Hide & Seek - James Patterson [61]
I knew about that feeling too. I wanted to be there for him. But where was he? How could I help if I couldn't find Will?
On the third day I called Barry again, and asked him to come to the house. “I feel a little out of control,” I told him once he arrived. “I think I should be doing something more, but I can't think what it might be.”
“He'll come back,” Barry said. “He has something good to come back to. Don't forget that.”
“You always overestimate me, and underestimate Will. He could have killed himself, Barry. I'm really afraid for him. His father committed suicide.”
“People like Will don't,” Barry said. “He knows what he's doing.”
“How can you say that? You don't know Will. You don't know how hard he takes things.”
Barry shrugged. He didn't believe it. In a way, neither did I. I thought that Will would come back. He loved me, and he loved the kids. He had to come back.
“I fantasize finding him in a ditch somewhere. Just because the police haven't found him—”
“They haven't because he doesn't want to be found. I understand how terrible this is for you, but you're overreacting, Maggie. He's probably on the bender of benders. He'll come back when it's over.”
Would he? I was afraid that maybe I didn't know everything about Will. I hadn't been with him in Rio. Who had? What furies drove him then? Which were driving him now? Perhaps he wasn't telling me the truth.
And how could he just disappear?
I saw a picture in my mind—Will and Allie riding Fleas across the lot in back of our house. He had to come back. It was inconceivable that he wouldn't.
CHAPTER 70
AND EVENTUALLY, HE did.
I was awakened by a familiar hand touching my cheek, then lightly stroking my hair. Will was in the bedroom! I knew his touch so well. My heart jumped. Terror came over me.
“Will!” I finally managed to whisper, my mouth dry with fear.
I pushed his hand away and twisted myself out of bed. I faced him with a fury that had grown all the time he was away, and now was at its height.
“Where have you been? Why didn't you call us? Oh God, Will. You think you can just come back like this?”
There was something in his eyes that night—something so different, so strange. It was subtle, but I picked up on it. He didn't look like himself.
He was dressed in unwrinkled black slacks and a black T-shirt. His hair was casual, the windblown look. His jaw was covered with a day or two's light growth.
He smiled at me the way I'm sure he did at every woman in his life who had been angry at him, and whose forgiveness he needed. I wanted to scream at him, lash out at him with my fists.
“I've been in London. I went to visit my aunt. She's like a second mother to me. Only she wasn't there, off on holiday with Aunt Eleanor, so I came home.”
Yes. Of course. To another mother. To me.
“I'm sorry, Maggie, I shouldn't have done it, definitely should have called. You can't imagine how upset I was at that dreadful premiere. You have no idea what goes through my mind.”
No, I didn't, I couldn't, I didn't want to, but I tried to be patient, and to understand. Maybe, I tried too hard.
CHAPTER 71
WILL HAD BEGUN to wear two-hundred-dollar dark glasses almost all the time now—at night and inside the house. He called it his “film star phase.”
He used any and every excuse to be out of the house. In truth, he was afraid to be around Maggie and the kids. Maybe he didn't love them anymore, couldn't feel what he wanted to, but he didn't want to hurt them either.
He didn't want to hurt them.
He drove his new Mercedes convertible into New York one obnoxiously sunny afternoon. He felt hollow, as though there were absolutely nothing inside him. He'd spoken to his brother that morning, but of course Palmer wasn't any help. Palmer didn't want to have anything to do with him anymore.
He wanted to end it all—maybe in a spectacular car crash. He pushed the Cabriolet to over a hundred on the narrow, winding Saw Mill. He was much too skillful a driver to crash though; his reflexes were perfect. Or maybe he didn't really