Die Before I Wake by Laurie Breton Read Free Book Online Page A

dust bunny inhabited its vacant space. Ditto for the bureau drawers. Tom kept his underwear and socks—
    stacked with razor-sharp precision—in the upright dresser. The bureau must have been Elizabeth’s territory. I was a little surprised to find no evidence that she had ever lived here. No clothes, no knickknacks, no wedding photos, no froufrou female stuff. At some point after her death, Tom had removed all her belongings. Now that I thought about it, I’d seen no evidence of her presence anywhere in this house.
    Downstairs, photos of the girls were displayed here and there: school photos as well as candids of them with Tom, and with their grandmother and their uncle Riley. But not a single likeness of Elizabeth graced the house.
    I wondered why this made me uneasy. It seemed odd that a man who’d loved his wife, a man who’d spent years with her and made babies with her, would keep no physical reminders of her after she was gone. No little personal objects, no mementos of any kind. It was as if the moment Elizabeth was gone, Tom had tried to pretend she’d never existed.
    Had their marriage been unhappy? Tom hadn’t mentioned any problems with his first marriage, so I’d simply assumed theirs had been a satisfactory union. On the other hand, I hadn’t bothered to ask.
    For all I knew, they could have been on the verge of divorce when Elizabeth died. If there were problems, that might explain why all trace of her was gone from the house.
    Trying to rationalize away my unease, I told myself I was probably just identifying too closely with Tom’s late wife. More than likely, my subconscious was wondering what would happen if I died.
    Whether I, too, would be erased from this house as though I’d never set foot inside it.
    Because that thought bothered me more than I cared to admit, I distracted myself with unpacking.
    It didn’t take long; I’d traveled light. Most of my clothes were packed away on that moving van. Until they arrived, I’d manage quite nicely with the jeans and casual shirts I’d brought with me. I’d packed only one “serious” dress, and I doubted I’d be need-ing it here; I couldn’t imagine that, as the wife of a small-town Maine doctor, I’d have many formal social engagements.
    I managed to fill one bureau drawer, and I hung the rest of my clothes in the closet. They looked pathetic hanging in all that empty space, as did my toiletries, lined up on one end of the massive white marble bathroom counter. I sneaked a peek in one of the medicine cabinets. Empty. I opened the other and found Tom’s toiletries—razor, toothbrush, deodor-ant, aftershave—all shelved neatly, again carefully spaced so that no two objects touched. I closed the cabinet, looked at my cluster of mismatched items cluttering up the counter, and decided to move them to the empty medicine cabinet, where my neatnik husband wouldn’t be forced to look at them every time he walked into the room.
    It was an improvement. I closed the mirrored door on my hair care products and perfumes, returning the powder room to its formerly immaculate state. Because I had no excuse to kill any more time up here, I headed back down to the kitchen. I still had the whole house all to myself. Except for Riley, but he was still outside, wielding the chain saw with its fe-rocious growl.
    I took the keys to the Land Rover from the hook in the kitchen, let myself out the screen door, and marched over to where my brother-in-law was working. He shut down the saw and watched me approach.
    “Can you give me directions? I need to go to Tom’s bank, the DMV, and the social security office.” He swiped at his brow with a shirtsleeve, picked up a bottle of water, and took a long swig. “The bank’s downtown,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “First National Bank on Main Street. You can’t miss it. Social security office is in the federal building across the street from the bank.
    Second floor, above the post office.