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silence as she struck the rocks two hundred feet below.

 CHAPTER 3 
    M aryAnne Carpenter jerked upright, her eyes opening wide as the sound of a scream echoed in her head. For a moment she felt totally disoriented, for the voice that had awakened her had been clearly recognizable.
    Audrey.
    Audrey Wilkenson.
    But it was crazy—Audrey was in Idaho!
    It must have been something else. Some other sound. A police siren on the street outside. A cat’s strangely human cry. She started to get out of bed, and only then, startled for a moment, became aware of Alan, sound asleep next to her, the single sheet that covered them shoved down to his waist, one arm curled around his pillow.
    Why hadn’t he awakened, too?
    She silently slipped out of bed, pulled on her robe and left the room, leaving the door slightly ajar, afraid that even the click of the latch might awaken her husband.
    She moved into the living room, leaving the lights off, and dropped down onto the sofa.
    She shouldn’t have let Alan stay.
    She should have simply sent him home when the kids went to bed last night, and not further confused the already complicated situation by letting him seduce her.
    And that was exactly what it was—a seduction.
    He’d helped her with the dishes, then suggested the four of them play a game of Monopoly. She almost groaned with the corniness of it—how many years had it been since the four of them had sat down to play a game together? She couldn’t remember. Yet when Alan had suggested that it“would be just like old times,” she had fallen right into it. But what old times had he been talking about?
    The old times when the four of them had sat in front of the television, just like everyone else, staring at the tube and pretending that their comments on the shows were conversation? It had taken the kids half an hour even to find the Monopoly set, for God’s sake! Who were they kidding?
    Yet she had gone along with it, enjoying the unfamiliar closeness of the family, allowing herself to forget that an evening without television—and without a quarrel between Alison and Logan, for that matter—was something that had rarely happened before, and undoubtedly wouldn’t happen again if she let Alan move back in. Instead, it would be back to business as usual, with the television filling the time between dinner and bedtime, and eventually Alan would begin working late again.
    Working late!
    Maybe that was what the scream in her mind had really been about. Maybe it had been a scream of protest that she was letting herself be sucked back into a marriage that only yesterday she had been quite sure was over. Until Alan had begun nuzzling her at the sink, and then, after the kids had gone to bed, beginning his campaign to spend the night.
    And it had worked.
    Oh, God, had it worked!
    Even now, as she sat in the darkness, she could feel the warmth of his body against hers, the touch of his fingers on her flesh, the—
    Stop it!
she commanded herself.
Just stop it!
    The cry in the night hadn’t been about herself at all.
    The voice hadn’t been hers: it had been Audrey’s!
    She realized, of course, that it hadn’t been her friend at all. It had been her own cry, she thought, regaining a measure of control, that her dreaming mind had assigned to Audrey simply because she didn’t want to face the true depths of her own confusion. What she really needed to do was to
talk
to Audrey. And not in the morning, either, after her subconscious had had a whole night to work her over and make her think that maybe everything wasn’t as bad as it seemed right now.
    Weil, why not? What was stopping her?
    She got up from the sofa, her mind made up. Going to the kitchen, she snapped on the light and glanced at the clock above the sink. One-thirty. Only eleven-thirty in Idaho.
    Even if Audrey had already gone to bed, she couldn’t possibly be asleep yet.
    MaryAnne picked up the phone, dialing the number from memory. The instrument at the other end