Stranded Read Free

as they raced down the hall and out the back of the gym toward the baseball field, which they could circle to access the parking lot.
    It was a tremendous relief to slide behind the wheel of her car. “Duck your head,” she muttered, driving out of the lot. Their path led them past two or three television vans with satellite dishes on their roofs and a growing crowd of people milling about. Alex didn’t sit up again until they were half a mile away and she gave him the all clear. Their gazes met and he smiled but she knew it wouldn’t be long before reporters figured out they’d slipped away.
    And it wasn’t as though they’d be hard to find.
    * * *
    “N OTHING MUCH HAS CHANGED ,” Alex said in wonder as he followed Jessica into the house and closed the front door behind them. It seemed surreal that for the past one hundred and three days he’d been living in the most primitive of conditions while his wife, his house, his job—his world—existed right here as it always had. At the time, emerged as he was in basic survival, all this had seemed like a distant fantasy he’d never live to revisit, but here it had been all along, chugging away without him, apparently none the worse for his absence.
    The same thing had happened when he’d been deployed in the army, only then he’d been shot at, as well. On the other hand, he hadn’t been alone and there was a lot to be said for companionship.
    The house was a newer one, built in a cluster of similar houses located in a small wooded area a few miles outside of Blunt Falls. They’d bought it with plans to fill the rooms upstairs with their children and had pictured them running through the trees and splashing in the shallow stream at the bottom of the gulch with the neighborhood kids as playmates. But that had never happened. Oh, the neighbors’ families grew all right, but theirs didn’t and now, in some ways, the houses all around them, strewn with tricycles and sandboxes, formed a painful reminder that things didn’t always work out the way you thought they would.
    Now the house welcomed him back with years of memories, and he stood by the big rock fireplace just trying to center himself. Meanwhile, Jessica closed the drapes and turned to face him. She’d deposited her purse and briefcase on the chair nearest the door, much as she always had and now stood looking up the stairs as though she wanted to dash up to their room.
    He reached for her hand. “We won’t have long before they track us down,” he said.
    She looked at him and nodded. “Good point.”
    “I’m a little beat,” he said with a smile. “Let’s go sit at the table like we used to. Let’s talk.”
    “Yes,” she said, nodding. “Okay.”
    He claimed the chair facing the living-room door and patted the one beside it. She entered the dining room behind him, her brown eyes velvety, enhanced by the oversize cream tunic she wore over slim black jeans.
    She looked good, her auburn hair longer than it had been in a while, combed straight back from her oval-shaped face which was devoid of makeup as it almost always was. He’d been afraid he’d find her worn-out and grief stricken, but instead she seemed almost luminescent. His disappearance didn’t seem to have hurt her.
    Well, why should it have? They’d been whisper close to a separation for most of the past year, so caught up in their different lives that they’d become like that old saying, “Ships passing in the night.” In fact, for the past three months his greatest fear had been that she would be relieved he’d vanished. No more fights, no more disappointments, no stress. Just over. And who was to say that that isn’t what happened? Maybe she’d moved on, maybe she’d even found someone else.
    Maybe he should stop borrowing trouble....
    “Are you hungry?” she asked, standing behind the chair he’d patted. It provided a good view of the garden and he’d already noticed the plethora of bushes and flowers that bloomed with