Hanging by a Thread Read Online Free Page A

husband came from out of nowhere and yanked her away so hard, she dropped her purse. The look on his face surprised me, it was so full of anger. But I thought I was mistaken. I mean, I thought I knew Paul, we’d ushered together a few times, and I’d had a few conversations with him about roofing—he was a good amateur carpenter. He was one of those guys who almost always has a grin on his face, like he’s got the point of a joke the rest of us don’t. So that look that day was surprising. I actually remember trying to decide if it was the angle of the sun putting a funny shadow on his face. You see, he was always willing to lend a hand, jump-start a car, bring groceries to a shut-in, like that.
    “But while I was surprised by him, I was surprised even more by the look on her face as she went off with him, like she was scared to death of what would happen when he got her home. Even weirder, when he noticed it, he shook her arm and she all of a sudden looked fine.” He shrugged.
    “At the time, of course, I didn’t think of it that way, that he was ordering her to wipe that look off her face. It was only later I learned what a son of a bitch he was, excuse my French. That she was right to be scared.
    “We were born the same year, Angela and me, and Paul was two years older. I went to high school with them both, though I never dated her—I was into big, cushy blonds back then, so I didn’t see her as my type. She was just a bit of a thing, and dark-haired. But she was pretty enough, and I think could have been popular if she put herself out some more. But she was shy, hardly said anything to anyone in school. I went on to get my degree in architectural engineering, but she dropped out of college to marry Paul.
    “Anyhow, the Sunday after I talked to Angela about the weather, Alice Skoglund said it was sad how Angela seemed so unhappy nowadays, and something about the way she said it made me think of that scared look. So I kind of kept my eye on her for the next few weeks, and once I paid attention, I could see Angela wasn’t just unhappy, she was scared. So I took to talking to her when Paul wasn’t around, which was like a minute here and a minute there—he was generally right with her. But I kept trying to find out what was going on. Pretty soon she trusted me enough to really talk to me. And soon after I got the hint from her that he was abusing her. I got mad on her behalf, and told her to walk out, just leave him, go down to Florida to stay with her parents; but she said she was afraid of what he might do.
    “By then I wasn’t just out to rescue a fellow Lutheran; it was getting personal. So I paid attention, I got to know her schedule, and we’d meet while she was grocery shopping or on her way to and from work, friends’ houses, like that. He was always checking up on her, phoning her, making her account for her time, so it was tricky.” He smiled. “But I’m an efficient scheduler, and we got pretty good at it. Then I started pressuring her to leave him for me. I said I’d send her to live with my parents in North Carolina, or my sister in Las Vegas, until he gave up looking for her, but she said he’d never give up, and when he found her, he’d kill her and whoever was giving her shelter, so she just couldn’t do that. I was even looking into those ways of giving someone a new identity when it happened.” His face tightened.
    “You’re saying he’s the one who killed her,” said Betsy.
    “Of course. There was no one else, how could there be? He never let her get close enough to anyone, so there was no one else to love her or hate her enough to do that.”
    “You managed.”
    “And he found out.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because she phoned me from work the day it happened, to warn me to keep away from her, that Paul had gone from suspecting she was fooling around to being sure she was, and that I was involved. He’d actually started writing down the mileage on her car, and it