Free Consider the Crows by Charlene Weir Page B

lies and agonizing over whether she was doing the right thing. And then time running out, summer coming to an end and the panic increasing as each day went by and the baby still didn’t arrive and it was one more day closer to the beginning of school.
    Let it go, she told herself, rolled over in bed, bunched the pillow under her head and looked at the clock. Two A.M . Get to sleep. She rolled the other way, turning her back to the clock. If she didn’t watch the time, maybe her body wouldn’t realize how little sleep it would get.
    As soon as she closed her eyes, she saw Lynnelle again, face down in the water, blond curls moving lazily with the current.
    Oh no, a voice said. Let’s not do that again. We’ve been over it and over it too many times already.
    When she finally went to sleep, she dozed fitfully and woke at six on Monday morning with a headache. The picture of Lynnelle in vivid color popped immediately to mind and she tried to erase it with aspirin and a shower. She still had to teach and she’d better start thinking about today’s classes. Even before Lynnelle, this school year had been hard-going. In all her years of teaching, she’d never had one so difficult. Of course, she’d never taught after a divorce before. It did powerful things to the concentration, like giving it a tendency to sit in one groove and snivel. Embarrassing too. When your wonderful husband suddenly decided to run away from home to find himself and took along a grad student, presumably to help him do it, you tended to be mightily embarrassed, and wonder what a nice person like you was doing in a cliché like this. And now there was Lynnelle. Why hadn’t Caitlin called?
    *   *   *
    â€œHave you seen this?” Hazel sat a mug of coffee on Susan’s desk and handed her the Herald, tapping a finger on the front page article about Lynnelle’s murder. No picture. Probably couldn’t find one.
    Susan nodded. The paper, more accustomed to lost dogs, local sports events and articles on Mrs. Whatsit took first prize in the raspberry strudel competition and Mr. Whoever caught a so-many-pound catfish at Potter’s Point, would play it for all it was worth. If she didn’t kick into second gear here, the good citizens would be cowering behind locked doors and acquiring Dobermans who would eat the neighbor’s children.
    She dropped the newspaper on the budget, which was still blank. And blank was what they still were on Lynnelle’s background. Missing Persons turned up nothing; routine check of police records turned up nothing. Department of Licensing in Oklahoma had come through with a confirmation of driver’s license issued to Lynnelle Hames with not so much as a speeding ticket against it. Department of Motor Vehicles had the yellow VW as registered to William Radler in Oklahoma City. No stolen vehicle report. No word yet on this Radler.
    â€œDr. Fisher’s office called,” Hazel said. “He’s finished the autopsy and you can stop by the pathology department and pick up the preliminary results if you want.”
    â€œTell him I’m on the way.”
    The pathology department was located in the basement of Brookvale Hospital in the middle of a warren of offices connected by corridors leading to the various nonmedical departments required to keep the place running; generators, laundry, housekeeping, maintenance, engineering.
    Upstairs, all was light, and pleasantly decorated; down here was strictly utilitarian, brown vinyl floors and scuffed white walls. She sensed, rather than heard, the hum of huge machinery and caught glimpses through open doorways of electrical ducts large enough to crawl through. Hospital personnel, busy and purposeful, constantly bustled along from place to place.
    She passed the lab, brilliantly lit, with technicians working on the specimens of blood, urine and tissue from the patients above. Computerized equipment