The Deep End by Joy Fielding Page B

“Hello? Hello? Is someone there? Why are you doing this?” she pleaded, about to hang up when she heard something. “Did you say something?” she asked, returning the phone to her ear.
    There was a brief pause. Then, “Mrs. Hunter?”
    “Yes?” Joanne tried quickly to place the somewhat raspy sound, but while there was a quality to it that was vaguely familiar, she was unable to determine what precisely it was. Certainly no one who knew her well, or he would have addressed her by her first name.
    “Mrs. Hunter,” the voice repeated.
    “Who is this?” Joanne asked, afraid of the voice though she wasn’t sure why. It defied categorization, she realized, neither young nor old, and curiously sexless.
    “Have you read the New York
Times
this morning, Mrs. Hunter?”
    “Who is this?”
    “Read the morning paper, Mrs. Hunter. There’s something in it that concerns you. Page thirteen of the first section.”
    The line went dead in her hands.
    “Hello?” Joanne repeated, though the caller had already hung up. She sat motionless in bed for several minutes, listening to her heart thumping, her senses heightened, like an animal when it instinctively feels the presence of danger. Whose voice had she heard and why the intrigue? What could there possibly be on page thirteen of the morning paper that would concern her? Something about Paul? she wondered, getting out of bed.
    Pulling her arms through the sleeves of her housecoat, Joanne quietly tiptoed down the stairs to the front door. The girls were still asleep. She wasn’t even sure the
Times
would be there this early.
    It was, she found, lifting the heavy Sunday paper and carrying it into the kitchen, dropping it onto the round pinewood table. The weatherman was calling for rain, she read, checking the increasingly cloudy sky through thesliding glass doors that made up the kitchen’s south wall. She hoped the rain would stop by tomorrow or the men wouldn’t be able to continue work on the pool, and Joanne was eager to have it completed and the strangers who paraded back and forth under her bedroom window out of her life. Especially now that Paul was gone.
    She flipped quickly to page thirteen and took a cursory glance down the various columns, seeing nothing that concerned her. Normally she avoided the front pages of the paper, the information therein usually too depressing and no way to start the day. She reasoned that news that was important for her to know would eventually filter down to her, and she had a definite, if not specific, sense of what was going on in the world. Maybe that hadn’t been enough for Paul, she realized now. He was a lawyer, after all, an educated man, and while she herself was university educated, it was true that in recent years she had insulated herself from as much unpleasant news as possible. Since the death of her parents three years ago, Joanne had regularly read only the entertainment and family sections of the newspaper. It made life easier, she rationalized, as slowly, more carefully, her eyes perused the designated page.
    There was nothing about Paul or his law firm, nothing about anyone she knew. There were just continuations of articles from other pages, something about a union dispute within the garment industry, a report of a roominghouse fire that left four people dead, and some further details about the woman who had been hacked to pieces in her home in Saddle Rock Estates. Joanne shrugged, closed the paper, then quickly reopened it to check out the page beside it. But there was nothing of note on thatpage either. What had the caller wanted her to see? She pushed the first section of the paper away and ferreted out the entertainment section, deciding that maybe she’d take the girls into Manhattan later in the week to see a Broadway play.
    The last play she had seen had been a revival of
Come Blow Your Horn
at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater in Jupiter, Florida, where she and Paul had vacationed briefly the previous year.