The Bog Read Free Page A

the apple of his eye, his firstborn, and although they shared very little of the world and possessed almost totally dissimilar interests, there was a closeness between them, a bond formed out of their great mutual respect and deep but often unstated affection for one another.
    He closed the door and quietly padded on. Next he approached the room of his six-year-old son, Tucker, but when he opened the door he saw to his surprise that Tuck’s bed was empty. He quickly rushed in to see if Tuck had fallen out of bed, but when he got there he still found no sign of his son. Worriedly, he turned and went out into the hall. He looked in the bathroom and then the kitchen, but still no Tuck. Finally he walked toward the living room and felt a wave of relief when he saw the distinctive glow of the television set shimmering on the wall. He looked in to see Tuck sitting about four inches from the set with the sound turned down low, feverishly playing a video game.
    “Tucker, what are you doing?” David demanded sternly.
    Tuck turned around, startled. He had dark-chestnut hair and matching eyes and a gaze that might have seemed disturbingly wise had David not known him to be one-hundred-percent boy, an inexhaustible tornado of arms and legs, unyieldingly curious, and capable of producing a wide range of startling and unexpected sounds.
    “I couldn’t sleep anymore, Dad,” he said guiltily.
    David was angry about not finding Tuck in his bed, but couldn’t stare into his son’s freckled and guileless face long without melting. He had to force himself not to smile. “Well, try hard, Tuck. I want you to go back to bed and I don’t want to see you out here again until after seven o’clock.” He walked over, turned the set off, and lifted his son up in his arms. He allowed himself to smile only when he felt Tuck’s arms close around his neck. Tuck was also very special to him, in some ways even more special than Katy, for he was a boy and in David’s eyes, as with most fathers and their sons, this made him a little homunculus of himself.
    He took Tuck back into his bedroom and once again drew the blanket up over him. “Now get some sleep. I’ll see you in a little bit.”
    “Okay, Dad,” Tuck said amiably.
    David shut the door to Tuck’s room and returned to his own bedroom. He found Melanie looking distant and deep in thought.
    “You know what I found our son doing?” David asked, grinning, as he threw off his robe and got back into bed. Melanie seemed not to hear.
    “He was playing a video game with the sound turned down low so that we couldn’t hear.”
    Melanie turned to him. “Brad said that the body was in good condition?”
    David looked at her sympathetically, realizing that she was still troubled. “Come on, Mel, I told you it doesn’t mean anything yet.”
    This did nothing to assuage her.
    “Are you trying to make me feel guilty about this?” he asked.
    She smiled. “Of course not.”
    “Because we talked all this out long ago and you said—”
    “—and I said that it was all right, that I would go along with your decision.”
    “So I don’t know why you’re doing this.”
    “Doing what?”
    “Acting this way.”
    “Listen, I said that I understood this move was important to your work and that I would go along with it. But, in turn, you’ve got to understand that I’ve got feelings in the matter too. I’m not totally happy about the possibility of pulling both Katy and Tuck out of school and moving to the sticks, but that’s my problem. You at least have to allow me my feelings.”
    “Fair enough,” he said as he snuggled closer to his wife. At that moment, had he paid attention to it, a tiny voice in the back of his mind was telling him that there was more to his wife’s sullen mood than just her unhappiness over the possibility of their moving. But at the time too many other thoughts were crowding for his attention, and he failed to pay it any notice. Instead, he moved closer still and