Wild in the Field Read Free Page A

No reason to. She didn’t want anything. But eventually she located the flat briefcase on the scarred oak bureau. She clicked the locks, pulled it open. Once upon a time, the briefcase had been filled with colorful files and advertising projects and marketing studies. Now it held a complete array of airline-sized liquor bottles.
    Quite a few were missing, although not as many as she’d planned. She hadn’t given up her goal of becoming an alcoholic, but the ambition was a lot tougher to realize than she ever expected. Frowning, she filched and fingered through the collection. Crème de cocoa was out of the question—she was never trying that ghastly stuff again. Ditto for the vodka. And the scotch. And the gin.
    Squinting, she discovered a bitsy bottle of Kahlúa. She wrestled with the lid, finally successfully unscrewed it, guzzled in a gulp, swallowed, and then opened her mouth to let out the fumes.
    Holy moly. Her eyes teared and her throat surely scarred over from the burn.
    As hard as she was trying to destroy her life with liquor, it just wasn’t working well. She set down the mini-bottle—she was going to finish it!—she only needed to take a few minutes to renew her determination.
    She sank down in the creaky rocker again, closingher eyes. Maybe the drinking wasn’t going so well, but other things were.
    Several weeks ago, she’d mistakenly believed that she wanted to die. Since then, she’d realized that one part of her was alive—totally alive, consumingly alive.
    The rage.
    All around her was the evidence. Violet had tried to give her a phone, but she’d trashed it. The cottage behind the barns had been built for a great grandmother who’d wanted to live independently, so there was no totally destroying the charm. There was just a front room, bedroom and kitchen, but the casement windows bowed, and the bedroom had a slanted ceiling, and the living room had a huge limestone fireplace with a sit-down hearth. She hadn’t fixed any of it. Hadn’t looked at any of it either. She’d been sleeping on a hard mattress with a bald pillow and no bedding. Cobwebs filled the corners; the floors hadn’t been swept, and the cupboards were empty.
    She couldn’t remember the last time she brushed her hair or changed clothes.
    Eventually this had to stop. She realized that in an intellectual way, but emotionally, there only seemed one thing inside of her. All she wanted was to sit all day and seep with the rage, steep with it, sleep with it. Fester it. Ache with it. My God. It had been bad enough to lose Robert. Bad enough to wake up in a hospital bed with a face so battered she couldn’t recognize herself, bruises and breaks that made her cry to touch, lips too swollen to talk…and that was before she’d been told Robert was dead.
    Initially, the grief had ripped through her like a cyclone that wouldn’t quit. It just wrenched and tore and never let up. But then came the trial. She’d been sopositive that the trial would at least bring her the relief and satisfaction of justice. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the dark street, heard her laughing with Robert, complaining about walking in high heels from the party on the balmy fall night, and then there they were. The bastards, the drug-high bastards. There was no reason for them to start punching her, playing her, scaring her. They’d have given them all their money in a blink. But it wasn’t money they wanted. Robert—he’d tried to protect her, tried to get in front of her. That’s why they were meaner to him. Why he ended up dead.
    All three of them had looked clean-cut and young in court—because they were. They had cried their eyes out, which had impressed the judge, too. They’d come from good families, had no records, weren’t even drug users—they just made one mistake, thought they’d experiment one time, and foolishly bought some