Praying for Sleep

ambush.”
    “No! Hrubek’s going to Boyleston. You’re wrong!”
    “Well, he ain’t going to Boyleston in the car he was driving. Front end’s mashed in.”
    Lis turned instinctively toward where her purse lay on the counter. “How badly hurt is he? I have to go to him.”
    “We don’t know. Can’t find him. Or Hrubek either.”
    “Where did it happen?” Portia asked.
    “By the old railroad trestle. Near downtown.”
    “Downtown where ?” Lis snapped.
    His fat mouth fell silent. Perhaps he suspected her of hysteria. He said, “Well, downtown Ridgeton.”
    No more than three miles from where they stood.
    The wreck wasn’t too bad, the deputy explained. “We think Hrubek took off and Owen’s after him.”
    “Or, Owen’s running, with Hrubek after him. ”
    “We thought of that too. The sheriff and Tom Scalon are out looking for them. All the phones in this part of town’re out. Stan had me drive over to tell you. He’s thinking you oughta leave. Till they find him. But your car’s outta commission, looks like.”
    Lis didn’t respond. Portia told him that they couldn’t get a tow truck.
    “Believe you’ll need more’n a tow for that particular vehicle.” He nodded toward the sunken Acura. “Anyway, I’ll take you. Just get your stuff together.”
    “Owen . . .” Lis looked around her, scanning the woods in vain.
    “I’m thinking,” the deputy said, “we oughta get a move on.”
    “I’m not going anywhere until we find my husband.”
    Perhaps she sounded ferocious, for the deputy added cautiously, “I understand how you feel. . . . But I don’t exactly know there’s a lot you can do here but fret. And I’ll—”
    “I’m not going anywhere,” she said slowly. “You understand?”
    He looked at Portia, who gave no response. Finally he said, “Have it your way, Lis. That’s your business. But Stanley said to make sure you’re okay. I better call him and tell him you don’t want to leave.” He waited a moment more, as if this might intimidate her into leaving. When she turned away he walked out into the rain once more and climbed into the front seat of the cruiser to make the radio call.
    “Lis,” Portia protested. “There’s nothing we can do.”
    “Go sit in the car with him if you want. Or have him take you to the Inn. I’m sorry, but I’m not leaving.”
    Portia glanced outside, at a tree bending under a furious gust of wind. “No, I’ll stay.”
    “Go lock the windows. I’ll check the doors.”
    Before he’d left, Owen had dead-bolted the front door. Lis now fixed the security chain, thinking momentarily how tiny the brass links seemed compared with the manacles that had gripped Hrubek’s hands at trial. She then locked and chained the door off the kitchen utility room. She wondered if Owen had remembered the lath-house door—the only way one could enter or leave the greenhouse from the outside. She walked toward it but paused halfway. She noticed a large rose plant—a Chrysler Imperial hybrid cultivated into a tree. Last year, one week after Owen confessed his affair, he had bought her this plant. It was the only one he’d ever purchased without her guidance. On the day of rest after owning up to Ms. Trollop, Esq., he appeared with the massive scarlet rosebush in the back of his truck. At the time Lis nearly pitched it out. Then she decided not to. The plant owed its reprieve to a passage from a class assignment in Hamlet, which her students were then studying.
    Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin . . . No reckoning made, but sent to my account, with all my imperfections on my head.
    The coincidence was too great to dismiss—this combination of literature, horticulture and real-life drama. So what could Lis do but resist the urge to destroy it? She rooted the damn thing and wondered if the plant would survive. It of course proved to be one of her hardier specimens.
    Lis stepped forward and cradled the flower. It was a paradox of her love for plants that her gardener’s hands had toughened so much that she could no longer feel the delicacy of petals. She brushed the backs of her hands over the blossoms, then started once again toward the door. She’d taken only a few steps when she saw vague motion from outside.
    Walking cautiously to a window, thick with condensation and the sheets of rain, she wiped the glass with her sleeve and saw to her shock the indistinct form of a tall man standing near the house. Hands on his hips, he was trying to