.”
    The sheriff glanced back to the cruiser, then to Ben. “Inside,” he repeated.
    Somehow Ben managed to pick up his feet. Somehow he put one in front of the other in the slow-motion motion of time crawling forward to that unwanted destination known as Bad News.
    Hugh followed him inside. He pulled Ben’s hands behind him and clamped cold metal around his wrists. “Ben Niles,” Hugh said, “you’re under arrest for indecent assault and battery on a child under the age of fourteen.”

Chapter 3
    Rita supposed she was having a hot flash. She supposed the reason she was standing at her window with her body half-hanging outside in the freezing autumn morning was because
that
time had finally arrived, though she was only forty-six and it seemed premature.
    The bitch of it was, she knew she was right. She’d missed her period last month and the month before that, too, and the gravity-slide of departing estrogen had already begun to thicken her middle. She’d heard of those symptoms, but no one had told her she’d be nauseous as well. The only good part, Rita supposed, was that she’d no longer have to worry about getting pregnant—as if that were an issue, for the last time she’d checked, in order to get pregnant one had to have sex.
    She stepped back from the window, wondering if she’d ever have sex again, and if this quasi-hot flash didn’t have more to do with nerves than with her ovaries drying up.
    Not that Rita Blair had anything to be nervous about.
    Throwing on the long chenille robe that she still liked though she now could wear silk, she ambled downstairs to brew up some coffee, grateful with each step that sheowned this old saltbox free and clear, yet still pained by the fact that it had been the life insurance that Ben Niles—Kyle’s employer, Jill’s husband, her friend—had taken on Kyle that had paid off her debts, that had set her financially free. The death of the son, saving the life of the mother. Though it had been over three years, Rita knew that would never be right.
    As she entered the kitchen, her heart filled with Kyle, she didn’t expect anyone to be at the table. She screamed, startling her mother, who screamed back in return.
    “Jesus, Mother, you scared the shit out of me,” Rita said once she’d regained her composure. “Do you have to creep around in the middle of the night?”
    “It’s not the middle of the night, it’s eight in the morning,” Hazel commented. “And if anyone’s creeping around, it’s you, not me. I’ve been sitting here for hours. I’ve had an entire pot of coffee and read
The Gazette
twice over.”
    Rita checked herself before saying
Bully for you
, remembering that Hazel was pushing eighty and was only up from Florida for a visit, though she’d declined to say for how long. She smiled at the woman whose hair was