A Good Marriage Read Online Free Page A

she should find out, just the same. Because if there was just the one, she was right about its being sexual curiosity that had been fully satisfied by a single peek into an unsavory ( and unbalanced, she added to herself) world. If there were more, that might still be all right—he was throwing them out, after all—but maybe she should know.
    Mostly . . . that clunk. It lingered on her mind more than the question about the magazines.
    She snagged a flashlight from the pantry and went back out to the garage. She pinched the lapels of her housecoat shut immediately and wished she’d put on her jacket. It was really getting cold.

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    Darcy got down on her knees, pushed the box of catalogues to one side, and shone the light under the worktable. For a moment she didn’t understand what she was seeing: two lines of darkness interrupting the smooth baseboard, one slightly fatter than the other. Then a thread of disquiet formed in her midsection, stretching from the middle of her breastbone down to the pit of her stomach. It was a hiding place.
    Leave this alone, Darcy. It’s his business, and for your own peace of mind you should let it stay that way.
    Good advice, but she had come too far to take it. She crawled under the worktable with the flashlight in her hand, steeling herself for the brush of cobwebs, but there were none. If she was the original out-of-sight, out-of-mind girl, then her balding, coin-collecting, Cub Scouting husband was the original everything-polished, everything-clean boy.
    Also, he’s crawled under here himself, so no cobwebs would have a chance to form.
    Was that true? She didn’t actually know, did she?
    But she thought she did.
    The cracks were at either end of an eight-inch length of baseboard that appeared to have a dowel or something in the middle so it could pivot. She had struck it with the box just hard enough to jar it open, but that didn’t explain the clunk. She pushed one end of the board. It swung in on one end and out on the other, revealing a hidey-hole eight inches long, a foot high, and maybe eighteen inches deep. She thought she might discover more magazines, possibly rolled up, but there were no magazines. There was a little wooden box, one she was pretty sure she recognized. It was the box that had made the clunking sound. It had been standing on end, and the pivoting baseboard had knocked it over.
    She reached in, grasped it, and—with a sense of misgiving so strong it almost had a texture—brought it out. It was the little oak box she had given to him at Christmas five years ago, maybe more. Or had it been for his birthday? She didn’t remember, just that it had been a good buy at the craft shop in Castle Rock. Hand-carved on the top, in bas-relief, was a chain. Below the chain, also in bas-relief, was the box’s stated purpose: LINKS . Bob had a clutter of cufflinks, and although he favored button-style shirts for work, some of his wrist-jewelry was quite nice. She remembered thinking the box would help keep them organized. Darcy knew she’d seen it on top of the bureau on his side of the bedroom for awhile after the gift was unwrapped and exclaimed over, but couldn’t remember seeing it lately. Of course she hadn’t. It was out here, in the hidey-holeunder his worktable, and she would have bet the house and lot (another of his sayings) that if she opened it, it wouldn’t be cufflinks she found inside.
    Don’t look, then.
    More good advice, but now she had come much too far to take it. Feeling like a woman who has wandered into a casino and for some mad reason staked her entire life’s savings on a single turn of a single card, she opened the box.
    Let it be empty. Please God, if you love me let it be empty.
    But it wasn’t. There were three plastic oblongs inside, bound with an elastic band. She picked the bundle out, using just the tips of her fingers—as a woman might handle a cast-off rag she fears may be germy as well as dirty. Darcy slipped off the