To Catch a Rabbit by Helen Cadbury Page B

looked as if she was trying not to cry.
    ‘And where is she now?’
    ‘Johnny says, last he heard, she’s got a place in Florida. He reckons they’ve gone there.’
    Karen looked away from her and out of the window. She wanted to say ‘I don’t believe it,’ but she knew she had no right. She stared out at the dove grey sky over the flat fields and watched a gull wheel in and out of view.
    Karen gripped the dog’s lead tighter, wrapping it round her wrist. Marvin was part Border collie and looked like she might have a tendency to round things up. When Stacey said she needed to collect Holly from a neighbour, Karen offered to take the dog for a walk. She wasn’t sure if Stacey really wanted her there any more, but she wasn’t ready to leave and her sister-in-law was probably too polite to ask her to go. Anyway, she wanted to see her niece now she’d come all this way. A public footpath sign led Karen across a field, pulled along by Marvin. They approached a hawthorn hedge and as the heels of Karen’s boots sank into the soft ground, Marvin pulled harder. At that moment, a small woman with a large German shepherd stepped through a gap from the next field. Karen tried to get past, but she’d forgotten the sociability of dogs. Marvin began to circle the other animal until their leads were completely entangled.
    ‘Come on, Marvin.’
    ‘Oh they love each other these two, old friends they are!’ The woman peered up at her. ‘You a friend of Stacey’s?’
    ‘Sister-in-law. I’m Phil’s sister.’
    ‘Oh.’ She bent down to untangle the dogs and Karen couldn’t see her expression. ‘He’s back then is he?’
    ‘No. I came to see if I could help at all.’
    ‘Such a shame, with a littl’un.’
    ‘I’ve been worried,’ Karen offered. ‘It doesn’t seem like him just to disappear.’
    ‘I usually let Caesar off here, do you think Marvin would like a run?’
    Karen’s arm was aching from the constant pull of the dog. When she unclipped the lead, she and Marvin shared a moment of relief and the two dogs raced away after the scent of a rabbit.
    ‘My name’s Jackie, by the way. Me and my husband Stan, we run The Volunteer Arms.’
    ‘Karen Friedman.’
    It was an oddly formal moment in the damp, dead grass of the field, as she stuck out her hand and Jackie took it with a firm shake. They walked together for a while and Jackie told her about how she met Phil when he first arrived in the village, how she’d offered him a job and what a lovely guy he was, always singing or whistling a tune. Karen found herself sharing a memory of Phil getting into trouble at school for humming and driving the teacher mad. And then it crossed her mind that this was the sort of conversation you have at funerals.
    ‘You older than him, are you?’ Jackie asked.
    ‘Yes, I looked after him when we were little. My Mum had MS, she was ill for a long time.’
    ‘You have a look of Phil. I can see the likeness.’
    She’d always thought how different they were, in habits and behaviour at least, but maybe the code that was written across their features and in their bone structure was stronger than that.
    ‘Did he…Stacey thinks… he may have been seeing other women?’
    ‘Really?’ Jackie peered ahead, as if trying to visualise it. ‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t listen to gossip.’
    The two women walked together without speaking, while the dogs returned, circled them and chased each other away along the edge of the field. Karen found herself thinking about how her mother used to do jigsaw puzzles. She found them harder and harder as her condition worsened, until in the end they only frustrated her. Karen remembered her struggling to force in a piece, which wouldn’t go, and then crying over the loss of that simple function. It was a picture of two retrievers, chasing a rabbit, in an autumn landscape. Now Karen felt like she had a piece of a puzzle in her hand, but she couldn’t see where it fitted.
    ‘Who’s