Pitfall by Cameron Bane Read Free Book Online Page B

wouldn’t want me to be alone the rest of my days. Still though, it’s hard.
    Leaning back, I gazed longingly at the picture, my heart stabbing with fresh ache. Sweet Colleen. She’d looked so much like her mom. I lightly traced their faces with my fingertip. Whoever said time heals all wounds has never suffered great loss. Like a flood my emotions overwhelmed me, my defensive armor dropping away.
    I closed my stinging eyes, and then somewhere in there, I slipped into a dream.
    *
    Megan and I had taken a day trip on my birthday, only two months away from our third wedding anniversary. The date was October 18, late fall, our favorite time of year, and we’d spent the crisp, clear afternoon at the preserved 1880s canal town of Metamora, Indiana. Megan preferred the art shops, I, the junk stores, while little Colleen liked feeding and chasing the ducks. The only thing that mattered was we were together.
    The day had been perfect. We’d walked and laughed and shared hot apple cider and corndogs, and I’d taken tons of still pictures and video; by then Colleen was talking up a storm and was faster than greased lightning.
    Later that night, after reading The Wind in the Willows to our daughter and singing the Mockingbird Song to her, we tucked her into bed. Megan and I then went downstairs, where I built a fire in our white stone fireplace. That done, I took a seat on the sofa’s far end. Megan sat on my lap and put her arms around my neck, and we began kissing. And it was there, in that sweet time, that she sprung her best gift: she was pregnant again. With our son.
    Needless to say I was ecstatic. After carrying her up to bed, we grew lost in each other as if the world and its joys would never end. The last sight I’d seen that evening were my wife’s huge, long-lashed soft brown eyes, flecked with gold and glowing with tender love under frosty autumn skies. We went to sleep held in one another’s arms, her head nestled in the perfect spot on my shoulder …
    *
    So Smedley and I, both well lubricated with our respective drinks and content with each other’s company, dozed and dreamed our happy dreams, avian and human, while outside the early evening sun gently lapped in through the slatted blinds.
    We slept until morning. And don’t you know the rest did me good.

Chapter Six

T he Beulah is on the west side of Madison, and as luck would have it, the Brighter Day Clinic was located over on Main Street, only a few blocks away as the crow flies. I’d just called them, pretending to be an office supply salesman, and was told the place had opened at eight. After showering and shaving, I stopped at a local car rental agency (it was time to step into character) and picked up a red Toyota Camry for a week under a false identity.
    I made it to Brighter Day by eight-twenty, and pulling into the newly recoated parking lot, I found the clinic shared the space with a state liquor store, a dry cleaner’s, and a rather crummy pony keg. Crazy name, pony keg. That’s what people around here call a carryout. Why? Who knows? I always thought that with a moniker like “pony keg” I might expect to see Mr. Ed or Seattle Slew behind the counter selling beer and Lotto tickets.
    Shutting my vehicle off I got out, and as I did the brutal heat nearly slammed me to the pavement. Sometime during the night the plug had been pulled on the cooler, dryer air of the last few days, and once again the climate had reverted to the sticky August blast furnace all of us here know and love.
    The humid sky above me was already bone white at this early hour, the heat waves shimmering off the asphalt and the road it fronted looking like a waterfall turned on edge. Across the way I could hear thousands of cicadas tuning up for their daily free concert in the trees, building to a crescendo and sliding away, over and over.
    Underneath my light blue short sleeve Oxford shirt, hot sweat was forming a small lake in my navel, even though I’d left the collar