Nightshade

Not the facade, for the columns supporting the porch roof were just as they’d always been. Nor was it the windows, with their dark green shutters hooked open, or the porch or the eaves. Every detail of the house looked the same, and as her eyes wandered over it, she almost convinced herself that she’d been wrong, that nothing had changed at all.

“Mrs. Hapgood?” Petrocelli glanced worriedly in the rearview mirror. Joan Hapgood appeared somehow puzzled, as if she wasn’t quite sure where she was. “Is everything — ” He stopped himself. He’d been about to say “okay,” but how could anything be okay for her right now? Petrocelli licked his lower lip nervously, and began again: “Is there anything I can do for you, Mrs. Hapgood?” For a moment it seemed she hadn’t heard him, but then she slowly came back to life.

“No,” she said, “I — Well, thank you for bringing us home.” The words were little more than a breath of air, and the wan smile she managed appeared to cost her most of what little composure she had been able to muster.

As Matt got out of the backseat and moved around the car to his mother, Petrocelli wondered what he should do. Go in with them? Just wait there until they were in the house? Or head right back to the scene? He tried to figure out what Dan Pullman would do in this situation, but then decided that if it were his own wife who’d died, he wouldn’t want anyone around except maybe a couple of really close friends. “If you need anything…” he began, then his voice trailed off. “I guess I better be going, unless you want something else.”

Neither Joan nor Matt replied, and finally Petrocelli drove on around the circle of the driveway heading back the way he’d come. It was at times like this that he wished he’d gone into partnership with his brother on the pizza parlor. When he glanced back and saw that neither of them had moved, he wondered if maybe he should go back. But what would he say? Feeling utterly inadequate, Tony Petrocelli kept driving.

And Joan Hapgood kept gazing at the house.

Though nothing about it had changed, nothing was the same either, and as she looked at it, she began to understand. It’s not mine anymore. But why? She’d lived in it for ten years, and never had any feeling about it except that it was where she and Bill and Matt lived.

It was home.

In fact, she realized, it had felt more like home than any other place she’d ever been. Certainly the house on Burlington Avenue should have felt like home, but for as long as she could remember, that house had always been associated with her mother’s constant belittlement of everything she did. Nor had any of the places in New York felt like home either, even before she’d found herself unable to support herself and Matt, and been forced to bring him back to her mother’s house. Then, nearly five years later, she’d married Bill and moved here and finally felt as if she truly was at home.

She and Bill and Matt.

But now Bill was dead, and now it didn’t seem like her house anymore.

Now her mother was waiting for her, not Bill.

As if in response to her thoughts, the door opened and Emily Moore came out onto the porch. She stood at the top of the steps, her eyes fixing on her daughter. “Where have you been?” the old woman demanded. “I’m hungry! I want my breakfast!”

The words — so totally unexpected — stunned Joan for a moment, and her eyes clouded with tears. How could her mother be so callous? Then she remembered — in her rush to get to Bill, she’d completely forgotten her mother. She didn’t know what had happened.

“Maybe I should have asked Cynthia for my breakfast,” Emily said. “She would have fixed it for me!”

“Cynthia?” Joan echoed. “Mother, you know — ”

“She was here,” Emily cut in. “She was here this morning! But now I can’t find her either!” Turning away, she started back toward the front door.

“Gram?” Matt called. The old lady turned to peer down at her grandson. “It’s Dad,” Matt said, his voice quivering as he struggled to say the words. “He — He’s dead, Gram. There was an accident, and he — he got shot!”

Emily Moore pursed her lips and appeared to struggle to process what her grandson had just told her. Finally, though, she shook her head. “Accidents don’t happen,” she declared. “There’s always a reason.” She turned away and disappeared back into the house, closing the door behind her.

Joan slipped her hand into her son’s. “She didn’t mean that, Matt,” she said softly. “Most of the time she doesn’t even know what she’s saying.”

Matt’s fingers tightened on her hand, but before he could say anything, they both turned at the sound of a car coming up the drive.

Seconds later Nancy Conroe pulled her Saab to a stop, then jumped out and put her arms around both Joan and Matt.

“I just heard,” she said. “I don’t know what to say — it’s just so — so awful!” With her best friend’s arm around her, the fragile fragments of Joan’s composure collapsed, and she began sobbing helplessly. “It’s all right,” Nancy Conroe crooned, gently smoothing Joan’s hair as if she were a child. Then, hearing her own words, she pulled Joan close. “Oh, God, what am I saying? It’s not going to be all right, is it? But we’ll get through it. Somehow, we’ll all get through it. Now let’s get you both into the house.”

With one arm still around Joan, she put the other around Matt, steering them both up the steps and into the house. “Let’s get some coffee on, and then I’ll — ” Nancy abruptly fell silent, unsure about what she should do. But when Joan said nothing, and Nancy could bear the silence no longer, she said, “I’ll do whatever you need me to do.”

Again there was a silence, then Joan began speaking, and Nancy could hear in her voice that the full reality of what had happened was closing in on her. “We need to call people,” Joan said. “All the people that were coming to Matt’s party tonight…”

“Of course. Where’s the list? Oh, never mind — I know who’s coming as well as you do, don’t I?” She set up the coffee maker, then picked up the phone that sat on the breakfast bar behind the big six-burner cook top.

“And our lawyer,” Joan added, almost as an afterthought. “You’d better call Trip Wainwright too.”

* * *

THE AFTERNOON PASSED in a haze. every now and then a familiar face emerged and Joan would listen to the same words spoken again and again:

“It’s just so terrible — unbelievable!”

“I can’t believe Bill’s gone! How will any of us get along without him?”

“Such a tragedy — how could something like this happen?”

“God works in mysterious ways, but we must trust in Him.”

“If there’s anything I can do, Joan, anything at all…”

But there was nothing anyone could do, and they seemed to know it. Almost as quickly as they uttered the expected platitudes, they left, and by five o’clock the trickle had dwindled away to Arthur Pettis, who wrung his Uriah Heepish hands for the last time and took his leave with promises that she needn’t worry about anything — “insurancewise, your husband was absolutely scrupulous about making sure his loved ones were covered.” She somehow knew that for today at least, there would be no more visitors.

After Nancy Conroe steered the insurance agent to the front door, however, Joan wondered which would be harder to bear: spending the evening alone in the house, or trying to make conversation with all of Bill’s friends.

Bill’s friends?

Where had that come from? Of the somewhat more than half-dozen people who had stopped by that afternoon, bringing some kind of casserole, or cold salad or pie or cake, most had been their friends, people she’d known her entire life.

Except that as they passed through the house, squeezing her hand and offering condolences, she’d begun to sense something. At first she thought it was nothing more than the fact that no one knew quite what to say. But then she started picking up on other things.

Little things.

The glances that some of them had shot toward Matt.

Not that anyone said anything — they’d taken Matt’s hand every bit as warmly as they’d taken her own, and murmured the same words they were speaking to her. But after they’d spoken to her and to Matt, they began