Spencerville Read Free

"Who's gonna chaperon you, darlin'?"
    She looked around at the room that she'd decorated with country antiques and family heirlooms. Cliff had been both proud and sarcastic regarding her taste. She came from a far better family than he did, and at first she'd tried to minimize the dissimilarities in their backgrounds. But he never let her forget their social differences, pointing out that her family was all brains and good manners and no money, and his family had money even if they were a little rough around the edges. And brainless, Annie thought.
    Cliff liked to show off the furnishings, show off his stuffed and mounted animals in the basement, his shooting trophies, his press clippings, his guns, his trophy house, and his trophy wife. Look but don't touch. Admire me and my trophies. Cliff Baxter was the classic collector, Annie thought, an anal compulsive personality who couldn't differentiate between a wife and a mounted deer head.
    Annie recalled with amazement how proud she'd once been of her husband and her house, and how much hope and optimism she'd had as a young bride, building a life and a marriage. Cliff Baxter had been an attentive and courtly finance, especially in the months preceding their marriage. If Annie had any second thoughts about the engagement — which, in fact, she had — Cliff had given her no reason to break it off. But early in her marriage, she'd noticed that her husband was just going through the motions of marriage, keying off her in what he did and said. One day she realized with a sinking feeling that Cliff Baxter was not a charming rogue who was eager to be domesticated by a good woman, but was in fact a borderline sociopath. Soon, however, he lost interest in his halfhearted attempt to become normal. The only thing that kept him in line, kept him from going completely over the edge, she knew, was his official capacity as guardian of law and order. Spencerville had made the bad boy the hall monitor, and it worked for Spencerville and for the bad boy, but Annie lived in fear of what might happen if Cliff became a private citizen, without the prestige and accountability of office. She swore that the day he retired or was asked to step down, she'd run.
    She thought of his gun collection: rifles, shotguns, pistols. Each and every weapon was locked in a rack the way a good cop would do. Most cops, however, probably all cops, gave their wife a key just in case there was an intruder. Cliff Baxter, though, did not give his wife a key. She knew how he thought: Cliff feared his wife would shoot him at four A.M. one morning and claim she mistook him for an intruder. There were nights when she stared at the locked weapons and wondered if she would actually put a pistol to her head or his head and pull the trigger. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the answer was no; but there had been moments...
    She tilted her head back in the chair and felt the tears roll down her eyes. The phone rang, but she didn't answer it.
    * * *
    She gathered the dinner scraps in a piece of newspaper and took them out to the kennel. She opened the wire gate and threw the scraps inside. Three of the four dogs — the German shepherd, the golden retriever, and the Labrador — attacked the food. The fourth dog, a small gray mongrel, ran to Annie. She let the dog run out of the kennel and closed the gate.
    Annie walked back to the house, the gray mongrel following her.
    In the kitchen, she fed the dog raw hamburger, then poured herself a glass of lemonade, then went out to the big wraparound porch and sat in the swing seat, her legs tucked under her, the gray mongrel beside her. It was cooling off, and a soft breeze stirred the old trees on the street. The air smelled like rain. She felt better in the fresh air.
    Surely, she thought, there was a way out, a way that didn't pass through the town cemetery. Now that her daughter was about to start college, Annie realized that she couldn't put off making a decision any longer. If she