Nightshade

some kind of argument.”

He continued speaking, but Joan didn’t hear his words; as the full reality of what had happened broke over her, a wailing scream of grief rose in her throat. “Nooo,” she howled, shattering the eerie quiet that had fallen over the scene. “Noooooo…”

* * *

IT WAS THE ringing telephone that first told Gerry Conroe that something had happened. After twenty years of running the little paper that managed to serve most of Granite Falls’ needs with its one edition a week, he had grown accustomed to a certain pattern: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays were the big news days, if you could really call the stories in the paper news at all. In truth, he thought of most of what he published as features, not news. Perhaps the scores of the high school athletic teams might be considered news; even the latest slate of officers for the Lions Club, Rotary, or the Gardening Ladies might fall into that category. But for hard news the people of Granite Falls turned to the Manchester Guardian rather than the Granite Falls Ledger. Thus, it fell to Gerry to keep them abreast of local doings, and everyone knew that if you wanted something in the paper on Monday morning, you’d absolutely better let Gerry know before lunch on Friday, and even then you’d better be able to convince him that there was a good reason to make changes that close to press time. So in Gerry’s life, Saturday mornings were generally quiet, spent helping his two-person staff finalize the layout of the paper so it could be sent down to Manchester to be printed on Sunday, coming back to Granite Falls just in time to be delivered Monday morning. So when all three of the office lines suddenly lit up at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, he knew immediately that something in town had gone wrong.

And when Kelly, who had started working Saturday mornings a year ago, appeared at his office door — her face ashen and her eyes glistening with tears — he knew it was serious, and very close to home.

Not Nancy. Please, not Nancy.

But when Kelly spoke, the blow her words dealt him was almost as powerful as if she’d told him something had happened to her mother. “It’s Uncle Bill,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “He — They say he’s dead!”

For a moment Gerry Conroe’s mind simply refused to accept it. Dead? Bill Hapgood couldn’t possibly be dead! They’d just had dinner at Bill and Joan’s last night, and this morning Bill was taking Matt —

In a flash, it came to him.

A hunting accident! Another damned hunting accident!

Suddenly, his shock at what had happened was tempered with fury. Every year it was the same — every year he printed the same editorial, questioning the whole idea of men going out hunting deer in this day and age. And every year he heard all the arguments from all his friends: if they didn’t argue that hunting was “in their genes,” they tried to raise it to a constitutional issue.

“What’s the point of having the right to own guns if we don’t own them?” Bill Hapgood himself had argued just a few weeks ago. “And we have to own them — some day we just may need to defend ourselves against our own government. So if we own them, it follows that we should know how to use them.” When Gerry had suggested that Bill had just named the exact purpose of shooting ranges, his friend only laughed. “Don’t give me that nonsense about target shooting — that’s all well and good for a novice, but once a man’s learned to shoot, he wants a challenge!”

And now Bill Hapgood was dead.

Mindlessly, stupidly, dead.

Then, through his anger, he heard Kelly speak again.

“They think Matt might have done it,” she whispered.

Once again his mind reacted without thought. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard — ” he began, but the words died on his lips as he remembered the scene at the Hapgoods’ last night.

Until he’d heard Matt argue with his father, he hadn’t thought him capable of such anger and bitterness.

Except Bill wasn’t Matt’s father.

Bill was Matt’s stepfather.

Not that it had ever made any difference to Bill. How many times had he heard Bill say that Matt was exactly the son he’d always wanted? Recalling the angry dinner, Gerry did his best to banish the idea that came with that memory. What was he thinking of? Was he seriously thinking that Matt might have shot Bill on purpose?

Ridiculous!

It was an accident.

It had to be an accident.

“I’d better get out there,” he said as he pulled on his jacket. “Where did it happen?”

“Not very far from the falls,” Kelly said. She followed him as he walked out of his little office and through the single large room where the two-person staff worked. “I want to go with you, Daddy.”

Her words jolting him to a stop, Gerry Conroe turned to look at his daughter. Go with him? But she was just a little girl!

“I’m almost sixteen,” she said, seeing his thoughts etched on his face. “I’m not a baby anymore.”

“For God’s sake, Kelly — why would you want to go out there?” As she hesitated, he knew exactly what she was going to say, and didn’t need to hear her explanation before he made up his mind. He was already shaking his head when she spoke.

“I want to see Matt. If they really think he — ”

Gerry held up a hand to silence her. “No,” he said. “You’re only fifteen years old. You don’t need to see — ” His throat tightened and he couldn’t bring himself to finish what he’d been about to say. It was going to be hard enough for him to see Bill Hapgood’s lifeless body himself, and he knew it was an image he would never forget. There was no reason for Kelly to have to bear the memory of that image. “No,” he said again, his voice much softer now. He cast about for some words that would neither offend Kelly nor upset her more than she already was. “Look,” he finally went on, reaching out and pulling her into his arms, “it’s going to be crazy out there. There’ll be police, and medics, and God only knows how many other people. I wouldn’t even go myself, except Bill’s my best friend, and I have to be there.”

“But Matt’s my boyfriend — ” Kelly began.

Gerry stiffened, then let his arms drop to his sides. “No,” he said one last time. His voice took on a tone that warned Kelly against pressing him further. “And I really don’t want to argue.” But even as he spoke, the hurt in her eyes made him relent slightly. “Let’s just wait until we know what happened, okay?”

As he drove away from the office, though, Gerry found himself wishing that Kelly had not been dating Matt at all, and in the back of his mind he could hear his own father explaining how to judge his friends. “The apple never falls far from the tree, Gerald,” Jerome Conroe had taught him when he was no more than six or seven. “Know the father, and you will know the son. That’s why you must always know who your friend’s families are.”

But no one except Joan Hapgood knew who Matthew Moore’s father really was. So maybe Bill had been wrong.

Maybe Matthew Moore hadn’t been the son he’d always wanted.

Maybe none of them — not even Bill Hapgood — really knew Matthew Moore at all.

* * *

“MATT?”

His name sounded muffled, as if it were coming from somewhere far off in the distance — or perhaps even from underwater — and it wasn’t until he heard it a second time that he slowly looked up to see his mother standing close to him, her eyes anxious, her face pale. She reached out to touch his cheek, but her fingers were like ice and he reflexively pulled away from the chill of her touch.

Joan winced at the rejection of what she’d intended as a gentle caress, but told herself it meant nothing — that he was still in shock from what had happened. “It’s going to be all right,” she told him softly. “Everything’s going to be all right. I’ll take care of you.”

Again Matt barely heard the words. From the moment when he’d looked down from the top of the bluff and seen his stepfather’s body lying in the thicket of brush next to the stream, something had changed. It was as if in that instant a barrier of some kind had fallen between him and the rest of the world.