Flash seemed to be reading the situation well. As soon as they reached grass near a shrub, he did his business, then turned around to face the house again. He sensed she wanted to get back behind locked doors.
Tonight she was in no mood to disagree, or to even try to reason through her probably unreasonable fear. Just get back inside and give Flash a treat. Tomorrow in the daylight she could give him a longer walk, even work with him.
But not tonight. She felt as if evil lurked out there, and she didn’t want to find out if she was right.
* * *
GEORGE NEEDED MONEY to travel. Everything else was on hold until he had more than the pittance he’d received at his release late that afternoon, fourteen hours earlier than he’d expected. But then, he’d been a model prisoner, and he noticed they’d dated the paperwork for the next morning.
But he didn’t have enough money to travel on or eat while he figured out exactly how he was going to deal with Dory. The bus ticket they’d given him was nonrefundable, meant only to take him back to the place where he’d originally lived—a small suburb of Saint Louis.
He’d been given the address of a halfway house, so he went there, arriving late at night, and resigned himself to spending some time figuring out how to get his hands on some money quickly. He sure as hell didn’t intend to work any of the low-paying menial jobs they probably would point him to. He had bigger things to hunt.
Even though it was late, with his release papers he got inside the door. They showed him to a bedroom and didn’t seem particularly worried that he asked to use a computer. The residents had one in a public room downstairs. Help himself.
So he did. He was too keyed up to just go to sleep. He’d dozed on the bus anyway. The only thing about this that shocked him was his surprising discomfort at not being surrounded by walls when he’d walked from the bus to this place. Not having his every movement watched or directed.
He’d never imagined the world could feel so big, and he suspected that once tomorrow began and life resumed out there, it was going to overwhelm him with chaos. He wasn’t used to chaos anymore. The order of his days had become deeply embedded over twenty-five years.
But so had sitting at a computer and hunting for information about his sister. She had vanished from the town where she had grown up. She was reputed to be a partner in a graphics business that had no address other than a web URL and email. The godparents who had raised her were dead.
He needed to know more about her than this, but he suspected if he called people around here in their old hometown he’d meet a brick wall. Well, unless he could somehow convince them he was someone else. Not likely. He feared too many local people might remember him. Maybe not young people, but the older ones who had probably devoured all the lurid details in the newspaper and on the evening news.
With that thought in mind, he headed upstairs to his room, where his bed was ready to be made. His own room. It had been a while. Not big, but bigger than a cell, without a cell mate.
For a little while the space bothered him, but then he settled down. Room was a good thing. If he thought back very hard to his early days in the slammer, he remembered how claustrophobic he had felt. No more of that.
Now there was infinite freedom.
He needed to remember how to enjoy it. To use it.
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