Left for Dead by J.A. Jance Page B

moved into the house his grandfather had built and which Phil had inherited when his grandmother died. He’d gotten the job working in the post office, and life was good.
    By then it had seemed clear that he and Christine weren’t going to have any kids, ever. They’d tried. It hadn’t worked. End of story. At least that’s what they thought. But then, much to their astonishment and right after Christine turned forty, she also turned up pregnant.
    Christine was ecstatic when Cassidy was born. So was Phil. Life was wonderful for a time, right up to Christmas Eve fifteen years ago, the night everything changed. Phil and Cassidy had been on their way home from a last-minute Christmas-shopping trip to Tucson. Between Patagonia and Sonoita, a drunk driver came across the double line into their lane. Somehow Phil managed to avoid being hit, but he lost control of the car. It rolled. Cassidy died.
    The original accident wasn’t Phil’s fault, but Cassidy’s death was. Her mother always made sure Cass was properly belted in. Insisted on it. That day when they started home, Cassidy, who was seven, said she was tired. She wanted to lie down in the backseat to sleep,and Phil let her. When the car rolled, Cassidy was ejected, and the car landed on top of her. She died instantly. Sometimes Phil wished he had died then, too.
    When he gave Christine the news, she didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. Instead, she leveled an accusatory look that shriveled his heart. He had known right then that she would never forgive him, and she had not.
    Cassidy’s funeral was two days after Christmas. When they came home from the funeral, the decorated Christmas tree and all the wrapped presents were there in the living room, taunting them and showing them how much they had lost. Phil’s first instinct had been to take it down and get rid of it, but Christine had stopped him. She told him that if he touched even so much as one decoration on the tree, she’d kill him, and he had believed her. The tree stayed up. Later, when they were still speaking occasionally, he’d managed to extract the agreement that the tree would stay up until the last light burned out. Fifteen years later, it was still there, and a few of the bedraggled lights continued to burn.
    But that Christmas and Cassidy’s death had been the beginning of Christine’s long retreat into herself. She stopped going out. For anything. She wouldn’t go to the grocery store or to the gas station or to the doctor or dentist. Friends tried stopping by to see her or calling on the phone. She wouldn’t open the door. She wouldn’t answer the phone. She stayed in the house day after day, year after year. If it hadn’t been for Phil’s job delivering mail, he suspected he would have gone nuts, too.
    Phil and Christine lived in the same house, but they slept in different bedrooms and existed on different timetables. When Phil left for work, Christine was usually asleep. Sometimes she prowled the house late at night, when he heard her pacing back and forth in her room. During the day, as far as he could tell, she spent most of her time sitting in the living room, watching the tree. He didn’t know what she thought about all that time. She didn’t seem to watch TV, had zero interest in current events. As far as he knew, she didn’t read books.
    With the house quiet and, except for the tree, mostly dark, he worried early on that someone might mistakenly think the house was empty and break in with her sitting right there in her chair. When he mentioned his concern to Christine, she gave him one of her scathinglooks. Then she stood up, walked over to the Christmas tree, and picked up one of Cassidy’s wrapped presents.
    “I’ll use this,” she said, tearing the wrapping paper off the softball bat, a present Cassidy had never opened.
    For months after that, Christine sat with the bat either in her lap or next to her chair. One day, though, for reasons Christine never explained,