Safe Passage Read Free Page A

Patrick gave her a curious look and leaned down to pet the cat. "What's the matter?" he asked.
         "Why should anything be the matter? You were groaning in your sleep. I was trying to imagine Simon's ear. I was having visions of Percival shooting Arabs with a gun." She sighed. Patrick did not believe in premonitions, so it was no use telling him. Better to steer conversation in a more productive channel.
         "Alfred's trying to con you," she said.
         "Number one, I don't believe that. Number two, even if it were true, it wouldn't be the first time somebody tried to con me. I wouldn't mind living in Florida."
          "I wouldn't trust him, Patrick," Mag said.
         "Why not? He's always been trustworthy."
          "He wants the house because his bimbo needs more room to raise her kids."
          "Alfred? Honorable Alfred?"
         "Even Adam ate the apple."
         "Yes, and a year from now you'll deny this whole conversation when you find out he was just trying to do us a favor."
         "It'll be you doing the denying, after Alfred suggests we retire to Florida so he and Cynthia can live here permanently."
         Patrick smiled. "We're too young to retire. Anyway, after they get married I'm sure they'll want a place of their own." It was true that a summer wedding had been mentioned, but no date had been set, and Mag did not regard the matter as settled.
         Then Patrick tied his bathrobe again, and it was such a sad gesture that her anger disappeared. He had lost weight, no question about it. He could play at being a blindman , but the truth was he was getting desperate in his effort to find out what was wrong with his eyes, now that the doctors obviously couldn't. Disappearing pupils were not as easy to invent solutions for as the wet bottoms and later the sweaty legs of his sons. And in spite of his cheerful pose, it was obvious to everyone that, for the first time perhaps, Patrick was afraid.
         The eye problem had begun last fall—a year ago—just when the sale of the sweatsuit patent seemed assured. Patrick had been jubilant over the prospect of a commercial success, what with so many boys off to college or about to be. He owned a small manufacturing business where people brought their vans to be upholstered in such fabrics as shag carpeting or fake fur. It was successful enough (though not so lucrative that the money from Mag's jobs didn't help), but the recession had been a setback. The manufacturer buying the sweatsuit patent was promising a big push. There would be full-color magazine ads and even TV commercials. Male models would demonstrate the Velcro fastenings that replaced the seams in the pants and shirt, showing how easily a runner could rip the suit off, leaving him free to run just in shorts and T-top when he got warm. Similar sweatpants were worn by professional basketball players, but they had never been made quite this way, or quite so cheaply, so as to be mass-marketed for runners. The garments were being promoted under the trade name RipOffs , which Patrick said was another inspiration sure to make money, even if the name had come from Madison Avenue and not from Patrick Singer himself.
         So they had not expected trouble. It was fall, and Patrick had taken a week off from the plant to conclude a series of meetings about the RipOffs . The day the problem started, he had one conference in the morning and then some domestic errands he'd agreed to do because Mag was at work. He took Lucifer to the vet for shots, had lunch, and then drove Izzy back to his apartment near the University of Maryland, an hour away, where Izzy was a graduate student and where his car was on the blink. Mag expected Patrick home early in the evening. Instead, just after dark, the phone rang. Simon answered it.
         "Dad says he's staying over in a motel," Simon yelled at her. "He says the fog is too thick to drive home."
         Mag's first thought was: He's