voice to hers.”
Lincoln sat forward, the meaning of her words at last piercing his fatigue.
“You’ve seen it too.”
“Yes.”
“When?”
She looked down at her hands, grasping the armrests. “It was in late summer. I was fourteen years old, and we had a house by the Boulders. It’s gone, now. Torn down years ago.” Her gaze shifted to the fire and remained there, focused on the sputtering flames. She leaned back, her hair like a halo of silver against the dark fabric of the chair. “I remember that night, it was raining hard. I woke up, and I heard thunder. I went to the window, and there was something in the water. A light. A glow. It was there for only a few minutes, and then…“ She paused. “By the time I woke my parents, it was gone, and the water was dark again.” She shook her head. “Of course they didn’t believe me.”
“Did you ever see the glow again?”
“Once. A few weeks later, also during a rainstorm. Just the briefest shimmer, and then nothing.”
“The night Claire and I saw it, it was raining hard, too.”
Her gaze lifted to Lincoln’s. “All these years, I thought it was lightning. Or a trick of the eyes. But then tonight, for the first time, I learned I’m not the only one who’s seen it.”
“Why didn’t you say something? The town would have listened to you “And people would ask all sorts of questions. When I saw it, which year it was.”
“Which year was it, Judge Keating?”
She looked away, but he saw the flash of tears in her eyes. “Nineteen forty-six,” she whispered. “It was the summer of ‘46.”
The year Iris Keating’s parents had died at the hands of her fifteen-year-old brother. The year Iris, too, had killed, but in self-defense. She had pushed her own brother through the turret window, had watched him fall to his death.
“You understand now why I didn’t speak,” she said.
“You could have made a difference.”
“No one wants to hear about it. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“It was so long ago. Fifty-two years-”
“Fifty-two years is nothing! Look at how they still treat Warren Emerson. I’m just as guilty of it. When we were children, he and I were so close. I used to think that someday, we would…“ She suddenly stopped. Her gaze settled on the fire, by now little more than glowing ashes. “All these years, I’ve avoided him.
Pretended he didn’t exist. And now I hear it may not have been his fault at all, but merely a sickness. An infection of the brain. And it’s too late to make it up to him.”
“It’s not too late. Warren had surgery last week, and he’s fine now. You could visit him.”
“I don’t know what I’d say after all these years. I don’t know that he’d want to see me.”
“Let Warren make that decision.”
She thought it over, her eyes glistening in the dying light of the embers. Then she rose stiffly from the chair. “I believe the fire’s gone out,” she said. And she turned and left the room.
There was a car parked in Lincoln’s driveway.
He pulled up behind it and groaned. Though he had not been home all day, the lights were on in his living room, and he knew what awaited him inside the house. Not again, he thought. Not tonight.
He trudged up the steps to his porch and found the front door was unlocked. When had Doreen stolen his new key?
He found her asleep on the couch. The sour stench of liquor permeated the room.
If he woke her now, there would be another drunken scene, crying and shouting, neighbors awakened. Better to let her sleep it off, and deal with it in the morning when she was sober and he wasn’t reeling from exhaustion. He stood looking down at her, regarding, with a sense of sad bewilderment, the woman he’d married.
Her red hair was matted, shot through with gray. Her mouth hung open. Her sleep was a noisy rhythm of whistles and grunts. And yet he did not feel disgust when he looked at her. Rather he felt pity, and disbelief that he had ever been in love with her.
And a sense of stifling and never-ending responsibility for her welfare.
She would need a blanket, He turned toward the hail closet and heard the telephone ring. Quickly he answered it, afraid that it would wake Doreen and ignite the scene he dreaded.
It was Pete Sparks on the line. “I’m sorry to call you so late,” he said, “but Dr. Effiot insisted. She was going to call you herself if I didn’t.”
“Is this about the slashed tires? Mark already called me about it.”
“No, it’s something else.”
“What happened?”
“I’m at her medical building. Someone’s smashed all the windows.”
16
Glass was everywhere, bright shards littering the carpet, the magazine table, the waiting room couch. Through the broken windows, now open to the night air, wisps of snow slithered in and settled like fine lace on the furniture.
Stunned and silent, Claire moved through the waiting room to the business office. The window above Vera’s desk had been smashed as well, and slivers of glass and broken icicles sparkled on the computer keyboard. Wind had blown loose papers and snow into drifts throughout the room, a blizzard of white that would soon melt to soggy heaps on the carpet.
She heard Lincoln’s boots crunch across the glass. “Plywood’s on the way, Claire. There’s more snow predicted, so they’ll get those windows boarded up tonight.”
She just kept staring down at the snow on her carpet. “It’s because of what I said at the meeting tonight. Isn’t it?”
“This isn’t the only building that’s been vandalized. There’ve been several this week.”
“But this is the second time for me in one night. First my tires. Now this.
Don’t you dare tell me this is a coincidence.”
Officer Pete Sparks came into the room. “Not having much luck with the neighbors, Lincoln. They called in when they heard the breaking glass, but they didn’t see who did it. It’s like that incident down at Bartlett’s garage last week. Smash and run”
“But Joe Bartlett had only one broken window,” she said. “They’ve smashed all of mine. This is going to shut me down for weeks.”
Sparks tried to be reassuring. “It should only take a few days to get those windows replaced.”
“What about my computer? The ruined carpet? The snow’s gotten into everything.
The data will have to be replaced, and all my billing records reconstructed. I don’t know if it’s worth it. I don’t know if I even want to start over again.”
She turned and walked out of the building.
She was huddled in her truck when Lincoln and Sparks emerged a short time later.
They exchanged a few words, then Lincoln crossed the street to her pickup truck and slid into the seat beside her.
For a moment neither of them spoke. She kept her gaze focused straight ahead, and her vision blurred, the twirling lights of Sparks’s cruiser softening to a pulsating haze. Quickly, angrily, she wiped her hand across her eyes. “I’d say the message came through loud and clear. This town doesn’t want me here.”
“Not the whole town, Claire. One vandal. One person-”
“Who probably speaks for a lot of other people. I might as well pack up and leave tonight. Before they decide to burn down my house.”
