God Project by John Saul Page B

physical being; they were somewhere else.
    His manner had changed. He seemed, to Lucy, to be more aware of things beyond himself. Also, there was a stability to him, and a hint of humor that was unfamiliar to her. Oh, he’d always been funny, but it had always been at the expense of someone else, usually her.
    “What changed you?” she suddenly heard herself asking. If the question surprised him, he gave no sign.
    “Life,” he said. “I guess I got tired of landing on my ass. It was either change my ways or pad my butt, and I decided wearing a pillow wouldn’t work. Maybe your throwing me out was the best thing that ever happened to me. For the first time, I didn’t have anyone to fall on, so I decided to stop falling.”
    There was a long silence then, and Lucy didn’t speak again until they were in the parking lot of the restaurant.
    “Jim?”
    He turned to face her, and once more it was as if he’d read her mind.
    “Don’t worry,” he said. “For a while, at least, I can take care of both of us. If you want to fall apart, you go ahead. You may not think I’m good for much, but right now I’m all you’ve got. And you can depend on me, Lucy. Okay?”
    Her tears brimmed over, and she sat still, letting them flow. Jim sat quietly beside her, holding her hand in his own.
       The Speckled Hen was very much as they remembered it, and for the next few hours they talked of things other than their son.
    They talked of times past, when things had been good, and times past, when things had been bad.
    Mostly, they were silent. No one watching them would have known they’d been divorced for nearly ten years. To an outsider they would have appeared very much married, with much on their minds, but little need to talk.
    By the time he took her home, Jim and Lucy Corliss were becoming friends again.

Chapter 9
    T HE NIGHT WAS WARM and humid, a precursor of the summer that was soon to come, and Steve Montgomery left his window rolled down as he searched for the right house. “It should be in this block,” he said, slowing the car and peering through the darkness for the numbers which seemed to him to be deliberately hidden from anyone who might be looking for them.
    “I still don’t see why you insisted on coming.” Sally’s voice was cold. She sat stiffly upright on the seat next to him, her arms folded across her breast, the fingers of her right hand kneading the flesh of her left arm. Steve brought the car to a halt, switched off the ignition, and turned to face his wife.
    “It can’t hurt, and it might help,” he said. He reached out to touch his wife, but she drew away from him. He sighed, and when he spoke again, he was careful to keep his growing impatience out of his voice. “Look, honey, how can it possibly hurt? You don’t have to say a word if you don’t want to. But all these people have been through the same thing we’ve been through. If anyone can help us cometo grips with this thing, they can.”
    He searched Sally’s face, hoping for a sign that perhaps she was willing to face the reality of what had happened to Julie. But her face remained unchanged, hereyes brooding, her expression one of puzzled detachment.
    Steve knew what was happening. She was sifting through her mind, trying to find a clue that would unlock the mystery of Julie’s death for her. It had begun that afternoon, when instead of beginning to put her life back together, as Steve was trying to do with himself, she had sat straight up on the sofa, a medical book in her lap, reading intently page after page of material that Steve was nearly certain she didn’t understand. But he understood very well what she was doing.
    She was looking for what he had already come to think of as The Real Reason for Julie’s death.
    It had begun the night before. As Steve lay trying to fall asleep, and thinking about the funeral to be faced the next morning, Sally had left their bed and begun wandering through the house as though she were