Twenty-One Locks by Laura Barton

Author:Laura Barton [Barton, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Jimmy bowled down the street. Monday morning, just after seven, and the start of the working week. He felt antsy today, a little restless, and as he drove what carried him was the nagging thought that something, somewhere was wrong.

The weather was still unsettled, and through the windscreen the sky shifted uneasily above him. He sat and stared at the traffic lights, stubbornly fixed at red, and tried to work out just what it was that bothered him. He was, by nature and by trade, a mechanically minded man, and as he pulled away from the junction, shifting first to second to third, he took a methodical approach to the problem.

For starters, Jeannie had come home late on Saturday night. They’d rowed in the pub, of course, and when he had returned home in the early hours and found the bed empty he had assumed she was asleep in the spare room, making some kind of silent protest. But later, when he’d got up to piss, he’d seen her clothes bundled in the hallway and it had struck him as peculiar.

What had they rowed about? He delved into the back of his mind and rooted around in the darkness. It must have been something about the wedding—that was all they ever seemed to talk about lately—in truth, he struggled to recall what they ever talked about before the wedding. God, it could have been anything: his suit, the cake, the DJ, her mother, his mother … He turned on the radio, let the sound of Bon Jovi fill his head for a while.

Where had she been? Jimmy turned the music down. At her mother’s? It seemed unlikely. At Marie’s house? It was a possibility, but again strange. Did she know anyone else? He delved further into the darkness and came up with nothing. It had never struck him as strange before, but suddenly it seemed odd that Jeannie had so few friends. Just him. The first heavy sploshes of rain hit the windscreen. He flicked on the wipers and they squealed and screeched, a distant violin practice in the engine. He’d have to fix that.

Then there was the matter of Terri. She was a regular at the Bull, and a bit of a head-turner; buxom and blond, she wore everything tight and short and low, she drank lager tops and was always chewing gum. She chewed Juicy Fruit, in the bright yellow wrappers, and when you spoke to her, the air between you billowed with synthetic fruit flavor. She’d shuck each stick of gum out of its foil with one hand and then fold it on to her tongue in one smooth moment. “What’s with the gum?” he’d asked her the first night they met. “I just like to have something in my mouth, Jimmy …” she’d said, saucily. “Are you blushing?”

Saturday night, they’d been flirting outrageously in the pub, just a bit of harmless fun, wedged between the bar and the jukebox, but even now he wasn’t altogether sure that nothing had happened.

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