Free Blood Red by Wendy Corsi Staub Page B

button open: casually comfortable.
    The hair and makeup are just as befuddling. Letting it hang in loose blondish waves is potentially sexy, which she doesn’t want, yet now that it’s shoulder-­length, a pony­tail is too stubby and severe. Her lashes and thin lips tend to disappear without cosmetic enhancement, but the liner and lipstick she wears on a daily basis suddenly seem suggestive. She doesn’t want him getting ideas.
    Oh, come on.
    He probably already has ideas, unless he really is the one who sent the package, in which case he’s all but summoned her presence this morning. But if he’s expecting a walk on the shady side of memory lane, he’s in for an unpleasant surprise.
    In the end, she skips the lipstick and eyeliner, goes with the ponytail, and turns her back on the mirror. Downstairs, she finds Doofus blissfully snoozing on the rug and has to shake him awake.
    â€œYou’d make a lousy watchdog, you know that?”
    He wags his tail, apparently mistaking it as a compliment.
    â€œI don’t suppose you’ve seen my keys?” she adds, unsuccessfully searching the cluttered kitchen surfaces, a daily occurrence.
    She lets the dog out into the yard and takes her medication on an empty stomach. To stave off the predictable tide of nausea—­evocative of morning-­sickness-­meets-­wretched-­hangover—­she belatedly gobbles a ­couple of saltines as she continues searching for her keys. After finding them in the pocket of last night’s jacket, she coaxes Doofus back inside too soon even for his taste.
    â€œSorry, but I’ve got to run,” she explains, dumping some food into a bowl for him and convinced he’s gazing reproachfully after her when she finally hurtles herself out the door.
    The pavement is slick and shiny as she winds her way south along Highland Road, riding the brake in anticipation of joggers and deer. Tendrils of mist obscure portions of the highway she knows so well.
    Growing up in Mundy’s Landing, she longed for the day she could leave the village behind. But when it finally arrived, she found herself longing to go back home. It took her well over a decade to do that. After a year as a commuter student at Hadley, the only college willing to admit her, probably only because the admissions ­people were local and knew about her recently deceased mother, she transferred to her mother’s alma mater, the University of Buffalo. Like Mom, she majored in education, not because she particularly wanted to become a teacher, but because it made her feel closer to her mother and it made her widowed father happy.
    Weary of western New York winters, she went south to Virginia for her master’s. But while she was back home over Christmas break, she met Asa Jacob Mundy IV, though no one ever called him that. He was just Jake. He was seven years older than Rowan, having graduated high school just ahead of her oldest brother, Mitch.
    Like most graduates of Mundy’s Landing High School during their era, Jake had gone away to college and stayed away. His father had died fairly young and his mother was still living in Mundy’s Landing, but she’s long since settled in Texas with Jake’s older sister, Liza.
    Jake hadn’t strayed so far: he was working for an ad agency in New York City when Rowan met him.
    They were married the June after she got her master’s degree. She’d had her fill of steamy Southern summers and welcomed the chance to move North again. She found a teaching position in the New York suburbs and that’s where they settled. Her father adored Jake—­not just because everyone likes Jake, but because he was a hometown boy, a Mundy.
    Dad lived to walk Rowan down the aisle and hold her firstborn, but died while she was pregnant with her second. He never met the daughter Rowan named for her mother, or his own namesake, Mick; never got to see her come full circle back to