“My poor baby.” Jill seemed lost in her thoughts.

Paxton looked at Maddie and she returned his gaze. He was glad this was one of those moments when neither of them needed to speak because their thoughts were as one. Maddie stepped toward Paxton to lean against his side and they wrapped their arms around each other. As they stood in silent embrace Paxton rested one cheek against Maddie’s head, and he contemplated what was supposed to be a joyous occurrence: Shad had given them another grandchild.

But where was Shad?

Chapter Fifteen

If you are going through hell, keep going.

--Sir Winston Churchill

When Dulsie first became aware that she was hearing muffled voices, she wasn’t sure if they were just the beginning of yet another bizarre dream. Everything felt strange and unreal. Even when she began to make out whom each voice belonged to, Dulsie doubted this was reality. All the talking seemed garbled. So she opened her eyes to check.

She saw a ceiling, tubes, and the upper part of a wall.

“Oh!” Aunt Maddie’s voice actually made sense. “She’s awake!”

Aunt Maddie, Uncle Pax, Mom, and Dad all crowded around her.

“Honey?” Mom cupped her hand along Dulsie’s jaw, but Dulsie hardly noticed the touch. “Can you hear me? Can you say anything?”

Dulsie tried to focus on Mom’s face. Somewhere in the fog of her mind a single reality rippled to the surface. Dulsie tried to speak it, but her mouth seemed too dry to allow the words to pass. She swallowed, and managed to get them out in a squeaky croak.

“My baby?”

The relatives glanced around at each other. Dulsie took a breath and managed to speak more clearly.

“My baby ... okay?”

Mom pressed her lips together and she blinked a few times. “The baby’s fine for now, honey.”

“She already knew.” Dad almost sounded amazed. He placed his hand on Dulsie’s forehead and brushed back some of her hair as he did so. “Sweetie, you picked a heckuva way to tell us you were pregnant.”

Dulsie shifted her gaze to him. Images started flashing through her memory. The positive result on the pregnancy test, Shad’s reaction to her news, then her reaction to Shad’s news....

Something else struggled out from the fog that seemed to enshroud her mind. She couldn’t tell them about Shad. Dulsie closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She opened them again to stare directly at the ceiling.

“I feel weird.” At least her voice seemed to be recovering. “Like I’m not really here.”

Uncle Pax’s voice conveyed certainty brought on by experience. “It’s the pain killers.”

Pain killers? No, she shouldn’t be taking pain killers! There was new life growing inside her. Dulsie was supposed to be a teetotaler consumed with label reading and eating nothing but organic and natural food right now. Her gaze shot back to her dad.

“Don’t let them give me pain killers. No more.”

Dad’s expression softened. “You may be needing those for a while, honey.”

“They aren’t good for the baby.”

Her father looked across the bed at her mom, who started stroking her thumb across Dulsie’s cheek.

“The doctors know you’re pregnant.” Mom’s voice had a consoling tone. “They wouldn’t give you anything that would hurt the baby.”

Dulsie closed her eyes again. “No more pain killers.”

She barely noticed her dad’s hand stroke through her hair again. “Dulsie ... do you remember why you’re here?”

Misty images staggered through her mind. Sadie was barking toward the road. The dog snarled and began charging. A shot cracked, and Dulsie saw the flashpoint. The dog wailed....

Her eyes opened. “Sadie?” Dulsie began glancing back and forth between her parents. “How’s Sadie?”

Uncle Pax, who was standing beside Dad, leaned forward and patted her gently on the knee. “I’m sorry, honey. Sadie ... was killed.” Then he looked across the bed at Maddie.

Her aunt also leaned forward and lightly placed her hand on Dulsie’s hip. “Dulsie, honey ... do you know where Shad is?”

Dulsie stared at her. More images began playing through the obscured screen of her mind. Shad walking into the bedroom and then coming out with a suitcase, Shad pausing in the doorway to answer her question just before he left....

“The motel.”

Aunt Maddie’s gaze shot from Uncle Pax back to Dulsie. “What motel?”

“In Linn.”

Aunt Maddie’s eyes widened and she looked at Uncle Pax again.

“What’s he doing in a motel?” Mom asked.

She couldn’t tell them about Shad. Dulsie closed her eyes again and struggled with this hateful haze that kept clouding her mind.

“Dulsie?” Her mom’s hand remained cupped against her jaw, but she was no longer caressing Dulsie’s cheek with her thumb. “Why did Shad go to a motel tonight?”

She couldn’t tell them.

A female voice Dulsie didn’t recognize at all broke into her muddled thoughts. “Excuse me, folks. We need to take a look at her.”

The Wednesday morning for Shad dawned bright and clear and as desolate as the previous morning. He brushed his teeth, got dressed as far as his gray slacks, light blue button-down shirt, and shoes, and then decided it was time to turn on his cell phone which had been sitting on the stand beside the bed.

No sooner did the phone beep upon returning to service than it chirped with the signal there was voice mail. Immediately Shad vacillated between hope and dread. Did Dulsie try to call him last night? If so, why would she have waited until after ten o’clock, when he turned off the phone? Then Shad saw it was Mam’s and Pap’s telephone number displayed on the readout of the screen he pulled up, and his dread thickened with perplexity.

What was even more disconcerting was the time the message had been received, which was after two o’clock this morning. Shad could feel his hands tremble as he selected the command to listen to the message and raised the phone to his ear.

“Shad? Shad, it’s Mam.” Her voice was tense. “If you get this message, you’ve got to come to the hospital. There was a prowler at your house tonight. He shot Dulsie. She’s going into surgery and we’re all going to the hospital now. Please, Shad, you’ve got to come as soon as you get this!”

Shad stood, stunned, for a couple of seconds as the phone started going into its automated query about how he wanted to respond. This couldn’t really be happening. This had to be an awful dream Shad would wake up from any second. Surely, but surely, the events of his life weren’t taking yet another turn for the worse.

Yet somehow, inexplicably, beyond his endurance and against all odds, they were. The weight of this new burden was crushing, so much so that Shad found himself back on speaking terms with the Other as he turned the phone back off and grabbed the keys to his pickup before striding out the door.

Paxton and Karl paced through the hall while Maddie and Jill stood beside each other and occasionally made comments about Dulsie’s welfare. Paxton glanced at a clock hanging high on the wall at the end of the hallway. It was a little past seven-thirty.

This was the second time this morning they had been thrown out of Dulsie’s room. The first time the medical staff evaluated her condition now that she was awake. Only twenty minutes after the family was allowed back in, not just one but two deputies arrived to interview Dulsie, so they were tossed out again. Unless the deputies were able to come up with even more questions than Karl, Paxton didn’t figure the interview would last much longer. It took Dulsie only about ten minutes to tell her father everything she could remember. Whenever anybody inquired about Shad, however, Dulsie would become silent.

The first time they were thrown out of the room, Maddie borrowed Karl’s cell phone and tried to call Shad again. And again it went straight to voice mail. So Maddie borrowed a phone book from the nurse’s station and got the number to the motel in Linn. When she called there, the front desk confirmed that Shad was checked in, but when they forwarded her call to his room Maddie still received no answer.