Somewhere Safe With Somebody Good Read Online Free

don’t think she’s the sort to leave her door open if she isn’t home.’
    ‘You seem to know her pretty well,’ he said.
    ‘We’ve had three art classes together. I taught two of them, she taught the other.’
    ‘What about household help?’
    ‘Her housekeeper goes back to Florida around the first of September, she said, and Irene goes back late October.’
    ‘I have an idea—why don’t we head to the Local and forget Chester’s tux? I’ll rent one from Charlotte, they could put it on the plane to Hickory.’
    She wasn’t listening. ‘I’m going inside and look for her, I feel creepy about this.’
    He glanced farther along Bishop’s Lane. Only one neighboring house in view, perhaps half a block away.
    ‘Go in with me,’ she said. ‘Remember what happened to Norma.’
    ‘Okay. I’ll wait downstairs and make feeble excuses when she comes home.’
    But she didn’t come home. While Cynthia called Irene’s name upstairs and down, he ambled about the living room off the foyer, peering at a series of five large oil paintings of what appeared to be the same young girl, signed Irene McGraw. He saw in the faces aninteresting detail so small that he surprised himself by noticing it at all. The eyes of each subject contained a subtle, but compelling, reflection: the nearly minuscule image of the subject. He adjusted his glasses and leaned close. It was as if the large subject were looking at herself dressed in different clothing—a yellow dress. The painted pupil was a miniature gem—to render such a feat required inordinate skill and, perhaps, the merest hair of a sable.
    He looked at his watch, heard Cynthia calling Irene’s name.
    On the grand piano, family photographs in silver frames. A lot of grandchildren, a perfect flock of them. He had missed having grandchildren, but Puny’s two sets of twins had stood in the gap very well.
    He thought of his brother, Henry, so recently known to him after all these years, and of what they’d gone through together in Memphis and Holly Springs, and wondered what his Kavanagh family portrait would look like now, with Henry among them.
    In a large photograph of the McGraws in this very room, the couple was surrounded by roughly two dozen good-looking progeny dressed to the nines. A life had been lived here—all those grandchildren tumbling and laughing, someone shouting, Don’t run in the hall, someone playing the piano, cousins kicking around a football. Like a lot of people who also live in tropical places, they probably spent Christmas and Thanksgiving here, hoping for snow. Now one was missing from this glad company. As for Irene, she would go on and things would be good again—but different, very different.
    He’d always thought Irene an unusually attractive woman, but with a subtle air of sorrow or distraction, as if she were actually living elsewhere and had beamed in a likeness for a fund-raiser. He remembered that she played tennis and wore what his mother had called ‘good’ pearls.
    He was turning away from the photograph when he realized that Chester—ha!—was sporting the much-talked-about tuxedo.
    He moved into the hall as his wife came downstairs.
    ‘She’s not here.’
    ‘I think we should go,’ he said. ‘You could call later.’
    ‘This doesn’t feel right, Timothy. You should see her bedroom. Things thrown all over the place. Not like her. Come and look.’
    Clothes tossed on an unmade bed, drawers pulled out, closet doors standing open, clothing on the floor, an exercise mat with an open bottle of water beside it.
    ‘What do you think?’ she said.
    He shrugged. ‘This is the way a lot of people’s bedrooms look.’ Dooley’s room in the early days of living at the rectory, for instance.
    ‘It doesn’t feel like Irene, she’s fastidious. Always cleans her brushes and palette and puts them away in her carryall.’
    ‘She’s plenty gifted,’ he said. ‘The paintings . . .’
    ‘Yes, and she’s never shown or sold