Free Beloved by Antoinette Stockenberg

natural on him. I ' m afraid of him. And Phillip knows that. Stay in your lane. "
    She ' s as much as calling him an ax murderer, Jane thought, amazed at the tenor of the conversation. She swung her head, looking back along the road. If they ' d driven past McKenzie, she ' d missed it. The thought that he ' d be passing her house quietly on foot sent the hair on the back of her neck rising.
    In a moment they were at her door. Mr. Crate slowed his Lincoln to a gradual stop — actually, Jane could have stepped out any time along the way and not even twisted an ankle — and she got out of the car. Dorothy, who ' d been sitting next to her in silence, suddenly stuck her head out the window and said ominously, " Single women can take nothing for granted. "
    They left Jane, mouth agape, standing there with her keys and thinking, What a timid little family they are. It was catching; she was regretting not having turned on the porch light. The problem was with the two huge hollies that flanked the door: fifteen feet high, they blocked light from the inside, as well as any view of the outside.
    Jane let herself in and instantly she felt the cold: the furnace must have blown another fuse. Damn. The electrician had warned her that the burner was old and inefficient and the sixty-amp service not up to the task. She ' d laid in a supply of fuses, but an expensive upgrade looked inevitable. Damn.
    She rummaged through a kitchen drawer for a flashlight and, since some of the inside stairs to the basement were missing, went back outside in the whistling wind to enter through the heavy cellar bulkhead doors. The dirt-floor basement was less than six feet high and filled with moldering lumber and rusted, broken-down machinery. The basement light was on the same fuse as the furnace, so when the furnace went out, the basement went black. After the electrician explained all this the first time, Jane had hoped never to return. Fat chance.
    She groped toward the fusebox, arcing the flashlight back and forth through the debris. She swung the beam where she thought the box should be and it lit, instead, on two bulging yellow eyes placed squarely over the most vicious fangs she ' d ever seen. Jane screamed. It screamed. She dropped her flashlight and felt something scurry past her legs. She jumped back, instantly wrapping herself in a cobweb of repulsive size. The sense that spiders and dead flies were all over her hair was overwhelming. She cried out in revulsion and fled, slamming into hard metal and scraping her shin on the way out.
    She ran straight into the bathroom, tore off her clothes, and jumped into the shower. There was, of course, no hot water. It hardly mattered. She shampooed, and scrubbed, and shampooed again. Clean and frozen, she checked out the damage to her shin, amazed at the depth of the gouge and the size of the goose egg on it. There wasn ' t a doubt in her mind that the plow, or whatever it was she ran into, was rusty. Oh, fine. Tetanus, too.
    Clearly I ' m not yet ready for prime-time country, she thought wryly. What was the worst it could have been—a weasel? A possum? As for the spider web—I go running off hysterically like Little Miss Muffet, and now I ' ll probably die of blood poisoning.
    She put on a pair of heavy Levi ' s and an old jacket and tried changing the fuse one more time, with a better flashlight. All went well and ten minutes later Jane was upstairs in bed, listening to the wind sending the door of the potting shed thwacking back and forth on its hinges. Jane counted the thwacks, like sheep, and in five minutes she was sound asleep without a thought in the world for weasels or ax murderers.
    And yet somewhere in her subconscious she was dreaming about the storm that raged at the island so alone and exposed, thirty miles from its motherland. She was dreaming of Nantucket ' s children, huddled under warm blankets, and its wild creatures, sheltered in its nooks and crannies. She was dreaming of its women —