Don't Cry Now by Joy Fielding Page B

didn’t mean to criticize you.”
    â€œYou have nothing to be sorry for.” He kissed her gently on the mouth, one hand reaching behind him to open the door. “Want to come along?” he offered suddenly.
    â€œHow can I leave Amanda?” Bonnie pictured her daughter asleep in her bed.
    â€œSam and Lauren are here,” Rod reminded her.
    Bonnie looked toward the staircase, thought of Sam in the kitchen and Lauren in her room. “ Don’t even think of using my kids as baby-sitters. They’re not here for your convenience ,” Joan had berated her one memorable evening soon after Amanda’s birth.
    â€œI better not,” Bonnie said, thinking of how Joan had done everything in her power to keep Sam and Lauren from knowing their half sister. How spiteful and meanand cruel she had been. Certainly not the paragon of virtue Bonnie had heard eulogized this afternoon.
    â€œBe back soon,” Rod said, shutting the door after him.
    Sam was still sitting at the table, hunched over his food, the light from the overhead fixture picking up the midnight blue of his hair, when Bonnie returned to the kitchen.
    â€œI’m glad that someone has an appetite,” she said.
    Sam turned around, orange sauce coating his lips like a heavy lipstick, the same shade his mother used to wear, the same shade she’d been wearing when she died.
    Bonnie took an involuntary step back, as if she’d seen a ghost. Sam smiled, something dangling from his right hand, like a pocket watch on a chain, except this wasn’t a chain, Bonnie realized, clutching her stomach. It was a tail.
    â€œOh God,” she said. “Tell me that’s not what I think it is.”
    â€œIt’s just a little white rat,” Sam said, laughing. “I let him nibble on some sweet-and-sour pork. Kind of a last meal sort of thing before I feed him to L’il Abner.” He stood up, and Bonnie tried not to notice the slight orange halo around the doomed rat’s twitching nose and mouth. “Want to watch?”
    â€œNo thank you,” Bonnie whispered, as Sam left the room. Then she sank down into one of the kitchen chairs, across from Joan’s ghost, and waited for Rod to come home.

9
    B onnie pulled her car into the staff parking lot at the front of Weston Secondary at exactly seven twenty-nine the following Monday morning. “The clock in my car is digital,” she remembered telling the police not long ago. And then she’d laughed. Not long, not loud. Just long enough to increase their curiosity, just loud enough to arouse their suspicions. They’d been back over the weekend to question her again, covering the same familiar territory, probably hoping she’d contradict herself, say something suitably incriminating, enough to justify Captain Mahoney clamping the pair of handcuffs always dangling from his belt around her wrists, and taking her away. They seemed unconcerned about whatever danger she and her daughter might be in, the danger Joan had warned her against. They probably think I made the whole thing up, Bonnie thought, frustrated by how little the police had revealed about their investigation, other than the coroner’s conclusion that Joan had been killed by a bullet from a .38-caliber revolver, quite possibly the one still registered to Rod.
    â€œYo, Mrs. Wheeler,” someone called as Bonnie reached the front door of the one-and-a-half-story reddish brick building. “Let me get that for you.”
    Bonnie turned to see Haze running toward her. Well no, not exactly running, she thought, watching him, mesmerized by the easy insolence of his gait. More like loping. A sleek, muscular, white stallion, dressed all in black, and totally tuned to his own body rhythms.
    â€œYou look real nice today, Mrs. Wheeler,” he said, pulling open the heavy door and standing off to one side so that Bonnie could enter first. “Nice to see you back,” he said as