Soul Survivor Read Online Free Page B

him
     to get right home.
    Bruce’s boss, who was also under pressure because of the massive work attached to their company’s going public, grudgingly
     agreed that Bruce’s place was at his wife’s side.
    Things sort of settled down over the next few days. Neighbors showed up with welcoming pots of food and baskets of flowers
     and lists of where to shop and which drugstores were open on weekends and evenings. It was a mellow moment after a bumpy entrance
     to their new home.
    And life went on. Andrea kept intensely busy putting the finishing touches to the house. Bruce was working fifteen, sixteen,
     seventeen hours a day.
    It was not until Wednesday, March 14, nine days after moving in, and a few days after the Mardi Gras fever had passed, that
     Andrea found time to shop for the matching towels she needed for the bathrooms. She headed for Bed Bath & Beyond, thinking
     that James would be fine in his stroller and that they would also get an introduction to the normal downtown life of Lafayette,
     without the parades and food vendors and tourist madness.
    It was a bright day and she was in a happy mood, the feeling of strangeness in a new town beginning to soften. As they walked
     to the bathroom fixture store, they passed a craft and toy store, Hobby Lobby, where she noticed a display outside—bins filled
     with plastic toys and boats.
    “Oh, look,” said Andrea, plucking a small model propeller-driven plane out of the bin. She handed it to James, who studied
     it. “And there’s even a bomb on the bottom,” she exclaimed, hoping this toy would distract James enough for her to browse
     comfortably for towels.
    But what James said—this little child in diapers—made her stop cold in her tracks. James looked at the toy plane, turned it
     upside down, and proclaimed, “That’s not a bomb, Mommy. That’s a dwop tank.”
    Andrea had no idea what a drop tank was. It was only when she got home that night and talked it over with Bruce that she learned
     that it was an extra gas tank that airplanes used to extend their range.
    “How would he know that?” she asked Bruce.
    Bruce shook his head. Maybe James noticed that there were no fins on the tank—a bomb would have fins.
    But how would he even know that?
    “He can’t even say ‘drop tank,’” she insisted. “He said ‘dwop tank.’ He can’t even say ‘Hobby Lobby’—he says ‘Hobby Wobby.’
     How would he know about a drop tank?
I
never heard of it.”
    It was bewildering, but not anything to worry about. Not yet—not before the nightmares began.

CHAPTER THREE
    W HILE THE BAD DREAMS rattled their nights on West St. Mary Boulevard that spring, and in the fuzzy aftermath of the discombobulating
     move, no one in the Leininger home was thinking too clearly. Too much work and too much worry and not enough sleep were leaving
     both Bruce and Andrea a little dazed and a little battle happy.
    By late May they decided that they needed a break—some distance from the “haunted house” in the White Oaks subdivision. They
     planned to drive the four hundred miles to Dallas, where the extended family was already assembling to celebrate Memorial
     Day, along with a birthday. Hunter, the first child of Andrea’s youngest sister Becky Kyle, would turn four on Monday, May
     28. Andrea and Bruce were also eager to see Becky’s younger child, Kathryn, known as K. K., who was three weeks older than
     James. The two toddlers, both still in diapers, still drinking out of a bottle, and still trying to figure out who was who,
     had a lot in common.
    Becky’s house was in Carrollton, a plush suburb on the northern lip of Dallas. But it was too small to pack in all the incoming
     Leiningers and Kyles, so Bruce and Andrea decided to stay at a nearby motel. (Another factor doubtless went into this decision—a
     vagrant thought, not openly expressed—that James might have another midnight outburst, which would make this holiday unpleasantly
     memorable.) So they