Conversations no longer eased when he came near. Instead, circles widened to include him.
The same thing had happened to Carolyn.
It was as if the town, recognizing that even the Sturgesses were not immune to tragedy, had closed ranks around them.
And now they wanted Phillip to lead them.
When they arrived at the park twenty minutes later, they found that Phillip did not, after all, have to put on the great display of domesticity that Carolyn had threatened him with. Instead, Norm Adcock grabbed the basket of baby supplies, while four of his men unloaded the beer.
Eileen Russell appeared out of the crowd, and pulled open the front door of the Mercedes, reaching in to take the baby from Carolyn.
“I swear to God, Carolyn,” she said as the other woman released the seat belt and got out, “if you don’t start using that baby seat I gave you, something horrible is going to happen to Amy.”
Then her face turned scarlet as she realized what she’d said, but Carolyn — as she always did at moments like this — ignored the gaffe, knowing it had been unintentional.
“When she gets older, she goes in the seat. For now, I just prefer to hold her.” Then she took Amy back, cradling her gently in her arms.
Amy.
At first both she and Phillip had been reluctant to give the child the name that had come to both their minds even before she was born, but in the end, they realized, there was really no other choice.
But this time, there was no chance that Amelia Deaver Sturgess was going to have anything but a perfectly happy life.
There had been a few shocked looks when people first heard the baby’s name, but after either Carolyn or Phillip had explained to them where the name had come from, and what had happened to the first Amy, people had quickly come to understand.
And Amy, too, had become a part of the healing of Westover.
Carolyn began threading her way through the crowd, doing her best to keep up with Phillip. Everywhere they went, people flocked around them, chatting with Phillip for a few moments, then clucking and cooing over the tiny dark-eyed baby nestled in Carolyn’s arms.
And Amy, her big eyes serious, looked up at all of them almost as if she recognized them, even though she was only six months old.
At last they came to a spot near the back of the park, where the wall separating the park from the railroad tracks lent some shade against the afternoon sun, and the babbling of the fountain in the wading pool made it seem cooler than it actually was. Phillip spread a blanket, and Carolyn gently laid their daughter in its center.
The moment she touched the ground, Amy Deaver Sturgess began screaming.
The spot Phillip had chosen for the picnic blanket was exactly where the little room behind the stairs in the basement of the mill had once been. Though Phillip and Carolyn were unaware of it, their child was not.
For even in her infancy, Amy Deaver Sturgess remembered perfectly everything that had ever happened in that room.
She remembered, and her fury still grew.…
