Third Degree. Greg Iles

for someone to play with her. If Laurel picked up the bag from behind the shrubs, the corgi might just leap up and rip it out of her hands. She gazed along her own line of shrubs with exaggerated concern, then waved broadly to Mrs. Elfman. “I guess I got it after all! I’ve got to run, Bonnie. The kids are waiting in the car.”

      “I’ll find your sprinkler and make sure,” Bonnie promised.

      Laurel’s heart thumped like a bass drum. “Don’t trouble yourself! Really. I thought I’d left it out here, but I took it back to the storeroom. I remember now. Don’t you get too hot, either. It’s been really warm for April.”

      “Don’t worry about that, it’s going to rain,” Bonnie said with the confidence of an oracle. “It’s going to cool off, too. By the time you get back from school, you’ll need a jacket.”

      Laurel looked up at the sun, clear and bright in the sky. “If you say so. See you later.”

      Bonnie looked miffed over Laurel’s escape. She would have much preferred to stand around gossiping for a half hour. Laurel knew from past experience that like most gossips, Bonnie Elfman was as quick to repeat stories about her as she was to confide in Laurel about others.

      “Shit, shit, shit,” Laurel cursed, as she hurried back around to the garage. The Walgreens bag would have to wait until after school. Christy was trotting at her heels, so the dog was no problem. But Mrs. Elfman wasn’t going anywhere soon. Laurel prayed that the old busybody would stay on her own property until school was out.

       TWO

      Laurel pulled her Acura up to the elementary-school door, leaned over, and kissed Beth on the cheek. Mrs. Lacey had door duty today, and she helped Beth out while Grant sprang out of the backseat like a monkey escaping from a zoo cage and darted into the school building to find his buddies.

      After Mrs. Lacey escorted Beth through the door, Laurel drove around the elementary school and parked in her reserved space beside the Special Students building. It was a small brick box, two classrooms with a unisex bathroom and an office, but it was better than nothing, which was what Athens Country Day had had for the past fifty years. A generous endowment by a local geologist had made the building possible. He had a niece in New Orleans who was mildly retarded and so understood the need.

      Laurel looked down at her computer and purse, which had lain under Beth’s feet during the drive over, but she didn’t reach for them. The engine was still running; she made no move to switch it off. She wasn’t sure she could face what lay ahead. Her students could be trying enough, but today she had parent conferences, and her first was with the wife of her former lover.

      The prospect of facing Starlette McDavitt while pregnant by the woman’s husband was almost unendurable. If Starlette weren’t the first appointment, Laurel would have tried to cancel the meeting. But it was too late for that.

      She didn’t know she was crying until she tasted tears in her mouth. It wasn’t the impending appointment, she realized. It was that she didn’t know for sure whose baby she was carrying. The odds were, it was Danny’s. They had ended their affair five weeks ago, but in the three weeks prior to that—the three weeks after her last period—they had made love at least a dozen times. She’d only had intercourse with Warren twice since her last period, both times after she and Danny had ended it. She hadn’t even wanted sex with Warren, but how else could she make an honest try? And what alternative did she have but to try, given Danny’s decision? Walk out on Warren to live alone in some lonely apartment, surrounded by other divorcées and waiting for a man who couldn’t come to her for another fourteen years, if ever? Not an attractive option even before she was pregnant. Now …

      Laurel wasn’t even sure whether a fetus conceived while you were on the pill was viable or not. She would have to look it up on the Internet. She should already have done it, but that kind of practical act didn’t square with her strategy of intense denial. She still couldn’t believe she was pregnant. She was on the pill, for God’s sake! Ninety-eight percent effective! How could she be in the unlucky 2 percent? She’d had some bad luck in her life, but never the worst luck. It was the rotavirus, she knew. Last month, she had somehow contracted the same gastrointestinal virus that had required the quarantining of major cruise ships. CNN had said the virus was sweeping the country: people were simultaneously puking and pooping from coast to coast. Three to five days of that, Laurel had learned, could eject from the system the progestin contained in a woman’s birth control pills. Since she’d had sex almost every other day last month, pregnancy must have been a near certainty.

      She laid her forehead against the steering wheel and allowed herself a single sob. She’d always believed she was a strong woman, but now fate had colluded with chance—and stupidity—to make the prospect of raising an illegitimate child in her husband’s house a reality.

      And that she could not face.

      There are probably women doing it, said a rebellious voice in her head. Right here in this town. Desperate to avoid thinking of her impending meeting with Starlette, Laurel spun through the possibilities. If you were going to be stuck in a loveless marriage for the rest of your life, that “love child” might be your only link to sanity, or at least to the life that might have been. But could she live a lie for the rest of her life? She had found it difficult enough to lie about even small things over the past year, to bring off the thousand tiny deceptions that an extramarital affair required. The thrill of the forbidden had lasted about three weeks for her, and after that, the lies had begun to produce a sort of psychic nausea. Every lie generated the need for a dozen others—lies and sub-lies, Danny called them—sprouting like heads on an endlessly replicating Hydra. Yet she had worked hard to maintain the charade of normalcy. She’d even become good at it—so good that lying had become automatic. She felt the dishonesty corroding her soul, yet still she lied, so desperately did she need the love that Danny McDavitt gave her.

      Yet what she was contemplating now was no simple deception. She wouldn’t be the only one lying. She would be forcing her unborn child into a lie from the moment of its birth. Its very life would be a lie. And what about Warren? He would try to love this baby, but would he actually feel love? Or would he sense something alien in the little interloper in his house? Something inexplicably but profoundly wrong? A disturbing scent? A genetically dissonant sound? A shiver at the touch of skin or hair? And of course, the baby wouldn’t look like Warren—it couldn’t—except by the merest chance.

      Laurel actually knew one woman who had done it. Kelly Rowland, a sorority sister at Ole Miss who had become pregnant by a one-night stand while engaged to the boy she had been dating for three years. Kelly’s fiancé had been a good, stable, somewhat bland boy of medium attractiveness and excellent financial prospects; in short, the ideal husband for a sorority girl at Ole Miss. Kelly had always insisted that her fiancé wear condoms religiously during sex, so it struck Laurel as odd when Kelly allowed one of the houseboys—a devastatingly hot soccer player—to screw her brains out sans protection one night after a candlelight ceremony for one of the other sisters. But when Kelly learned she was pregnant, she had simply moved up her wedding date, scheduled her own candlelight ceremony, and never looked back. That was thirteen years ago, and the couple were still married and living in Houston.

      Laurel drew no inspiration from this memory. But what was the alternative? Abortion? How could she abort the child of the man she truly loved? And even if she convinced herself she could bear that, how could she tell her husband she wanted an abortion? You get the abortion without telling him you’re pregnant, said a cold, Darwinian voice. With dread she pictured herself running a gauntlet of antiabortion protesters to sit alone in the waiting room of some distant women’s clinic. She’d have to go at least three states away to avoid any possibility of being recognized, and even then the physician might—

      A fist rapped on the window beside Laurel’s head.

      She jerked away from the noise like a woman being carjacked, then looked back to see Diane Rivers, the third-grade homeroom teacher, mouthing