Free Sleepwalk by John Saul

herself.”
    Banning stretched his aching muscles, and yawned against the fatigue that clouded his mind. “I don’t know,” he said, almost echoing Gloria Hernandez’s words of a few minutes before. “I guess we’ve been pretty lucky around here. This kind of thing seems to happen every day now. Kids who seem fine just suddenly give up. It’s as though the world has become too complicated for them, and anything seems better than having to cope with one more day.” He moved to a sink, and began washing up. “By tomorrow we should know for sure. But if her blood comes up clean, I’m going to call it a suicide.”
    Later, back in his office, Greg found himself still thinking about Banning’s words.
    And he also thought about Heather Fredericks. He’d liked Heather, even though she had often been a bit manipulative, trying to get her own way about everything. But no one, he was sure, thought she was the kind who would commit suicide.
    Perhaps, after all, they would find something indicating that it hadn’t been suicide at all.
    Sighing heavily, he picked up the phone and rang the front desk.
    “Gloria? When the lab reports on Heather Fredericks come in, make sure I get a copy, will you?”
    “Of course, Doctor,” Gloria replied. “I’d have done it anyway. She was your patient, wasn’t she?”
    “Yes, she was,” Greg agreed, then hung up.
    But all that day, and into the next, he kept thinking about Heather, and wondering what, if anything, the lab would find.

Chapter 5
    The funeral for Heather Fredericks took place three days later, on the kind of perfect summer day when the New Mexican skies are deep blue and cloudless, and even the heat of the desert is made bearable by the dryness of the air. But as Judith Sheffield stood with Max and Rita Moreland in the cemetery next door to the old Methodist church she herself had attended as a child, it seemed to her the atmosphere was wrong. Though cloudy skies would have been a cliché, she still thought they would have been more appropriate.
    Ted and Reenie Fredericks stood gazing blankly at the coffin that contained the remains of their only child, as if they hadn’t yet quite grasped what had happened. But as the minister uttered the final words of the service, and the coffin was slowly lowered into the ground, an anguished wail of grief suddenly welled up out of Reenie’s throat, and she hurled herself into her husband’s arms, burying her face in his chest. Judith, embarrassed to witness Reenie’s unbearable pain, averted her eyes, letting them run over the crowd.
    She was surprised by how many of the mourners she recognized, many of them people she’d grown up with. Now, as she identified them ten years later, she found herself unaccountably bewildered that they were no longer the teenagers she remembered. Most of them had children, ranging in age from ten downward, and as she watched them she couldn’t help wondering what they were thinking. Were they, like her, wondering which of the other teenagers in the crowd might be considering following the course Heather had taken? Were they wondering if, in a few more years, or tomorrow, it might be their own child in that casket? Every face she studied wore an expression of shock—shock mixed with apprehension.
    Heather’s friends seemed to have clustered together of their own accord, taking up a position close to the casket but separated from Heather’s parents by the casket itself.
    Amazingly, Judith found she even recognized some of the dead girl’s classmates, though they had been only five or six years old the last time she’d seen them.
    Randy Sparks and Jeff Hankins were there—apparently still the inseparable friends they had been since they were little boys. But something about both of them had changed. Judith watched their faces—Randy’s narrow and vaguely hollowed, in contrast to Jeff’s tendency to chubbiness, which gave him a slightly baby-faced look—and realized, sadly, that their