Author: Rick Hautala; Kellianne Jones; Gary Braunbeck
Date: 2011-02-09 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: An average American family: father John, mother Julia, and thirteen year-old daughter Bri journey back to Glooscap Island, Maine, the place of John’s birth and early childhood, to care for his father Frank, who’s suffered a stroke. John is less than thrilled with this move. They soon find they are being stalked by a kind of wraith that seems to be related to a dark secret from someone’s past.
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Winter Wake

by

Rick Hautala

A revised edition with a new introduction published by

Necon Ebooks at Smashwords

Revised Edition Copyright 2010 Rick Hautala

Introduction Copyright 2010 Gary Braunbeck

DEDICATION:

To Bob Booth … for years of friendship.

CONTENTS

Introduction by Gary Braunbeck

A Brief Note from the Author

PART ONE: Clotho-the Spinning Fate

ONE: Coming Home

TWO: Church Wood

THREE: Unloading

FOUR: First Day Jitters

FIVE: Meeting Audrey

SIX: A Certain Slant of Light

SEVEN: Frank and Julia

EIGHT: Trick or Treat

PART TWO: Lachesis-the Assigning Fate

NINE: Wharf Rats

TEN: High School Memories

ELEVEN: After the Storm

TWELVE: “Dem Bones”

THIRTEEN: Fish Bait

FOURTEEN: Ice Maiden

FIFTEEN: Nor’easter

SIXTEEN: Father and Son

PART THREE: Atropos — the Cutting Fate

SEVENTEEN: Wish List

EIGHTEEN: Christmas Eve

NINETEEN: DOA

TWENTY: Suspicions

TWENTY-ONE: “See what he did ...”

TWENTY-TWO: Storm Watch

TWENTY-THREE: The Blizzard

TWENTY-FOUR: Across the Bay

EPILOGUE: Waiting to be Born

Rick Hautala, Samuel Beckett, Frank Marino, and Winter Wake: An (Answerless) Equation That Would Make Stephen Hawking Give Up and Go Into a Gloomy Room to Weep.

by Gary A. Braunbeck

Read the following line and remember it; it’s going to be important later. Or maybe not. You never know:

“‘I’m serious,’ he said, his expression grim and serious.’”

That beauty – which haunts me to this day – was from the original 1989 Warner Books release of the novel you are about to read. Note the date of original publication – it right at the cusp of horror’s so-called “halcyon days” in the late-80s – early 90s, a time when publishers couldn’t get the stuff out fast enough and readers couldn’t buy it in enough quantities. What should have been a formulae for glorious success quickly turned into a (pardon the cliché, but seeing as we’re talking about horror in the 80s and 90s …) a recipe for disaster. Because the public couldn’t get enough, publishers and many you-should-pardon-the-expression writers were churning out … let’s be courteous and call it work of sub-standard quality. A lot of horror writers whose work was all over the place and were rapidly be hailed as new “household names” by their publishers are now little more than trivia questions under the Whatever Happened To …? subject line on dark fiction discussion boards. Their work is now consigned to used-book stores, and those of us who were around back then spot these names and book titles and feel a momentary wave of nostalgia … then the embarrassment and nausea kicks in and we flee to the Dickens, the Poe, the Lovecraft, Straub, King, Barker, and eventually to drinking alone in a darkened living room, trying to kill those memories and staunch the scent of horror’s first bout of explosive diarrhea.

Not exactly a literary pinnacle for the field (I refuse to use the word “genre”), is what I’m saying.

However, some really good stuff got lost in the shuffle. Case in point, Winter Wake, which, despite a few clunks here and there -- “‘I’m serious,’ he said, his expression grim and serious.’” -- could still stand tall above the majority. The clunky areas can be attributed to both youthful impatience on Hautala’s part and the often-unreasonable deadlines writers were working under at the time. (The late J.N. Williamson once had to deliver a novel to Zebra Books in – get this – twenty-five days from their acceptance of his proposal package. (For those of you unfamiliar with that term, a proposal package is the first 3 chapters or 50 pages of a novel, along with a 2-page, single-spaced synopsis of the remainder of the story. Even with 50 pages already finished, can you imagine what it must have been like to have to write, revise, and deliver an entire novel in less than a month? Is it any wonder than even several quality writers such as Williamson occasionally coughed up something as resplendently awful as Queen of Hell? Plus it damn near killed him and paid a pittance -- $3,000.00 – to boot.)

All of that might be important later. Or maybe not. You never know.

The ‘89 edition of Winter Wake was also blessed with one of the most gaudily gruesome covers of the decade. I’m not even going to try to describe it – go online and find it for yourself; you’ll be glad you did. It still has a strange, compelling kind of beauty to it, though I often hid the book in a newspaper as I read it in public.

The novel also put Hautala on the brink of becoming a Big Name. And that’s where Samuel Beckett and Frank Marino come into the equation. Take off your Stephen Hawking Hats, because you’ll never figure this out, either.

What does Samuel Beckett have to do with any of this? Well, in the early 1970s, Beckett, for the first and only time, directed a stage version of his Waiting for Godot in London. It enjoyed a respectful limited run but received decidedly mixed reviews, mostly because Beckett, having come back to his most popular but least-favorite play, directed the actors to move and speak in an almost robotic fashion, all but annihilating the Absurdist humor that made – and still makes – the play a classic. One critic from The Sunday Times remarked that audience members should keep in mind that “…the Samuel Beckett who directed this production is not the same Beckett who wrote Godot thirty years ago …” Some critics even accused Beckett of displaying his near-contempt for the piece by directing in such a manner so as to destroy its original tone and the memories of past productions’ warmth and humanity.

Sensibilities can change in an instant, and thirty years’ worth of changing sensibilities can cause a writer to re-examine and/or re-interpret his or her work in ways that do more damage than they do any enriching of the original.

The Rick Hautala who so painstakingly revised this version of Winter Wake is not the same Rick Hautala who wrote it over twenty years ago. His sensibilities have changed, his literary concerns have deepened, and his prose is now a richer reflection of much more patient, thoughtful, and self-critical craftsman.

Which is to say you needn’t worry that he’s somehow ruined the novel he wrote over two decades ago; if anything, he’s streamlined much of the narrative, more fully developed the humanity of his characters (which was pretty damned impressive to begin with), and turned the volume on the creepiness factor up to 11 – but without grandstanding or drawing attention to the writing or his intent as the writer, no small achievement.

Here’s the thing; Winter Wake, in its original form, and for its sometimes clunky prose and plot-holes, was about something, and I will forgive a novel many faults if its thematic concerns strive toward more than giving the reader a good scare, chill, or gross-out. I’m a little snobbish that way. What Hautala has done here is comparable to the breathtaking sleight-of-hand William Peter Blatty pulled on us when he re-wrote Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane to give us the magnificent The Ninth Configuration. And Hautala has done it for the same reason as Blatty; he was never happy with the original, could see only the flaws, the missed opportunities, the moments of self-indulgence or self-consciousness.

You don’t always get it right the first time. Sometimes it takes twenty years to get it right.

That may be important later on. Or maybe not. You never know. I say this seriously, with a grim and serious expression on my face.

Now Frank Marino enters the equation, and Hawking’s Tears begin.

I know – know for a fact, do you hear me? – that a full 98% of you have no effing idea who Frank Marino is, and if you love, like I do, really exquisite and overpowering blues-rock-jazz guitar, your musical life is all the poorer for it.

Frank Marino is the guitarist for a group called Mahogany Rush, who came this close to superstardom in the mid-70s. They still record and tour, as does Marino as a solo act, but few will recall albums like Maxoom, Tales of the Unexpected, World Anthem, and a minor masterpiece called Strange Universe (which, as far as I’m concerned, was the inspiration for other great metal bands like Tool and Dream Theatre, but I digress). In 2007, Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush released a live album called, simply enough, Real Live. It is, hands-down, one of the 10 finest live albums ever recorded by any band, and contains guitar work by Marino that is nothing short of astonishing – hell, he plays “Red House” better than Hendrix did. His virtuosity is right up there beside that of Hendrix, Roy Buchanan, Rory Gallagher, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Pat Metheny, Emily Remler, John McLoughlin, and Steve Morse – and in a few cases, Marino’s fretwork surpasses some of them. He’s that good. So why haven’t you heard of him and Mahogany Rush? Confuses the shit out of me. But now, hopefully, I’ve piqued your curiosity enough to seek out the work of Marino and company.

What’s the Hautala/Marino connection that further confuses this equation? In 1989, Rick Hautala’s name was high up on many peoples’ reading lists. It’s the last third of 2010 as I write this, and for some reason, Rick’s name has slipped through the cracks; and like the obscurity of Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush, there’s no good goddamn reason for it. Here we have a writer who for the past decade has been producing some of best work in the field, a majority of it coming from the small press. Rick’s last appearances in the mass-market ended a couple of years ago with the publication of the last in a series of heart-wrenching and mind-bending ghost story novels published under the pseudonym of “A.J. Matthews” by Berkley Horror (this was back when publishers still put that word on the spines of their books). The confidence, depth of feeling, multi-leveled characterization, and ominous tone that was the trademark of these fine novels is on full display here in this (most definitely) “preferred” version of Winter Wake. It begins with that old chestnut, the dreaded Family Reunion Under Difficult Circumstances, but it quickly becomes so much more than a mere familial fable of deep dark secrets and the ghosts that accompany them.

There is an ongoing sequence throughout this novel wherein one of the major characters keeps having repeated dream-memories of a real-life past event that at first seems, well, sad and tragic, but every time this dream-memory occurs, something has been altered. This is one difficult mother of a chore to pull off in a novel, because each time you go through the sequence, a lot of it’s the same as last time. Something like this can wear on a reader’s patience in a hurry, but in Hautala’s hands, it becomes something akin to a metaphysical Greek Chrous warning the audience that all is not as it seems. By the time the revelation hidden deep within this dream-memory (and the character’s crumbling denial of the truth) is revealed, your heart may very well be trying to squirt out through your rib-cage; and the final fifth of Winter Wake achieves a level of operatic grandeur with one of the longest and most jaw-dropping set-pieces I’ve ever encountered, taking place in a wicked blizzard that gains momentum and destructive power as the dark forces coalescing around the Carlson family turn Glooscap Island into a place of broken spirits and frozen life-death. Think of the finales of Ghost Story and Bag of Bones combined and streamlined, with a dash of both Poe and Lovecraft added to the mix, and you’ll have some idea what you’re in for.

Rick Hautala’s work deserves to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers who have had their fill of Hannibal lector-wannabes, Romero knockoffs, and minor-league Lestats posing as angsting teenagers with perpetual scowls that are supposed to pass as characterization.

The re-issue of Winter Wake trumpets with loud fanfare the ferocious second wind of one of our most underrated story-tellers. You should hop on the New Hautala Express, or else you’ll wind up weeping alongside Hawking while listening to Frank Marino and reciting passages from Godot as you try to discover why you missed out.

-- Gary A. Braunbeck, Lost in Ohio, Sept. 2010

A BRIEF NOTE

The republication of an early novel must always give a writer pause. I had a very long and frustrating pause with this particular project.

When Bob Booth first said he wanted to republish Winter Wake as part of the NECon Classics, I was — of course — flattered and thrilled to have what, in memory, anyway, has always been one of my personal favorites of my own books. Unlike some authors, I never go back and re-read or even browse through my earlier books. They are what they were when I wrote them, and I have decided to leave them alone.

But republishing Winter Wake required that I look over the electronically scanned text, and let me tell you — while the story was (I think) fairly solid, all I saw where awkward constructions, faulty syntax, clunky dialog, lousy punctuation, and way too much “rumination” on the part of the characters. Naturally, I was sorely tempted to revise, rewrite, and restructure the whole damned thing. Point of fact, I started doing exactly that. The red-lined version looked like the computer screen had been hit by an arterial spurt or two. Before long, though, I found myself getting frustrated. I wanted to firebomb the whole damned novel and start from the ground up.

And then my good buddy Matt Costello (who was gently reinforced by Holly) made it clear to me that Bob was publishing what he considers a “classic” horror novel. Here I was, on the verge of coming up with “New Coke” to replace the old “Classic Coke.” Why not, Matt and Holly asked, let it stand as it is?

Please don’t even begin to think that I consider this book — or anything else I’ve written — to be a true “classic.” Far from it. I am painfully aware that I was a very young man when I wrote Winter Wake. It was, after all, only my fifth completed novel. I had a lot to learn (and still do) about the art and craft of writing and story telling. This particular book reflects a young man’s concerns and perspectives — some honest and true; some callow and (to be kind) “immature.”

But I had to make a decision, and ultimately that was to leave the book almost exactly as it was originally published — scabs, warts, divots, and all. There was a much longer opening scene that explained in more detail the death of Bri’s cat, Bungle, that was cut due to length considerations. I see now where I could have engaged in other, more judicious pruning. Yes, I have removed my (youthful) overuse of exclamation points(!), and I have tweaked a few sentences here and there, but this book as you’re reading it is 99.9% the way it was when it was originally published by Warner Books.

For better or worse, here is Winter Wake, alive and breathing again thanks to Bob Booth and the NECon Classics line of e-books.

Enjoy!

(… There I go with the exclamation point again …)

Rick Hautala

July 8, 2010

Westbrook, Maine

Do you not see from what
acts of yours you suffer as you do?

To destruction self-inflicted
you fall so shamefully.

— Sophocles

PART ONE

Clotho — the Spinning Fate

In the shadow of the hill,

Shall my soul be upon thine,

With power and with a sign.

Though thy slumber may be deep,

Yet thy Spirit shall not sleep;

There are shades which will not vanish,

There are thoughts thou canst not banish.

— Lord Byron

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,

And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

— Shakespeare

ONE

Coming Home

I

As John Carlson drove, his mind sifted through thoughts and speculations about what lay ahead — for both him and his family. After leaving home almost twenty years ago, there wasn’t much comfort in the prospect of coming back to Glooscap Island. Hell, why not admit it? There wasn’t any for him. Of course his wife, Julia — as usual — was making the best of the situation, but that only made it worse.

The bottom line was — his father, Frank, needed help. Last spring, he had suffered a stroke that had left him partially paralyzed on the left side and subject to blackouts and memory lapses. The stroke was “very minor,” as the doctor had said, but still worrisome. So he and Julia had been given two rather obvious options — either put him into an elderly care unit, hospital, or nursing home, or else move back to Maine and live with him so they could be there to help. If he had wanted to spend the rest of his life sleeping on the couch — or out in a snow bank — he would have said no when Julia insisted they move back to the island.

As it turned out, the land-surveying company John worked for in Vermont had connections with the Atkins Construction Company in Portland. His boss quickly arranged for an interview, and he got the job. So with a job and a place to live — on an island in Casco Bay with an ocean view, no less — things should have been ... well, maybe not rosy, considering his father’s situation, but certainly not as depressing as the cold, rainy drive.

He noticed he was holding the steering wheel too tightly — even for such bad driving conditions. His bottom line — ignoring Julia’s — had been that he didn’t want to move back home … not to Maine, not to Glooscap Island, and certainly not to his father’s house. It was like being sucked down a funnel, right back to the one place he didn’t want to be. He knew damned right well that “you can never go home again,” and his response had always been — Who the Christ would want to?

“I think it looks kinda spooky,” Bri said as she stepped out of the car and looked down the stretch of the suspension bridge leading over to Glooscap Island. Even with the hood of her raincoat pulled tightly around her face, strands of her light brown hair stuck out and fluttered in the wind until the pelting rain matted them down. Usually, Bri’s eyes sparkled with the youthful excitement of a thirteen-year-old, but now they were dark with apprehension.

“I hope it’s not a bad omen,” Julia said. She was standing with John beside the U-Haul truck no more than fifty feet from the bridge. They had stopped to check a flapping sound coming from the trailer, but John was relieved to find it wasn’t a flat tire, as he had feared. Bri had gotten out to stretch her legs after such a long drive. October rain came down like hard pellets, rattling the truck top and their raincoats. The road over the bridge seemed to dance, vibrating with energy. Pencil-thin streams dripped from the brims of their slickers, and Julia’s sneakers made squishy sounds when she shifted from one foot to the other.

Across the narrow bay, Glooscap Island was shrouded in fog. The land looked an amorphous gray, darker than the sky that seemed to breathe and swell. The island actually seemed to change shape in the shifting mists. Close to the end of the bridge, Julia could barely make out a few houses — or maybe fishing shacks. She wasn’t sure. The water in the bay was black and gray, capped by white wind-blown scud. The air was tangy with salty.

The bridge, so John had told her, had been built back when he was a boy growing up on the island. He had told her how the island people had divided into two quite hostile camps — those for and those against connecting Glooscap to the mainland. Before the bridge, people had gotten to and from the mainland in one of two ways — either on the Casco Bay Lines ferry or in their own boat. Those folks opposed to the bridge saw easy access to the island as a threat to their independence and their quiet way of life. Those in favor of the bridge viewed it as a way to increase the population — and real estate value — of the land. Easy access meant more people, more houses, more summer folk, more jobs if you ignored the impact on the fishermen and lobstermen. In sum, it meant more money. Regardless, the bridge’s existence was evidence of which side had the greater pull in the state house. It all depended on your point of view whether you thought it gave the Glooscap residents the best of both worlds ... or the worst.

II

When they arrived at the house, Julia waited in the street with the car running while John slowly backed the U-Haul up the driveway to the garage door. Actually, it was an old barn converted into a garage that connected to the house by a breezeway. All but one of the windows along the top of the garage door were cracked or broken.

Surrounded by maple trees, the house sat on the corner lot between Shore Drive and Oak Street. It was a typical New England cape, a bit larger than Julia remembered from previous visits to the island ... larger and much more rundown. The formerly white paint on the clapboards had weathered to a dull yellow. The sheltered sides were chipped and peeling; the front had practically been stripped down to bare wood. Rain slanting in off the ocean gave the house a mottled, sickly look.

Time for a coat or two of Sears’ Best, Julia thought as she surveyed the house.

The dull gray shingles on the roof were curling with age —”fish-lips,” as the locals called them. It looked as though the next strong gust of wind — certainly the first northeaster this winter — would tear them away along with the antique storm windows with their green felt-lined frames. No newfangled doors and aluminum combination windows, much less triple-pane thermoseals, for this house. The door in the breezeway sagged to one side, obviously loose on its hinges.

The maple trees in the side yard were spindly and gray, permanently bent landward from the prevailing sea winds. Their branches reached skyward like tired skeleton’s hands, grasping but never grabbing hold of the tattered clouds. Braced between two old maples was a stack of unused firewood which, by the rotted looks of it, would remain unused. All in all, the scene pretty much reflected how Julia was feeling inside — dull and dreary. She needed something to cheer her up, soon.

Julia drummed her fingers on the steering wheel as she watched John get out of the truck, go into the house by the breezeway door, and then, from the inside, run up the door. She wondered if he could fit the U-Haul inside, the garage was such a cluttered mess, but John dashed out to the truck, started it up, and, leaning out into the rain, backed it on in. The front end of the truck barely made it inside so he could close the door — not that the rain couldn’t pour in through the broken windows.

But only a portion of Julia’s attention was on what John was doing. Most of her mind was occupied with thoughts about the house — their new home. She hoped it wasn’t as bad as her first impression. Of course, she couldn’t have expected Frank to keep the place up — not after his stroke. The rain didn’t help her mood. It beat down on a summer’s worth of tangled weeds and uncut grass, and muddy runoff streaked the driveway.

She had wanted to take Bri into the house as soon as they got there, but she also wanted John to be the first to greet his father. In spite of their agreed-upon arrangements, they had set up the whole business of moving in with him over the phone, and she was nervous about their first face-to-face meeting.

Looking up at the large house — God, in this weather, it looks like Noah’s ark, she thought — she began to wonder if they were doing the right thing after all. She wasn’t blind to the heavy responsibilities they were taking on, even with the help of a visiting nurse, who was supposed to stop by daily. But the reality of it hit her hard.

John, meanwhile, had run the garage door down and was standing in the shelter of the breezeway, waving for her to bring the car up the driveway. Julia put the car into gear and drove right up to the barn door and cut the engine. John began to unload the car as Julia and Bri got out and approached the kitchen door of their new home.

Sitting in his wheelchair, Frank Carlson — Bri’s new grandfather — was waiting for them in the kitchen. If the house had appeared more run-down than Julia remembered, then Frank appeared much worse. Her strongest memory of him was of a hearty, robust man who, in spite of being six feet tall and weighing over two hundred pounds, had carried himself with grace and an easy strength. The frail man sitting in a chrome-plated wheelchair, his thin legs covered by a frayed patchwork afghan, looked like an entirely different person. Only his face, which was much thinner and more wrinkled, remained the same.

“Frank,” Julia said, approaching him cautiously, as though he were an animal she didn’t want to spook. “Nice to see you again. How have you been?”

Frank made a smacking sound with his lips as he ran his fingers through his baby-thin gray hair. His eyes suddenly clouded over as he looked from Julia to Bri and back again to Julia. He shifted in the wheelchair, the motion almost knocking off the tattered slipper from his left foot.

“You ain’t Abby, are yah?” he said, his brow furrowing.

“No, no,” Julia replied. “I’m Julia ... John’s wife. Remember?”

“‘Course you are,” Frank said, his eyes suddenly brightening. Then his voice dropped to a low rumble. “Well, hell — I’ve been better.”

“You’ve never met Brianna before,” Julia said. “Bri, this is your Grandfather Carlson.”

“It’s-umm, very nice to meet you,” Bri said, sounding to Julia like a schoolgirl reciting a memorized line.

She held out her hand to Frank, and after regarding her a moment, he held up his own hand and they shook. Bri was surprised by the warm strength of the man’s grip. His hand was callused and hard from a lifetime of work, but there was also gentleness when he touched her. When they broke off, she found herself staring at the blue veins and tendons that stood out beneath the thin, nearly translucent skin on the back of his wrinkled hand.

“Why don’t I heat up some water for tea,” Julia said, cutting into the awkward silence. She rubbed her shoulders and shivered. “By the time John gets inside, he’ll be chilled to the bone.”

“I got some Salada,” Frank said as he started to roll his wheelchair over toward the kitchen counter. “None of that fancy-pants herbal stuff.” He pronounced the “h” in herbal. Only Bri caught the little twinkle dancing in his eyes as he said this. She smiled back at him.

“I’ll get it,” Julia said, halting him. She went over to the stove and picked up the teakettle and inspected it before giving it a quick rinse and filling it with cold water from the tap. Its bottom was blackened.

Frank grunted. “Works well enough … I just can’t always get to it fast enough.” He slapped his hand down on the armrest of the wheelchair. Pulling back hard on the wheels, he swung over to the table. The tendons in the backs of his hands stood out as thick as pencils as he moved, and both Julia and Bri saw his neck tighten with the effort.

As the water was heating up, Julia rummaged around in the cupboards, looking for cups and sugar. Frank seemed unwilling to tell her where to look, so she took the opportunity to go through the cupboards. She noticed that all of the food and only a few dishes, bowls, cups, and glasses were on lower shelves within easy reach of someone who no longer could stand up. What surprised her, though, was the cleanliness of the kitchen. Everything was in order, stacked neatly away. From the condition of the outside of the house, she had expected to walk into a pigsty. This was a pleasant surprise.

Julia found the sugar bowl on one of the higher shelves. She figured Frank didn’t use it. When she took the lid off, she was even more convinced — the sugar had dried to a single, solid lump. She put four cups on the table, and then leaned back against the counter while she waited for the teakettle to start whistling.

Bri was standing by the kitchen window, looking out into the back yard. She jumped with surprise when her grandfather spoke close behind her.

“There’s a much betta’ view out the living room window,” he said. “Storm like this can really send the waves up over the rocks.”

“Oh. I’ll have to go see,” she said.

Once Bri had left to check out the view, the silence in the kitchen got thicker. It wrapped around Julia like a heavy coat. She was trying desperately to imagine John growing up in this house, but she couldn’t picture him living here. Of course, back then things would have been much different. Frank would have been young and strong, like John was now. Dianna, Frank’s mother, would have had her drinking, which would eventually kill her, under control; and John and his brother, David — who, unlike John, hadn’t been lucky enough to return from Vietnam — would have been racing through the house, whirlwinds of noise and activity.

But no matter how hard she pushed her imagination, she simply couldn’t conjure up those ghosts from the past. This had been the home of a solitary, crotchety old man for too long.

“I have to say, you do seem to have gotten along quite well before now,” Julia said. She winced as soon as the words were out of her mouth, realizing how they might easily be taken the wrong way.

Frank, who apparently was used to taking things the wrong way, snorted. His left hand, lying stiffly in his lap, twitched slightly.

“I mean,” Julia continued, “the house is — it isn’t a ...” She rubbed her hands together and was grateful when the teakettle started whistling shrilly and she could turn her attention to it and let her sentence die.

“I been having Hilda Marshall do a bit of housework a coupl’a times a week,” Frank said.

“Well, I guess from now on you won’t have to,” Julia said. She finished filling the four cups, then went over to the window to see if she could catch any sign of John. She rinsed the kettle again, shook it empty, and put it back onto the stove.

Frank made a soft chuckling sound and shook his head. “I been sayin’ all along it weren’t necessary for you and John to do this, yah know.”

Julia turned and looked at him. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out. She was thinking, If John didn’t want us to come here, and he doesn’t want us here ... did I really force the issue this far?

And in spite of all her altruistic motives based on family ties and needs, for the first time Julia wondered what she had gotten herself and her family into.

“Bri ... Honey,” she called out, forcing a steadiness into her voice that she didn’t feel. “Why don’t you go out and get your father. Tell him I have some hot tea for him.”

Bri came running from the living room, but she only got halfway to the kitchen door before John swung the door open and, in a gust of wind-blown rain, stepped inside. He shivered as he sloughed off his raincoat. His face looked pale and tense, almost frightened as he glanced at his father and nodded a silent greeting.

“So,” his father said, his voice rumbling in his chest like distant thunder. “After all these years you finally come home to stay.”

TWO

Church Wood

I

“We probably ought to take a look around, don’t you think?” Julia asked. She had gotten up from the table and was putting the empty teacups on the counter beside the sink. She would wash them later, after they had supper. The surprise would have been if Frank had an automatic dishwasher.

Rain was still rattling against the windows, but with the furnace rumbling like a friendly beast in the basement and the ceiling light spreading a warm, yellow glow all around, the kitchen was cozy. The only chill had been the not-so disguised tension between John and his father.

A blast furnace at full tilt, Julia thought, might thaw that out.

“You’ll have to ‘scuse me from helpin’ yah,” Frank said. “I think Johnny remembers where everything goes.”

He pushed his wheelchair away from the table and started moving toward the living room, where Bri, her tea getting cold on the coffee table, was sitting on the couch, looking out at the storm-tossed ocean.

Once Frank was out of hearing, Julia sighed and shot John a withering look.

John took a breath and shook his head, covering his face with his hands as he rubbed his eyes.

“I’m beat from the drive,” he said by way of excuse, but when Julia didn’t respond, he nailed her with a look and said, “This isn’t going to work out, you know.” His voice was muffled by his hands. “I knew it all along, and I tried to tell you.”

Julia was standing at the sink, her fists tightened.

Granted, their first hour in the house had been tense, but she was convinced that it was only a matter of time before everyone adjusted.

“He’s used to being alone,” she said, nodding toward the living room. She could hear the soft buzzing of voices as Frank and Bri talked. “After an active life like he’s had, don’t you think you’d be a bit resentful, being confined to a wheelchair?”

John shook his head and, sighing, leaned back and looked up at the ceiling light. The cheap cut glass made the glow spin in watery circles in his vision.

“I think he’s done pretty well, considering what he’s had to adjust to,” Julia continued. “I mean, feeling so confined and so dependent on other people ... no wonder he’s a little cranky.”

John laughed at that and suddenly shifted forward, his voice lowering as if he were threatening her. “He hasn’t changed — not one damned bit. It’s a matter of degree, not kind.”

Julia wet a dishrag, walked over to the table, and wiped up the crumbs, scooping them into her hand, then rinsing them down the drain. She was determined not to let her husband’s hostility and negativity get to her.

“I wish you would give this a fair chance,” she said. “After I —”

John laughed again and rubbed under his nose with the back of his hand.

“Yeah … sure. Go ahead and regale me with your story of your grandmother and what happened to her when she was put into a nursing home.”

“That’s not fair, John, and you know it.” Julia was wringing out the dishrag and now gave it an extra hard twist.

“Come on. Tell me about how the staff treated her ... or failed to treat her. About the time you came to visit her, and she had crapped herself and had been lying in her own filth for how long? An hour? Two? Certainly long enough so it had —”

“Stop it,” Julia shouted. She slapped the dishrag down on the edge of the sink. “That’s not fair!”

“Sure yes, it is,” John said, pushing his chair back and getting up. “I think it’s more than fair because, as far as I’m concerned, this is your gig.”

With a ragged intake of breath, Julia turned away and looked out the kitchen window. Her pulse made a soft, fluttery sound in her ears like a trapped bird; her throat felt as though she had swallowed something hard and dry. She started to speak, but all that came out was a sharp clicking sound.

“Little Miss Goody-two-shoes,” John said.

Julia could see his reflection in the window, and she didn’t like the smirk on his face ... not one little bit. Taking a deep breath, she turned and looked at him, forcing her emotions to loosen up.

“John —” she said, raising her arms pleadingly, signaling him that it was time to stop this “got’cha” crap and hug her. He hesitated for only an instant, then got up from the table and came to her, pulling her close. She lost herself in his heavy scent, grateful that she could let him hold her like this, if only for a moment. She twined her arms around the small of his back and, looking up at him, waited for him to kiss her. When he did, she couldn’t help but notice his lips were cold and tight.

“You know,” she said, pulling back and looking him squarely in the eyes, “this isn’t going to work out unless you’re with me on it.”

John bit down onto his lower lip and nodded.

“And I realize,” Julia continued, “that coming back home — to stay — isn’t exactly easy on you. I know it isn’t quite what you wanted to do —”

“Not quite,” John said with a snort. “That could be called the understatement of the day.”

“But your dad needs us. He may be too proud to ask, but I can tell, and I’ll bet you can, too. It means a lot to him that you would come back and help him like this.”

“It means a lot to you, too — doesn’t it?” John said.

Julia considered for a moment, then nodded agreement.

“And I know, in some ways, you’ve been so — so pushy about this because you want to make up, somehow, for what happened to your grandmother.” He wagged his forefinger in front of her face. “Uh-huh. Just this once, don’t deny it, all right?”

Julia was silent for a long while. Then she nodded.

“I promise you I’ll try to make it work, okay? For you and Bri and me.”

“And your father?”

John nodded, but a flicker of resentment crossed his face.

“For him, too. Come on, let’s give Bri the grand tour so she can start getting settled in her bedroom. She is getting the best bedroom in the house, you realize.”

Julia forced a laugh and gave him a playful punch on the shoulder. “You’re just saying that because it was your bedroom when you were a kid.”

“That’s right, and look what a fine, upstanding person I turned out to be.”

II

“Is it true what” — Bri paused before saying the next word, as if her tongue wasn’t quite used to forming it yet —”Granddad said?”

“What?” John asked. “What did he tell you?”

He was leading the way up the stairs with Bri and then Julia following behind. Julia more or less remembered the house from the few times she and John had visited before, and she hung behind, wanting Bri — more than anyone else — to be excited about this move.

“About the ‘church wood,’ “ Bri said.

When they reached the upstairs landing, John turned and looked at her. For an instant, in the dim glow of light from the ceiling fixture, his daughter’s face looked ... different, somehow. It was fuller, more mature. Her eyes were cast into shadow that — for no more than a heartbeat — made her look almost like a different person entirely.

“Church wood?” John said, his voice catching in his throat. “I don’t know what that is.”

Bri nodded. “He said this house was made from wood gathered from a whole bunch of buildings that had been torn down and stuff, and that some of it was made from what was left of one of the churches after it burned.”

Julia shook her head, confused, looking from Bri to John. “I’m sure back in the old days, when this house was made, they did stuff like that — recycled wood from other buildings. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Well ...” Bri cast a nervous glance down the length of the hallway. Trimwork that had needed new paint at least ten years ago and faded wallpaper gave everything an unnerving gloom. Thick dust had gathered in every corner. “Granddad says that — even back when he was a boy, his mother said she could still hear the organ music playing late at night ... that the wood echoed with it.”

Julia snorted a laugh and shook her head. “Come on. He’s making that up to tease you. Let’s take a look at your room. We won’t unload the truck ‘till the rain stops, so we can take time now to figure out where we’ll put everything.”

“Is it true, though?” Bri asked, her brow creased with concern. “Or was he just, like, trying to freak me out? He told me his wife — dad’s mother — heard it sometimes, too — especially in winter.”

John and Julia looked at each other, each of them knowing the other was thinking that John’s mother very well might have heard organ music resonating throughout the house. By the time John had left the island to go to college, his mother was so far gone with her drinking that she might have seen pink elephants dancing in the hallway, too.

“Look here, Bri,” Julia said, placing her hands firmly on her daughter’s shoulders and looking her squarely in the eyes. “I don’t know your grandfather a whole lot better than you do —” She saw that John was watching her. “But I’d say he’s just ribbing you.”

Bri couldn’t repress a shiver when she looked down the length of the dimly lit hall again. “Yeah, but —”

“No yeah-buts,” Julia said. “Sure, there are going to be unfamiliar sounds in an old house — creaking floorboards … squeaky doors … stuff like that — but that’s to be expected.”

“Even a new house,” John added. “These days, with construction and materials so shoddy, you hear all sorts of weird noises.”

“But that sounds so ... creepy,” Bri said, her voice hushed with awe.

“Don’t get yourself worked up about it,” Julia said, pushing to the front. “Let’s take a look at your bedroom.”

She led the way down the hallway toward the farthest door. Bri hesitated before following her and John. When she turned and looked down the stairs, her heart gave an extra-hard thump in her chest when she saw her grandfather, sitting in his wheelchair at the foot of the stairs, gazing up at her. He was smiling, but the thinness of his face and the hollowness of his gaze made it look more like a grimace of pain. Very slowly he raised his hand and, placing his forefinger to his lips, made a soft hissing sound.

It took effort for Bri not to say something. All she could think was, Is he trying to warn me about something? She knew already that, for the first night, at least, she was going to be lying there in bed, staring at the ceiling half the night, waiting to hear the soft, wavering notes of ghostly organ music.

III

“You’re not having second thoughts, now, are you?” John asked. A trace of a smile danced across his lips, but he tried not to let it show.

Julia’s face, he thought, was a perfect copy of what Bri’s had been as she surveyed her new bedroom. Frank had called out for someone — anyone — to come downstairs, and Bri had gone, reluctantly, to see what he wanted. Julia was pacing back and forth across the hardwood floor of the bedroom where they would be sleeping, her eyes scrunched up as she tried to assess its possibilities.

Her first — and practically only — thought was that she was angry at herself for one slight miscalculation. If they were planning on staying here with Frank for however long, then she was damned well going to have to do a bit of “paint-’n’-paper” work. She couldn’t figure out why John hadn’t reminded her what a sorry state the house was in. She had been expecting simply to move into the house … that the house would easily absorb them and all of their possessions — at least the ones they hadn’t put into storage. It had never even crossed her mind that, especially in the years since his wife died, Frank wouldn’t have kept things up.

“No … Not at all,” she said, shaking her head as she paced back and forth. “Although it does feel kind of funny, thinking we’ll be sleeping in the same bedroom your parents used all those years.”

“Well … you do look a bit ... discouraged,” John said.

Julia looked at him, took a deep breath, and let her shoulders drop. Her lower lip began to tremble, but she didn’t know whether to turn away from him or collapse into his arms and let all her frustrations out in a single, big sob.

“Okay … Yeah, I ... I guess I am — a little let down.” She forced her voice to stay steady. “I don’t think you realize how hard this all is for me, too. Do you realize that in all the time since we decided to do this — the whole time we were discussing it —”

“Arguing about it, really,” John said.

“Whatever ... I don’t think you ever once thought about how all of this was going to impact me. I mean … think about it. You’ve got it easy, compared to me and Bri. You’re coming back to a place you know well — the house you grew up in and all. There are still people around who know you. Everything’s familiar to you.”

John smiled as he came over to her and put his arm around her shoulder. He tried to pull her close, but she resisted.

“Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?” she asked, looking at him, her expression firmly set.

John nodded. “‘Course I do.”

“You’ve got a job lined up and everything,” she said, “and what do I have to look forward to? Taking care of your invalid father and an antique house that looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in years.”

“You’re forgetting one thing,” John said, his voice even and low. He glanced at the doorway, to make sure Bri wasn’t out in the hallway, listening. “I never wanted to come back here in the first place.” He wagged his forefinger at her and he waited, watching for her reaction.

Julia turned away from him and walked over to the window. This room had the same ocean view as Bri’s except for a large maple tree in the front yard that blocked some of it. Her breath came in a long, shuddering gasp.

“You really can’t admit that by forcing the issue you may have made a colossal mistake, can you?” John leaned one arm on the wall and, cocking his hip, regarded her with an icy stare that penetrated the back of her head as she stared out at the rain. “In all the years I’ve known you,” he went on, “I’d have to say that’s your one real flaw.”

“Oh? And what’s that?” She turned to meet his stare.

“You’re so damned hardheaded. Once you commit to something — no matter what happens, you can’t admit it when you’re wrong.”

“So you think coming back home to help your father is wrong?” Her voice was quivering now.

John nodded. “In a way — yeah. I’ve said all along I think the best thing would be to put him into a nursing home where the staff could take care of him twenty-four-seven.”

Julia started shaking her head gently, but he went on.

“And don’t say it — I know you’ll say what happened to your grandmother was the exception, not the rule. The one thing you haven’t accepted is that things change. The days of families, parents, children, grandparents — everybody living together in the old family homestead like this is ... is some half-assed romantic notion you’ve got.” He raised his arms, indicating the dingy bedroom with a wide sweep. “Well, babe, this is it. This is the reality that’s going to throw cold water right into the face of your romanticism.”

He turned and strode out of the room, his footsteps sounding heavily on the stairs as he went back downstairs to the living room. Julia pressed her face against the cold windowpane, staring at the rain splashing on the glass in front of her eyes. She finally was able to let go of the emotions inside her, and hot tears rolled down her cheeks.

IV

A short while later — after she had composed herself — Julia came downstairs. She put her best face on in front of Frank and Bri, but the iciness between her and John remained even after the hour or so they spent dashing back and forth in the rain between the house and the car to get what they needed for the night.

Frank hadn’t gotten any extra groceries for his guests. There was a half-used package of hot dogs, a can of B&M baked beans, and two cans of Pabst lined up for his usual Saturday night supper, but there wasn’t much else in the house to eat.

“Hilda, the woman who does my cleanin’ for me, usually gets me groceries on Monday,” he said. That was the closest he came to apologizing.

Julia caught herself wondering if Hilda’s shopping was as skimpy as the alleged cleaning she did.

“I reckon you could drive on down to Pottle’s for a few things,” Frank said. “‘Less you feel like hauling on into Falmouth to the Shop ‘n’ Save.”

Neither prospect appealed to either John or Julia, but finally — because John wanted to avoid anyone who might recognize him at Pottle’s — Julia drove down to the corner store. Half an hour later, she came back grumbling about the outrageously high prices at the corner store.

“Fella’s gotta make a livin’,” Frank said. “Y’could have gone to Falmouth if you wanted bargains.”

“His prices are almost double what we pay in Vermont,” Julia said as she unloaded a head of lettuce, some tomatoes, hot dogs, and rolls onto the counter. She tried to simmer down while she and Bri made a salad and heated up the hot dogs and beans.

Supper was a tense affair, and Julia found herself thinking if this was how it was going to be, there was no way things would work out. Every time she started a conversation, either John would not pick up on it or Frank would cut her short with a ... well, it might not have been meant as a nasty remark, but she was so sensitive, it sure felt that way.

Throughout the meal, Bri kept thinking about her cat, Bungle, who had died a week before the move. He’d been hit by a car in front of their house. The image of him, lying dead on the sidewalk, his fur matted down by the rain, kept rising in her mind, and she kept choking back tears. The few times someone — usually her mother — directed a comment at her, she would shrug and say, “Huh?” forcing whomever to repeat their question.

Frank seemed to be the only person who enjoyed this “traditional” Maine Saturday night supper of beans and hot dogs. After the tension of driving across three states, and the worse tension of their argument earlier in the bedroom, Julia ate so little she was sure she would be looking for something to munch before bedtime.

“Good meal,” Frank said, pushing his wheelchair back from the table and tossing his wrinkled napkin onto his empty plate. He reached to pick up his plate to bring it over to the sink, but Julia quickly stood up and took it from him.

“I can get that for you,” she said.

He looked at her, his expression dancing somewhere between irritation and gratitude.

“I ain’t no invalid, you know,” he said softly. “A little something like this ain’t gonna keep me down for long.” He slapped himself on the thigh.

Julia went over to the sink and rinsed his plate under the faucet, then put it on the counter next to the pans. She wanted to say something to establish her role as helper, not nurse, but she was still so tense from what they’d all been through today that she said nothing and went back to the table to get her own plate.

“Mind if I smoke?” Frank asked, reaching into the pocket of his cardigan and fishing out a battered corncob pipe and pouch of tobacco.

“It’s your house,” John said, so Frank rolled open the pouch and filled the bowl. Within a few seconds, he had the tobacco stoked and, grunting his thanks, rolled his wheelchair into the living room.

They spent the evening watching television, the intermittent conversation going about the same as it had at supper. When bedtime rolled around, there was a brief discussion about who would sleep where until they got the bedrooms set up. Finally, Bri agreed to roll out a sleeping bag on the rickety bed in her bedroom —”Just this one night,” she insisted, and John promised she would set up her bed first thing.

Frank, of course, retired to his bed in what used to be John’s brother’s bedroom. Even if he had offered to let Julia and John sleep there, which he didn’t, they would have refused. Once Frank bid them good night, and Julia had settled Bri in her room, she and John folded out the couch hide-away bed in the living room and made it up with sheets from the linen closet.

“These smell nice and fresh,” Julia said as she tossed open the contour sheet so John could catch the other end.

John hesitated for a moment, looking at her with his eyebrows raised. “Umm,” he said, holding the sheet to his face and inhaling deeply. “Kind of surprising.”

They spread the top sheet and a heavy quilt over the bed, and while Julia worked the pillows into the pillowcases, John stripped off his clothes and went to the downstairs bathroom to brush his teeth. Julia put on her nightgown and then collected both her and John’s clothes and put them in the laundry room.

“You want the curtains open or closed?” John asked when he came back into the living room.

“Either way,” Julia said.

“Let’s leave ‘em open, then,” John said.

He stood by the window for a while, staring outside. In the distance, a blinking light flashed rhythmically — the lighthouse on Great Diamond Island. Off to the right, Julia could see the small yellow rectangles of a few neighbors’ windows. Rain pattered against the glass, turning the view into a bubbly blur.

“Cozy, isn’t it?” she said. That wasn’t really what she was feeling, but she was tired and didn’t want to start an argument with John, or say anything that would get him upset. Turning off the light, she came over and stood beside him, looking out. He put his arm around her shoulder and drew her close, making a soft sound in the back of his throat and glanced down at her.

“I —” she started to say, but he nudged her to silence by pulling her close.

“I know what you’re going to say,” he whispered, his breath warm against her ear, “but you’ve got it all wrong.”

“Huh?”

“I was the asshole. Ever since we got here, I’ve been acting like a —”

“You already said it,” Julia said with a laugh, “like an asshole.”

“Thanks for agreeing so quickly,” John said, giving her a good-humored shake.

“John, I —”

“You were supposed to say, ‘No, honey. You weren’t acting like an asshole. I totally understand …”

“I was joking. I know how stressed out from the drive you are,” she said. “I could have been a little more understanding myself. But what you said earlier — do you think it’s true?”

“About what?” He thought she meant what Bri had said about the “church-wood.”

“About me being stubborn … bullheaded? That once I’m committed to something, I can never admit I’m wrong?” She looked up at him, her eyebrows arched.

John nodded slightly. “I hope so,” he said, snickering. “At least when it comes to living with me.”

Julia’s smile widened. Touching him gently on the cheek, she drew his face close to hers. They kissed long and passionately, and Julia shifted to press her body against his. One of John’s hands moved in a slow, sensuous circle from her shoulder up her neck to cup the back of her head. The other hand slid down the small of her back, pressing her hips against him.

When the kiss broke off, Julia smiled at him and moved her hand from his chest down over his stomach and slid them into his underpants. She gripped his stiffening manhood and gave it a few gentle upward strokes.

“Maybe we should turn the light on behind us,” John said in a husky voice, “and give the neighbors a show.

Julia grinned but then backed away, suddenly concerned that anyone outside could easily see them. She went quickly to the couch and slid under the covers. Propping herself up on one elbow, she undid the top two buttons of her nightgown and said, “Once you’re through taking with the view, I’ve got something else to show you.”

V

A sudden blast of sound slammed into Julia’s sleep like a sledgehammer hitting the side of the house. Before she could register where she was, she sat bolt upright in bed and let out a loud scream.

“Huh — wha … What is it?” John said as he scrambled off the couch, feeling blindly for the wall light switch. He slammed his knee against the coffee table and went down with a howl.

Julia clutched the sheet to her chest, her heart pulsating in her throat as her eyes widened, trying to take everything in. She remember they were on the couch in the living room and that a horrendously loud noise had catapulted her out of sleep. She waited in the dark, listening as John scrambled to his feet. She hoped, if she heard the sound once the lights were on, she’d be able to identify it.

At the same instant, John found the wall switch and snapped it on, and the sound came again. From outside came a low, throaty honk that gradually rose up the scale. Julia’s fearfilled eyes latched on to John’s.

“You mean that?” He nodded toward the window, a smile slowly spreading across his face.

The sound continued for a second or two and then abruptly dropped off into silence. Once it was gone, Julia had the distinct sensation it had never really been there, that she had imagined it.

“What the hell is it?” Her eyes darted frantically from John to the living room window. Outside, all she could see was the steadily blinking light from Great Diamond. The street out from was dark. Julia glanced at her wristwatch to see what time it was.

Quarter past three. Who — or what — the hell would make a sound like that at this hour? she wondered.

“It’s the foghorn out on Great Diamond,” John was smiling as he walked back to the couch and sat down on the edge. He placed his hand gently on Julia’s knee beneath the covers.

“Does it —” she started to say but then cut herself off when the sound came again, filling the night.

“Mom …?” Bri’s voice came faintly from upstairs, tentative with fear.

Both Julia and John turned to see her as she came to the top of the stairs. She leaned over the railing, glancing around the living room.

“It’s all right, hon,” Julia said.

“Are you all okay?” Bri asked warily. “I thought you shouted.” She covered her throat protectively with one hand.

Flushed with embarrassment, Julia shook her head.

“We’re okay. The, uh — The foghorn caught me by surprise, is all,” she finished lamely.

“Oh,” Bri said simply. She came the rest of the way down the stairs and sat in the rocking chair near the fireplace. She hadn’t noticed the foghorn until that moment. She was, in fact, rather surprised she hadn’t. She had gone to bed earlier than usual and lain there, looking up at the ceiling, fully expecting to hear the low, throbbing notes of organ music reverberating in the woodwork. She had no idea what time she had finally drifted off to sleep, but she had been expecting to wake up at the slightest sound.

“Well,” John said, rubbing his hands vigorously together, “now that we’re all up — Wait a minute, should I wake up my father, too?”

“Don’t be silly,” Julia said, shaking her head.

“I just thought since we’re having a little party and all.”

Julia rubbed her face with her hands and yawned.

“I’m sorry, all right? I wasn’t expecting that, and when I woke up, I didn’t remember where I was, so I kind of panicked.”

“Real good, Mom,” Bri said, glancing at John with a teasing twinkle in her eye.

“Well, we’re up now,” John said. “Why don’t the two of you enjoy the view? This’ll help.” He snapped off the living room light, plunging the room into darkness. “I’ll go warm up some milk to soothe any jangled nerves.”

“Good idea,” Julia said, “seeing as how your father doesn’t have any herbal tea.” She emphasized the “h” in herbal, chuckling as her gaze drifted back to the steadily pulsing light in the window. When the sound of the foghorn came again, she was ready for it and actually found it rather soothing — now that she knew what it was.

“Be back in a jiff,” John said.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Julia’s nerves gradually unwound. She sat with her back against the couch and, patting the space beside her, invited Bri to sit with her. They didn’t speak as they sat watching the weak flood of light come and go … come and go. Each pulse showed them, faintly, an image of themselves reflected in the living room window.

“A lot or a little?” John called from the kitchen.

“A lot,” Julia shouted.

“Me, too,” Bri said.

Julia lost track of how long it was taking John to heat up the milk. There was something so calming … so peaceful about the gentle patter of rain against the window, the drops glowing like bright, silvery beads with every flash from the lighthouse. Finally, footsteps approached from the kitchen, and she and Bri straightened up.

John was carrying three cups filled with warm milk on a tray, using both hands and feeling his way carefully in the dark. He knew where the coffee table was and would avoid it this time. His shins still ached from the impact. He was about to say something like, “Here it is,” when the light from the lighthouse came and winked off.

In that moment, he saw — thought he saw — something that made his breath catch in his chest. His tongue felt too large for his mouth and made it impossible to speak.

“John?” Julia said, her voice drifting like a disembodied spirit out of the darkness.

John stood frozen in the living room entryway, his body bathed by a cold sweat. He was tensed — waiting for the light to come again. In spite of the sudden ground swell of panic, he couldn’t react. He couldn’t move. He had to wait … wait for the flash of light to see if his eyes had been playing a trick on him or if ...

The dark square of the window suddenly blossomed with warm yellow again. John could vaguely distinguish the reflections of the objects in the room — the couch, the easy chair …

He held his breath until it burned in his lungs as he watched the brightening reflection in the rain-skimmed window.

“Holy shit.” He might have spoken out loud, or it might only have been a thought.

The light grew steadily brighter, reached its peak, then began to fade, but this time he had no doubt about what he saw. The light illuminated Julia and Bri, casting their reflections in the window, but there was something else … something that sent a chill rippling up his spine.

Something gray ... slouched and gray that looked frighteningly like a person was dangling from the ceiling behind the couch, slowly twisting around.

As the light from the lighthouse faded, the reflected image dimmed. John wasn’t sure if he had seen or imagined it.

“What is it?” Julia asked, glancing over her shoulder. When he didn’t answer right away, she added, “Come on, John …This is no time to be playing games.”

John wanted to say something, but he still was unable to get anything more than a shallow breath into his lungs. It felt as though he were in the embrace of some giant who was intent on crushing the air out of him.

“John?” Julia said sharply.

She shifted on the couch and looked at him, but he stood there, his eyes riveted by the darkness, focusing on the spot in the picture window where the reflection had been … where he knew, when the light came again, he would see ...

It hadn’t really been there, he kept telling himself, but in the dark, the cold, dark body dangling in the space between him and the couch was a palpable presence.

The darkness suddenly brightened again, and the room lit up. John was so wound up he wanted to scream as he looked up, expecting the light to reveal the gray shape hanging from the ceiling. The light filled the living room, its brightness peaking and then quickly fading. John’s numbed brain flooded with relief. The only people he had seen reflected in the window were Julia and Bri.

No one else, his mind shouted with glee. There was nothing else there.

He took a step forward, hoping his hesitation would be read simply as his caution in the dark.

“I — -umm, I’m having a little trouble finding my way,” he said.

To his own ears, his voice sounded strangled and weak.

“The lighthouse light kinda threw me off.”

“Bri, get the light, will you?” Julia said.

John stopped where he was, not willing to chance a spill while Bri went over to the wall and threw the switch. The living room was immediately bathed in yellow light as he went over to the coffee table and carefully set down the tray.

“Well, well, well,” he said, straightening up and brushing his hands together. “Lookee here. I didn’t spill a drop.”

He smiled with satisfaction, but all he could think about was what he had seen.

No, he told himself. What I thought I saw … a trick reflection from the lighthouse … or a shadow or something on the picture window.

Bri came back to the couch and sat down next to her mother, bouncing up and down like a little kid.

“This is fun,” she said, reaching for the nearest mug. She held it in both hands and blew over the top before taking a sip.

Julia frowned and scratched her head. “We should all be asleep, and we would be if that damned lighthouse foghorn hadn’t scared me.”

As he moved to sit on the couch, John noticed that Bri and Julia were sitting in the same spots he had seen them in when the lighthouse light had been the only illumination in the room. His back was toward the kitchen, and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled when he thought about the gray shape he had seen hanging from the ceiling behind the couch.

“Here you go, honey,” Julia said as she handed him a cup of milk.

He took the cup, angry that his fingers were trembling as he raised it to his mouth. The momentary image of that gray figure still burned vividly in his mind as though it were etched in acid. He took a sip of the warm milk, but it tasted sour and clotted as it slipped down his throat.

“You okay?” Julia asked.

Damn her for noticing, John thought even as he smiled, nodded, and said, “Yeah ... sure.”

Bri had stopped bouncing on the couch and was sitting now, staring at the blank rectangle of the window as the lighthouse light pulsed on and off. She hadn’t taken any more sips after the first tentative one.

The foghorn still hooted in the darkness … like a lost, lonely soul, Julia thought, but she realized she wasn’t noticing it as much now that she was expecting it.

“You know,” Bri said suddenly, turning to look at her parents. “I was just thinking ... “

When Julia and John saw tears welling up in her eyes, they had a pretty good idea that she had been thinking about Bungle.

“If —” she choked on the first word but then forced herself to go on. “If Bungle was here right now, he’d be trying his best to take a lick out of my cup.”

Julia said nothing as she placed her arm around Bri’s shoulder and gave her a reassuring hug.

“If you’d like,” John said, “maybe we can ask around on the island and get a new cat for you.” His gaze followed hers to the black slab of the window, but his mind was filled with what he had seen — No, goddamnit! …what I thought I saw — reflected there. His mind played with the idea that somehow there had been someone outside looking in, and the trick of the reflection had made it look as if he was in the living room.

But how the hell could that be? John wondered. And who could have been outiside, looking in at them at three 0’ clock in the morning, a curious neighbor?

He took a shaky breath, wanting to look away but was unable to. No matter how many times he told himself it had been a trick reflection in the glass — maybe something to do with the double-pane storm window — he couldn’t blot out that image of someone suspended in midair, hanging between him and the couch.

“No,” Bri said, her voice sounding tight. “I don’t want to get another cat” She slurped noisily as she took another sip of milk. “I think — I don’t know. I kinda feel like Bungle would be mad at me or something if he knew I replaced him so fast. Know what I mean?”

The image of rain-matted fur and Bungle’s sightless stare up at the gray sky rose unbidden in her mind.

Julia looked at her daughter and smiled knowingly.

“I think I do,” she said, her voice low and warm. “When you lose someone you love, waiting is the right thing to do — to honor their memory.” She appreciated being able to be the strong, knowing, and caring mother after getting scared like a little child and waking up — well, almost the whole household.

“Well, I don’t know about anyone else,” John said suddenly … a bit too suddenly, judging by the look Julia gave him. “But I’m feeling sleepy.” In spite of the heat of the liquid, he gulped down what was left in his cup. “What say we all hit the sack?”

Julia sat there looking at him as though he were an odd specimen; then she finished her warm milk and, placing the cup on the coffee table, nodded her agreement.

“Yeah. Bri — get yourself back to bed. We’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow — if this rain lets up.”

“You know what they say. ‘If this rain keeps up, it won’t come down.’“

She kissed them each good night, and, even though she didn’t relish the thought of going upstairs in this strange new house by herself, she said a cheerful good night and boldly walked up the stairs to her new bedroom.

VI

“So what’s bothering you?” Julia asked once the light was out again, and they were snuggled under the covers.

John rolled over and looked at her. His back was to the window, and the pulsing light from the lighthouse steadily blossomed and faded, casting faint yellow light onto the walls of the living room. Steely tension wound up inside him as he imagined — that’s all it is … imagination — that gray shape reflected in the window.

Who the hell could it have been? he wondered as his mind clicked off a few possibilities, none of which made sense. The lighthouse had shown the reflection only once ... well, twice, but the first time had been so sudden and so shocking, he hadn’t registered it until the room had plunged back into darkness. The second time, when he had been ready, the image had been blurred, as though it was the dim reflection of a reflection … an image trying to condense into reality.

“Well?” Julia said, prodding him in the ribs with her fingertips.

“I —” John’s voice caught in his throat, and in spite of himself, he suddenly rolled over and stared at the living room window, prepared to see something — someone — standing outside the house, a harsh black outline against the rainy night. But the window was empty except for the circle of light from the lighthouse.

“God, John, you’re acting all freaked out or something,” Julia said. She rolled onto her belly, propping herself up on her elbows, and looked at him.

“You know tonight … when I was getting the warm milk?” he said, his voice rattling in his throat, “I thought I saw — I don’t know.” He shook his head and forced out a nervous chuckle. “It sort of looked like my … my mother or … someone reflected in the living room window.”

“What do you mean?” Julia said. She paused and then laughed softly in the dark. “Is this another one of those stories, like that crap about the church wood your father tried to scare Bri with?”

John shook his head vigorously. “I’m serious,” he said. “I saw … something in the window.”

Julia felt blindly in the dark until she found his face and gave him a quick kiss.

‘‘G’night,’’ she said, as if she didn’t believe him.

She was exhausted and didn’t want John’s little spooky story and the steady tooting of the foghorn to ruin the rest of her first night’s sleep in their new house. She settled down, her back to her husband, and slept solidly until the morning sun, rising up over the ocean, lanced her eyes.

John, on the other hand, lay there in the dark with his hands clasped behind his head as he stared blankly up at the ceiling. For the first time in his life, the haunting sound of the foghorn filled him with cold and lonely thoughts. He drifted in and out of sleep, picturing himself out there on the night-stained ocean, tossing around and being pulled helplessly by the rushing waves and tides.

Over and over, the ceiling would lighten with a wash of light and then fade. Every now and then, he would snap his head to the side and look at the window, positive that in the corner of his eye he had caught a fleeting glimpse of motion outside. Whenever he sensed something — someone — hanging from the ceiling. behind the couch, he shivered and, staring up at the darkness, waited for the flash of light from the lighthouse to show him that there was nothing there.

He finally fell asleep sometime before dawn, but his sleep was as disturbed and restless as the dark, storm-tossed ocean.

VII

Like her father, Bri also had trouble getting back to sleep. Up until she mentioned missing Bungle, she had been doing fine trying to settle in her new bedroom; but once she remembered how much she missed her cat, how much she wanted him here, she found she couldn’t get him and his rain-matted body out of her mind.

She made a mistake that helped keep sleep at bay. Of course her mother had no way of knowing it, and John apparently had forgotten that her bedroom was directly over the living room, and there was a heating vent in the floor. She could hear everything they said downstairs as they settled down to sleep. As soon as John mentioned that he might have seen the ghost of his dead mother, she got out of bed and, keeping an ear close to the open vent, listened.

In spite of her occasional reading of a horror novel, she didn’t really believe in ghosts or the supernatural. Like her mother, she dismissed what John said he had seen as nothing more than a trick of the glass — a doubling of one of their images or something.

The church wood was something else.

Maybe it struck her fancy simply because she had never heard of a house actually echoing with sounds it had “heard” years before. The whole idea of wood that still reverberated with centuries-old church music gave her the willies. After her parents stopped talking and she tiptoed back to bed, she lay in the dark, waiting to hear … something.

Sleep sneaked up on her despite her gnawing worry, and she drifted off after a while. Only once during the night did she hear something that dragged her toward wakefulness. From inside the wall, at the head of her bed, there came a low thump and then a faint scratching, skittering noise. After a while, another soft thump that sounded like a small pillow being dropped to the floor snapped her out of sleep. She sat up in bed, her sleeping bag pulled up to her chin.

Shaking her head and rubbing her eyes, she tried to decide if she had heard it or if it had been part of a dream. It had sounded like there was something plump and heavy was moving around inside the walls, but she was too exhausted from the drive today, and she settled back down and let herself drift to sleep. She was determined to mention it to her father or grandfather in the morning. Maybe — like the church wood — her granddad would have a story about it.

THREE

Unloading

I

“Rats. ‘s’what it is,” Frank said. He spooned some Rice Krispies into his mouth and began chewing noisily. Several pieces of cereal fell back into the bowl when he continued to talk with his mouth full. “There’s rats in the walls. Gotta ‘spect that in an old house like this.”

Julia looked wide-eyed at John, who silently shrugged his shoulders noncommittally.

“So I ... I wasn’t imagining it?” Bri said. She had been hungry when she first came downstairs, lured by the smell of eggs and bacon frying, but now her breakfast sat untouched on her plate as she listened to her grandfather. With the sun streaming like honey through the window, she felt rested in spite of her interrupted sleep. One time during the night, she had awakened from a disturbing dream that had something to do with Bungle, her dead cat, and a girl she didn’t recognize. In the clear light of morning, she was grateful that the vivid details of the dream had dissolved from memory.

“You bet yer as — Your, ahh, bottom dollar there are,” Frank said. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and took a slurping sip of coffee. “Good coffee,” he said, nodding to Julia.

“Frank, honestly —” Julia said. “I don’t think you should be filling Bri’s mind with such stories.” Given the freedom to do so, she would have gone on a bit more about the adjustments Bri was going to have to make, leaving her friends behind in Vermont to live on Glooscap, but she hoped that Frank would have figured that out by now.

‘‘They ain’t stories,” Frank said, shaking his head quickly. “They’re facts. They ain’t stories a’all.”

“Well they’re nonsense … all this about ‘church wood,’ as you call it. What else would you call it if not nonsense?”

“Now that’s one thing,” Frank replied, his eyes suddenly twitching and rolling ceilingward. Julia panicked for an instant, thinking he was about to black out, but he suddenly leaned forward and shook his head. “And them rats in the walls are another. Living so close to the mainland, ‘tweren’t hard for rats to get over here. ‘Specially on boats and whatever. They can swim plenty good, too. You go down to the wharf sometime, ‘n’ you’ll see. Tell her, Johnny.”

For an instant, John glared at his father’s use of what he considered his “little kid’s” name. No one since high school had called him “Johnny.”

“Tell her what?” he asked, tossing his hands up. “That there are rats down at the wharf? O’course there are.”

“And in the walls … In the walls too, goddamnit!” Frank snapped. He brought his fist down hard enough onto the table to make the silverware jump and clatter. Turning back to Bri, he said, “In the fall, especially, they come in, yah know, looking for a warm place for the winter, same’s anyone. An old house like this has enough space between the walls so’s even a person can practically fit in behind there. Round ‘bout autumn, them rats start comin’ in ‘n’ they stay there ‘till spring.”

“And you can live with that?” Julia asked, wrinkling her nose at the thought.

“Do they ever come into the house?” Bri asked, her voice winding up high. “Do you ever, like, see ‘em?”

Frank shrugged casually. “Now and again, but they ain’t nothing. I figure these rats — least their kin — have been coming into this house since ‘fore I was born. It’s as much their house as it is mine.”

Julia turned to John and said softly, “I want you to get some D-Con or whatever and set some traps. I don’t want to come down here some morning and find a rat sitting on the countertop, nibbling on a loaf of bread.”

“Hell,” Frank said, his voice blending into a cackling laugh. “They don’t nibble. You ain’t never seen these fellas. They’re some big. Get to be the size of a small poodle, ‘n they’re twice as mean as a badger.”

“Oh, great,” Julia said, her face darkening even more. She nailed John with an even harsher look. “I mean it,” she said. “I don’t want to see any damned rats in this house. They’re ... unsanitary.”

“I sure as shi —” Frank glanced at Bri and corrected himself. “Sure as heck ain’t gonna do anything about it.” He took another spoonful of Rice Krispies and chewed. “The last thing I want is to have them rats mad at me.” Turning to Bri, he added, “They’re like cats, you know? They can sense things people ain’t aware of.”

Julia looked over at Frank, wondering exactly how much of this was truth and how much was bullshit. She was beginning to think Frank liked to spin these little tales and make up stories to get a rise out of people.

“As exciting and as stimulating as this discussion is,” John said as he drained his coffee cup, “I’ve got a truck to unload and get back to U-Haul. I don’t want to have to mess around with it tomorrow. I’ll be looking for volunteers.”

Bri nodded eagerly and dug into her breakfast, taking bites of toast and eggs, and washing them down with orange juice. Julia busied herself at the kitchen sink, anxious to start getting their own things unpacked so she could start feeling as though they belonged in this house.

Rats as big as poodles in the walls ... indeed.

II

The morning sun had pushed away the rain clouds, and a clear, blue sky vaulted overhead, vibrating with intensity. Seagulls wheeled above, tiny white specks moving in wide, lazy circles. Thin wisps of steam rose from the street as the morning sun warmed the asphalt. A brisk breeze was coming in off the water, so in spite of the sweat John worked up unloading the truck, he had to wear a jacket against the chill.

John looked down to the street when a car pulled up and stopped, and a man stepped out, squinting against the glare. He waved to John, but it wasn’t until he was halfway across the lawn that John recognized Randy Chadwick, his old friend from high school.

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Randy said as he walked up to the truck and held his hand up for John to shake.

“Son of a bitch, yourself,” John said.

He shook Randy’s hand, then jumped down to the ground beside him. “So you’re still dragging your sorry ass around this island.”

Randy smiled. “And I see you’re dragging your sorry ass back to it. How the hell have you been, Johnny?”

“Fine ... fine,” John said as he stepped back and looked at his friend.

It had been six years since he had last seen Randy Chadwick, when Randy had showed up at Johns’ mother’s funeral. Even in the six intervening years, though, time hadn’t been kind to Randy. Once the leanest, toughest-looking guy in the school, he now had the bulge of a well-cultivated beer gut. His hairline had receded a few inches, and his face was tanned and deeply lined — either from worry or hard outdoor work. All in all, John’s first impression was that Randy, who was only six months older than he was, looked at least five years older.

“I heard you might be back this way,” Randy said. He snapped his head around when Julia came out the front door; then his eyebrows shot up as he quickly took her in. Turning to John, he winked lasciviously and nodded his immediate approval.

“Uh, Julia,” John said, bristling at his friend’s reaction. “This is an old friend of mine from high school — Randy Chadwick. I’ve told you some of the crap we used to pull. Randy, this is my wife, Julia.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Randy said, offering his hand for Julia to shake. Looking back at John, he said, “I never heard you got married. When’d that happen?”

“Five years ago,” John said, shuffling his feet. “I would have thought my dad would mention it to someone.”

“If he had, I would’a heard about it,” Randy said with a laugh.

Just then, Bri came out of the front door and drew to a startled stop when she saw Randy. John introduced her as his daughter, figuring Randy could do the math and figure out she was actually his stepdaughter.

“We were about to take a break for lunch,” Julia said. “Would you care to join us?”

Randy glanced at his car as though it had just called to him, reminding him of something he had to do, but he shrugged and said, “I’m not particularly hungry, but I’ll sit and have a beer with yah.” Turning to John, he added, “It’ll give us a chance to catch up. Christ — I can’t believe you’re married. Of all people, you’re the last one I thought would ever get married.”

Julia frowned, wondering what Randy meant by that, but she left her question unasked as she turned to go to the kitchen and slap together a few sandwiches. Embarrassed by her own awkward entrance, Bri followed her mother into the house.

John and Randy sat down opposite each other at the weather-beaten picnic table on the porch. For the briefest moment, an awkward silence fell between them, but before long Randy got his jaw working and filled John in on the local gossip. In the time it took for Julia to make the sandwiches, he told John more than he cared to know about some of the people they had gone to school with back in the late sixties.

While Randy was in the middle of a story about a friend of theirs nicknamed “Booger,” Julia came out with paper plates, napkins, and a platter loaded with tuna fish sandwiches. Bri was right behind her with a bowl of potato chips and several cans of soda and beer.

“Help yourself,” Julia said as she plopped down onto the picnic-table seat. She let out a huff of air that flapped the strand of hair hanging down over her eyes. John took half a sandwich, smiled at her, and said, “Thanks, hon.”

Randy took a can of beer and popped the top. After a long swallow, he put it down on the table and continued. “Course, I suppose you never heard from Abby again, did you?”

John had taken a bite of sandwich and was chewing. He leaned forward and coughed, casting a quick glance at Julia and muttered something none of them understood as he shook his head.

“Who’s Abby?” Bri asked, looking back and forth between her parents.

Julia smiled thinly and echoed Bri. “Yeah … who’s Abby?”

She vaguely remember that Frank had called her Abby yesterday when they first arrived, but she didn’t mention it.

Randy picked up on the tension and, frowning, cocked his thumb at John and whispered, “I take it you never told her about Abby?”

Obviously embarrassed, John tried to turn it aside.

“No need to,” he said. Then to Julia he added, “She was my girlfriend in high school.” He swallowed the mouthful of sandwich and quickly took a drink of beer.

“I see,” Julia said as she sipped Diet Pepsi thoughtfully, actually enjoying watching John squirm.

“It was never anything serious,” John added. He took another sip of his beer, grateful when he didn’t choke on it.

“Nothing serious? Right,” Randy said with a wide smile. “And the pope doesn’t wear a funny hat. They were only the” — he glanced at Bri, then finished —”the hottest couple in the school. You’d see them everywhere together, at school, after school, hanging around Pottle’s, in town Portland — everywhere, always holding hands and hugging.” He leaned back and laughed with the memory. “They were the school couple — senior prom king and queen, the whole works.”

“What can I say? We were young and foolish,” John said, shaking his head and wishing to hell Randy would shut up. He was actually beginning to wish Randy had never even stopped by, unless he was going to offer to help unload. John wasn’t ready for all this memory-lane crap.

“So?” Julia said casually. “What’s she doing now?”

“Probably married to a lobsterman with three or four little brats running around, right?” John said. “Fifty pounds overweight and looks ten years older than she is.” He finished off his first sandwich half, and, after another sip of beer, reached for another.

“Actually, no,” Randy said. “Ole’ Romeo here must’ve broken her heart bad, ‘cause — what was it? Maybe two weeks before graduation? Something like that, she up and left school … left the island. Gone. I’m telling yah, buddy,” Randy slapped John hard on the back, “you must have really broken her heart.”

“You’re not remembering the way I do,” John said, his voice strained. “She broke up with me.”

“Oh, yeah ... sure,” Randy said, chuckling. “You expect me to believe that?”

John shrugged. “God’s honest truth. She broke up with me, and then the next morning she was gone. She told me she was going to leave. She had some crazy notion she could make it as a model in New York City.”

His gaze flicked over to Julia. He was trying to gauge how she was taking all of this. She was probably as bored with high school memories as he was. He knew someone would mention Abby sooner or later, so it was just as well to get it over with now. But if living on Glooscap was going to be a steady stream of high school and childhood reminiscences, he didn’t want any part of it. He was sure Julia would tire of it soon enough, too.

“No one knows where she went?” Bri asked. She, at least, appeared interested in Randy’s story. She found it fascinating to try to imagine her stepfather as a boy, growing up in this area. John was beginning to think, what with his father’s and now Randy’s stories, she was getting an earful.

Randy shook his head. “All I know is, no one on Glooscap ever saw or heard from her again. Her parents and her sister ... you remember Sally, Abby’s sister, right?”

John shifted uneasily and nodded. “Uh … sort of. She was a couple of years ahead of us.”

Randy threw his hands up in a helpless gesture.

“Well, for whatever reason, Abby plain up and disappeared.”

“That’s kinda weird, don’t you think?” Bri asked no one in particular.

“How ‘bout you and Ellie?” John asked, trying to change the subject. “You guys still together?” He scooped a handful of chips onto his plate and then started munching them.

“‘Course we are,” Randy said. He drained his beer can and put the empty on the table. “Ellie’s like what you said about Abby — married to a lobsterman with — well, she’s only got two snot-nosed brats clinging to her knees, ‘n’ she ain’t exactly fifty pounds overweight.”

“You still lobstering?” John asked. “I thought you were going to get out of the family business.”

Randy said, “And do what? It’s a ball-busting job, but the money’s still good.” He was smiling, but his face suddenly clouded over as he looked at John. ‘‘I’m kinda surprised you never heard from Abby again,” he said. “I always figured you and she would end up together. That’s why I was surprised to find out you’d gotten married.”

“Time marches on,” John said. He finished off his second half of sandwich with a huge bite, stuffed a few more chips into his mouth, and finished his beer. Glancing at his watch, he said, “And this truck ain’t gonna unload itself.” He paused to see if Randy would offer to help, but when he didn’t, he was just as glad. An entire afternoon of listening to Randy’s stories would surely drive him crazy.

“Well, I thank you for the beer,” Randy said as he got to his feet. “Nice meeting you, Julia — and Bri. I’d help you unload, but I’ve got to take Ellie over to visit her mom. I could swing by and help you later this evening.”

Julia, who had been dreading the thought of carrying their large bureaus upstairs, started to accept his offer, but John shook cut her off before she could say anything.

“Oh, no. We got it, no sweat.”

“Once you’re all settled in, Ellie and me’ll have you guys over for supper. How’s that sound? We can catch up on old times.”

John walked with him down the porch steps. Once they were on the walkway, Randy turned and looked at him, smiling. “Man, when I think about all the shit we used to pull back then.” He smiled and, shaking his head, held his hand out to John. As they shook, he continued, “I’ve got to say, though, I never thought I’d live to see the day you came back here … not after how much you told me how you couldn’t wait to get the hell off this island.”

John shrugged. “Things change.”

“Yeah, I suppose they do,” Randy said, nodding. “For some of us, anyway.”

III

“Your high school sweetheart, huh?” Julia said, smiling wickedly. She and John had wrestled the first of two bureaus up the stairs and into the master bedroom. They were both sweating and panting with exhaustion, but grateful they hadn’t made any gouges in the walls.

“Come on,” John said, shaking his head angrily. “Forget about it. It was never as serious as Randy makes it out.”

Julia grunted and shrugged. “Sure sounded serious to me.”

“Well it wasn’t.”

“Would have been nice if he helped us unload.”

John sniffed and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

“He unloaded enough on us.”

Julia looked at him, one side of her mouth curling into a half smile.

“I’m surprised you never mentioned Abby to me, though.” She made it sound as if she was hurt, but honestly — and she didn’t know why — she was actually enjoying seeing John get so flustered. “You know, yesterday, when I first went into the house, your father asked if I was Abby.”

“He did?” John suddenly tensed and looked at her wide-eyed.

Julia nodded, thinking, no matter what John said, there was some obvious tension about this Abby. “He did. I figured he confused me with someone else because of those blackouts he’s been having.”

“I dunno … Maybe,” John replied simply.

“Was Abby someone he wanted you to marry?” Julia asked.

John’s mouth tightened into a hard line before he answered.

“Just the opposite,” he said, his voice small and wire tight. “He did everything he could to break us up.” He sighed and shook his head. “He was always telling me I shouldn’t tie myself down to someone from the island … that I should wait until I went to college and found someone who wouldn’t nail my butt to this friggin’ place.”

“I see,” Julia said, nodding. “So, by the sound of it, it was more serious than you indicated.”

John turned on her, his eyes flashing with anger.

“Look, it’s ancient history as far as I’m concerned, so just forget about it, okay? Christ, I’ve got enough to deal with getting the rest of our shit upstairs without you grinding me about this.”

Even though she knew she didn’t have anywhere near the whole story, Julia let it drop. They went downstairs and out to the truck. They had nothing to say to each other as they lugged the second bureau up the narrow stairway, but once that last big piece of furniture was off the truck, it was almost a pleasure to carry in the broken-down pieces for their beds and the much lighter boxes of clothes, dishes, and kitchen utensils, books, and other possessions. Both of them appreciated that they had sold off their living room furniture, figuring if Frank’s turned out to be too old and grungy, they would buy something new.

By three o’clock, they carried the last box into the house. John rolled the truck door down and drove it around to the side driveway, figuring it was too late to take it back to rental lot in Portland today. He’d take in first thing in the morning.

“I’m going for a little walk,” Bri announced.

Both of her parents were sprawled on the couch in the living room. The only thought in John’s mind was that he wanted a hot shower before he set to work putting their bed together so he and Julian could sleep in their bedroom tonight. He shivered when he recalled the gray shape he had seen reflected in the living room window. No matter how much he ached from unloading, he was determined not to spend another night sleeping in the living room.

Bri glanced at her parents, waiting for either of them to give her permission to go explore a little.

“Have fun,” he finally said after taking a deep breath.

“Where are you going?” Julia asked. She glanced at the darkening sky outside the living room window. “I don’t want you down by the ocean after dark.”

“I was thinking of going to the beach across the street,” Bri said. “Maybe I’ll meet some of the kids downtown.”

“Don’t you remember what I told you?” John said, smiling. “There is no downtown.”

“Make sure you’re back before dark, okay?” Julia said.

“Promise,” Bri replied, and she turned to go.

IV

She looks as lonely as I feel was Bri’s first thought.

She was standing on the side of the road, looking out at the ocean through a break in the trees. A narrow path winding down to the sandy beach was lined on both sides by a tangle of pine and wild rosebushes. Rose hips the size of small apples speckled the dark brush with bright red dots. The breeze coming in off the water was tangy with salt. Waves lapped up on the shiny sands, leaving behind white lines of scud.

The girl Bri was watching moved slowly along the edge of the water, darting up higher onto the beach every time a wave slid landward. She was wearing an old heavy-knit gray sweater — maybe her father’s, Bri thought — and blue jeans rolled up at the cuffs. Her sneakers pom-poms hanging from the laces. She left no footprints in the hard-packed beach sand.

The sky was darkening, and the ocean was stained a deep purple as Bri walked down the path and onto the wide stretch of land. The waves made the soft, hissing sound of tearing paper as they slid smoothly over the sand. The beach was littered with tangled masses of kelp that tripped Bri up several times as she walked briskly toward where the girl had gone.

But the strange thing was, Bri couldn’t see her anymore.

Confused, she looked back the way she had come and then down the length of beach, trying to figure out if the girl could have gone that far in the short time it had taken her to come down the path. It looked to Bri as though the girl had gone — what? — maybe a quarter of a mile in the time it had taken her to walk the hundred yards or so down to the shore.

“That’s weird,” Bri whispered under her breath. The breeze off the ocean took her words and whisked them away.

Looking at the sand, she tried to find any trace of the girl’s footprints, but the beach was as smooth and untouched as if it hadn’t been walked on in days.

Maybe the tide’s coming in and it washed away her footprints, she thought, still walking along the beach, her eyes straining to find some trace of the girl.

Up ahead, a stream of fresh water running to the ocean had carved a deep gully into the beach.

Ah-hah, she thought. That’s how she got up into the woods.

Bri scanned the sand for any footprints to tell her she was right, but she could find nothing. Looking behind her, she clearly saw her own footprints, a wavering dark line winding all the way back to the trail, and that was all.

Of course, Bri thought, if she walked in the water, she wouldn’t leave any tracks … Maybe she saw me and didn’t want anything to do with me.

And even though she clearly remembered seeing the girl carefully avoiding each wave as it came toward her, Bri told herself that had to have been what happened. She had seen Bri following her and had dashed away, up the gully and into the woods to avoid her.

“Some friendly place this is turning out to be,” Bri said softly to herself.

She bent over and picked up a worn piece of oddly shaped driftwood. After brushing the loose sand from it, she hefted it in her hand, cocked her arm back, and spun it end over end into the brush. It ripped through the branches and hit the ground with a dull thud.

“Welcome to our friendly little town!” she yelled, throwing her head back and shouting at the darkening sky. “So nice to meet you! You’ll love it here!”

Spreading her arms out wide, she started spinning around in a circle, her feet kicking up fans of sand. She wanted to laugh … or cry. She didn’t know how she felt other than very lonely. The wind coming in off the water brought tears to her eyes as she spun crazily around until she got dizzy and was sure she was going to fall flat in the sand.

“Goddamnit!” she shouted, clenching her fists and shaking them. “God-damn-it, damn-it, damn-it!”

Bri lurched to a stop and stood there, knees locked and legs braced while the world spun around her — beach, sky, ocean — beach, sky, ocean — all blurred until they looked like smudged colored chalk.

Knowing she must look like she was drunk, Bri staggered from side to side, waiting to regain her balance. With the sun gone, the chill of the air bit through her thin jacket, and she knew she had to get home. Her mother would be worried if she was out after dark.

As she started along the beach, back the way she had come, something in the corner of her eye caught her attention. Squinting, she peered hard at the line of rocks and brush ahead of her, past where she had first come down onto the beach.

It looked like ...

Bri was sure it was a trick of the deepening gloom. It was impossible for her — the girl she had been following — to be back down the beach, but sure enough … there she was.

Did she run all the way back there while I was screwing around? Bri wondered.

What the hell is she doing?

Not entirely convinced the girl was really there, Bri smiled and waved to her over her head. She was looking directly into the western sky, which glowed brightly, as if there were a forest fire beyond the horizon. That intensified the darkness in the rocks and trees by the edge of the beach.

“Hello ... “ Bri called out, still waving as she started walking toward the girl.

There was no doubt.

She was standing in the gloom at the edge of the brush. It sure looked like she was watching her, but the girl didn’t respond. She stood there stock-still, staring at Bri. Her gray sweater appeared to be oddly suspended in midair, and the darkness seemed about to swallow her up.

“Hey! … Hold on a minute!” Bri shouted.

She pumped her fists as she ran, taking in deep gulps of air that burned in her lungs.

In a matter of seconds, Bri closed the distance between them, but when she looked down so she wouldn’t trip in the uneven sand or on some kelp, she looked up again, and the girl was gone.

Bri drew to a halt and stared, frustrated, at the black line of brush against the fiery red sky.

The girl was gone.

Vanished.

“Hello!” Bri shouted.

Her voice bounced back from the wall of rocks with an odd reverberation. She slapped her fists against her thighs and grunted angrily.

“Come on!” she yelled as she started walking toward where the girl had been. “For crying out loud … I just want to talk.”

Her legs ached from running. The air rushing into her lungs like liquid fire. She didn’t try to hold back the tears that gathered in her eyes and were streaking down her cheeks.

“I just want to talk ... “ she repeated feebly, her words echoing softly.

Dejected, she turned and headed back toward the path that would lead up to Shore Drive. It was way past time to be getting home. Her mother was probably already worried and looking for her. She kicked at the sand as she crossed the beach and started up the slope, but then, not five steps into the woods, she jolted to a stop. Looking down, she saw a peculiarly shaped piece of driftwood. It looked oddly like a boomerang, and when Bri stooped down and picked it up, it felt strangely familiar in her hand.

She stood up and studied the piece of wood as she turned it over and over in her hand, not believing that this was the piece of wood she had thrown into the woods back by the gully.

“Screw this,” she hissed, and then she threw the wood down as hard as she could, satisfied by the snapping sound as it broke on the ground.

“Friggin’ bunch of weird people on a friggin’ island,” she said as she stomped up the trail back to the road.

V

Her mother had everything pulled out of the cupboards and lined up on the counter while she reached up onto the top shelf and scrubbed the shelves with a Lysol and hot water. She looked around when Bri came into the kitchen.

“Nice of you to show up,” Julia said, scowling. “I was starting to wonder where you were.”

“Out,” Bri said simply, going to the refrigerator and taking out a gallon jug of milk. She got a glass from the counter and filled it, then put the milk back and stood leaning against the countertop while she sipped. She wanted to tell her mother about what had happened on the beach, but she decided not to. Why get her all worked up?

“So, did you meet anyone while you were out?” her mother asked, as though reading her mind. Apparently satisfied with her job, she dropped the sponge into the pan full of sudsy water and eased herself back down to the floor.

“Not really,” she replied.

“What does that mean?” Julia asked.

“No one.”

Julia busied herself, putting some of the boxes and cans back into the cupboard. She inspected each item and, more often than not, dropped them into the trash can beside her. “God, some of this stuff has been here for years.” The only thing that made her feel good was that she hadn’t found any evidence of mice — much less poodle-sized rats — so maybe Frank had been pulling Bri’s leg after all.

“I don’t think you have to worry, though,” Julia said. “You’ll be starting school tomorrow, and I’m sure you’ll meet plenty of kids then.”

Bri nodded and then drained off the rest of her milk.

“Yeah, great. I’ll be the new kid, and no one except the losers will talk to me.” She still wanted to say something about the girl she had seen on the beach, but the girl’s evasiveness had hurt Bri’s feelings. She definitely wasn’t going to mention this to her mom.

“Do I really have to start school so soon?” she asked, her voice whining. This had been a point of discussion ever since they’d started packing. Both of her parents had insisted she jump right into school so she could start adjusting to her new life, but now, with the reality of all the unpacking and cleaning they had to do, she was trying one last time to get a few days’ reprieve — a week, if she got lucky.

Julia chuckled. “The ‘new kid.”

“But Mom —”

“No ‘buts,’” Julia snapped.

“You don’t understand,” Bri said.

“I understand plenty.” Julia turned toward her with a frown. “I moved a few times myself when I was young, and I know exactly how it feels to be the new kid.”

“Things are different now,” Bri said weakly. She knew she had lost — and this had been the final round.

“Is Granddad home yet?” Bri asked. ‘‘I’m hungry.” She looked longingly at the kitchen table to see any evidence that supper was close.

“He should be back soon,” Julia said, wiping her hair from her eyes. “If you’re hungry, have a snack to tide yourself over.”

Bri looked at her mother with wide, sad eyes. “Do you want me to starve?”

Julia shook her head angrily. “Look, Bri — your father and I are exhausted. Between unloading the truck and getting all sorts of furniture shifted around and cleaned up in here, I don’t have the energy to do anything fancy tonight. All right? If you want something to eat, get it yourself. And when you’re done, maybe think about getting your own stuff unpacked. Your father has already put your bed together, so maybe put some sheets and blankets on it while you’re at it.”

“God, you make it sound like I committed a capital crime or something,” Bri said.

For a second longer, her mother’s face remained hard; then it softened, and she said mildly, “Sorry, honey. I’m hot, tired, and cranky.”

Bri nodded, further resolved not to mention the girl she had seen on the beach. Her mother left the kitchen and went upstairs, and Bri stood by the counter, silent for several seconds while she listened to her mother and father upstairs, moving something heavy, by the sounds up in their bedroom. Finally she opened the refrigerator and fished around. The best she could come up with was the tuna fish left over from lunch, so she slapped together a sandwich, refilled her glass of milk, and walked into the living room to sit on the couch and eat.

Outside, the sky was now dark. The distant flash of the lighthouse winked on and off, and the solitary streetlight on the corner spread a faint yellow glow over the road. A few falling leaves drifted by on the breeze, spinning in the rectangle of light from the house. Even with the sounds of her parents unpacking upstairs, knowing they were nearby, Bri couldn’t have felt any lonelier.

She ate and drank in silence, tossing over in her mind what had happened on the beach. She had wanted to tell her mother about the girl she had seen, but something — she didn’t know what — told her not to. If anything, her mother would caution her about talking to strangers.

A car came down the road, its headlights sweeping over the yard as it turned into the driveway and stopped. Bri got up from the couch and, looking out the side window, saw a man get out, take a wheelchair from the backseat, fold it open, and then help Frank out of the front seat and into the wheelchair. She listened to the buzz of their voices through the window but couldn’t make out what they were saying.

After a bit of discussion, the man got back into his car and drove away as Frank rolled his wheelchair up the walkway to the kitchen door. As the car was backing around and its headlights swung around, Bri caught a glimpse of a person standing on the other side of the road under a maple tree.

She tensed with instant recognition.

It was the girl she had tried to follow on the beach. She was standing there, not cringing or hiding by the side of the road, but looking up, bold as could be, at the house. She was still wearing that old gray sweater, and her arms were folded across her chest. Her face — in that instant wash of light — looked pale, and her expression blank as she looked up at the house.

Can she see me? Bri wondered.

She cast a fearful glance up the stairway, wondering if one of her parents might be there and also be able to see the girl outside. The stairs were empty, though, and she could tell by the scuffling sounds from upstairs that they were still unloading boxes and putting things away.

When the car pulled away, Bri wondered why it didn’t pause even when its headlights shined directly on the girl. The kitchen door banged open as Frank came in, but Bri didn’t say a word or move a muscle as she stood by the window, watching the dark roadside.

Once the car was gone, the light from the corner streetlight wasn’t bright enough to illuminate the girl, and Bri thought she had disappeared again — had pulled a quick vanishing trick like she had on the beach. The light cast thin shadows of tree branches onto the street, but underneath the tree, the shadows were thick and black … impenetrable.

Bri knew at least one thing now. The girl — whoever she was — must have seen her and followed her home. There was no other explanation why she was outside the house. Bri wondered why she was — there was no other word for it — spying on her.

Maybe she’s shy ... just checking me out before she tries to meet me … She’s trying to figure out who I am.

Bri peered out into the darkness. She had no idea if the girl was still standing out there under the tree or if she had gone home.

And just where is home?she wondered.

“I see you folks got some work done while I was out,” Frank said gruffly to Bri as he rolled from the kitchen into the living room.

Bri, feeling as if she had been caught doing something wrong, quickly turned away from the living room window and smiled at her grandfather.

“Umm — Mom and Dad did most of the moving.” She cast a quick glance over her shoulder at the window, unable to shake the feeling that the girl was still outside the house, still watching her.

As if to prove the truth of her statement, Julia yelled from upstairs, “Bri! You know those boxes in your room aren’t going to unpack themselves.”

With a sigh and an exaggerated slouch, Bri nodded at Frank and then trudged up the stairs to her bedroom. Walking down the hallway, she called out to her mother that Frank was home and then went into her room to face the disaster. The old, squeaky bed was gone, and Bri was happy to see her own bed. With a loud whoop, she jumped onto the bare mattress and started bouncing up and down.

The bedroom door opened, and her mother poked her head into the room. Her face was streaked with grime and sweat, and her eyes looked tired.

“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” she asked as she eased into the room. Her face registered disapproval at the amount of work that still needed to be done.

“Nope — I was, uh, just getting used to it,” Bri said, slightly embarrassed at being caught acting like a little kid.

Julia frowned as she moved over to the window and looked out. The yard was dark, and fitful gusts of wind rattled the panes. She hugged herself and shivered.

“I suggest you get a move on,” Julia said, turning from the window to face her. “You’ve got school tomorrow, and I don’t want you complaining that you can’t find anything to wear in the morning.”

Bri nodded, got up from the bed, and bent down to open the first box within reach. It happened to be clothes, and she started loading up her bureau drawers while her mother leaned back against the windowsill and took a break.

Bri was torn, wondering if she should tell her mother about the girl she had ... well, met wasn’t exactly the correct word — had seen on the beach … and now outside the house. It bothered her and gave her the creeps that the girl had followed her home and waited outside … and maybe was still out there, watching her. She jammed her clothes into the bureau drawers, wishing, if nothing else, to lose her concerns in activity; but the thought of that girl out there in the dark and cold gnawed at her mind. She wished her mother would leave the room so she could peek outside and see if she was still there.

“So are you excited about starting school tomorrow?” Julia asked.

Thank you, God, Bri thought when her mother pushed herself away from the window and started pacing the room. Now if I can only think of some reason to go over by the window …

Trying to look totally casual, Bri shrugged as she took out several sweaters and refolded them before putting them on the top shelf of the closet. “I dunno,” she said. “I mean, I’d rather not —”

“We’ve already had that discussion,” Julia said coolly.

“I know,” Bri said, whining. She took one of her sweaters and unfolded it, holding it up for her mother to see. “All I’ve got is this old stuff. I don’t have anything new.”

“That sweater’s just fine,” Julia said. “Besides, no one at the school is going to know it isn’t new.”

“I will,” Bri said, her eyes flicking angrily from her mother to the sweater. Then, with a sigh, she folded it again and put it on top of the pile in her closet. “At least I won’t be as out of style as that girl I saw. She was dressed like someone out of the sixties or something.”

“What girl?” Julia asked.

“Oh, just someone I saw … downtown,” Bri answered as she sat on the floor and opened another box. This one was filled with her stuffed animals. She picked up a blue elephant she had named Oscar and, stroking her chin, said, “Hmm, I think I’ll keep him on the windowsill for now. “

Her heart skipped a beat when she crossed the floor to the window. A floorboard creaked underfoot, and she made a startled little squeak, but her mother seemed not to notice. She stroked Oscar’s blue fuzzed head, remembering Bungle before placing him on the windowsill. As casually as possible, she let her gaze drift outside.

Her heart almost stopped when she saw her.

The girl was still out there, standing in the shadows on the opposite side of the street. And she was looking up at the house. Her gaze was directed up at Bri’s window. The faint wash of the far-off streetlight gave her upturned face a gauzy glow, and Bri could see that she was smiling.

Behind her, her mother was saying something about school, but Bri’s mind shut her out as she stared down at the girl. Their eyes met. There was no doubt. A cold jolt hit her in the stomach, and her hand was trembling as she let go of Oscar.

What is she doing? Bri thought. What does she want?

Steeling herself, Bri forced a smile as she raised her hand and waved to the girl outside. She could see her own reflection in the glass, and the thin hollowness of her smile unnerved her. But then her smile widened into a genuine grin when the girl raised her hand and waved back.

“Mom ... come here,” Bri said, quickly turning away from the window. “There’s someone outside.”

Julia came over to the window, but when they both looked outside, the girl was gone. Bri had almost expected it.

“She was there just a second ago,” Bri said, looking at her mother’s face close to hers.

“Who was?” Julia asked.

Bri was silent for a moment as she weighed her words. There was still something in the back of her mind that told her not to say anything more about this to her mother, to let it go. But one thing Bri had always prided herself on was her honesty with her mother — especially after she and her father divorced eight years ago. Holding back on her would be like lying.

“This afternoon, when I went for a walk,” she said softly, letting her gaze, drift toward the window. “Down on the beach … I saw a girl.

It didn’t take long to give her mother the details because not much had happened. She realized, as she spoke, that she might be blowing this situation way out of proportion. It all boiled down to the fact that she had seen someone who, basically, had ignored her.

So what was the problem?

The problem was, the mystery girl had followed her home and was hanging around outside the house, and Bri had no idea who she was or what kind of person she was.

Maybe she was a nut case ... a girl without friends who was — well, weird.

Maybe she was into, like, kinky sex or something. Her mother had told her about those kinds of girls.

Or maybe she had a rotten home life, had a drunk for a mother and had been sexually abused by her father. Her mother had told her about those kinds of situations, too.

Maybe this girl hung around other people’s houses because they had the “normal” home life she didn’t have.

Or maybe she didn’t have a home. What if both her parents had died, and she lived alone … say down by the wharf in one of the fishing shacks?

Maybe, with winter coming, she was looking for a warm house to be invited into.

Or maybe, as Bri had thought before, this girl was just shy and wanted to meet her but didn’t know how to go about it.

There were far too many possibilities to consider, Bri realized, but she knew one thing — her thoughts would stay mere speculations as long as she never got to meet the girl and talk with her.

“You’re sure there was someone out there? I don’t see anyone.” Julia was unable to hide the tremor in her voice. She didn’t relish the idea of anyone from the island playing “Peeping Tom” with them.

Realizing she had to calm her mother, Bri shook her head as though confused.

“I don’t know for sure,” she said. “Maybe it was the shadows from the streetlight.” She knew it hadn’t been that, but she didn’t want her mother getting all worked up about it.

“I’m probably imagining things,” Bri said.

“Well, you either saw her or you didn’t,” Julia said harshly. She was exhausted from the day of steady work, and her nerves were frayed.

“I know she was out at the beach,” Bri said, not wanting her mother to question her further. “But … it was probably the shadow of a tree branch or something. There’s no one out there now.”

“I’m going to have your father go out and have a look around,” Julia said as she started toward the door. Before she left the room, she turned to Bri and, pointing her forefinger at her, said, “And you get to work, young lady. No more gazing out the window. I want all this stuff put away pronto.”

VI

Frank went to bed earlier than usual, saying that his day out “visiting” had worn him out, but Julia, John, and Bri worked long into the night, trying to blend their things in with what was already in the house. They realized early on that much of their stuff would probably end up in the garage, but there were several personal things — paintings and books and pieces of furniture — that they couldn’t abandon. They wanted to wait to talk to Frank about some of his things of his that might end up in storage.

“I can’t wait to hit some real sheets on our own bed,” Julia said, glancing at her wristwatch and seeing that it was almost midnight. “We can’t get it all done in one night anyway, so why don’t we all get to bed. Bri, you’ve got to be in the principal’s office at seven-thirty in the morning.”

Bri grunted and started to protest one last time but then fell silent. After kissing her mother and father good night, she went up the stairs, put on her flannel nightie, brushed her teeth, and slid into bed.

But in the darkened room, listening to her parents as they washed up, she was as tired as she would have been after drinking ten cups of coffee. She clasped her hands behind her head and lay there, staring at the ceiling, her eyes so wide open they felt as if they were glued that way.

First she told herself she was waiting for her parents to stop clunking around in the bathroom, running the shower, using the blow dryer, flushing the toilet. But soon enough, they were quietly settled in bed, and the house fell silent. Still, sleep didn’t come. She told herself she was tense and excited about starting school in the morning, but she knew the truth — she was waiting to hear the low, throbbing strains of organ music echoing in the walls ... or the soft thump of a rat scurrying around inside the wall.

At last, though, she admitted what she had known all along: she was wondering how long that girl had waited outside the house in the dark, looking up at her darkened bedroom window.

What if she’s still out there?

She glanced at the dial of her alarm clock.

Twelve forty-five.

God, I’ll never get up on time tomorrow if I don’t get to sleep.

Her fresh-washed sheets and pillowcase crinkled under her weight as she shifted onto her right side. Her eyes fixed on the window and the dark silhouette of Oscar, the elephant, on the sill. Beyond the glass, the night sky vibrated with stars, bone-white pinpricks in the black. The thin shadow of a tree branch swaying in the breeze caught the edge of her windowsill, and even though she knew it didn’t look anything like a hand or claw, it unnerved her because she couldn’t help but imagine there was something outside on the window ledge, trying to pry open her window … clawing its way to her.

She wanted to say the hell with it and roll over onto her other side.

Don’t even look at the window!

Don’t even think about that girl, whoever she is!

Get some sleep.

She wouldn’t make much of a first impression at school if, on top of everything else, she fell asleep in class. But trying to fall asleep, she had found, was like trying not to think about something — the harder you tried, the more you failed.

With a deep sigh, she threw her covers off and swung her feet to the floor. A tingling chill went up the back of her legs, but she barely noticed it as she moved slowly toward the window.

Will she still be out there? she wondered.

No … That’s impossible …How could she be?

Bri held her breath until her lungs felt like they would burst as she looked out into the thick darkness. Beyond the harsh, dark line of the horizon, the starry sky looked like powdered velvet. The street was bathed in the soft glow of the streetlight, but everything was quiet and calm.

The girl definitely wasn’t out there anymore.

“At least I can’t see you,” Bri whispered. Her face was close to the window, and her breath fogged the glass. Her view of the road blurred, and she could almost imagine the girl was still there, hiding in the tree’s shadow.

Crouching by the window, Bri waited, taking shallow breaths and trying not to blink. She didn’t want to miss the girl if she was there.

What began as a suspicion soon became a conviction. She was still out there ... she was hiding in the dark, looking up at her window. Bri could sense her sad, lonely eyes reaching up out of the darkness … touching her.

With a sudden sharp intake of breath, Bri stood up and spun away from the window. Fishing around in the dark, she found her slippers and slipped them on. Then she raced down the stairs, taking them two at a time, her hand sliding on the railing, guiding her in the dark. She dashed to the living room door and flung it wide open. The chilly night air slammed into her like a shock wave.

Once outside, Bri didn’t hesitate. She ran around the side of the house to Oak Street, her eyes trying to slice into the darkness. Both the streetlight’s glow and the shadows it cast seemed more intense than usual. Bri ran to the edge of the lawn and then drew to a stop, panting as she stared across the road.

“Hello,” she called, her voice no more than a raw whisper. “Are you out there?”

A chilling breeze circled around her ankles like tiny hands, clutching her. Bri felt suddenly very alone and exposed. The one girl wasn’t the only one watching her. A multitude of eyes surrounded her and were staring at her, unseen from the darkness ... eyes that were cold and hungry.

A stronger shiver ran through Bri’s body, and her voice sounded fainter as she called out again,

“Hey … Are you there?”

Her only answer was a fitful breeze, hissing like a snake in the dried grass and weeds of the lawn. Her vision blurred as tears welled up in her eyes, and her throat was suddenly parched.

“I know you’re there,” she said, her voice weaker as she scanned the solid wall of the night. “I just want to talk.” Her voice faded even more. “I just want to be friends.”

The night remained as silent and unyielding as it was dark. No soft chirring of insects in the grass … no gentle call of night birds ... only the wind sighing.

Her tears carved warm tracks down her cheeks. Bri was nearly overwhelmed with loneliness, but she wasn’t sure who she felt it for more — herself or the girl.

Maybe both of us because I know … I can feel that you’ve lost something like I have … I’ve lost my friends and my home in Vermont, and my best friend, Bungle …but what have you lost? … Why are you so lonely?

She turned and headed back to the house, convinced more than ever with every step that, somewhere in the darkness, cold eyes were fixed on her like magnets. She mounted the steps and went back inside, grateful, at least, to be out of the cold wind. Leaning her back against the door, she shut and locked it.

“See anyone?”

The voice coming out of the darkness startled her. She let out a loud squeal, and it took a moment or two for her eyes to adjust to the darkness inside the house. The she saw the silhouette of her granddad in his wheelchair, perched in the doorway of his bedroom at the end of the hall.

“I — umm,” she started to say, but surprise held its fingers around her throat, and words couldn’t form.

“Sometimes, you know,” he said, his voice sounding distant, “I get the feeling, too, that there’s someone out there.” He started rolling down the hallway toward her. As he got closer, she caught a glimpse of his face — his eyes were half open, looking blankly up at the ceiling.

“It’s like ... I dunno,” he said. “Sometimes I can almost touch it ... and then it’s … gone.”

He shook his head as though to clear it, but when he looked at her again, his face registered surprise, as though he had just noticed her standing there.

“What’re you doing up at this hour?” he asked sharply.

Unable to speak, Bri simply shrugged.

“I wasn’t able to sleep, either.”

Frank snapped on the hall light. The sudden flood of light was so bright it hurt Bri’s eyes. Shielding her eyes, she squinted as she looked at him watching her. She was suddenly self-conscious, standing there in her nightie and slippers. Dried leaves and twigs clung to the hem of her nightie.

“I ... it was the weirdest thing,” Bri said, stammering the words. “I was ... I’m positive someone was outside the house.”

Frank sniffed and scratched his head. “Could’ve been,” he said. “Lots o’ nights some of the fellas end up drinkin’ late down at the wharf. Could’ve been any one of them stumblin’ home in the dark.”

Bri wanted to tell him about the girl but instead bent over and started picking the crud off her nightie.

“Yeah ... well, maybe,” she said.

It bothered her that she was unable to maintain eye contact with him, but it was spooky, the way he sat there hunched up in his wheelchair, staring at her, examining her. And even weirder how he had spoken with her and then acted surprised at seeing her. She wasn’t sure, but it was almost as if he was toying with her — as if he knew something and was just waiting for her to say the right words so he would know that she knew, too.

“It’s late. Hadn’t you ought to get back up to bed?” he asked.

Bri covered her mouth with her hand and feigned a yawn as she tossed the dried leaves she’d collected into the wastebasket by the coat closet.

“I guess so,” she said, nodding, “See you in the morning.”

“G’night,” Frank said, not moving, but shifting his eyes to follow her as she went up the stairs. “Pleasant dreams.”

FOUR

First Day Jitters

I

Once John and Bri had left for the day, Julia was more at loose ends than ever. It wasn’t that there wasn’t any work to be done. Far from it. They had unpacked about a quarter of their things the day before, and most of what had been unpacked still hadn’t found a place yet in Frank’s house.

Our house now, Julia thought as she sat at the kitchen table, her hands wrapped around a cup of coffee.

For several minutes she sat there looking around, comparing this kitchen to the one she had left behind in Shelburne Falls. Granted, this one was much larger, but her kitchen back in Vermont had been sunny and yellow and warm. How many times had she sat in that kitchen, drinking coffee and talking with Sue or Ann or any number of friends who seemed always to be dropping by. There had been someone visiting just about every day, but who was there to visit with here on Glooscap? She had to resist the desire to pick up the phone and give Sue or Ann or someone a call. Maybe talking with her for a few minutes would get her out of her funk.

But the longer she looked from dingy cupboard to dusty floor, the more she wondered why she had so willingly gone into self-exile from friends and everything she cherished back in Vermont.

As if in answer, a soft thump sounded on the floor and, turning, she saw Frank maneuvering his wheelchair around the corner into the kitchen.

“Mornin’,” he said, pausing to scratch his beard-stubbled jowls.

“I hope we didn’t disturb you this morning,” Julia said, standing up and making room for him to get past her. “John and Bri had to get an early start.”

“Ahh, I’m a light sleeper anyways,” Frank grumbled. A twinkle lit his eyes when he added, “I was up late, listenin’ to the organ music.”

He reached for the coffeepot and cup Julia had left out on the counter for him, filled his cup, and twisted around in his wheelchair to place it on the table before going to the refrigerator for the milk.

Julia’s first impulse was to get it for him, but she knew he was used to doing things on his own and that he might see anything she did to help as patronizing. She slowly eased back into her chair, not sure what to say or do next. All she could think was, if Frank didn’t turn into a much better conversationalist soon, she would have plenty of motivation to get to work unpacking.

Frank came back to the table, stirred a generous amount of milk into his cup, then, took a sip and leaned back in his wheelchair, smacking his lips.

“Well, this is going to be unusual,” he said, placing his cup on the table.

“What do you mean?” Julia was afraid he was going to start in on how they would have to be much quieter in the morning.

“Havin’ coffee made for me when I get up.” Frank took another sip. “It’s kinda nice. You serve breakfast, too? Or do I have to fetch my own?”

Julia smiled and stood up.

“Scrambled or over easy?” she asked, reaching for the frying pan.

“Actually, toast and cereal will do just fine. But I reckon you got enough to do without waitin’ on me hand-and-foot. I can fetch it myself.”

Is this some kind of test? Julia wondered, looking at Frank while trying to gauge what he meant. He was smiling at her pleasantly enough, but beneath the surface, was he silently measuring her?

And, she wondered, by what standards?

“No problem,” Julia said, opening the cupboard and taking down a box of Rice Krispies. She popped two pieces of whole wheat bread into the toaster, got a jar of grape jelly from the refrigerator, a bowl and silverware from the cupboard, and placed them all on the table in front of Frank. While she drank her second cup of coffee, he ate his skimpy breakfast. She wondered how he could eat cereal without any sugar but decided it was probably doctor’s orders.

The bowl of Rice Krispies was soon gone, and Frank was halfway through his second piece of toast when he nailed her with an unexpected question.

“So, what in the hell’s John’s problem, anyways?”

His bluntness surprised her. With difficulty, she swallowed her mouthful of coffee before looking at him and saying, “Beg your pardon?”

“I asked what the hell’s John’s problem?” he repeated. “It don’t take no goddamned Sherlock Holmes to figure out somethin’s bothering him. ‘N’ since he ain’t about to open up to me, I thought maybe you could enlighten me.”

Instantly, Julia ticked off the possibilities to herself. Of course she, too, had noticed that John was acting ... well, not strangely, but a little bit differently since the arrived in Maine.

In some ways, she thought, his father knows him better than I do…What’s he driving at?

“I don’t think it’s anything serious,” she said, wringing her hands helplessly. “I mean, I don’t think it’s anything more than the stress of relocating and starting a new job and all, and —”

“And coming home,” Frank said harshly, “to live with me … to take care of me.”

He curled one hand into a fist and brought it down hard enough on the arm of the wheelchair to make it rattle.

“Kinda funny, though, when you think how much I was always the one pushin’ him to get an education so he could get the hell out of here.” He snorted and shook his head. “Can’t say he don’t resent it.”

Julia’s bottled-up resentment for Frank genuinely scared her. Of course, in the years she had known John, he had told her plenty of things about what kind of father Frank had been … what kind of childhood he’d had. When she compared John’s childhood to her own, she believed he had gotten off fairly easy. It certainly hadn’t been as tough as her life, being passed from foster home to foster home after her parents had died when she was four.

“It’s not fair to say that,” Julia said softly. “He doesn’t resent you.”

She wanted to say more, but she cut herself off and, looking out the window past Frank, groped for what to say. She was about to continue when, from the corner of her eye, something — a thin, indistinct shadow — slid across the windowsill. For an instant, the sunlight streaming in had been blocked. She tensed, looking at Frank to see if he had noticed it, too, but his back was to the window.

Forcing herself to stay calm and look casual, Julia got up and brought her half-empty cup over to the sink. She leaned forward, looking back and forth out the window, squinting into the sun as she dumped the coffee out and rinsed the cup. As far as she could tell, there was nothing unusual — no tree branches or birds or anything that could have accounted for the shadow. It had been so thin and fleeting she was half-convinced she had imagined it. But she couldn’t rid herself of the unnerving thought that something had been outside there.

Probably a bird flying by, she concluded, but that didn’t dispel the sensation she had that the source of the shadow had been closer to the house.

“To be honest,” Frank went on, apparently not noticing her distraction, “I think it’s ‘cause he don’t like me … Never has. ‘Specially after his mother died. I think he blames me for what happened to her.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Julia said automatically. She reached out blindly and put her cup in the dish drainer but kept scanning the yard.

“Come on, Julia,” Frank said. His voice had such intensity that she turned around and faced him. “We’re both adults here, and if we don’t talk honest, your living here simply ain’t gonna work. You know it, and I know it.”

“Of course,” Julia said.

Her back was toward the window now, and she about screamed from the sensation that someone was out there watching her. Her breath caught in her throat, and she found it difficult to look directly at Frank. She wanted to maintain solid eye contact with him because she didn’t want him to read her rising fear and think it meant she was hiding something about John from him.

“Then you can tell me up front what the hell it is that’s botherin’ him,” Frank said. “Ever since you folks got here, he’s said maybe three words to me. ‘N’ if he hates me so much —”

“He doesn’t hate you,” Julia said, forcing her voice to stay mild. But then she had to clamp her jaw shut when, glancing down at her hand resting on the counter, she saw a shadow slide across the countertop. The sun warming her back suddenly went cold as though something had come between her and the sunlight.

With a low grunt, she spun around and stared out the window, fully expecting to see a person, standing out there, looking in at her. The cold spot on her back sent waves of goose bumps down her arms, and she had all she could do not to scream when she realized there was nothing … no one there.

The sun poured, unblocked, through the window.

“You all right there?” Frank asked, for the first time noticing her agitation.

Julia nodded, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Yeah, I thought I heard something outside.”

Frank kept looking at her as though he could peel aside her exterior and peer into her deepest thoughts. Of course, she knew that John honestly hadn’t wanted to come back to Glooscap, that he would just as soon have continued their life in Vermont and let Frank fend for himself, either at home or in a nursing home. She couldn’t admit to Frank that she had insisted they come to help him.

She couldn’t — and wouldn’t — tell him that.

“Look, Frank,” she said, “if there’s a problem between you two, it’s up to you to talk to John about it. He’s your son, after all.”

She waved her hands for emphasis, barely able to repress a shiver as she wondered who or what had blocked the sunlight in the window behind her back.

Frank snorted and shook his head as though she had just delivered a joke. “Yeah ... right.”

“I’m not going to get between the two of you,” she went on. “If you can’t talk to him, then, yes, you’re right — our being here isn’t going to work.”

She heard what she was saying, and she honestly meant it, but her mind was consumed by the desire to move from where she was standing with her back to the window. She was so tense, though, she was afraid if she moved right now, she would scream and run from the room. The sensation that somewhere outside the house someone was watching her scared the bejesus out of her. Coupled with what Bri had said last night about the girl she had seen down on the beach, Julia was beginning to have grave doubts — not about living here to help Frank — but simply about living on Glooscap Island. There was something strange going on here, no doubt.

“I have a lot of work to do,” she said. She held her breath as she shifted away from the window, still feeling unseen eyes boring into her back as she came over to the table and started clearing Frank’s place. He quickly grabbed his empty cereal bowl and said, “I got it.”

Knowing it was time to back off, Julia said simply, “Fine,” and smiling a smile she didn’t feel, she went out into the living room and got to work opening boxes of books and placing them on the shelves by the fireplace. She tried to lose herself in the work, but she couldn’t shake the conviction all day that someone was watching her. And she would never forget the chilled sensation on her back when whoever or whatever it was had come between her and the sun.

II

“My first impression, if you want the truth, is that you’re walking right into the middle of a shit storm,” Barry Cummings, John’s new boss at Atkins Construction, said.

He was a tall, heavy-built black man with a warm smile John had liked immediately.

After dropping Bri off at school, John had trouble finding a parking place and had gotten to the office a few minutes late, making for a great first impression. The first thing Barry did was take him out of the office building and down the street to show him where he could be guaranteed a parking space — if he arrived before eight every morning. Then he gave John a quick tour of the office, introducing him to everyone they bumped into. After loitering around the coffeepot, making light conversation with the employees, Barry showed John his new office. The company had recently moved into a new building on Commercial Street, and from his office window, John could see the hazy purple lump of Glooscap Island in the distance across Casco Bay.

Home, sweet home, he had thought bitterly while looking out over the water.

Now, working on their second cup of coffee, he and Barry were leaning over a huge blueprint unrolled across John’s new work desk. The room was pleasant enough, clean and well lit, but perhaps a bit too small. John figured, being “low man,” he had been given the smallest space.

The blueprint they were looking at was of lot divisions and a proposed road for Surfside Ledges, a condo development being built by the Freedom Corporation, one of the biggest land developers in the Portland area. It just so happened that the project was being built on the northeast side of Glooscap Island, on the ocean side of two small hills known locally as The Brothers that overlooked Whale Cove.

“Everything looks fine to me,” John said after scanning the plan a few minutes.

Glooscap was a relatively small island, and even though he hadn’t been home in years, he knew every square foot of the place. As a boy, he and his friends had ranged far and wide over the island, playing guns, swimming, doing whatever kids do. Past Larson’s Pond, where they went skating every winter, the area around The Brothers was — at least back then — one of the last woodsy areas on the island. Huge oaks mingled with second-growth pines down to the shore. On the extreme tip of Whale Cove was Haskins’ farm, about fifteen acres of cleared land, an old farmhouse, and a tumbled-down barn. The condo development was situated so residents would have a gorgeous view of the outer islands of Casco Bay.

“Oh, the plans are fine. Nothing wrong there,” Barry said, straightening up and rubbing the small of his back. “It’s the — let’s call it the ‘local opposition.’ The folks who don’t want to see condos on their island.”

John shrugged and leaned back from the drafting table. Focusing on the blueprint, he drained his coffee cup and lobbed it into the trash can, waiting for Barry to continue.

“You realize how tough it’s getting, I suppose,” Barry said at last, a faint smile on his lips. “The local environmentalists start screaming about — I don’t know ... whatever. Saving the breeding grounds for Arctic terns is the latest I’ve heard. The environmental impact, as they’re so fond of saying.”

“But Freedom’s gotten all the necessary clearances and permits, right?”

“Oh, yeah — sure, sure.”

“So any protest is pretty much a waste of time.”

“An expensive waste of time, but that doesn’t seem to stop them. There was quite a stink awhile ago about banning any noncommercial fishing uses of — well, that was in Portland harbor. There’s also been a big ruckus about some developing down around Old Orchard Beach, so it’s been putting some heat on what Freedom Corp’s doing out on Glooscap. Lot of people on the island are bitchin’ about how they want to keep out-of-state money from ruining their island.”

“That’s only natural,” John said, letting his gaze drift out across the water to the distant hump of the island. “‘Course, you don’t hear them bitching when those out-of-staters buy their lobsters, do you?”

“Never,” Barry said.

Seeing the planned construction had made John start remembering the times he and his friends had spent out there — especially the times he and one of his girlfriends would meet in the woods or go up into the hayloft of Haskins’ barn and fool around. Back in those days, copping a quick feel on the outside of your girlfriend’s blouse was a major accomplishment. Anything more and, as the guys used to say, you were an “skinner.”

“So what do you think?”

“Huh?” John was ripped out of his reverie when Barry asked him a question he hadn’t heard.

‘‘I’m not keeping you awake, am I?” Barry said, smiling.

John started to apologize, but Barry waved him to silence.

“I know. You’re not even in the office an hour, and here I am bombarding you with all the bullshit. I asked was if you felt like you were caught in the middle, seeing as how you live out there. Some of your neighbors might not take too kindly to you being involved with this project.”

“Oh, no — no,” John said, waving his hand. He wanted to look out the window over toward the island but stared down at the blueprint instead, focusing on the thin, dark blue lines that represented the reality that hovered in the pale haze on the horizon. “It’s just ... well, everything’s still kind of spinning for me. It’s going to take me a while to absorb it all.”

“Hey, man, I understand,” Barry said. “What say around lunchtime we go up to Carbur’s for a sandwich. We can go over this in more detail. That is, of course, unless you want to start out with another project, first.”

John took a moment to consider. It might make sense to back down if this was such a volatile issue. And the bottom line was, he wasn’t so sure how he stood on this issue. He couldn’t work as a land surveyor and hold onto a sentimental attachment to the way things used to be on the island. Progress was progress, and with more people moving to the Portland area, more housing space was needed. Whether you liked them or not, condos were places where lots of people could live on a relatively small area of land, and land development was going to happen. The best hope was that the developers would show responsibility with what they did.

Then again, this wasn’t just any condo project.

This was on home turf. This involved places he used to go to play and skate and slide in the winter, places where he went drinking with his friends, where he tried his best to get laid, and now they were going to be ripped down and dug up to make room for a row of buildings that, judging by the sketches Barry had showed him, looked more like a stretched-out beehive than a place for people to really live.

“This road looks like it’s going to be near ... “ His voice trailed off as he stared down at the map. In the silence that followed, Barry’s eyes bored into him. He looked at his boss, his pencil poised in the air.

“There’s a grove of oak trees out around here,” John said, swallowing with difficulty. “I used to — it’s a sort of special place to me from when I was a kid.” Again he swallowed, and the sound his throat made was unnaturally loud in the small office. “It’s not noted on the blueprint, but it looks like this road goes near it.”

Barry craned his neck forward and looked at the blueprint, considering for a moment.

“I think most of them oaks are going to be cut down to make way for the road,” he said. “We tried to work the road around them so we could spare them, but there’s too much ledge farther to the north.”

“Cut down, huh?” John’s throat had suddenly gone dry. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “That’s progress, I guess. Say, where was that water cooler again? It must be the heat in this building is drying me out.”

“Out by the coffeepot,” Barry said, picking up his empty Styrofoam cup. “Come on, I’ll show you. I’m due for a refill.”

FIVE

Meeting Audrey

I

Julia didn’t know what Frank did to fill up his days, but he did make an effort to keep out of her way and eventually, as she threw herself into the job of getting unpacked, she stopped wondering and worrying about him. Judy Bartlett, the local nurse, still came by every morning to help him … mostly with physical therapy. The bottom line for Julia was that Frank had, after all, made it on his own — even after the stroke — before they moved in. At times, she questioned how much he actually needed their help.

She spent the better part of the first day cleaning the bathrooms, upstairs and down, and then sorting through the toiletries and towels. Most of the towels Frank had were frayed, faded, and full of holes, so she threw them away without a second thought and replaced them with their own.

Once that was done, she started in on the bigger project of making her own kitchen utensils and the foods her family preferred fit in with what Frank already had. At one point, she sought Frank out in his room to ask him if he minded her plugging in the microwave.

“Microwave be damned,” was his response. “Anything that cooks stuff in plastic and won’t let you cook in metal is unnatural.”

It took her a moment to catch on that he was joking with her. Regarding the microwave, she discovered that the wall plug was so old-fashioned that it wouldn’t handle the grounded three-prong plug. She left that problem for John to figure out.

She was concerned, needless to say, about how Frank would feel about her throwing away — or at least putting into storage — his old toaster, an antique Sunbeam that shot out sparks every time it popped — his battered aluminum pots and pans, tarnished flatware, and an assortment of other things. He told her to chuck anything she didn’t want. “ ‘S your kitchen now’s much as it’s mine,” he told her. So, using the empty boxes from her own unpacking, she packed up anything she thought might someday be usable and threw the rest into the trash cans out back.

Although at first it had seemed a formidable task, the actual job of cleaning turned out to be not so bad once she got started. Of course there were some corners — especially inside the stove — where the grunge had built up over the years and would never be clean again, but Lysol and elbow grease took care of just about everything in the kitchen. Later in the week, she even spent an afternoon and evening repainting the trimwork in the kitchen, and she got John’s promise that some weekend soon he would repaper the living room. All in all, in spite of first impressions she, John, and Bri were settling into the house quite well.

That wasn’t to say there weren’t some conflicts. Although he warmed up some, John still wasn’t very talkative — especially to his father. But even when it was just the two of them, Julia noticed a tension about him that she had never seen before. For his part, Frank tried to break the ice several times, but as soon as he met any resistance from John, his own horns went up, and they were silent and sullen with each other.

Julia didn’t like living with such tension, but she told herself — and would have told Frank if he had spoken to her about it a second time — that John was adjusting to a lot of things all at once, particularly his new job, and she was sure he would eventually mellow out.

By Thursday night, though, Julia was beginning to wonder if John would ever chill out. When he came home from work complaining of a splitting headache, she casually told him to get some aspirin from the bathroom medicine cabinet. The next thing she heard was a roar and then a torrent of curses.

“What’s the problem?” she asked in amazement. She was standing at the kitchen sink, up to her elbows in cold water, rinsing fresh spinach for supper.

“This … goddamned ... cover!” John shouted. He shuffled into the kitchen, his knuckles white as he tried to twist off the cap of the Tylenol bottle. “They should call it Damn-itol or Jam-itol.”

“Let me try,” Julia said, shaking her hands dry and taking the bottle from him. She put her thumb under the edge of the cap and with a quick flip, sent the cover flying halfway across the room. “Sometimes you need a woman’s touch,” she said with a laugh as she shook two pills out into his hand.

John scowled as he popped the pills into his mouth and washed them down with a gulp of water. Without a word of thanks, he turned and strode off into the living room, leaving Julia standing there.

“You’re welcome,” she said, softly enough so — she thought — he wouldn’t hear.

It hadn’t been that big a thing, but to Julia, now that she was watching for it, it was significant. Coupled with several other incidents, each relatively harmless on their own, it all added up to trouble brewing. Trouble because whatever was bothering John, he wasn’t saying much — or anything — about it.

Julia had her own problems. Throughout the day, she did the usual household things — grocery shopping, cleaning, unpacking, and rearranging furniture. But she had a growing conviction that there was something strange about the house … not so much about the house as around the house.

Maybe, she told herself, John’s agitation is getting to me.

Or maybe Bri’s loneliness was working on her nerves,

Then again, maybe it had something to do with Frank’s problems communicating with his son.

Or Frank’s bitter hostility at being confined to a wheelchair after an active, full life was working her nerves.

It could have been some or all of these, but Julia was certain there was something more ... a presence in or around the house was the best way she could describe it … a feeling or a “vibe.” More times a day than she cared to think about, as she was working she would get an eerie sensation like she was being watched. The skin on the back of her neck would suddenly go cold; her armpits would feel damp and clammy. Sometimes, she would quickly turn around, expecting to see Frank in the doorway, watching her silently, but he wasn’t there. The feeling also came at times when she knew Frank wasn’t home, when she was positive she was alone in the house.

“I think the house might be haunted,” she said to John one evening. It was Friday night. Tomorrow would mark their first full week living on Glooscap.

The lights were out, and they were tucked into bed. She had an arm and a leg draped over him, pulling him close. Her warm breath rebounded from the pillow, but the reassurance of John’s being there didn’t eliminate the chill creeping up her back.

“Of course it is,” he mumbled, smacking his lips and rolling onto his side away from her. The instant she said the word “haunted,” John’s mind filled with the image he had seen that night in the living room, but he wanted to play it down.

The slouched, gray shape he had seen suspended in the air by the couch had certainly looked like a person, but it had been hanging back to him, so he didn’t see the face. In his imagination, the body was slowly spinning around, and his heart pulsed coldly as he expected to remember seeing — and recognizing — the face.

With a sigh, Julia flopped onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, an indistinct gray blur that, strangely, seemed to come closer and recede with each breath. In the silence that followed John’s laconic reply, she lay there listening to his low, steady breathing. She couldn’t tell if he was really asleep or merely faking it to avoid talking to her.

The darkness pressed close, rubbing against her like a soft animal. When she began to sense that, even now, somewhere in the dark, eyes were fixed on her with a cold, steady stare, a low whimper escaped the back of her throat.

“John?” she whispered, pulling him closer.

“Huh?” He heaved a heavy sign but remained with his back to her.

“Honey ... “ she said, feeling suddenly needy as she slid her hand under his arm and gripped him, willing the warm solidness of his body to remove the fear churning up inside herself. She thought about how she spent most of her time — admit it … all of the time — worrying about other people — Frank, John, and Bri …

But what about me? she thought as tension coiled inside her like a hot wire.

Her hand slid across John’s chest and down his belly until she was gripping him hard. Then she moaned as she started stroking him. Raising her head from the pillow, she brought her mouth close to his ear and blew into his ear, flicking her tongue like a kitten lapping milk.

John’s breathing caught in his throat. Then, with a moan, he rolled onto his back. Even though she couldn’t see his face clearly, she knew he was looking at her in the darkness.

“Not now, honey,” he said, his voice thick with sleep. “I had a bitch of a day, and my head is still killing me.”

“That’s supposed to be my line,” she said with a chuckle. “Come on.” She slid the covers down, exposing his bare chest. “We haven’t fooled around all week. We’re not gonna start acting like a couple of old farts, do we?”

She leaned down and gently kissed one of his nipples, feeling him getting harder in her hand.

“Really, Jule —” John said, sounding a bit more awake.

“You know what I’m thinking?” Julia brought her face up to plant a wet kiss firmly on his mouth. Her tongue darted between his lips and lingered there for a moment. When the kiss was through, she continued talking so he wouldn’t be able to voice any protest. “Now that we’re getting kind of settled here, maybe we ought to start thinking again about having a baby.”

“What?” John said, his body stiffening. “Are you nuts?”

He hiked himself up in the bed, keeping her at bay, but he was still rock-solid in her hand. He couldn’t resist when she lowered her head, slid down, and started sucking on him. With a deep sigh — a mix of pleasure and irritation — he leaned back while she sucked until he was ready to burst.

Julia paused for a moment and looked up at him in the dark. She, too, was lost in the pleasure of the moment, but as soon as she stopped, a dark, seething fear began to twist within her. She had the distinct sensation that she — they were being watched.

“Don’t stop now,” John said, reaching down and caressing the top of her head, but she pulled herself up until they were face to face in the dark. The moment had passed, and he felt himself wilt.

“Why do you have to start in again about having a baby?”

“I ... just —” Julia began to say, but she cut herself off, afraid the tremor in her voice would give her away.

“We’ve been over it too many times,” John said, holding her firmly in his embrace, “I don’t think it’s a good idea. Why do you keep at it?”

“You know how much it would mean to me,” Julia said, “to have your baby.”

She still hadn’t gotten over the feeling that it was not just the two of them in the bedroom. The urge to scream and make a lunge for the light became almost intolerable. She couldn’t stop imagining cold, hard eyes staring at her from the surrounding darkness. Her body began to shake.

John found her lips in the dark and kissed her, holding her close, but the fear continued to wind up inside her. She was convinced someone was trying to communicate with her, reach through to her but, like a weak radio signal, didn’t have the strength. With a little whimper, she broke off the kiss and pushed John away.

“For Christ’s sake, Jule! Is that what sex is for you now? A function?” John said, keeping his voice low so he wouldn’t disturb Bri or Frank. “You ruin every time by talking about having a baby. Can’t you just enjoy it?”

“It’s not that.”

“Bullshit! For the past — how long? A year, now, at least, that’s all I hear from you. I want to have a baby! I want to have a baby!”

Tears were building up in her eyes, but her voice was too constricted for her to say anything. It was true enough; she did want a baby, and she didn’t see why now wouldn’t be as good a time as any to try, but it was the eyes that were bothering her now ... the eyes she was convinced were drifting around her bed in the darkness, lurking at the edge of her perception like the pale reflection of a cloud’s shadow ...

“Right now, I don’t think we need the added burden of a new baby, all right?” John said. “Think of it. Diapers … two A.M. feedings … baby-sitters … the expense … the whole thing. Christ, it would ruin our lives.”

“But it would add so much,” Julia said. Her voice was flat and emotionless, but apparently John didn’t notice.

“It’s not exactly fair to Bri, either,” John said. “Look, when we tried last year and it didn’t work out, I thought you were satisfied. You have a fantastic daughter, and —”

“I always thought you wanted a child of your own,” Julia said, her voice a throaty whisper. “I know you love Bri and all, and I think you’re a fantastic stepfather, and having a baby won’t take away anything between you two or between us. It will make it better.”

“Seriously, Jule,” he said, holding her even tighter. “We gave it a fair try, and it simply didn’t work out.”

“It doesn’t mean we can’t try again,” Julia said.

She struggled within herself to find security in his hug, but she still couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. The idea hit her that there was a little soul, hovering in the darkness by their bed — a baby, waiting to be born both touched and terrified her.

“Yeah, sure — we tried,” she said. She let her voice drift away because she knew she was close to saying something she would regret.

“Fine … Go ahead. Blame me,” John said. He snorted in the darkness and pulled away from her.

Julia tried to hug him tighter, not caring now if the tears fell or if he knew they fell. All she wanted was to hold him.

“It’s just — I have needs, too. And sometimes I get the feeling you don’t give a damn about what I need. I know what I’d be getting into if we have another baby. And if it’s something I want, I just … I just —” Her voice hitched in her chest, and she pulled back to wipe at her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I don’t see why you won’t agree to it.”

“There are a million reasons,” John said.

But you don’t feel the eyes watching you ... You don’t know about the baby who’s waiting to be born, she thought, unable to repress a shiver.

“And there are a million reasons I could give you why we should,” she said. “But I would think ... I’d like to think you’d do it because you love me.”

She pulled away from him, sighing as she settled her head in the well of her pillow. Her first impulse was to get up and go downstairs to sleep on the couch.

Let him stew a little, she thought bitterly.

Tears were streaming down both sides of her face now and soaking into the cotton pillowcase. John made a futile attempt to comfort her, but she resisted him, rolling over onto her side. The darkness pressed in so close it was like a second layer of skin, but Julia wasn’t fearful anymore.

All she could wonder was, Who’s out there …waiting to be born?

II

Saturday morning dawned bright and clear. Across the street from the Carlson house, there was a rockbound point of land jutting out into the ocean almost half a mile. The island people called it Indian Point. The ground sloped downward from the street, ending abruptly at the rocks, dropping off into the ocean as if the land had broken off and sunk. Up to the rocky edge, the ground was covered by a dense growth of scrub pine, frail saplings, wild roses, and other tangled bushes Bri didn’t recognize. Tiny birds — sparrows and finches — darted through the trees, their warblings whisked away by the steady wind coming in off the water.

Throughout the week, Bri had spent as much time as she could — until darkness fell — wandering the sandy beach and the ledges farther along the shoreline where glittering tide pools swarmed with life. Waves swept in, sometimes gently, sometimes crashing over the seaweed and kelp-bearded rocks. But now that school was out for the week and there was plenty of daylight available to her, she was determined to hike through the thick brush and explore as much of Indian Point as she could.

The air wasn’t just chilly; it was downright cold. Waves sent bubbly white sea foam flying high. The wind off the water whistled shrilly through the trees and bushes, filling the air with the sweet scent of pine. Bri shivered and pulled her collar tightly around her neck, but after walking for a while, she warmed up from the exercise and loosened it again.

To her surprise and relief, she found a network of paths winding through the undergrowth. Apparently she wasn’t the only person who liked to get away for some solitary thinking. This was such a gorgeous piece of land, she wondered why no one had ever built out here. She figured it was probably protected, either by the state or private ownership. The paths, at least, indicated that whoever owned the land didn’t mind people using it.

Bri was hoping against hope that the girl she had seen last Sunday would be out here again. All week, she had built up so many fantasies, so many wild and implausible stories about her that she was actually beginning to dread meeting her. The mundane reality of who she was, where she lived, and why she looked so lonely walking the shore might be better left undiscovered.

In spite of that, though, Bri still couldn’t shake the idea that she and this girl could be friends. Speaking only for herself, of course, Bri was so lonely on Glooscap, all she wanted was one person — one good friend to make life on the island more tolerable ... She wanted someone to go with to the mall and the movies and out to eat … like her friends back in Vermont.

She paused to watch sea gull wheeling overhead, stalling and drifting in the strong breeze, its wings flashing brilliant white against the blue sky. Its mournful cry came to her on the wind, and with a sudden fluttering, it swooped down and landed in the water, where it rode the shifting gray swells, looking too tiny to survive in such a cold and hostile environment.

Just like me, Bri thought, and her eyes began to tear up as she faced into the wind and licked her upper lip to taste the salt. She was amazed that the gull wasn’t picked up by one of the waves and sent crashing against the jagged rocks.

She lost all sense of time as she focused on the solitary gull, losing him and then finding him again, bobbing on the waves. The horizon was dotted with the sharp outlines of islands farther out, but Bri concentrated close to shore, trying to really feel what that gull experienced as he was tossed about by powerful natural forces. Her thoughts were drifting on the water with the gull, but suddenly the back of her neck prickled, and she snapped back to full awareness, aware that someone was watching her.

Her mouth gaped open as if she were about to speak as she turned and looked back along the path she had come. A tight constriction gripped her chest when she saw a figure in the shadows of the low-hanging branches. It was almost totally camouflaged by the tangle of tree limbs and dead leaves still clinging to the trees.

It’s her, Bri thought, her breath catching in her throat with an audible click.

The girl from the beach was standing there, looking at her.

Bri licked her lips and sucked in a quick breath before speaking.

“Hey … Hello,” she said.

Bri was looking at the girl over her shoulder, and now she turned slowly around. Something in her mind made her think of this girl like a frightened animal. She didn’t want to do anything to spook her.

“I — umm, I thought I might bump into you today,” Bri said tentatively. She shrugged awkwardly, lifting both of her hands to indicate the expanse of ocean behind her. “It’s so beautiful down here. I can understand why you like to come down here.”

Standing in the tangle of bushes, the girl didn’t move or say a word. She stood perfectly still and was so silently Bri began to wonder if she was really there at all. She was suddenly aware of how dry her throat was.

Maybe I’m imagining things, Bri thought. She’s an illusion ... a trick of light and shadows.

“Come on,” Bri said, taking a small step in the girl’s direction. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.” She gave a quick little laugh that sounded unnaturally loud to her own ears.

The girl stood there looking at her through the tangled branches. Her eyes were the only things about her that moved, darting back and forth, from Bri to the ground and back to Bri. Her face had a pinched quality, and it looked unnaturally pale, especially for someone who apparently spent as much time outside as she did. Her hair was thick and long, a dull black — the exact color of the shadowed tree branches she was hiding behind.

“I know you saw me last week over on Sandy Beach,” Bri said, taking a few more steps closer to the girl. For some reason, it looked as though they got no closer. “I’ve been thinking all week that we probably ought to meet. I think we’re — what do they call it? ‘Kindred spirits?’ Yeah. That’s it.”

“Maybe,” the girl said. Her voice was a low, airy whisper that was instantly whisked away quickly by the sea breeze and left the impression that she hadn’t spoken at all. But with that single word, Bri knew they were going to be friends. Her tone of voice held a lost loneliness that mirrored Bri’s own feelings of being without friends.

“Come on,” Bri said, waving her forward with her hand. She glanced over her shoulder at the tossing swells heaving up on the rocks, sending white spray flashing into the sky. “I mean, walking alone out here can be fun and all, but sometimes it’s nice to have someone to talk to. Don’t you think?”

The girl didn’t answer. Instead, she closed her eyes and, tilting her head back, looked up at the sky. When she opened her eyes again, she looked directly at Bri with an expression that was both distant and piercing.

“I guess so,” she said, her voice still a low thrum.

“Well, then — come on.” Bri waved at her more vigorously. “I don’t bite, for crying out loud.”

The girl seemed to deliberate for a few seconds, apparently weighing the solitary freedom she was giving up against the companionship she might be gaining. Then, ducking beneath an overhanging branch, she stepped out onto the path in clear view.

The first thing Bri noticed was that, in full sunlight, the girl’s hair took on a richer, deeper tone that made her face look all the paler. Her eyes were dark brown and had a distanced warmth that Bri had never seen before in anyone’s eyes. As the girl moved toward her, Bri couldn’t help but be surprised at how small she was. Having seen her only fleetingly and at a distance, she had for some reason expected her to be much taller than she actually was. But her smile, faint and fleeting like the rest of her, was also genuinely inviting.

“My name’s Brianna Mullen,” Bri said, holding out her hand for the girl to shake. The girl’s hand was freezing cold in her grip, and she wasn’t surprised when the other girl quickly broke off the contact. As soon as they let go, she slid her hands into her sweater pockets. “Everyone calls me Bri. I live up on —”

“I know where you live,” the girl said, looking Bri squarely in the eyes without blinking. “Your last name’s Mullen?”

“Well, yeah. My mom’s married to John Carlson,” Bri said. “So her name’s Carlson, but my dad’s name is Mullen. You probably know Frank Carlson. The old guy who lives in the house on the corner.” She was finished, thinking she already had blurted out too much, so with nothing else to do, she shrugged awkwardly and waited for the girl to tell her her name.

“I see,” the girl said finally, nodding her head slightly. “So you’re not his real daughter.”

“Oh, no. My real father lives in Cooper Falls, New Hampshire. He’s a schoolteacher. But, umm, what’s your name?” Bri asked before another awkward silence could descend.

The girl’s gaze drifted out over the water, and she — just as Bri had been — seemed captured by the seething power of the ocean.

Kindred spirits, indeed, Bri thought.

“My name’s ... Audrey,” the girl said, a faint smile twisting one corner of her mouth. “Audrey Church.”

With that, she turned and started walking slowly down along the rocky edge. Bri hurried to catch up with her as she leaped from rock to rock.

“And — uh — how come you know where I live?” Bri asked. As they walked, they kept well back from the water’s edge; but because of the unevenness of the ground, they couldn’t walk next to each other.

“This is a small island,” Audrey said. “It doesn’t have many secrets. Word gets around fast.”

“I see.”

As they walked, Bri was astounded at how effortlessly Audrey moved over the rocks. It seemed as though she easily scaled over large rocks that Bri, rather than scrambling up, would just as soon walk around. Bri struggled to keep up with her, and before long she found herself almost too winded to talk.

“Was that you outside my house the other night?” she asked when they had reached the tip of the headland and stopped to look out across the bay toward the city of Portland. The purple-hazed outline of the city looked like a mirage in the distance.

For a flickering instant, Audrey remained hypnotized by the view, her eyes fixed on the distant city skyline. Then, shaking her head, she turned and looked at Bri.

“Outside your house?” she said, a look of genuine confusion on her face. “I — I don’t know … I don’t think so.”

“Last Sunday?” Bri said. “I saw you down on the beach. I tried to catch up with you, but you well … kind of avoided me. I thought you were outside my house later that night.”

Audrey seemed to consider and then shook her head. Again, looking Bri squarely in the eyes, she said, “No … I mean … I remember taking a walk on the beach — at least I think I did ... I like it on the beach. I suppose I might have walked past your house on my way home.”

“Come on,” Bri said with a nervous laugh. “You’re teasing me. You were out there, watching me in the window.”

She tried to swat Audrey playfully on the back, but the girl twisted to one side, and Bri missed. The move was so quick Bri almost lost her balance and fell. Looking down at the more than ten-foot drop to the water, churning with foam and seaweed, she felt a cold dash of panic in the pit of her stomach. Audrey’s face remained impassive, as if she either hadn’t realized how close Bri had come to falling or else she simply didn’t care.

“It was really late at night,” Bri said, her voice tight with tension. She took a few steps away from the drop-off. “You — or someone — was out under the streetlight by the side of the house.”

Audrey shook her head. “I wasn’t ... unless I was, like I said, on my way home.”

“So where you live? What are you into?” Bri asked, trying to lighten the mood.

For several seconds, Audrey didn’t answer as she peered out over the ocean. Bri was beginning to accept that this was typical of her — to act as if she was either considering her response or hadn’t heard her at all and had her mind on something else.

“I’m over on the other side of the island,” Audrey said at last, indicating the general direction with a vague wave of her hand.

Bri thought of an odd image. Each of Audrey’s words was a milkweed puff, and as soon as a word was out of her mouth, it zipped away, carried by the breeze. She had the curious feeling that when Audrey spoke, she wasn’t sure she had said anything. Her words were like water that evaporated as soon as they were spoken.

“I was wondering why I didn’t see you all week at school,” Bri said. “I kept hoping I’d bump into you so we could meet, but — I mean I thought I saw you once or twice, but you must be in high school, huh?” She shrugged and slapped her hands against her legs as though she could provide no answer herself.

“It’s my ... my parents,” Audrey said, her face suddenly darkening. “They don’t put a whole lot of trust in school. They don’t want me to go because they don’t think I’ll get the right kind of education.”

“Are they fundamentalist Christians or something?”

A confused smile flitted across Audrey’s face. It was the most expression Bri had seen so far, but it had such wistful sadness it almost broke her heart.

“No … My parents ... they’re —” Audrey suddenly cut herself off and turned from Bri to look over the ocean again.

Bri couldn’t help but finish the sentence for her. In her mind, she heard the words, They’re dead. She didn’t know how she knew this. It didn’t make sense, but dead was the word she was sure Audrey would have used to finish her sentence.

I’ll bet it’s because she’s poor … Just look at that ratty old sweater … She won’t tell me where she lives because she’s embarrassed about her home life …

Bri shivered and hugged herself. They started walking again, angling around the curve of the shore, along the landward side of Glooscap. Here, sheltered from the wind, Bri realized how heated she was from trying to keep up with Audrey, who continued to climb seemingly effortlessly over the rocks. Up ahead, around the bend, gray-weathered pilings ringed with seaweed marked the entrance to the harbor. The sea was calmer on this side of the island, and everywhere it was dotted with the brilliant markings of lobster buoys and anchorage floats.

When Bri started off toward where the rocks dropped off and the beach flattened out, Audrey drew to a sudden halt. Her eyes — which had looked so warm and brown before — now took on a steely coldness, looking almost blue as she stared across the narrow harbor toward the assortment of wharfs and fishing shacks.

“I — I don’t want to go over there,” she said, shaking her head from side to side.

“Okay.”

Audrey turned to Bri with a scared-animal look in her eyes. It struck Bri as strange how she could change so suddenly and apparently with so little reason. The only sound besides the gentle rush of waves along the shore was the far-off putt-putt of a lobster boat rounding into the harbor from the opposite side of the island.

“Is there someone over there you don’t want to see?” Bri asked.

At least by the way Audrey was acting, Bri had the impression there was someone she was embarrassed or shy about seeing. Maybe her father was one of those reprobate lobstermen her father complained about … or maybe she had had an argument with her boyfriend who worked down on the docks and she didn’t want to bump into him. But other than the lobsterman rounding into the harbor — and he was far enough away so he wouldn’t have been able to tell who they were — the only other people in sight were the small, dark specks of the men hanging around the fishing shacks.

“I don’t want — people to see me when I walk. That’s all,” Audrey said simply. She turned and looked back the way they had come.

Bri glanced at her watch, then out to the point of rocks they had just left. She wanted to spend the rest of the day with Audrey and get to know her and maybe figure out where she was coming from, but it was close to lunchtime, and she had promised her mother she’d finish her room this afternoon.

“You wanna come to my house for lunch?” Bri asked.

Audrey seemed to let the question settle in her mind for a few seconds. Her eyes flickered back and forth, not focusing on anything. Finally she patted a bulge in her sweater pocket and said, “Thanks, but no. I’m not hungry.”

“Come on,” Bri said. “After lunch, I told my mom I’d finish unpacking my things. You won’t have to do any of the work, but it’d be nice to have someone to talk to while I do it. I can show you —”

“No. I don’t think so,” Audrey said distantly, cutting Bri off.

“Then why don’t I go home and fix us some sandwiches? I can get us each a bottle of soda, and we can make a picnic of it.”

Audrey shook her head vigorously. “No,” she said. “I like being alone.”

Bri had been thinking she and Audrey would be fast friends —”kindred spirits” — and she was stung by the sharpness of Audrey’s reply. The wind off the water whistled in her ears, and looking out over the ocean, she knew how deep and cold Audrey’s loneliness was. Her eyes started to burn with tears.

“Well … then,” Bri said, “after lunch … maybe I’ll bump into you again.”

“Maybe,” Audrey said.

Without a backward glance, she started walking out toward the point of land. Her slouched, frail figure in her bulky gray sweater quickly blended in with the tumbled rocks, and before long, she was out of sight.

“S’long,” Bri called out, her voice sounding flat. The wind blowing straight into her face stuffed her words back into her mouth. She had the curious sensation that she was talking to herself — and had been all along. Embarrassed that someone might see her, she quickly turned and started back along the path up to the road.

III

All morning, while she was painting the window trim in the living room and John did the wallpapering, Julia found it best to keep her distance from her husband. It wasn’t so much that he was still angry at her from their argument the night before. They’d had that discussion often enough. No. She sensed a different kind of tension circling around him like a hungry shark in the water. When he looked at her, his eyes smoldered with a hidden fire almost as though he was looking at something he didn’t want — or dare — talk about. Whatever it was, it was deeper than anything she had seen in him before. Another round of talking about having another child certainly wasn’t the cause.

Julia’s first thought was that it mostly had to do with unspoken and unresolved issues between father and son. Once she and John could talk to each other — maybe tonight — she was going to push him about making a more honest effort, as he had promised, to deal directly with his father.

Meanwhile, she found escape in work and was content to let him work. They limited conversation to questions about the color of the paint or requests to hold a piece of wallpaper in place while measurements and cuts were made before gluing.

A little after noontime, Bri burst into the kitchen, her cheeks glowing red, her eyes wide with excitement. Julia was at the kitchen sink, washing the paint from her brush.

“Well, don’t you look like the healthy one,” Julia said. “I hope you’re invigorated enough to get that room of yours straightened up.” She tore off several paper towels and wiped the paintbrush across them.

“I finally met her,” Bri said excitedly as she shrugged off her jacket and hung it on the wooden peg beside the door.

“Who?”

“Audrey … Her name’s Audrey Church” Bri was bouncing with excitement. “Remember that girl I said was on the beach last Sunday?”

“Uh-huh.”

“We spent most of the morning together.”

“Doing what?”

“Just talking and stuff.”

“That’s nice. Is this the same girl who was hanging around outside the house last night?” Julia asked.

“No — no. That wasn’t her,” Bri replied. “I was wrong about that.”

She knew that wasn’t really true. Audrey’s denial had seemed thin at best, but she didn’t want her mother ruining this friendship as it was starting. “Audrey’s cool.”

“I’m sure she is,” Julia said.

She finished wiping the brush and tossed the used paper towels into the wastebasket. After placing her paintbrush on the edge of the counter, she asked Bri, “What would you like for lunch? Soup and grilled cheese sound okay?”

Julia went to the refrigerator and took out the sliced cheese.

“The soup’s in the cupboard. You want to start heating it up while I get the sandwiches going?”

“Don’t want to, but I will,” Bri said, laughing. She got the soup — her favorite: Campbell’s minestrone — and snapped it under the electric can opener. As she poured the contents into a pan and put the pan on the stove, she was thinking about Audrey and wondering why she would spend so much time out in the cold on the beach.

Once lunch was ready, Julia called John and Frank to the table, but this lunch — like every other meal so far was frosty — was devoid of any content. Bri didn’t bother to mention Audrey to her father or grandfather. Frank bitched about the problems he’d been having with the cable reception while John complained about the poor quality of the wallpaper glue he was using. Julia ate her soup and sandwich in silence, wishing to God everyone would keep their complaints to themselves.

After lunch, while Bri and Julia were clearing the table, Bri casually mentioned that she was planning on taking another walk down to Indian Point.

“Oh no, you’re not,” Julia said firmly, pointing at her with the sponge she was using to wipe the table. “You told me this morning you’d get the rest of those boxes in your room unpacked, and you’re not taking one step outside of this house until you do.”

“But, Mom ... “

“But Mom nothing …That’s the last word on it until it’s done.”

So Bri spent the bulk of the afternoon in her room scowling and throwing things into bureau drawers, onto closet shelves, and under the bed. She had some rock music tuned up loud to irritate her mother.

Her bedroom windows looked out over the street toward Indian Point, and several times Bri stopped her mad dash to empty the boxes and knelt on the floor, elbows resting on the windowsill, and looked out at the granite-bound point. Once or twice she thought she detected motion that might have been Audrey, scrambling around on the rocks, but it was too far away to tell for sure.

She was finished by three o’clock, and after flattening all of the boxes — John said he wanted to save them in the rafters of the garage in case they ended up moving again soon — Bri raced downstairs.

“All done,” she hollered as she ran into the living room.

Even with the living room furniture pushed aside, she couldn’t believe how different the room looked now that her parents had finished with it. The walls looked alive, not drab like some dusty room out of the last century, and even without the curtains up, the trimwork around the windows looked brand-new.

“Could always use another hand,” John said, looking down at her from his perch on the stepladder as he wrestled a glued piece of wallpaper into place.

Bri smiled and shrugged. “Actually, I was kind of thinking I’d head back out to the point. You’ve been telling me all along that fresh air was one of the bennies of living here.”

“Not when there’s work to be done,” Julia said, shaking her head.

“Come on, Mom. I want see if I can find Audrey.”

“Who’s Audrey?” John asked. He had turned back to his work, but now he lost his grip on the edge of paper. As it started to slide away from him, he made a grab for it and almost ended up doing a half-gainer off the ladder. He managed to snag the paper and regain his balance without mishap.

“She’s the girl I met today,” Bri said casually. “Audrey Church. You know her or her family?”

John cast a quick look at Julia, but she had already heard it all and was concentrating instead on painting the trimwork.

“The last name doesn’t sound familiar,” John said, frowning. “They must be new.”

Bri shrugged. “She didn’t say one way or another. Can I go now, Mom? Please …?”

Julia gave a loud huff, the breath stirring the hair hanging over her forehead. “Go on. Get out of here,” she said, and that was all Bri needed. She pulled her jacket on in the kitchen and was out the door before Julia could catch her breath and tell her to be home before — not after — dark.

But Bri’s excitement soon faded.

She followed the twisting trails through the scrub growth, clambered over the rocks, and walked the length of Sandy Beach three or four times, but there was no sign of Audrey anywhere. Feeling sad for herself, and thinking that Audrey had no interest in being her friend after all, Bri wanted to cry. But in spite of the cold, she didn’t give up all afternoon. Finally, as the sun started lowering in the west, she turned and headed back to the house, wondering if this morning had been not just her first, but maybe her last chance to talk with Audrey Church.

SIX

A Certain Slant of Light

I

“Bri can take you down to Sandy Beach and show you the ocean anytime,” John said. “And besides, that’s what the tourists come to Maine to see. I can show you parts of this island the tourists never get to see. Come on.”

Sunday morning had dawned, like the day before, bright and clear. Frank, as usual, had gone to church at nine, so Julia didn’t feel as if she was shirking her duty when she, John, and Bri took off for a pre-lunch stroll.

“Shouldn’t we finish up the living room today?” Julia asked.

“Come on. You’ve been complaining all week about how uptight I am. So let’s unwind. Right up here’s where we used to play cowboys and Indians all the time.”

“If this is going to be a nonstop nostalgia trip, I’d just as soon you hooked up with Randy so the two of you could go at it,” Julia said. She halted for a moment but let him tug her arm so she’d follow along.

They had crossed the road behind the house and were trudging across a field, heading toward a fairly steep incline, which John had informed them was called Bald Hill. The crest of the hill was thickly forested with pine and hemlock, so Bri wondered aloud how it had come to be called “bald.”

“Maybe back in the old days there weren’t as many trees,” Julia offered.

“Actually, back when my father was a kid, most of the woods in the middle of the island were burned flat. Luckily, no homes burned. But the lobstermen say this hill looks like a bald man’s head from out in the bay.”

“Local color galore,” Julia whispered, rolling her eyes.

She was keeping her steps high so the knee-high grass wouldn’t trip her up. Summer’s grass was mostly dead and yellow; dying weeds were browned and bent over everywhere. Milkweed pods had burst open, and their white fluffs were drifting lazily on the breeze. A few crickets not yet killed off by the frosty nights chirred in the deep grass, but they were the last remnant of summer. There was no doubt the hand of autumn had touched the woods and fields.

Bri, who was dragging several paces behind them, kept stopping and looking back down the hill toward the ocean. From this high up, she had a clear view of Indian Point and part of the beach. In the distance, the skyline of Portland was clear-cut against the western sky. In all, the view was gorgeous, but all Bri could wonder was, Is Audrey walking around down there now … maybe looking for me?

“That’s called the Hook Road over there,” John said, pausing and pointing to the left. “Bri!” He waited for her to catch up with them. “Come winter, I’ll take you out to Larson’s Pond for some ice skating. Even if there’s a heavy snow, the wind off the ocean usually blows it clean as a whistle. You can go for a mile or more.”

“Sounds like fun,” Julia said.

She slatted her eyes and, leaning back, took a deep inhalation. The warmth of the sun and the gentle wind on her face eased her nerves. For the first time, she wondered how much of John’s uptightness was actually her own being reflected onto him. He was right. She had to admit this might be what they all needed.

Bri was dawdling behind, kicking at the dead weeds, so after waiting a bit longer, John and Julia decided to ignore her and go ahead at their own pace. They entered the deep, cool green shade of the woods and started up the gradually inclining path.

Glancing over her shoulder, Julia caught a glimpse of Bri’s yellow headband. She called out, “Come on, Bri. You’ll get lost if you don’t keep up.”

John shook his head as he went on without slackening his pace. “There’s only one path. She’ll be fine as long as she sticks to it.”

“You know this place,” Julia said a bit sharply. “She doesn’t.”

When it was apparent that Bri wasn’t going to come running after them, they went on ahead. The forest floor was littered with curled brown leaves — mostly beech and maple leaves. Thick groves of pine held the deep green they would have all winter. Sea gulls flew by high overhead, their raucous cries drifting on the wind.

“You know what I notice most?” Julia asked after a while. “There aren’t any — oops, there’s one, but it’s the first one I’ve seen.” She bent down to pick up the rusty beer can by the side of the trail. After inspecting it for a moment, she tossed it into the brush.

“Well, there isn’t much litter around.”

John shrugged. “Thank God for returnables,” he said. “There’s a grove up ahead. I can’t remember exactly where, but when we were in high school, we used to come out here drinking.”

“What, no girls?” Julia asked with a snicker.

John shook his head.

“Naw. This was a private spot for the guys. When we wanted to fool around, we’d go out to —” His voice caught in his throat, and he had a sudden fit of coughing before he could finish.

“That much fun, huh?” Julia said, laughing.

“We’d ... go to ... “ John said, still sputtering. He had his hand over his mouth and was trying to catch his breath. “To Haskins’ barn ... on the other side of the island.” He was going to say more, but a sudden, vivid image of a face — pale and slack — rose in his mind. An unnaturally thick tongue protruded from between nearly bloodless lips, and the face held an expression of agony … even in death.

“You all right?” Julia’s face was creasing with worry as she swatted John on the back.

Bending down, bracing his hands on his knees, John sputtered and then sucked in a deep breath. He pounded on his own chest, gasping. His eyes were watering, blurring his vision, but the traces of what he had imagined lingered like visual echoes in his mind.

“That isn’t how you usually react when you think about sex,” Julia said, still laughing now that it was obvious John was going to be okay. She widened her eyes and smiled wickedly at him. Casting a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure Bri wasn’t within hearing range, she said, “Maybe Haskins’ barn is where I’ll have to get you if I want to make a baby.”

The coughing fit finally subsided, and John’s breathing returned to normal. The momentarily clear image was fading from his mind. Wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, he straightened up. He tried to say something but then simply signaled for Julia to be quiet. With Bri still trailing behind, they continued their walk side by side up to the top of the hill.

If the view was gorgeous from halfway up, it was fantastic from the top. Shimmering blue ocean stretched away in three directions, the surface dancing with sparkles. The horizon was broken by dozens of islands, and everywhere small specks of boats — some with full-bellied white sails — glided over the water. Weekend sailors were taking advantage of what might be the last good weekend before they hauled their boats out of the water. Some lobstermen were making late morning hauls, and a Casco Bay Lines ferry was heading across the water to Peaks Island.

“Not bad, huh? John said, moving close to Julia and encircling her waist with his arm. His coughing fit was all but forgotten as they looked over the scenic beauty.

Julia snuggled into the hug, letting herself fill with contentment.

“It is nice,” she said, but even as she said it, something cold took hold of her heart and squeezed.

It wasn’t just that she still couldn’t see Bri down the slope, hidden by the trees …

It wasn’t just that a whole week of unspoken hostility between John and his father had stripped her nerves down …

And it wasn’t just the feeling of being uprooted … of leaving her home and friends behind in Vermont.

No.

It was all of these … and more …

She had a vague sense of something more sinister waiting to spring on them.

“Over there’s Blanchard’s Orchard,” John said. “They’ve got — at least they used to have — the best damned apples in the state. Macs and Cortlands and a couple of other varieties. Next year, we’ll have to go apple picking.”

As he spoke, Julia was so filled with a dark, churning dread she barely registered his words.

What is it? she wondered, as her stomach twisted with oily uneasiness.

What the hell’s the matter with me? …I can’t let myself have a good time and enjoy a nice walk like this?

“Sure ... sure,” she replied vaguely. She wondered if John was picking up on her agitation as she looked up at the sky — perfectly cloudless except for out on the distant horizon. She looked down at the dried brown and yellow hill gently rolling down to Shore Drive and the band of houses that ringed the island. Everything was so peaceful and quiet, but still, a dark, nameless dread coiled around her heart like a snake.

“Where’s Bri?” she said, suddenly snapping to attention.

She glanced at John, then looked down the path.

“Don’t worry — she’ll be along in a minute,” John said.

Now the nameless fear suddenly had a focus. Julia was suddenly convinced Bri was in danger. She didn’t know how she knew it, but she did. Pulling roughly away from John, she started down the path a few steps. Cupping her hands to her mouth, she yelled as loud as she could.

“Bri! ... Bri!”

Her voice rolled down the hill and echoed back up at her with an odd reverberation. The pine trees surrounding her suddenly looked dark and ominous, as if they were closing in on her, and she expected any minute to see ...

What? she wondered, so frantic she was nearly speechless.

“Come on, Bri!” she yelled. “Where are you?”

II

“Hey, Bri.”

Bri stopped walking and stood stock-still in her tracks when the voice called out to her. It drifted to her softly on the breeze ... so softly it could have been the wind whispering in the pines. Her eyes darted to both sides of the path leading through the pine woods. She couldn’t even tell which direction it had come from.

The yellowed carpet of fallen pine needles covered the ground on both sides of the trail. There was no indication of anyone having walked there. She was about to start walking again when something — a faint stirring of motion off to her left — caught her eye. Far back, under the deep emerald-green shadows of the pines …

Was that a shadow?

Or was someone standing there, watching her?

There is someone, Bri thought, her eyes widening with rising fear.

She glanced quickly up the trail where her parents had disappeared, wishing they had waited for her. She didn’t dare call out.

What if there’s a crazy person lurking in the woods? … a killer ?

Pressure began to build in her bladder.

She strained to see into the thick shadows under the pines, but it was as if night were had already arrived in the dark hollows of the land. The shadows were so intense they vibrated with ultraviolet purple.

“Bri ... Over here … “

The voice came again, striking her eardrums like feathery velvet. It was coming at her from all around, wafting through the pine branches more like the scent of pine resin than any real sound. She looked frantically up at the green trees reaching to the blue sky, but she found no reassurance there. The dark shadows under the trees were shifting and twisting into a shape that looked like ...

“Audrey?” Bri said. Her voice sounded more like a bark. “What the heck are you doing?”

The shadows under the tree coalesced, and it did look like her new friend was standing there, looking at her and beckoning her to come to her. Although Bri couldn’t actually see her eyes, she knew she was watching her.

“Cut it out,” Bri said, forcing lightness into her voice which she didn’t feel. “You really scared me there for a minute.”

She took a step forward, convinced, now, that Audrey was standing in the shade, beckoning to her. But as she got closer, the shape shifted away, and then Audrey — if she had been there at all — was gone like a pattern drawn in the sand, erased by the wind.

Confused, Bri halted halfway between the path and the spot under the pine trees. A fitful gust of wind waved the branches, sighing with a low, snakelike hiss. She studied the interplay of shadows and light that could have made it look as if someone was standing there.

But no one was there now.

“Audrey?” Bri called out, her voice frail, almost a whisper.

Scowling, she turned and started back toward the path, but then the voice called to her again.

“Bri ... “

Am I imagining this? she wondered as she tried to hold back a rising flood of panic. Am I going nuts or something?

“Over here … “

With a sudden shout, Bri raced forward to the place where she thought she had seen Audrey. Her heart was hammering in her chest; the sides of her neck pulsated as she swung her hands at the trees to clear her path. Pine branches swished and snapped back into her face, and then she broke into the clearing. She spun around in a wild circle, scanning the woods for the source of the voice.

“Is this another one of your tricks?” she shouted, clenching her fists in frustration. “Like disappearing on the beach?”

The thought struck her that it might not even have been Audrey. It seemed more like something some kid might cook up to tease her, to make her think she was crazy.

“Well you don’t scare me!” Bri yelled.

She picked up a rotting branch and swung viciously at the branches around her. On the third or fourth swing, the branch snapped in her hand and hit the needle-covered ground with a dull thud.

“Over here … “ the voice whispered again … so faint this time Bri almost didn’t hear it. She was so worked up, she knew she wasn’t reacting rationally as she kicked and scuffed the forest floor.

“Screw you, Audrey!” she shouted, spinning around so her voice projected in all directions. “Screw whoever you are!”

As her voice faded in the woods, she spun on her heel, thinking to head back to the path and catch up with her parents, but again a shadowy figure deeper in the woods caught her attention. Stunned, Bri froze in midstride and looked. There was no doubt now that it was Audrey. She was standing in the shifting shade of the trees, one hand raised and slowly motioning for Bri to follow.

“Come on over here ... Bri … “

“No, goddamnit!” Bri shouted. “I’m not going to play any of your stupid games.”

She waved her hands in frustration as she started backing away.

“I’m sick and tired of you teasing me.”

Tears flooded her eyes, making the dim figure look even more indistinct.

“If you want to be friends, we can be friends, but I’m not going to play any stupid games.”

With that, she quickly turned around and started running back toward the path. Her footsteps were muffled by the thick carpet of pine needles, and moving soundlessly, she had the momentary impression that she was drifting — flying, as if in a dream. Low-hanging branches swished against face. One caught her headband and almost pulled it off, but she kept running, wanting to put as much distance as she could between her and Audrey.

Her mind was spinning as she ran. She was thinking how much she liked Audrey, how much she wanted to have a new friend, but she was also thinking that she really didn’t know a thing about her. She acted so strange, like a spooked-out weirdo who might not be all there. “She’s got the phone, but no dial tone,” as her stepfather would say.

As she ran, a squeezing fear gripped her. She realized she should have crossed the path by now. It was a well-trodden path. It would have been impossible for her to miss it.

So why hadn’t she come to it already?

Air rushed into her lungs like fire, and she was grateful for the heavy panting sound filling her ears. Otherwise, she might still hear Audrey still calling to her.

She leaped nimbly over deadfalls, and dodged trees and boulders as she ran, but the farther she went, the more she knew she was in trouble.

Oh, God! I’m lost, a voice in her mind screamed.

She didn’t slacken her pace, but she started looking around for any familiar sign — a break in the thickening woods where she could get her bearings. The woods were getting deeper, thicker. Up ahead was a big boulder sticking up out of the earth like a solitary giant’s tooth. She knew she would have remembered seeing that.

A whimper, so low it sounded strangely disembodied, escaped her throat as she ran toward a grove of pines dripping with shadows. And in those shadows, an indistinct figure was standing … waving to her … beckoning to her.

She tried to stop quickly, but the pine needle-covered ground was slippery, and she fell down, skidding like a baseball player sliding into home plate. Her right foot plowed up the pine needles, exposing thick, black soil, and it was only luck that she got her hands into position in time to save herself from smashing her face into the ground. Her nose was filled with the dank, earthy smell of fresh soil.

“Bri ... “

The sound filled her ears, but she wasn’t sure … she couldn’t be sure if it was actually there … or if it was an echo in her mind.

Her chest like it was going to burst from the pressure pushing out from inside her. If she screamed now, she would probably strip her throat of flesh.

Pine needles and forest mulch flew into the air as she scrambled to get back up. Her panic was blind now, and she ran back the way she had come, figuring that, in her confusion, she had gotten turned around and missed the path.

Head uphill, her mind shouted. They’re up at the top of the hill.

She clenched her fists and pumped her arms, pushing away the pain in her desperate run. Her knee was numb from the fall she had taken, and she was sure she had a nice, deep gash in her leg from a buried rock. Pain throbbed up to her hips.

The effort of running up the steep slope soon took its toll, and before long she was lunging and stumbling forward more than running. The muscles in her legs felt unstrung. She was convinced a presence loomed behind her, something dark and nameless, and it was closing the distance between them, but she didn’t dare turn and look back as she ran.

Just run! ... Run, damn it!

Exhaustion twisted inside her body, peeling away her muscles, shredding her lungs. And then, with a startled shout, she tripped and fell forward.

At first she thought she had stumbled over a fallen tree. She barely registered that her foot had hit something soft and yielding. But as she scrambled to get back on her feet, she looked down and saw something that sent panic crashing through her. The sunlit woods all around her suddenly telescoped into a laser-narrow beam focused down at her feet.

Lying on the ground was the thing that had tripped hera horribly decomposed human body.

Bri stared at it, gaping. She took a ragged breath, but that only crammed her scream further down into her chest.

Only the top half of the body was exposed. From the waist down, it was covered by thick, black mulch. Wind and weatherand possibly wild animals and carrion birdshad stripped away all but a few tatters of flesh. Some remnants of clothes, heavy with mold, clung to the bleached skeleton. The eye sockets, like two dark inkwells, stared sightlessly at the swaying pines overhead.

Bri’s heart contracted into a fist-sized stone. Her teeth clamped down hard together as she stared unbelievingly at what lay at her feet. A scream would have burst from her lungs and throat, but there was no air, no pressure to let it rip. Bright spinning spots of light exploded in front of her eyes, but the darkness of those two vacant eyes grew stronger … pulsating … swelling … swallowing her. Her head was spinning wildly, like she was drowning … being pulled into those two black sockets.

Barely aware of anything except that sightless skull staring at her, she struggled to get up, to run away. Her arms flailed the air as if searching for a handhold. Her feet slipped on the slick carpet of pine needles again, and she went down for a third time. Her head hit a glancing blow against a tree trunk, and then the darkness of those vacant eyes filled her mind.

And she fell into the darkness.

III

“You’re sure you’re all right?” Julia asked.

She was sitting on the edge of Bri’s bed, holding a cold washcloth on her left temple where she had skinned it against the tree trunk when she had fallen. Bri had complained of a headache, but the Tylenol she had taken when she got home was kicking in.

“Yeah ... I mean, it still hurts, but I don’t think there’s any brain damage or anything,” she said, forcing a tiny laugh.

“You sure had me and your father worried,” Julia said. She took the washcloth away, refolded it, and then held it to Bri’s head again. “You’ve got to remember, when you’re out for a walk, never leave the trail. You found out today how easily you can get lost.”

Bri nodded, even though the motion sent a sliver of pain shooting through her head.

She wanted to tell her mother that she wouldn’t have left the path, but she had seen her friend Audrey and followed her. That might be a mistake after all, though, so she remained silent.

When she had come to in the woods, her father was gently slapping her face to bring her around. She had started babbling about a decomposed body half buried in the forest. No matter how much she insisted that’s what she had seen, her parents had shown her — pointed directly at — the rotting deadfall she had tripped over. When she had grown more insistent, they had pointed out to her where her foot had kicked the log, removing a big piece of the rotting wood. They showed the scuffed ground where she had fallen and then tried to scramble to her feet.

“There couldn’t possibly be someone buried there,” her father had kept repeating.

“I know what I saw,” she had protested. But the protestation had gotten gradually weaker until she finally accepted their suggestion that, in her panic — maybe after she had bumped her head — she had imagined seeing a dead person there.

Even though serious doubts remained, she finally told them she accepted their explanation — if only so they would drop it for now and let her rest. The pounding in her skull, though fading, still sent out jabs of pain that made her wince. In her heart, she knew what she had seen, and she was smart enough to know that, if she kept insisting she had seen a dead person instead of a rotten tree trunk, they might have a strong argument for brain damage. There wasn’t the slightest trace of humor in that thought.

“We were so worried when you didn’t answer me,” Julia said, shaking her head.

The whole incident, Julia thought, had been ... “unusual” wasn’t the best word to describe it, but it was the closest. No matter how much she thought about it, she couldn’t account for the weird sensation she had gotten while she and John were at the top of Bald Hill looking at the view that Bri was in trouble. John’s rambling reminiscences about playing out here as a boy should have been soothing … nostalgic. They should have given her a sense of the kind of childhood she had never experienced. Instead, she had been filled with a dark foreboding and — as it turned out — an accurate fear for Bri’s safety. All she could think was

What if I hadn’t thought something was wrong?

What if Bri had been out here alone when she got fell?

What if I hadn’t insisted that we go back and look for her?

She laughed, trying to dismiss such thoughts as the usual fears a mother has, but the truth was, Bri had been in trouble. She had gotten lost. She had fallen and hurt herself, maybe more seriously than it seemed. If they hadn’t combed the woods for her — they had been looking for more than a half hour before they found her — she might still be out there, lying unconscious in the woods.

That body she thinks she saw, Julia thought as the dread she had experienced echoed in her head … That could have been Bri if we hadn’t found her.’

She repressed a shiver as she smiled fondly at her daughter and stroked her hair back.

“Who knows?” she said, letting her smile widen even though she was trembling inside. “Maybe this will be good for a day off from school.”

“Maybe,” Bri replied sleepily. “Actually, I’m feeling kinda wiped. Would you mind pulling the shades so I can sleep?”

“Not at all.” Julia said. “Just promise to tell me if your headache doesn’t go away.”

Bri grunted as she snuggled down into her pillow, careful to keep the hurt side of her head up.

Julia went over to the window and pulled the shade down. She wished she could feel relief, but she didn’t. The sense that something was wrong … something had been wrong and was still wrong ... wouldn’t go away no matter how many times she told herself to stop worrying. Bri was safely home now.

That’s what mattered.

The darkened room filled with the sound of Bri’s deep, even breathing. Julia stood by the window, watching her daughter and experiencing those feelings all parents experience, that she would do absolutely anything to keep her child from harm.

Quietly she tiptoed to the door and eased out into the hall, letting the door click softly shut behind her

“Please,” she whispered, staring at the solid wood door. “Please let my baby be all right.”

IV

“Oh, yeah — sure.”

John narrowed his eyes as if he were in pain as he paced back and forth in front of the picture window in the living room. He continually slapped his fist into his open palm, making a fiat, wet sound. A stub of a cigarette was hanging from his lower lip.

“It was a great way to start the project. I should have that much fun every goddamned workday.”

Julia was sitting on the couch, sipping a glass of rose as she watched her husband pace. He had come home from work late, and the first thing he did was grab a glass and fill it half full of whiskey, straight. When that was gone, he filled it again, but now the glass was forgotten on the coffee table as he strode back and forth across the living room floor.

“You want to know the worst thing about it?” He smirked and shook his head with disbelief. “It wasn’t just that this truck driver — whoever the hell he is — decked this guy because he’s opposed to these condos going in and tried to stop his truck, or that this guy who got hit is probably going to sue his ass. Hell, not just the driver … He’ll probably go after the whole damned company. Christ! Maybe he’ll come after me because I got between them and tried to stop the fight. No, the worst thing is —”

He took a drag of the cigarette in his hand, clenching it so tightly between his fingers he almost crushed it.

“I — uhh, I’m there, helping this guy up off the ground, you know, and fucking Randy Chadwick is standing there, smiling at me like I’m some kind of Benedict Arnold because I’m working out there.”

He exhaled noisily, went over to the coffee table, and ground out the cigarette in the ashtray. He immediately lit another, sending a plume of smoke up to the ceiling.

Julia ducked her head to one side, trying to avoid the billow of smoke, and smiled weakly.

“Come on,” she said mildly. “It probably wasn’t as bad as you thought. You told me Randy said he wasn’t actively protesting — that he had just shown up to see what was going on.”

“Yeahsure,” John snorted. His eyes fastened on his whiskey glass, and he picked it up and took a swallow, wincing from the burn as it roared down to his stomach. “And then I said to him ... I actually said to him, ‘Small world, isn’t it?’ I can’t fucking believe that was the best I could come up with.”

“You were probably a little more concerned about the guy who’d gotten punched,” Julia said. “For crying out loud, John, give Randy a break, and watch your languageBri’s upstairs, doing homework.”

“Sorry ... sorry,” John said, but he didn’t stop pacing.

“You didn’t hear any more about it this afternoon, did you?” Julia asked, keeping her voice as mild as possible.

John shrugged. “No. Nothing when I got back to the office, but Barry and I were on the site the rest of the day. We didn’t leave the island until after five o’clock.”

“The cops never came, so maybe this guy isn’t going to press chargesnot if he didn’t report it to the cops.”

“Jesus!” John shouted and then, cringing, glanced toward the stairs and lowered his voice. “He had a good twenty or twenty-five witnesses there. I don’t think he’ll have any trouble getting a few of them to back him up. I mean — this could turn into a real shit storm. It’s enough to make me want to quit the damned job and do something else.”

Julia chuckled softly under her breath. “Like what?”

“I don’t know,” John said, his face suddenly rigid. “We don’t need the money from my job the way we used tonot living here with no mortgage.”

“Bri’s going to be heading off for college before we know it.”

John waved his hands in front of his face. “We’ve got savings, and we can always take a school loan. I don’t see why I have to bust my ass day in and day out. I could“ He snapped his fingers in the air. “Wait a second. I’ve got it! Maybe Randy would hire me to help him lobster. Or I could get my own boat and set some traps in my father’s area. Nothing much to get started, but I could do it myself.”

“Get serious,” Julia said, shaking her head.

“I am serious. Maybe I hate this friggin’ island because of the way my father was always pushing, telling me I had to go to college and leave this island so I didn’t end up like him. Hell, he even“

John stopped himself, but in the sudden silence that followed, he locked eyes with Julia.

“He what?” she asked.

“No … Nothing.”

“What were you going to say?”

John stared down at the floor, considering for a moment as he shook his head from side to side.

“He was responsible for breaking up me and Abby back in high school.”

“Oh ... really?”

John shifted from one foot to the other, then went over to the picture window, drew the curtain back, and stared out at the ocean. “If I had a dollar for every goddamned time he told me not to get married right out of high school and settle down here. Christ!”

“He was doing what he thought was best for you. He wanted you to have a better life than he did.”

“He practically forced me and Abby apart so I’d go to college, said he didn’t want me to be end up like him.” John took a deep breath. “But I was talking about my goddamned job.”

“Or how you want to be a lobsterman,” Julia said with a half smile.

“Think about it. I could get a boat, and I know plenty of guys at the dock who will help me get started. I could set my traps where my father used to. I’d be out to work before dawn and back home by noon if I didn’t get too serious about it.”

“I don’t know, but I would guess the job’s a lot harder than you realize. You’re romanticizing it.”

“I did it enough, helping out my dad when I was a kid to know what I’m getting into.”

“Yeah, and you’d be working in all sorts of weather,” Julia said. “Listen to yourself. You’re making it sound like this is your idea of paradise. All I ever heard from you before was how much you always wanted to leave home because you wanted to be something more than a lobsterman.”

“Maybe that was my father talking more than me,” John said, shrugging as he took a drag on the cigarette and stared thoughtfully out the window. Evening was coming on fast, and the water had turned a deep purple against the indigo sky. Small black specks — either sea gulls or lobster buoys — rose and fell with the swells.

‘‘I’m just saying I don’t need this kind of pressure,” he said softly, his face close enough to the window to fog the glass. “I don’t need the hassles and the bullshit.”

Julia shifted uncomfortably on the couch.

“Well, I can agree to that.” She paused and took a sip of wine before continuing. “But I don’t think it’s your job that’s getting to you.”

John wheeled around and faced her.

Did I let something slip? he wondered, feeling a sudden jolt of panic.

“For one thing, you’ve got to stop acting like a —” Julia glanced in the direction of Frank’s closed bedroom door. Faintly, she could hear the muffled sounds of the TV. Lowering her voice, she finished, “Stop acting like a child around your father. Ever since we moved back here, you’ve been acting … different, somehow.”

John finally noticed that the cigarette in his hand had burned down to the filter. He dropped it into the whiskey remaining in his glass. Then, heaving a sigh, he turned to look out the window again.

“You have to admit you’ve been acting really uptight since we got here,” Julia said. She got up and walked over to him. Standing behind him, she encircled his waist with her arms and pressed herself tightly against his back.

“If I’ve been uptight lately, it’s with goddamned good reason,” John muttered.

“And what — exactly — is the reason?” Julia demanded. She spun him around so they were face to face and looked him squarely in the eyes.

“I ... “ he started to say, but his voice trailed off, and his gaze went blank. Then, shaking his head, he looked at her. “Everything. My job, my father, living here — all of it is eating away at me.”

“Including me?” Julia said, her voice husky as she pulled him close.

John was silent for several heartbeats, but before he could reply, Julia pushed herself away from him.

“It’s me, too. Isn’t it?” A dull hollowness began to expand in the pit of her stomach. “I’m getting on your nerves, aren’t I? Is it because I want to have a baby?”

Slowly, barely perceptively, John lowered his head in a nod.

“You’ve got to admit that you have been a little bit pushy about it.”

His words sliced her like a razor. Julia’s first impulse was to lash our at him. She wanted to shove him away and run upstairs, leave him to wallow in his own depression and self-pity.

Christ! she thought angrily. Let him fume if he wants to …What’s he got to be so damned upset about, anyway?

But because she didn’t act out of reflex, her second — and better — response was to ignore her own hurt and try to see what he meant by what he’d said, try to understand what he was going through. Even she had to admit that she might have been pushing too hard on the baby issue. But it was more than slightly painful to hear him put it so bluntly.

“The way you’ve been going at it,” John said, “it’s more like a job than any romance. I mean — what? We can’t screw for fun anymore? It always has to be trying for a baby?” He clenched his fists in frustration and stared at her, not seeing how much his words were hurting. “No wonder you haven’t gotten pregnant in the year we’ve been trying. You put so goddamned much pressure on me, my fucking sperm is probably fried.”

Julia’s eyes were stinging as she looked at her husband, wondering if this really was the man she had married five years ago. How well did she know him? A corner of her mind was whispering that, just like with her first husband, Sam — Bri’s father — she was doing it again — grabbing and holding on so tightly she was actually driving him away. But she knew in her soul that it wasn’t just her. It wasn’t about the job or the house or the baby she wanted. There was something … something deep ... something that was stripping his nerves raw.

“I know —” she said, her breath catching in her throat. “I probably have been a little too pushy about it.”

“Pushy? Christ! You’ve been positively demanding. Come on … Let’s fuck … I want to have another baby. Jesus!” John’s face flushed red as he glared at her.

“Okay, okay,” Julia said, unable to control the trembling in her voice. Without another word, she turned and walked away. She stopped by the couch back and stared at him and wondering, Who the hell’s to blame here? …What the hell is going on?

Her anger was rising in swells, like the ocean when a storm is brewing.

“It’s just that Bri —”

“Come on, now,” John said. “You know I love Bri as much as — hell, more than if she was my own daughter.”

“I know,” Julia said sullenly, “but I want a baby with you. So … okay — maybe I am a bit demanding, but I’m doing it because I love you.”

“You may not mean to come across as pushy, but that’s the way you come across. God, I’m lucky I can even get it up with that pressure.”

“We don’t have to have a baby,” Julia said as tears rolled down her cheeks. “I mean … I want one … I really do, but if you’re dead set against it, we don’t have to. Maybe we can adopt instead. God knows there are enough kids in the world who need a chance.”

“It isn’t that!” John shouted, followed by a deep sigh. “It isn’t that at all! I don’t want to have a baby. Can I make myself any clearer? And even if I did, the way you’re pushing so hard takes all the fun out of it.”

“Fun?” Julia said, her face twisting with a lopsided smile. “I don’t think you can call having a baby ‘fun.’ You never had one of your own. You don’t know how much work a baby is, but it’s so worth it.”

“That’s not the point, either,” John said.

“Then what — exactly — is the point?”

Something in her tone finally got through to John. It broke down the wall they had so quickly thrown up between them. It hurt him to see how she cringed away from him when he started toward her, but he held his hands out. After a moment’s hesitation, she walked around the couch and collapsed into his arms, letting herself be nearly smothered by his crushing hug. She trembled with sobs as they stood there holding on to each other like they were desperately clinging to a life raft in the middle of a storm-tossed ocean.

Finally John reached down and gently prodded her under the chin. Raising her face to his, he gave her a kiss. At first her mouth was nothing more than a cold, hard line, but gradually the ice melted, and she playfully darted her tongue between his teeth.

The kiss was long and slow, and when they broke off, John put his mouth close to her ear and whispered, ‘‘I’m sorry.” His warm breath washed over her ear, and she ignored the aroma of whiskey.

“Me, too,” she rasped, unable to control the sobs that shook her body.

“And ... “ He paused, clearing his throat before continuing, “if it means that much to you, then … okay. We can give it another shot.”

“You mean it?” she asked, not wanting to hope he meant what she thought he meant.

“Yeah.” John said, stroking her back with the heels of his hands. “We’ll try to have a baby.”

She smiled at him, her eyes glistening with tears. She was incapable or letting him know how much this meant to her, but she was sure that, over the next few months, she would make him understand.

SEVEN

Frank and Julia

I

The small band of sunlight that wedged between the curtains cut across the foot of the bed. The room was muted with warm yellows and browns, dusty with age. Spinning motes of dust were caught for an instant in the bar of sunlight and then winked out, like burned-out stars. The only thing in the room that didn’t look old and used was the shiny chrome wheelchair beside the bed.

John watched the sleeping figure of his father, not sure the bed sheets were rising and falling with his father’s low, steady breathing. He experienced a moment of panic when he remembered how his mother, dead in her casket, had appeared to still be breathing.

“Umm, Dad?” he whispered.

He was holding a breakfast tray in both hands, so he bumped the door open with his hip. The air in the room was musty and stale and had a peculiar undercurrent of ... something …

What? John wondered, trying to place it.

When it came to him, he gasped softly, his hands involuntarily clenching on the edges of the tray.

It smelled like a barn in here. The air was thick with the smell of rotting hay … of dry, blackened tatters of cobwebs and dust … of a moldering dirt floor ...

When John looked at his father’s sleeping face, the smell of damp earth and the diffused glow of sunlight made it look as though Frank’s face had been sprinkled with dirt. John staggered backward a step as he imagined seeing his own hands scooping dirt over his father’s dead face, covering him with thick, black, mulchy soil.

Frank was lying on his back, his head cocked to the side, his face turned away from the door. His hands, looking frail and nearly bloodless, were flung out to his sides. He didn’t stir as John, heart hammering in his throat, took a few steps farther into the room. His eyes were riveted on his father’s hoary, yellowed fingernails, and he couldn’t help but wonder if that’s how his hands would look when he was this old.

“Hey, uh — Dad?” John whispered as he tiptoed closer to the bed. “I’ve got some breakfast for you.”

He was about to reach out and shake his father’s shoulder when he suddenly became convinced that his father was dead.

He wasn’t breathing.

There was no pulse in the neck, no flicker of the eyes beneath his eyelids.

John became convinced that, when he had imagined seeing his own hands dumping dirt onto his father’s face — had it even been his father’s face? — it had been a premonition, or maybe his subconscious mind registering the truth before he was consciously aware of it ...

He’s dead, John’s mind screamed.

He almost dropped the tray when he took three quick steps backward. The backs of his legs felt as if they were made of rubber that was fraying. Icy waves, centered in his stomach, rippled outward throughout his body.

That’s the smell … Not a barn smell … That’s the smell of death!

He looked frantically at the door as though help were going to charge into the room. He tried to form words, but the only sound that came out was a strangled aarggh. He backpedaled, and his foot caught on something. When he put out his hand to catch himself, he let go of the tray. With a loud clatter, it hit the floor. The impact sent the glass of juice, a cup with two soft-boiled eggs, silverware, and napkin flying. John hit the floor hard on his tailbone, sending an electric jolt of pain up his spine.

“What the hell?”

A surprised shout caught in his throat when his father sat bolt-upright in bed and saw him sprawled on the floor.

“Jesus H bald-headed Christ! What are you doing?” Frank shouted. His eyes were wide with fright, and his lower lip was thin and pale.

John looked down at his crotch, where the wet stain of orange juice made it look as if he’d pissed himself. Remains of the eggs were splattered everywhere. Shards of broken glass and porcelain littered the floor. John was grateful he hadn’t cut himself.

“I — uhh, I was bringing you breakfast in bed,” John stammered. He grabbed the paper napkin and, getting slowly to his feet, tried to wipe away the wet stain on his crotch.

“Hell of a way to wake a fella up!” Frank shifted around on his bed and then sat up, looking at John, gave a half smile. “What the hell you tryin’ t’do, give me a heart attack?”

John wondered if he looked more frightened or comical, but either way, he burned with embarrassment.

“Before I went to work, I thought I’d bring you breakfast,” he said as he knelt down and gingerly began picking up the largest of the broken pieces.

“What’s going on in here?” Julia asked, poking her head into the room. “I heard a crash.” She quickly assessed the situation and sadly shook her head. “Did you get hurt?”

John grimaced and shook his head.

“Just lost a glass and a couple of eggs.” He was still wiping the stain on his crotch. “Damn! I’m gonna have to change.”

“Let me help you with that,” Julia said, coming over and kneeling down beside him.

“What the hell is this, anyway?” Frank said, sounding nasty. “D’yah think I’m too damned feeble to get to the breakfast table myself?”

He awkwardly shifted his feet to the floor by grabbing the cloth of his pajama leg and pulling it to get his useless left leg to move. The motion made the cuff roll up, and John caught a glimpse of his father’s thin white leg, laced with blue veins that stood out like thin cords under his skin. The muscles looked flaccid … useless.

“I thought we could have a bit of a talk while you ate,” John said, looking down at the shattered remains of the breakfast, now piled up on the tray.

“Talk?” Frank said, frowning. “What the hell’ve we got to talk about?”

Julia gave John a sympathetic look when she realized what he had been trying to do — probably because of their discussion last night. John had taken what she had said to heart and decided to try to break down some of the barriers between him and his father. The attempteven though it failedtouched her and brought tears to her eyes.

“Go change for work,” she said as she waved a hand over her shoulder. “I’ll get this.”

John went to the door but hesitated, looking back at his father sitting on the edge of his bed. The old man’s face was perfectly neutral, as if he either couldn’t guess at what John had been trying to do or he simply didn’t care.

“I never cared for soft-boiled eggs,” he said, his mouth still twisted up into a crooked, smile.

II

After cleaning up the rest of the mess, Julia left Frank at the breakfast table, happily plowing through his usual bowl of Rice Krispies while she went upstairs to talk with John. She wanted him to know that she, at least, appreciated his gesture even if his father didn’t.

But when she came into the bedroom, it was almost like there was a different person knotting his tie in front of the mirror over his bureau. His mouth had a distinctive downturn, and his eyebrows looked like two dark shelves over his eyes as he stared at her in the reflection. Deep creases marked the corners of his eyes, but she couldn’t decide whether they were from hurt and embarrassment, or from a bottled-up rage he was struggling not to let out.

“Well,” Julia said, easing into the room and gently shutting the door behind her, “no one’s going to fault you on your intentions.”

John snorted, finished with the knot, and jerked it up tightly under his neck — too tightly, actually. He gagged and wiggled his finger under the knot to loosen it a bit.

“What a son of a bitch,” he said, sneering as he grabbed his sports coat and shrugged his shoulders into it. “He doesn’t appreciate anything. Never did, so I guess I was a fool to think he’d be any different.”

Julia’s mouth was set in a firm line, and she shook her head in denial.

“You can’t say that. You don’t know how he feels. “

Again, John snorted.

“How he feels? Who gives a sweet shit how he feels? If he never lets it show ... “

His eyes flashed in the mirror, glaring at her as he adjusted his lapels.

“He could feel like the frigging savior of the world inside, but if he doesn’t do something about it, what goddamned good is it? Fuck him!”

“Keep your voice down.”

John took a comb from his bureau, ran it quickly, savagely through his hair a few times, then slammed it back down.

“I guess I’m all set,” he said, turning to look directly at her for the first time.

“You look great,” Julia said, coming over and giving him a tight hug. “Maybe before you go, you can try to say something nice to him.”

John pushed her away and angrily shook his head.

“Honest to God, it’s like he’s ... shit!” He laughed and shook his head. “You say you want to have a baby so much. You don’t need one. You’ve already got one right here. Hell, in a year or two, he’ll get so bad he’ll start shitting himself and need diapers.”

“Come on, John. That’s not fair.”

“Fair? Who cares about fair?” John shouted. “I try to do something nice for him, and what do I get? He acts like I dropped the tray on purpose to wake him up. Maybe he thought I really was trying to scare him to death so I could get my goddamned inheritance, such as it is. And what’ll that be? This house and a mountain of overdue bills? No way. If I try to do something nice for him, does he say thanks? No way. Not Frank Carlson. He doesn’t even know the frigging word ‘thanks.’”

“Keep it downhe’ll hear you,” Julia said, waving her hand to shush him.

“You think I care if he hears me?” John shouted. “What kind of thanks are you getting? You’re stuck here all day doing — what? Taking care of an old man who should have been put in a nursing home?”

“Is that what you want?” Julia snapped.

John closed his eyes in rage and banged both hands on the bureau. The comb bounced and fell to the floor.

“That’s not what I want, but Christ, Julia! Is this what you want? To be hanging around the house all the time, watching him go downhill?”

“I’m not ... unhappy,” Julia said softly, convinced that she was telling the truth — at least mostly.

“I don’t see that you’re all that happy.” John scowled at her. “Five years ago, when we got married, that was the one thing I wanted to do — make you happy.”

“And you do.”

“Really?”

“You know what would do that,” Julia said, softer still.

“No. Don’t start in on that again!” John stretched out his arm and glanced at his watch. “Shit! I’m going to be late. I can grab lunch in town.”

He started out of the room, but Julia caught his arm, halting him. He wheeled around, facing her with anger in his eyes.

No, she thought. Maybe not anger …Hurt.

“Even if he never says it, I want to thank you for trying.”

The harsh light in his eyes melted as John leaned forward and kissed her firmly on the lips. A sudden, powerful stirring of sexual energy took hold of him, and if he hadn’t been running late, he would have grabbed her and carried her to the bed right then. He’d give her the baby she wanted, all right.

“I really gotta run,” he said after breaking off the kiss.

He went quickly down the stairs to the front door.

So he won’t have to go through the kitchen and see his father, Julia thought, as sadness welled up inside her.

“Call me when you get to the office, okay?” she called.

“I will.”

And then he slammed the front door and was gone.

Julia stood at the top of the stairs, waiting to hear the car start up and pull away before going downstairs. By then, Frank had finished his breakfast and gone back into his bedroom. Through the closed door, she could hear the buzzing of the television. She wondered how much Frank had heard of their conversation, but she dismissed it as she set about her day. Judy Bartlett would be over soon to take care of Frank, and Julia wanted to get — and stay — as busy as possible.

III

“I think the whole idea is... sinful. That’s what it is,” Frank said with a grumble. It was a chilly but sunny Saturday afternoon, and he was sitting in the kitchen, talking to Julia while she washed the lunchtime dishes.

John had driven over to the condo construction site to recheck a few angles and elevations so work wouldn’t be delayed on Monday morning. Bri. as usual, was off on one of her long walks along the shore. Julia found herself wondering if Bri’s walks might not be as solitary as she claimed — if maybe she was meeting a boy down there. She was considering giving her a serious mother-daughter talk that evening, but now — as usual — Julian was alone in the house with Frank.

“It’s just harmless fun,” she said as she opened a plastic bag and poured tiny M&Ms bags into a bowl. “It’s a fun holiday for the kids.” She smiled pleasantly at Frank, but what she really wanted to do was laugh at him outright.

“It’s a holiday for Satan. That’s what it is,” Frank said. “Bad enough they celebrate it at all, but on Sunday! The Lord’s day!” He banged his fist on his wheelchair armrest, making it vibrate.

“That’s why the kids are trick-or-treating tonight instead of tomorrow night,” Julia said.

“People don’t realize … once they open themselves up to this ... this devil stuff, it gets to where they can’t stop it, ‘n’ it overwhelms ‘em.”

Unable to stop herself, Julia snickered, and it immediately blended into an all-out laugh. She turned to Frank, fully convinced he was smiling behind her back at the put-on he was creating. But Frank was frowning, his jaw set in a grimace that doubled the lines in his thin cheeks.

“I’ll bet when you were a boy, you did your share of trick-or-treating,” Julia said mildly.

She had found over the past few weeks that — as the old expression went — Frank’s bark was worse than his bite. Frank scowled and grumbled a lot — and some of that was justified, considering that up until four months ago, he had been a hale and hearty man. But now he was confined to a wheelchair, and no matter how much his doctor said there was a chance that, with exercise and luck, he might be able to walk again, he knew he was going to be wheelchair-bound until he died.

This was it ... the end of the line.

That couldn’t help but sour anyone’s attitude, Julia thought, and what with his frequent memory lapses — he had called her by at least four different names since they moved it: Abby, Dianna, Ruth, and Marcia. She tried to deal with him with patience and understanding. When he got into a tirade, though, it was difficult not to lose her composure. What bothered her most was that, even in the short time they’d been living with him, his outbursts seemed to be increasing in frequency and intensity. And now he was starting in on something as harmless as Halloween.

“When you’re a kid,” Frank said, “young ‘n’ foolish, you do plenty of stupid things — things you’ll live to regret ... if you’re lucky ‘n’ smart.” He blinked, holding his eyes closed for several seconds before continuing. “Sure, I done things I wished I’d never done. We all have. But I think makin’ a national holiday out of devil worship is going too far.”

“It’s not a national holiday,” Julia said. “It’s just a … a custom … a little fun and a few harmless pranks. Tell me you never soaped up a window.”

Frank’s scowl deepened as he looked down at his useless leg. His lower lip began to tremble, and Julia felt a jolt of panic when, for an instant, his eyes fluttered and rolled upward.

Is he having another stroke?

“I was reading in the paper th’other day about these kids — teenagers — who got involved with those dungeon games, and they did a spell or something that actually raised a demon that possessed ‘em. They killed two girls.” He snorted. “Should’ve killed themselves and done the world a favor.”

“Come on,” Julia said, laughing softly. “You don’t actually believe it was the game that made them do that.”

“I read it in the paper,” Frank said, as if that was the final authority. “These kids got possessed and ended up killing people before they turned themselves in. Said they wanted to be exercised.”

“You mean ‘exorcised.’”

“Whatever. The point is, something like Halloween can unleash demonic forces.”

“A couple of dozen kids roaming the neighborhood asking for candy hardly seems like a threat from hell,” Julia said.

“Go ahead,” Frank shouted, pointing at her with a trembling hand. “Go on. Laugh all you want. You’ll see. Once you open the door to these things, you can’t shut it. They’ll get you in their power ‘fore you know it, and ‘fore you can get away from ‘em. It ain’t slipped my attention that since you moved here, you and my son ain’t been to church. Ain’t you religious?”

Oh, boy … Here we go, Julia thought.

She took a deep breath and held it, shaking her head. They had spent a lot of days with just the two of them in the house, and from discussions they’d had and comments Frank had let drop — especially on Sunday, when Josh and Allen Stubbins came to bring him to church — she had feared this topic would eventually come up. Now Frank had taken the opportunity of bitching about Halloween to get around to what was really on his mind.

“It’s not that we’re not religious,” Julia said, leaning back and bracing herself with her hands on the counter.

“What is it then?” he asked, but before she could reply, Frank went on. “Me and Dianna tried to raise John right, yah know? But even back then, he was so damned headstrong.”

I wonder which side of the family he gets that from, Julia thought.

“We took him to church, did what the baptism service saysput the scriptures in his hand — but it didn’t do no good. I was kind of hoping you’d be the one to bring him back.”

“I don’t want you to get me wrong, Frank,” she said, hoping what she was really feeling didn’t show. He could talk about his religion all he wanted, but that didn’t stop him from letting fly a curse whenever his blood pressure spiked. “John and I simply don’t buy into organized religion. We believe that religion is —”

“Buy into! You said you don’t buy into religion? It isn’t something you buy into!”

Julia cocked her head to one side, resisting the temptation to throw at him some recent incidents involving television evangelists and their pitches about buying salvation while soliciting prostitutes, both male and female.

“I don’t want you to misunderstand me,” she said. “I think — and John thinks — that religion is a personal thing, an individual choice.”

“There’s only one way,” Frank said, his voice taking on a preacherly resonance. “I would think even if not for your own sake, you’d want to do something for Bri.”

Julia rubbed her hand over her face, wishing she were anywhere but here right now. It took great effort not to lash out and ask him what the hell it mattered to him, anyway, how they raised Bri.

Don’t talk to me about being a hypocrite, she wanted to say. Look at your relationship with your own son.

She took a deep breath and carefully measured her words.

“When she’s older, Bri can decide for herself. I don’t want to push her one way or another.”

“It ain’t a matter of pushing, for Lord’s sake,” Frank said. “It’s a matter of guiding … of directing. A child can’t choose for itself if you don’t show it the right way. Satan will always be there to grab ‘em and drag ‘em down. There won’t be time then to ‘decide for yourself.’“

“Bri’s not a child,” Julia said as mildly as possible, She had to bite down on her tongue to keep from pointing out that her daughter could decide for herself, not itself.

“And if you want to be honest, you’re not setting the best example what with your swearing all the time.”

Frank lowered his head and shook it.

“You may not have noticed, but I’ve been makin’ an effort not to cuss, ‘specially when Bri’s around. But I talk the way I talk from spending my life on the docks. I ain’t saying I’m perfect myself, but —”

“No, I don’t think you are,” Julia snapped, “but you are saying you’re better than I am and John is, and that’s one bit fair.”

It took effort to make her motions appear unhurried, but she grabbed the sponge, wet it under the faucet, and started wiping up crumbs from the table. While Frank sat there speechless, she tossed the sponge into the sink, rinsed her hands, then dried them on the dish towel hanging from one of the cupboard door handles.

“John and I know how we want to raise Bri,” she said, her voice low, almost trembling. “Now, I can appreciate your concern, but when it comes to Bri — whether it’s something as silly as whether or not she’ll go trick-or-treating or something as serious as the salvation of her soul — as her mother, I can handle it, if that’s all right with you.”

She was glaring at Frank, and she knew she was taking advantage of him, standing so close to him he had to tilt his head back to look up at her. But she was angry enough not to care. If he wanted to, he could treat John like he was still a boy, but he sure as Hell wasn’t going to tell her how to raise her daughter, church or no church.

“If you don’t mind me using your car,” she said, “I have to go out shopping,” Julia said.

Frank’s face was expressionless as he pointed toward where his car keys hung on a nail by the door. “I ain’t ever gonna use that car again,” he said gruffly.

“If Bri comes back while I’m gone, tell her I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

Frank was silent and didn’t move as Julia grabbed her jacket and the set of car keys, and walked out to the car in the barn. She opened the barn door, got into the car, started it up, and backed down to the street, the whole time thinking: Screw him! If he’s going to give it to me, he’s going to have to learn that I’ll shovel it right back.

IV

When Julia drove up to the condo site, she saw John’s car parked on the side of the road. Its trunk was open, and the transit box was on the roadside, open and empty. Some of the other equipment was gone as well. As Julia parked the car, she wondered how he dared leave his equipment out like that. What would stop someone driving by from stealing it?

She got out of the car and scanned the area, looking for him, but there was no sign of him anywhere. He had said he would be working with Barry today, but he hadn’t mentioned whether he was going to pick him up in town first or meet him out here at the site. If Barry had driven to the island this morning, they might be off in his car somewhere. She glanced at her watch. It was a little after one o’clock. Maybe they were off getting lunch.

On her left, the open, flat field sloped down toward the ocean, it thick mat of yellowed grass and weeds flattened and torn up by the heavy equipment. Other than a few mounds of dark soil, there wasn’t much that would hide him from view, so she turned to the other side of the road, toward the trees and dilapidated barn. Cupping her hands to her mouth, she called out John’s name several times.

Her voice didn’t carry very far, however. It bounced back with an odd flatness. With only the devastation of the ground breaking and one deserted, weather-grayed house and barn in sight, she was filled with a sense of loneliness. It surprised her how desolate, how unsettled this end of the island was. It made the southwest tip of the island where they lived seem downright thriving.

She called out John’s name again before she concluded that he and Barry — if they weren’t getting lunch — were probably off in the woods across the road. John had mentioned something about the old barn and some woods that were going to be cleared out. Maybe they were over there.

Pocketing her car keys and making sure her car doors were locked, Julia started out across the field toward the barn. She paused now and again, turning back to look at the view from the field. The wind off the water had a clean snap to it, chilly and invigorating. She couldn’t deny the beauty of the spot. Whoever ended up living out here was going to have a gorgeous view of outer Casco Bay.

She also experienced a strong sense of the place’s raw beauty and what it would be losing once construction began. The gray house with its partially caved-in barn, looking out over the cold gray sea, spoke of a distant, less complicated and less hurried way of life — the kind of life, actually, John must have experienced growing up here. Even though she had no personal attachment to the island, sadness filled her when she considered how these fields would be chewed up by thick-treaded bulldozers and the house and barn would be bulldozed to make room for luxury living — the kind of living probably no one currently living on the island could afford.

The dead grass swished at her legs as she walked. The sound, combined with the salty breeze, reminded Julia of the day last week when they had gone for a walk on Bald Hill and Bri had gotten lost in the woods. Looking to her left, she could see the ridge of Bald Hill rising above the screen of woods. Along the edge of the field, most of the trees, predominantly oaks, had been stripped bare by the cold weather.

A blue jay singing its harsh song suddenly darted out of the woods. Caught by surprise, Julia was shaking as she watched the harmless blue bird flash over the field.

Why so skittish? she wondered as she looked around to see if anyone was nearby and had seen her reaction. Being out in the open like this made her feel exposed, vulnerable. She had never been comfortable in wide-open spaces, so she hurried her pace to get closer to the trees.

Once at the edge of the woods beneath an ancient, spreading oak, she stopped and called again for John. The echo of her voice died away quickly. She strained to hear a reply, but none came.

“Where the hell are you?” she muttered, looking back along the path she had trampled through the dead grass. Several wooden stakes had been driven into the ground and flagged with orange plastic tape to mark boundaries. John had been here, but when?

From here, she could see the back of the barn with its shingle-less roof and fallen-down outbuildings. The side door was hanging open, and although at this distance she couldn’t hear it, fitful gusts of wind were shifting the door open and closed, banging it against the side of the barn. The windows on the side of the barn had long since lost their glass from boys throwing stones or winter storms slamming the northeast side of the island.

While she was looking back at the barn, a tingling sensation rushed up her back between her shoulder blades … a sensation as if someone was watching her. A wave of goose bumps rippling over Julia’s arms.

As she looked around, trying to see if anyone was watching her or if it was her imagination, she caught a brief motion shifting inside the darkened doorway of the barn. Thinking it might be John and wanting to get some distance between herself and the trees, she started across the field at a brisk pace.

“John? … Is that you?” she called.

She focused on the opened door as it swung back and forth, banging the side of the barn. The closer she got, the louder the banging became. She cringed at the squeaking sound of rusted hinges moving.

The ground around the barn was littered with refuse — a collapsed chicken coop, old tools and machinery, a rusted plows and harrow, the burned-out shell of an old car, and several stretches of barbed wire and slat wood fences, now knocked flat. The air was redolent with the smells of age and rot. Everything combined to give the side yard the illusion of a devastated battlefield and nostalgia or not, it would probably be a good thing to get this mess cleaned up.

Julia walked gingerly through the rubble until she arrived at the side barn door. She braced it open by leaning against it with one hand. The door was weathered smooth, but when a sudden gust of wind tore it out of her hand, a sliver of wood lanced into the heel of her palm.

“Shit!” Julia shouted, pulling her hand away from the door and staring at the dot of blood that welled up like a ruby bead. A tiny splinter was sticking out of her palm. It was easy enough to grab it with her fingernails and pull it out. Squeezing with her thumb and forefinger, she forced the blood to flow and then put the cut to her mouth and sucked on it. The coppery taste of blood filled her mouth, and she spat onto the ground.

A soft chuckle sounded from the darkness inside the barn drew her attention. Her breath caught in her throat as she looked wide-eyed through the opening, wondering if that had been laughter or the sighing of the wind in the grass.

Leaning forward but being careful not to enter, she looked around inside, trying to pierce the gloom. The musty smell of old hay filled her nostrils as she looked at the broken-down stalls, the collapsed workbench, the rickety ladder and trapdoor leading up to the hayloft, and the arching beams of the roof, no doubt populated with spiders and bats, The spaces between planks on the roof where shingles had been torn away let in brilliant shafts of sunlight, but as soon as the pure light of day entered the barn, it seemed to be swallowed up by the dusty shadows. If it was possible, the place seemed more decayed on the inside than it did on the outside.

If from a distance she had seen motion inside the doorway, there wasn’t any evidence of it now. The only sound was the harsh whistle of wind as it whisked through cracks and holes in the barn. The only motion was the gentle swirl of dust spun up into the rafters by the breeze where it spiraled in the beams of sunlight.

“Don’t go in there,” a voice said behind her.

Julia spun around with a frightened squeal and broke into a relieved smile when she saw John coming toward her from the woods. After casting a cautious backward glance into the barn, she started moving toward him, smiling and waving. She couldn’t believe how happy she was to see him even as she hoped he hadn’t noticed how much he had surprised her.

“What are you doing out here?” he asked when they met in the middle of the field.

Taken aback by the hostile tone in his voice, Julia refrained from hugging him as they looked each other in the eyes. After the gloom of the barn, the brilliant sunlight made her eyes water.

“I wanted to see you,” she stammered. “See what you were doing.”

“You shouldn’t be snooping around,” John said.

The tension in his body more than bothered her — it frightened her. It was as if she had caught him doing something he shouldn’t have been doing, and he hadn’t appreciated the interruption.

“I was just taking a peek inside the bam,” Julia said defensively. “This is Haskins’ barn, right?”

John nodded.

“I think old places like this are interesting. “

“You’ve got to be careful,” John said, his voice low but still sounding unnaturally tight. “An old relic like this could collapse without warning.”

“I don’t think there’s any danger.” Julia looked back over her shoulder at the barn. “It’s lasted this long. I say it’ll hold up a few more winters.”

John shrugged. “It’ll all be gone in a few weeks, anyway.”

“Kind of a pity, don’t you think?” Julia’s mind was filled by the sense of loneliness, the same wistful feelings for the long-gone past she had experienced out in the field.

“Why’d you come out here, anyway?” John asked sharply.

“I saw your car and figured you were working around here. You didn’t hear me calling?’’

John shook his head. “Nope. I was checking the farthest boundary line over there.” He waved his hand in the general direction of the woods.

Julia squinted and, looking out across the field, was struck by something curious. If he had been off in the woods not too far from the big oak tree where she had been, why hadn’t he heard? Why hadn’t he answered? He certainly would have been close enough.

“Everything okay at the house?” John asked.

Julia nodded, but she noticed how he still seemed agitated — as though she had interrupted him doing … something.

“Yeah … Sure,” she said vacantly as she looked across the field. “Everything’s fine. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about out here, is all.” She paused, then added, “I thought you said Barry was helping you today.”

John hesitated, then said, “He left a while ago — probably pulled out just before you got here. You must have passed him on the road.”

Julia shook her head, fairly positive she hadn’t passed any cars on her way out here. What bothered her even more was the feeling that John was lying to her … hiding something from her. If she’d had a more suspicious nature — and if she hadn’t known John as well as she did — she might have suspected he was meeting a woman. But the idea that John was having an affair was ridiculous. Even if, by some remote chance, he was meeting someone he didn’t want her to know about, why would they meet out here, on a cold, windy field or in Haskins’ barn?

Julia told herself she knew him well enough to know he wasn’t screwing around, but then, what was he doing out here apparently alone?

“Did you leave your surveying equipment in the woods?” she asked, looking past him toward the lines of trees.

John glanced over his shoulder, his eyes momentarily widening. Then he shook his head. “No — it’s all down by the road near the house. I was — uh, walking the boundary line. It was all mapped out before I got the job.”

“I see,” Julia said simply, noticing that he didn’t have any surveyor’s maps with him. She was convinced, now, that earlier, when she was sure someone had been watching her, it had been John, hiding in the woods and not wanting her to know he was there … at least until he yelled at her not to go into the barn.

But why? she wondered.

Was she being ridiculous, suspecting something was going on that she wasn’t supposed to know?

Was the truth simply that Barry had left early, and John was walking the boundary line alone … that he hadn’t heard her calling him … and that he first saw her just as she was entering the barn?

Or was there more?

“I haven’t had lunch yet, and I’m hungry as a bear,” John said. “If Dad and Bri are all squared away, how ‘bout we head into town and get something. There’s a lobster house in Yarmouth that used to be the best in the area. Let’s see if it’s still there.”

“Sure,” Julia said. “I’m not that hungry, but I’ll join you. Actually, I wanted to talk to you about your father.”

“What now?”

“We had a bit of a religious discussion this morning.”

“Oh, boy,” John said. When he rolled his eyes upward, it reminded Julia of Frank when he had his momentary memory lapses.

“Nothing serious,” Julia said. “We can talk about it over lunch. I’ll get your car and bring it around. Why don’t I meet you in front of the house over there?”

They each started out across the field in different directions. Julia was enjoying the prospect of lunch with just the two of them, something they hadn’t done for so long. The thought of what John might have been hiding from her receded. She leaned her head back and inhaled the fresh ocean air.

As she passed the open barn door, still swinging back and forth with the gusting wind, she couldn’t forget the sensation she had had of seeing motion in the darkness inside. She couldn’t push aside the conviction that someone had been hiding somewhere nearby … watching her with icy hatred.

Julia shivered and didn’t start to feel better until she was well past the barn. She jumped and cast one last fearful glance backward when the door slammed open with a resounding bang against the barn wall. She forced herself not to look too intently inside, and most of all, she tried not to speculate who or what might be waiting there in the darkness.

V

“I always thought he was bad, and by the sound of things, he’s gotten worse,” John said. He tipped his head back and sucked noisily on one of the small lobster legs. When he had gotten out the tiny nugget of meat and swallowed it, he wiped his chin with his napkin and took a sip of beer.

Julia sat with her hands folded in her lap. She hadn’t been hungry, and she had never much cared for lobster, but John had insisted that she try a “real” Maine lobster. Watching him work at his, though, had taken away what little appetite she might have had.

“Maybe we can put mine in a doggie bag,” she said, frowning as she pushed her plate away.

“They’re best hot out of the pot,” John said. He took his lobster and ripped off one of the large claws. Using a nutcracker, he broke the shell and extracted the wad of speckled pink meat.

“Sorry. I’m going to have to pass,” Julia said. Her stomach churned as she watched him dip the meat into the melted butter and stuff it into his mouth.

“So, anyway,” John said, chewing as he spoke, “you and the old man squared off, huh?”

Julia nodded.

“And you think you came out on top?” He chuckled. “That’d be a first.”

“What was he like as a father?” Julia asked. “You’ve told me some before, but you never got into the religion part.”

John smirked as he wiped his hands on his napkin and then stared out the window at the bay for a moment.

“I don’t think he was into it as much when I was growing up. Certainly not as bad as you make it sound now. We’d go to church and all, but it was never hellfire and damnation like you said he laid on you.”

“Not exactly hellfire and damnation, but he was really pushy about it, saying there was only one way to get to God and going on about how Halloween is a holiday for Satan.”

“That I’ve heard before.” John snorted with laughter before taking another drink of beer. Julia was glad to see him actually relaxing and enjoying himself.

Maybe, she was thinking, this is all we needed … to get out together now and again … just the two of us …

“I always figured he’d end up a Bible-thumper,” John said, still snickering. “Especially after my mother died. I think it’s some kind of guilt thing because he feels like maybe he was responsible for her dying.”

John suddenly started coughing so hard his face turned bright red, and his eyes began to water. It took a while for the fit of coughing to subside, but when it was over, he wiped his face with a fresh napkin and smiled weakly at his wife.

“You okay there?” she asked, settling back into her seat.

John nodded.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice sounding strangled. “I … I must’ve swallowed down the wrong pipe.”

‘‘I’m not surprised, the way you’re gobbling up that lobster,” Julia said. “We’re not in any hurry.”

“Yeah,” John said, stretching out his arm and looking at his wristwatch. “But can we talk about something besides my father?”

“Sure,” Julia said, and they turned their conversation to things other than Frank or John’s condo site or Bri’s problems making friends at school. Their time in the restaurant and their drive back to the island passed too fast, and looking back on it, Julia realized it was one of the last times they had a genuinely good time together.

EIGHT

Trick or Treat

I

Off and on all week, Julia wondered if Bri was planning on going trick-or-treating. Granted, she was a bit old for it, but last year she and several of her friends had dressed up and gone out and had a great time. Julia was hoping Bri had made friends with at least a few kids at school so she wouldn’t sit home moping all evening.

At four-thirty, as the sky was darkening, Bri got the bowl of candy from its hiding place on the top cupboard shelf and placed it on the small table in the entryway. She opened the front door and stared up at the thin branches of the trees, which looked like black lace against the fading sky.

“So, you’re not going after all?” Julia said when she walked into the living room and found Bri leaning out the door.

Bri shrugged, shut the door, and went over to sit in the armchair, her feet splayed awkwardly in front of her. She grunted a reply, but Julia didn’t need to catch it.

“How about that girl you told me about? … Audrey?”

Again Bri sniffed. Leaning forward, she reached around the doorjamb and grabbed a bag of M&Ms. She peeled it open and popped several into her mouth, chewing noisily as she stared blankly at the floor.

“I haven’t seen her since that time out on the point,” she said. A thin glob of chocolate formed at the side of her mouth, and she wiped it away with her fingers, then licked her fingers clean.

“Why don’t you give her a call?” Julia said. “It’s not too late to throw something together for a costume.”

Bri shook her head and dumped some more M&Ms into her mouth. After chewing and swallowing, she looked at her mother and said, “Her name’s not in the phone book. I already checked.” She moved to grab another bag of candy, but her mother stepped forward quickly and gave her a light rap on the back of the hand. “Leave something for the kids.”

Bri frowned and turned back around in the chair with a sigh.

“She doesn’t want to be friends, I guess,” Bri said, and Julia could see her lower lip trembling. “We talked that day and … that’s all.”

“You said you thought she seemed nice,” Julia said.

“I guess I was wrong,” Bri said. Now that her mother had moved over to the couch, she snatched another bag of candy uncontested, except for the frown Julia gave her.

“I kinda hoped we’d have a class together or something, so we could get to know each other, but I haven’t seen her all week. She must be in high school.”

“Gotta be if after two weeks you still haven’t bumped into her.”

“I thought I saw her a few times, but — I don’t know.” She shook her head as though unable to put the pieces of the mystery together.

“Did you ask any of the other kids about her?” Julia asked.

Julia was thinking back to her own high school days, and to one of her classmates in particular. Her name was Ann Clifford, and she had been the “new kid” the beginning of sophomore year. She had been so quiet and withdrawn the kids nicknamed her “Phantom.” Slowly, though, as the school year went on, Phantom loosened up, and she and Julia became close friends — at least until they went their separate ways after graduation. But several of the students never did accept her into their tight little circles.

Julia had no idea what to tell Bri. If Audrey was the class scapegoat, one of the school’s loners, it would be nice of Bri to befriend her. The expression “misery loves company” kept drifting through her mind, but she dismissed that. The cliché she thought of to counter it was, “Still waters run deep.” On the other hand, if Audrey was a social misfit — and no one was better than junior high school students at tagging and tormenting social misfits — it wasn’t going to help Bri’s acceptance into the school social structure to associate with her.

“I asked a couple of the girls, but they said there wasn’t anybody named Audrey Church in the school. I think they might have been putting me on.”

“They must have been, unless Audrey doesn’t go to school. You said she acted sort of standoffish, talking about her home life. Maybe she’s dropped out.”

“I dunno,” Bri said. “Maybe her parents work and she has to stay home to do housework or take care of a younger brother or sister or something. “

“Maybe that’s it. Both her parents work, and she stays home to baby-sit. Dad drove Granddad over to his lodge meeting tonight, but when they get home, I’ll ask Frank about the family. He should know them if there are anyone named “Church” lives on the island.”

Bri shrugged as though it didn’t matter anymore, but before she could say anything, there was the sound of running feet on the front walkway, and a chorus of voices hollering, “Trick-or-treat!”

Bri and her mother went to the door to see the troop of costumed children on the doorstep. As Bri put a handful of candy into each bag as it opened up in front of her, she addressed each child as the character he or she was. The tally was one witch, two ghosts, and — what sent Julia into near-hysterics — an IRS auditor, complete with blood-splattered rubber ax in hand. Seeing a knot of parents standing down by the road edge, Julia waved, but only one of them waved back.

After that first round of kids, only two other groups showed up to the door that evening. It wasn’t for lack of trick-or-treaters out and about. From the living room window, Julia saw dozens of children, white sheets or vampire capes flapping behind them as they raced up and down the street. The streetlight cast long, lean shadows on the street. But not many of the trick-or-treaters came up the walk to the Carlsons’ door.

“I guess we’ll have plenty of M&Ms left over,” Bri said, once it was obvious their house was off limits.

“Don’t let your father find them, all right?” Julia said, winking.

“No problem,” Bri said, smiling thinly. “But how come they’re not coming up here?”

Julia shrugged as she went to the window and looked out on the now fully dark street. Eerie, silhouetted figures flashed by under the corner streetlight, but she could tell there wouldn’t be any more visitors tonight unless they got a late-night window soaping.

“Probably because Granddad hasn’t given out Halloween candy in years,” Julia said.

“How do you know that?” Bri asked, opening another bag of M&Ms and filling her mouth.

Not wanting to get into the “religious” discussion she and Frank had that afternoon, she shushed Bri and went to turn off the light over the front steps. She took what was left of the candy and walked into the kitchen.

“I thought you said I could have it,” Bri said, following behind her.

“I just said to keep it away from you father,” Julia said. “Looks like I have to keep it away from you, too.” She opened the cupboard and put the bowl up onto the top shelf and then swung the door shut. “You’ll know where to find it tomorrow.”

Bri’s disappointment registered on her face, but she obviously knew it wouldn’t pay to argue. Taking a deep breath and letting her shoulders droop, she said, “I’ve gotta admit, this has been one of the funnest Halloweens I’ve ever had.”

Julia smiled and shook her head. “‘Funnest? Did you actually say ‘funnest?’

Bri nodded, a smile flickering at the corners of her mouth.

“I’m going to have a talk with your English teacher.”

“Okay, the most fun I’ve ever had,” Bri said, waving her mother away as she reached out in an attempt to tickle her. “This has been absitively, posolutely the bestest night of my life. Satisfied?”

“Much better,” Julia said, bursting out with laugher. “Your command of the English language is surpassed only by your natural grace and charm.” She jabbed her forefinger into the crook of Bri’s neck and wiggled it until she squirmed away.

Chuckling even while she knew it was to hide her own disappointment, Bri forced a yawn. “I think I’ll wash up and go to bed early. Maybe read a little before I crash.”

“It’s only” — Julia glanced at the clock over the refrigerator —”a little past eight. Come on. Stay up and keep me company. We can play a game or something.”

“I don’t think so,” Bri said as she started moving slowly out of the kitchen toward the hallway stairs.

“Maybe there’s a good movie on TV,” Julia said. “One of the local stations has got to be showing Night of the Living Dead.”

“Honest, Mom. I haven’t been sleeping well lately, and I wanna chill out. See you in the morning.”

Julia suspected that Bri was heading to bed so early because of her disappointment about missing trick-or-treating, and she wished she could make it up to her somehow, but she also knew that she couldn’t — it was going to be up to Bri to make her own friends.

“G’night, then,” Julia said, giving her a little wave. She stood in the kitchen, listening to Bri’s footsteps as she trudged up the stairs,

II

Lying in bed, her attention barely on the words dragging by her eyes, Bri listened to the sounds of kids whooping it up in the street. Laughs and screams and hollers echoed in the still night, repeatedly drawing her eyes to the blank rectangle of the window. Several times she turned off her reading light and got out of bed. Crouching by the window, she looked out at the pale quarter moon riding low in the sky. She found herself disappointed that it wasn’t a fat-belly full moon casting long, blue shadows beneath the parade of figures in the street.

But the moon wasn’t the only thing that disappointed her. She missed her friends back home and was practically in tears that she couldn’t go out tonight and whoop it up with them. She wondered if, right now in Shelburne Falls, Lisa and Veronica and Debbie and all the others were cruising the streets.

“Damned foolish holiday, anyway,” she whispered as she went back to bed and slipped under the sheets.

The book she was reading — Anne of Avonlea — lay facedown on her pillow, open to the page she hadn’t been able to concentrate on. Sometime after eleven o’clock — an hour or so after her father and grandfather came home — she turned off the light and snuggled down under the covers. Sleep, though — like reading — didn’t hold her, and she lay there, staring up at the ceiling.

What brought her to full attention was a low, steady throbbing sound that seemed to be as much a part of the night as the darkness. Once she noticed it, she couldn’t say for sure when it had started. Propping herself up on her elbows, she looked at her window where the shadows of branches, thrown by the streetlight, danced like stiff-jointed skeletons on her windowsill. The sound stopped, and her room was hushed.

Leave it to me to freak myself out on Halloween night, she thought.

Confused as to what the sound had been, she closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to pull back the memory of it. She wasn’t sure if it had been real or in her imagination, but she held her breath and didn’t move for a long time as she waited for the sound to be repeated.

Tension coiled inside her, and when the sound came again, it caught her by surprise. The only sound she could make was a strangled click in her throat. She was wide awake. She knew she was. And drifting out of the darkness, winding and twining with a soft, subtle whisper, were the soft strains of organ music.

Bri wanted to leap out of her bed and run to her mother, but like a child whose imagination has convinced her that there are alligators — or worse under her bed, she didn’t dare bring her feet out from under the covers. Her heart was hammering a tinny drumbeat in her neck as her eyes darted around the room, trying to find from which direction the music was coming.

It seemed to be coming from every direction.

The notes blended, swelling and throbbing with pulsating power that, Bri sensed, was being held in check. The tune — yes! There was a definite tune seemed familiar, but Bri couldn’t quite place it other than that it was definitely a religious hymn.

“Church wood,” she whispered, her throat raw and dry. She wasn’t sure if she had actually spoken out loud.

As soon as she realized she was hearing the church wood, she felt the walls and floor of her bedroom vibrate, resonating with the deep sound of the organ. The vibration worked its way into her bones, making her entire body tingle. If she dared to get out of bed and look at herself in the mirror, she was sure she would see that her face was glowing with an eerie blue light.

This has got to be a dream, she thought desperately. But it can’t be … I’m wide awake … I know I am …

Remembering a trick someone had once told her about how to tell if you’re dreaming or not, she held her hand up in front of her face and stared at it.

Yes … That’s my hand …

Slowly she flexed her fingers, never letting her concentration waver from her hand — This isn’t a dream! — and still the soft organ music throbbed in the darkness like a living presence in the darkness. The more she concentrated on it, the more it seemed to fade, until it was at the very border of her hearing.

The rawness in her throat got worse, and Bri realized she was breathing too fast, sucking in quick, dry gulps of air through her mouth. It took all the mental effort she could muster to inhale slowly through her nose, but no matter how hard she tried to calm herself down, her nerve endings were stripped raw as the organ music rose and fell like the heavy surge of the ocean.

“No … “ she said, moaning softly as her eyes darted around the darkened bedroom, trying to find the source of the receding sound. Like a will-a’-the-wisp, it shifted every time she thought she was about to hone in on it. First it would come from the corner by the window, and then, as soon as she looked in that direction, it would shift over to her bureau. When she looked there, it would echo from inside the closet.

She wanted to cry out for her mother to come to her room, but no matter how hard she tried to calm her nerves, whenever she thought she might have enough air in her lungs to shout, she couldn’t make a sound. The dry lining of her throat felt like it was on fire.

Suddenly a sound hit her ears as loud as the snap of a rifle.

It wasn’t much ... a quick pop that drew her attention away from the organ music now softly filtering into her room from behind the headboard, The new sound was so sharp and sudden, Bri thought for an instant that it had been inside her head.

Maybe I’m so scared I popped a blood vessel, she thought, her fear mounting even higher.

But the sound came again, and this time she identified where it had come from, if not the sound itself.

Something had hit the window glass.

With a sudden flurry of motion, Bri threw aside her bed covers and jumped out of bed. The organ music stopped the instant her feet hit the hardwood floor. She tiptoed over to the window in a few long strides.

It felt like she was breathing dust as she crouched on the floor and looked out into the night. The moon had set, so the only illumination was from the weak glow of the streetlight. Low-hanging mist swirled and eddied between the trees and crept up onto the edge of the road. Everything was hushed. The night sky looked like fuzzy, dark velvet.

And then another snap hit the window right in front of her face.

Bri jumped back with a startled yelp that tightened her throat. Instantly she realized what was going on. Someone was out there, tossing pebbles against the glass to scare me.

Slowly she eased herself up to the window again. Hands gripping the sill, she looked out to see where the person was hiding,

They could be across the street … or behind the maple trees, but more than likely, they were pressed up against the side of the house, out of sight until they darted out and tossed another pebble at her bedroom window.

An element of calm returned to her as she sat on the floor, thinking what to do next.

The organ music ...

Well, that had to have been part of a dream.

Even though she didn’t feel as though she had fallen asleep, she must have drifted off, and — this being Halloween night — she had let what her granddad had told her about the “church wood” invade her sleep.

That was clear enough.

But what about the — ?

Another click on the glass made her jump again. She leaned forward quickly, hoping to catch the pebble thrower before he darted back to cover. Reaching up to the window lock, she snapped it open, planning to run it up before the culprit threw another pebble.

Try as she might, though, she couldn’t get the window to budge.

She stood up and made sure it was unlocked, not locked.

The catch was open. Last weekend, before the weather got too cold, she’d had the window open to air out the room, so she knew it worked.

Why won’t it open now?

She pushed up as hard as she could. It was while she was struggling to raise the window that she glanced down and saw a solitary figure standing by the side of the house.

She knew right away who it was

Audrey had her head tilted back and was staring up at her bedroom window, her pale face floating in the darkness below as though she were looking up from the bottom of a deep, dark well.

“What in the heck?” she whispered.

She knew Audrey couldn’t hear her, not with the window closed, so she redoubled her efforts to get it open. Crouching, her knees locked, she pushed as hard as she could against the sash until — finally — it slid up. A cold wash of night air swept over her, raising goose bumps on her arms as she stuck her head out the window and peered down. A fitful gust of wind blew into her face, lifting her hair.

“For crying out loud, Audrey! What are you doing out here?”

She had no idea what time it was, but the moon was down and the street was silent. No hint of the coming dawn brightened the black vault of sky.

Audrey didn’t say a word, but she kept staring up at Bri. It looked as though she had been out trick-or-treating. Her face had a glowing, white cast as if she hadn’t yet washed off her face makeup. In the feeble glow from the streetlight, Bri saw the heavy, dark lines beneath Audrey’s eyes. Her mouth opened, but she said nothing.

‘‘What do you want?” Bri whispered, hoping not to wake up her parents.

Audrey shook her head from side to side and raised a hand in a beckoning gesture. Bri knew she wanted her to come outside, but the gesture — the same one she had made that day in the woods — sent a shiver up her spine.

“No — I can’t come down.” She shook her head. “It’s too late. You should be home.”

Audrey remained silent as she waved her hand slowly up and down. Her eyes never blinked, and her cold stare worked its way into Bri’s heart.

Suddenly, she was sure she knew what was going on, and she didn’t like it.

Audrey wasn’t any different from any of the other kids on the island. She had no interest in being her friend, and she was pulling this spooky stunt merely to freak her out.

“Look, Audrey, I —” Bri started to say, but to her ears, her voice sounded distorted, as if she were speaking directly at a wall, and her words were bouncing back at her.

“Come with me,” Audrey whispered, her voice faint, feathery. She still slowly beckoned to Bri with a waving hand as pale and polished as white marble.

And as cold, Bri thought with a shiver.

“Go home,” Bri said. “I’ll meet you on the point tomorrow.”

At first, Audrey didn’t reply, but then she said softly, “Come with me ... now.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bri hissed. “It’s almost —”

She turned to glance at the clock by her bed, but it was facing away from her, and she couldn’t see the dial. Dashing to her bedstand, she grabbed the clock and saw that it was a few minutes before one in the morning. She went back to the window and, somehow, wasn’t surprised that Audrey was no longer there.

She was left with the peculiar sensation that Audrey never had been there … that she had dreamed this … just as she had the church-wood organ music .. .and might still be dreaming.

Rubbing her shoulders to warm up, she then slid the window down, all the while working to convince herself she had imagined everything. She was just getting back into bed when a heavy thump sounded downstairs as if something had hit the front door — hard.

“Jesus,” Bri whispered under her breath as she leaped from bed and raced out of her bedroom and down the stairs. She moved as quietly as she could so she wouldn’t disturb her parents or grandfather. Through the sidelight window beside the front door, she saw the shadow of someone — Audrey! — on the front steps.

Bri’s hand was shaking as she fumbled to open the lock and turn the doorknob. As the door swung open, a cold gust of wind swirled into the foyer, tearing through the thin fabric of Bri’s nightgown. Whatever she had been about to say was lost in a sharp intake of breath.

The doorstep was empty.

The wash of light from the streetlight carpeted the granite slab step.

“What the — ?”

Bri took an involuntary step backward, positive she had seen Audrey’s shape outside. Then, with a start, when she focused farther down the walkway, she did see Audrey. She was standing down by the road, under the maples.

How did she get away from the door so fast? Bri wondered.

With that thought, her suspicion became a conviction — Audrey, and probably several other kids — were teasing her, trying to scare her.

“I know what you’re up to,” Bri called out to the solitary figure down by the road. She had to admit the effect was good — the soft yellow glow of the streetlight, the silently swirling ground mist, the fitful gusts of chilling wind … and Audrey’s face ... so pale … so ghostly.

“Stop teasing me,” Bri whispered harshly. “It’s not funny.”

Her lower lip was trembling, and she wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t give Audrey or anyone who might be with her the satisfaction.

But Audrey, obviously, wasn’t going to stop — not yet, anyway.

Again, she slowly motioned with her hand for Bri to come outside. Her voice carried on the wind from the darkness.

“Come with me … I want to show you something.”

“No way,” Bri shouted, unmindful now of waking up her parents. She took a few quick steps forward into the night, her fists clenched at her sides. “You’ve got to stop it! Stop teasing me!”

Her eyes darted to each side of the front stairs, but she didn’t see anyone else hiding there, watching her. Her anger became a hot flush of blood coursing over her cheeks.

“If you don’t go away and leave me alone, I’m going to tell my parents!” Bri yelled.

Her voice echoed in the night with a muffled dullness. When she looked down by the roadside again, she was stunned into silence.

Audrey was gone.

Suddenly and silently, she simply wasn’t there.

Bri shivered with the cold. Figuring Audrey, knowing the joke was played out, had ducked behind a tree, she was turning to go back into the house when she sensed more than saw or heard someone moving beside the house to her left. Just as she turned to look, a face popped out of the darkness, stopping mere inches from her own face. A cold dash of panic hit her, nearly blinding her; and in that first frightening instant, she recognized Audrey’s pale face, eyes and mouth wide open … so close she could feel the chill of her skin.

“I want you to tell him ... “ Audrey whispered, her lips moving with an odd disunity with her words. “I want you to tell your father something.”

Bri was too frightened to ask what. It felt like thin, cold fingers were pressing in the sides of her throat, holding her motionless.

“I want you to tell your father that you saw me tonight,” Audrey whispered. Her breath was cold on Bri’s ear.

“I —” Bri started to say, but that was all that came out.

“Tell him you were talking to … Abby.”

The last word was long and drawn out. It reverberated in her ears like the echoing sound of church-wood music.

With that last word, Audrey suddenly ducked back, dissolving into the night like a passing cloud.

Bri gasped as she drew in a deep gulp of air and then forced it out as a long, wailing scream. Her legs gave out beneath her, and she was dimly aware that she was falling. She didn’t feel her knees slam into the hard stone step … She didn’t feel the cold stone as she fell face first onto the walkway. The next thing she was aware of was her mother and stepfather talking softly to her as they leaned over her and rubbed her face with a cold washcloth.

III

‘‘I’m worried about her,” Julia said later in their own bedroom. It had taken her and John more than an hour, until well after two o’clock, to calm Bri down and get her settled back in bed. Knowing dawn was only a few hours away, Julia was half-tempted to stay awake and try to enjoy the peace and quiet before everyone got up for the day.

“I —” John said, then paused and, lacing his hands behind his head, stared for a moment at the ceiling. “I think it was a harmless prank —”

“Harmless?” Julia said, wanting to shout but holding back so she wouldn’t wake up Bri. “Do you call scaring her so badly she faints harmless? She’s lucky she landed the way she did. She could have banged her head really hard on the steps.”

“You didn’t let me finish,” John said. “I think it was a harmless prank that got out of hand. From the way Bri described it, they had it all worked out — what with her seeing that girl Audrey down by the road, and then having someone jump out from behind her.” He chuckled in spite of himself. “You’ve got to admit, it was pretty elaborate.”

Julia sat cross-legged on the bed, looking at John and not believing what she was hearing. She also didn’t like what she was thinking, that he wasn’t taking Bri’s experience seriously because she wasn’t his biological daughter. Maybe that allowed him to see the humor in all of this, but all she felt was defensive and protective of her daughter.

“I don’t think it’s fair of those kids — whoever they areto tease her like that,” Julia said, grimacing and shaking her fists with frustration.

“But if you look at it from the other side,” John said mildly, “you could take it as — well, almost a hopeful sign.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?” Julia snapped.

“They at least consider her important enough to tease. I honestly don’t think it’s that serious.”

“It’s serious if someone gets hurt,” Julia said angrily.

John shrugged and said, “Yeah, but she didn’t get hurt bad. Mark my words — at school on Monday, I’ll bet the kids treat her a little better, and before long, she’ll be in with them.”

Julia snorted and shook her head. “Yeah — or by Monday they’ll have thought of some other way to tease her ... some other little practical joke, and if it’s anything like this last one — who’s to say they won’t stop until they put her in the hospital?”

“I think you’re overreacting,” John said mildly.

He reached over and turned off the light, plunging the room into darkness. John fluffed his pillow and, with a deep sigh, sank his head down into it.

For several minutes, Julia didn’t move. Still sitting cross-legged on the bed, she listened to her husband’s steady breathing, her eyes focused on the distant darkness out toward the horizon. She was mulling over everything that had happened, everything they had said, but she couldn’t bring herself around to John’s point of view. What those kids had done to Bri was downright mean-spirited. A prank’s a prank, but at least in this instance — because it’s my daughter — they went too damned far. If there were any way to find out who had been out there tonight, she definitely would make a few phone calls in the morning. First off, there was this Audrey Church girl.

“What do you think she meant by that?” Julia said suddenly.

John had already drifted back to sleep, but he rolled over and groggily muttered, “Huh — what?”

“That girl … She told Bri to tell you she had seen Abby. What do you think that’s all about?”

Even in the dark, she could tell John was fully awake now. His body tensed as he heaved a sigh and shifted in the bed. When he spoke, his voice had a deep tremor.

“I have no idea. I mean … obviously it’s someone’s idea of a sick joke. Who knows? Someone who knows it — maybe someone who’s opposed to the condo development might have put this girl up to it, trying to spook me.”

“Do you think she meant your Abby?”

“What do you — Who’s my Abby?”

“Your high school sweetheart.”

“How the Christ should I know?” John snapped. His fist hit the mattress with a soft thump. “For Christ’s sake … this was a bunch of kids pulling some stupid Halloween prank. That’s all.”

“Then why mention Abby?”

Julia shifted around and lay down on the bed, not bothering to get under the covers. Her head turned toward the black rectangle of the window, she knew she wasn’t going to fall back to sleep.

For a long time, they lay in silence in the dark room. Julia could tell by John’s breathing that he wasn’t asleep, His breath rasped gently in and out … in and out. Julia wanted to keep talking. She wanted to question him further, but their night’s sleep had already been ruined, so she lay there staring at the window, not saying what was on her mind.

IV

After tucking back into bed, Bri listened to the low-level buzz of her parents’ voices as they talked in their bedroom. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she had a good idea what they were discussing, and she was grateful that their talking masked the other sound … the low, piping of organ music that she might otherwise hear if the house were perfectly still.

Sometime around dawn, she drifted into a thin sleep, but like a swimmer doing surface dives, she kept popping up to the surface to take a gulp of air before going back down. Her dreams shifted kaleidoscopically through her overworked brain, distorted replays of the night’s events.

A face loomed out of the darkness at her, and in her dreams now it became twisted and rotted, with loose flaps of decaying skin hanging down in shredded chunks. Pointed, dirt-caked teeth grinned at her as the mouth opened in wild, soundless laughter. The figure standing down by the road became a thin, wafting, transparent shape that drifted on the wind. Thin, pale arms swayed like strands of kelp, tossing gently in the push and pull of the tide.

Audrey’s upturned face floated up the side of the house and stopped at Bri’s upstairs window. Her cold, vacant stare was unblinking. Her eyes, as black as inkwells, drilled into Bri’s heart like icy spikes.

Several times, Bri awoke with a start and found herself sitting up in bed, her face bathed with sweat, her eyes fastened on the rectangle of her window. She would have screamed if she had seen even a hint of a shadow there … and even when she was sure there was nothing in the window — no face staring in at her — her conviction that someone was outside, hanging from the sill below the window ledge … just out of sight — became so strong she wanted to scream and not stop. The only sound she could make was a soft whimper as she snuggled back under the covers where she was safe.

With dawn brightening the sky, she finally slipped into a deeper sleep and stayed asleep until well after ten o’clock when her mother finally called to her.

PART TWO

Lachesis — the Assigning Fate

I dreamed last night a deathly dream. Perhaps

The morning will dispel it if I speak it...

— Euripides

Terrors compelled me,
to terrors I was driven.

I know it. I know my own spirit.

— Sophocles

NINE

Wharf Rats

I

It was the first day of November, and the weather changed overnight. Monday morning dawned cold, windy, and raw, with rafts of clouds spreading like steel gray fingers over the island. The early morning sun, looking like a low-wattage light bulb, shifted in and out of the clouds like a teasing dancer.

At first John thought the nausea in his stomach when he first got out of bed was simply a case of the morning blahs; but even after breakfast — which he barely touched — he didn’t feel any better. Worse, in fact, and during the drive in to Portland, the twisting in his stomach intensified.

After he had parked the car and walked up to the Atkins office, the backs of his knees were feeling like sponges. He went straight to his office, bypassing the crowd gathered around the coffeepot in the conference room. A few minutes later, Barry poked his head into the room, a steaming Styrofoam cup in each hand.

“I brought you a cup,” he said, his smile wide and pleasant. John simply nodded as he slouched in his chair, barely able to focus on Barry’s face.

“Are you getting serious about your work, or’s something bothering you?” Barry asked as he sidled into the room.

John shifted forward in his chair and, supporting his head with both hands, propped both elbows on the desk. Looking at Barry, he forced a smile and grunted. The mere thought of taking a sip of coffee sent his stomach into a whirlpool.

“I’m — ah, not feeling so well,” he said.

Barry chuckled, apparently not realizing how bad John felt. He put the coffee cup on the desk next to John and said, “Well, what with working on Saturdays and making the rest of us look like slouches, it’s no surprise you feel like shit on Monday.” He glanced out the office window at the gun-barrel sky. “‘Specially on a crappy Monday morning like this.”

“I don’t mean to —” That was as far as John got because his stomach suddenly felt like someone had connected with a solid jab in the gut. Spinning around quickly in his chair, he grabbed the wastebasket beside the desk and ducked his head into it. With three loud heaves, what little he had for breakfast splattered into the metal can like rain on a tin roof. Barry took an involuntary step back, his eyes wide with surprise.

“Jesus, man,” he said, watching dumbfounded as John continued to retch into the bucket. “If you’re feeling that bad, maybe you should’a called in and stayed home?”

John looked up at him with glazed eyes.

“I didn’t know I was —”

That was all he said before another series of dry heaves clenched his body.

“Lemme get you some water,” Barry said, and he hurried from the room, returning moments later with a cup of water and a handful of paper towels. He handed them to John and then stepped back, wrinkling his nose from the ripe smell of vomit.

John nodded his thanks and took a quick sip of water, but that only gave his stomach something else to heave out. After wiping his mouth with a paper towel, he was back with his head in the wastebasket.

“I, ah, think you’d better head on home,” Barry said once this wave was over.

John nodded agreement, but when he stood up, he didn’t think his legs would carry him down the hall to the elevator, much less out to the parking lot. If he had been feeling better, he might have found it funny how the room appeared to be expanding and contracting with each breath. He felt oddly dissociated from his hand as he reached out for his coat, and it took an incredible effort to put it on. Screw buttoning it up.

“Don’t worry ‘bout the wastebasket. I’ll take care of it,” Barry said, stepping to one side so John could walk out into the hallway.

Placing his hand on Barry’s shoulder, John forced out the word “Thanks,” and then made his way slowly toward the elevator.

The drive home was hallucinatory. It reminded John of the times at college when he had used LSD. The worst aspect was the time dilation. It seemed to take hours to get out of town and across Tukey’s Bridge. The construction on I-295 didn’t help, but even after he was on Route One, he had the distinct impression the road was a greased upward incline, and he was getting nowhere. To keep from falling asleep, he rolled the side window down and let the cold air wash over him. He shivered so hard his teeth chattered, but it was better than falling asleep at the wheel.

By the time he took the turnoff onto Foreside Road, the world looked and sounded like it was submerged in water. Crossing the bridge onto Glooscap, he was still shivered with fever chills, so he rolled the window up and clamped his coat collar tightly around his neck. That didn’t do much good. By the time he slowed for the turn into the driveway, bright yellow spots were zigzagging like meteors across his vision.

He stopped the car halfway up the driveway, not caring that he left it at an angle that blocked the garage door. All he cared about was getting into the house and upstairs to bed. The only positive thought was that, since this bug had hit him so hard and fast, maybe it would leave as quickly.

“I’m home,” he called out as he shouldered open the door and lurched into the kitchen. His voice barely carried above a whisper, but he could tell from the dense silence of the house that both Julia and Frank were out. Bri had left for school when he left for work, so that left the whole house to himself and his misery.

The churning in his stomach was slightly better, but he needed something to help settle it. He opened the refrigerator, grabbed the half-liter bottle of ginger ale, twisted off the cap, and drank down several swallows. With a rumbling belch that almost brought everything back up, he went over to the counter, fumbling for a pen to leave Julia a note, telling her that he was upstairs in bed and didn’t want to be disturbed.

He found a pencil and notepad, but when he walked over to the kitchen table and sat down, he noticed a sheet of paper lying squarely in the center of the table.

“What the — ?” he muttered, picking it up and looking at it. The sheet had been torn from a notebook; all three ring holes were ripped. At the top of the sheet, a single letter — or was it a number? — was scrawled in heavy pencil.

I

Dizzy with fever, John scowled at the page, trying to figure out what it was. Obviously it had come from Bri’s notebook. She had probably started to write something and then changed her mind. Most likely, in the flurry of activity to catch the school bus, she had forgotten to throw it away.

With a quick flexing of his fingers, John crumpled the paper into a tight ball, twisted around in his chair, and tossed it at the wastebasket. It hit the rim and bounced onto the floor beside the refrigerator. Rather than getting up and putting it into the wastebasket, John stood up, shaking with chills, and made his way up the stairs. The joints in his arms and legs burned like hot wires as he peeled off his shirt and pants and slid under the covers. Within seconds, he was flirting with sleep, and throughout the rest of the morning, his awareness skimmed like a seabird over the surface of sleep.

As his fever raged, vague dreams and images twisted through his mind. Several times, he became convinced there was someone in the room, standing at the head of the bed....

How can that be, he wondered groggily, when the bed is up against the wall?

But that was the feeling he had as he wrestled with sleep.

Maybe it was Julia, back from wherever she had gone. But if it had been her, she no doubt would have talked to him, asked him how he was, maybe gotten him some more ginger ale.

He remembered leaving the bottle of ginger ale on the kitchen table, and like someone lost in the desert who sees a distant oasis, he wanted nothing more than to get that bottle of ginger ale and gulp it down. But he didn’t have half the strength he needed to get downstairs, and even if he did, he knew he couldn’t make it back upstairs to bed. At one point, he dreamed he did get down to the kitchen, but when he grabbed the bottle and tilted his head back to drink, his mouth was suddenly filled by a flood of soft-bodied, gray things — maggots! He woke up, sputtering and spitting, but — surprisingly — didn’t throw up again.

Over the course of the morning, the clouds had shifted and sunlight now filtered into the room. In his brief moments of clear consciousness, John watched motes of dust, brightly illuminated, spinning like planets and then winking out as they drifted into shadow. The shadows themselves — cold and blue — seemed to shimmer and sway, at times creating the watery illusion that the bedroom furniture was moving, shifting soundlessly across the floor.

The worst part of it was the sense he had that someone was hovering around the bed as he lay there tossing and turning. The image he had seen — When? he wondered — rose in his mind with shocking clarity.

A slouching gray shape dangled from the ceiling, frayed rope digging deeply into the flesh of the neck. The head was snapped to one side because of the broken neck. The face, gray and bloated, was turned away from him, but in his mind he saw the face turning... slowly turning... to look at him. The eyes, cold and lifeless, were slowly opening.

The image rose in his mind and fell away like the surge of the tides. Every now and again, John would hear what might have been a soft, indistinct voice whispering close to his ear... so close, in fact, that he could almost imagine the cold, dead breath washing over the side of his face like ice water. He couldn’t understand the words, and whenever he turned his head to see who was there, the voice would shift to the other side, still hissing and whispering weakly like a radio signal struggling to increase its gain.

Sometime in the early afternoon — he knew it was afternoon because, in a moment of clarity, he saw that there were no longer shadows cast across the sill of the east-facing bedroom window — he imagined a hand reaching out from behind the bed and gently brushing the sides of his neck. Icy darts shot up to the base of his skull when the cold fingers gently stroked his throat under his jaw. The touch — like the whispering voice at his ear — was faint, as though, as much as those hands might want to grab him, they didn’t have enough substance or strength … not yet, anyway.

Throughout the afternoon, the voice whispering to him from the head of the bed seemed to gain in strength, so he could actually make out a few of the words. Lying there with his eyes closed, John tried to focus his awareness, imagining it as a beam of laser light cutting through the darkness, but no amount of concentration would bring the voice in any clearer.

“ … didn’t … fault … haven’t … yours …” the voice hissed, wavering up and down the scale.

Moaning and tossing his head in the fever-hot well of his pillow, John tried to reply, thinking that whoever was trying to speak to him had an important message for him.

... you... realize... fault...

John’s muttered responses were no more coherent than the babble of words he was hearing. He blurted out fragments of thoughts, none of which, in his more lucid moments, made any sense even to him.

Sometime in the afternoon, Julia came upstairs — yes …It was really her — and asked if he needed anything. Grateful at last to actually see someone, and not feel like there was an unseen person in the room whose hands were reaching out for him from the wall behind him, he shook his head and rasped a single word, “No.”

‘‘I’ll check in on you in a bit, then,” Julia said, edging toward the door.

John stirred, opened his eyes, and as best he could, because of the swirl of images and memories in his brain, tried to tell her what he had been imagining. In broken phrases, he communicated fragments of the hallucination to her, and she listened patiently until he settled back down into bed.

“The fever’s doing this to you,” Julia said mildly. She carne back over to the bed and, sitting on the edge, gently rubbed John’s forehead. His skin was like a smoldering coal under her fingers. His hair was matted down in a ring of sweat. He seemed to pull away from her touch, though, so she stood back up and, easing the door shut behind her, left him there.

During his next waking moment, John figured she must have come back into the room after he had fallen asleep, because — after another particularly frightful dream, in which he began to feel pressure being applied to his throat, like a noose slipping tighter — he awoke with a start and, seeing the glass of ginger ale, grabbed it and gulped it down greedily. Within a minute, he was kneeling on the bedroom floor with his face over the wastebasket; coughing and sputtering as his stomach spewed it all back out.

Julia came rushing into the room and, after helping him back into bed, handed him a cold washcloth for his face. But the chilly cloth on his forehead only reminded him of those hands he had imagined reaching out, feebly trying to touch him, trying to choke him. Once she was gone, he let the washcloth drop to the floor and sank: back into a thin, disturbed sleep that would last long into the evening.

II

Earlier that day, after Bri and John had left and after Mrs. Bartlett had visited with Frank and gone, Julia asked Frank if there was something special she could do for him. She was still feeling guilty about their argument about churchgoing, and she wanted, once and for all, to make it up to him.

Frank didn’t answer right away, but she was beginning to understand that it was his way to silently consider things before answering. It may have seemed typically Yankee, but it also suited Frank’s personality perfectly. After a few minutes, though, he nodded his head and said, “Yeah, I spose there’s somethin’ you could do for me.”

“What’s that?” Julia asked after a short pause, trying the unhurried Yankee style on for size.

“I was thinkin’ how it’s been awhile since I went down to the wharf. See who might be around. ‘s probably deserted, but we could give it a shot.”

Unlike just about everyone else on the island, Frank had never lobstered for a living; he had worked for years at the CMP power plant on Cousins Island, and had retired seven years ago. But almost all of his friends around town were lobstermen, and on days off, he usually visited them down on the docks for a bit of drinking and card playing after their day’s work was done.

Julia readily agreed, so around ten o’clock she rolled Frank out to his car, helped him into the front seat, then collapsed his wheelchair and put it into the backseat.

“You’ll have to tell me where to go,” she said as she started up the car and backed out onto Oak Street.

Frank nodded and made a slight motion to his right as she drove to the stop sign at the intersection of Shore Drive. After the right turn, a short distance past Pottle’s, he nodded to the left, and she turned down onto a road marked Wharf Road.

“Might wanna slow down for this,” Frank said, but his words were a second too late. When the asphalt abruptly ended, the car bottomed out on the potholed dirt road. The incline down to the water was quite steep, and with the shimmering gray water straight ahead, Julia felt a momentary panic, thinking, What if the brakes let go? She could imagine the car gaining speed as it bounced over the swath of grass and then shot out into the cove.

But the brakes didn’t let go.

The car squeaked to a stop at the bottom of the hill. The dirt road branched left and right, and Julia sat waiting for more directions. For a moment, Frank sat there, too, wondering why she wasn’t moving.

“Oh — take a left, I spose,” he said. “Might’s well see if Frenchie’s round.” Julia obliged with a left turn.

Driving past the fishing shacks, Julia was struck by the thought that, as postcard pretty as they might look from the ocean, the close-up reality of these ramshackle buildings reminded her more of third world poverty in the Caribbean. On both sides of the dirt road were the tiniest and — if they had been painted and refinished — the cutest little buildings. But she could see that those that did have doors usually had slats of cardboard filling most of the windows. The single windows looking out onto the road were likewise mostly all broken; the holes filled either with newspaper, cardboard, or moldering cloth.

Everywhere the ground was littered with empty beer cans, whiskey bottles, crushed cigarette packs, assorted food wrappers, empty fuel drums, piles of gray-weathered lobster pots, tangled ropes, and stacks of brightly painted buoys. Weeds, now dead and brown, choked the narrow alleys between the shacks, which were backed by a long wall of thick granite blocks. Other than the buoys and the boats riding at anchor in the harbor, there wasn’t a single thing in sight with a fresh coat of paint.

“It’s —” Julia started to say, but then thought better of it. She had been about to say, “It’s depressing,” but she instantly thought, who was she to judge? It wasn’t as though the lobstermen couldn’t afford to keep up appearances; they simply weren’t into them. Let the outta-staters think what they want and be damned seemed to be the attitude.

“Don’t see no one,” Frank said, squinting as he scanned each side of the road, peering into the darkened doorways as best he could as Julia drove by. “Why don’t you park over there by the boat yard?” He pointed to a wide open area off to the left. Up the rise of the hill, Julia could see what must have been the back side of Pottle’s store.

“I won’t get towed or anything, will I?” Julia asked as she slid the car into Park and clicked off the ignition.

Frank snorted with laughter and said, “I got a feelin’ they’ll recognize my car even though it’s been in the barn ever since —” To finish, he slapped his useless leg with the flat of his hand.

“Oh, I’ve been using it some,” Julia said as she got out and went around to the passenger’s door. After taking the wheelchair from the backseat and unfolding it, she set the· wheel lock and helped Frank swing up off the car seat and into the chair. He shifted his hips from side to side, getting comfortable.

In the shelter of the harbor, the air was much warmer than up at the house. She tipped her head back, and, closing her eyes for a moment, inhaled deeply. The mingled scents of ocean-fresh air and rotting bait, tinged with wet rope had a rawness that, while unpleasant at first, actually was rather invigorating. Julia was filled with a sense that this was where honest; hardworking men spent their days from before sunrise until after dark. In spite of how many times she had heard John bitch about the narrowness and the grubbiness of the world down by the harbor, Julia almost envied the salt-of-the-earth feeling the place had.

“Where to?” she asked, taking hold of the handle grips. As she was leaning forward to release the wheel lock, the sharp report of a gun shattered the air. It was followed an instant later by the whine of a bullet ricocheting off a rock. Three more shots cracked off in quick succession. Julia crouched down, her panic-stricken face level with Frank’s.

Frank was smiling, watching her. Then, shaking his head, he said simply, “Yup. Sure sounds like Frenchie’s around.”

“What’s going on?” Julia asked, her eyes darting from side to side, trying to locate the source of the shots.

Frank pointed off to the left, down by the water, where a man wearing a nearly shapeless red felt hat and dingy tan coat was sitting on the edge of the wharf. He had a rifle cradled in his lap and was leaning forward, studying the tumbled granite blocks of the wharf that jutted out into the cove. Sunlight made the water sparkle farther out, but the man was peering into the shadows in close where the water rippled like ink.

Before Frank could respond to Julia’s question, Frenchie brought the rifle up to his shoulder and the sharp report cut the air three more times. Each bullet whined like an angry bee as it bounced off the rocks.

“Yo, Frenchie,” Frank hollered, raising his hand up to cup his mouth. His voice didn’t carry well, and it took several more shouts to get the man’s attention.

Finally Frenchie turned, but he didn’t rise from his perch. He signaled instead with a wave of his hand — which clenched the neck of a wine bottle — for Frank and Julia to join him.

“Down around to the right there’s a bit of road,” Frank said, so Julia released the brake and pushed in that direction. The rutted dirt road, though, wasn’t much good; the wheelchair bounced and wobbled viciously. A few times, Julia was afraid she was going to tip Frank out onto the ground, but eventually she made it to the wharf edge, and once she struggled the chair up onto the relatively smooth rock surface, pushing Frank was a bit easier. She didn’t wonder very long why Frenchie didn’t come to help; as soon as they got close to him, it was obvious he was three, maybe four sheets to the wind.

“Fine mornin’, ain’t it?” Frenchie said.

His face was a dense network of deep lines crisscrossing skin that looked more like leather than flesh. His hat shaded his eyes, but from underneath the uneven brim, Julia could see his eyes sparkling like chips of amber. His jowls were covered by white stubble. His smile, when Frank introduced Julia to him, exposed a row of rotted and browned teeth.

“Pleasure to meetcha,” Frenchie said.

“Nice to meet you, too, Frenchie,” Julia said as she shook hands with him. His grip was dry and hard from a lifetime of pulling on lobster trap lines. It wasn’t until she bent over to fasten the wheelchair brake that she saw the real reason Frenchie hadn’t helped her get Frank’s chair onto the wharf. His left leg had been amputated above the knee. The loose flap of pant’s leg was folded up and pinned shut.

“Frank told me ‘bout you and John movin’ in with him,” Frenchie said. “He didn’t tell me you were so pretty.”

Slightly flustered, Julia looked down at the ground. Everywhere the rocks were splattered with sea gull shit and litter. She had been wanting to sit down but decided against it.

“So how’s the huntin’ been today?” Frank asked.

“Had betta,” Frenchie said, shrugging his shoulders and tipping the wine bottle to his lips. Old Duke sloshed back and bubbled as he took several gulps. Then, with a satisfied smack of his lips, he handed the bottle to Frank, who took a slug without pause. After Frank had his first swallow, he offered the bottle to Julia, but she shook her head and mumbled a quick “No, thanks.”

“I tell yah, as the years go along, them sums-a-whores are gettin’ smarter. I swear they are,” Frenchie said, squinting as he turned his attention back to the shadows under the stone blocks.

Julia strained her eyes, trying to see anything other than the sea-weed-collared rocks and inky water. Frenchie, though, obviously saw something because he snapped the rifle to his shoulder and popped off two quick shots.

“Damn,” he snarled, shaking a clenched fist in front of his face. “Missed ‘em.”

Frank looked around at Julia and, reading her confusion, said, “Yah see, ever since Frenchie lost his leg, back in — what was it? ‘Seventy-nine?”

Frenchie nodded but didn’t take his eyes off the wharf.

“Yeah — ‘seventy-nine. He’s took it upon himself to rid the dock of wharf rats.”

Julia raised one eyebrow, silently questioning if anyone other than Frenchie could see these rats.

“Used ta think I could do it, too,” Frenchie said as he took the wine bottle from Frank and drank deeply. “Thought for a while I was makin’ progress, but them sums-a-whores breed like rats,” he finished, ending with a chuckle at his own dumb joke. “They come up from the wharf, too, ‘n get into people’s houses.”

“Yah see,” Frank went on. “The accident that resulted in Frenchie losin’ his leg all came about ‘cause a rope he was dependin’ on let go, and Frenchie claimed —”

“Didn’t claim,” Frenchie snapped. “Know.” The knuckles of his hand holding the wine bottle turned white.

“Yeah, well — Frenchie knows the rope let go ‘cause some rats been gnawing on it and weakened it. Ever since then he’s been campaignin’ against the rats. Says he’s gonna be like the Pied Piper, and get rid of all the rats on Glooscap.”

“Damn well gonna try, anyway,” Frenchie said. He suddenly clamped the bottle between his thighs, aimed, and shot again. The bullet whistled in the air as it ricocheted and then went plink into the water.

“Course, that gets to be a real problem when you consider pretty near every boat that ties up here can be crawling with rats in the hold,” Frank said. “Not to mention they can swim across the bay even if they don’t bother to use the bridge.”

Frenchie looked at Frank and shook his head sadly.

“You’re bein’ too depressing on such a nice day. You know that?”

“Just fillin’ Julia in a bit, is all,” Frank said sullenly.

Julia could hear in his tone of voice the unspoken thought. So, here we sit … Two useless old farts … Might as well be drunk.

“I honestly don’t see anything out there,” Julia said, craning her neck as she tried to pierce the shadows of the wharf.

“Surprised you can’t,” Frenchie said, “Some of ‘em get pretty damned big.”

“As big as poodles?” Julia asked, remembering what Frank had told Bri after she had heard thumping sounds in her bedroom wall at night. She suspected she was being strung along with a variation on the old fish story.

“Sure,” Frenchie said. “Reckon some of ‘em — ‘specially the smart ones like that one I just missed — might live long enough to get that big. They can get pretty mean ‘n’ nasty, too. I seen one of ‘um attack a German shepherd and do a pretty good job on him before the dog called it quits.”

Julia looked at Frank to see if his expression would reveal that she was being put on, but as far as she could tell he didn’t let on that she was. She was worried that the family might be in danger from vicious rats living in their house.

“There,” Frenchie said, pointing to a spot above the waterline. “See ‘um?”

The water was lapping gently at the base of the wharf, and the unevenly cut rocks created a maze of shadowed cracks and spaces as jumbled as the lines of Frenchie’s face. The darkness under the rocks was so dense it seemed to vibrate in contrast with the water, but after staring where Frenchie was pointing, she did see … something — a vague shifting. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw, perched on the edge of a rock, shaded by an overhang, the biggest rat Julia had ever seen in her life. His plump bulk actually looked as big as … well, a small poodle.

Julia watched the motionless animal for several seconds and was thinking she was imagining it when the sharp report of Frenchie’s rifle made her jump. Beneath the loud gunshot, she heard a little squeak, and then the dark bulk flipped off the rock and landed with a big splash in the water.

“Damn straight. Got ‘um,” Frenchie said before taking a swallow of wine. “One less of them sums-a-whores.”

“Couldn’t you get arrested for doing this?” Julia asked. Her eyes were still focused on the spreading ripples where the rat had sunk beneath the water. The only response from both Frank and Frenchie was snorting laughter.

Now that he had scored, Frenchie was apparently feeling a little more sociable. He put down his rifle, turned on the rock to face Frank and Julia, and withdrew a new bottle of Old Duke from his coat pocket. Twisting the cap off, he offered the first sip to Julia.

Thinking what the hell, Julia held the bottle up and toasted Frenchie.

“To one less son-of-a-whore rat,” she said, smiling as she took a gurgling swallow then handed the bottle to Frank.

Frenchie motioned for her to have a seat on the rock beside him, so she sat down, and for the rest of the morning, the three of them sat there, talking about anything and everything that came up as they watched the lobster boats and sailboats entering and leaving the harbor. The lulling sounds of gulls crying as they circled overhead was shattered only when Frenchie shouldered his rifle and cracked off some more shots at the “sums-a-whore” rats.

Around noon, Julia walked up to Pottle’s and bought them each a submarine sandwich — an “Eye-talian,” as Frenchie called them — some chips, soda for her, beer for Frank, and another bottle of Old Duke for Frenchie. Julia ended up tossing half of her sandwich to the gulls that swooped in as soon as they started eating.

While they were eating, two men — obviously brothers and possibly twins — joined them. Frank introduced Julia to Herb and Mark Winslow, who stood around, adding their two cents to everything that was said until, around one o’clock, they drifted off, saying there was a poker game in one of the fishing shacks. Frenchie declined, saying the hunting was “too damned good to give up.”

When Julia noticed that it was after two o’clock, she reminded Frank that Bri would be home from school soon, so they should get back to the house. Saying good-bye to Frenchie, who looked as though he planned on sleeping right where he was, she rolled Frank back up to the car, helped him get in, then loaded his wheelchair into the backseat. The last thing she heard as she drove up the steep dirt road was the sharp report of Frenchie’s rifle.

“I can honestly say I enjoyed myself,” she said as the car labored up the incline to Shore Drive.

Frank sat with his hands folded in his lap, his face clouded by a deep scowl. His wrinkled eyebrows reminded Julia of the thick, shadowed rock ledges that made up the stone wharf. She put on her turn signal for the right turn onto Shore Drive.

“I can see why you enjoy going down there,” she went on. “That Frenchie is quite the character.”

“Oh, yeah,” Frank snorted and shook his head. “All of us are up to our ears with local color.”

“What he said about those rats bothers me, though,” Julia said.

“How so?” Frank said sharply.

“Do they — the rats, I mean, really come up from the docks and get into people’s houses?”

“I told yah. If you hear any scrambling noises inside the walls, it’s rats.” His eyes suddenly rolled upward, staring blankly at the car ceiling. “Unless it’s — who the hell is that?”

“Who?” Julia asked, looking around, wondering who he might have seen.

“Huh?” Frank said.

He turned to her, and his eyes suddenly snapped back into focus. After a long silence, Julia said, “You were telling me about the rats. Are they really that dangerous? They carry diseases, and if one got into the house … what if one of us gets bitten or something?”

“T’ain’t never been a problem before,” Frank said, scowling.

“Don’t see why you should make it one now.”

Julia wanted to say more, but by the time she turned onto Oak Street, a cloud had fully descended on Frank, and she knew anything else she might say would only prompt a snappy reply from him. It didn’t take much for her to understand what was bothering him, either, even though she knew she couldn’t talk to him about it directly, at least not yet. Being confined to a wheelchair was getting to him. Seeing Frenchie only reminded him that he and his buddies were getting old and dying off. She felt helplessness and wished there was something she could say or do, but there was nothing.

“I wonder why John’s home so early,” she said when she saw his car parked at an odd angle in the driveway. She had to park down by the road because she couldn’t get her car around John’s without driving onto the grass.

Frank shrugged as if he didn’t know or care.

And on top of everything else, Julia thought, that — the way he and John interact — only makes matters worse.

“Probably forgot something and had to dash home to get it,” she said more to herself than to Frank. She was still wondering how she could break through and connect with Frank. While she was getting his chair out of the backseat, she remembered the Serenity Prayer her grandmother had recited to her long ago: “God, grant me the courage to change what can be changed, accept what cannot be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Maybe, she thought, that’s why Frank’s so involved with church … He’s working on accepting what’s happened to him … what can’t be changed.

But that thought only made her feel all the more guilty for the argument they’d had over the weekend.

“I hope you didn’t mind my tagging along today,” she said as she opened the car door and helped him swing out into the wheelchair.

“Not a bit,” he said, his mouth close to her ear as she did her best to lift him. It was a struggle, but she got him settled into the chair and started pushing him up the walkway.

Julia was convinced that he didn’t mean what he had said. She sensed that he tolerated her only because she had asked to come along in the first place. She was convinced he never would have asked her on his own.

She wanted to say something, to reach out and communicate with him so badly it pained her, but he was so defensive most of the time. In those few moments — like this morning — when he let his guard down, she found him to be genuinely enjoyable, but those moments were fleeting. As she wheeled him up to the kitchen door, she vowed that, while she wouldn’t be pushy about it, she was definitely going to keep trying.

A few minutes later, she found John upstairs in bed, tossing and turning with a fever.

TEN

High School Memories

I

Although the rain let up on Thursday, by Friday afternoon another storm roared into the area, bringing chilly winds and a pelting, cold rain that changed to sleet in the evening. Over John’s halfhearted protestations that after four days home sick he still didn’t feel totally better, Julia had accepted Ellie Chadwick’s invitation to their house for supper. Bri had also been invited, but she excused herself, saying she didn’t want to go out on such a miserable night. She convinced her parents to let her stay home with Frank. When they left, she stood in the kitchen doorway and waved goodbye.

Once her parents had driven off, Bri joined Frank in the living room where they settled down for a few games of checkers. Bri won two of the first three games rather handily, and she began to suspect that her grandfather was letting her win. Halfway into the fourth game, she decided to make a stupid move, just to see what he would do.

“You really wanna do that?” he asked, scratching his beard-stubbled chin. The sound was like sandpaper scraping on wood.

Bri pretended to examine the board and then nodded. He saw the opening and took the jump.

“Oww, man. I didn’t see that,” she said, leaning back in her chair and slapping her forehead with the flat of her hand. “That’ll teach me. “

Frank smiled as he removed her two captured pieces. “You ain’t got your mind on the game’s all. What yah thinkin’ ‘bout?”

“Nothing,” Bri said. Now that she had blown a move, she looked at the game with renewed intensity.

“One thing on your mind is you’re probably thinkin’ there are better things to do than sit ‘round here, playin’ checkers with an old fart.”

Bri had her head down, but now she chuckled as she tried to figure out what he was getting at. When she looked up, he was smiling at her, but a trace of sadness or concern lit his eyes.

“No,” she said. “I’m having fun.”

“Oh, sure,” Frank said.

He pushed himself away from the table and rolled over to the refrigerator. Opening the door, he reached in and grabbed two cans of beer.

“You wanna have a beer with me?’ he asked, holding up the two cans.

Bri shook her head.

“No, thanks. Maybe I’ll get a soda after this move.”

She had never liked the taste of beer whenever her father had let her try a sip. Besides, she was concentrating on the board, trying to find some way out of the hole she had stupidly dug for herself.

“Oh, yeah — that’s right. You kids are into smokin’ pot, right?”

Bri wrinkled her nose as she looked up at him.

“Come on, Grandpa. Not every teenager has a drinking or drug problem.”

Frank popped the top of his Pabst and then rolled back to the table.

“That ain’t what I read in Reader’s Digest,” he said. His face was completely deadpan, and Bri couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

Maybe he’s trying to distract me from the game.

Finally, she saw a good move and slid her piece on the board. Satisfied, she sat back, waiting for Frank to make his move.

“You know,” Frank said after taking a sip, ‘‘I’ve been noticing you go for a lot for walks down to the beach.”

Bri stiffened and thought, Yeah, sure. I’d rather be spending a rainy night like this with some friends …even Audrey.

“I like the beach,” she said simply, her voice taking on a defensive whine. A ripple of impatience ran though her.

“Oh, it’s nice, all right,” he said. “Where do you go?”

This was beginning to feel like the Grand Inquisition, but Bri didn’t want to be mean and tell him to mind his own business.

“I walk around — mostly on Sandy Beach and out on Indian Point.”

“You’ve gotta be careful out there,” Frank said. “Them rocks can get pretty slippery when the tide’s out.”

“I know. I’ve taken a few little slips.”

“‘Specially after a storm like this,” Frank said, nodding toward the rain-beaten window. Bri followed his glance. “It’ll probably be a nice day tomorrow, but you know that storm’s still settin’ off the coast. Them waves’ll be high — ‘specially on the headlands. Every now and then, a big one’ll come up, and if you’re too close to the edge — whoosh. You’re in.”

Bri wondered if what he was saying was true, or if he was saying this to scare her for whatever reason to keep her away from the point.

“I had a friend — fella named Robbie Peterson. Smart fella. Grew up here on the island. Knew all about the moods of the ocean. He went out fishing off the point one day after a hurricane, and a wave swept him out to sea.”

“Did he drown?”

“Darn tootin’ he drowned. There’s a wicked undertow off them rocks, so if you go out there — ‘specially after a storm — you stay clear of the waves, okay?”

“Don’t worry,” Bri said, nodding her head. “I will. Are you going to take your turn or just rattle your dentures all night?”

Frank sat back, surprised and secretly pleased at her use of his own pet expression for talking too much. He sipped his beer, then glanced at the board.

“I swear to Christ you ain’t got your mind on this game,” he said as he jumped two of her men and landed on her side of the board.

“King me,” he said with a laugh.

“King yourself,” she snapped.

She tossed him one of his captured pieces and glared at him with mock anger. Then they both burst out laughing, long and hard, when — accidentally on purpose, as he said afterward — Frank’s elbow knocked the board and jiggled the pieces around, ending the game.

“I win by default,” Bri cried out, standing up and shaking her clenched fists over her head. “I’m gonna get a Pepsi to celebrate, and you’re going down four out of five.”

II

The supper Ellie served was surprisingly elaborate — a dish she called “Greek-oregano chicken,” along with fresh green beans, salad, and home-baked bread and real butter — something Julia didn’t allow in their house because of the ever-increasing spare tire around John’s middle. By the time Ellie brought out dessert — carrot cake with whipped cream — the conversation had fewer awkward silences than at the beginning of the meal. Ellie and Julia found they had a lot in common, while Randy and Frank mostly reminisced about high school.

After dessert, with coffee in hand, they went into the living room and settled down. Their conversation remained on a fairly superficial level as the two couples took each other’s measure. For Randy and John, it was a slow discovery of who the friend from high school had become over the past twenty years.

John was surprised most by Ellie. It was stunning how much she had changed over the years. In high school, she had been a petite, rather plain, but certainly not unattractive girl, but having two children had aged her significantly. Dark circles lined her eyes, and her hair, which he had remembered had been full-bodied and a shimmering brown, was now limp and lifeless with strands of gray showing. She was still small and had an attractive figure, but she looked frail and drained of life, much older than her years. This confirmed his conviction that living on Glooscap wore people out before their time.

Even Randy looked much older than John thought he himself looked. His hairline was receding, and his stomach swelled out and hung over his belt buckle. He looked strong, especially his hands and forearms, but John couldn’t reconcile this man with the thin, wire-framed boy who had been the baseball team’s star pitcher and one of the school’s top scholar. Randy hadn’t bothered with college, choosing instead to do what his father had done for a living — haul lobster traps. Working outside every day, winter and summer, had aged him.

It’s living on this island that’ll drain the life out of you, John thought bitterly.

When Randy hauled out a CD of Summer Days and Summer Nights, an old Beach Boys album, the conversation headed further down memory lane. John was feeling increasingly uncomfortable, and he lit a cigarette and tried to stir the topic around the past.

“So — uh, what do you folks think about Freedom Corporation’s condo project?” he asked. “I get the feeling it doesn’t have the backing of a lot of folks around here.”

Ellie smiled weakly. “Randy and I both signed the petition against it. At this point, I don’t suppose it’ll do any good.”

John laughed out loud as he looked at Randy and said, “Not now that they’ve broken ground. But … Randy, I never would have taken you for an environmentalist.”

“Randy’s no environmentalist,” Ellie said before Randy had a chance to speak. She pronounced the word with contempt, as if it were something dirty. “It’s just … that condo ain’t the most popular thing on the island right now.”

“I’m beginning to pick that up,” John said” “A couple of times, now, people have been out there protesting, carrying signs like it’s an anti-war rally or something. You must’ve heard about that truck driver and a handful of protestor who slugged it out.” He leaned forward and flicked the lengthening ash of his cigarette into the ashtray, catching Julia’s frown in the corner of his eye.

“You want the truth?” Randy said, leaning toward John. “You ain’t the most popular guy on the island.” He was smiling, but John — having known him so well — caught the subtle intensity in his voice.

“What do you mean?” John asked. He couldn’t help but catch the nervous glance that passed between Randy and Ellie, as if she was trying to tell him to please shut up.

“You’re working for these people — the Freedom Corporation —” Randy said. “I didn’t want to get involved ‘n all, but —” Randy paused as he searched for the right words. “Well … you know how it is. Some of the guys down at the wharf were shooting off about how since you were born and raised here, maybe you should know better.”

“Know better?”

“Uh-huh. Maybe have a little respect for the Glooscap way of life.”

“The ‘Glooscap way of life?’” John echoed, arcing an eyebrow. “I’ve never heard it put quite that way.”

Not so subtly, Ellie tried to get Randy’s attention to get him to change subjects, but he ignored her and went on.

“You haven’t been around for quite a while. Come on, John. You gotta realize how people feel about big developments going in out here. It’s ruining our way of life.”

“Maybe that’s the point,” John said, his anger rising. “Maybe that ‘way of life’ isn’t possible anymore. The world moves on, you know? You can bury your head in the sand, but times change.”

“Hell, I know that,” Randy said. He sat back casually on the couch to signal that he personally did not share the opinion he had expressed. “I’m telling you what I heard … that a couple of people around town are kinda surprised you’d work for bastards like the Freedom Corporation.”

“I work for Atkins — a surveying company,” John said stiffly. “That’s all.”

In the back of his mind, a thought flickered to life. As he looked at Randy, sitting there and smiling so good-naturedly at him, John couldn’t help but wonder if Randy might be more serious than he was letting on. Now that he thought about it, maybe that little prank outside their house on Halloween night had been intended for him, not Bri. Maybe Randy hated what John was doing.

The Beach Boys had been wailing about summer and surfing and girls all the while, and when the CD clicked off, it produced an awkward silence.

John laughed nervously and tossed his hands into the air as though he had just been dealt a terrible poker hand.

“Look, Randy. I had no idea what projects were going on when I took the job with Atkins, all right? I took their offer because we had to move back here to help my old man. No one said anything about a condo site on Glooscap until after I got the job.”

“But you don’t think it’s wrong?” Ellie leaned forward and nailed him with a harsh look.

“All I know is it’s a job,” John said. He shrugged and looked to Julia for support, but she sat there silent. “People have to live somewhere. They want to live on the islands because of the beauty.”

Ellie frowned and shook her head.

“Don’t they realize they’re destroying exactly what they’re moving here to experience? By the time everyone gets here, the beauty won’t be here anymore. It’ll be gone to make room for more condos.”

“I don’t know — I guess that’s the price we have to pay for living in God’s country,” John said, chuckling to lighten things up. Nobody picked up on his sarcasm, so he let it drop.

“Actually,” Julia said, “John was telling me a couple of days ago that he thought he might quit his job and start lobstering. “

Randy’s burst of laughter was sudden and loud. Ellie glared at her husband, but he was laughing so hard, he shook and almost dropped his coffee cup.

“That’ll be the day,” he sputtered. A fleck of spit shot out of his mouth, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I’d want to have a film crew there. The day you go out in a lobster boat is the day I’ll put on a three-piece suit and start selling life insurance.”

“ What is this,” John said, “shit-on-your-buddy night?”

His cigarette had long since burned down to the filter, so he dropped it into the ashtray. He started to reach for another, but he caught Julia’s stare and let his head drop to his side.

“It just … it kills me trying to imagine you on a lobster boat. You wouldn’t know the first thing what to do.” Randy tilted his head back, howling at the ceiling with laughter as he shook his head. “I can’t picture it.”

“You ought to go out some morning with Randy and give it a try,” Julia said. Her eyes were twinkling with merriment as she glanced at Ellie and Randy.

“You should,” Ellie added. “Some Saturday morning, you ought to hop into the old Bait Barrel and go out with Randy. See what it’s really like.”

“Can’t be any worse than building condos, right?” John said.

Tears were rolling down Randy’s face.

“Do you remember what you wrote in my yearbook?” he said, still laughing so hard now he could barely catch his breath.

John shook his head and, deciding to hell with Julia’s discomfort — if they’re going to tease, I’m going to smoke — took a cigarette and matches from his shirt pocket. His hands shook slightly as he struck the match and lit up.

“Nope,” he said, blowing the smoke out through his nose. “Can’t say as I do.”

Without a word, Ellie got up from her chair and went up the stairs. A minute later, she returned and handed her husband a dark blue, imitation leather-covered book. Without reading the title stamped in fake gold on the front, John recognized the 1966 edition of Rocks and Pebbles, their high school yearbook.

“Check it out, my man.” Randy was still shaking with suppressed laughter as flipped the book open and fluttered through the first few pages. When he found what he was looking for, he displayed a page with a photo of a skinny, shorthaired boy staring at the camera with wide-eyed surprise.

“Talk about a deer caught in the headlights,” he said.

“I don’t know,” Julia said after studying the picture. “I think he’s kind of handsome.”

She held out her hand for the book, and when she took it, she thought that it was strange how she didn’t remembered ever seeing John’s graduation picture. Maybe once, when they first met they had leafed through it, but she realized now that she hadn’t come across it while they were packing for the move to Maine.

“Pretty cool-looking dude,” Julia said. “Radical hairstyle.”

She handed the book back to Randy after studying the picture for a moment, trying to see the man in the boy.

“Oh, he was cool, all right,” Randy said. “Just look at that hair.”

Again, his laughter was so loud he snorted as he doubled up.

“Give it a rest, will you?” John said. He glanced briefly at the picture, unable to accept that this was really him. The hair that had seemed so outrageously long back then was, in fact, barely touching the tips of his ears. And his eyes did look like the eyes of a scared animal.

And that’s just what I was, his mind whispered, a scared animal …

He struggled to control his shaking hand as he raised the cigarette to his mouth and inhaled deeply.

“See what he wrote?” Randy said. Clearing his throat, he held the book at arm’s length and read with a stern, professorial tone. “‘To Randy C. Probably the only person who truly knows how much this day means to me. I hope we stay friends in the years to come, but we can’t if you end up smelling like a bait barrel.’ Isn’t that sweet?”

“Actually,” Ellie said, “that’s why Randy named his boat the Bait Barrel … in honor of you.”

“I’m deeply touched,” John said, placing his hand over his heart. “I truly am.” No one reacted to the sarcasm.

“Could I have another look?” Julia asked.

Randy handed her the yearbook, and she silently flipped through the pages while Randy continued to needle John.

“That might not be such a bad idea, though,” Randy said. “Going lobstering, I mean. We could head out early next Saturday morning, and you can see exactly what the job is. I don’t remember a single time you’ve been out on the ocean.”

John squirmed in his chair and repeatedly flicked the tip of his cigarette into the ashtray. “I don’t need to do that. I know all I need to know about lobstering. It’s hard, smelly work.” Turning to Julia, he said, “Make sure you stand downwind of this guy after he docks.”

Randy leaned close to John’s ear and, just as he always did in the old days, egged him on, whispering, “Come on … What are you, pussy?”

Grimacing, John shook his head.

“I’m not interested,” he said.

For the first time, he thought Randy’s behavior was shifting beyond teasing. He was getting mad at Randy — and not just the old Randy he had known twenty years ago. For the first time since they’d gotten home, John wished Julia had declined the invitation, and if she could have read his mind right then, he would have flashed the message, Let’s get the fuck out of here now.

“What’s this?” Julia asked, her voice cutting off Randy’s next comment. John, at least, was grateful for the relief from the tension.

“What you got?”

Randy moved over to Julia’s chair and looked at the book spread open in her lap. John didn’t like seeing his old high school buddy sitting close to his wife.

Randy studied the yearbook page for a moment and then muttered, “I’ll be a son of a bitch.”

“Randy,” Ellie said, casting her eyes ceilingward.

“Look at this,” Randy said, taking the yearbook from Julia and showing it to his wife.

Curious, John also got up from his seat and came over to look at the book. The instant he saw the page, he recognized it; and when he saw what was wrong, a cold chill hit him in the gut.

“Look at that, why don’t you,” Ellie said, shaking her head with wonderment. “One of the pictures has faded.”

“That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.” Randy held the opened page up to the table light and turned it so he could see it at different angles. The page was of the graduating class portraits, but right across the middle was a blank strip where there should have been a photo, name, and description. Even under a bright light, there was no trace of the missing photograph or information.

“That’s weird,” Randy said, his voice dropping low. “John … This is where Abby’s picture used to be. What the hell happened?”

Feigning interest but fighting the waves of cold that made his teeth chatter, John craned his neck to look at the blank spot on the page as Randy angled it back and forth under the light. He had looked at that picture often enough to know exactly what should have been there … Abby’s smiling face … her soft, rounded cheeks… her long, dark hair hanging to her shoulders … and that quotation he had always thought was so damned stupid: “Fresh of spirit and resolved to meet her perils constantly. “

“It just … disappeared,” Randy said, confusion written all over his face. Marking the place with his finger, he flipped through the other pages of the yearbook, checking to see if there was any other damage. Apparently satisfied, he reopened it to the missing picture.

“Maybe they used ... I don’t know, some kind of cheap paper or printer’s ink or something,” Julia volunteered. She knew that was a foolish suggestion because, if that was the case, other parts of the book would have suffered as well.

“I’ll be damned,” Randy said with a shrug. “I can’t figure it out.” He turned the yearbook over in his hand and inspected the sides and back. “You have a yearbook, don’t you?”

John shrugged. “Probably.”

“What do you mean, probably?”

“I mean I don’t sit around and look at it, recalling the old days. I’d just as soon forget them.”

Randy frowned and said, “If you think of it, maybe check yours to see if Abby’s picture in it.”

“If I think of it,” John said. It took effort to keep his voice from trembling, but he managed to add, “It’s like memories … They fade away after a while.”

“I’m gonna take this to the photo shop in Portland and see if they can explain it,” Randy said, obviously still bothered.

“It is sort of strange, don’t you think?” Julia said. “You said no one’s seen Abby in — how long?”

“Since right before graduation?” John said, his voice shaking noticeably.

“And then her picture fades out of the yearbook. It’s like something out of The Twilight Zone.” She rubbed her shoulders and shivered.

“I’m sure there’s a more reasonable explanation,” John said.

When it was obvious no one had anything to add, Randy put the yearbook away. That also, thankfully, seemed to stop any more nostalgia for the evening, and they spent the rest of their visit talking about raising kids, how Frank was doing following his stroke, and jobs — but not condos. Around nine-thirty, John gave Julia the signal that he was ready to leave, so they said their thank-yous and, bundled against the raw weather, started for the door.

At the door, Randy nailed John with a look and said, “So are you gonna do it?”

“Do what?” John asked, dreading what he thought was coming.

“Go out lobstering with me on Saturday. If nothing else, it’ll make you realize how lucky you are to have the job like that.”

“We’ll see,” John said.

Randy swung the door open and held it for them as they dashed out into the rain to their car. John went first and held the car door open for Julia, who threw herself onto the seat. Her face was dripping wet from the short time in the downpour.

“I had a good time,” she said, wiping her face with one hand and waving to the Chadwicks, who were standing in the doorway. “How about you?”

“It was okay, I guess.” John punctuated his comment with a low sniff. Leaning to one side, he fished the car keys from his pocket and started up the car. Looking over his shoulder, he backed down out of the driveway. “Randy’s kind of a dipshit, though.”

“He was teasing you,” Julia replied. “And — I don’t know — maybe what he said explains why the people haven’t been all that friendly to us.”

“The condo, you mean?”

Julia nodded.

John’s mouth was set in a hard line as he pulled into the street and started forward. The headlights worked to push back the cold darkness

“Yeah, well, one thing you got to admit. I sure as hell don’t look as old as Randy.”

Julia regarded John in the soft glow of the dashboard light and then said, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think he or Ellie ooked all that bad. A bit more weathered than us, maybe, but they didn’t seem that old. You want to know what I’m still ticked off about, though?”

“What’s that?” John said, expecting Julia to say something about the condo project.

‘‘I’m ticked off that I still don’t know what she looks like,” Julia’s voice took on a dreamy quality.

“What are you talking about?”

John looked at her face, glistening in the light reflected from the wet pavement.

“Abby,” Julia said softly. “I wish that picture had still been there in the yearbook. I’d like to know what your old girlfriend looked like.”

“Can we not talk about it?” John said tensely.

He forced a sharp laugh and, keeping his eyes focused on the road, added simply, “For one thing, she wasn’t half as pretty as you are.”

And in his mind, he involuntarily finished his sentence, Not anymore, she isn’t.

ELEVEN

After the Storm

I

Bri had pretty much given up on the idea of trying to meet Audrey again and make friends with her. At least that’s what she told herself when she set out for her walk on Saturday morning. The week at school had been lousy, and she was trying to accept that — at least for now — she wasn’t going to make friends easily — if at all — either at school or on the island. This bothered her because she had been part of such a close-knit group of friends back in Vermont. On her walks, she thought a lot about the way things used to be.

The day had dawned clear and bright, just like her grandfather had said it would. The breeze off the ocean was raw and invigorating, tangy with salt. It tasted funny on the back of her throat when she breathed through her mouth. Waves were piling up high on the rocks — huge swells that crested before they hit. White spray flew high into the sky. Driven toward land because the sea was so rough, sea gulls circled and dove among the breakers, looking for crabs that had washed up onto the rocks.

The storm had stripped what little foliage remained on the trees on Indian Point. The winding paths were mired with mud and rain-battered leaves. In order to keep her shoes clean, Bri had to skirt some pretty deep puddles. Halfway out onto the point, she saw someone’s footprints in the mud, and her instant thought was it was Audrey, out for a walk. But she pushed aside any excitement, determined not to say a word to Audrey if they met.

It’ll serve her right for what she’s done to me, she thought as she mentally catalogued Audrey’s offenses: trying to scare her on Halloween night; ignoring her, maybe even actually hiding from her at school; and that trick she had pulled out on Bald Hill, hiding in the deep woods and calling to her …

“Yeah, screw you,” she said sullenly as she kicked a divot in the wet turf.

More and more, Bri was coming to see the ocean as her only real friend on the island. Oh, sure, there was always her mother and father, and — truth to tell — she was starting to appreciate her grandfather. Still, it was only when she came down to the ocean that she could think and feel her own thoughts, and there was no need to say them out loud because nobody else was around.

Off in the distance, Bri could see the Great Diamond lighthouse. The crystal-clear air made it look much closer than it was. The steady breeze off the water carried a lonely, distant hoot from some offshore light or buoy. Bri’s eyes started to water as she eased down off the slope and started climbing around on the slick, black rocks. Tangles of seaweed and frayed rope, driftwood, and a few smashed lobster pots littered the strand.

Bri was beginning to know this area like the face of an old friend, so it surprised her to see how much one storm could actually change the shoreline. Whenever she found some washed-up wood or rope, she would pick it up and toss it back into the ocean. This gave her something to do, a sense that she was restoring the point to what it had been before the storm.

In the lee of a huge rock, half-buried in the sand, she saw something glittering — a piece of shattered green glass, worn and rounded by the waves. As she bent to pick it up, someone spoke from behind her.

“Looking for buried treasure?”

Taken by surprise, Bri barely registered what had been said. She was even more surprised when she turned and saw Audrey smiling down at her from the bluff. The sun was directly behind her, and her long hair blew in the wind like tangled smoke. She cast a long shadow over the rocks all the way to Bri. The bright sunlight and the brilliant blue of the sky blurred her features.

“Lots of treasure,” Bri said, instantly mad at herself for not sticking to her resolution not to speak with her if they met. She wanted to walk away and ignore Audrey — let her feel what it was like to be ignored. Instead Bri stood there, tossing the beach glass from one hand to the other as she looked up at Audrey.

“There’s supposed to be pirate treasure buried somewhere on this island,” Audrey said.

“Whoop-de-do,” Bri said, not caring if Audrey got mad and left.

“Can I look for buried treasure with you?” Audrey asked. Her voice was pleasant and mild, so soft it seemed as though she was standing beside her, not at the top of the rise.

She still hadn’t moved from her position looking down on Bri.

When Bri shifted to get out of Audrey’s shadow, the sunlight stung her eyes so she shielded them with her hand.

‘‘I’m just walking,” Bri said. “You can do whatever you want.”

Audrey let out a soft laugh, barely audible above the hiss of the wind off the water. Breakers roared against the rocks, and the air was filled with the cry of sea gulls. When Bri turned to continue making her way along the shoreline, Audrey noiselessly climbed down the rocks and suddenly appeared at her side. They walked for a while in perfect silence, their hands in their pockets and their faces turned away from the cold wind.

“How come you act so... strange?” Audrey said at last.

“I thought we might be friends.”

They had rounded the point and were heading toward the harbor. The ocean was much tamer on the landward side, but there was still plenty of evidence of the storm washed up on the rocks.

Bri shrugged as she recalled the first — and only — time she had walked out here with Audrey. Talk about acting funny, she thought, remembering how Audrey had been afraid of being seen by anyone on the wharf. She wasn’t surprised when Audrey suddenly turned on her heel and said, “Let’s go back on the other side. I like to watch the waves come crashing in.”

Not caring one way or another, Bri turned with her and started retracing their route around the point. She was burning to say something to Audrey … to ask her why she acted so … well, funny wasn’t the right word. Mysterious and mean was more like it.

What have I ever done to you? …Don’t you want to be friends? … Why do you tease me like this?

These and other questions arose in her mind, but she didn’t ask any of them, figuring she’d give it a rest and see how Audrey treated her today. If they spent the morning together and had some fun, then fine. If Audrey suddenly took off, leaving her behind — then fine. She simply wasn’t going to push it anymore.

“I love it when the ocean’s so wild,” Audrey said, stopping in her tracks and turning her face into the wind. Her hair blew straight back, exposing her face. When Bri looked at her, she felt a sudden chill. Until now, she had never taken a good look at Audrey. She realized that Audrey always kept her eyes averted and never looked directly at her. As she studied her now, she was surprised how thin and pale Audrey looked. Although she couldn’t have been more than sixteen, the cornerss of her eyes were wrinkled like an old woman’s, and her lips were thin and cracked. Her jawbone stuck out as though the skin covering it was no more than paper-thin. To Bri, she looked like someone who hadn’t eaten or slept well in years.

“Don’t you just love it?” Audrey asked.

When she looked directly at her, Bri had to struggle not to scream.

Audrey’s face — even as she was looking at it — seemed to shift subtly. It wasn’t just the interplay of the shadows from her windblown hair. Her skin seemed to have lost what little muscle tone it had and was dissolving away, exposing the skull beneath. Her eye sockets were shadowed, and Bri had the terrifying illusion that the girl’s eyes were actually gone … that Audrey was staring at her from bony, empty sockets.

In a roaring rush, she flashed on the decomposing body she had discovered that day on Bald Hill. No amount of insisting by her father or mother was going to convince her that she hadn’t tripped over a human body in the woods. And now …

Am I losing my mind? she thought as waves of fear tugged at her.

“Something the matter?” Audrey asked.

She leaned closer to Bri, and in Bri’s terrified imagination, she saw — not fleshy lips, but the clacking teeth of a skeleton. The voice didn’t come from Audrey’s thin throat … It was in the roaring air all around them.

It was inside her own head.

“No … I …” Bri managed to stammer.

I’m going crazy!

She wanted to believe this wasn’t happening.

A trick of light or the reflection of the sun off the water was making Audrey’s face look so distorted.

Swept up in a blind panic, Bri found the willpower to tear her eyes away from Audrey and look down at the ground. She stared intensely at the rough, black texture of the rocks, trying to root herself in what was real and solid. But the details of the rock surface was dancing with crazy energy. Sharp lines of light and shadow cut across her vision like razor blades. Her panic only swelled higher, stronger.

“For crying out loud, Bri,” Audrey said, her voice nothing more than a velvety ruffle. “Cut it out. You’re scaring me. You’re acting like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Audrey’s voice had a soft, lilting tone of concern, but beneath that, like the clammy draft of wind snaking along the floor of an old house, was an undercurrent of enjoyment at Bri’s discomfort.

“I … No, I … uh —”

But that was all she could manage.

The next thing she knew, a cold, embracing wetness came crashing down on her, blocking out the sunlight as it swept over her. She thought she was falling … fainting, but as the towering wave tore at her legs, she realized in a flash of panic that she had been swept off the rocks and plunged into the icy ocean water.

In the back of her mind, she heard the warning her grandfather had given her the night before …

‘Specially after a storm like this … That storm’s still right off the coast … The waves’ll be pretty high — ‘specially on the headlands. Every now and then, a big one’ll come up, and if you’re too close to the edge — whoosh … You’re in.

I’m in, Bri thought as a numbing chill of panic gripped her.

I’m gonna die!

She didn’t know if she called for help or simply thought it, but when she opened her mouth to scream, she swalloweda mouthful of briny water. She gagged and sputtered, trying to blow it out, but the water was all around her, stinging as it flooded into her nose, throat, and eyes.

I’m drowning … Oh, God … Help me! … I’m drowning! her mind screamed, but at the same time she knew she wasn’t dead … not yet, anyway. She wouldn’t be able to struggle so hard if she was already dead.

She barely felt the pain as she scraped against some submerged rocks. The water cushioned her from slamming too hard as the tide pulled her out to sea. Her arms and legs flailed wildly as she tried to resist the undertow, but like a tiny piece of driftwood, she was pulled wherever the ocean wanted to take her.

As she struggled against the downward drag of the water, Bri’s mind registered everything in slow motion. She was surrounded by bubbly green water — numbingly cold — right up over her head. Something was tangled around her legs … something slippery and tough … like slimy hands trying to pull her under. She imagined the emerald green, barnacle-crusted hands of drowned sailors, reaching for her. A small, rational corner of her mind knew it was probably kelp or seaweed wrapped around her legs, but whatever it was, it was assisting the waves in holding her under.

In her mind, at least, she was screaming as she strained to rise to the surface that shimmered like a fire above her head.

If I can get a breath of air, she thought. Just a breath of air …

It struck her as strange how time slowed down, and she had so much time to think about things. She was slowly twisting and bending with the currents, drifting as though in freefall. She remembered hearing that drowning was supposed to be a relatively painless way to die …

Painless, yes … but what about the panic?

She kicked as hard as she could, trying to get free herself from the tangling seaweed and get to the surface, which now looked like the end of a long, shimmering tunnel. It caught her by surprise when her efforts were rewarded, and without any sensation of moving upward, her face burst up into the air.

With a throat-tearing roar, she swallowed air into her lungs in one huge, salty gulp before letting out a shrill scream.

“Help! ... “

She was shocked to see how far from the land she was.

There wasn’t any way of knowing how long it had been since she had fallen in. It could have been a few seconds or several minutes.

Audrey must still be around, she thought as she paddled frantically against the rushing tide.

Why doesn’t she help me?

“Help! ... “

Another wave swept over her, beating her under with its surging power, but Bri’s legs were free of the kelp — or the fishy, dead hands — and she was feeling confident as she kicked up to the surface. There was still such a ferocious downward pulling on her legs; she expected to be pulled under again … maybe for good this time.

Going down … down for the third time, her mind whispered.

But the waves weren’t cresting this far out to sea, and the air rushing into her lungs made her feel she had a chance of surviving. If only she could catch the landward drift of a wave and let it carry her to shore without smashing her against the rocks.

She tried to get her bearings relative to the beach and looked longingly at the distant strip of sand, wondered if she was going to have the strength to make it that far. The water was numbingly cold, and she lost all feeling in her arms and legs. She could barely move, but she knew she had to make shore … and soon … or else die.

As she struggled to swim toward the beach, she realized something else … something that sent a dizzying spiral of fear through her. She just might make it, but then, she thought, What about Audrey? … Audrey wasn’t on the rocks!

“Oh, my … God,” she sputtered.

As she kicked toward land, her head kept bobbing under water; and when she surfaced, sputtering and blowing, she stared frantically all along the shore for some sign of Audrey.

What if she got swept in, too, and drowned?

Oh, God! No!

Or maybe she’s gone for help.

Between her and the shore, the waves were cresting, spewing plumes of white spray as they broke. The beach looked as if it was miles away.

Can I make it? …Can I make it? she kept asking herself as she struggled against the undertow. The story her grandfather had told her last night about his friend who had been washed away and drowned after a storm kept playing in her mind.

Whoosh … You’re in.

Swept far out to sea.

The only bright spot was, she realized, that it didn’t look as though she was going to be washed up against the rocks. The current had taken her far away from Indian Point. She would never survive a pounding against the rocks. If she drifted that way, sometime that afternoon, or maybe tomorrow, a lobsterman or someone taking a walk on the point would find her bruised and bloodless body smashed against the granite shore.

No, she shouted in her mind. No!

The waves tossed her about roughly, but she was getting steadily closer to shore.

Every joint in her body ached with cold as she stroked toward the shore. Every muscle was chilled and stiff and felt dead. She must have inhaled at least a gallon of briny seawater. Her nose and the back of her throat were on fire.

As she got closer to shore, she could literally feel the adrenaline kick into her system. She pounded the water with her hands and did powerful scissor kicks. The stretch of smooth, sandy beach was getting closer … closer …

“Whoo —” was all she could say when a wave suddenly picked her up from behind as though it were a powerful hand, and, lifting her up, carried her toward the beach.

I’m flying, she thought, and in an instant of panic, she believed she migh have already drowned …

Maybe I’m already dead!

The ocean was simply tossing her soul about on its surface as it were a leaf, floating on a pond.

The wave continued to build, carrying her forward with a rush that threatened to tumble her over. The icy water surged around her, both lifting and pulling. She thought this was never going to end … that she was going to spend eternity rolling head over heels forward until she blacked out … and never came out of the blackness.

Then a wash of churning white foam exploded into her face.

She was falling, and with a muscle-wrenching impact, she landed face-first on the sand. The wave crashed over her and quickly sucked back off the sand, trying to drag her back with it, but it lost its grip on her and left behind a crumpled form, facedown on the sand.

Coughing and sputtering, Bri struggled to her feet. She spit sand and water from her mouth. A quick glance over her shoulder revealed another, even larger wave barreling toward her. She lunged forward like a football player, diving for the last yard to the goal line as the wave smashed onto the beach. Cold hands slapped the backs of her knees, but she had enough momentum to carry herself the rest of the way. With a long, warbling moan, she collapsed onto the dry sand and lay there, staring up at the sky.

It’s a miracle … I made it … I’m alive, she thought as relief and exhaustion all but overwhelmed her.

She wanted to get up and whoop for joy but, at the same time, she wanted to sink as deeply as she could into the comforting and relative warmth of the sand. The thin November sun shone down on her face with a steady hammering beat.

Where’s Audrey? Bri thought, suddenly sitting up and looking around.

What if she’s drowned?

What if she didn’t make it?

Tears stung her eyes, and cold panic griped her as she staggered to her feet and looked all around the beach, looking for a sign — any sign of Audrey. She tried to push aside the mental image of Audrey sinking slowly into the cold, green depths of the ocean with seaweed tangled around her legs and arms and throat as she drifted down beneath the tossing waves.

“Audrey!” she shouted, cupping her hands to her mouth and spinning around in crazy circles. Anyone watching from the road would have thought she was drunk as she lurched this way and that, calling Audrey’s name.

The breeze off the water soon counteracted the feeble warmth of the sun, and Bri clutched her shoulders and rubbed them vigorously. She stared at the tossing waves, wondering if, maybe, she would see Audrey’s gray sweater bob up, or her hand reaching futilely to the sky as she went down.

Going down for the third time …

“The rocks …” she said, her throat raw from yelling.

She might be able to see better if she got up on the rocks, and maybe they would give her some shelter from the chilling wind as well.

She started running across the sand, barely watching where she stepped because her eyes were fastened so intensely on the rocky point of land. But she hadn’t taken many steps before she saw —

“Oh, my God!”

Standing on the rise of land, silent … motionless … her arms at her sides as she stared at her with a blank, passive expression was Audrey. The wind whipped her hair like a tattered banner and ruffled her heavy sweater, but she seemed somehow not really there … That was the only way Bri could explain it. It was as if she were an illusion.

“Audrey …?” Bri called, walking forward with a few lurching steps. The chill had invaded her muscles now and was cramping them. She had heard the term hypothermia, the life-threatening loss of body heat, and she wondered if that’s what was happening to her.

Would she be able to get home and get warm before her body simply gave up?

“Audrey … “ she said again, softer, almost pleading as she held up her hands. Her teeth were chattering so loudly they sent bright little pinpoints of pain through her head.

As she got closer to Audrey, feeling immense relief that she hadn’t been swept away by the ocean, another thought occurred to her, and she drew to a dead stop.

Why didn’t she go for help?

She’s just standing there … doing nothing.

Bri and Audrey stared at each other for a long time. No words passed between them, but then Audrey turned and walked away, disappearing as silently as a puff of smoke below the edge of the land.

She was there … then she was gone … like that.

Bri stood there, her mouth hanging open as she thought, Had she really been there?… Maybe I imagined her.

She didn’t contemplate it for long. Chills were wracking her body. If she didn’t start for home now, her muscles were going to give out on her. She would collapse in the sand and die of exposure. Telling herself this was it — she would never trust or even try to see Audrey again — she started up the slope toward the road and home.

II

Bri lucked out, as far as she was concerned. When she got to the house, her parents had left a note, saying they had gone out shopping. Her grandfather was in his room, probably asleep with the TV blaring away. There was no one to question why she was dragging herself home, soaking wet, covered with sand, and shivering. In the kitchen, she sloughed off her clothes and threw them into the washing machine. Then she went upstairs and took a long, hot shower. The hot water helped relieve the aches in her muscles and joints, but even after she had slipped into a clean flannel shirt and jeans, shivers racked her body all afternoon as she sat on the couch, idly watching TV and reading.

Her mind kept turning back to Audrey, and she wondered why she had stood there doing nothing while Bri floundered in the water.

Why hadn’t she tried to help?

By late afternoon, after her parents got home, the chills were much worse. After supper, she lay down on the couch and covered herself with a heavy blanket, complaining of a headache and chills. She thought her symptoms were from her dunking in the ocean, but she realized that she must have the same flu bug her father had recently had.

Her parents considered canceling their plans to go to the movies in Portland, but Bri insisted that she would be fine. All she needed was rest.

“I can take care of her as long as she stays downstairs on the couch,” Frank said. Turning to Bri, he added, “‘Sides, I’ve got to even up the score with a coupla games of checkers … if you’re up to it.”

“Maybe later,” Bri said, snuggling the covers right up to her chin. The TV was on, but she barely noticed the sound as she drifted off to sleep.

“Anyway,” Frank said to John and Julia, “you two git goin’. You need some time out. Things’re under control here.”

So they went, driving away as the sun colored the sky with a vibrant orange.

Frank sat for a while, silently watching Bri as she slept. Then he rolled into the kitchen and got himself a beer. He grabbed a copy of Reader’s Digest and sat in the doorway to the living room, drinking beer and reading.

An hour or so passed, and the house was silent except for random creakings as floor joists registered the drop in air temperature. Bri started to stir, and Frank came quickly over to her and waited for her to open her eyes. When she finally did, she looked up at him with a distant, glazed expression.

Frank smiled sympathetically as she tossed her head from side to side, groaning. Then, with a mighty effort — not as much as I needed to swim for my life though, she thought — she sat up on the couch and met her grandfather’s stare.

“I told you, didn’t I?” he said after a lengthening stretch of silence.

Bri’s face flushed as she wondered what he meant.

“Well?” Frank said, leaning closer. “Didn’t I?”

“Tell me what?” Bri asked.

The fever raging in her body flushed her cheeks, but worse was that she knew exactly what he meant.

“I told you to stay away from the shore after a storm,” Frank said gruffly. “I told you it was dangerous.”

“I didn’t —”

“Tut-tut,” he said, waving a pointed finger in front of his face. “You might not tell the truth to your folks — for whatever reason — but don’t you go lying to me, ‘kay? I know you had a bit of trouble down on the point.”

“How … how do you know?” Bri asked.

Her first — and only — thought was, if her parents found out what had happened, they would insist she stay away from the point. She never wanted to see Audrey again, not after what she had done — and not done — but she didn’t want to give up her walks down there, either. That was pretty much the only pleasure she had found in Maine.

“I suspected something happened,” Frank said. His eyes clouded over for a moment, and then he shook his head. “Now I know. You wanna fill me in?”

Knowing she was caught, and actually wanting to unburden herself to someone, she told him what had happened … even the part about how she knew, as soon as she saw Audrey on the bluff, that she hadn’t even tried to get help. It felt good to unload, too. Just saying the words to another human being was an immense relief.

“But how’d you know?” Bri asked once she was through. “Did someone see me and call the house?”

Frank shook his head.

“No. You might’ve been real careful ‘bout gettin’ your wet clothes into the washer, but you left your sneakers in the entryway, soakin’ wet and covered with sand. I didn’t realize it was as serious as it was till you told me.”

Embarrassed, Bri looked down at her hands folded in her lap.

Besides the fever, she could feel something else — something cold and sad and lonely twisting in her gut. Her lower lip began to tremble, and she knew she was going to start crying — damn it! As much as she tried to hold it back, she couldn’t.

Frank dropped his magazine to the floor and quickly came over to the couch, reaching out to her. Leaning forward off the couch, it was awkward, trying to hug him in his wheelchair, but she was also grateful for his warm strength as he pulled her close and gently patted her back. The rough texture of his sweater pressed against her face, and she inhaled his musty old-man smell as tears flooded her eyes and soaked into the old wool. In one corner of her mind, she knew she would forever link that particular wet-wool smell with her grandfather and how much she loved him right then.

She cried so hard her body shook, but at last the waves of loneliness receded. Having someone to hug was enough to dull the panic an pain. Sniffing, she sat back on the couch, grabbed a Kleenex, and wiped her eyes and nose.

The living room was silent for along time as they sat looking at each other, each knowing they shared a deep bond.

“You ought to tell your folks ‘bout what happened, you know,” her grandfather said.

Bri sniffed and nodded, but he sensed that she didn’t mean it. It saddened him to see that same distance growing between Bri and her mother as there was between himself and John.

Maybe, he thought, it’s just the way things are between parents and kids.

“It ain’t just about what happened today, is it?” Frank said softly.

Bri’s face twisted through a gallery of expressions as she groped for the words that would express what she was feeling. They didn’t have to be exactly the right words … anything close would do.

“It’s that … they don’t understand what I’m going through,” she finally managed to say, although her voice was scratchy and raw. The fever was laying soft, hot pressure on the back of her head.

Frank smiled, a sympathetic smile and reached out to pat her gently on the knee.

“I don’t think parents ever understand what kids are going through. You may tell yourself when you’re a kid that, once you have children of your own, you’re gonna remember what it was like, but by the time you do, things have changed you enough — ‘n’ times have changed enough — so even though you may honestly want to understand, you just can’t do it anymore, no matter how hard you try.”

Lord knows, I tried, he thought to himself even though he couldn’t push aside the feeling that, for him and John, it was already too late.

His words only made Bri feel all the more helpless and alone, but the fact that he was saying them to her — and she wasn’t thinking them to herself — made her feel about as good as she could.

“It’s up to you, you,” he said. “You don’t tell ‘em what you’re feelin’, how’re they ‘spozed to know?”

“I’ve told them hundreds of times, but they don’t listen to me. They never do.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Frank said. “I think — hell, I know your mom and dad love you a lot, ‘n it bothers them that you ain’t happy here.... “ His voice trailed off as he thought, Because they had to come here to help me. Seeing what it was doing to Bri cut his heart like a razor.

“Yeah … well,” she said, but before she could say more, a wave of shivers raced through. Her teeth started chattering, and when she sniffed loudly, tiny spinning lights danced across her vision.

“What you need is some rest,” Frank said. “I was kinda hopin’ for a coupla games of checkers, but —”

“I’ll play,” Bri said, trying to brighten up. But as she leaned forward on the couch, the sudden motion made the pressure in her head suddenly worse, and she collapsed back onto the couch and closed her eyes.

“Maybe you oughta head on up to your room,” Frank said. “The checkers’ll wait.”

Bri started to protest, but instead she shifted her feet to the floor and, dragging her blanket behind her like a loose robe, she mumbled a “g’night,” and shuffled slowly up the stairs.

“Hope you’re feelin’ better in the morning,” Frank said.

He waited at the foot of the stairs, listening as she walked slowly up to her room. Her bedroom door clicked shut behind her, and then he heard the squeaking of the bedsprings as she dropped onto the bed. He didn’t move from his position until he was sure she was asleep, but even then, he didn’t feel as though everything was done, as though everything was safe.

Something else was gnawing at the back of his mind … something he knew he should have told her. It had come to him while they were talking, but before he could say it, it had faded again, like a tiny flame that had gotten blown out. All he knew, as he stared silently up the stairwell toward Bri’s bedroom door, was that it had something to do with that girl she had talked about —

Something to do with Audrey, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember now.

III

She’s back!

The words came crashing like a tidal wave into John’s mind as he stood in the kitchen doorway, staring in astonishment at the dim reflection in the picture window. And almost immediately, his second thought was, Why did I think she?

They had come home late from the movie because they had had to wait for the second show. Supper at Tortilla Flat had taken a bit longer than they had planned, and by the time they found a parking space — which, on a Saturday night at the Westbrook Cinema, was close to a miracle — the early showing of the new DeCaprio movie was sold out. It was either another movie, certainly not the gory horror movie Night Siege, or wait for the late show. So they killed time wandering around the Maine Mall and got back to the cinema in plenty of time.

Julia enjoyed the movie almost as much as John did, but it had some violent scenes where she had to press her face against John’s chest until he signaled it was okay to come up for air. As soon as they got home, Julia went upstairs to check on Bri. She poked her head into the room, saw that she was asleep, and tiptoed downstairs. Frank’s door was closed and the TV was silent. They figured, without Bri’s company, he had gone to sleep early as well.

While Julia waited in the living room, John fixed them each a cup of tea. As he was carrying the tray into the living room, he was overwhelmed with a sense of deja vu — the feeling that this had happened before — when he glanced at the window and saw two people reflected in the window — Julia and … someone else.

He remembered the last time this had happened, on their first night in the house.

The sudden blast of the foghorn had awakened them, and Julia and Bri had waited on the couch while he heated up some milk for them. The living room had been dark except for the steadily blinking lighthouse beacon. Rain had been beating against the window, and he had seen — no, he told himself, thought he had seen — a dark figure hanging from the ceiling.

This time, a single reading lamp was on in the living room. Bri was in bed. Through the picture window, like that other night, John could see the lighthouse, but no rain beat against the glass. Centered in the middle of the window, though, was that same figure — the same indistinct blur. It certainly looked like a person, but this time he told himself not to panic.

He stopped in the doorway and stared at the window.

“What’s the matter?” Julia asked, turning to him.

He wasn’t sure, but it seemed as though the second reflection, which had its back to him, was slowly turning around to face him as well.

There’s gotta be some kind of double reflection or something? he thought.

He moved his head from side to side, studying the change in perspective.

Everything in the room — even the weird double reflection — shifted. It was too dim, too vague to see clearly, but whatever it was, it looked like another person was there with them.

“There’s a … “

He shook his head and, with as few steps as possible, put the tray down on an end table and went back to the doorway. As soon as he looked at the window, he saw the double reflection was still there, but damned if he could figure out if it was Julia’s or...

No ... It can’t be someone else.

“Raise your hand and wave to me,” he said.

“What?”

“Wave o me.”

Frowning, Julia did as she was told, and John watched, fascinated, as both reflections raised their hands. The clearest reflection of Julia’s back was easily recognizable, but the second one — even as it waved its hand — looked somehow … different.

“Come here a minute,” he said, motioning her over. “Stand right here.”

Julia came over and stood where he indicated.

“Now watch when I sit down on the couch.”

He walked over and sat where Julia had been, turned to face her, and said, “Look at my reflection in the window. What do you see?”

“Your back,” Julia said, frowning with confusion. “What this all about?”

“No, no … look carefully at the reflection. Where the light from the lighthouse is.” He raised his hand and waved it from side to side. “Now … what do you see?”

Julia leaned forward and stared at the window, but all she could see was the clear outline of her husband, waving his hand over his head like a fool. She told him so.

“There isn’t, like, a double reflection?” He turned to a look at the window again. “Can’t you see a dimmer outline of me … like a shadow?”

Julia shook her head. “Just you. Is this some kind of joke?”

John was looking back and forth from Julia to the window again and frowning as he tried to see if she was standing exactly where he had been.

“Move back and forth, and keep looking at the picture window. Tell me if anything changes.”

Again Julia did as she was told, but after a while she shook her head, came over to the couch, and sat beside him.

“I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t go see that scary movie,” she said. “You’re too suggestible. May I please have my tea before it gets cold?”

She reached for the tray on the end table and almost dropped it when John suddenly shouted, “Wait. Stay right where you are.”

He got up from the couch and went back to the kitchen doorway, staring at the picture window. Julia, meanwhile, was reaching awkwardly across the couch, looking at him over her shoulder as if afraid he was losing his mind.

“This isn’t the most comfortable position,” she said.

“Just a second,” John said. She might not have seen the shadowy reflection — and, by Jesus, it had looked like another woman reflected in the glass — but he had … and it was there again. He moved back and forth, up and down, trying to see it more clearly, but nothing he did made it clearer. If he moved even a fraction of an inch, it would be gone like smoke.

“John … This is getting a tad ridiculous,” Julia said. She shifted back into a comfortable sitting position and took one of the teacups. Testing the liquid with her lips, she nodded and said, “Come on and sit down and relax.”

“Just a second,” he said.

Keeping his eyes fixed on the window, he made his way across the living room floor, feeling his way around the furniture. He hardly noticed the jolt of pain when he bumped his shin against the coffee table.

When he got to the picture window, he could still see something that looked like a stain, embedded in the glass. It got lighter and darker, depending from which angle he viewed it. He got as close to the glass as possible, trying to see beyond the superficial reflection of the living room. Julia watched him in amazement. Bending over, he put his fingers to the glass and rubbed it with small, circular motions.

“I never noticed a blemish in this glass before,” he said. “Did you?”

“Will you get over here?” Julia said, slapping the couch cushion beside her.

He could see she was starting to get irritated with him, but damn if it still didn’t look as if it there was a second vague figure hovering at the edge of vision, like a negative on an old-fashioned photographic glass plate.

“God,” he said, straightening up. “That is so weird.”

“You’re the one who’s weird,” Julia said. “There’s some tiny imperfection in the glass that’s distorting the light.”

Cupping his chin in his hand, John studied the picture window a while longer; then he went back to the couch and sat down with a heavy sigh. Julia handed him his cup of tea — now getting cold — but he didn’t notice as he sipped it.

They carried on a casual conversation for quite a while, brushing at times on a few more serious problems, particularly Bri’s lack of adjustment at school, but John’s eyes were constantly drifting back to the window, trying to get a fix on what he thought he had seen there. Every so often, especially as he was turning to look away from the window, the dark splotch — which certainly resembled a human figure — would whisk away just before he turned and looked straight at it.

“What the hell are you doing?” Julia finally asked out of frustration. “You’re not hearing a word I say.”

“No — I, uh … keep thinking I see something,” John said.

“What is it?”

John shrugged nervously.

“I dunno. It’s gotta be some kind of defect in the glass, but it moves even when you and I are sitting still.”

“Maybe the house is haunted,” Julia said. A sly smile spread across her face, and she held her hands up like a witch’s claws.

“Cut it out,” John said, pushing her away.

“Seriously,” Julia said. “Maybe it’s your mother’s ghost.”

“That’s not funny,” John said, frowning.

“This is an old house. Who’s to say it doesn’t have a few spooks hanging around in the rafters? I hear sounds at night, like bumping and banging around inside the walls.”

“Probably the rats my father was telling us about,” John said with a snicker. “Unless it’s my father trying to get down the hallway to the bathroom without turning on the lights.”

He laughed, but the laughter sounded thin and unconvincing, even to his own ears.

Wharf rats as big as poodles, Julia thought, unable to repress a shiver.

Before she chalked up anything to a ghost in the house, she wanted to eliminate all of the more reasonable explanations first.

“It’s just that —”

He cut himself off because he again caught a hint of motion in the corner of his eye. This time he was convinced it had been there … that someone had walked past the window outside. Recalling what had happened to Bri on Halloween night, he thought was maybe Randy Chadwick was out there, snooping around for whatever reason.

Julia jumped when he turned quickly and looked at the picture window.

“What?’“ she asked. “Did you see something?”

“No … nothing,” John replied.

He drank the last bit of cold tea and glanced at his watch, surprised to see that it was already after midnight.

“We ought to hit the sack. I’m not used to staying up so late.”

Julia stifled a yawn and nodded agreement as she stood up. She put their empty cups onto the tray and carried them into the kitchen while John turned off the living room light. As the room was plunged into darkness, he couldn’t stop wondering about what the darkness might be hiding.

What reflections might there be in the picture window now if his eyes could pierce the darkness?

Or who might he see standing outside in the dark, looking in at him?

He met Julia at the foot of the stairs, and arm in arm they went upstairs. After a quick wash-up, they tucked into bed, kissed good night, and rolled over to sleep. But as late as it was, sleep was elusive for John. As he drifted in and out of a thin slumber, his mind kept playing with what he had seen reflected in the living room window. In his dreams, thin, dark shadows kept resolving into clearer shapes … shapes that took on sharper definition as if struggling to gain substance …

Twelve

“Dem Bones”

I

After all that had happened on Saturday — some of which Bri never confessed to her parents — Sunday was a relatively relaxing day. As usual, Frank went to church in the morning and spent the afternoon visiting friends. Bri was feeling better but still not well enough to get out of bed before noon. Then, after a light lunch of toast and juice, she went back to bed. She was secretly hoping to have at least one day off from school. Julia and John had finished off the living room painting and papering last weekend, so they spent a leisurely afternoon browsing through the Maine Sunday Telegram. The one time John mentioned that he might snap on the football game, Julia threatened divorce, so the TV was quiet all day.

From her bed, Bri could see Indian Point, and several times throughout the day, she saw someone walking around out there. The figure was little more than a dark dot in the distance, and the rough terrain blocked her view most of the time. She was sure it was Audrey, but after what had happened yesterday — how Audrey had stood there when she had been swept away by the wave, and not gone for help — Bri never wanted to see or talk with her again.

Julia was grateful for their free time because John finally started to unwind. Earlier that morning, he had seemed wired, but after lunch and her joking about divorcing him if he watched football, he seemed like the person she used to know before they moved to Maine — the fun, relaxed, easygoing John.

“You said a while ago how you might want to find something else for a job,” she said. “Were you serious?”

They were sitting side by side on the couch, the Sunday paper a fluttered mess around their feet on the floor. John was drinking a beer, which was unusual for him before evening, but Julia didn’t feel he needed it to unwind.

Staring thoughtfully at the top of the can, his finger flicking the pull tab and making it hum, he shrugged.

“I dunno,” he said, shaking his head. “I guess I was pissed off. I wasn’t serious about lobstering, but … it’d be kind of nice not to have so much pressure.”

“Is there really that much pressure at work?”

John took a swallow of beer.

“Enough. You know, Randy wasn’t making that up about me not being the most popular guy on this island. And even if I wasn’t working for Freedom, being the new guy at Atkins and all, I feel I have to prove myself more than the guys who have been there for years. Sometimes I feel like — you know what my father used to say?”

Julia arched an eyebrow.

“‘Like I’ve been shot at and missed, shit on and hit.’”

“Colorful,” Julia said, smiling in spite of herself. “But what are your alternatives?” She shifted forward and placed her hand gently on his arm. “Realistically?”

“Realistically? I got nothing.” John slouched down and — to Julia’s surprise — actually snuggling up closer to her.

“So why not take up Randy’s offer? Give lobstering a try. Who knows? Maybe you’d like it.”

John’s laughter came out with a snorting spray.

“Oh, I can see it now. The Old Man and the Sea. Come on. Gimme a break.”

“Just a suggestion,” Julia said, nestling her face into his chest.

What she was thinking now had nothing to do with his work. She was weighing in her mind whether or not she should try again to bring up the subject of having a baby. She hadn’t come up with any new angle, but maybe, since he was in such a good mood …

“I guess I’ll toss this,” John said, heaving a sigh and standing up after taking one last sip of beer.

Julia started to say something but remained where she was, letting the moment slip away.

Maybe later … tonight, she thought.

“I’ll check on Bri,” she said, also standing. “See if she needs anything.”

From the kitchen, John listened as she went up the stairs. It seemed as though every step on the stairway had a rusty-nail creak in it. He went to the entryway and tossed the empty into the bag where they collected the returnable bottles and cans. Pausing for a moment in front of the refrigerator, he considered having a second beer but opted to have a Diet Pepsi instead.

As he was reaching into the cupboard for a glass, something caught his attention in the corner of his eye. Turning, he saw a single sheet of notebook paper folded in half and stuck between the sugar and flour canisters. A spark of recognition made him start, and at the same time he experienced a weird sense of deja vu like he’d had the night before when he had seen that strange double reflection in the picture window.

He slowly lowered his hand from the cupboard unable to control the shaking as he reached out and took the sheet of paper. From upstairs, he heard the soft buzz-buzz of Julia and Bri talking. His father wasn’t around, but John couldn’t shake the sense that someone was watching him as he flattened the paper open on the countertop and scanned what was written there.

I Won’t …

A dash of chills raced through him when he recognized the same heavy-handed pencil marks. He chuckled to himself, but that did nothing to relieve the tingling tension that was winding up in the pit of his stomach. His breathing became rapid and shallow.

Is this the same piece of paper I saw before? he wondered as he held it up to the light, inspecting it.

He was sure he had crumpled up that first note and tossed it into the wastebasket, so this couldn’t be the same one, but it sure looked the same — even down to the torn notebook ring holes — exactly the same ... except for the additional word “won’t.”

“Won’t … what?” he said aloud.

His scalp began to tingle, and he was sure someone was watching him from behind, but when he turned quickly, there was no one there.

The trembling in his hands got worse as he tore the sheet of paper several times, each tear making a sharp, hissing sound. When the note was a little pile of rough squares, he sprinkled them like snowflakes into the wastebasket, then crammed them down beneath the day’s trash so they were out of sight. Then he got a glass from the cupboard and the Diet Pepsi from the refrigerator, and while he was pouring himself a glass — even though now he could really use that beer — he heard Julia’s footsteps as she came back downstairs.

“How’s she —” he started to say, but he was cut off by Julia’s sudden shout.

“What the hell did you do in here?”

Confused, John put the Pepsi down and came into the living room to see Julia standing there with an expression of total confusion on her face. The newspaper, which had been lying on the living room floor, was shredded. Several sheets had been torn into long ribbons and strewn about like party streamers.

John was just as confused as Julia, and he held up his hands helplessly.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said, thinking if Bungle were still alive, they could blame him.

“Is this some kind of joke?” Julia looked at him with a harsh expression. “After that number you did last night about the reflection in the window … are you playing some kind of game?”

“No ... honest, I —” John went over to the pile of torn newspaper and picked up several ribbons, letting them slide like ticker tape from his hand to the floor. Shaking his head, he looked at Julia.

“Are you sure you’re not trying to play some kind of trick on me?” he asked.

“I was upstairs with Bri. And why the hell would I do something like this?” She paused and, staring at the paper, suddenly clutched her shoulders and shivered. “Do you think it was … rats?”

“What?”

“You know — maybe they were going to use the paper for — I don’t know — for nesting or something.”

She looked back and forth along the floorboards, trying to find any trace of the rats might.

All John could hear was the harsh ripping sound he had made as he tore up the note in the kitchen. Was there a connection?

“I don’t think rats would do something like this. The paper’s torn so evenly on the side. Rats would gnaw things, but … I suppose anything’s possible.”

“I don’t like this,” Julia said, nervously scanning the floor and walls. “I don’t like this one bit. If one of them is brazen enough to come out and start chewing on our newspaper in the middle of the day while we’re one room away, what else might they do?”

“I don’t think it was rats.”

“Then what was it?”

John shrugged.

“They might get into our food,” Julia continued. “Or what if they attack us when we’re sleeping? There was a news report about a baby in New York City, where the mother came into the child’s bedroom at night and found a rat in the crib, gnawing on the baby.”

“They don’t do stuff like that,” John said. “That’s right up there with those albino-alligators-in-the-sewer stories. You’ve got to remember, I grew up in this house. We never had a problem with rats before.”

“Yeah — before,” Julia said. “It sure looks like we do now.”

As he started to scoop up the shredded pages — and now that he looked at it, it didn’t seem quite so bad; only a few pages were torn, and a rat might have done it — ·John started to laugh, remembering one of Bri’s favorite books when she was little. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. The image of a real rat wearing a pair of wiry bifocals and reading the Maine Sunday Telegram was too much for him. Shaking with laughter to relieve his tension, he crumpled the newspaper into a tight ball, went into the kitchen, and stuffed it into the trash.

Julia followed him and, checking the time, said, “Your father’s gonna be home soon, but I don’t feel like cooking. Maybe I’ll heat up some soup for supper.”

“Fine with me,” John said. “I’m not all that hungry, anyway.”

The truth was, his stomach was twisting from the tension he had felt when he first found and read that note.

I WON’T …

Won’t what?

After cramming the newspaper into the wastebasket, being sure to tamp down the remnants of that note, he tried not to give it a second thought. Seeing the bottle of Pepsi on the counter, he poured some into a glass and headed back to the living room.

“I’m gonna pop on the TV and see what the score is,” he said, trying to ignore the withering stare Julia gave him.

But he had other things on his mind — things that, at least for now, he didn’t want to think about … things like What did that message mean, and who wrote it?

II

All day Monday at work, an undefined sense of dread filled John. By the time he left to go home, he had figured out one reason why. Tomorrow, he was scheduled to go out to the Surfside condo project. Whenever he thought about the field where Haskins’ barn stood, he couldn’t help but remember the times he had spent out there while in high school. And some of those were memories he would just as soon not stir up.

The sun was edging the horizon as he drove across the bridge onto Glooscap. Even though he knew Julia would be waiting on supper until he came home, and even though he honestly didn’t want to, he turned left after the bridge instead of right, intending to drive past the construction site and the old barn. He kept telling himself all he wanted was to glance at the site so he could see what progress had been made, and he would know what to expect in the morning.

The workers had left for the day, and in the gathering gloom, their silent, abandoned machinery looked like dinosaurs frozen in time, Everywhere, the land showed marks of their passing, with huge chunks of earth carved and piled up like mountains on the moon. Like blank, unseeing eyes, frozen puddles in the rutted dirt road and churned up earth reflected back a pale image of the sky.

As John rounded the corner and glanced up at Haskins’ barn, a shiver ran through him. He was tempted to stop and go up to see what work had been done around it. He knew the place was schedule for demolition, but not yet. In he morning, he was going to check the grading for the road that would be laid out past where the barn now stood.

He slowed the car, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop.

There was no way he was going up to that barn alone … not with night falling so fast.

Stepping down on the gas, he rounded the corner a little too fast. His tires skidded in the dirt the trucks had spilled on the asphalt, and his car swerved around the corner alittle too fast. He experienced a momentary panic that he might drive off the road and over an embankment, but he gritted his teeth and held the steering wheel until the tires grabbed the road and held.

He was relieved once he had control of the car, but a plume of dust from his tires rose in his rearview mirror like storm clouds, swirling behind him. No matter how fast he drove down the road, he couldn’t dispel a gnawing feeling of dread about this place and especially that barn.

He wondered if he ever would …

III

“You’ve got to talk to your father … or Mrs. Marshall …or someone.” Julia said when she greeted John at the door.

He walked into the kitchen, shook off his heavy coat, and hung it on a peg in the entryway. Dropping his briefcase to the floor, he stared at Julia.

“Why?” he asked.

“Someone’s been screwing around with the furniture. I went to the store this afternoon, and when I got back, the couch had been moved over to the wall. I had a hell of a time pushing it back.”

“Did Bri stay home from school today?” John asked. “Maybe she moved it so she could look out the window.”

“Bri didn’t move it,” Julia snapped. “There’s no way.”

“I don’t suppose my father could have, either.”

“Then it must have been Mrs. Marshall. She must have done it when she came to clean. I told your father he didn’t need to have her come in anymore, but he insists. He says he’s paying her with his money and she’s come to depend on the income, so he doesn’t want to let her go.”

John shrugged. “Well, if she’s screwing things up, maybe it’s time we spoke to her.”

“Maybe you should talk to her,” Julia said. “You should call her right after supper.”

“All right … I will,” John said. He picked up his briefcase and carried it into the living room, where he deposited it beside the telephone desk. A moment later, he returned to the kitchen.

“Oh, and there’s something else,” Julia said, folding her hands in front of her as she stood by the kitchen table. John raised his eyebrows.

“I don’t want to go pointing a finger,” Julia said softly, “but I’m missing some jewelry.”

“You’re sure you didn’t misplace it?” John asked.

Julia shook her head.

“Positive. Nothing valuable, but I haven’t been able to find a necklace and two pairs of earrings. You know my gold-link necklace? And those two pairs of Laurel Burch earrings — the ones with the birds on them.”

“What, you think Mrs. Marshall may have taken them?” John said.

“Like I said. I don’t want to point a finger at anyone,” Julia said. “I was wondering if you knew where they were.”

One side of John’s mouth twitched into a smile.

“Those earrings don’t go with a thing I have,” John said, smiling at his own joke more than Julia did. “I haven’t gone to work in drag lately. You know, I’m trying to give that up.”

“Oh, aren’t we the comedian tonight. Come on, John. This is bothering me.”

“What do you think I can do?” John said. Then he snapped his fingers and said, “I know. We’ve got gremlins.”

“I’m serious,” Julia said with a flash of anger. “They were some of my favorite jewelry.”

“You know I wouldn’t notice stuff like that,” John said. “Ask Bri. Maybe she borrowed them.”

“I …. I don’t know … I guess so.”

“We can either ask both of them, and if it’s Mrs. Marshall, we’ll tell her not to come by anymore, that we don’t need the help.”

“That might be the best way to handle it,” Julia said. “I don’t want to come right out and accuse her. But … maybe they’ll turn up. I could have misplaced them. Why don’t you call Bri down for supper? I’ll see if your dad’s awake.”

John turned to do as he was told, but then Julia said, “Oh,, there’s one more thing.”

What now? John thought even as he forced himself to smile.

“I told you I went to the store,” Julia said. She bent down and opened up one of the bottom cupboard doors and took out a large brown bag with Trustworthy Hardware printed on both sides. She handed the bag to him and said, “I don’t care what your father says about it, either. I want you to put these out.”

John opened the top of the bag and saw three large metal rattraps with shiny, mean-looking teeth.

“After you give Mrs. Marshall a call, you can smear those with something — the guy at the hardware store recommended peanut butter — and put them up in the attic. I don’t want any rats in my house.”

“What happened to your live-and-let-live attitude?” John said.

“I still have it,” Julia replied with a sly smile. “I’ll let the bastards live as long as they don’t come into my house.”

“Fair enough, I suppose.”

John refolded the bag and put it on the counter beside the toaster. He didn’t relish the idea of setting the traps — or cleaning them if he managed to catch anything — but once Julia had her mind made up, there was no swaying her. If there had been, they never would have moved to Maine in the first place …

Supper went peacefully enough even after Julia informed Frank that she absolutely didn’t want Mrs. Marshall coming by to do cleaning anymore. She didn’t mention the moved furniture or the missing jewelry. Instead, she said it was an insult to her own housekeeping abilities to have someone else do the work, and that was that.

After supper, Bri went straight up to her bedroom, saying she was still feeling wiped out by the flu. Frank and Julia went into the living room to watch the evening news while John cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher. It was Bri’s turn, actually, but he told her he would give her a break as long as she paid him back once she was feeling better.

From the living room, Julia shouted to him, reminding him that he had a certain phone call to make. John almost countered that, since he had work to do on the plan he would be using the next day, and since she was the “heavy” in this instance, she ought to call, but Julia insisted it was his job. Reluctantly, he grabbed the phone book and flipped through the pages to find Hilda Marshall’s phone number.

As he rifled through the pages looking for the M’s, when he saw a piece of paper stuck inside the phone book. His stomach dropped as soon as he saw it because he instantly recognized what it was … a sheet of notebook paper, folded in half … with its punched ring holes torn … and something written in heavy-handed pencil.

He could read the scrawled words in reverse through the paper.

Whoever had written it had borne down hard to tear through the paper. John dropped the phone book and hurriedly unfolded the paper to read what was written.

“Hey, Jule?” he called out, aware that his voice was shaking.

“Yeah?” she replied over the televised sounds of gunfire and a reporter’s voice-over.

His throat went dry, and he wasn’t sure his next words would come out right, but instead of going into the living room to show her the paper and ask if she knew what this was all about, he tore the paper into tiny fragments and rolled them into a ball.

“Uh … oh, nothing,” he said, his voice little more than a croak. “I’ve got it.”

He went into the bathroom down the hall and sprinkled the torn paper into the open toilet bowl. He hit the flush, and the paper disappeared with a sucking gurgle. But even as he watched the water swirl the note away, he knew he was going to see it again — next time, probably, with another word added.

He wondered if Julia, or Bri, or maybe his father was playing a trick on him, and he decided that, no matter what was going on, the best thing for him to do was simply ignore it.

IV

“Because I don’t particularly like rats, that’s why. Is that all right with you?”

Julia was standing with John in the upstairs hallway. She shushed him with a wave of her hands, indicating with a quick nod Bri’s closed bedroom door. What bothered John was the smirking smile on her face as she watched him, flashlight, hammer, and nails in one hand — bag of traps, jar of Skippy peanut butter, and a knife in the other.

“Well, I don’t particularly like them, either,” Julia said, eyeing the attic door. “But I don’t see why you can’t go up there and set a few traps.”

“If it’s so damned easy, why didn’t you do it this afternoon?”

“I never knew you were scared of rats,” Julia said, her smirk widening into a smile.

John sucked in a breath, held it, then let it out with a slow whistle. His eyes practically danced in his head, flicking between the attic door and his wife.

“Everybody has his thing, all right? Some people can’t stand snakes. Others can’t handle spiders. Mine just happens to be rats. Are you coming with me?”

Julia thought for a moment, but even considering that he had already done one “dirty” job tonight, calling Hilda Marshall, she didn’t want to go up there. She could barely stand being here in the opened doorway. Crawling around in a dusty, dimly lit, confined area even if it wasn’t infested with rats wasn’t her idea of a fun time. She chastised herself for thinking it, but baiting the rat traps seemed like a man’s job.

“You can take care of it,” she said as she took a few steps away from the door. “I’ll wait here and listen for any screams, okay?”

“Thanks,” John said, shaking his head. “Thanks a pant-load.”

He opened the attic door and put his foot on the first step, but before he started up, he looked back at Julia.

“You’re sure you won’t reconsider? Last chance.”

“Go on,” she said, waving her hand at him. “Get it over with.”

He reached out for the light switch on the wall, snapped it up and down several times, but somehow wasn’t surprised when the bulb didn’t come on. None of them had been up into the attic since moving into the house … mostly, John told himself, because storing stuff up there instead of in the garage made it feel like more of a permanent commitment to staying. In the back of his mind, he clung to the idea that they would be moving off the island and out of Maine soon.

With a flick of his thumb, he snapped on the flashlight and let the oval of light play up the stairs to the top. Only the floor of the attic was insulated, so cold air came rushing down at him. The breeze stirred up a thick layer of dust and cobwebs in the stairway. With one last inhalation of fresh air, he braced himself and started up the stairs.

I won’t see any rats, he kept telling himself. They’ll run and hide as soon as they hear me coming.

The floorboards creaked underfoot. When he reached the top of the stairs, he stood in a crouch, looking back and forth to each end of the attic, trying to decide the best places to set the traps.

Again, he thought of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and chuckled softly, wondering if perhaps he might see a rat wearing Julia’s gold necklace and earrings.

“Look out!” Julia suddenly yelled from downstairs. John swung the flashlight around and leaped to one side even as he registered Julia’s sharp cackle of laughter.

“A real comedian, you are,” he snarled. “Why don’t you let me handle this.”

He tisked softly to himself, but there was nothing funny about the sweat-slick grip he had on the paper bag and the flashlight. The musty attic air, which probably hadn’t circulated in a decade or more, filtered into his throat like fine-grained sand. The chill of the night air turned his breath into a fine mist.

Looking around, he saw that sometime recently his father had brought some things up here. Everything was hazy with the thick layer of dust, but he recognized several pieces of furniture. There was the old easy chair his father used to read his newspaper in at night. The red covering was laced with holes from which yellow tufts of stuffing hung like curdled cream. An old coffee table with a chipped and splintered top was buried under several bundles of tied-up magazines. Some of the twine had rotted and snapped, fanning the magazines — old copies of Life and Look — across the rough-cut pine flooring.

Further in were several boxes jammed so full of old clothes they bulged out the sides. Sleeve ends and hems looked frayed, as though they had been … chewed, he thought, even though he didn’t want to admit it. A wave of nostalgia hit him as he scanned the accumulated family history. Fragments of his childhood — maybe even his collection of plastic soldiers and his old Lionel train set — were up here collecting dust, their boxes good for nothing more than to provide material for rats’ nests.

Was that actually his mother’s fancy blue wool coat, the one she used to wear every Easter, hanging from a nail in a rafter?

And wasn’t that the sleeve of his father’s military uniform sticking out of that box, the one John used to put on when he played soldiers with Randy?

John had been moving slowly down to the end of the attic, watching for any sign of rats, but there were no droppings on the floor, at least that he could see.

He froze when a soft scuffing sounded behind him.

His neck and shoulders were tense and tingling as he snapped around, his flashlight beam weaving as it tried, like a bloodhound, to locate the source of the noise.

Was that a rat sneaking around behind the piles of junk?

Or was Julia still at the foot of the stairs, making noises to tease him?

He hadn’t heard her leave and go downstairs.

“That you?” he called out. His voice, dry from the attic air, was little more than a whisper.

To his left, he caught the faintest hint of motion, but by the time he brought his flashlight beam to bear on it, it was gone. Swearing softly under his breath, he scrunched down and opened the bag from the hardware store. Bracing the flashlight under his arm, its beam directed at the open mouth of the bag, he took out a trap along with the jar of peanut butter and the knife.

He had three traps to set and, if he’d had his choice, he would just as soon have set all three up by the door. Let the damned rats come to him. But rats were probably smart enough to avoid something so obvious as three traps lined up side by side.

John nailed the anchor chain to the floor, bending over the nail to make sure no matter how big a rat he caught, it wouldn’t crawl away dragging the trap with him. He spun off the jar lid and scooped a glob of peanut butter, smearing the bait pan. Then he spread the teeth-lined jaws apart and locked them open with the spring bar. Gently, he placed the trap on the floor, pushing it with his foot toward one of the piles of boxes.

He had started to stand up to go to the other end of the attic when — again — he heard a faint rustling sound. This time it was a bit louder … and closer. A thin dew of sweat broke out on his upper lip, and a deep, urgent churning filled his gut. He waited, poised in one position until his arms and legs began to ache, but he didn’t dare move — not yet.

“Jule … if you’re fooling around … “ he said, but as he waited for even a hint of a giggle, something moved over by the old recliner. A thick, heavy body dropped with a thump to the floor and quickly scurried out of cover not five feet from him.

John let out a startled gasp when the rat, one of the biggest rats he had ever seen, stopped, turned, and glared at him with a cold stare. Its beady eyes shined like black metal balls glistening with oil. The rat laid back its whiskers, exposing its chisel teeth. It chattered at John, who still hadn’t found the strength to move.

Christ … He’s going to attack me … he thought in a flood of panic.

The open attic doorway — his only escape — was beyond the rat.

It might as well have been a hundred miles away.

The rat hunched up its body, its front paws skittering on the floorboards, making a sound much worse than fingernails being dragged across a chalkboard.

Finally John’s body responded to his mental command to do something.

Raising the hammer defensively, he took one step back and braced himself, ready to jump forward the instant the rat came at him. He prayed he could get past him.

“Go on! Get out, you bastard!” John shouted. He shook both the hammer and the flashlight back and forth in front of him.

The rat darted off to one side and disappeared under another pile of boxes … gone as suddenly as it had appeared. John’s heart was thundering in his ears so hard he could barely hear the scuttling sound of the rat’s departure.

“Goddamned good riddance,” John said.

Without wasting a second, John moved quickly to the other end of the attic, anchored, baited, and set the second trap, then went to the attic doorway, where he left the third baited trap. After spinning the peanut butter jar shut, he crumpled up the hardware store bag, tossed it over by the first trap, and hurried down the steps to the upstairs hallway. Not wanting to disturb Bri, he eased the door quietly but firmly shut and locked it. He leaned against the solid wood for a moment to give his racing pulse a chance to slow down.

“Everything all set up there?” Julia called out from downstairs.

“Yeah,” John said, wiping his forehead with his shirtsleeve. He took a deep breath and added, “Everything’s Jim-dandy.”

But he didn’t feel Jim-dandy because he knew the worst was yet to come.

In the morning, he was going to have to check the traps to see if he had caught anything, and he more than half suspected he was going to lie awake half the night waiting and listening for one-two-three snaps as the traps sprung.

Just Jim-dandy …

V

In the morning, it was even worse than he had imagined.

Before he opened the attic door, he sensed trouble. And he found it, all right, at the top of the stairs.

Overnight, he hadn’t heard any of the traps spring, but at least one of the rats had gone for the bait, and the steel jaws had snapped shut over their prey. The problem was, the prey wasn’t dead.

“You son of a bitch,” John whispered as he eased his head around the edge of the stairway and locked eyes with the creature.

The rat’s reflexes must have been quick, John thought, but not quick enough, It looked as though, just as the trap had snapped, the rat had tried to turn and escape. The teeth of the trap had clamped down on his left rear leg, which now hung from a few shreds of torn muscle and shattered bone.

Cold, hate-fined eyes misted with dull, animal pain stared at John, reaching inside his stomach with a black, icy touch.

You did this to me, the rat’s eyes seemed to say. The trap didn’t kill me … Look what you started … Now you’re going to have to finish it.

For the space of several heartbeats, John stood there, staring at the doomed animal. There was a cold, hateful intelligence behind those nearly dead eyes, and the accusation chilled John’s soul. He knew what he should do next. He should walk up to the rat and step down — hard — on its head to end its suffering, if nothing else.

But he didn’t do that.

He couldn’t do it.

No matter how much he knew he should, he simply couldn’t bring himself to go up those stairs into the attic. The dust-thick air clogged his throat; the dim lighting seemed to hide and distort vague, fleeting shadows that shifted from corner to corner. And way at the back of the attic, what he knew was his mother’s old blue wool coat didn’t look at all like a coat. In the dull light, it looked like …

A body … dingy gray, bloated in death … suspended from the rafter.

The old coat, John knew, was hanging motionless on the nail. He had seen it yesterday, but now, as he looked at it … It started to swing ever so gently from side to side … swing and — please, God, no! — turn around.

In a second, he would see a face grinning … leering at him with eyes cold and sightless in death, but looking at him … reaching out to him with icy malice.

“What the hell?” he said, trying to force himself to calm down as he started to back down the stairs to the hallway.

Let the bastard suffer. I’ll clean him out tonight when I get home from work.

He went quickly the rest of the way down the stairs, looking all the while, not at the rat caught in the steel jaws of the trap, but at his mother’s old coat …

At the bloated shape hanging from the rafters.

He made it to the bottom of the stairs and shut the attic door firmly behind him. Trembling, he went downstairs to the kitchen for breakfast. Fortunately, Julia didn’t notice the sweat on his forehead, and she didn’t bother to ask how the traps had worked out. He sure wasn’t about to volunteer any information, either, so after eating a piece of toast that was dry and scratchy … like the attic air … and practically gargling his coffee, he kissed Julia good-bye and rushed out the door.

VI

Although the day was sunny, the wind off the water had a sharp bite. Even with a woolen hat and gloves, it wasn’t long before John’s face and hands were numb. He was in the field by Haskins barn, sighting through the transit and jotting down the elevations in his field book. All around him, the sounds of heavy machinery filled the air as bulldozers scooped out dirt and dump trucks dumped it elsewhere.

It always amazed John how fast certain phases of construction went and then how slowly others seemed to go. Laying out this road seemed to be taking much longer than it should. He and Barry had been crossing and recrossing the open field on the ocean side of the road all day, and they still couldn’t make the staked areas agree with what was on the map. He hoped the boss didn’t blame any of the delay on his work.

“Gotta do one more setup,” he shouted to Barry, who was crouched at a back site, trying to get warm. “Then let’s knock off for lunch.”

Barry nodded, but as he started to stand up, he looked across the road. Competing with the sound of the trucks and bulldozers was an undertone of harsh shouts. When John turned to follow Barry’s gaze, he saw several men hollering and waving to them.

“Wonder what’s up,” Barry said, walking quickly toward John.

“I hope it’s not another bunch of protesters,” John said. He wanted nothing more than to get to the closest restaurant and start pouring in the coffee. He shrugged and, shouldering the transit tripod, said, “Let’s get to the next setup —”

Before he could continue, though, he heard one of the men shout that they had found something near the woods.

“Wanna take a look?” Barry asked.

Sighing, John shook his head.

“Not really. I’d rather get this last elevation done so we can break for lunch. How important can it be?”

“I dunno,” Barry said.

By this time, he had already started up toward the road, so John, still carrying the tripod, followed along behind him.

As they clambered up onto the asphalt, one of the men who was coming toward them across the field shouted,

“Where’s Watson’s truck? I need to use the radio.”

“Someone hurt?” Barry asked.

The man shook his head vigorously.

“No … not recently, anyway.”

“What is it, then?” John asked, feeling a sudden coldness in his groin.

“Dug up some bones,” the man replied. He didn’t make eye contact with either of them. He was too busy scanning the area for a truck with a radio.

“No shit,” Barry said. “So what’s the panic?”

The man said, “Remember last summer, when them workers out to Old Orchard uncovered the body of that man who’d been missing for a coupla weeks? Well, I ain’t takin’ any chances with this. I’m getting the police out here right away.”

With that, he started across the field toward the truck. Barry and John exchanged glances.

“Bones, huh?”

The tightening in John’s stomach was an actual physical pain as he looked across the road to where several men had gathered near the tall oak tree not far from Haskins’ barn. They were huddled close together, looking down at a deep gash in the ground. Twisted, arm-thick roots of the oak lay exposed to the air in a tangled heap beside the now silent backhoe.

“Wanna take a look?” Barry asked, raising an eyebrow.

John’s neck felt as if it were welded into place as he tightly shook his head.

“No,” he said, voice sounding unusually high. “We’ve got our own work to do.”

“Come on,” Barry said as he started out across the field, his boots crunching the frozen earth. “A little excitement to break the monotony.”

Reluctantly, John followed him over to the spot under the oak tree. His mind was running on automatic, and he was barely aware of walking as he came up close to the hole in the ground.

“What you got there?” Barry asked, glancing around the circle of men.

“Looks like someone was buried out here,” one of them said, pushing his hard hat back on his head and rubbing his forehead with the flat of his hand, leaving a large dirt streak above his eyes.

Looking down, John saw a single knob-end of a bone almost the same color as the dirt sticking up out of the ground. The blade of the backhoe had scraped along the side, exposing a thick, mushy-looking black center. For several seconds, he barely listened as each of the men offered an opinion as to what this was.

“Might be some Indian or something,” one of them suggested. “Look how deep it was buried.”

“Don’t be an asshole, Mike. Soil round here’s too acidic. Bones won’t last more’n a coupla hundrit years, tops. Gotta be more recent ‘n that. Maybe a farmer from colonial times.”

“Bone looks too thick to be human,” someone else offered. “Might be a cow or a deer leg bone.”

“Wouldn’t be too thick if it was your skull.”

“Shut the fuck up!”

“Why don’t all a’ you guys get back to work?” one of the other men said sharply. “The cops are on their way. We can stand around here jawin’ all day and not be any closer to knowin ‘. There’s plenty of work needin’ to be done.”

Grumbling, the men dispersed, leaving Barry and John and the man who had sent them back to work standing by the open trench. As the men walked away, they continued to argue about who — or what — might be buried there. Their words hit John’s ears like the garbled reception on a cheap transistor radio. He fished a cigarette from his coat pocket and lit it, inhaling deeply and letting the wind whisk the smoke away as he blew it out. He couldn’t move. All he could do was stand there, staring at the single bone sticking up out of the ground.

And all he could think was, Maybe they’ve found her … Maybe they finally found Abby …

Fifteen minutes later, the police arrived, and while they set about exhuming the single bone and digging close by to see if there were any more bones, John and Barry left for lunch. When they came back an hour later, the state police had arrived, and now they wouldn’t let anyone near the site except for the job foreman and the man who had first uncovered the bone.

After John and Barry got the figures they needed, they drove back to the office. Barry insisted on listening to the radio to see if any reports mentioned the find at the site. But even during the drive home after work that evening, John hadn’t heard anything about the discovery of bones, human or otherwise, on Glooscap Island that afternoon.

When he got home, he complained to Julia about a splitting headache, but he had one more unpleasant surprise to cap off a perfectly awful day. He went up to the attic to get the dead rat and found, instead, that the trap had been pulled to the limit of its anchor chain. Still clenched in the jaws of the trap was the rat’s shredded hind leg, but the rat was nowhere to be found. He realized immediately what had happened. It had chewed off its own leg to get away. Judging by the streak of crusted blood on the floor, it had crawled over to the eaves. No doubt it would die of its wounds, and no doubt the family would soon smell the dead rat as it rotted somewhere inside the walls.

Just fucking great, John thought as he went back downstairs to find the Tylenol.

THIRTEEN

Fish Bait

I

“What’s the matter?”

Coming out of the darkness, the voice made John sit up quickly and spin around. Air caught in his throat with an audible click.

“Nothing,” he said when he saw Julia standing in the living room doorway.

“Something’s gotta be the matter,” she said, coming around the edge of the couch and sitting down beside him. “It’s almost three o’clock in the morning. Most people don’t sit up at this hour unless something’s bothering them.” She put her hand on his knee and gave it a squeeze, but he pulled away from her.

Outside the picture window, the steady flashing of the lighthouse drew their attention. John was unnaturally stiff as she wound her arm around his neck and snuggled up to him.

“Is what happened out at the site today getting to you?”

Both the six o’clock and eleven o’clock news had covered the discovery of bones at the Surfside Ledges condo site. Although neither report had specified whether or not they were actually human bones, the implication based on the caginess of the state trooper they interviewed was that they were human. The trooper’s final comment had been, “We haven’t ruled out anything yet.”

John took a breath and shook his head. When he shifted uneasily on the couch, Julia noticed a soft crinkling sound, like crumpling paper. She almost said something but then thought better of it. He was upset about his work or maybe …

“Are you nervous about going out with Randy today?”

“Not really,” John answered, his voice sounding distant and hollow.

Yesterday afternoon, Randy had called to confirm that John was coming out lobstering with him in the morning. After supper — against his will — John had called back and agreed. He wasn’t sure why … maybe just to get it over with so Julia would stop nagging him about it.

“Everything at work’s going okay?” Julia said. “I mean, other than those guys finding those bones.”

“Sure,” John said, nodding stiffly. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“So why are you sitting here at three o’clock staring out the front window?”

John looked at her, and even though she couldn’t see his face clearly, she knew that he was angry.

“I’ve got a lot on my mind, if that’s all right with you.” He shifted forward and almost stood up, but then he sank back down onto the couch, his chest heaving shallowly.

“John … Honey …” Julia took his hand and squeezed it. “If something’s the matter, you can tell me.”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

This time he did stand up, and as he did, Julia heard the crinkling sound of paper again coming from under the cushion John had been sitting on. He was a black silhouette as he strode over to the window and, clasping his hands behind his back, stared out at the black expanse of night and ocean.

Julia remained on the couch, but then, when she shifted to stand up, she tried to make the motion appear natural and uninterrupted as she slid her hand under the cushion. Her fingers brushed against a sheet of paper, which she pulled out, quickly rolled into a ball, and palmed before walking over to John.

“It’ll be good for you,” she said, carefully keeping the hand holding the piece of paper away from him. She was burning to know what if anything was on it, and not being able to read it immediately convinced her all the more that it was connected with John’s agitation.

He looked at her over his shoulder and laughed shallowly.

“Yeah … Sure. Go out there on a freezing cold morning, in the predawn, for God’s sake. Get myself soaked and freeze my ass off … probably get frigging sick again, too, to watch Randy haul up his traps. What a great time it’ll be.”

“Yeah, but the fresh air will be good —”

“If it’s so goddamned good, why don’t you go instead? I’ll stay home where it’s nice and warm and dry, and you can freeze your ass off.”

“Randy didn’t invite me,” Julia said. “Besides —”

“You think this’ll be a good chance for me and Randy to reconnect, huh?” He snorted and shook his head disgustedly. “Big fucking deal.”

“Well …”

“Wait a minute!” John snapped his fingers, his hostility flashing like summer lightning in his eyes. “I know what.” He slapped his hands together, making a loud crack. “We’ll both go. Randy won’t mind one more passenger.”

“John, I don’t think —”

“No.” He held up his hand to stop any more protest. “No argument. You’re coming.”

“John …”

“If you don’t go, I don’t go. In a while, once I’m sure he’s awake, I’ll give him a call and ask. Even better. We’ll see if Ellie can come along so we can make it a regular party. Agreed?”

Julia shifted her eyes away from her husband and back out into the predawn darkness. She was earnestly wishing she had stayed in bed, left him alone in the darkness downstairs and not seen him until he came back from lobstering. Also, she was burning to know what if anything was written on that piece of paper. She couldn’t help but wonder if it, rather than work, was why John was acting so strange.

Julia clenched her fists, then cringed when the paper made a crinkling sound. John seemed not to notice because he was pacing back and forth, getting more and more excited by his idea.

“You’ve been telling me what a great thing this will be,” he said, practically laughing. “Well … here’s your chance to experience life on the open ocean.”

Julia was silent for a lengthening moment as she considered the corner he had neatly backed her into. Finally, she grunted her agreement.

“Yeah … Okay. I’ll go as long as you can convince Ellie to go.” Her fist hiding the piece of paper tightened. “You’re supposed to be down at the wharf by four-thirty, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’ve got a deal. I’ll put on a pot of coffee, splash some water on my face, and whip up some breakfast. By the time we’re done, you can give Randy a call and see if it’s all right.”

“Fine,” John said. “You might want to put together a few sandwiches, too. I have no idea how long we’ll be out.” He turned and headed for the stairs. “I’m gonna take a quick shower to wake up, although it’s after we’ve been on the boat that we’ll both need to be hosed down.”

Julia was happy John was heading upstairs because it would give her time to read what was on the paper and replace it before he noticed it was missing … if he even knew it was there in the first place. What bothered her most was thinking there was something he was hiding from her. She had always assumed they had an open, honest relationship. If what she was clenching in her hand was very serious …

Well, she would have to see what if anything was on the piece of paper before she jumped to conclusions.

She waited in the kitchen, practically shaking with apprehension until she heard the sound of running water from upstairs. Her fingers were trembling as she unfolded the single sheet of notebook paper and saw what was written there. In strong, bold pencil lines, someone — it didn’t look like John’s handwriting. It looked more like a child’s — were the words:

I WON’T FORGET WHAT…

That was it.

Julia frowned as she turned the paper over, expecting to see more, but the back side of the lined notebook paper was blank except for the reverse impression of the heavy pencil marks.

That’s it? … That’s what’s bothering him?

She turned the sheet over and looked at it again.

What’s the big deal?

“I won’t forget what …”

From upstairs, she heard the sound of running water shut off, so with one last glance at the notebook paper, she refolded it and dashed into the living room. After sliding the note back under the couch cushion, she went into the downstairs bathroom to splash some water on her face.

As she put together breakfast, she kept turning over in her mind the words on the piece of paper. She had no idea what it meant or if this note was what had upset John in the first place.

It might be something else, like those bones they had found at the construction site … or perhaps he wasn’t getting along with someone at work or maybe it was something she didn’t have a hint of, like he was having an affair.

Impossible, she thought, even as a tingling chill danced between her shoulder blades.

But what if it was something like that? … What if he and … how about that girl he had dated in high school? …Abby? … What if they had gotten back together?

“Naw,” she said, shaking her head as she scrambled a batch of eggs with a whisk in a bowl.

Both he and Randy had said that Abby wasn’t living on the island anymore. No one had seen her since high school. Besides, John wouldn’t … he couldn’t be having an affair with her or anyone else. It wasn’t his style. It simply wasn’t in his nature. She knew him that well, at least.

Or maybe she didn’t …

Seconds later, the heavy clumping of John’s feet sounded on the stairs. After a quick detour into the living room —

For what? Julia wondered. To see if that note was still under the cushion?

— he walked into the kitchen as she was stirring eggs in the pan with the spatula. Leaning over the stove, he inhaled and smiled with satisfaction. Then he walked over to the wastebasket and dropped something —

What was that? Julia wondered, the sheet of crumpled-up notebook paper? … Is he in some kind of trouble … something he can’t talk to me about?

— into the trash, jamming it down to bury it under the broken eggshells and empty orange juice carton.

“I — umm,” Julia said. She had been about to ask him about the note but decided not to and concentrated on not letting the eggs burn.

“Yeah?” John said, about to pull out a chair and sit down.

“Would you out some dishes and silverware?”

“Sure thing,” John got the table set while Julia scooped out the eggs, buttered the toast, and brought everything over to the table.

But in the back of her mind all she could think was there was a problem here … a possibly serious problem because John was definitely hiding something from her. The only clue was that stupid cryptic note.

I won’t forget what …

Who won’t forget?… Forget what?…Did John write it?… Or someone else?… Maybe Bri? … What the hell was going on?

Like a worm tunneling through an apple, the tiny doubt that John was hiding something from her could get serious, she knew. How it could get serious, she didn’t dare guess, but like they said about one bad apple spoiling the whole barrel, one little secret between a husband and his wife could gain strength until, like an atomic chain reaction, it reached critical mass.

All she knew, as she and John sat down to eat, was that before they left to meet Randy and Ellie at the wharf, she was going to have to find out if the paper was still under the couch cushion or if that’s what John had thrown away.

Either way, she didn’t like the possibilities.

II

At the wharf, Randy and Ellie, both dressed as warmly as John and Julia, stood waiting for them at the head of a ladder leading down to a float where a small dinghy was moored. Randy directed John to the parking area by the boat yard and then climbed down to the float and busied himself with untying the small boat from the dock. Ellie waited on the wharf with Julia, a tight smile on her face. It was obvious she had had other — and better — things to do this morning.

“Mornin’ to yah,” Randy said, glancing over his shoulder as he tossed the mooring line into the boat and, kneeling, held on to the gunwales.

John was about to ask him to spare the “old salt” routine, but he kept his quiet as he stepped back for Julia and Ellie to climb down the ladder to the floating dock.

“You ever been out lobstering?” Julia asked Ellie once they were on the float.

Biting her lower lip, Ellie shook her head.

“Not since we got married, years ago. I’m not nuts about the ocean.” She spoke softly, but her voice carried in the early morning silence and echoed from the granite pier. “I took some Dramamine so I won’t get seasick.” She chuckled softly, glancing at her husband. “I’m a landlubber.”

“I am, too,” Julia said, wondering if she should take something for seasickness, too.

Pausing to look around, she was surprised by the contrast between the wharf area now and what it had been like the morning she and Frank had spent with Frenchie. Then, with the sunlight and brisk breeze, and boats putting into the cove and pickup trucks rattling on the dirt road, it had seemed an active, though certainly not thriving, workplace. With the sun not yet up, the sea gently lapping the underside of the float, and the air heavy with the smell of rotting fish and low-tide mud flats, it all seemed so lonely … and depressing.

Inside the stone well of the harbor, distant sounds were oddly muffled while the noise they made — even walking across the parking lot — was unnaturally magnified. Riding easily at their moorings in the predawn gloom, the lobster boats that had, in the daytime, looked so brightly painted and seaworthy now looked worn and beaten. Their thin layers of paint were flaking off like —

Like flesh off a skull, Julia thought with a shiver, surprised by such gruesome imagery.

Where did that come from?

She took a deep breath to steady herself and held her arms out for balance as the dock gently bobbed in the water.

“This sure ain’t gonna be what I planned,” Randy said, smiling as he glanced from his wife to Julia.

Julia started to say something, but when she shifted her weight forward, the dock began to rock harder. She braced her feet and held her arms out wider for balance. Once she was confident she wasn’t going to pitch over the side and into the harbor, she cautiously approached the dinghy.

“If there isn’t enough room, Ellie and I don’t have to go,” Julia said. She could feel John behind her, glaring at her back for even suggesting that they stay behind.

“Oh, no … no problem,” Randy said. “I only brought oilskins for me ‘n John, but you ladies probably won’t want to bait and haul, anyways. Plenty of room up front.”

If the smell of rotting fish had anything to do with the job at hand, Julia didn’t want to consider working. She wrinkled her nose at the thought.

“This is going to be a pleasure ride for us ladies,” she said. “You men can do all the hard work.”

“Thanks tons,” John said as he walked confidently on the dock to the dinghy.

“I’m all baited up ‘n’ ready, so let’s get a move on,” Randy said. “Watch it when you step into the punt. It’s none too stable.”

Julia placed her hand on his shoulder as she stepped over the gunwales into the little boat. She banged one of the oars with her knee and, when she tried to regain her balance, set the boat to rocking wildly. This time she knew she could pitch overboard, so she made a quick grab for the rails. Steadying herself, and with Randy adding his muscle to it, the boat quickly stabilized.

“Where do you want me to sit?” she asked, scanning the grungy floor of the boat. There were empty beer bottles, lengths of frayed rope, and assorted rusty tools scattered about and floating in the bilge water.

“The bow or the stern,” Randy said. “Just watch out for that barrel there.”

“Not exactly luxury, is it’?” Ellie said, wrinkling her nose.

Crouching low, Julia moved cautiously toward the front of the boat. When she stepped past the barrel Randy had indicated, she glanced inside and immediately wished she hadn’t. Her stomach did a quick flip, and her breakfast almost made a hasty exit. The barrel was full of fish heads and tails connected only by their saw-toothed spines, and emitted the overpowering stench of rotten fish. She tried not to let it get to her. Otherwise, she’d be hanging over the side of the boat, emptying her stomach.

John waited until Julia and Ellie were settled in the prow before he got in and seated himself in the stern. He sat stiffly with his hands on his knees and inhaled deeply.

Randy obviously hadn’t even tried to keep up appearances with this boat. It had last seen a paintbrush five or six years ago. Dirty bilge water sloshed back and forth on the floor as their weight shifted back and forth, and all Julia could wonder was if the boat would fill up and sink before they made it out to the mooring.

Once his passengers were settled, Randy pushed off, leaped into the punt, unshipped the oars, and started rowing. Julia watched his back bend and his shoulders hunch as he pulled, strong and steady, on the oars. It seemed as though he had eyes in the back of his head because he threaded his way between the mass of moored boats apparently without looking. She glanced back at the receding dock and wondered why she had let John bully her into coming. The strong smell of bait and the rocking motion of the boat were doing one hell of a number on her stomach. She considered asking Ellie if she happened to have some Dramamine but decided to tough it out … if she could.

Before long, she thought, I’ll be giving all of you guys a little show … a little wet burp. She chuckled softly to herself when she thought of Bri’s euphemism for throwing up.

Wet burp, indeed.

“We can do a short haul today,” Randy said, straining on the oars. “I don’t expect we’ll be more’n three or four hours.”

Oh, great, Julia thought as the dinghy lurched from side to side. My stomach will never last that long.

She faced into the wind and inhaled the fresh sea air, trying to get the smell of rotting fish smell out of her nose. Her only hope was that, once they were on the lobster boat, she could get a bit more distance between herself and the bait barrel.

Soon enough, Randy shipped the oars and, standing up quickly, grabbed the side of his lobster boat before they hit it. Pulling the punt in as close as he could, he nodded toward.

“All a’board,” he said. “Welcome to the Bait Barrel.”

Appropriately named, Julia thought as she clambered over the side, grateful for the relative stability of the larger boat. Her movement made the underside of the punt slap against the water, but Randy apparently didn’t think he was in any danger of getting swamped. Once she was on board, Ellie and John climbed up, and Randy tied his punt to the mooring.

“Grab this, will yah?” Randy said to John as he muscled the bait barrel over to the side and lifted it.

Wrinkling his nose, John carefully took hold of the splintery container and swung it down to the floor.

“Christ,” he said, wiping his hands together. “Don’t I get rubber gloves or something?”

“I’ve got some you can wear,” Randy said as he leaned over the side of the punt, making sure it was securely tied to the mooring. “But it’ll wreak havoc on your hands if you wear ‘em all day.”

John brought his hand to his nose and gave it a quick sniff.

“Might want to chance it,” he said, shaking his head, but this was just the beginning of the ordeal. Randy climbed into the boat, ran though a quick check of his equipment, and then started up the engine. It took a few tries to get the old machinery going, but before long the Bait Barrel was putt-putting away. Randy cast off and steered a course through the harbor mouth and out to sea.

In the time it took them to load up, the sun tipped its orange disk over the edge of the horizon. With a fresh, dry wind blowing off the land, it promised to be one of those achingly clear November days — the kind you can find only along the Maine coast, and which would be perfect if there weren’t the darkening threat of winter approaching.

John donned some oilskins and gloves and was talking to Randy as he set a course out around the harbor entrance. From the harbor mouth, Randy cut to the left —”hard a’ port,” as he informed his guests — and angled away from Glooscap. Behind them, gulls flew low over the water, keeping pace with the boat, drawn by the prospect of an easy breakfast if any bait chanced to fall overboard.

The slanting morning sun touched the island with a lance of gold, bringing out sharp details of the still-sleeping island. Beyond the gentle white curve of Sandy Beach, the smooth, bare hump of Bald Hill rose above the evergreen woods. With most of the deciduous trees stripped of leaves, Julia thought the hill did look like a man’s balding head. Farther along the shore, lined with picture-postcard quaint houses — at least at this distance — the rocky coast stretched around the curve of the island.

“Is that where the condos are going?” Julia asked Ellie, pointing to a bright yellow and brown stretch at the tip of the island. The morning sun illuminated the freshly laid roads, making them look like dark scars on a land colored with the yellows and browns of autumn.

Ellie nodded, but John, thinking she was talking to him, leaned out of the boat housing and, cupping his hands to his mouth, shouted, “What?”

Julia simply shook her head and waved him away.

“If you ladies get too cold up there, you can always come inside the cabin here to warm up,” Randy shouted to them. “I’ve got two thermoses of coffee.”

“Maybe in a bit,” Julia said, fully enjoying the brisk wind in her face. She figured once the sun had been up awhile, she would warm up. She looked out over the water.

The bow of the boat was slapping into a light chop, sending white foam flying to either side. Up close, the water looked cold … menacing, even. Julia wondered if she would be able to last even a few minutes if she fell overboard. She grabbed on to the gunwales tightly for reassurance as the boat headed further out into Casco Bay.

One thing that struck her as strange was how different real lobstering was from the tourist image of it — which, in point of fact, was all she’d had until now. Postcards and books about Maine always made the job look so quaint, completely glossing over the dirty, smelly aspects. She found it hard to imagine that this was what Randy had to look forward to every morning, heading out to sea in cold weather and sometimes worse.

The steady throbbing of the engine was lulling her into dreamy thoughtfulness, so she was startled when the engine suddenly cut to a low idle. She turned around and saw Randy, one hand on the wheel, the other holding a long wood handle with a hook on the end. It didn’t take her long to realize that he was going to snag one of the buoys she saw bobbing in the swells.

Randy and John were talking, and Julia was interested in hearing what they were saying, but she didn’t want to leave Ellie alone up front, so she stayed where she was and watched as the boat slowed to a stop. Randy leaned out over the side with the gaff, and with one quick swipe, hooked the buoy line and pulled. When the rope was close enough to grab, he leaned the hook against the side of the boat, grabbed the rope, and started pulling.

John stood off to the side. He signaled for Julia to join him. Being careful not to lose her balance, she made her way to the other side of the boat. Looking as though she would have much preferred to be at home, Ellie stayed where she was, watching them with indifference.

Randy had to yell to be understood as he described what he was doing. After pulling the rope up enough so the buoy and a smaller float were inside the boat, he laced the rope — or “warp,” as he called it — around a pulley, then wound it around the drum wheel.

He flipped a switch, which started a motor that was much louder than the boat’s. The rope caught and started to come up easily, All Randy had to do was guide it to make sure the rope didn’t foul as the lobster pot lifted up off the ocean floor.

The drum on the pot hauler wrung briny water from the rope, sloshing the deck. If Randy hadn’t been wearing oilskins, he would have been soaked through within seconds. Before long, the lobster pot banged up against the protective wooden slats nailed to the side of the boat, and Randy swung it up and over onto a roughly built wooden stand.

“You got one,” Julia said excitedly when she saw a dark green, almost black lobster angrily flipping its tail inside the trap. Its claws clattered like maracas on the wet slats of wood.

Randy turned off the pot hauler and opened the trap door. Grabbing the lobster by the back, he held it up in the air for a quick inspection before banding its crusher claw and dropping it into the holding tank. With barely a glance over his shoulder, he stuck his hand —

God, Julia thought, his bare hand!

— into the bait barrel, grabbed one a fish head, stuck it onto the bait hook inside the trap, then shut and locked the trap door.

“That’s all there is to it,” Randy said before he dropped the trap over the side and played out the line as it sank to the bottom. “One down … fifty-six to go.”

John nodded approval, and Julia, who had been thinking it didn’t look all that tough, sighed when she considered how many more traps he had to haul today.

“At the dock, you said you had a short haul today,” Julia said. “What did you mean by that?”

Randy was back at the wheel, steering a course for his next buoy. The engine was racing loudly again, so he had to lean close as she repeated her question.

“Altogether, I’ve got more ‘n three hunrit ‘poverty boxes.’“

“Poverty boxes?”

“Lobster traps … That’s what we call ‘em. In the summer, I do all right. Now that winter’s comin’, I start takin’ ‘em out of the water, but I’ll still have over a hunerit and fifty. A short haul is when you pull little less than half of your traps and leave the rest for the next day. By alternating back and forth, you don’t bust your ass quite so bad. No reason to, now that tourist season’s over.”

Julia nodded and then rejoined Ellie at the bow, grateful to be away from the nauseating bait smell. No matter how interesting all of this was, she didn’t think it was worth putting up with the stomach-churning stench, which now saturated Randy but — hopefully — not John.

Randy pulled a few more traps, and John pitched in, helping out. At first, Julia thought his motions seemed tentative as he flailed with the gaff and tried to hook the buoy. After a while, though, with Randy’s help, he started getting relatively proficient at it. Several times, either when his grip on a pot would slip or he held on to the warp too long when throwing the pot back in, he and Randy would hoot and holler, and Julia was happy to see her husband genuinely enjoying himself. Randy broke out a thermos of coffee, and Julia and Ellie came back to share it with them, but mostly they kept to the front of the boat, letting the sounds of the men working as well as the conversation-killing steady throb of the engine and the lapping of waves lull her into a relaxed, dreamy state.

As the sun rose higher, cutting but not entirely removing the chill, the ocean turned brilliant blue. Farther out to sea, Julia saw rough-looking whitecaps —”heavy chop,” Ellie informed her. But here in the shelter of the islands, the water was calmer. Shimmering light so bright it hurt to look directly at it trailed alongside the boat as Randy took them further out to sea. Randy explained that they would make a wide loop out around Chebeague and then circle back so they could get a good view of Portland harbor … the “tourist trip,” as Randy called it.

After more than two hours, Randy had quite a catch of lobsters, and John worked efficiently alongside him now, no longer a hindrance. He was opening traps, rebaiting hooks, and sinking the traps almost as quickly as Randy could.

And as they worked, Julia noticed that John and Randy related better. The night they had visited Randy and Ellie, and even this morning when they were starting out, John had treated both Randy and Ellie with a cool distance that, Julia thought, hid more outright hostility. But now Randy and John seemed to have rediscovered and started to share whatever they’d had as best friends in high school. They traded off-color jokes, which Julia and Ellie chose to ignore, and good-natured goofing around, trading insults and verbal abuse the close friends do. It made Julia doubly enjoy the morning and the fact that, even at the expense of her stomach, she had come along.

It was while they were stopped, after John had gaffed a pot and started to haul it up, that Julia glanced over the side of the boat and saw something.

“What the — ?” she said aloud, shifting into a sitting position but not taking her eyes off the water.

There had been a flash of motion to the side of the sun’s reflection — something that hadn’t looked quite right.

“You seasick?” Ellie asked, concern registering on her face as she moved closer to Julia.

“No,” Julia said, “I —”

She cut herself off, and then, as she was leaning over the rail, straining to see what had been shimmering below the surface next to the boat, John let out a loud shout.

“Come on, you mother-humper!”

“Did it fetch up on you?” Randy asked, leaning from the house.

John flipped off the hauler and was straining to hold on to the warp. His mouth was set in a hard line, his teeth exposed.

“I don’t know what’s the matter,” he said sharply. “But if you don’t give me a hand here, we’re gonna lose it.”

Leaving the wheel, Randy came over to the side of the boat and took the rope from John.

“I saw something under the boat,” Julia said, looking past Ellie to the men struggling with the lobster pot. She heard the nervous quaver in her voice, and all she could think about was the theme music from Jaws. She had no idea what she had seen, but there most definitely had been something … something long and dark, shifting beneath the surface, just out of sight.

Randy was still holding on to the line, trying to jiggle it free.

“Might be caught up in some kelp,” he said. “Take this and hold tight. Lemme try —”

He didn’t finish the sentence as he handed the rope to John and, easing the engine up a bit, swung the boat around to approach the pot from the other side. Once he had come about, he cut the engine again and took the rope from John, but no amount of pulling would get the trap free.

Julia, meanwhile, was looking back and forth from what the men were doing to the water below the boat. While Randy was bringing the boat around, the blurry motion was still there. It wasn’t much. The rippling surface of the water refracted the light, but she could have sworn she saw a vague white figure swimming alongside the boat even as it turned.

Of course, it was entirely possible that a big fish — a tuna or even a shark — or perhaps a school of fish that looked like one big fish might follow along beside a boat. The only part Julia was having trouble accepting was her conviction that she had seen legs … that the shape underneath the boat had given a quick, powerful kick to keep up.

“Could there be … something like a big fish … maybe a shark tangled in the line?” she asked Ellie.

“I’m not the one to ask,” Ellie said with a shrug of her shoulder.

Julia suddenly got the crazy thought that there was a gigantic lobster down there, holding on to the rope, ready to seek revenge on all the local lobstermen on the island … starting with Randy. Her mind filled with images of giant sea beasts and crabs from half a dozen lame brained science fiction movies from the fifties.

Why not an oversized lobster?

Julia dismissed her wild speculations but found no reassurance in Ellie’s disengaged expression.

There was something down there!

On the port side of the boat, looking away from the sun, the water was darker, impenetrable. It rippled alongside the boat like splotches of spilled ink. Still, Julia could see a hint of motion as though whatever was down there was keeping pace with the boat.

Could it be the shadow of the boat, reflecting in the water?

That was possible, but even as the boat turned, now and again the flicker of motion appeared to travel in the opposite direction. It darted back and forth, keeping close to the underside of the boat. She couldn’t shake the impression that she had seen, for an instant, the blurred image of human legs, kicking as though — crazy though the thought was — someone was swimming alongside the boat a good six feet or more beneath the surface.

“We may have to give up on this one,” Randy said, glancing at John over his shoulder as he continued to try to raise the pot. “‘S funny, though. The bottom here’s usually pretty smooth.”

He pulled on the line so hard the boat started listing seriously to the side. Julia shivered and looked longingly at the nearest land when she imagined all four of them falling over the side of the boat and into the icy water. Could she swim to shore before the cold got her?

“You gotta expect it now ‘n then,” Randy said. “‘Least I can save the buoy.”

Taking a six-inch knife from his belt sheath, he sawed through the strands of rope. When he was about halfway through, the tension on the rope released with a loud snap. The sound reminded Julia of the sound a bullet would make hitting the water, and she remembered that day watching Frenchie unload his rifle at the wharf rats. The rope sucked back into the water so fast she had the impression something down there had yanked it.

Randy coiled up the rope he had salvaged and tossed it to the stern.

“The storm the other day probably stirred up the kelp beds,” he said, shaking his head with disgust. “I hate to lose a pot.”

“Occupational hazard,” John said as he shook out a cigarette and lit it.

Julia was giving them scant attention when Randy opened up the engine and started toward his next buoy. She was still convinced that whatever was under the boat was still there. She jumped with a startled scream when a heavy thump sounded on the bottom of the boat.

“What was that?” she asked, looking anxiously from Ellie to John and Randy.

Ellie shrugged. John and Randy, apparently, hadn’t heard her.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Ellie said, shaking her head. “Maybe we hit another buoy.”

“It sure sounded like … something,” Julia said, her voice tightening.

Glancing over the side again, she froze when she saw eyes —

Human eyes!

— staring up at her.

In the instant her body flooded with panic, she tried to convince herself it had been her own face reflected in the water, but glancing down again, she most definitely saw wide, staring eyes looking up at her. They glowed with unnatural brightness, but even as Julia tried to register what she was seeing, they faded away, sinking down into the murky depths.

“John —” she said, but then she caught herself.

John looked at her, but she simply shook her head, feeling foolish.

“You okay?” John asked, making his way toward her. “You feeling seasick?”

“I should’a given you some Dramamine before we left,” Ellie said apologetically.

Julia tightened her lips and shook her head, thinking, If only it were that simple … I’m seeing things …

No, there … there’s someone following us.”

John glanced around, scanning the ocean, obviously not getting what she meant.

“They’re swimming underwater … beside the boat.

When she thought it might be a mermaid, she almost laughed out loud.

Almost.

But that was the impression she’d had ... of a person with long, flowing hair swimming on her back below the surface, looking up at the suurface.

How? … Longingly?

Angrily?

And why do I think her?

Panic tugged at her mind.

Why do I assume it’s a woman?

“Look over the side. Tell me if you see anything,” Julia said, pointing down over the gunwales.

Both Ellie and John obliged her, staring for a while as the ocean slid past the moving boat. Then they both looked at her. John shook his head.

“Sorry,” he said. “Just water ‘s far as I can see.”

“I don’t see anything either,” Ellie said. Her face twisted between concern for Julia and caution.

“I —” Julia halted, searching for the right word. ‘‘I’m … not sure. I thought I saw something.”

“Could have been apiece of the kelp,” John offered. “Randy said the storm might’ve stirred things up. Or maybe it was a seal. I don’t know.”

By this time, Randy had gotten to his next buoy. He cut the engine, bringing the boat to a stop, and he and John set to work, hauling the pot. As the hydraulic drum whined, pulling the lobster pot up, Julia was tense. Any minute, she expected to hear the hauler whine louder as it struggled to pull free another pot that was snagged on the bottom.

But this one came up easily, and Julia let out a sigh of relief, telling herself to calm down and not get overexcited about things.

What kind of things might be down there? Julia asked herself.

For an answer, all she had to do was look — or try to look — over the side of the boat.

Was that really a person? she wondered, or had it been a trick of the interplay of her reflection with the water and sunlight?

Try as she might to deny it, Julia was convinced there was a person down there, floating along beside the boat, swimming on her back. If she looked now, she would see her. Her eyes would be closer to the surface now … so close Julia would be able to peer into them.

Tension wound through her like taut bared wire as she imagined … not just eyes, but hands as well … swollen, white, water-wrinkled hands slapping like dead fish onto the side of the boat as they tried to find a hold … tried to get enough purchase to pull up …

Julia knew it was impossible.

No one — no human being could possibly stay in water this cold as she —

Why do I keep thinking she? Julia wondered.

— followed the lobster boat out to sea.

It had to be something else … the kelp, like Randy said, or a school of fish … or maybe a sea otter like that one up in Rockport years ago. What was his name? Andre? She read something about how Andre made a nuisance of himself, following fishing and lobster boats around the harbor.

Over the sounds Randy and John made as hey worked, Julia thought she heard a heavy, wet slap against the side of the boat. Her imagination was now spinning into overdrive, and her mind was flooded with the frightening image of those eyes coming up closer to the surface … of those hands, reaching up to the side of the boat.

Swallowing hard before she sucked in a deep breath of air, Julia turned away from watching Randy and John. Her hands clenched into fists, and her shoulder muscles bunched up as though she were about to take a punch at someone. She inched her way to the side of the boat and, bracing herself, let her gaze drift down to the water.

In one frozen instant, her mind literally went blank.

There was someone there.

A person.

And eyes — cold …blank …dead — were staring up at her.

Hands were reaching up out of the water.

Hands as cold and white and thin as a skeleton’s broke the surface of the water and then, ever so slowly, waved to her as though beckoning for her to lean over the side of the boat … to look closer … to come closer …

Waves of dizziness crashed over Julia as she stared in disbelief at the figure in the water.

It was a girl … a young girl.

Not much older than Bri, she thought with stomach-dropping horror.

The girl’s long, dark, flowing hair twisted and tangled in the ocean currents. Her thin legs scissor-kicked in long, languid strokes that easily kept pace with the boat. She was suspended in the water, floating gently several feet below the surface, her image distorted by the rippling waves as she bobbed like a feather riding the breeze. She held her hands almost pleadingly up to Julia. Her long, narrow fingers curled as she beckoned.

“No … I …” Julia stammered.

She took a short step backward and thumped into the boat housing. Unable to force the image from her mind, she tried to tear her gaze away, but those eyes … those cold, dead eyes shot like coldly burning sparks into her soul. Like whirlpools, they dragged Julia forward to the side of the boat again, against her will.

Seaweed and black slime dangled like bracelets from the hands as they waved to Julia, luring … drawing … pulling her to the side of the boat.

“ … come … “ a voice whispered, rasping in Julia’s mind like the hiss of metal on stone.

Julia was drawn closer to the side, her gaze transfixed by those eyes those cold eyes.

“… come to … “

One more step forward brought Julia up against the gunwales. She gripped the rail tightly, her knuckles going white as she leaned out over the water, fighting — yet deep inside herself not wanting to fight — the irresistible pull of those cold eyes … those dead, white hands … that voice …

“… come … to … me …”

Sunlight shattered like diamonds on the ocean surface, dazzling her eyes and burning like a laser into her retina, leaving spinning afterimages that danced across the water. The dark shape beneath the surface rippled and began to resolve into a clearly defined human shape as the hands reached up to her.

“No,” Julia said in a whimper.

Just then, Randy gunned the engine, and the boat leaped forward.

Caught off balance, Julia started to go over the side of the boat, but then something — someone snagged her arm and pulled her back.

“Julia! For God’s sake! Be careful,” Ellie yelled above the roar of the boat’s engine.

Julia lurched to the side, breaking free of Ellie’s grip and swinging her arms wildly to regain her balance.

“… come … to … me … Julia …”

John turned when he heard Ellie shout and dashed over to Julia as she slumped against the boat housing.

“Are you all right?” he yelled, looking anxiously from Julia to Ellie for an explanation.

Julia’s eyes were wide as she looked at her husband. She grabbed him by the shoulder and held him close … as close as she could. His breath was the only warmth she could feel as it washed over the side of her face. Her eyes bulged from their sockets, and her face was cold and bloodless … as deathly pale as …

As those hands, she thought.

Her panic increased with an audible rush.

Those hands … were … reaching up … to me.

“No … the — umm, I kinda lost it there for a second,” she stammered. Her voice had a distorted vibration. “Sorry. Maybe I’m getting seasick.”

“You look like shit,” John said, shifting to one side and hugging her tightly. “For a minute there, I thought you were going to go over.”

“Yeah, when the boat started up … it kind of caught me off balance, and my stomach sorta went.”

“Well, now’s certainly not the time of year to take a swim,” John said, forcing a laugh. He had caught only a glimpse before Julia fell backward, but he had the clear impression she had been about to jump — not fall — into the water.

“Yeah, I … I don’t know,” Julia stammered. “I think I’m gonna lose it.”

She looked desperately at her husband, wanting to tell him what she had seen.

No, she thought. Not saw … Thought I saw … It wasn’t really there …

She wasn’t sure why, but she couldn’t bring herself to do that. It wasn’t that she was afraid he would think she was crazy.

What else would you call it? her mind whispered.

“Why don’t have some more coffee?” John said. “Warm yourself up.” His voice was strong and reassuring, and it helped dissolve some of the panic inside her. “You still look pale. You probably ought to get out of the wind and rest a bit.”

Randy stuck his head around the corner of the boat housing and said, “We can head back in if you’re not feeling well.”

Julia started toward the boat housing, but every step was shaky, and she was grateful to have John to lean on. She shook her head at Randy’s suggestion.

“You’ve got work to do,” she said. “I don’t want to screw up your day just because I got a little queasy.”

“This ain’t an actual workday for me, anyways. I could let you and Ellie off at the wharf,” Randy said. “John and I can come back out and finish off.” He glanced at his wife, who had followed them inside the small cabin. The look of pleased expectation on her face was impossible to ignore.

John held Julia’s elbow and assisted her in taking a seat inside the housing.

“You may be coming down with that flu Bri and I had,” he said. “You shouldn’t take any chances.”

“I’m all right … Honest,” she said, reaching for the thermos of coffee and pouring herself a cupful. “I lost my balance there for a second. I’ll be all right. I’m sorry I spoiled it for the rest of you.”

For the next hour, as Randy and John hauled a few more of Randy’s traps, she maintained a brave front; but for the rest of the time they were on the boat, she couldn’t get that image of a woman in the water, under the boat, out of her mind.

Maybe, as John had suggested, she was getting the flu. If she was running a fever, she could have been hallucinating. But she shivered whenever she looked toward the side rail of the boat. It had seemed so clear, so definite … those eyes staring up at her … and those hands reaching for her … and that voice.

“… come … to … me … Julia …”

By the time they moored the Bait Barrel and rowed the punt back to the dock, what she had seen began to take on the elusiveness of a dream. The image was still there — those eyes … those hands blazed in her mind like a glowing branding iron, but she told herself that, rationally, there couldn’t have been anyone swimming alongside the boat.

It was impossible!

She was running a fever or had seen a fish or something … but whatever rational explanation there might be — even if she never discovered it — she came away from this experience with one very clear thought.

She was never going out on a boat, lobstering or otherwise, ever again.

FOURTEEN

Ice Maiden

I

A blue funk, that’s what Julia called it, even though it wasn’t Monday and it wasn’t even morning.

It was Wednesday afternoon, and she couldn’t shake the feeling of … well, it wasn’t exactly depression. It was more like a fatigue, both mental and physical.

Frank had come back from visiting friends down at the wharf and, after a light lunch, was in his bedroom with the TV blaring away, no doubt asleep. John was at work. Bri was still at school. And Julia was bored out of her mind.

She had done the grocery shopping and all the housecleaning she could stand on Monday. With Robert Parker’s latest Spenser novel spread open on her lap, she was sitting in the living room, staring blankly out the window.

After the cold — and terrifying — ride in Randy’s lobster boat on Saturday, she had come home with a bone-deep chill that she was sure would turn into a fever by night. It made sense that it was her turn to get whatever John and Bri had just gotten over. But by Sunday, although she still didn’t have much energy, she hadn’t been laid low, either — certainly not as badly as John and Bri had. She was sure she was fighting a light touch of something, though. That’s the only way she could account for her inability to get interested in anything. Even the Spenser book wasn’t holding her interest.

Earlier that day, she had considered taking a walk, but the weather had gotten increasingly colder since Saturday, and she didn’t want to take any chances of lowering her resistance if she was fighting a flu. Instead, after running a few loads of laundry through, she brewed a cup of spearmint tea — that “unnatural” tea, as Frank called it — and settled in the living room to read. The only problem was, the stillness of the house, cut only by the indistinct buzz of Frank’s TV, worked on her nerves and kept drawing her attention away from her book.

She had a lot to consider, and thoughts and feelings she didn’t like having kept intruding on her mind.

Thoughts like — What about that note she had found?

I won’t forget what …

What?

Who wrote the note and why?

And, more importantly, why had John been hiding it from me?

He had purposely it under the couch cushion and then, when he thought she wasn’t paying attention, grabbed it and thrown it away.

Why?

Why did she suddenly feel as though she couldn’t trust her own husband?

She was desperately wrong if something as simple as that note — but is it so simple? — could shake her trust in him.

Why didn’t she tell John, honestly and upfront, what was on her mind?

Even if she hadn’t confronted him about the note, why couldn’t she tell him what she had seen in the water under the boat?

It wasn’t just because he might think she was crazy.

They had always had an honest and open relationship. They prided themselves on never hiding anything from each other. But — and it hurt to admit this — for the past few weeks — ever since they’d moved to Glooscap, if she was honest with herself — John had been acting like he was hiding something from her.

Maybe it was as simple as not wanting to live with his father … or that he didn’t like his new job. Certainly, it couldn’t be that he loved her any less, but something was galling him and was eating him up from the inside.

She knew him well enough to know that.

Wishing she had someone to talk to, she let her gaze drift over to the phone. If she had felt a little better, she would have dialed her friend Sue back in Vermont and talked it out. Over the years, she and Sue had been through a lot, and Sue might see something obvious that she was missing.

But she didn’t want to break the closed silence of the house. The small measure of contentment and security of just sitting on the couch and watching small motes of dust spiral through the shafts of sunlight filtering through the curtains was soothing. The droning of Frank’s TV receded to little more than a distant insect-like hum as Julia sat there, staring off into space and letting her thoughts roll around in her mind until she became aware of something … a very light tap-tapping sound.

By the time the sound had intruded on her awareness, it was as though she had been listening to it for a long time before she became aware of it. Shifting her feet to the floor, she let the book drop to the floor as she craned her head around and tried to locate the source of the sound.

It seemed to be coming from the kitchen … a steady, faint tap-tapping … as though someone was rapping lightly on the window. She stood up and walked around the side of the couch. When she entered the kitchen, the tapping sound suddenly stopped, and a fleeting shadow shifted across the windowpane.

Her first impression was that a bird had been sitting on the sill pecking at something — maybe its own reflection on the glass. Before she could relax the tension in her shoulders, the sound came again, only now it was behind her, in the living room.

Julia was about to call out to Frank to ask if he was doing something that might be causing the sound, but he napped every day at this time. There was no sense disturbing him. She walked back into the living room and almost screamed out loud when the indistinct silhouette of someone appeared in the front door window. Before she could blink, the figure rippled and then was gone.

It didn’t duck away to one side.

It simply ... vanished.

Am I imagining things? she asked herself.

She was torn between wanting to walk boldly to the door, pull aside the curtain, and look out. Either that, or ignore it and go upstairs instead and lie down, pretending she hadn’t seen a thing.

But she had seen something, and as her mind replayed the figure she had seen in the water beside the boat the other day, a deep chill took hold of her.

Am I losing my mind? she wondered.

Is there something wrong with me?

She thought that perhaps the pressure of moving and trying to adjust to island life was affecting her more than she realized. A wave of panic clutched her, but she told herself they had been living in Maine for almost two months, now. That excuse was wearing thin. Julia’s hands were clammy, and a swirl of cold air as though the door had been left open sucked up around her, making her shiver.

I’m getting sick, she thought, eyeing the couch and her unread novel lying facedown on the floor.

The muscles in her legs turned to jelly as waves of cold swept up and down her back, making her teeth chatter. Staggering backward, she grabbed the couch arm for support and was easing down onto the couch when the tapping noise came again … this time behind her … near the dining room window.

Her legs almost gave out from under her as she swung around to look and yet again saw a hint of motion as someone ducked out of sight.

“This isn’t very funny,” she muttered. She didn’t have the strength to shout as she strode to the closet by the front door. Grabbing her heavy jacket, she shrugged her arms into it and, swinging open the front door, stepped out onto the front doorstep. With her first breath, the cold autumn air hit her lungs like a hammer. She gasped, and her eyes were watering as she looked around both sides of the house.

The grass was yellow and matted. It showed no sign of footprints by either the living room or dining room windows. Pulling her collar tightly around her neck, Julia came down the steps and walked slowly around the side of the house. Frozen soil crunched underfoot, sounding like someone grinding away on a mouthful of breakfast cereal.

Julia walked to the corner of the house and looked down along its length, but there was nobody there. It was possible no one had ever been there, that she had imagined it all, due — perhaps — to the fever she was running. Or maybe Bri had gotten home from school early and was goofing around outside.

“I caught you,” she yelled suddenly, and turning quickly, she dashed around the front of the house to the Oak Street side where she could see both the living room and kitchen windows.

Again, though, there was no sign of anyone … no footprints in the matted grass or anything to indicate the sound had been other than her imagination.

With a sigh that came out a thick plume of cold mist, Julia turned and started back toward the front door, but she had taken no more than two or three steps when the front door, which she had left open, slammed shut with a loud bang. It sounded like a gun going off close to her head. Julia jumped back with a startled yelp and stared wide-eyed at the closed door. As she cautiously approached the front steps, she was convinced that below the crunching sound her feet made in the dead grass, she could still hear a low, steady tap-taping sound on a window, only now it was coming from inside the house.

Trembling, Julia mounted the steps and reached for the doorknob, convinced that it wouldn’t budge when she turned it.

It’d be just my luck today to lock myself out, she thought as she turned the knob.

To her surprise, the door opened, and as soon as she stepped inside, the faint tapping sound stopped.

Shaking her head, convinced she was letting her nerves get the better of her, she took off her coat and hung it back up in the closet. If she had been feeling poorly before, she was much worse now. Her only thought was to get to the couch and lie down before she collapsed onto the floor.

Lurching forward, her arms raised in front of her like Frankenstein’s monster, she walked over to the couch, thinking she wanted nothing more than let sleep pull her down.

Damn any tapping sounds, she thought. Damn it all!

Her knees bumped into the couch arm, and she pitched forward, letting her arms flop out to the side. The knuckles of her left hand dragged across the floor, but she didn’t care. Tiny spots of light swam in front of her eyes like amoebas. She reached for the afghan on the back of the couch and pulled it down on top of her, but it wasn’t going to be enough to cut the chills that was now ripping like a blizzard through her.

As she drifted away in a thin, disturbed sleep, the tap-taping sound came again, but now not from just one window but several at the same time. The sound grew steadily louder until it rattled every window in the house. It seemed as though the panes of glass would shatter and explode inward, and in her disturbed sleep, Julia thought a howling winter storm — like the chill racking her body — was throwing its full strength against the house. Icy fingers knocked on the windows and reached under the clapboards, trying to tear the glass and wood away.

Julia was drifting uneasily, so she had no sense of how long these sounds continued, but suddenly another sound as though from another world intruded on her awareness. She heard the screeching of school bus brakes.

Bri’s home, she thought hazily, rolling her head to one side and staring at the door.

From outside in front of the house, she heard with unusual sharpness the sounds of the school bus door opening and a brief burst of laughter and shouted conversations that cut off as suddenly as it had begun. Then Bri came up the walkway and opened the front door.

Hey! ‘‘I’m home!” she shouted.

“And not playing with the windows anymore,” Julia said lazily as she tried without much success to sit up on the couch.

“God, you look awful,” Bri said as she walked into the living room and, slinging her backpack to the floor, looked at her mother.

“Thanks,” Julia said.

“I’m serious,” Bri said as she came over to the couch and placed her hand on her mother’s forehead. “You’re burning up with fever.”

Julia nodded and tried to look directly at Bri, but her vision kept wavering in and out of focus like she was looking through a telescope, and someone else was fiddling with the focus. She could still hear a loud chattering sound, but it took her a while to realize it was her teeth, not someone outside tapping on the windows.

“I guess I … caught a chill when I was outside,” Julia said weakly. “I thought you were tapping on the windows.”

“I just got off the bus,” Bri replied with a shrug. “You want me to get you anything? Ginger ale or tea or something?”

Julia shook her head. “I’m fine … but I saw someone … out there. Maybe your friend Audrey stopped by looking for you.”

Bri started to say something, but no words came out. Looking down at the floor, she acted as if she hadn’t heard her.

“Does your friend have long, dark hair?” Julia asked. She thought she had caught a fleeting glimpse of dark hair in the window, but then she realized that what she was remembering was the girl she had seen swimming in the ocean beside Randy’s lobster boat.

Bri’s eyes darted back and forth from her mother to the kitchen doorway.

“Uh, yeah … her hair’s kinda long, but she’s not my friend.”

Julia was having trouble focusing as she looked up from the couch. She almost drifted off to sleep and had to force herself to stay awake.

“Was her at school today? Why would she come around here before school was out?”

“I don’t know,” Bri said. She picked up her backpack and started toward the kitchen. “I haven’t seen her since I fell —” She cut herself off before she let her mother know about her near drowning the weekend before last. “ — for a long time,” she finished lamely.

“Maybe it wasn’t her, then,” Julia said.

Desperate to switch the subject, Bri asked if she wanted some aspirin. Before she could reply, Julia drifted off to sleep, so Bri tiptoed out into the kitchen and poured herself her usual after-school glass of milk. The milk was fresh and cold, but the mere mention of Audrey’s name made it taste sour and curdled. She poured more than half of it down the sink and then went up to her room to do her homework until her father got home.

II

The worst thing Julia expected to happen on Thanksgiving Day was that John and his father would plant themselves in front of the TV and watch football games all day while she and Bri did all the work. John was usually good about helping out in the kitchen, and it never failed to surprise her how, on holidays, he acted as if the kitchen was her job and hers alone.

This Thanksgiving proved different. If anything, John was more helpful than necessary. He stuffed the turkey, kept an eye on it in the oven, and basted it every half hour. He cut and prepared the squash and potatoes, and had the table set before she asked. Julia and Bri felt left in the dust because, whenever they went into the kitchen to start working on something, John was already at it.

An hour or so before they planned to eat, when Julia went out to start the mashed potatoes and found John getting them ready, she finally figured out what was going on. Glancing at the living room, where Frank sat watching the Patriots smear the Dolphins, she leaned close to John and whispered into his ear.

“Are you being helpful because I just got over being sick, or are you doing all of this so you can avoid —” She cocked her thumb toward the living room, and at that exact moment, a loud cheer went up from the stadium crowd.

John frowned and shook his head innocently. “What d’you mean?”

“I mean I think you’re being Mr. Helpful in the kitchen because you trying to avoid spending any more time than necessary with your father.”

“Cut me some slack, will yah?”

He was using a wire masher on the cubed potatoes, and Julia detected a slight increase of pressure as he pushed down on the spuds. She was about to say more when Bri came into the kitchen and grabbed a diet soda from the refrigerator. She instantly picked up that her parents were having one of “those” discussions, so after popping the can top and taking a glass from the cupboard, she left them alone. She had made tentative plans to get together with Kristin Alexander, a girl she had started being friends with at school, and didn’t want to say or do anything that might upset those plans.

“Look, John — I mean, since we’ve moved back here … It’s going on two months now, and have you ever sat down and talked with your dad? I mean, really talked — one on one?”

John sighed and, letting go of the potato masher, allowed his hand to drop to his side. He placed the bowl gently down on the table and slumped in his chair.

“No,” he said softly. “We never had that much to talk about.”

Julia looked at him sympathetically and shook her head.

“Oh, but there is. Don’t you realize it? Your father’s going through a lot right now, what with having to depend on us and all. He needs you to talk to him.”

John snorted, but he didn’t take up the bowl of potatoes and get back to work. Julia could see that she was getting to on some level.

“Especially on holidays and with Christmas coming up … he seems to be — I don’t know. You know him better than I do.”

“I would never claim to know my father.” John shook his head, his mouth tightening into a bloodless line.

“It’d be nice if you and he could connect, you know, on an adult level. God. Ever since we moved here, you act like a kid whenever he’s around.”

“Look,” John said, his face suddenly cast over with a frown. “How many times do I have to remind you that I never wanted to come back here? This was your idea.”

“Let’s not start in on —”

John cut her off with a quick slicing motion with his hand.

“As far as I’m concerned, my father and I have nothing more to deal with. I’m his son. He raised me. And I have to live with the good things and the fuck-ups he passed on to me. It’s too late for either of us to change what we are to each other. Got it? So why not just drop it?”

Julia was silent for a moment as tears welled up in her eyes. She was angry at herself for mentioning it to him, but now she was thinking, There you go … You’ve done it again … You’ve spoiled the whole day.

She took a step away from the table, casting a fearful glance at the living room doorway, worried that Frank might have heard some or all of their conversation. But the TV was blaring away, and when Julia moved so she could see Frank, he was totally absorbed with the game. The football players on the screen were little more than blue and red blurs through her tears.

“It’s never too late,” she said, her voice a sharp rasp. She knew John would dismiss anything she said, attributing it to her own situation with her parents, but she had to say it anyway. “You can never say it’s too late … not until the day your father dies. Then and only then can you say it’s too late.”

John looked at her, at a complete loss for words. His eyes were stinging, and he couldn’t stop following her gaze toward the living room doorway. Although he couldn’t see his father’s back, as Julia could. In his mind, he pictured him sitting hunched up in his wheelchair, his thin hands gripping the armrests so tightly the blue veins and tendons stood out in high relief beneath his pale skin. He could clearly imagine his father’s thin face with its wattle of loose flesh hanging down under his chin … his thin, nearly colorless lips pressed tightly shut … his dull blue eyes glazed by the years, staring at the TV.

“I want you to promise me one thing,” Julia said as she wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

“What’s that?” John asked, his eyebrows raised.

“For me … as a special gift, I want you to promise me you’ll treat your father like you’re both adults.”

“But I —”

This time it was her turn to cut him off with a quick chopping motion of her hand.

“No buts,” she said, softly but firmly. “Promise me, maybe some night when Bri and I go out Christmas shopping or something, that you’ll sit your ass down and talk to him. Try to find out who he is now … before it’s too late.”

Slowly, John nodded his agreement, but when he reached for the bowl of potatoes, Julia darted forward and took it from him.

“And the last thing I’m going to put up with is your lumpy mashed potatoes. I’m not going to let you ruin my Thanksgiving dinner with lumpy mashed potatoes.”

“Lumpy?”

“You’re darn-tootin’, mister,” Julia said, trying to lighten the mood as she went to the counter and dumped the contents of the bowl into her Cuisinart and hit the high-speed button. “Grab a beer and watch the rest of the game. I can handle it from here.”

III

The rest of Thanksgiving Day went fairly well, as far as John was concerned, but it wasn’t great, either — especially as far as Julia was concerned. Bri was ticked off because her mother told her she wanted her to stay home with the family rather than visit her friend Kristin. John ended up spending most of the afternoon in the living room with his father. What little conversation there was between them was strained and quite often hostility surged just below the surface like a hungry shark.

But it never broke out.

The dinner was fantastic. In an attempt to get into the spirit of the holiday, Julia added boiled onions and succotash to her usual turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, peas, candied yams, and cranberry jelly. The after-dinner desserts — apple pie with vanilla ice cream, and pumpkin pie — went practically untasted because everyone was so full.

That evening, Julia suggested they all settle down to play a board game, but once they finally agreed on Monopoly and dug out the old game box, they found several cards were missing and put the game away. Then Julia suggested they go for a walk to help their digestion so they would have room for dessert.

At first Bri didn’t want to go along, saying she would rather stay at home where it was warm. Maybe she’d have a checker game or two with Frank, but Julia persisted, so she agreed, grumbling as she pulled on her coat, hat, and mittens.

Once everyone was bundled against the cold, they left by the kitchen door. After a brief hesitation, they decided to turn left and walk along Shore Drive in the direction that would eventually take them out to the Surfside condos site.

John silently vowed that he would get them to turn around before they got that far. The last thing he wanted was to do was catch even a glimpse of that place. Whenever he thought about the bones that had been found out there, his blood ran cold. Even when he was a boy, there had been stories about Haskins’ barn and the woods around it, and he never had been — and never wanted to be — out there after dark.

The road was strung with streetlights every hundred feet or so, but on Glooscap, the Highway Department hadn’t yet replaced the old-fashioned bulbs with sodium arc lights. Even directly under them, the thin light cast weak shadows over their faces and the ground. Bri tried to joke about how “spooky” they looked, wandering down the road, but everyone’s laughter was thin and forced.

Their footsteps echoed hollowly in the cold night as they walked past the houses of neighbors they hadn’t met.

Why doesn’t John go out and reacquaint himself with the life he used to know? Julia wondered.

The brightly-lit living room windows, most of which didn’t even have the shades drawn, flickered with the glow of TVs. They looked homey and cozy, but that only made Julia feel colder and more alone.

As John led his wife and stepdaughter down the road, he experienced an odd mixture of the past intruding on the present. Other than the hike up Bald Hill, this was the first time since they had moved back to the island that he had gone out for a stroll through his old neighborhood. Until now, Shore Drive had been nothing more than a means to get on and off Glooscap and to reach the condo development he was working on. But now — especially at night — the road seemed both intimately familiar and strangely alien. In many ways, he knew it was he, not the road, had changed over the years. Even though there were a few new houses on the outer stretch of the road, and the road looked different, there was a haunting familiarity, and he felt as though he had never left the place … or maybe the boy he had been, the boy who had walked and run and ridden bike and then driven cars along this road had never grown up and was still somewhere on the island, and he had simply been given that boy’s childhood memories.

“Maybe it’s me,” Julia said as they walked along the side of the road, “but doesn’t it seem to have gotten colder sooner here than it did in Vermont?”

“Colder, maybe, but in Vermont we would’ve had snow by now,” John’s breath was a plume of thick steam that looked as if he were smoking a cigarette. “All depends. Sometimes the coast gets snow early in the winter, and it snows like hell all the way through to March. Other years, it just gets frigid and there’s almost no snow.”

“The cold feels rawer here,” Julia said, “because of the moisture from the ocean.”

“For sure,” John replied. “What I always liked about it was that we’d get in a lot of ice-skating before snow fell. We almost never had to bother with clearing off a patch of ice to skate, like we did in Vermont.”

John sighed as memories and images from his past arose in his mind.

“One winter, it got so cold the bay between the island and mainland froze, and you could walk over to the mainland.”

“That’d be dangerous,” Bri said. “I thought seawater was too salty to freeze.”

Whenever they were under a streetlight, John noticed that Bri’s eyes would flick back and forth nervously, as though she was trying to see something on the fringes of the darkness. It was almost as if she was looking for someone.

“Randy and I crossed the frozen bay that winter,” John said, “but only on a dare, and — yes — it was dangerous. The whole time, the ice was crackling and buckling. A couple of times it split open near me.” He chuckled at the memory. “Truth to tell, I was scared out of my wits. If you fell into that water, fimagine how cold it would be! God, you wouldn’t last more than a few seconds.”

He was talking to Bri, but his words sent a tremor of fear through Julia. As soon as he said the word water, she dredged up the image she had seen off to the side of Randy’s lobster boat. Of course, it would have been impossible for a person to be swimming in the ocean beside the boat — even if it wasn’t autumn. But she had seen something, and it certainly had looked like a person, and even if it wasn’t, that didn’t stop her mind from manufacturing an array of thoughts and images of what it might have been.

“Guessing by how cold it is already, I’d guess we’re going to have a cold winter without much snow.” John pumped his arms to heat up his muscles.

“How do you know that, Mr. Weatherman?” Julia laughed softly even as she was tormented by the memory of what she had seen. “It’s funny how weathermen talk about what kind of winter we’re going to have when they can’t even say what it’s going to be twelve hours from now.”

“I’m not making any predictions here,” John said. “But maybe we should check out Larson’s Pond. I’ll bet it’s already frozen, and the ice is perfect for skating.”

“Yeah. That’d be great,” Bri said, showing interest in the conversation for the first time since they had left the house. “Kristin mentioned that. I’d love to go skating. Maybe I can invite her.”

“Where’s Larson’s Pond?” Julia asked.

“Up Oak Street and then take a right onto Hook Road. It’s not far. We used to skate there all the time — hockey games and when we were a older, skating parties with our girlfriends. What do you say we check it out tomorrow?”

“Can ask Kristin?” Bri asked, jumping up and down excitedly.

“I don’t see why not,” Julia said, especially pleased to see Bri’s enthusiasm.

They had walked more than a mile and were on a stretch of road where there were no more houses. Thick, dark woods lined one side of the road. On the other side was darkness and the soft rolling sound of the ocean as waves washed up against the rocks. The air was so cold it burned the insides of their noses.

John knew it wasn’t too much further before they would be at the construction site. He stopped under the next streetlight, took out a cigarette, and lit it, drawing the smoke into his lungs. When he exhaled, he tried to keep from staring down the dark road as he thought about those bones … those damned bones that had been dug up. The woods around him seemed to get darker and draw closer.

“I don’t know about anybody else,” he said, his teeth chattering loudly, “but I’m freezing my tail off. Let’s head back.”

“Same way?” Julia asked, looking back the way they had come. “Didn’t I see where Hook Road comes out onto Shore Drive? Maybe we could walk home that way.”

“We could go by the pond and check to see if it’s frozen,” Bri said.

John took another drag on the cigarette and shook his head.

“Not at night,” he said. “There’s aren’t any streetlights out there — not many, anyway. Besides, Hook Road winds a long way around. We’d end up walking twice as far as we would going the way we came. I wanna get home.”

“Why’s that? Is something the matter?” Julia leaned forward and patted John’s rounded stomach. “Afraid you might wear yourself out?”

John laughed and started bounding up and down on his toes like a prizefighter warming up.

“I’m not afraid of a little exercise,” he said, swinging his hands back and forth and clapping his upper arms. But then, before he could say more, he started coughing. He let the cigarette drop to the street from his mouth and crushed it with his heel as he doubled over, hands on his thighs, and coughed so hard it hurt his stomach. The coughing jag lasted only a few seconds. When he was through, he looked at Julia and shook his head.

“I want to have a slice or two of pie,” he said, his voice sounding thick with mucus.

“And ice cream,” Bri added.

“What say we jog back?” Julia said teasingly. She wanted to say something about how he should quit smoking, but then his coughing fit was comment enough.

“Let’s not get too worked up here, okay?” John said. “If we go skating tomorrow, it’ll be exercise enough.”

IV

Julia’s left knee hit the ice first, and she had enough forward momentum to spin around in a lazy corkscrew spiral as she slowly crumpled onto the ice. Her skates — somewhere far behind her — made loud, crunching noises as the black ice rushed toward her face. The shock of her hands slamming down hard sent jolts of pain up to her shoulders. She was vaguely aware of John’s loud bray of laughter as she slid to a stop, the tip of her nose less than an inch from the ice.

“You all right?” John shouted.

She raised one mittened hand and waved to signal she had survived the fall. Then she started scrambling to her feet. Her skates didn’t want to stay under her, and with a swick sound, like ripping cloth, her feet shot out from under her again, and she went down flat onto the ice.

John’s laughter was louder, and in spite of the pain in her hands, elbow, and knees, the embarrassment burning her ears was worse. She was sucking in some air to yell at him when she saw the arm reaching up out of the frozen depths of the pond.

Instead of shouting at her husband, a strangled cry came out of her mouth.

The arm — at least it looked like an arm — was frozen in midmotion, reaching futilely up through the five or six inches of solid ice. All Julia could see clearly was the hooked fingers and part of the forearm. The rest, from the elbow down, gradually blended into the thick, black depths of the closed-in water.

“Jule?” John called out. “You all right?”

She twisted around and looked at him, but her throat was constricted, and she knew that no words would come out.

“You hurt?”

She turned back and looked down at the ice … down at what surely looked like a hand suspended in the murky darkness. She thought that this hand reaching up toward the surface looked exactly like the hand she had seen over the side of Randy’s boat. The memory rose in her mind with an audible whoosh of blood rushing to her head

Impossible, her mind screamed. This can’t be!

Behind her, she heard the hissing of John’s skates as he skated over to her. With a loud scraping sound that sent a spray of ice chips flying, he skidded to a stop inches from where she lay and bent down. He rested one hand so gently on her shoulder she could barely feel it through the thick layers of coat and sweater.

“Sorry I laughed,” he said, his voice low and kind. “It didn’t look like that bad a spill.”

Julia sawed her teeth over her lower lip and shook her head, afraid that if she tried to speak, the only thing that would come out would be an ear-piercing scream. Her eyes were transfixed by the sight below the ice — that hand … exactly like the one she had see reaching up out of the ocean to grab the side of Randy’s boat … or her.

“Come on,” John said, trying to hold her under the arms and help her to her feet. “We’ve been at it a while. Let’s take a break.”

“Look,” she said, forcing out the word as she pointed down to the ice with her mittened hand. “Look … down there.”

Confused for a moment, John shook his head as he stared down at the surface of the ice. What was he supposed to see? Blood on the ice? Whatever it was that had tripped her?

“Let me help you up,” he said.

But his words barely registered with Julia. She continued to stare through the ice, down at the indistinct shape that looked to be beckoning to her.

A wave of dizziness crashed over her, and every muscle in her body felt like rotting rubber. The darkness below the ice started to spin in an inward-turning vortex that tugged her down … down.

“You gonna get up?” John asked, more forcefully as he tried to yank her to her feet. “We’re not used to this much exercise.” He snorted with laughter. “And you thought I couldn’t handle it.”

“No … I …”

She tried to get up, but her legs were as useless as if they belonged to someone else. All feeling and control was gone.

“Down … below the ice …”

John eased her back down, and the solid surface — cold as it was — was comforting. She brought her face close to the ice and cupped her hands on both sides of her eyes as if she wanted to rest her head and fall asleep right there.

John’s first panicked thought was, She banged her head … She’s got a concussion.

He looked around for Bri, but she was down at the far end of the pond, spinning circles and figure eights with Kristin. He cupped his hands to his mouth to call for her to go get help when Julia said something. Her face was so close to the ice her words were distorted, and he didn’t quite catch what she had said.

“Tell me where it hurts,” he said, his voice edged with fear. “Did you bang your head?”

“No,” Julia said, her voice stronger. “Look down there for Christ’s sake!”

She pounded the ice with her mittened hand, and John realized that she meant below the surface. Once he adjusted his focus and his eyes registered what he was looking at, his chest went suddenly cold.

“What the fuck?”

Julia turned and looked up at him with an expression of mounting fear. Her blue eyes bored directly into his mind, laying open every secret he ever had. He felt stripped naked, like he was standing in the face of a frigid blast of arctic wind when he saw his own reaction mirrored in his wife’s face.

“It … it can’t be what it looks like,” he stammered, looking back down at what certainly looked to him like a human hand, frozen in the ice, reaching helplessly up to the surface.

“What the hell else could it be?” Julia said, her voice sounding like a creaking door.

As the initial rush of fear subsided, John sat back on his heels and, removing one glove, swiped his hand over his forehead. His fingers were like hot coals against his skin.

“Tell me what you see,” Julia said, feeling a little more rational now that she was sharing this with someone else … now that someone had confirmed what she had seen. At least she knew she wasn’t going crazy.

John swallowed with difficulty and, taking a deep breath, looked up at the vault of clear, blue sky before answering.

“It certainly looks like an arm,” he said. His throat was so raw, he was surprised the words came out at all.

Julia nodded.

“That’s what I think, too,” she said.

They both looked back down at the thing under the ice. John scrambled to one side, trying to catch it from a different angle, but no matter how many angles he tried, it still looked like a human arm.

“It can’t be,” he said, shaking his head from side to side. “It simply can’t be.”

“Of course it could be,” Julia said. Every breath she took sent ripples of cold through her body. “I mean, it’s possible. Maybe someone was swimming out here last summer and drowned.” She shrugged as though that had to be the answer. “They drowned, and no one ever found the body. Just before the pond froze, the body floated up and …and —”

“Uh — uh,” John said, shaking his head. “No one swims here. Water’s too mucky.” He pointed to the line of dead cattails along the edge of the pond. “It’s practically a swamp. No one would come swimming here.”

“Then they fell in,” Julia said with a shrug. She was unable to stop from staring down at the frozen arm. “Maybe some kids were playing with a boat or raft, and one of them went over.”

“The water’s not that deep. They would have sent a diving team in to find the body,” John said tightly, his gaze fastened on Julia.

“Maybe … I dunno. Maybe someone was out here alone … or someone island killed whoever’s down there and sank the body.”

With a sudden grunt, John stood up quickly. His skates slipped, and he had to wave his arms to catch his balance before he fell backward. His mouth opened, but he didn’t say anything. He reminded Julia of a fish that had been yanked up into the air. His hands fumbled in his coat pocket as he reached for his cigarettes and lighter. He popped a cigarette into his mouth and hurriedly lit it.

“Maybe there’s a killer loose on the island, and he’s sinking the bodies of his victims into the pond,” Julia said. “Wasn’t there something a few years ago up in Holland, Maine, where some guy was doing that to kids?”

John exhaled a thick stream of blue smoke as he shook his head.

“Come on,” he said. “You’ve been reading too many mysteries. It’s probably not even an arm.”

With the cigarette dangling from his lower lip, he dropped down onto the ice again and stared down at the thing.

“It’s a tree branch or something, and ice is distorting it so it looks like an arm. It’s too dark, anyway. A body that’s been underwater for a long time would be puffy and white.”

“How would we know?” Julia asked.

“Glooscap isn’t the kind of place where —” He was interrupted by a cough that rattled in his chest. “ — where that kind of stuff happens. Come on. Let me help you up. If you stay on the ice like that, you’re going to get sick again.”

“We have to notify the police?” Julia said. All she could think was, if that was a body down there, the authorities had to know.

“How ‘bout we take a break,” John said. “We can check it once the sun shifts. With different lighting, we probably see it’s a waterlogged tree branch or something. I wish we could make a campfire to warm up.”

Julia was silent as she stared out over the ice, but from the angle at which he was looking at her, John couldn’t tell if she was watching Bri and Kristin in the distance or looking at the spot where she had fallen. He could see where that was because of the skate marks on the ice.

“If you lit a campfire these days,” Julia said, her voice soft and distant, “you’d probably get arrested.”

John snickered.

“Probably that same group of tree-huggers protesting the condos would take us to court for polluting.”

He finished the cigarette and crushed it out on the side of his skate blade and — not wanting to litter — slipped the butt inside the cellophane of his cigarette package. He flopped back, stared up at the blue sky, and told himself he should feel contented, but neither he nor Julia could stop wondering what that was under the ice.

What he was trying not to think about was how that thing that looked like an arm under the ice might be connected some way to those bones the workers had uncovered at the condo site. He hoped Julia hadn’t made the connection … and he wished to hell he hadn’t.

They rested on the edge of the pond for a while. Then they went back out onto the ice for a few more turns. Bri and Kristin were tireless, so about an hour later, once both John and Julia was completely wrung out, they took off their skates, put their shoes back on, and started for home, telling Bri to be back before dark.

“You want to check it once more before we leave?” Julia asked.

John didn’t have to ask what she meant. Reluctantly, he nodded. Slipping on the smooth ice, not used to the feeling of not having skates on, they skidded back to where Julia had fallen. Both of them were tense with expectation as they neared the spot.

“Well …?” John said, standing back as Julia bent down and peered into the frozen depths.

She was silent for a long while other than her heavy breathing. Then, frowning, she looked up at John and shook her head.

“I don’t see a damned thing.” Her voice was raspy. “Are you sure this is the spot?”

John held his hands out helplessly.

“Looks it to me. You’re the one who fell down here.”

He leaned over and looked for himself but saw nothing.

For the next five minutes or so, they scanned the area, searching beneath the ice, but whatever they had seen wasn’t there now.

“So … what do we do?” Julia asked once they had given up looking. She stood up and brushed her mittens clean on her pants.

“What do you mean?”

“Do we call the cops or not?”

John barked a short laugh and then shook his head.

“And tell them what? That a crack under the ice looked like a person’s arm? Don’t be ridiculous. There’s nothing down there.”

Julia looked from him back to the ice, and, shaking her head, let her breath out slowly.

“I know this is the place,” she said. “But …” She rubbed her forehead with the fiat of her mitten. “I guess you’re right.”

“Come on,” John said. “Let’s get home and heat up some cocoa.”

He started to walk away, his feet skittering on the ice. When Julia hesitated for a moment, he turned back to her and shouted, “You coming?”

Julia nodded but still didn’t move.

“Hurry up,” John shouted, his voice edged with impatience. He turned and continued walking away, but a small voice in the back of his mind was whispering …

Forget about it … if you can.

FIFTEEN

Nor’easter

I

Exactly one week after Thanksgiving, by mid afternoon on Thursday, the first real snow of the season arrived. It slammed into the rock-rimmed northeast edge of Glooscap Island like a huge, howling animal. When Bri was settling in to wash the supper dishes around six o’clock, she knew — and secretly rejoiced — that there wouldn’t be school in the morning. There couldn’t be. Not if it kept snowing like this. Outside the kitchen window, the snow was coming down so fast and thick she could barely see the streetlight down by the road.

“‘S what the old-timers call a real ‘rafter-snapper,’’’ Frank said. He was sitting in his wheelchair by the kitchen table, making conversation with Bri while she worked. “Jus’ listen to that wind.”

Bri stopped scrubbing one of the pots and listened.

The blizzard whistled low and throaty as it tore under the eaves. Below that sound, she could hear a deeper, lower vibration that was a little like someone moaning. Actually, she thought, it sounded a lot like her father’s snoring.

Julia was pacing back and forth between the living room and the kitchen. Every time she entered either room, she would go to one of the windows and peer out into the blinding sheet of flying snow. John had called from the office over an hour ago, saying he was heading home, but because of the storm, they shouldn’t hold supper for him. He’d settle for a sandwich whenever he got home.

Well, Julia thought nervously, we finished supper, and Bri’s almost finished with the dishes. He should be here by now.

She didn’t want to say anything to Bri that might upset her, but her pacing was message enough.

“I reckon if you don’t have school tomorrow, maybe we’ll have an opportunity to playa few games of checkers,” Frank said. “‘S I recall, I’ve got a few games to catch up on yah.”

“Sure,” Bri said, smiling even though the worry her mother was feeling had been transmitted to her. She was thinking about the term paper that was due next week in History. She hadn’t picked a topic yet, and a long weekend might give her a chance to get started.

Julia hadn’t stopped staring out into the snow and sighing. She turned and walked back into the living room but had only taken a few steps when the house lights flickered. They dimmed for only a few seconds before brightening again.

“Frickin’ brownout,” Frank said matter-of-factly.

“Do you lose the power during storms often?” Julia asked nervously. She had noticed the stack of years-old firewood in the garage and figured — if worse came to worst — they could build a fire in the fireplace to keep warm.

If worse comes to worst, she thought grimly, John won’t make it home tonight … Please let him drive safely.

“We don’t have much trouble with it,” Frank said. “You might want to get some candles handy just in case, though.”

While Julia fished around in the cupboard for candles, she kept telling herself that it was foolish to worry. Traffic leaving Portland on any given night was slow enough. In a storm like this, it would be terrible.

Besides, she thought, if something happens … or I get a phone call from the police … at least I’ll know … It’s waiting and not hearing that’s so hard.

She found little reassurance in that thought.

She found some candles and placed them on the countertop and stood there for a moment, waiting to see if the lights flickered again. Once she felt certain the lights weren’t going out — not yet, anyway — she walked back into the living room and stared out onto the street.

It looked like there were at least three inches of snow on the ground already. With the wind swirling the snow into drifts, it was impossible to tell. By the streetlight, the snow was a thick halo around the feeble light.

“Jesus Christ, I wish he’d call!” she whispered, slapping her fist into her open palm. Her breath fogged the window, and she was about to head back into the kitchen when the telephone rang. Its harsh br-ring cut into her ears like an ice pick.

“I’ll get it,” she shouted, her voice wound up tightly as she dashed into the kitchen and snatched up the receiver fully expecting to hear — not John’s voice — but a state trooper’s.

“Hello?”

“Guess who?” the voice on the other end of the line said good-naturedly.

Julia had been so startled by the phone ringing it took her several heartbeats to register that it was John on the line.

“Sweet Jesus” was all she managed to say as she slumped back against the kitchen wall, her body flooding with relief. For an instant, she locked eyes with Bri, who then turned back to her job at the sink. Frank seemed unconcerned as usual.

“Where the hell are you?” she said into the receiver, still not believing she was hearing John’s voice. Her frightened imagination was telling her she hadn’t really heard him … that the next words would be spoken by a state trooper who would tell her they’d found John’s car wrapped around a utility pole on Route One.

“I –ah, had a little trouble at the bridge,” John said.

“You what?”

“The visibility was crap in the snow, and I sorta … I missed the turn.”

“Good Lord! Are you all right?”

Julia was torn between feeling relief that John was all right and nervous that he wasn’t home yet.

“I’m fine,” John replied. “I went off the road by the bridge. It was —” He paused and had to swallow before he could continue. “It was … strange.”

“What do you mean?”

“As I was driving onto the bridge, I could have sworn I saw someone — that I bumped into a person walking along on the side of the road.”

“Oh, my God. No one was hurt, were they?” Julia asked with a gasp.

“No, no. Everyone’s fine,” John said, his voice taking on a husky edge. “I was — I got out, and there wasn’t anyone there. I don’t know. Anyway, a guy who lives nearby saw me swerve off the road. I’m at his house. He and I tried to push the car back onto the road, but it’s stuck pretty good. There’s a tow truck, but it might be a while. I didn’t want you to be worried, is all.”

“I haven’t been worried,” Julia said, and she caught the sidelong glance Bri shot her over her shoulder. “Couldn’t you leave the car where it is and walk home?” She wished now more than anything that he was safely home. To hell with the car, as long as John was safe.

“A guy named Smokey — I knew him in high school. He runs the Mobil station nearby and said he’d be along with his tow truck when he could,” John replied. “I can’t leave it here. It’ll get plowed under, and we wouldn’t find it till spring. ‘Sides, I don’t particularly relish the thought of trudging a couple of miles in this snow. It’s pretty bad.”

“Well, be careful,” Julia said. ‘I’ll have a pot of coffee ready for you when you get here.”

“‘Kay,” John said. “See you in a bit.”

“‘Bye,” Julia said softly, and then she hung up, grateful that John was at least as close as the island.

II

John arrived home an hour and a half later. He sat down to a supper of re-heated spaghetti. After that, he started a roaring fire in the fireplace, and he, Julia, and Frank, who was impatient for a game or two of checkers, were all sitting in the living room, quietly enjoying the blaze. Bri was upstairs at her desk, silently cursing her history text. A little after nine o’clock, the lights “browned out” again, flickering a few times before completely winking out.

“I was expecting that,” Julia said as she got up from the couch and went into the kitchen. With the flickering fire coming from behind her in the living room, she got the candles she had gathered earlier. Along with a flashlight and two oil lamps, which Frank kept for such emergencies, they were ready to tough out the power outage.

“Bri?” Julia called out at the foot of the stairs. “Hold on a second. I’ve got a flashlight. I’ll be right up.”

Alone upstairs, Bri had a moment of panic as she fumbled out of her bedroom and into the hallway. As soon as the lights went out, the sound of the storm raging outside increased in intensity. The wind sweeping under the gutters made a faint vibrating noise that sounded like … the low-throated rumble of organ music.

Keeping her hand on the wall so she wouldn’t lose her balance, she made her way toward the distant glow of firelight reflecting in the stairwell. Her breathing was loud and ragged in her ears, but it was better than listening to the wind as it wrapped its cold hands around the house, sounding like …

Church wood,

A shiver danced between her shoulder blades.

Her mother came to the foot of the stairs and shined the flashlight so she could make her way down. She was grateful to leave her history book behind as she joined her family in the living room.

“Quite the night, huh?” John said, smiling at her as she leaned on the arm of the couch.

He was bent over an oil lamp on the coffee table, trying to trim the wick evenly before lighting it. Julia followed Bri to the couch and shined the light so John could see what he was doing.

“Jesus! Can you not shine that in my eyes?” he shouted. He squinted and shielded his face with his hand.

“Sorry … I was trying to help,” Julia said mildly.

“You won’t if you friggin’ blind me.”

“How long do you think this will last?” Bri asked in the awkward silence that followed. She looked from her father to her grandfather to her mother. She was confident there would be no school tomorrow, but it would be nice to get all of her homework done tonight so she could enjoy the long weekend.

“You mean the storm or the power outage?” her father asked, still sounding snappish. She did her best to ignore it and didn’t reply as she watched him trim the wick below the ragged, burned edge, then strike a match and touch it to the wick. A warm, yellow flame licked across the top of the wick. Satisfied, John put the clear glass globe back on. Immediately, the flame spread and brightened.

“Power won’t be back on for a coupla hours, at least … maybe days,” Frank said with a low grumble. He was used to watching TV in the evening, so he was angry about being cut off. “Forecaster says this storm’s gonna be with us till tomorrow afternoon.”

“Boy, that lantern sure throws the light,” Julia said. She snapped off her flashlight and sat down on the couch, careful not to nudge John. As far as she was concerned, he owed her an apology for snapping at her. “Do you think it’d be bright enough for me to finish my homework?” She wanted to get her work done tonight, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. She didn’t want to be upstairs alone while the power was out, either.

“It wouldn’t be good for your eyes, dear,” her mother said, shaking her head.

“Bright ‘nough for a game of checkers, though,” Frank said, smiling.

Bri smiled and then went to the closet where they kept the checkerboard. She set it up on the coffee table beside the oil lamp, and Frank angled his wheelchair so he could reach it. Bri plunked down on the couch and began sorting the pieces.

Satisfied that there was enough light — at least in the living room — and that the water pipes wouldn’t freeze because of the blazing fire, John got up and walked over to the window. Holding the curtain aside, he looked out at the storm.

The streetlights were out, and the few houses he could see were plunged into darkness. He wondered if Portland had lost its power, too. He doubted it. When he was growing up, the islands lost their power with practically every storm while the mainland remained well lit.

Deciding that she should make the first move toward an apology, Julian came over beside John and, leaning close to him, looked out the window with him.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” she said. She sighed as she wrapped her arm around his waist and hooked a finger through one of his belt loops, tugging him close.

John grunted and kept his eyes fixed on the snow streaking past the window. It might have been her imagination, but he seemed to shy away from her.

“Kinda scary, too, though,” she added. A shiver raced through her. “It makes you realize how much we depend on things like electricity … how much we take for granted.”

“When I was a boy,” Frank said, not bothering to look up while he was busy placing his checker pieces on the board, “we didn’t even have ‘lectricity out here. Like a lot of modern conveniences, you find once you don’t have ‘em, you don’t really need ‘em.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Julia said, nudging John in the side.

“What now?”

“How ‘bout we go for a walk.”

John turned and looked at her like she was nuts. The scowl on his face deepened. Shaking his head, he said, “I had enough tromping around in the snow for one night.”

“Come on,” Julia said, giving him a playful shake. “It’ll be romantic. I want to see what the island looks like with just candles and lamps glowing in the windows. It’ll be like we stepped back a hundred years.”

“I’m cozy right where I am,” John said.

“Ah, you’re no fun,” Julia said, swatting his arm before leaving him standing by the picture window. She walked back to the fireplace and sat down on the couch to watch Frank’s and Bri’s opening moves.

John was convinced that her idea of a romantic walk in the snow — like going lobstering with Randy — was one of those things she was going to have to experience before she accepted that romantic notions and reality are often far apart. As he looked out the window, he saw an indistinct fluttering motion outside in the storm. Goose bumps swept across his arms. For an instant — no more than half a heartbeat — one area of the solid gray wall of snow darkened like a spreading stain that took on a familiar shape …

The person I saw on the bridge tonight, he thought as chills uncoiled through his body. That damned idiot who made me drive off the road.

His hand holding back the curtain clenched involuntarily into a fist, and the curtain rod sagged with the weight and almost pulled out of the wall. His eyes bulged as he stared outside, fighting back a rush of panic. He didn’t know whether he wanted to see that figure again to confirm it was there or not see it so he could tell himself all it had been was snow swirling in the wind.

Behind him, he could hear the pleasant chatter of Frank and Bri as they played their game, and every now and then Julia would throw out a comment, but John’s mind was racing.

Am I imagining things, he wondered, or had there really been someone out there on the bridge earlier tonight … and was there someone out in front of the house now?

No one in their right mind would be out on a night like this.

And why would they be out in front of his house?

John glanced nervously over his shoulder at his family. In the warm glow of the firelight, they looked so warm and content. The scene was Norman Rockwell perfect.

But he was standing away from the fire, even this short distance, he was chilled. The warmth didn’t quite reach him. Thin tendrils of cold brushed against him.

When he looked out the window again, he would have screamed except that his throat closed off as tightly as if cold hands were reaching out and choking him.

It was no trick of the swirling winds.

It was no illusion.

Someone was out there.

He could clearly see a figure, bent over, coming up the walkway toward the front door.

Panic strangled him. His breathing came in sharp, painful gasps that fogged the window as he watched, unable to move a muscle as the figure came closer to the door, trudging step after trudging step … closer … closer …

He couldn’t possibly see who it was.

All he could see was a small, slouched figure wearing a long, dark coat that hid her feet.

How do I know it’s a woman? he wondered.

The wind whipped around the figure, fluttering her coat and hair.

Yes! He could see long, dark strands of hair twisting in the wind, writhing like snakes. She was almost up to the front steps now, and still — as much as he wanted to — John couldn’t move.

He stood and watched with horrified fascination.

Any second now, he thought as panic flooded through him, I’ll hear a heavy-fisted knock on the door.

The black shape trudged slowly up the steps. As soon as she was too close to the house for John to see through her the window, he stepped back from the window with a gasp as though breaking a spell. A strangled little whimper came from his throat, but neither the checker players nor Julia noticed. His legs felt like they were bound by splints as he turned and started for the front door.

This can’t be happening, his mind was shouting. It’s impossible! … There can’t be anyone out there … not on a night like this!

But he had seen them!

His hand was trembling when he got to the front door and was reaching for the doorknob.

There’s no one out there … There can’t be anyone out there.

He watched his hand reach for the doorknob as if it belonged to someone else … as if it was under someone else’s control. He didn’t want to open the door. There couldn’t be anyone out on the doorstep.

The doorknob was like ice as his fingers closed around it and began to turn it slowly. It seemed to twist forever, but then — finally — with an audible click that slammed his ears like a gunshot, the latch snapped open. Caught in a gust of wind, the door burst inward as if whoever was out there on the doorstep had slammed his — no, her! — shoulder against it. With a loud, tearing shriek, snow spiraled into the foyer, and cold wind clawed his face.

“What the hell are you doing?” Julia shouted, looking over at him as he braced his feet so the door wouldn’t slam him back against the entryway wall.

The storm roared into the house like an animal unloosed from its leash. As the cold air spun around him — for an instant — John thought he heard laughter — thin, high laughter — but he saw that there was no one in the doorway … no woman dressed in a long, dark coat … no one … just the raw, elemental power of the storm screaming into the house and sucking out its warmth.

“Will you please shut that door?” Julia said as she dashed over to him. “God, you’re letting out all the heat.”

“I —” John stammered.

He wanted to tell her that he was convinced someone was outside, wanting to come in, but he clamped his mouth shut and — with Julia’s help — pushed the door shut.

“For crying out loud, John!” Julia glared at him. “Are you out of your mind? It’s cold enough in here as it is. What were you doing?”

Dazed by what had happened —

Did I really hear laughter?

— he snapped the lock and took a quick step away from the door.

“No, I — ahh, I wanted to see how much snow had fallen,” he stammered.

“Well don’t open the door again,” Julia said, rubbing her hands vigorously together to ward off the cold. “I’m convinced this isn’t a good time to go for a walk, all right?”

John nodded and forced himself to smile.

“I thought, you know, if you needed proof —” he said, his voice tight and high.

He was looking at Julia, trying not to think about what had just happened — what he had seen outside; but he couldn’t shake the feeling that, even now, someone was out there, and if he went to the window and looked outside, he would see a cold, pale face close to the window, staring in at him … at all of them.

And in the depths of his soul, he was convinced he would recognize the face that was pressed up against the freezing glass.

III

Other than Frank, who opted for his own bed, the rest of them decided it would be fun — and warmer — to sleep in the living room by the fireplace. John figured it would be an easy way to keep the fire tended, and Bri — although she didn’t dare admit it to anyone — didn’t relish the idea of sleeping alone in her room with only a flashlight to find her way around. So after Frank had gone off to bed — with three out of four satisfying wins at checkers under his belt — John and Julia folded out the couch, and Bri spread her sleeping bag out on the floor by the hearth.

Trying to get to sleep, though, with the storm still raging outside was difficult, and long past midnight scattershot conversations were still going back and forth. Finally everyone drifted off to sleep and stayed that way until sometime in the night Julia woke up with a start and nudged John.

“Huh? … What?” he muttered, instantly awake.

Julia rolled over and looked at him. In the fading glow of the firelight, his face was lined with deep shadows.

“You hear something?” she whispered close to his ear so as not to disturb Bri.

John smacked his lips and said, “No — Christ, I’ve been sound asleep.”

The truth was, he had been in the middle of a disturbing dream.

He was lost in a rickety, old building and was desperately trying to find a way out while a tornado — suggested, no doubt, by the nor’easter howling outside the house — tore the building apart, board-by-board. The most vivid part of the dream had been the sensation that he couldn’t breathe, that the air was being sucked out of him. The sensation was so acute that he awoke with a sharp pain in his chest.

He was silently grateful that Julia had brought him out of the dream. He could see how his dream was simply a distortion of what had happened earlier that evening. The only difference was that he hadn’t been in his father’s house. It had been someplace else. But the dream was rapidly fading, and he couldn’t hold on to the fragmented images.

“I heard something,” Julia whispered, her voice wire-tight. “Something like — I don’t know … like music.”

“Umm … church wood,” John said, his voice thick with tension as the dream lingered.

“What?” Julia said, sitting up suddenly and leaning over him.

“Huh? … I don’t know what you’re talking about,” John said.

“I said I thought I heard music, and you said something,” Julia said.

“The wind in the eaves?” John replied, keeping his eyes tightly shut even though he knew his sleep had been shattered. “It’s the wind. The storm’s not over yet.”

“I thought you said something else,” Julia said.

“Give me a break,” John said. “Go back to sleep. I’m beat.”

Julia eased herself back down on the couch and closed her eyes, letting the low whistling of the wind and the pebbly hiss of snow beating against the house lull her to sleep. Before long — once no other sounds came to her from the darkness — she drifted off to sleep.

John, meanwhile, realized that he was getting farther and farther away from sleep. He had felt uncomfortable about sleeping on the couch again. The memories of seeing that hanging figure reflected in the window their first night here was still fresh in his mind. Whenever the image began to resolve more clearly, he could see the cold, bloated face of the dead person …

She was hanging by the neck …

The frayed rope — as gray and rotting as her dead skin — had bit deeply into her neck … so deeply it was almost buried in the folds of rotting flesh …

Her tongue — a thick, purple wad of flesh — protruded from between her teeth, almost bitten clean off …

Whimpering softly, John rolled over and stared into the fire. Whenever he closed his eyes, he watched for a while as the insides of his eyelids glowed with a flickering orange glow. He prayed that the light would dispel the images swirling in his brain, but it didn’t.

Finally, though, he gave up. It was too late. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep, so he opened his eyes and lay there, staring at the wanly glowing embers on the hearth. The wind shrieked in the darkness outside, but — unlike Julia — the sound didn’t soothe him back to sleep. She may have heard music, but as he lay there waiting to fall asleep, he was afraid that the next sound he heard would be a heavy hand, pounding on the front door …

IV

Overnight, the world was transformed.

Bri was the first to get up. She ran to the living room window and looked out at the heavy blanket of snow, glowing with blinding white in the slanting rays of the morning sun. Out by the headlands, the sea was roiling blue-green as heaving waves smashed into the rocks and tossed white spray high into the air. The purity and freshness of the world thrilled her as she got dressed to go outside. She decided that — Audrey be damned! — she was going to take a walk out on Indian Point to see how beautiful it was after the storm.

“You going to help your father shovel the driveway and front walk?” Julia asked as she trudged into the kitchen where Bri was already half finished eating breakfast.

“I want to go for a walk first,” she said, busily chewing the last bite of toast. “I can’t believe how beautiful the snow is. I want to go down to the Point. I’ll bet it doesn’t even look like the same place anymore.”

Julia sniffed and nodded as she fumbled to get the coffee brewing. Without waiting to hear her mother’s response, Bri cleared her place and tugged on her heavy overcoat, hat, scarf, and mittens.

“Make sure you’re careful down there,” Julia said once Bri was bundled up and ready to go.

“Don’t worry,” Bri replied. “I learned my lesson. Tell Dad to save some of the shoveling for me to do later, all right?”

With that, she swung open the door and stepped out into the razor sharp air and started down the hill to the shore.

The closer she got to the ocean, the louder the sound of the waves got. Sometimes, depending on the wind, there were deep, muffled roars, like distant cannons … and sometimes there were loud, explosive crashes followed by a deep, grinding rumble like thunder as rocks tumbled against each other.

Nothing compared to being this close to the sea and being surrounded by the sound,, smells and the feeling of such surging power …

The power that almost pulled me under, Bri thought, and that finalized her decision to stay well up on the headlands, away from the water. She could enjoy the brisk air and hear the waves just fine from up there.

She had been right about the snow changing things on Indian Point. It covered everything with an unbroken white sheet. Only close to the water had the waves stripped the snow away and exposed glistening black rocks to the sunlight. Thick clumps of snow were caught like distorted baseballs in the twining branches of the scrub brush. The rocks and branches on the seaward side were crusted with thick ice-frozen salt spray. Corny as it was, Bri started singing “Winter Wonderland” as she plowed through the snow out to the tip of peninsular. She hadn’t gone more than twenty or thirty feet along the trail before she saw that she wasn’t the first person out here this morning.

“Audrey...? she whispered as she stared at the footprints entering the trail from the right Of course, there was no way to be sure who it was, but Bri was positive it was Audrey, and she wouldn’t enjoy her walk if Audrey was around.

Thanks a lot!

The tracks in the snow were small and obviously fresh. The edges where the snow was broken were still sharply defined, so whoever had walked here had done so no more than a few minutes or even seconds ago.

Bri strained to see through the winter-stripped trees out to the point. There was no reason to shout or to try to hear because of the pounding roar of the ocean, but suddenly Bri wanted to — she had to know if these tracks were Audrey’s. If they were, then she was set to turn around and go home.

The walk could wait.

“No, damn it!” Bri slapped her mittens together and adjusted her scarf and woolen hat over her eyes. “I have just as much a right to be out here as she does.”

She started forward, struggling through knee-deep drifts. She wondered why the tracks she was following looked as if they had been made so … easily — as if whoever was walking out here had lightly skipped through or over the snow. She found it quite a job to plow her way along the trail.

As she went along, Bri had to admit that she was following the tracks, curious to see whose they were. She didn’t want to meet with Audrey. She wanted to avoid her more than anyone else. She also had to admit that she was curious to find out who — if not Audrey — was out here so early after a storm.

The tracks wound along the edge of the cliff overlooking the pounding surf. Soupy white foam shot up into the air as wave after wave smashed against the rocks. Bri stopped to watch, feeling both thrilled and terrified by the power of the ocean. Far out on the deep blue water, sea gulls were bobbing in the waves like miniature icebergs, heedless of the danger closer to shore. Bri wondered if sea gulls or seals ever got swept up in a rushing tide and were smashed against the rocks to die. She shivered when she thought how that’s exactly what could have happened to her that day she had fallen into the water. Trying to put such morbid thoughts from her mind, she turned and continued following the tracks, which were beginning to fill in with windblown snow.

The tracks swung back along to the west side of Indian Point, but before they got to the ledge with a clear view of the harbor, they swung back around under the trees.

“It’s Audrey, all right,” Bri said under her breath, recognizing the place where, not so long ago, Audrey had stopped their walk and turned around, saying she didn’t want anyone down by the dock to see her.

Under the snow- and rime-laden trees, Bri followed the single set of footprints. She knew that not more than a couple of hundred feet ahead she would come back to where she had first picked up Audrey’s tracks, so she was looking for the trail to veer off to the left. She grunted with surprise when the trail continued straight back to where she had initially picked it up.

“What the …? That’s impossible,” she said, squinting as she looked back the way she had come, then forward to where she could clearly see where she had started following the trail.

“How can that be?” she wondered aloud, scratching her forehead with the rough wool of her mitten.

There had only been one set of footprints, and she was positive she had followed them around in a circle until they came back to where they started, making one big circle in the snow.

But where had they started?

She either must have missed where the tracks branched off or …

“It’s another one of her tricks,” Bri said.

Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she was taking tiny sips of air, like water, through her mouth. Knowing Audrey, the only surprise was that the trick wasn’t meaner.

Bri suddenly straightened up and turned to face away from the wind. Cuping her hands to her mouth, she shouted as loud as she could, “Audrey! I know you’re out here!”

Her voice was whisked away like a dandelion fluff caught by a breeze.

“I know you are! And I know what you’re trying to do!”

Behind her, the ocean surged and roared, and closer to her, the wind whistled shrilly through the ice-covered branches, but that was all — no reply came … none that she heard, anyway.

The sun glinting off the snow and the knife-sharp wind brought tears to Bri’s eyes, blurring her vision as she looked back and forth along the circular trail in the snow.

How did she do that?

She supposed Audrey — or whoever — could have looped around the point and then smoothed over the snow to hide where she had come from and gone. Bri remembered how, back in Vermont after a snowstorm, she and her friends used to hop on one foot around the base of a tree to make it look as if a person had straddled the tree — or walked right through it — like in cartoons.

Or maybe Audrey had simply done one complete circuit and then, while Bri was following her first set of tracks, gone down to the rocks closer to the ocean where the surf washed away her footprints. That was a possibility, but it didn’t explain why, looking back and forth, she still could only see two sets of tracks — her own and … whoever else was out here.

“Audrey!” Bri yelled, letting the word tear from her lungs. Her voice sounded frail against the sound of the wind and the ocean.

“The hell with you, Audrey!” Bri shouted as her anger boiled over.

Whatever was going on here — even if Audrey was running around in a million circles — Bri wasn’t about to waste her time playing follow the leader. She had better things to do than try to figure out where Audrey had come from or where she was going. With an angry harumph, she turned and started back along the path toward the road. She had promised her father she would help him shovel, so to heck with this … to heck with Audrey ... to heck with everything!

As she made her way off the point and back to the road, Bri paused halfway and looked back over her shoulder. She still could see some of the tracks she — and presumably Audrey — had made. She shouted one last time, “To hell with you, Audrey!”

SIXTEEN

Father and Son

I

The following two days — Saturday and Sunday — were beautiful … sunny and cold with temperatures reaching into the lower teens.

“Damned-right seasonable for December,” Frank commented when he returned from church and visiting friends on Sunday afternoon.

By Sunday night, the sky was overcast again, and Bri found herself hoping against hope that the storm roaring up the East Coast wouldn’t veer out to sea. She wouldn’t have minded another day off from school. By midnight, though, two hours after she had gone to bed but wasn’t able to sleep, the snow hadn’t started, so she resolved to get up in time for the school bus at seven o’clock.

On Monday morning, Bri and John both agreed that it was a perfect Monday — overcast, cold, and gray. By now the freshness of the snow had been broken by snow plows and footprints and melting. The island took on a desolate atmosphere that made Bri wonder if this was how life was in Russia all the time.

On his way to work that morning, John slowed after crossing the bridge and, looking to his left, was surprised to see evidence of his skid off the road. A lot more snow had fallen, and the snowplows had cascaded snow off the road, but he could see faint traces of his tire tracks and the tracks left by Harry’s tow truck. He shivered and sped past the site, trying to put the incident out of his mind.

In the office, he lingered only for a few minutes around the coffee urn and then went straight to his office to begin work on the plans for a new septic system for an apartment building on Maple Street, in Westbrook. He was finding — as long as he didn’t have to deal with Surfside condos — that the office was the only place where he could relax.

With blueprints and logbooks and computations spread out over his drawing board, he immersed himself in work, but even though the system he was designing wasn’t all that complicated, his mind kept drifting back over events of the last few days. His feelings of uneasiness grew stronger, and he found himself swearing at the slightest thing — a dropped pencil, a blueprint that wouldn’t stay flat, cold coffee.

First and foremost, there was Julia.

Something … something bad was coming between them.

He had no doubt. He could see it as clearly as if someone, literally, had driven a wedge between them. For … how long now? A month or more, she had been acting like she didn’t trust him … as if she didn’t believe half of what he said even when it was about innocuous things.

Of course, in many ways, she was correct because he was keeping secrets from her.

Several things had happened lately that he couldn’t or wouldn’t discuss with her.

What happened last Thursday night, for instance, when he had skidded off the road … How could he tell her — and expect her to believe him — that he had seen a person walking along the side of the road in the snow storm, and the next that person had bounced off his car? And when he had gotten out to check on her — yes, her … He was sure it was a woman — she was gone.

How could he expect Julia to believe something like that?

Either it never happened, and he imagined it, or else he had hit someone and left them to die on the side of the road.

Worse were those notes he’d been finding around the house.

Who was writing them?

And what in the name of Christ did they mean?

So far, he had found four, and so far they spelled out the message:

I won’t forget what …

Was this someone’s idea of a practical joke?

The thought had crossed his mind more than once that someone in his family or maybe Randy or someone else on the island was playing an elaborate practical joke on him. But if they were, he wasn’t getting it,

The memories being stirred up in him were not at all funny.

So he didn’t talk to Julia about the notes because — first of all, he had no idea who was writing them or why, and second, he didn’t know what they supposed to accomplish … if anything except piss him off.

Why give Julia something else to worry about?

There were other things gnawing at his heart as well … things a husband didn’t like to think about or acknowledge … such as Julia’s wanting to have a baby.

On the surface of it, the idea was ludicrous.

They had a teenage daughter — not his own daughter, granted, but he loved Bri as if she were his own, and that should be enough. At their age, the last thing they needed was to be strapped down with an infant. God, the thought of diapers and teething and “baby-proofing” the house sent shivers up his spine, but Julia’s desire to have another baby seemed to go much deeper than that.

It also had put a glaring light on their sex life … or lack thereof.

They had been married more than five years now, and sure, it made sense that the romance would dim. No one can live together, day after day, and maintain that unique spark of being totally bowled over by love … not and stay grounded in reality.

But ever since they decided — Julia decided to move back to Maine, their sex life had gone south.

Maybe it was simply that every damned time they started something, Julia suggest not using birth control, and that ruined it for him. He felt more like a performer than a lover.

Or maybe they weren’t as sexually compatible as they had thought.

Maybe five years together had doused the flames of passion entirely, and her eyes — as his were increasingly — had begun to wander elsewhere, looking at strangers and fantasizing.

Hell, for all he knew, Julia and Randy had been getting it on ever since that day on the boat.

No, he dismissed that thought as too ridiculous.

But if Julia was messing around with Randy, that might explain what those frigging notes were all about.

Maybe they were rough drafts of Randy’s frigging love letters to Julia.

“Don’t be absurd,” he cautioned himself, but a seed of doubt had already become firmly implanted in his mind.

Beyond that, other things — deeper and darker things — were bothering him.

Some he could pinpoint easily enough … maybe a little too easily. Others made him feel like one of those six proverbial blind men trying to describe an elephant simply by touch.

Moving back to where he had grown up hadn’t been —

And still wasn’t!

— his idea of a smart move.

His sentiments for the people on Glooscap — especially his father — hadn’t changed in the time he had been away. If anything, they were more firmly entrenched. He had thought … had hoped that he had left all of them and their narrow-minded ways behind. After all, his father had been the one to push him so hard, demanding that he go to college, get a decent job, and not end up married to some island girl and finish his days spinning his wheels deeper and deeper into the mud on this island until he was deep enough to bury.

Seeing Randy Chadwick and experiencing all the high school memories that dredged up wasn’t his idea of fun, either.

At work he had made a few new friends — especially Barry. He enjoyed that relationship partly because it was new. It wasn’t based on having grown up together or having been high school buddies. Reconnecting with Randy and seeing how island living had aged him and Ellie both saddened and angered him. He knew that he and Julia would never feel comfortable socializing with the Chadwicks. Just knowing they had chosen to stay on Glooscap made him uncomfortable. He wanted to associate with people who had never known him as “Frank Carlson’s Little Boy.”

And the workmen finding those buried bones out at the construction site by Haskins’ barn — that business sent cold, numbing waves of darkness through him whenever he remembered what had happened out there in that barn when he was a teenager.

It wasn’t possible that Julia — or anyone else — knew about what had happened out there in the spring of his graduating year.

No way!

It was the one secret he would keep until he died.

But things had happened since he and Julia came back to Glooscap that had stirred up those long-buried memories like a ladle gently stirring up the bottom of a witch’s black brew. Seeing the barn or even simple, innocent remarks by people like Randy Chadwick struck too deeply into his mind, sending out dark spider web rays of fear and guilt.

“Yo, my man.”

The voice suddenly intruding on his thoughts made John jump up out of his chair. His elbow knocked the pocket calculator from the desk. When it hit the floor, the black plastic housing shattered before skittering under the desk.

“Christ! Don’t do that!” he shouted, glancing at Barry. He bent down and started scooping up broken pieces.

“Sorry, man. Why you so jumpy?” Barry said, getting down to help him. “Looks like that’s a goner. Don’t worry. I’ll get a new one.”

He handed John the few scraps he had collected, and John dropped them into his wastebasket.

“Forget about it,” John said, shaking his head. “It was a cheap one I picked up at WalMart.”

“Time to switch to decaf?” Barry asked. He glanced at the design John was working on, then locked eyes with him.

“I was —” John took a deep breath and finished, “Just thinking.” He rubbed his forehead with the flat of his hand and sigh. “I’ve got some problems at home, is all.”

“Nothin’ serious, I hope,” Barry said, frowning.

John shook his head and forced himself to sound casual.

“Naw. You know how it is.”

Barry, who had been married for sixteen years and had four children, nodded his understanding.

“Hell, man, I haven’t seen you that jumpy since … well, least since that day out at Surfside.”

Squinting, John looked at Barry, hoping what he was feeling didn’t show on his face. Barry chuckled softly under his breath and shook his head.

“I’ve never seen anyone get so freaked out. I mean — Christ, you must’ve been on jobs that uncovered bones before. Any other time, we’d keep on working, figuring whatever was buried there didn’t give a shit no more.”

John nodded and, as much as he didn’t feel like working today, stared blankly at his current project, hoping Barry would get the hint and disappear.

“Half those guys were looking at them bones like they were going to get up and dance, for Christ’s sake,” Barry said, still jiggling with laughter. “Maybe it was ‘cause it was so close to Halloween or something.”

“What, uh — whatever happened with that, anyway?” John wanted to sound casual, but his throat felt like it was pencil-thin, and — at least to his ears — his voice sounded unnaturally high.

Barry scoffed and waved his hand in front of his face.

“Fucked if I know? I didn’t call the cops and ask. I figured, once they were involved, it was out of my hands. Our job was to get as much work done out there as possible before snow covered everything.”

“Who would know what they found out about those bones?” John asked. The backs of his legs felt rubbery, the way they had that day after skating with Julia, so he eased back into his chair.

Barry shrugged. “Call the staties if you’re wondering. Actually, I wanted to ask what you think the office should do for a Christmas party this year.”

John scowled.

“The consensus is it might be too late to plan something before Christmas ‘cause everyone’s already made plans. Most folks want to have a New Year’s Eve party instead.”

“Sounds good to me,” John said with a shrug. He wished his voice would loosen up.

“If you got no problem, then, I’ll put you down for New Year’s Eve,” Barry said. “It pretty much looks like that’s what it’s gonna be.”

He turned to leave, but then paused for a moment at the door.

“Sorry ‘bout your calculator. Maybe Sanity Clause win get you a new one for Christmas.”

“I said — don’t sweat it.”

It took an effort not to sigh with relief when Barry wheeled around the corner and was gone. If it hadn’t been too obvious, John would have gotten up and closed his office door, but instead, he turned back to his plans, telling himself he had to get working on them and not just sit there, pondering things that were probably better left alone, anyway.

As he shuffled through the pages of notes, jogging them into order, he noticed a single sheet of paper sticking sideways out of the stack. As soon as he saw it, his blood went cold, and his hands began to shake.

He recognized it immediately —

A single sheet of notebook paper.

Slowly, his teeth clenched and his breath stopping so long his lungs began to burn, he took hold of the edge and slowly pulled it out from his pile of notes.

It isn’t! his mind was screaming. It can’t be!

But as he slowly extracted the sheet of paper, his chest began to thump. Hot pressure filled his ears as he unfolded the paper. In an instant, it felt like someone had dashed his eyes with acid.

There, in the middle of the paper, in heavy-handed pencil marks, were the words —

I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID …

Whimpering, he shredded the paper, ripping it into confetti.

Save that for the New Year’s Eve party, he thought as a crazy laugh tried to escape him.

He crumpled the paper into a tiny ball and jammed it into the bottom of his wastebasket. A sharp piece of the broken calculator housing nicked the back of his hand, but he barely noticed the jolt of pain or the tiny beads of blood that formed. His mind was racing along dark, narrow lines …

How the fuck did this get here?

And who the fuck is doing this to me?

II

The night was cold and clear when John went out to the garage for an armload of firewood. Overhead, the stars were bright chips of diamonds scattered across the rich black velvet of the night sky. The first breath he took froze the lining of his nose, making it sting as if he had inhaled water. Even though his nasal lining was hurting, his teeth were chattering, and his misted breath hung over his shoulder like a scarf, he preferred this moment of arctic cold to being inside the house. Julia and Bri had gone Christmas shopping at the Maine Mall, leaving him — for the first time since his mother died — alone with his father.

The logs he carried clunked like maracas in his arms. He wished — somehow — he could stay outside all night rather than go back inside and sit in front of the fireplace while his father read Readers’ Digest and he stared into the flames, seething with thoughts he couldn’t share with anyone.

But the cold cut like a knife right through his sweater. Within seconds, his hands were so numb he was afraid he was going to drop the wood as he dashed back into the kitchen door and kicked the door shut behind him.

“Might wanna leave some of the glass in them door windows,” Frank said, not bothering to look up from his magazine when John walked over to the hearth and dumped the wood.

“It’s freezing out there,” he said by way of apology. His teeth were still chattering as he pulled open the fire screen and, wincing from the sudden blast of heat, dropped two fresh logs onto the bed of glowing embers. Sparks corkscrewed up the flue as he took the poker and jiggled the logs into a better position, then stirred the coals.

“Should always put three logs in at a time,” Frank said. “Burns better that way. More even.”

This time Frank did bother to look at his son, who stared back at him, wanting more than anything to tell his father to mind his own damned business, but the reflection of the flames in the chrome of his father’s wheelchair made him hold back his comment. Sighing, John straightened up, put the poker back in the rack, and sat down heavily onto the couch.

“You know —” he began to say, but he stopped himself and rolled his head back and forth against the cushion to relieve the wire-tight tension in his neck. His body was wound up like a tiger ready to spring on its prey.

“What’z that?” Frank said.

He stuck his index finger into the middle of the magazine to mark his place and leaned forward a bit in the wheelchair. One of the wheels made a high-pitched squeak that set John’s teeth on edge.

John opened his mouth again, feeling he had something to say, but he didn’t because he knew he would sound like …

Like a little kid, he thought as a flush of heat that had nothing to do with the fire in the fireplace washed over his neck.

He squirmed at the memory of what Julia had said about how, ever since they had moved in, he’d been acting like he was still a little boy around his father — as if he weren’t an adult. Ironically, his father was now the child. He had become dependent on them. Still, that didn’t remove the feeling John had that he would always be the “kid,” and his father would always be the adult.

“You ‘bout to say nothing,” Frank said.

He reached out to the side and placed the magazine on the end table beside him.

“No — I … It was nothing,” John stammered as he shook his head. He wished to heaven he hadn’t already gotten the firewood. He needed to get out of here.

“Want a beer or something?” John asked as he hoisted himself up to his feet.

Frank nodded and said,

“Sure. A beer’d be fine ‘bout now.”

Grateful to be out of the room, John went into the kitchen, grabbed two cans of beer and two glasses, taking his time about it before walking back into the living room. He handed a can and a glass to his father, who simply grunted his thanks, popped the top, and poured, raising an inches-thick head of foam.

“That’s not how you pour a beer,” John said, wishing even as he spoke that he had kept his mouth shut.

“Oh?” Frank replied. “Temm me, how d’yah pour a beer? I mean, I always pretty much assumed if yah got it into the glass and from there to your gob, you were doin’ all right.”

As if a demonstration was needed, Frank tilted his head back, took a long swallow, smacking his lips with satisfaction.

Not wanting to carry this any further, John slouched back on the couch and, dispensing with the glass, popped the top and drank. He wished he could stop bristling at even the slightest little thing his father said or did, and yet he also wanted to tell his father exactly how he had made him feel after all these years.

What his father had said, about always putting three logs in the fire, was a perfect example of how he had always driven it into him that if he didn’t do something his way, he wasn’t doing it the right way.

Especially now, John felt an urgency to talk with his father.

After the stroke, he knew his father didn’t have all that many years left. As tough a nut as he was, his system had suffered a shock, and John didn’t think he would last more than five … ten years, tops. The man had lived his life, and it was nearing its end; but before he died, John wanted to clear the air about a few things. Otherwise, after his father was gone, he would spend the rest of his life resenting his father.

Clearing his throat, John shifted forward and, looking from the fire to his father’s lined face, said, “That’s always been something you do that drives me crazy.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re always telling me how to do things rather than letting me find my own way.”

Frank made a deep rumbling sound in his chest, and John had a quick impression he was about to spit at him. He didn’t, though. Instead, he rubbed his hand over his face and sighed.

“I’m tryin’ to give you the benefit of what I’ve learned,” Frank said softly. “I ain’t got much money in the bank, ‘n’ when I go — what’ll you have? This old house and a handful of unpaid medical bills Medicare won’t cover. I’m tryin’ to pass on to you some things I learned … ways of doing and looking at things that I think are the right way —”

“Your way, maybe,” John snapped. “What works for you won’t necessarily be right for me … or anyone else.”

Frank took a long, shuddering breath.

“Well, what works always works, to my way of thinking. I’ll tell yah — what breaks my heart more’n anything is how you still won’t take your family to church. Now you’ve got a wife and a child, you should be going to —”

“No! No way,” John said, making such a quick slicing motion with his hand he almost spilled his beer. “I’m not gonna talk about that.”

Frank’s expression hardened. In the glow of the fire, the lines on his face deepened like ink lines.

“‘S far as I can see, that’s where you’ve gone wrong,” he said in a low, thundering growl. “If you could only see that —”

“No, if you could only see!” John shouted, suddenly shifting forward. The motion splashed beer onto his lap, but he ignored it as he turned on his father. “If you could have seen what it was doing to us — to me and Mom — you might have eased up a little on that church bullshit!”

“Better watch what you say,” Frank said.

“I’ll say whatever the fuck I want,” John shouted, his face flushed with anger. “You didn’t — Christ, you couldn’t see it!” He lowered his head and shook it sadly from side to side. “You drove both of us fucking crazy with this church crap. All the time. As if going to fucking church was somehow miraculously going to change things.”

Frank’s mouth opened, but he was so choked up with anger the only sound that came out was a strangled gasp. His hands tightened on the wheelchair armrests, and when he looked at his son again, tattered waves of darkness swept in around the edges of his vision.

“This may sound spiteful,” John said, ignoring of his father’s rising anger, “but that isn’t how I mean it. You pushing it all the time — I don’t know, maybe going to church gave you the idea that your way was the only way, but I think that’s a lot of what got Mom started drinking in the first place —”

“That had nothing to do with it,” Frank said. His voice was low, steady, almost under control, but John could see his father’s knuckles turning white as he increased the pressure on the armrests of the wheelchair.

“It had something to do with it. I know it did. You never realized how much you pressured me about going. I didn’t want to have a thing to do with you or your fucking God.”

“Watch your mouth, boy!” Frank snarled.

“I’m not a boy,” John snapped back. “Jesus! Don’t you see it? Once even you couldn’t deny that Mom was drinking too much, what did you do? You prayed for her to stop?” He snorted and, for a breather, took a swallow of beer. “What the fuck kind of husband would let his wife drink herself to death?”

The smoldering glow in Frank’s eyes burned hard as he stared at his son. As John was speaking — yelling at him — Frank’s face, his body, even his nerve-dead left side tighten as dull tingling rushes ran through him. His son’s words hit his ears like the rapid, deafening punch of a jackhammer.

“Tell me exactly what kind of husband you are to Abby,” Frank said. His voice was steely, his mouth a thin, bloodless line. His eyes were rolled upward, and the firelight caught a wicked gleam in the exposed whites of his eyes.

John hadn’t missed his father’s slip of the tongue, calling Julia “Abby.” In the awkward silence that followed, he looked away and stared into the fire, trying to calm down. For a moment, he imagined faces rippling in the glowing bed of coals.

“From what I see,” Frank continued, “ever since you got here …

“I don’t want to hear anything you’ve got to say,” John said, standing up slowly and walking over to the fireplace. He took the poker, opened the screen, and jabbed at the blazing logs.

Frank’s mouth tightened into a grimace as he watched his son.

Although the thoughts were vague in his mind, he couldn’t help but feel both disappointment and sadness — disappointment because he didn’t like what he saw his son had made of his life, and sadness because he knew there wasn’t a damned thing he could say or do to make John change.

Maybe back when John was young —

God knows I tried to raise him right.

— he might have been able to change things …

Maybe the sadness came from knowing he couldn’t go back and do things differently now.

Or maybe, down deep, he realized that even if he could go back, things would probably work out this way, anyway, because of who — and what — they all were.

John looked at his father over his shoulder. The firelight cast one side of John’s face into high relief, and staring at him, Frank had the dizzying sensation of seeing himself when he was younger. He saw his own disappointments and failures written on his son’s face, but as much as he wanted to reach out and connect with him, his next words came out like honed-steel blades.

“‘S far as I can see, you ain’t much of a husband to Julia, and you ain’t no kind of father to Bri.”

John scowled, thinking, Well, at least you got her name right this time.

He frowned, the firelight reflecting wickedly in his eyes.

All his life, he had to put up with slams like that, but Julia was right about one thing. He was no longer the kid in this house. He was an adult, and he didn’t have to put up with shit like this from anyone … not even his father.

“You’re in no position to judge what kind of husband or father I am,” he said. His voice was tense, and it wavered, but he fixed his gaze on his father, letting himself dredge up and really feel all those years of hurt and rage and frustration.

If only there was some way to make you see … to let you feel what I’ve been through.

“You ask me, Bri’s too damned good to be your kid,” Frank said. “And although it saddens me to think the family name’s gonna die with us, I ‘spose it’s as God intends it. I ‘spose it’s the punishment I get for —”

“Did you ever think that maybe your stroke and being left in a frigging wheelchair was part of God’s punishment? Did you?”

John started pacing in front of the fireplace as he watched his father. He paused, picked up the poker in his right hand, and squeezed the handle so hard his fingers began to throb.

If he ever had any desire to communicate with his father before, any need to try to settle things between them — before he dies, he thought with a sudden chill — that desire had passed. Like before — like always! — his father said things that cut too deeply to be forgotten … or forgiven.

Frank’s hands, gripping the wheelchair armrests, began to tremble. As with many things in his life, he regretted some of the things he had said, but John had never showed him proper respect due a parent, and he wasn’t showing it now.

John didn’t believe in God.

Maybe that’s where it all started … or maybe that was simply an outward symptom of something deeper that was wrong with his son.

It didn’t matter, Frank thought, feeling deep, painful bitterness.

It simply didn’t matter.

It was too late for both of them to change.

“I think,” Frank said, his voice so low John could barely hear him above the crackling of the fire, “that having you for a son is pretty near all the punishment God needs to dish out to me.”

“I could say the same about you as a father,” John said, clenching his hands and shaking them in front of his face. The poker, still in his right hand, clanged against the mantel.

“You’ve never been any kind of father to me. All I ever got from you was criticism. Do this my way or else …”

Frank shook his head, trying to slow his racing pulse.

It had always been this way between them from the time John was a baby. He had always been willful —”bullheaded,” his mother used to call him. He and his wife used to say that a certain amount of that would serve him well in life, but in Frank’s eyes, John had never had anything to balance that bullheadedness, had never shown the proper respect to authority to his parents or — especially — to God.

“It’s true,” John wailed. “You never gave me room to breathe. Christ! You were always hounding me about how I had to leave this island. If you hated it here so fucking much, why didn’t you leave?”

“All I ever wanted was what any parent wants,” Frank said. “I wanted you to have a better life than I did.”

“Oh, yeah — right. Know what? I don’t believe you. But … do you want to know something else?” Before Frank could reply, he continued. “I’ll never forgive you for practically forcing me to break up with Abby back in high school.”

“Abby... “ Frank’s voice dropped to a whisper as he tilted his head back and stared up at the ceiling. Something — a vague thought — danced out of his reach, like a shadow that shifts every time you turn and try to see it.

John paid no attention to what his father was doing as he continued his tirade.

“Oh, you broke us up, all right. Always saying how she wasn’t good enough for me. That if I ended up with her, my life would be ruined. You drove me to —” He caught himself, took a deep, shuddering breath, then went on. “Christ! I couldn’t wait to graduate from high school, but not because I could leave this goddamned island. I wanted to get out of this fucking house. Out from under your shadow. All my life, I never measured up to your standards. I couldn’t even come close.”

With that last word, John cocked his arm back and swung the poker viciously at the mantel. The metal handle bent deeply into the wood. John’s eyes were stinging. His breath came in hard, fitful gasps that burned down to his stomach. All he could think was how easy it would be to go over to him, sitting there helplessly in his wheelchair, and whack him with the poker.

A lifetime of anguish … of feeling inferior would explode in that single, vicious swing that would crush his father’s skull like an eggshell.

Maybe that’s what he wants, John thought, not daring to look at his father because he knew the jolt of hatred he would feel might make him do it.

Maybe he’s so damned tired of living like this he wants me to end it for him.

“You watch what you’re doing there, boy,” Frank shouted angrily. “You’ve got no right to go bashing up my house.”

“You’ve been a bastard!” John wailed.

He swung again and hit the mantel with the poker, feeling the impact numb his arm up to his shoulder.

“Nothing but a mean, rotten, lousy bastard to me all my life!”

For a third time he swatted the mantel, and this time the tip of the poker hit the edge and removed a piece of wood the size of his hand. The iron bar was now bent almost ninety degrees.

I could do it, John thought as his mind was swept away by a flood of red-hot anger.

I really could kill him … Right here! … Right now!

“You don’t calm yourself,” Frank said, “I’ll call the cops. You ain’t got no right to be stavin’ up my house like this.”

John suddenly caught himself and stopped. He looked at his hand holding the poker, at the veins and tendons standing out in sharp relief, the twitching muscles that he knew with one quick swipe could end his father’s life.

He’s driving me to this, he thought. All my life, he’s been driving me to this.

“Look, son, Let’s admit we never really liked each other,” Frank said, “‘n we never will.”

He released the brake on his wheelchair and gripped the wheel rails.

“We’re gonna both gonna have to learn to live with that. But I’m warnin’ yah —” He pointed his gnarled forefinger at John as if it were a loaded and cocked gun. “You think you can pull horseshit like this in my house and get away with it, you’re dead wrong.”

His piece said, he spun his wheelchair around and rolled across the floor to his bedroom without a backward glance, shutting the door firmly behind him.

With a sudden, gut-deep grunt, John threw the poker to the floor. It clanged like a fire bell. Taking a long, rasping breath, he walked away from the fireplace to the window and looked out. His vision jumped with his pounding pulse. His mind was a torrent of raging thoughts, tangled emotions, and blazing anger as he stared blankly into the night. Beyond the reflection of the firelight in the window, he couldn’t see the starry sky he knew was out there, but he did see something beyond the glass. It emerged from the darkness … a fleeting glimpse of —

His mind went suddenly numb when he registered what it was.

— the outline of a person standing right outside the living room window, close to the house, looking in at him.

“Jesus Christ,” he shouted as he stumbled backwards. Air rushed from his lungs in a painful gasp as he staggered back. When he looked again, the shape was still there.

There is someone out there!

The face close to the window stared him straight in the eyes. And in a flood of panic, he recognized the cold, dead-white face.

This was the same person … the same figure he had seen reflected in the glass late at night … the same person he had seen hanging from the ceiling … the same person he had seen walking up to the house the night of the blizzard … the same person he had seen walking along the side of the road while he was driving home during the storm.

“No,” he said, his voice little more than a whimper. “Impossible!”

The face leered at him, smiling as it locked eyes with him with an icy glance.

As impossible as it was, he was looking at Abby Snow, and she was watching him through the thin pane of glass that separated them.

John backed slowly away from the window, tripping on the rug edge. The room spun crazily around him, throwing him off balance. The skin on the back of his neck prickled, and he thought he could hear low, hollow laughter. His eyes came to rest on the bent poker, and he bent down to pick it up. Holding it in front of him like a sword, he stared at the window.

She’s not out there … She can’t be out there …

Panic raged inside him

Using a shuffling sidestep, he approached the picture window, not knowing if, when he got there, the person — the illusion — would be gone, or if the window would suddenly explode in a shower of razor-sharp shards. He felt foolish holding the bent poker out in front of him, but if there was someone out there —

It can’t be Abby … It can’t possibly be Abby!

— he wanted them to know he didn’t take kindly to Peeping Toms.

With a sudden rush, he charged the window, holding the poker above his head, ready to swing. If someone was out there, they were going to be sorry when he caught them.

But when he looked out the window, there was no one there. Beyond the dim reflection of the fireplace and furniture and his own terror-stricken face, there was nothing but the snow-covered lawn and the black, frozen night. The streetlight cast a veined shadow across the glass from one of the maple trees in the front yard. Relieved. John burst out with laughter.

Is that what it was all this time … the shadow from a tree?

Loud, crazy laughter filled the living room. He dropped the poker to the floor.

No Peeping Tom … and certainly no Abby Snow! Just the streetlight, throwing a tree shadow onto the picture window.

John realized he must have been half crazy and had imagined seeing Abby’s face.

He had to have because one thing he was sure of was, no matter how much Randy Chadwick or anyone else around town speculated, he knew for certain that Abby Snow was dead.

He had seen her body.

PART THREE

Atropos — the Cutting Fate

And now how abhorred in my imagination it is!

My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that

I have kissed I know not how oft.

— Shakespeare

Justice foreshadowing the event shall come, in her hands a just victory. Yes, she will come, my child, in vengeance and soon!

— Sophocles

SEVENTEEN

Wish List

I

In the two weeks before Christmas, there were times when Julia felt like she was living in a Norman Rockwell painting. The temperature stayed in the teens — and lower at night — and several light dustings of snow, never more than an inch or two at a time, kept the ground sparkling white. Even some of the more tedious holiday chores ahead, such as sending Christmas cards and untangling strings of outdoor lights, were less tiring. If back in October when they had first moved in, the house had seemed old and dingy, now that she and John had finished with the necessary “paint ‘n’ paper,” it was positively homey in an old-fashioned way in spite of the tensions that still existed, especially between John and his father.

Julia was thankful that Bri, at least, had finally started making friends at school. She spent almost every afternoon with Kristin, either at one of the other’s house. Several of the local kids had shoveled off a large area of Larson’s Pond, and Bri went skating there on weekends. What Julia was happiest about, though, was that Bri had stopped her lonely walks out on Indian Point. She had never liked the idea of that, and she certainly didn’t have a good feeling about that girl Audrey that Bri had met out there. Kristin and she seemed to be developing a true friendship.

Things with John, on the other hand, were not going as well.

Julia had started inviting Ellie Chadwick up to the house once or twice a week for coffee and conversation, but she certainly didn’t feel close enough to Ellie to tell her about her problems and concerns with John.

Most of them centered around how he still was not relating well to his father. If anything, their relationship had deteriorated, and Julia found herself wondering what might have caused it. As far as she was concerned, she got along fine with Frank — even now, with the colder weather and him at home more because he couldn’t visitfriends down at the wharf. Although Bri was doing more things with Kristin and had less time to spend at home, she still found time to have a few games of checkers with her grandfather. Both of them had pierced Frank’s gruff exterior.

But John ... well, his relationship with his father was a problem, which made things doubly difficult for Julia.

The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced her problems with John weren’t solely because of tensions with his father. Ever since October, John had been steadily building a wall around himself, at least at home. From what little he told her about his work, it seemed as though things were going along fine there. It was a different story when he got home in the evening. If he wasn’t sullen and quiet, he was grumpy and sometimes outright hostile, snapping at the slightest irritation and swearing about minor things. She tried to mention — offhandedly and usually jokingly — that she still wanted to get pregnant; but whenever she did, John would glower at her.

Wanting to get pregnant was one thing she was willing to talk about with Ellie.

“If I was you,” Ellie said one bright morning as they sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee, ‘I’d stop using birth control and not tell him. You get preggo, and then —” She shrugged. “He has to adjust, like it or not.”

Julia shook her head.

“I don’t know. I don’t operate that way. John and I have always been honest with each other.”

Julia could tell by her wry expression that Ellie didn’t have to say aloud what she was thinking — Come on ... totally honest? …As if …

“That’s how I got Randy in the first place,” Ellie said, smirking into her coffee cup.

‘You got pregnant?”

“Back in high school, the idea of birth control was limited either to not doing it or the guys using rubbers —”

Julia’s chuckle interrupted her. “It’s getting that way again, what with AIDS. If Reagan didn’t bring us all the way back to the fifties, AIDS will.”

“What’s next? Huge tail fins on cars?”

They both laughed heartily.

“But I was saying — the last thing Randy wanted was a wife and kid right after high school, but I knew if he went off to college, I’d lose him.”

“You got pregnant on purpose?”

Ellie shrugged innocently.

“I used my ‘womanly wiles. I figured — you know one of the classic lies — Guys say ‘I’ll only put it in a little way?’ Well, one night — actually, now that I think about it, we were on a double date with John and Abby — I decided to let him go all the way, figuring if I got pregnant, he’d marry me and not go off to college.”

Although Julia chuckled along with Ellie, she also was wondering how anybody could do such a thing to someone they supposedly loved ... Let yourself get pregnant in order to hang on to them and ruin their chances to go to college and get ahead. All in all, it was a testament to their love that, like other couples she knew who had gotten married straight out of high school, they hadn’t gotten divorced. If anything, they seemed happy together, and they had two healthy kids.

“I don’t want to get too nosy,” Julia said, “but my math’s good enough to tell me that your oldest is only twelve; that’s not old enough to be —”

She cut herself off as the realization hit her.

Jesus!… Me and my big mouth …She lost the baby …

“Life’s full of ironic little twists, isn’t it?” Ellie said. She was still smiling, but Julia wondered if she had hit a long-dead but still raw nerve. “I miscarried a week after we got married. Maybe it was God’s way of punishing me.”

“Don’t even think that,” Julia said. Ellie had let her guard down, and Julia could see the lingering pain in her eyes. “I didn’t mean to —”

“Forget about it. It was years ago.” Ellie forced a smile. “I was only a couple’a months along. It wasn’t like I lost a child. Most people around town never even suspected it was a shotgun wedding, ‘cept for gossip, and once I got birth control pills, I didn’t get pregnant ‘till eight years later. It’s the trying that’s fun, right?”

“Absolutely,” Julia said, but she frowned and stared down at her coffee cup.

Even trying isn’t fun for us anymore.

That’s when it hit her that she couldn’t deny it. Things weren’t just rotten between John and his father. Things were rotten between her and John. They were drifting apart. Considering the strains they’d been under lately, that was understandable, but a sudden urge to be alone swept over Julia. She wished Ellie would hurry up and leave.

“That’s what I’d do if I was you,” Ellie said. “Men!” She made a sniffing sound and shook her head. “They don’t know what they want, anyway. I mean, Randy is so predictable.”

She looked at Julia and, pointing her finger at her, said, “You want a baby? Have one. John’s got nine months to adjust.”

Julia smiled weakly. She was wondering if she really did want a baby, or was she latching on to this idea because she knew, deep down, things weren’t going well between her and John, and having a baby might pull them together.

Was this need — yes, it was a need — to get pregnant a refuge from a marriage she saw heading toward the rocks but was too afraid to admit?

Their conversation turned to other things, thankfully, and they made plans to go to a local crafts fair on the weekend. Ellie told her about a place up in Windham where they could select and cut their own Christmas tree and suggested that a week before Christmas, both of their families could go out together and maybe have supper together afterward.

Julia thought that sounded like a good idea, but she was still stewing about this “baby business,” as John called it. There was nothing wrong with wanting to do something that would bring them closer together as a family, she decided, and maybe Ellie was right — John would have nine months to get used to the idea. She hardly paid attention as Ellie went on and on, chattering about this family or that situation. Finally, shortly before lunch, she left, saying she wanted to get home in time for Donahue. Julia was glad to see her go, but as she fixed lunch for herself and Frank and throughout the afternoon, she was lost in thought, trying to sort things out.

II

On Thursday, with Christmas nine days away, John took the afternoon off from work and went shopping on Exchange Street. When he had been rushing out to work that morning, Julia had given him a slip of folded-over paper, saying it was her Wish List. He didn’t take the time to look at it until he had left the office, deposited his briefcase in the car, and was striding down Exchange Street. When he opened the sheet of paper and saw what she had written, he didn’t know whether to get angry or laugh with relief.

Printed in small, neat letters in the middle of the page were the words:

A BABY

That was it.

The instant before he opened, he had the panicked thought that he would see, in heavy-handed pencil lines, something like —

I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID ...

The relief had been so great he didn’t get as upset with Julia as he otherwise might have.

“Some help you are,” he said, resisting the temptation to crumple up the paper and toss it. If this was her idea of a joke, it was passable, at best. He remembered her best joke of all time — when she had sent him grocery shopping. She wanted chicken breast meat for an Italian dish she was making, so on the list, she had written, “chicken tits.” That had made him laugh so hard several customers turned and left the aisle in order to avoid him.

But this wasn’t simply a joke, and he knew they couldn’t talk rationally about it. He had tried his best to make her see how foolish it was to start all over again with babies. Besides, this didn’t give him any clue what to get her for Christmas. Looking at the overpriced goods in the Exchange Street shop windows, he had no idea where to start.

The wind blowing off Casco Bay was knife-edge cold, and the sky was a rich gunmetal gray. It looked like it might start spitting snow — again. As John walked up and down Exchange Street, he found himself feeling a touch of the Christmas spirit. The decorations on the quaint, little shops and the gentle strains of Christmas carols from outdoor speakers all combined to make him feel as though he had taken a step back in time and was wandering the streets of Dickens’ London. People walked by, bundled against the cold. More than a few smiled at him and nodded, uttering friendly holiday greetings. It was enough — almost enough, he thought — to make him forget about the problems hanging over his head at home.

After a couple of hours, in spite of Julia’s lack of help, he had an armload of presents — some nice soaps and perfume, a silver pendant sea gull, a new pair of Laurel Burch earrings to replace the ones which Julia had lost ... or which the rats in the wall had “borrowed,” and a package of writing paper and envelopes for Julia. For Bri, he bought a large stuffed alligator, a designer T-shirt emblazoned with the Portland skyline (the logo read: LONDON-PARIS-ROME-PORTLAND), and — against his better judgment — the new album by Bon Jovi. His father was the only problem, but he was content with the shopping he had done so far and took his loot back to the car. He considered leaving everything in the trunk and trying to find something for his father, but in the past two hours he had come up dry. Figuring he was burned out, he paid his parking fee and drove home.

His good mood evaporated as soon as he entered the kitchen.

“What the hell is this?” Julia said.

She had obviously been waiting for him at the door. In her hand was a sheet of notebook paper, which she flapped rapidly in front of him. He couldn’t see anything was written on it, but the cold clutching around his heart told him he had a pretty damned good idea.

“What’s what?” He was painfully aware of the tremor in his voice.

“This! What the hell does this note mean?”

She stopped shaking the paper long enough for him to see, scrawled in heavy pencil across the middle of the paper —

I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID TO …

“Any ideas?” Julia said after giving him the note.

He had left the bags of presents in the car, intending to get them later so he could hide them until he got them wrapped. A cold tingle traveled up his spine as he clutched the paper. He shivered as he shrugged off his coat and, still holding the paper, went into the hallway to hang it up. He had noted the addition of the word “to,” and the gnawing in the pit of his stomach told him, now more than ever, that there was more to come.

“I ... I haven’t got a clue,” he said when he rejoined Julia in the kitchen. He turned the sheet of paper over in his hand, as though looking for more. After handing it back to her, he went to the refrigerator and grabbed a beer, snapped it open, and took a huge swallow. His mind was raging, but all he could think was, he didn’t have anything more to say to her. He was as confused as she was.

“Where’d you find it?” he asked, trying to control the shaking in his voice.

“It was on the kitchen table when I got back this afternoon. I was visiting Ellie.”

John willed his hand not to tremble as he reached out and took the sheet of paper again. As he studied it, it struck him as remarkable how every sheet looked identical except for the addition of a new word each time. He knew — he was positive — he had thrown away the other notes, but this sheet looked exactly the same, even down to the torn ring holes on the side. The heavily scrawled letters, each of which had been gone over several times, still looked like a child had been practicing lettering, but he knew it was much more serious than that.

“Seriously. I haven’t got the foggiest,” he said with a dismissive snort as he handed the note back to Julia. Beads of sweat stood out on his brow, and his stomach was cold.

“What about the other ones, then?” Julia asked, nailing him with a hard look.

“What — what do you mean, ‘other ones?’” John mouth felt like it was full of sawdust, so he tipped his head back and took another healthy swig of beer, letting the bubbles cascade down his throat.

“I mean the other note — or possibly other notes — you might have found around the house.”

Her grip wrinkled the paper, and John wished she would throw the damned thing away and forget about it.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, squinting and shaking his head with confusion. He lowered his voice so, if his lie was too obvious, she might not notice it.

“I think you do,” she said, “and it bothers me that you would keep anything from me. The day we went out lobstering with Randy? Remember?”

“What about it?”

“I came down around three in the morning and found you sitting on the couch, staring out the living room window. Remember?”

John gave her a slight nod of the head.

“You had a note almost identical to this one,” Julia said, her voice taking on a steely edge. “And when I came into the living room, you stuffed it under the couch cushion so I wouldn’t see it.”

Again, John nodded, unable to maintain eye contact with her for long. To keep busy, he took another sip of beer.

“That one said, I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU ... Now this one has two more words. ‘DID TO’ ... So what does it mean?”

“I told you. I have no idea.” John shrugged. “Maybe it’s Bri’s.”

He wanted to go to her and hug her … tell her to forget about it, that everything was all right, but a black chill was creeping through his gut, and it told him otherwise. Each additional word pushed his mind further down a certain path that he didn’t want to — he didn’t dare to follow.

“Bri’s not going to write something like this,” Julia snapped.

“Besides, this one wasn’t here when I left for Ellie’s, and Bri went to Kristin’s straight from school. She didn’t write it, and your father didn’t write it.” Julia’s voice broke with the strain. “I think it’s yours.”

“I’ve been in Portland all day. How could I have put it there?”

Julia relaxed and said, “All right. Maybe.” She heaved a sigh. “So you don’t know what it means — but do you want to know what bothers me the most?”

Unable to swallow much less form a word, John nodded.

“It bothers me that you would hide anything from me. I thought —”

Her voice choked off, and tears welled in her eyes.

Icy hands squeezed John’s heart until it felt like it was going to collapse inward. If he looked deep inside himself, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see noting more than dark, dry powder where his heart should be because he had an idea what those notes meant … what they were leading to. He might not know who was writing them — not yet, anyway — but he was positive what they meant. And he knew, as deeply as he knew the darkest secrets of his own heart, he could never tell her.

“I thought we were honest — totally honest with each other,” Julia said as tears gushed from her eyes. “But you found that note that morning and you hid it from me.”

“No, I —”

“Yes you did! You hid it under the couch cushion,” Julia shouted. “You didn’t know I saw you do it, but when you went upstairs to get dressed, I read it. Then later, I put it back, and you took it and threw it away because once we were back from our lobstering expedition, I checked under the cushion, and it was gone. Can you deny that you threw it away?”

Biting his lower lip, John nodded slowly.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice registering hollowly in his ears, “I did. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Why did you try to hide it from me in the first place? You didn’t tell me.” Julia’s voice broke as more tears coursed down her cheeks. “You didn’t tell me about it. You hid it from me and didn’t tell me, as if it was some ... some kind of secret.”

“It wasn’t that at all,” John said. “I’m as confused about this as you are. Yeah — sure I found the other note that morning —”

“Only one other?” Julia nailed him with a cold stare.

“Yes. Just that one. I swear to God! And I don’t know what this one or the other one means. I have no idea, so I threw it away.”

“I want to believe you,” Julia said. “I really do.”

She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, but all that did was make them red and puffy. Her breath came in sharp hitches that shook her shoulders. She was still holding the notebook paper, now balled up in her hand, and she stared at it as if she expected it to give her an answer.

“I don’t know what to think,” she said, her lower lip trembling. “I mean, how can we have a … a marriage that works if I can’t trust you?”

“You can trust me,” John said, his voice low and — he hoped — convincing.

“But you kept this from me,” Julia said.

“It wasn’t that big a deal.”

“Don’t you get it? If there are any secrets between us, what I thought was ... was love isn’t going to last.”

John was fighting back a flood of panic because he knew, as surely as he knew there would be a sunrise tomorrow, there would have to be another note to finish the sentence. If there was a chill in his soul now, he could only imagine how he would feel when the message was completed.

I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID TO ...

Did what? ... to whom?

One more word … maybe two — a name — would complete the message.

John dreaded when the next note would come and what it would say, but more than that, one thing was certain: when it came, Julia would not find out about it.

“Can we forget about it?” he said.

He put his nearly empty beer can down on the countertop and came over to her, wrapping his arms around her waist and pulling her close. She collapsed into his embrace, burying her face against his chest. Deep sobs wrenched her body as he ran his hands up her back and, lacing his fingers in her hair, gently rubbed the back of her head.

He was going to say more, about how she could trust him and believe him as she always had … that there were no secrets between them — ever — and never would be — but even as the words formed in his mind, they wouldn’t leave his mouth.

He couldn’t lie to her.

“I love you,” he said, pulling back and looking at her upturned face.

She gazed at him, her eyes glimmering with tears. She sniffed and wiped her nose with her palm.

“I love you, too,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper.

John didn’t like the way she looked at him, though. Her eyes were still narrowed with suspicion as though, if she squinted while she looked at him or caught a glance of him out of the corner of her eye, she would see someone different from the person right in front of her. He was afraid she would see who he really was. He could sense that, even if it was only the tiniest chink in the wall, he had lost a measure of her trust, and he was going to have to work hard to regain it.

They kissed, but even after they broke the kiss off and he took the crumpled note from her and tossed it into the trash can, he caught her, from time to time throughout the evening, looking at him in a strange way … as though she was no longer quite sure who he was.

EIGHTEEN

Christmas Eve

I

It had always been a tradition in Julia’s family to wait until Christmas Eve to decorate the tree, and John had readily adopted that tradition because, for one thing, it went against what he saw as the over-commercialization of the holiday. Another more practical reason had always been that, until recently, he had usually been so damned busy up until Christmas Eve that he rarely had time to get to it before then.

School was getting out for the week at noon, and Julia suspected that John’s office — since they weren’t having their holiday party until New Year’s Eve — would also let out early for the day. While Frank watched, adding his own small talk, she decorated the house, taping the cards they had received around the living room doorway and nailing the family stockings to the mantel. The day was overcast, so long before sunset, she turned on the electric candles in the windows. Their orange glow flooded the living room look with warm light.

The night before, John had cut their tree to size and set it in the tree stand in the living room so the branches would drop. Julia was on her knees, testing and replacing the burned-out bulbs in several strings of lights.

“One favor I gotta ask yah,” Frank said.

“What’s that?” Julia asked. They still had an old fashioned string of lights where, if one bulb went out, the whole string stayed off. After trying for fifteen minutes to locate the offending bulb, she was close to throwing the string away.

“I was wonderin’ if you folks’d accompany me t’ church this evenin’, it being Christmas Eve ‘n’all.”

Julia didn’t look up, but she let out a deep sigh she hoped he didn’t hear.

“I — uh.”

“Far’s I’m concerned, it’s the only thing you have to do for me for Christmas,” Frank said. He looked past her, his eyes dimming as they focused on one of the lights in the window. “It’d mean a lot.”

His voice was low and earnest, and when she turned to look at him, the expression on his face made her see how ridiculous it was to get so worked up about something as stupid as a set of tree lights.

If the holiday isn’t for doing things to make your family feel good, she thought, then what good is it?

Before she could say anything, though, Frank continued.

“I know John won’t take kindly to the idea. Never has.” He turned and looked at her expectantly. “But even if he doesn’t come along, maybe you ‘n Bri’d join me.”

“We’d be happy to,” Julia said.

Maybe it was the holidays that made her feel so sentimental, but it took an effort not to burst into tears and rush over to hug him.

“Oh, ‘n’ by the way,” Frank said, nodding to the floor by her foot. “You ain’t ever going to get that string of lights to work if you don’t plug it inta the socket.”

Julia looked behind her and saw that, while she had been untangling the lights, her foot must have pulled the cord from the wall socket. As soon as she plugged it into the wall, the string lit up.

“I owe you,” she said, smiling at Frank, who was chuckling so deeply his wheelchair was squeaking. Without another word, he spun around and went to his room, closing the door gently behind him.

Long before John and Bri got home, Julia had everything done except for decorating the tree. The boxes of ornaments were sorted out and waiting on the floor beside the tree, and she had finished wrapping the gifts for the family. The sky was lowering, and it looked as if there might be a bit of snow headed their way, but that was too much to hope for on Christmas Eve.

A little after noon, Bri slammed in through the door and, slinging her backpack to the floor, collapsed at the kitchen table.

“I can’t believe it,” she wailed, leaning back and shaking her fists at the ceiling. “Mrs. Endicott gave us a term-paper assignment due the week after vacation! At least five pages! She’s nuts if she thinks I’m going to ruin my vacation researching Shakespeare. Dad was right — she is a battle-ax.”

“Is that the only homework you have over vacation?” Julia asked.

Bri nodded, her mouth a grim line.

“Yeah … the rest of the teachers apparently are human.”

“Count your blessings,” Julia said. ‘‘I’m sure you’ll find time to do it. Maybe you and Kristen can work together.”

“Maybe, Bri said, shaking her head with disgust. She stood up, grabbed her backpack, and trudged up the stairs to her bedroom, grumbling something about that woman not having a heart.

A few minutes after Bri had left the kitchen, John came home. Julia greeted him at the door with a smile and a kiss, hoping he would drop the frown that wrinkled his forehead.

“Rough day at the office?” she asked, wishing she didn’t sound like such a stereotypical housewife on TV.

“You might say that,” John replied as he stamped his feet on the rug and took off his coat. Clumps of snow fell to the floor and started to melt into irregular puddles. “Even tougher getting out of town, what with all the traffic.”

What he didn’t tell Julia … what he couldn’t tell her was that, once he had left work and gotten to his car, he had found another note, exactly like the others. It had been stuck smack-dab on the middle of his car seat, even though all the doors had been locked and all the windows were rolled up.

In the same handwriting, were the words:

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID TO …

He had torn up the sheet of notebook paper and sprinkled it on the snow-covered ground in the parking lot, grinding it into the slushy snow with his heel. And as he had driven home, he had known and dreaded that when the next message came, the last word —

A name!

— would be added.

And he knew, more than ever, whose name that would be.

Julia busied herself, making a sandwich for him.

“After you have a bit of lunch,” she said, “maybe we could get the tree decorated.”

John cocked an eyebrow as he looked at her.

“After supper won’t be time enough? Christ! I just walked in the frigging door. Gimme a chance to catch my breath.”

“I was thinking …hoping we’d get it done this afternoon so we could go to church tonight with your father. He —”

Turning and glaring at his father’s closed bedroom door, John sucked in a quick breath, held it, and then let it out with a slow hiss.

“He put you up to this, didn’t he?”

Julia could only stammer.

“Don’t pretend. I know he did.”

John scowled as he leaned back on the counter, his arms folded across his chest.

“Com’on. It’s Christmas.” Julia looked at him with pleading in her eyes. “It means a lot to him.”

She walked over to him and, smiling, wound her arms around his waist. With a sudden clenching of her arms, she pulled him so close to her it forced his breath out. Caught by surprise, he had to laugh when she reached down to his crotch and grabbed him firmly but not too tightly.

“I don’t want to have to resort to extreme measures of persuasion,” she said, tightening her grip. “But if you don’t see reason … Can I make myself any clearer?”

Wincing in mock pain, John groaned and said, “All right … all right. I’ll go. I won’t like it, but —”

“No buts,” Julia said.

She released the pressure but didn’t let go. Instead, after a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure Bri wasn’t standing in the doorway, she began to rub up and down on his crotch. She smiled with satisfaction when he began to stiffen under her hand.

“And who knows …?” she whispered, her mouth close to his ear as she maintained the steady friction. “Maybe after church, once all the good little children are tucked safely into bed, waiting for Santa Claus to come, we can have our own little fun.” She said the last word with a throaty growl.

John ran his hands up and down her back, molding the curve of her hips beneath his fingers. He was still wire-tight from work and the drive, but he relaxed a bit. Bringing his mouth close to hers, he whispered, “We’ll have to wait and see, now, won’t we?”

“You know what I want under the tree …” Julia said before their lips met,

“I always knew you had a dirty little mind,” John said, almost laughing. “And here you are, talking about going to church.”

After John ate his sandwich and washed it down with a beer, they called Bri downstairs. Frank came out of his room and supervised as they strung the lights and then hung ornaments and tinsel from the branches. Julia was glad to see John starting to unwind. He joined in, joking and laughing along with them. Actually, he seemed so relaxed she couldn’t help but remember how much fun he used to be. She was pleased to see him even directly address his father a few times, asking his opinion on how this or that looked on the tree.

Throughout the afternoon and supper, everyone seemed filled with holiday cheer. It was only after supper, while they were getting ready for church, that Julia began to feel guilty. She didn’t know when she had decided, but as they were driving to church, she knew she had made up her mind. She was going to take Ellie’s advice and tonight, if they did make love once Bri and Frank were in bed, she was conveniently going to forget to use her birth control.

John had never liked going to church. He had a host of reasons why, but one of his strongest — especially on Christmas Eve, the night of the candlelight service — was remembering the time he got scared in church. Scared wasn’t the word. Terrified. No other word came close. He could barely admit it to himself, but that was it — he had been terrified during the candlelight service when they darkened the church.

He had been — what? — ten years old, tops, the first time his parents — this was before his mother began drinking — took him to a Christmas Eve candlelight service. The beginning of the service had been typical — boring and long, with the minister and congregation droning responses back and forth, and everyone joining in on the hymns. But after the sermon, someone at the back of the church turned off the lights, plunging the whole church into darkness. A single candle still burned on the altar, and the minister had still been talking, going on and on about the promise of hope and light that the season brought, but it had taken John several terrifying seconds to realize he hadn’t suddenly lost his sight.

His first thought had been, I can’t see … I’m dying!

For an instant, ten-year-old Johnny was spinning … falling backwards … completely out of control … his mind a swirl of blackness except for one tiny sliver of light.

While the minister was going on and on about a light in the time of darkness, a black, nameless dread —

I’m not dead ... but I’m dying!

— had gripped him in its icy clutch.

Before he knew what he was doing or could stop it, he had let out a high-pitched, warbling screech that had echoed throughout the church. Needless to say, the entire service had been disrupted by John’s outcry.

He remembered what happened next only in fragments that filled him with fear and embarrassment. His father had grabbed him by the arm and roughly jerked him down the aisle and down to the church basement. He was in tears, flailing his arms and legs, screaming as loud as he could — partly because of the licking he knew he was going to get, but mostly because that cold, dark terror was still squeezing his heart, making it impossible to breathe. Everyone in the church, he knew, must be wondering what the devil was wrong with him.

Was he sick?

Had he his mind?

He told his father that he’d had an awful jab of pain in his stomach, that he was going to throw up. As it turned out, that had spared him the whipping he had expected. Ever since that day, he had never been able to enter a church without feeling at least an echo of that black, nameless dread —

I’m not dead ... but I’m dying!

— he had first felt on Christmas Eve.

But that was then,. This was now.

Pushing Frank in his wheelchair, he and Julia and Bri walked into the church and sat down … a little too close to the front, John thought, eyeing the doors at the back of the church — his escape route if he needed one. He ground his teeth, trying hard not to let his agitation show. It took effort to remain calm, and he knew it would only get worse when the church went dark for the candle lighting, but he kept telling himself it would only be for an hour … He could make it. He had been ten years old, after all. The church’s sudden plunge into darkness had caught him by surprise. It had scared him. He was an adult now, he kept telling himself … He could handle it.

There were several familiar faces in the congregation, and many people he didn’t recognize came over to Frank and wished him and his family a Merry Christmas. John struggled to put names to faces, and he even got a few, but he kept smiling and looking cheerful all the while thinking, Am I going to scream again when the lights go out? … Will I feel like I’m dying?

The minister — still Pastor Vernon, looking old and tired — came out, and the service began with a rousing “Joy to the World.” John was surprised how much of the service he remembered, and he mouthed responses along with the congregational with only a few glances at his hymnal. He half-heartedly joined in the carol singing, although he did have to admit it was nice having Julia and Bri beside him.

But his mind was rushing ahead, waiting … dreading the moment after the sermon when the church lights would go out, and he would be standing there alone —

Yes … Alone … No matter how close I’m standing to Julia and Bri.

— in the dark, waiting for the ushers to move down the aisles so all could light their candles, wondering if that same cold dread he had experienced so long ago was still there, still waiting for him …

I’m not dead ... But I’m dying, his mind whispered, thoughts from more than twenty-five years ago.

As the sermon was drawing to a close, its words and message were completely lost to John. Same old gobbledygook as far as john was concerned. Gripping the hymnal tightly, his hands slick with sweat, he waited ... waited for the sudden drop into darkness.

Reverend Vernon declared, “A light in the time of darkness.”

That was the cue, and suddenly the church lights winked off.

But John was ready this time.

He focused straight ahead at the single candle still burning on the altar as blackness rushed down around him with an audible whoosh. A cold jab pierced the pit of his stomach as though he’d been skewered by an icicle. He bit down hard on his lower lip, but a tiny whimper was the only sound he made.

In his mind, he was ten years old again, and —

Yes!

— the cold, eternal dread was still there.

It sprang like a tiger out of the darkness at him.

But with his eyes fixed on the single burning candle, he watched as Reverend Vernon reached forward with a large white candle and touched the wick to the flame. With the second candle burning, adding its light to the dark church, John felt a measure of relief. Memories and fears were still rushing in his mind like a whirlwind, but the ushers touched their candles to the one the minister was holding, and soon they were moving down the center aisle as everyone passed the flame and lit the small candle he or she had been given when entering church.

John glanced at Julia. Her face was bathed in the warm glow of the candles. She looked serene and content. Even the rough crags of his father’s face appeared to be smoothed out … softened. The rising tide of dark, oppressive fear inside John crested like a towering wave, and then, ever so gently, it began to recede.

But then, when John looked straight ahead, he saw something … someone who made his heart thump hard in his chest.

Standing only three pews away was a woman … a young girl he was positive hadn’t been there the moment before the church lights went on. She was wearing a rough-looking gray sweater — certainly not fancy Christmas Eve attire — and her long, dark hair swept down her shoulders in a swirl that gleamed like a crow’s wing in the flickering candlelight.

In an instant of panic, John was sure he recognized her.

Her hair, the stoop of her shoulders, her stance — everything about her was so familiar. Around him, the congregation made noises — hushed whispers and muffled shuffling of feet and creaking of floorboards as each person passed the flame to his neighbor. Below the crowd noise, though, he heard something else … a low, rippling giggle that danced at the edge of his hearing.

He wasn’t positive, but it looked as if the girl’s shoulders were shaking … as though she’s laughing, John thought, suddenly desperate to see her face.

The ushers made their way slowly along the aisles. Once Frank had his candle lit, he nudged John, to get his attention so he could light his. John then passed the flame along to Julia and Bri, all the while struggling to keep his hands from trembling.

Who is she? he wondered, unable to pull his eyes away from the young woman’s back as he watched her, concentrating his gaze so intensely he was sure she could feel his eyes boring into her back.

John sensed more than saw a stirring beside him and, looking to his left, realized that his father was watching him, his eyes glistening like wet glass in the candlelight.

Maybe he’s thinking about what happened that Christmas Eve, too … and he’s expecting it to happen again.

Frantic helplessness churned inside him.

When Frank followed John’s gaze, he, too, saw the girl in the gray sweater. An expression of confusion swept across his face. The lines around his eyes and mouth deepened into a nest of shadows. His lower lip began to tremble, and his eyes rolled back in his head as he gazed blankly for a moment at the ceiling.

“Ain’t that ... ?” Frank whispered, more to the ceiling than to his son.

His father’s hand clenched the hymnal as wave after wave of what looked like — concern? No, worry … or stark fear — swept over Frank.

With a sudden twist, Frank looked wide-eyed at John. He indicated that he wanted John to say something to him. After making sure they wouldn’t disturb anyone, John leaned down to his father.

“That’s what I was going to tell yah,” Frank said, his voice a papery rattle. “I was tryin’ to remember. That ... that’s ...”

Again, blankness swept like a banner across his eyes as he reached deeply into his mind, struggling to find the words that were there but weren’t forming for him. His face reflected the struggle raging inside him.

“What?” John asked, prodding him. His stomach was churning as he kept flicking his gaze back to the girl in the gray sweater.

“I saw her before … at the house,” Frank said.

“Saw who?” John asked.

In answer, Frank jerked his head in the direction of the girl standing three rows in front of them.

John looked at her as his own fear rose, compounded by whatever his father was trying to communicate to him. A dread coldness reached out to him from the darkness of the church where the candlelight didn’t reach. He was convinced the girl hadn’t been there when the service began, and although the logical explanation was that she had arrived late and slipped into place unnoticed with her family, there was something about her … something unnerving, and it obviously bothered his father, too.

John’s first impression had been that — at least from behind — she looked like someone he knew very well … someone who couldn’t possibly be here tonight.

By now, everyone in the church had a candle lit. The church organ began the triumphant strains of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” As the congregation joined in, John found himself dumbly mouthing the words as he looked back and forth between the girl’s back and his father’s confused expression. The girl appeared not to move. She simply stood there, head bowed, apparently not singing.

The memory of the panic John had dreaded earlier was nothing compared to what he was feeling now. He tried to tear his gaze away from the girl but couldn’t. As he glanced at the burning candle in his hands, feeling the warmth on his face, it suddenly went cold. The flame burned with a deep blue.

Beneath the swelling chorus of voices, John could still hear a faint ripple of laughter — cold and icy … like the darkness he had dreaded earlier only worse because it wasn’t just cold — it was cruel.

With all the candles burning brightly, the church was almost as bright as it had been with the ceiling lights on, but this light had a peculiar flickering glow that looked somehow unnatural. When Julia poked him in the ribs, he turned to her.

“You okay?” she whispered, her brow creased with concern as they looked at each other.

Tight-lipped, John nodded. “Yeah —”

“What did your father want?”

“Nothing.”

He stopped himself from mentioning his father’s sudden confused panic, and glancing at him now, he appeared to be perfectly fine, singing along out of tune with the carol.

“Then sing with us,” Julia said, holding her hymnal so he could see the page. “Come on.”

John quickly riffled through his hymnal until he found the correct page, but all the while he was positive he could still hear faint traces of laughter, nibbling at the edge of his awareness. Once he found the carol, he scanned the lines and found where they were, but then when he lifted his head — aware that Julia was still watching him — his throat closed off with a strangled gag.

The girl wasn’t there anymore.

John looked at his father to see if he had noticed or reacted, but Frank was singing along, oblivious to his confusion. John turned and looked down the aisle to see if the girl —

It couldn’t possibly be who I thought it was!

— was leaving, but she was nowhere in sight. There wasn’t a gap in the crowded pew where she had been. John saw the wide back of a man in a dark blue sports coat where, seconds before, the girl with black hair and wearing a shaggy, gray sweater had been.

Am I seeing things?

A chill rushed up his back. The tips of his fingers tingled with pins and needles, and he was taking short, gasping breaths.

How could she vanish like that?

Leaning close to his father’s ear, he whispered, “Did you remember who you wanted to tell me about?”

Frank jerked away from him and glared at him with anger.

“What — ? Who?” he whispered harshly. “Don’t go botherin’ me during the service.”

John straightened up, thoroughly confused by his father’s earlier reaction.

“Are you sure you’re feeling all right?” Julia whispered, nudging him in the side and leaning close. “You look pale.”

“I’m fine — It’s the candlelight,” John said, forcing his voice to stay light. He shook his head vigorously from side to side.

Julia turned back to her own hymnal, glanced at Bri beside her, and continued singing. John tried to push aside the thoughts that kept rushing in on him. He tried to convince himself that the girl in the gray sweater had been there all along. He simply hadn’t noticed her. And finally, once the candles had been lit, she had left, either to go downstairs to the bathroom or to go home.

She’ll be back, he told himself, but even if she didn’t, she had been there. That was her father in the dark blue sports coat.

But what the hell was my father doing? he thought, looking at him from the corner of his eye.

Why is he acting so weird ... and then pretending he hadn’t said anything?

His words echoed in John’s mind …”That’s what I was going to tell yah … I was tryin’ to remember. That’s … I saw before ... at the house.”

The thin laughter had been ... must have been — like the momentary blue glow of his candle — his imagination playing tricks on him. Just because, from behind, the girl had reminded him of Abby Snow … that was nothing more than coincidence. His earlier fears, remembering what had happened to him in church on that Christmas Eve when he was ten years old, had hijacked his imagination and made him think she looked like Abby … because he knew that Abby Snow, had been dead for twenty years, so she couldn’t be here — or anywhere — tonight.

III

The too-good-to-hope-for snow Julia had wished for started falling during the church service. As people filtered out into the night, thick flakes sifted down, tumbling like flat coins in the glare of the streetlights. Lit from the inside, the stained-glass windows of the church stained the piled-high snow banks with soft reds, blues, and yellows. The night was filled with holiday greetings, and even John, who was still feeling disoriented from his panic, tried to get into the holiday spirit.

“Should’ve put on some snowies,” Frank said, chuckling as John struggled to push his wheelchair down the snow-slick walkway. Julia and Bri followed close behind.

“I think this is wicked neat,” Bri said.

“‘Wicked?’” Julia said, smiling that she had adopted an expression she had only heard down at the dock.

Bri bent down, scooped up a handful of snow, made a small snowball, and tossed it at John’s back.

He turned and said, “I’ll get you for that. Or maybe Santa will leave coal in your stocking.” As he looked back at her over his shoulder, a shadow under one of the yew bushes beside the church deepened and shifted, but he pretended not to notice.

“Well …” Bri said, skipping close to him, “I happen to know that Santa got you nothing but neckties this year.”

“Not again,” John wailed dramatically.

They crossed the street to their car, and while Julia swung open the back door, John helped his father get into the front seat. He collapsed the wheelchair and went to put it into the back of the station wagon, but as he was raising the hatch, a sharp peel of shrill laughter filled the night, setting his nerves of edge. His mind went blank with fright. Looking at the church, with no idea what he expected to see — maybe the girl he had been watching — he was relieved when he saw two boys, racing across the church parking lot, throwing fistfuls of snow at each other. A few paces behind, a balding man and an overweight dark-haired woman were walking. The man shouted, “Aaron! ... Jesse! You guys stop that right now!”

Smiling and shaking his head with relief, John got into the car and drove back to the house, grateful — at least — that church was over.

“Anyone feel like taking a peek under the tree?” Bri said when they burst into the kitchen, stamping their feet on the kitchen rug to knock off the snow. Julia walked over to the stove and asked if anyone wanted coffee or hot chocolate.

“Let’s have some cocoa, and then we can each open a present,” Bri said, jumping up and down excitedly. It was nice to see her acting like a kid, Julia thought.

“Sounds good to me,” John said.

On his way into the house, he had scooped up a small handful of snow. After he swung the door shut behind him, he turned and, shouting “Here’s yours,” threw it at Bri.

Bri ducked to the side, but not fast enough. The snowball caught her on the side of the face and splattered with a wet plop.

Julia scowled at them.

“If you two children want to play, would you please go outside?”

“I’ll wipe it up,” John said, reaching for some paper towels. “You okay?” he asked Bri, who smiled and nodded.

While Julia heated the milk for cocoa and Bri went upstairs to put on her nightgown and robe, John and Frank went into the living room. John plugged in the tree lights and then sat down on the couch, trying to put the girl he had seen in church out of his mind.

Bri came tromping down the stairs, her arms loaded with the presents she had wrapped for her parents and grandfather. She went over to the tree and added them to the gifts Julia and John had spread out before they left for church. They had waited until Bri and Frank were in the car because Julia said she wanted to maintain a bit of the illusion of Santa Claus. Frank had gone to his bedroom for a moment and returned with three envelopes, one with each of their names on it.

“Didn’t have much chance to get out shoppin’,” he said by way of excuse as he handed them to Bri, who put them under the tree.

“Here we go,” Julia said, entering the living room with a tray and four steaming mugs of cocoa. She placed the tray down on the coffee table and plunked herself down beside John on the couch.

“So … who goes first?” Bri asked. She was kneeling in front of the tree, her hands on her knees, looking anxiously from one person to another. “Granddad, why don’t you take a peek inside of … this?” She got up and handed him a small rectangular box, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek as she did.

“You didn’t have to get me anything,” Frank said, looking slightly embarrassed as he fumbled with the ribbons and paper until he exposed a box. When he opened the lid, his face broke out into a wide smile.

“Well I’ll be a son of a gun,” he said, holding up a pair of fleece-lined slippers. “I was needin’ a new pair.” He put them back into the box and placed the box on the table beside his wheelchair.

John and Julia were sitting back, smiling as they sipped cocoa and watched. It struck Julia as charming that, even though Bri was already thirteen and growing up right under their noses, Christmas still had enough magic to turn her into a little girl.

Maybe, she thought, that’s the magic of Christmas — that even though you’re much too old to play with toys, you can act like a kid at least once a year.

“Bri,” Julia said, “why don’t you check out that green box over there?”

“You mean the one that says ‘From Santa?’”

Julia nodded.

Bri chuckled as she reached for the box. Before she opened it, though, she held it up and gave it a gentle shake.

“Sounds like something from Cherry Webb,” she said, smirking. “I hope it’s a green something.”

“Open it and see,” Julia said, smiling. “Hold it. Before you do ...”

She got up and went into the kitchen, returning a second later with her camera. Squinting in to the viewfinder, she took aim and nodded. “Okay — go to it.”

Bri ripped open the paper and then burst into a grin when she saw that it was, indeed, the green blouse she had wanted. The room filled with a sudden burst of light as Julia snapped a picture. Bri blinked in a daze and, holding the top up against herself, said, “Geeze, I’m not sure it’s worth getting blinded for. Thanks, Mom and Dad.”

“We didn’t get that for you. Santa did,” Julia said, moving so she could get a different angle for another shot.

Laughing, Bri leaned toward the fireplace and, looking up the flue, shouted, “Thank you, fat man.”

Before she pulled back, the room again filled with the flash of Julia’s camera.

“While you’re at it,” Frank said gruffly, “you might’s well hand out them envelopes I gave yah. No sense waitin’ till tomorrow.”

Bri gave her mother and father a quick glance to see if she had their approval as well, then gave one each to her mother and father, keeping the one with her name scrawled on the front. The handwriting was done in thin pencil lines and that were so faint they looked like a tattered spider web.

“Go on … Open ‘em,” Frank commanded when all three of them sat there stunned, looking at the envelopes.

Bri was first. She slid her finger in under the flap and tore it along the top. Inside, was a money card — the kind with the little oval in the center so you could see the president’s face on the bill peering out. Bri’s smile widened when she opened the card and saw that it wasn’t a president after all. It was Benjamin Franklin, smiling up at her. Written on the outside was: “To Bri — with love and Merry Christmas — Granddad.”

“Oh, Granddad,” she said. “You didn’t have to do this.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck so hard she almost pulled him out of his wheelchair.

Meanwhile, Julia and John had opened their envelopes and found that they had one-hundred-dollar bills inside theirs. Both of them expressed their surprise, but in spite of himself, John couldn’t help thinking, You never used to be this generous … Why now?

“Thank you so much, Frank,” Julia said, coming over to his wheelchair and giving him a kiss on the cheek. “I agree with Bri — you didn’t have to.”

“Ahh,” Frank said, waving her away with his hand, “it’s the least I could do. I ain’t ever gonna get out to spend it.”

“You got out enough to get to the bank and get crisp new bills and gift cards,” John said, eyeing his father slyly. He chastised himself for having such ungracious thoughts.

To prevent having to respond, Frank picked up his cup of cocoa and took a drink.

“That just leaves the two of you guys,” Bri said, reaching under the tree. She turned with a present in each hand and held them out to her mother and father. “Now take your time opening them. Don’t throw the paper all over the place in your excitement. “

Both Julia and John snickered as Julia came back to the couch and sat down beside them.

“You go first,” she said, nodding to John.

“Oh, no. Ladies first,” John replied.

Shrugging, Julia looked at the nametag: “To Julia — Love John,” it read. She slipped her fingers in under the paper and peeled it back. Smiling, she pulled out the box of White Shoulders perfume.

“My favorite,” she said as she opened the box and, unscrewing the cover, brought the small bottle up to her nose and sniffed. Her eyes flickered as the fragrance filled her nose.

“Quick. Where’s the camera?” Bri shouted. She saw it on the coffee table and grabbed it, aimed, and shot while Julia, with a wide, silly grin, held the perfume bottle up close to her cheek.

“One left to go. Are your sure you’ve been a good boy this year?” Bri asked, turning to her stepfather.

John smiled as he looked at the present in his hand. It was small and light. Actually, it was so light he thought it might be empty. Inspecting the nametag, he read out loud, “To John … from a secret admirer.”

Julia looked at him with upraised eyebrows, as if to say, It’s not from me. She was also thinking that, since she gave Bri all of her extra wrapping paper, she would have recognized if it was from her.

John sipped his cocoa and then, sitting back, began unwrapping the gift slowly. The tabs of Scotch tape pulled away easily, exposing a plain white box. When he flipped open the cover, all he saw inside was a wad of crumpled-up tissue paper. After a few seconds pawing through the tissue paper, he looked up, first at Julia, then at Bri.

“Is this a joke?” he asked.

His hand was still fishing around inside the box, but by now he knew it was empty. He pulled all the tissue paper out and looked through it, but nothing fell out.

“No. Not at all,” Julia said.

“It’s empty … unless someone thinks a box of tissue paper is a gift. Bri? Did you do this?”

Bri shook her head, and from her furrowed brow, John was convinced her denial was genuine.

Shrugging, he set the box beside him on the couch.

“I don’t know. Maybe it was from someone at the office or something, and the store forgot to put the gift in before they wrapped it.”

“That’s strange,” Julia said. “Bri — grab something else, will you?”

While Bri busied herself inspecting the remaining presents under the tree, John dropped the empty box onto the floor and started balling up the tissue paper. When he picked up the wrapping paper from his lap, he noticed some marks on the underside of the paper. At first he only saw two words:

WHAT YOU

His heartbeat sounded suddenly loud in his ears as he unfolded the paper the rest of the way. Shielding it from Julia’s view, he looked at the message scrawled in pencil on the inside.

Same heavy-handed printing as before ... same message ... with one more word added.

I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID TO ME!

He was stunned.

This wasn’t what he had been expecting.

ME?

John’s throat made an involuntary click as he gasped for breath.

He had been expecting more messages, more words, and he thought he was ready to deal with them. He had been so positive the last word would be a name.

But this … this … with the last word — ME underlined so heavily the pencil had almost torn right through the paper. ...

The last word should have been ABBY!

The rapid whooshing of his heartbeat in his ears was so loud it sounded like the roar of the ocean. Drops of cold sweat broke out across his forehead. His armpits were clammy, and his hands trembled as he rolled the wrapping paper up into a tight ball and squeezed it, making sure none of the writing showed.

“Hey! Did you fall asleep or something?” Bri asked. She jabbed him with a brightly wrapped box. “This one’s from me, so I know there’s something in it.”

Her voice came to him like she was at the end of a long tunnel. Turning to her, he felt curiously dissociated from his body. His hand reached out mechanically, as though someone else controlled it. He said something, but his voice was distant and flat.

“Thanks … You didn’t have to,” he heard himself say as his hand closed on the package. The sudden weight of it as Bri let go caught him by surprise, and he almost dropped it.

He couldn’t stop thinking about what was written on the inside of that wrapping paper.

His mind was roaring with questions …

Who is writing these messages?

How did they get them to me? … the note in my car... and now one in a package under the Christmas tree?

And why?

Why is ... whoever … doing this to me?

The memory of what had happened to Abby was torment enough. Why would someone torment him like this?

He was increasingly convinced that it had to be Randy, but if so, why?

And why finish the message with the word ME?

“A new set of wrenches, I’d say by the feel,” he said, forcing a laugh to cover up the tremor in his voice. He glanced at Julia, and although she didn’t say anything, he was positive she was looking at him strangely, as though she knew full well what was going on.

Is she in on this with Randy?

And then it hit him like the concussion of a cannon shot.

It has to be Randy Chadwick.

He’s known all along what happened to Abby, and now that I’m back, he’s using it against me.

And maybe Julia’s helping him.

How else could these notes be appearing in places they shouldn’t be?

Randy’s trying to steal my wife away from me.

“Come on ... Open it,” Julia said. “It’s late, and I have to get to bed.”

Her voice sounded innocent enough, but when John looked at her, he was convinced he saw something dark shifting behind her eyes.

His hands trembled out of control as he tore through the wrapping paper. All the while, he was thinking, What if I see the same message on the inside of this?

I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID TO ME!

But as he peeled the paper away, he glanced at the inside of the box, relieved that there was no handwritten message. It was a small white box, heavy for its size, with the word Norelco stamped in gold on the bottom left corner.

“An electric razor,” he said.

He took a breath, fighting to control the trembling he was sure everyone had now noticed.

“That’s neat. Thanks.”

He slid open the cover and looked inside but didn’t bother to take the razor out of its case.

Bri leaned forward, presenting the side of her face, and he kissed heron the cheek and then put the box down on the coffee table next to his cocoa cup.

“I’m beat,” Frank said as he pulled back on the wheelchair wheels and turned around. “I’d say, all in all, it’s been a fair to middlin’ evenin’.” Glancing at Julia, he nodded and added a soft, “Thanks for comin’ to church with me, Abby.”

Julia was about to correct his mistake, but then decided to let it go.

“My pleasure,” she said, and then she turned to Bri and said sharply, “You! … Get your teeth brushed and your butt into bed now.”

“Do you want me to help you clean this mess up?” Bri surveyed the crusted cocoa mugs and torn gift wrapping that was strewn around.

“You need to sleep,” Julia said, glancing at her watch. “It’s already almost midnight. Your father and I can take care of this.”

John noticed that, again, she looked at him strangely. Was it because his father had called her “Abby?”

“Merry Christmas, everyone,” Frank said tiredly as he rolled down the hallway to his bedroom. His door slammed shut behind him.

“Go on,” Julia said, waving her hand at Bri. “Get upstairs.”

“I hope I can fall asleep,” she said as she started slowly up the stairs, dragging her feet on each step. “Tm so excited about Santa coming.”

“Get out of here,” Julia said. She took some crumpled-up wrapping paper and tossed it playfully at her.

John still hadn’t moved from the couch. He sat there, staring blankly at the lights on the Christmas tree as though hypnotized. The ornaments caught and fragmented the colored lights into thousands of dazzling sparkles. Beside him on the couch was the balled-up gift paper with the penciled message. It burned against his leg like a hot coal. He was vaguely aware of Julia as she started bustling about, cleaning up.

“You want me to take that?” she said, standing at the end of the couch with her hand out.

“Huh?”

“That paper,” she said.

He picked up the paper ball, fully expecting it to sear his hand the instant his fingers touched it.

But nothing like that happened —

It was just a crumpled-up piece of wrapping paper which he handed to his wife. For a tense moment, he looked at her, studying her… trying to fathom that curious, dark expression in her eyes. He wanted to know if she did know what was written on that paper.

“That’s about it,” she said simply as she scooped up the other discarded wrappings and, crumpling them all together, went into the kitchen and stuffed them into the trash can.

She went around the house, turning off all the lights except the Christmas tree lights. Then she sat down on the couch, snuggling under her husband’s arm as she laced her fingers through his and held him tightly.

“Did you have a good time tonight?” she asked, giving his hand a jiggle.

“Good enough,” John said, not able to look away from the tree.

“You’ve been acting kinda uptight all night.” She jiggled his hand. “Come on. Tell me what’s the matter.”

She reached up to his shoulder, pulling him around so he would have to look her directly in the eyes. They stared intently at each other while the brilliant tree lights sparkled in their eyes.

“Nothing’s the matter,” he said, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. ‘‘I’m just … beat, is all.”

“Well …” She pulled him closer and brought her face up to his. “You know, I was wondering if you were going to give me what I wanted for Christmas.”

“You mean what was on your list?” He noticed the glazed look in her eyes.

“Um-hmm,” she said. “That.”

They brought their faces closer, their lips less than an inch apart. She pressed her mouth against his and gave him a long, lingering kiss. His body was rigid in her grasp, but the longer they kissed, the more he loosened up. His tongue flicked between her lips, and she took that as a signal to proceed. Rubbing her hand on his chest in long, lingering circles, she sighed and let herself melt into his arms.

Half an hour later, naked and bathed with sweat, the two of them were slouched side by side on the couch, their arms wrapped around each other as they stared out the picture window at the cold night. The snow had stopped, and through the breaks in the clouds, a sprinkling of stars spread across the night sky.

“That did it,” Julia said as she ran her fingertips up and down John’s inner thigh. “I know it did.”

In the moment before he penetrated her, she admitted that she wasn’t going to use the diaphragm, and he had simply muttered, “What the hell ...?”

John chuckled.

The sex, he had to admit, was good. He had lost himself in its release. All evening, ever since Julia had first told him she wanted to go to church, he had felt tension building inside him. And during the candlelight service, remembering what had happened when he was ten years old and trying to figure out what his father was trying to say to him and then seeing that girl and, later, that note on the inside of the wrapping paper — everything had worked to fray his nerves.

He had needed a release.

But now, after making love and — maybe — a baby, he was finally unwinding ... beginning to, anyway. The other memories were just that — memories. They might be unpleasant, but they were already fading. He told himself he could deal with them, ignore them as much as possible, and dismiss or explain them the next time they arose … if they did.

The note, though —

I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID TO ME!

— was different.

Unlike a memory, it had been — and was — too real.

Someone was leaving notes around to remind him about what had happened to Abby.

To his knowledge, no one — other than himself — had known a thing about it, but the notes indicated otherwise. Once he was convinced it was Randy — and the more he thought about it, he realized he had started to suspect Randy back when he and Julia had gone over to the Chadwicks’ for supper — it all made sense ... maybe twisted sense, but sense nevertheless.

What he had to do was simple — make sure he never gave Randy or whoever else might be doing this the satisfaction of seeing that it was getting to him.

After all, it wasn’t like he had done anything wrong.

It wasn’t as if he had killed her or anything.

He had to admit that it was a nice, chilling touch to use the word ME, when he had been expecting to see her name. The note should have read: “I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID TO ABBY!”

In the warm glow of the Christmas lights, John held his wife close, feeling her sweat-slick skin pressed against his. He wanted to let himself feel absolutely content. If she was right, if she had gotten her pregnant tonight, well, then ... so what? It was what she wanted, and God knew they had tried often enough before, so she must have her mind made up on the issue. And anyway, if tonight was like so many other nights back when they had first gotten married and both wanted to have another baby, it hadn’t worked, and she still wasn’t pregnant.

“How can you be sure,” he asked, looking at her skin, glowing from the multicolored tree lights. “You can’t feel it or anything, can you?”

“Women have ways of knowing things,” she whispered before kissing him on the chest and shoulders. Her lips were warm and wet on his skin. “When it happens, you can feel it.”

“Yeah … sure.” He chuckled softly. “Men can feel it, too. It’s called ‘orgasm.’”

“Cut it out,” Julia said, slapping him playfully on the bare stomach hard enough to make a loud smacking sound. “You men are all the same —”

For an instant, John wondered exactly what she meant by that. He was trying not to think that maybe Julia had been seeing Randy Chadwick, and he had gotten hr pregnant because he couldn’t.

Was that possible, or was he being paranoid?

Could his wife, who was home all day while he worked in Portland, be having an affair with his best friend from high school?

Had soap opera come to Glooscap Island?

Stranger things have happened, he supposed.

A sudden dash of chills blew over his naked body when he thought, That’s why Randy’s leaving those notes around. He’s trying to drive me fucking crazy so he can steal my wife.

“If we’re going to get up sometime before noon tomorrow, we ought to be getting up to bed,” Julia said. She stood up and stretched her arms over her head, and John couldn’t help but admire her shapely body in the glow of the tree lights.

Shifting forward, he bent over to pick his clothes up from the floor when a sudden, loud groan interrupted the silent night.

Startled, he and Julia looked at each other, their eyes widened with sudden fear and surprise.

“What was that?” John asked as they both scrambled to get dressed. A second later, another — louder — noise … a ragged shout … sounded through the house. This time, they both knew where it was coming from.

“My father …” John said.

He bounced up and down as he pulled his pants up and zipped them. Bare-chested, he ran down the hallway. Buttoning her blouse as she ran, Julia was a few steps behind him.

The door to Frank’s bedroom was shut, and when John turned the doorknob, it wouldn’t budge.

“He’s got it locked. He never locks the door!”

He looked frantically at Julia when, for a third time, a sound — a low, stifled scream this time — came from the bedroom. John clenched his fist and hammered on the door.

“Dad! … Dad! Are you okay?”

He gripped the doorknob and twisted it violently from side to side with no effect. The door rattled on its hinges, but it wouldn’t open.

“Oh, Jesus! … Oh, Jesus!” Julia muttered when, below the sound of John’s pounding on the door, she heard a strangled, gurgling sound coming from behind the door.

“Dad! For Christ’s sake! Open the door!” John wailed. He stopped trying the doorknob and instead pounded with both hands on the door. Then, moving back a few steps, he coiled himself up and threw himself at the door. He hit with a resounding thump, but still the door didn’t budge.

“Why would he lock his bedroom door?” John shouted frantically.

Julia stared at him with eyes like shiny coins. She held her hands up in a gesture of helplessness.

“Come on, Dad! Let me in!”

Both he and Julia could tell by the sounds coming from his bedroom that something was seriously wrong with Frank.

Another stroke ... or a heart attack, John thought, and already his mind was darkening with thoughts of all the things that would be left unresolved between them if his father died now.

“Is there a spare key or something? Maybe in the kitchen?” Julia asked, her voice pinched with panic.

John shook his head and then threw himself at the door again, hitting hard and bouncing back with a grunt.

“Jesus Christ!”

For a third time, he slammed his body so hard against the door he thought the doorframe would smash to splinters, but the door only gave a fraction of an inch. From inside Frank’s room, they heard a loud rustling and thrashing sound, as though Frank were struggling violently. His raspy breathing filled the night, and his throat made loud clicking sounds like he wanted to scream but couldn’t find the breath to do so.

“Get me something,” John said, turning to Julia as he continued to rain heavy-handed blows on the door. “A hammer … an ax … anything!”

Frantic, Julia turned to run out to the garage and ran smack-dab into Bri, who had come downstairs to find out what all the commotion was about. Julia let out a piercing shriek.

Turning and seeing Bri cowering in surprise, John shouted to her, “Quick! Call nine-one-one.”

While Julia went out to the garage to find the ax or hammer, Bri hurried into the kitchen and dialed. Convinced the door was giving way, John braced his legs against the opposite wall and pressed against it, pushing with everything he had. Sweat stood out on his brow and ran into his eyes. His muscles strained; his veins bulged.

The door sagged inward but wouldn’t give. It was as if the wood was swollen and wedged tightly inside the frame. The wood creaked and groaned every time John pressed against it, but the sound wasn’t loud enough to mask the strangled, choking sounds coming from inside the room. He grunted and pushed for all he was worth. The sounds of the struggle within the room grew louder until that was all he could hear. A flurry of motion beside him caught his attention.

“Here,” Julia said, her voice a raw bark as she thrust the ax into his hand.

John gripped the ax handle, braced his legs, and flailed at the door like a madman. The blade bit into the wood with each swing, sending splinters of wood flying. The door reverberated like a tight drumhead. Julia stood back and watched, horrified at what was happening and thinking crazily, Why on Christmas Eve?

Finally, the door gave way with a loud inward explosion of shattered wood. John dropped the axe to the floor and thrush himself into his father’s darkened bedroom. His eyes strained to see in the darkness but — so far — all he could see was a shapeless mass wrapped up in a tangle of sheets.

“Dad!” John shouted as he fumbled for the wall switch. Loud, ragged breathing came from the bed, sounding like someone crinkling paper. He found the wall switch and swatted it on, ready for anything, but what he saw made him stagger backwards until he hit the wall.

“What the — ?” Julia said from behind him, looking through the shattered door.

After a second or two, John regained his composure and walked over to the bed. He knew his father was dying. His raspy breathing sound sounded like what they called the “death rattle.”

“Did you call the rescue?” he yelled, glancing at the doorway over his shoulder.

“Bri did,” Julia said as she approached the bed and looked at Frank. The sheets and covers looked like he had been wrestling with someone. They were untucked and strewn all around, hanging off the bed. Frank lay on his back, his arms and legs spread wide. The buttons of his pajama tops had ripped off, exposing his white, bony chest that rose and fell with his quick panting breath. His eyes were milky white, and they stared blankly up at the ceiling.

John stood helplessly beside the bed, his hands hovering over his father as if he wanted to touch him, to help him, but he didn’t dare to.

“Can you hear me Dad?” he whispered, leaning close to his father’s ear.

The old man’s harsh breathing sounded like metal scraping against metal. He didn’t blink. He didn’t move except for his labored breathing. His face had a translucent cast to it, like waxed fruit. His eyes looked sightless … dead

“The ambulance is on its way,” John said as he reached out gingerly and, simply to do something — anything — buttoned his father’s pajama tops. When his fingers brushed against his father’s chest, he was shocked at how cold his skin was.

Julia came over and stood beside John. They exchanged worried glances, silently acknowledging what they were both thinking —

This is it … The ambulance isn’t going to arrive in time.

Tears of thick, milky fluid formed in Frank’s eyes and trickled down the sides of his face, soaking into the sheet. Traces of pink foam dribbled from the corners of his mouth. His pale lips were moving, but neither John nor Julia could tell if he was trying to speak or if it was only a muscle spasm.

John turned to Julia and nodded at the sheets, indicating that the least they could do was cover him up, make him as comfortable as possible until the ambulance arrived. Julia went to the other side of the bed and, trying not to touch Frank, untangled the sheets from his legs and pulled them up with John.

“She —” Frank said, his voice a raw whisper.

“Just relax, Dad,” John said as he tucked the sheet under his father’s chin. “You’re gonna be all right.”

He knew it was a lie.

A faint flicker of light brightened Frank’s eyes for an instant as he broke his steady stare at the ceiling and looked at John. At first, John thought it was simply a spark of recognition, of realization that he was dying and, although he never had and couldn’t now say to his son what he wanted to, it was all right ... everything was all right now ... he was beyond pain. But as John looked deeply into his father’s eyes, he saw something else — a spark of what could only be pure terror …

“It’s okay, Dad,” John whispered, knowing now — as he had always dreaded — that the things they should have said to each other would never be said now.

Frank’s mouth made loud smacking sounds as he tried to form words. The pink foam kept bubbling out, running down his face and onto the sheets.

“She was …” he rasped. “She was … here!”

“Who was?” John practically shouted.

Frank’s face contorted as he struggled to speak.

“Her!”

“Who are you talking about?” John said, wondering if his father might have hallucinated seeing his dead wife.

Frank tried to speak, but his back suddenly arched as his chest heaved with a roaring intake of breath. He seemed to rise above the bed, suspended in the air, but then he let out a long, watery sigh and settled back down onto the bed, melting onto the mattress.

At that precise moment, from far off, came the banshee wail of an approaching ambulance.

NINETEEN

DOA

I

When the ambulance and police arrived, Bri was sitting on the couch, sobbing with her face in her hands. Julia was sitting next to her, patting her on the back. She was also teary-eyed, but she tried to be strong for Bri, saying whatever comforting words came to mind. She knew from personal experience when her parents died that it didn’t matter what anyone said so long as they were there to comfort you.

John, stunned from having his father practically die in his arms, stood in the kitchen, looking out at the driveway as the cruiser and ambulance pulled into the driveway. Their flashing blue lights strobing across the freshly fallen snow for some reason made him think about the sudden flash of Julia’s camera earlier that evening.

Christmas Eve …

He shook his head sadly as four men — dark silhouettes against the snow — hurried up the walkway to the kitchen door. John went to meet them and inform them that they didn’t need to hurry any more. When he opened the door, he was surprised to see that one of the men was Randy Chadwick. He didn’t recognize the other three, but one of them introduced himself as Officer Pelkey.

“Your dad?” Randy asked, looking at him with a twisted, worried expression.

Eyeing Randy darkly, John nodded.

“Uh-huh,” he said even as his mind filled with angry thoughts about Randy and what he had been doing to him. “He’s in his bedroom.” John’s throat was raw from yelling earlier, and his arms and shoulders ached from the wild axe swings he’d taken to get the door down. “I think it was his heart.”

Randy nodded and then followed silently as John led them down the hallway to his father’s bedroom. Julia stood in the living room doorway, nodding a silent greeting to Randy as he passed. Doing his best to fight any dark suspicions at a time like this, John tried not to read any deeper meaning into the glance.

“What in th’ hell happened to the door?” Pelkey stared in amazement at the splintered remains hanging from one hinge.

“It was locked,” John said, shaking his head as though dazed. “I — ah, had to get in there.”

“Did he lock his door every night?” Pelkey asked, running his fingers along a particularly deep gash in the wood.

John shrugged. “Can’t say as I ever checked.”

“I’ll get the stretcher,” Randy said, his voice low. Turning to John, he added, “If you want to wait in the living room, we can take care of it from here.”

“Might’s well wait until Chuck gets here,” Pelkey said as he studied at the body. “You plan to use Lang for the funeral?”

“I guess so,” John said with a shrug. “I hadn’t given it much thought.”

He was feeling hollow inside as though nothing he could say or do would make a bit of difference, anyway. But he decided to stay as Randy and the policemen went over to the bed and did a brief examination to confirm that Frank was dead.

Pelkey picked up the containers of medicine on the bedstand and inspected each label.

“Had a stroke a while back, as I recall” he said. “We’ll have to take these to the lab and have ‘em checked. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Not at all,” John said weakly.

Pelkey shook the containers, making them rattle. The sound reminded John of the rattling noise of his father’s breathing moments before the end. He stared blankly as Randy opened up a medical bag, took out a stethoscope, and reached under Frank’s pajama shirt. He listened for a moment, then took the stethoscope off and shook his head.

“Could you stand back, please, while we get some shots?” Pelkey said.

One of the other policemen raised a camera and started snapping pictures from different angels. Each glaring blast of light made John think, Jesus, more Christmas photos!

“So,” John said, turning to Randy while the policemen did their work, “I didn’t know you were a medical man.” He was leaning back against the bedroom wall, mostly because the backs of his legs felt like rubber, and he was afraid he would fall down if he didn’t have some support.

Randy shook his head.

“I’m not. I’ve had a minimal amount of training and work as a volunteer EMT.”

John nodded, but all the while as he watched the policemen examine and photograph his father, he couldn’t stop thinking, He’s got to be the one who’s doing leaving those notes around … and worse … I’ll bet he’s messing around with Julia.

The more he thought about it, the more made sense. When Randy had passed Julia in the hallway, they had looked at each other in a weirdly intense way, like they shared a secret.

‘‘I’d hazard to guess it was his heart,” Randy said, looking at John. ‘‘I’m sorry.”

“Appears you’re right, Randy,” Pelkey said. “I’ve got to contact the medical examiner. Can I use this phone?” He indicated the telephone on the bedstand, and John nodded that it was all right. Pelkey dialed a number and stared up at the ceiling while he waited for an answer.

“Al ... sorry to ring you so late, ‘specially on Christmas Eve, but we got a —” He cut himself off and, looking at John, said, “Would you mind waiting out in the hallway?”

John shook his head and muttered, “I’ll wait here, if you don’t mind.”

Pelkey shrugged and spoke into the phone again.

“We have a possible DOA at oh one-fifteen.” He paused, then added, “Mr. Frank Carlson at Thirty-three Shore Drive … on Glooscap.”

Possible? John thought. Christ, he’s as dead as a stump!

Pelkey paused while the man at the other end of the line said something, then grunted agreement.

“Uh — huh. Appears to be heart. Had a history of heart trouble.”

“He had a stroke last spring,” Randy whispered, and Pelkey nodded and repeated the information. He read the labels of Frank’s prescription drugs and then, after a pause, nodded again and said, “Okey-dokey. Thanks … And have a good holiday. Catch yah later.” After hanging up the phone, he turned to John and said, “We have permission to move the body. You want me to call Lang’s and have him come over?”

A deep shudder ran through John’s body as the reality of what was happening sank home.

His father was dead … stone cold dead at one-thirty on Christmas morning.

Instead of opening the rest of their presents and enjoying a turkey dinner tomorrow, he would be going to Charles Lang’s Funeral Home to make burial arrangements.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice sounding strangled. “We’ve used Lang’s when my … my mother died.”

“Let me give Chuck a call.” Pelkey took a notebook from his shirt pocket, looked up a number, and dialed.

The other cop, meanwhile, had finished taking pictures. Now that they had permission to move the body, he and Randy were busy straightening Frank out so they could move him onto the stretcher when the funeral director showed up. Frank’s limbs were already stiffening, but certainly rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet. Without the spark of life, his father looked diminished, somehow … small and frail. The icy pit in John’s stomach got worse as the men shifted his father’s body around as if it were a piece of useless meat.

But that’s all it is now, he thought as blades of ice cut through him. That’s what I used to think he was, and now that’s all he is.

The stinging in his eyes grew worse, and his vision blurred.

He barely noticed the buzzing of Pelkey’s voice as he spoke into the phone with the funeral director.

After Pelkey finished his call, and while they waited for Lang to arrive, John went out into the living room to be with Julia and Bri. Bri’s tear-streaked face all but broke his heart. He came over to them, and the three of them stood in the middle of the living room, hugging each other and seeking the reassurance of warm, living bodies in the numbing presence of death. To John’s knowledge, this was the first time Bri had ever seen a dead person.

For himself … well, besides his mother’s funeral, there was that other time.

As soon as he thought that, he thought about Abby —

I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID TO ME!

He remembered the gray shape reflected in the living room window ... that person hanging from the living room ceiling with gray, frayed rope twisted deep into the fold of her swollen neck, the body slowly turning ... turning …

John finally realized who he had seen, and the realization hit him so hard he almost cried out loud.

In his memory, he saw the body spinning slowly around until the face was visible.

It was swollen and bloated, the skin gray … The tongue was hanging out between clenched teeth, bitten almost clear through …

It was Abby Snow …

“Why ... why did this have to happen?” Bri asked, her voice strained as she looked back and forth between her mother and John.

Julia shrugged, knowing there were no rational, reasonable answers. John did nothing but shake his head. They remained where they were, hugging and sobbing, until another car — the funeral director, no doubt — pulled into the driveway. Pelkey went into the kitchen and let the man to the bedroom. John left Bri and Julia and walked back to his father’s bedroom. Lang was followed by his assistant, who was pushing a collapsible stretcher. While Lang’s assistant and the policemen shifted Frank’s body onto the stretcher, Lang spoke kindly and sympathetically with John in the corner of the room.

Back in the living room, Julia stayed with Bri, hugging her daughter and racked by deep sobs.

“No, don’t,” Julia shouted, her own voice breaking with emotion when Bri started toward the bedroom. “You don’t want to see.”

Her face pale, her eyes and nose running, Bri sniffed and shook her head.

“Can’t I see him … and say good-bye to him?” she asked.

Julia shook her head.

“No. I want you to remember him the way he was … when he was alive. It’s best.”

Bri put her hand to her mouth and started gnawing on the knuckles as they listened to the sounds coming from down the hallway. There was a loud clanking of metal and then the soft rasp of fresh sheets shifting. A moment later, Bri’s eyes widened when the men wheeled the sheet-draped figure by. The sound of the stretcher wheels reminded her of the sound her grandfather’s wheelchair used to make, and she burst into tears again.

“Take care of her,” John said tightly when he came back into the living room. He rubbed his hand on Julia’s shoulder. ‘‘I’m going to the funeral home.”

Standing in the doorway, Randy said, “I can come with you if you’d like.”

The offer seemed genuine, but John shook his head.

“I can go alone,” he said. “Thanks, though.”

A corner of his mind asked how he could ever have suspected Randy of leaving those notes and cheating with Julia. He must have been crazy to be so paranoid about his old friend.

“I could stay here,” Randy said, “with Julia and Bri until you get back.”

Ah, there it is, he thought, his fragments of doubt instantly disintegrating. Before Julia could respond, John said, “That won’t be necessary.”

Julia looked at him, dumbfounded, but before she could speak, John followed his father’s body out to Lang’s station wagon. The cold night air grabbed the back of his throat and made his eyes sting as he watched the men slide the stretcher into the back of the hearse and secure it.

“Let me grab my coat. I want to come along,” he said after Lang had closed the hearse doors.

“Fine,” Lang said. “You can ride with me or follow in your car.”

“I’ll follow,” John said.

He went back into the house and came back moments later, wearing a heavy coat, woolen hat, and gloves. He got into his own car and started it up, waiting as Lang backed out of the driveway onto Oak Street.

II

John got home from the funeral home about two hours later. Julia was still up, waiting for him in the living room, sitting cross-legged on the couch and staring blankly at the winking Christmas tree lights. She had a cup of tea in hand, but it had long since gone cold. Bri was upstairs in bed, but Julia doubted she was asleep. She and John sat on the couch in silence for a while, looking at the bright tree and the dark night outside. Both of them were thinking … remembering … trying to make any kind of sense out of what had happened.

Neither of them succeeded, and eventually they went upstairs to bed.

No one slept well in the house where death had so recently brushed his cold hand, and as the light of dawn brightened the bedroom window, they both stopped pretending to be asleep and went downstairs. Even the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee and the butterscotch bars of sunlight spilling across the kitchen floor didn’t dispel the gloom wrapped around the house,

“Every time I look down there,” John said, glancing down the hallway, “I expect to hear him thumping around.” Several splintered boards littered the hallway floor where he’d broken the door down last night. The memory was as distant as a bad dream, but the emotions were raw and on the surface.

Julia, who had had to deal with the loss of her parents when she was twelve years old, nodded silently. Sometime during the long night, her stomach had started churning and, although at first she thought it was from the tension and grief, she still felt like she was going to be sick to her stomach. She was already worried that she had another touch of the flu they had all suffered recently.

“When I think of all the times I … I —” John’s voice choked off, and he lowered his gaze so his wife wouldn’t see the tears forming in his eyes. He couldn’t stop thinking about growing up in this house … especially after his mother had died —

After my father let her drink herself to death!

— he had wished … he had closed his eyes, folded his hands, and fervently prayed for his father to die.

And now — after all this time — he got his wish.

And with it came guilt, sharp and stinging.

When he looked at Julia and saw the grief in her eyes, his heart constricted into something black and cold because all he could think was, Tell the truth … Are you screwing Randy?

They both looked up when they heard footsteps on the stairs. Bri entered the kitchen, her face drawn and pale. Without a word, she plopped herself down into her usual chair, propped her chin in her hands, and sat staring down at the tabletop.

“Didn’t sleep, huh?” Julia said, coming over behind her and gently massaging her shoulders.

Bri shook her head and sighed, a deep, shuddering breath. She tried to look around at her mother, but the singing in her eyes was too strong. When she shifted her gaze and found herself looking down the hallway toward her grandfather’s bedroom door, she burst into tears and let her head drop forward onto the table. Her shoulders heaved as she cried.

Julia looked at John helplessly, both of them silently acknowledging that this was what they would all need in order to get over it — tears … tears and time.

After a light breakfast of toast and coffee, Julia cleaned up the kitchen while John went to his father’s bedroom to clean up the mess from the night before. The door couldn’t be repaired. Its shattered remains, along with pieces of the doorframe, were strewn on the floor. It took several trips to carry all of the debris out to the garage. On his way back from the last trip, he peeked into the living room and saw Julia and Bri side by side on the couch, contemplating the array of presents under the tree.

Cleaning up the broken door, he found, was the easiest part.

Looking at the tangled mess of his father’s bed, the pile of church clothes he had worn last night and had kept on for Christmas Eve while they sat around the tree, distributing gifts, the pair of slippers he had gotten from Bri … everything about the room filled him with aching melancholy. The finality of death hit him. He didn’t feel as though his father was out of the room for a moment … that he was still alive and would be back shortly. His room was saturated with loneliness and a cold sense of his being gone … forever.

Moving mechanically, and trying — but not succeeding very well — not to think about it, John stripped the soiled sheets and blankets from the bed, rolled them into a ball, and stuffed them into a plastic trash bag. He assumed Mr. Lang at the funeral home would want to dress his father for burial in his church clothes, so he folded them as best he could and placed them on the top of the bureau. Other things, such as dirty underwear and socks, John tossed into the bag along with the sheets and blankets.

He didn’t take the time to sort through his father’s valuables or to tidy up the room. His only regret, after he had taken the trash bag out to the garage, was that the bedroom door couldn’t be closed. The memories and regrets that had died with his father should stay locked in that dingy, dark room.

But once all this was done, and the room was straightened up, one thing continued to weigh on John’s mind. It had been sitting there in the back of his mind ever since last night, but no matter how much he mulled it over, he couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer.

What, he wondered over and over, did he mean when he said, “She was here”? Who was here?

He couldn’t have meant Julia or Bri.

Maybe he’d had a vision of his dead wife waiting to greet him on the other side. That had been John’s first idea.

Or maybe …

No!

John shook his head, trying to dismiss that thought that formed, but it, like the churning guilt produced by those notes Randy —

It had to have been Randy!

— had been leaving for him, wouldn’t go away. The thought echoed in the dark recesses of his mind, over and over …

She was here! ...

She was here! ...

And as much as he didn’t want to admit it, he had a damned good idea who she was.

III

Visiting hours at Lang’s funeral home were the next day, Sunday afternoon. The day after Christmas.

That morning, Julia had felt queasy when she woke up, and as the day progressed, the sour churning in her stomach got so bad she considered not going to the funeral home. But she had to so she could be there for John and Bri, who was feeling the loss deeply. Dressed in their Sunday best, while hushed organ music filled the dimly lit room, they spoke with the surprisingly large number of island people who showed up. Several families sent flower arrangements, and there was even one from CMP, acknowledging Frank’s years of service to the company.

The dense aroma of flowers made the air in the room heavy as people came by and offered their regrets.

“What a terrible thing to have happen right at Christmas time …”

“He was a good man ... a damned good man …”

“Such a shame but he struggled so after that stroke…”

“He’s better off now…”

“He’s with Dianna now. You have to believe that …”

The only time Julia came close to breaking down was when Frenchie showed up, swinging himself down the aisle on battered crutches. He was wearing a shabby brown tweed suit that he had obviously not worn in many years. The left leg was pinned up over the stump of his leg, and his necktie was cocked to one side. He stopped beside the casket and looked down at Frank. His lower lip trembled, and his amber eyes misted over. Tears streamed from his eyes and wound through the white stubble of his beard. He looked much smaller than Julia remembered — diminished, as though looking at his dead friend told him that his time was also due all too soon.

“I’m gonna miss the old sumbitch,” Frenchie said, his voice cracking as he looked at Julia. “He was one helluva card player.”

That was it — Frenchie’s eulogy for Frank — and Julia knew that no one else was going to do better. Frenchie turned and made his way back down the aisle and out of the funeral home, not bothering to stop and talk with anyone.

“We — umm, shot rats down at the wharf one day … with your father,” Julia said by way of explanation to John, who looked at her curiously once Frenchie had left.

The two-hours of visiting seemed more like four or five to Julia. Throughout the afternoon, her stomach felt as if some giant had reached down inside, grabbed her guts, and was squeezing them with all his strength. Several times, she went to the rest room, thinking she was going to throw up. Locking the door behind her, she leaned her head over the toilet bowl, praying she would let it go so she would be done with this icky feeling. It wasn’t her reaction to grief, she knew. It was more than that. It was something physical …

When she rejoined John, she thought how he was handling things quite well. Everyone who came by knew him by name — some of them called him “Johnny.” She wished he would loosen up and not deal with his father’s friends as if he either didn’t know they were or didn’t want to remember them. He stood stiffly, shook their hands, mumbled his thanks, and listened to their words of condolence as though nothing registered.

Bri, on the other hand, couldn’t stop sniffling and crying and wiping her eyes with tissues. Her eyelids were red and swollen, and her face had a waxy paleness. Her thin shoulders never stopped heaving and shuddering as she cried. When people from the island, most of whom she had never met before, would say a few words to her, she would embrace them and sob like they were long-time friends or relatives.

Shortly before the afternoon visiting hours were over, Randy and Ellie Chadwick arrived. As soon as John saw them, his posture stiffened even more. Julia noticed that John’s hand clenched into a fist, and he shifted from one foot to the other as Randy and his wife approached.

‘‘I’m so sorry,” Ellie said, leaning forward and hugging John, kissing him on the cheek. She turned to Julia and gave her a hug.

“I wish I hadn’t been on duty that night,” Randy said simply, obviously at a loss for words as he and John shook hands and looked intently at each other.

“It’s the way it goes,” John said, his voice a raw whisper.

He let go of Randy’s hand but kept staring at him, searching his face and waiting for him to reveal —

What? … Is he genuinely feeling sad … or is he masking that he’s screwing my wife?

Maybe it started the day they went lobstering with Randy.

Or maybe sooner than that.

Maybe it had started the day they moved into the house, and Randy dropped by.

John still wasn’t positive — he didn’t have proof that Randy and Julia were getting it on, but he was positive Randy was leaving those notes around the house and in his office and in his car …

I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID TO ME!

Nice touch, adding “ME.”

Cold … Ruthless.

Somebody knows something about what had happened, John thought, and who could it be if it isn’t Randy?

Back in high school, no one had known him better than Randy had. They shared all their secrets …some which, even now, John hadn’t revealed to Julia. It was possible Randy had figured out what had happened out at Haskins’ barn that night. And if he had, and if he was writing these notes, trying to drive him crazy, he must have some ulterior motive.

What better reason than to try to steal my wife?

“Usually, you know,” Randy was saying, “when you get an ambulance call on an island small as Glooscap, you gotta figure it’s someone you know, but it ain’t often it’s someone — well ...” His voice trailed away as his glance shifted in Julia’s direction.

“Gotta be tough,” John said, not knowing what else to say, mostly because he was hardly listening. He watched Randy, waiting for a tiny chink to appear in his facade, waiting for a silent flash of communication between him and Julia … the proof he needed.

If he’s trying to make me crack, I’ll show him.

He’s not going to get to me.

By this time, Ellie was talking softly with Bri, who was crying against her shoulder. Randy had moved in front of Julia. They simply looked at each other, neither one saying anything while John studied them. And then Randy leaned close and kissed Julia on the cheek. That seemed all the more suspicious. A moment later, Randy and Ellie left, moving to the far side of the room where they saw some neighbors.

“You could at least be civil, for God’s sake,” Julia said. She leaned close to John so Bri wouldn’t hear. “Why are you acting so ... so cold to everyone?”

“What do you mean?” John shrugged innocently.

“You know exactly what I mean. You don’t have to treat Randy like you think he … he’s responsible for —” Her voice caught in her throat, and she finished lamely, “for what happened.”

“I don’t. Not at all,” John said, shaking his head. Before he could say or do anything else, more people came up and spoke softly about how much they had admired Frank and how much they were going to miss him at church.

And that’s how it went, in the afternoon and again from seven to nine that evening.

Frank’s funeral was set for ten o’clock the next morning, so by the time they got back to the house at nine-thirty that night, all three of them were wrung out — especially Bri. Julia’s irritation at John was blunted, but only because the twisting in her stomach had gotten worse instead of better. While she was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth before bed, she thought she was finally going to be able to throw up and clean out her system once and for all. But even though the churning in her gut grew worse, it never came to a head. She went to bed and eventually fell asleep, but all night her stomach tossed up and down.

Only once did she have a dream.

She was in a boat — it was like Randy’s but much bigger, almost a luxury yacht. In the dream, she looked overboard and saw someone —

A young girl … with long black hair … and ivory smooth skin …

— swimming on her back and looking up at her. Julia awoke with a start and sat up in bed, her breathing fast and hot in the deep night.

IV

The ringing telephone startled them both awake early the next morning. John reached over Julia and snagged the receiver in the middle of its second ring.

“‘ello,” he said, his voice thick with sleep. He could barely focus on the alarm clock and was surprised to see they had slept past seven o’clock.

“John … It’s Randy.”

“Umm ... what do you want?” John’s voice suddenly tightened as he made eye contact with his wife.

“I didn’t wake you up, did I? Sorry, but —”

“No, no,” John said, shifting into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. “We were up.”

“I was thinking … talking to Ellie, you know, and if you want me to, I can pick you up and drive you to the funeral … whenever you’re ready to go.”

Frowning, John looked at Julia and considered for a moment.

It might nice not to have to hassle about driving, but he sure as hell didn’t want Randy around ... especially if it would make him stew all through the service about what — if anything — was going on between him and Julia.

“What ‘cho think — ?” Randy said.

“I — uh, thanks for the offer, but … no. I guess not. I think it’s best if we went as a family. You understand.”

“Totally,” Randy replied. “We’re planning on going, ‘n I was — you know, just offering.”

“I appreciate it,” John said. “I’ll see you there.”

Julia sat up in bed, propping herself on her elbows. He passed the receiver to her, and she replaced it and then sagged back down. Black waves of nausea swept through her like a rip tide. She was sure she would throw up if she moved too fast.

“That was Randy —”

She nodded.

“He offered to drive us to the funeral today.”

“I heard you tell him no.”

Standing up, John pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt, then went to the window and stood looking out at the day. Like yesterday, bright sunlight glanced off the snow with a blinding glare. On the horizon, the open ocean was a tossing dark blue mass with white capped waves. It was so cold, thin strands of steam — what the locals called “sea smoke — twisted up into the sky.

While John was staring out the window, Julia prayed that she would feel a little better than she had yesterday. Knowing that she and John had Frank’s funeral to face, she let out a low groan, tossed the covers aside, and swung her feet to the floor.

“We probably ought to get ready,” she said. Her voice was strangled, like someone had his hands wrapped around her throat.

“You all right?” John said, glancing at her over his shoulder. She was about to say, Of course I am, but as the words formed in her mind, her stomach clenched hard. When she opened her mouth, all that came out was a deep, watery belch. A thick, bilious taste flooded her throat, stinging the insides of her nose. All she could do was nod.

“You sure?” John moved beside her and touched her shoulder. “You look like crap.”

“Thanks a bunch.”

Julia smacked her lips, trying to get rid of the sourness in her mouth.

John placed his hand on her forehead and grunted.

“You don’t seem to have a fever.”

He didn’t say any more, though, because Julia suddenly bolted from the bed, raced down the hall to the bathroom, and ended up kneeling with her face over the toilet. John followed behind her.

For a second or two, Julia waited, breathing heavily as her nausea condensed into a hard, burning ball under her ribs. Then, with a sudden wrenching convulsion, she opened her mouth and let it rip. Hot vomit shot from her mouth and splattered into the toilet. The smell only made her stomach lurch worse, and she heaved and heaved until her sides were aching.

As she was throwing up, John grabbed a washcloth and wet it with warm water. While she leaned over the toilet bowl, still heaving, he pulled her hair back and rubbed the cloth over her brow. Wave after wave racked her body until there was nothing left to spew out, and she started dry heaving. Each contraction made her eyes feel as though they were going to pop out of her head. She tried not to imagine them plopping like fat grapes into the puke-filled water in the toilet bowl.

“Jesus, that was a mean one,” John said once the worst had passed. Julia was still sitting on the floor. Bleary-eyed, she looked at him, her face drained of color. Thin strands of wet hair clung to her forehead.

“Off to a good start, I’d say,” she rasped, her throat as raw as hamburger. “Can you get me a glass of water?”

John ran the water until it was cold, then filled the bathroom cup and handed it to her. She wanted to gulp it down but restrained herself and merely took a single sip. The last thing she needed was to trigger another round of heaves.

“Do you have the flu?” John asked, his face creased with concern. All he could think was, Here it is, the day of my father’s funeral, and my wife gets as sick as a dog.

Julia found it impossible to focus on him as she shook her head.

“No … Know what I think?”

But she didn’t say what she really thought.

It was too soon … much too soon for her to be experiencing morning sickness. That came during the second or third month. This must be psychosomatic. She kept reminding herself that every pregnancy is different, but there was no way she could have morning sickness yet … not unless she had gotten pregnant before Christmas Eve.

“I — umm, think it’s that pork we had for supper between visiting hours … It didn’t sit so well,” she said.

“That’s an understatement,” John said, forcing a chuckle. He was about to say more when a muffled knocking from downstairs caught their attention. They looked at each other questioningly.

“Sounds like someone’s at the back door,” Julia said. “Would you go see who it is?”

John nodded, turned, and was gone, his footsteps clomping down the stairs.

Still feeling weak-kneed, Julia gripped the sink edge and pulled herself up off the floor. The shock of what she saw when she looked into the mirror made her think there was someone else’s face reflected there. This couldn’t be her — pale, drawn, and hollow eyed — reflected in the mirror.

She turned on the faucet until it ran ice-cold and then splashed a handful of water onto her face. Blowing and blubbering, she straightened up and almost screamed when she did see another face in the mirror.

It was staring at her over her shoulder.

Only after the first jolt of panic did she realize Bri was standing in the doorway.

“Are you all right?” Bri asked faintly.

Julia grabbed a hand towel and patted her face dry.

“Yeah,” she said, short of breath. “Good Lord, you scared the crap out of me! Don’t go sneaking up behind me like that, okay?”

Bri nodded as though she had a stiff neck.

“Yeah — sure. I was worried about you. I heard you wet-burping in here.”

“Don’t worry,” Julia said, still feeling her heart racing in her chest. “It was something I ate. I’ll be fine.”

She tried to smile but found that she couldn’t. She was afraid if she let herself feel what she thought was happening, she’d start laughing and wouldn’t be able to stop.

If I can make myself this sick just thinking about being pregnant, I hope it doesn’t go on for the full nine months.

V

When John got downstairs, he found Randy Chadwick standing outside the kitchen door. He was wearing a heavy coat and a woolen hat that was pulled down to his eyebrows. Cold air blasted John when he opened the door so Randy could come inside. John reached past him and swung the door shut. Randy looked at John with a faint half- smile, but he came no farther inside than the rug by the door.

“Ellie, uh, wanted me to bring this over for you” he said. He was holding out a covered casserole dish. “So right after I hung up I decided to scoot t on over. It’s homemade lasagna.”

The casserole was still warm in John’s hands when he took it from Randy and placed it on the countertop.

“Thanks,” John said simply, wondering if he’d find another note on the bottom of the dish.

What would this one say?

“You want to reconsider, the offer’s still on,” Randy said. “I wouldn’t mind at all.”

Biting his lower lip, John shook his head firmly.

“No. We’re fine.”

A sudden flood of anger at his former friend filled him. Even with his father’s funeral only a few hours away, and Randy apparently was genuine in his offer to help, all John could think was, He’s got to be the one who’s writing those notes.

I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID TO ME!

“Tell Ellie thanks for the lasagna,” John said.

He was anxious for Randy to leave, mostly because there was nothing else for them to talk about … unless he asked Randy why he was writing those notes and if he was fucking his wife.

He surprised himself by not saying anything as he reached past Randy and opened the door for him. The sudden blast of cold air made him shiver as Randy stepped back outside,

“See you later, then,” Randy said before starting down the walkway to his car, which was parked down on the road.

“Sure … thanks again.”

John smiled grimly, watching Randy carefully for any sign that would reveal what he was really thinking.

Is he watching me … waiting to see if I’m starting to crack? he wondered as Randy’s car pulled away slowly. The blue cloud of car exhaust drifted heavily in the cold air, like sea smoke rising.

“Who was that?” Julia asked.

Her voice caught John by surprise, and he let out a startled yelp as he wheeled around.

“Jesus! You scared the shit out of me!”

He eased the door shut and then walked over to where he had left the casserole dish.

“Randy,” he said, letting his hand rest on the still-warm dish cover. “Ellie sent over a dish of lasagna.”

“Oh, isn’t that sweet,” Julia said. She picked up the dish and lifted the cover, sniffing of the contents. “Umm — as lousy as I feel, this smells great.”

“I’ll just bet it does,” John said, his voice taking on an little kid’s sing-song tone. “It’s so sweet of him to bring it over.”

Julia placed the casserole on the counter, all the while frowning. When she looked at John again, her frown deepened. He glared back at her.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Her body was still feeling limp from throwing up so hard, and the last thing she wanted was an argument with John.

“Oh, nothing … nothing’s the matter. I’m feeling great. My father’s going to be buried this morning, and dear, sweet Randy is running over to do these darling little favors for us. ‘Would you like me to drive you to the funeral today?’ … ‘Here’s something the little lady cooked up for you.’ Goddamn! I don’t need this horseshit!”

“He’s a friend. He’s trying to help,” Julia said as she pulled a chair away from the table and sat down. The backs of her legs were throbbing, and her stomach was churning.

“A friend? ... Right!” John practically snarled.

And is it friendly to be popping your best friend’s wife?

Is it friendly to leave notes around, intending to drive that same friend out of his mind with guilt?

“I’m sure if it had been his father instead of yours, you would want to help any way we could,” Julia said. “Come on. He was your best friend in high school, for crying out loud.”

“High school was along time ago.”

Julia smiled and shook her head. She didn’t want to fight, but she couldn’t let him feel and say such things unchallenged.

“Those days are dead and gone,” John said, pointing at her. “Randy and I don’t have a goddamned thing in common anymore.”

Or do we? his mind whispered, filling in the brief pause. Maybe we have you in common …

“He doesn’t know me any more than I know him. And for all I care, that’s the way it can stay.”

Julia wished this wasn’t happening … especially now. She was sure Bri, who was still up in her bedroom, could hear every word they were saying. This might be how John was expressing his grief, but it wasn’t healthy.

“Who the fuck does he think he is?” John shouted. “He comes here, acting all best buddies or whatever.”

Even buddies don’t share wives, he thought. That’s called “buddy-fucking.”

“We — I don’t fucking need his goddamned help. I can handle this by myself, so fuck him!”

If you’ re not already fucking him, a small voice whispered in his mind.

“Keep it down,” Julia said as mildly as she could. “I don’t Bri upset any more than she already is.”

John started to say something, but the only sound he made was a loud snort. He fixed his eyes on the casserole dish, walked over to it, and picked it up. Hefting it with both hands, he raised over his head, spun around, and flung it as hard as he could against the kitchen wall. There was a loud crash and a sickening splat as glass and lasagna exploded everywhere. The mess slid slowly down the wall to the floor, leaving a bloody-looking asterisk and streak on the wall beside the phone.

For a sickening instant, when she looked at the bright red mess on the floor, Julia had the impression it was flesh and blood, not tomatoes and noodles. Her stomach tightened again, threatening to heave.

“John! … Stop it!”

It was frightening to watch as he closed his eyes tightly and, clenching his fists, shook them in front of him. His lower lip was pale and trembling, and his breath came in short, stuttering gasps. For a short while, she waited to see if his rage had passed or if he was going to do something else. But then, exhaling with a sagging of his shoulders, he unclenched his fists, brought his hands down, and slammed them hard against his legs. He threw his head back and let out a long, low wail.

Julia forgot her own raging nausea as she went to him and threw her arms around him. He felt as limp as a scarecrow in her arms as he sobbed, his body shaking uncontrollably. She braced the back of his head with a gentle but firm grip and, because words failed her, she simply breathed deeply and evenly as she cried.

TWENTY

Suspicions

I

John decided to have Frank’s funeral service at the funeral home instead of at church, but he did ask Pastor Vernon to conduct the service. He, Julia, and Bri were sitting in the front row as people quietly entered and took their seats. A small, white lectern was set up at the front near the open casket, where Frank lay, his hands folded across his chest, the harsh lines of his face smoothed and softened by the mortician’s art. Frank wore the same suit he had worn to church on Christmas Eve. With the curtains drawn, the lights dimmed, and organ music playing softly in the background, he could easily imagine that they were at the church.

I’m not dead ... but I’m dying!

Bri sat at her mother’s right-hand side. From time to time, she clenched her mother’s hand tightly — especially whenever she looked at her grandfather’s body. She kept telling herself this was it — this is real … he’s dead and soon to be buried.

But every time she looked at her grandfather, she could have sworn his frail chest was rising and falling with shallow breaths. The illusion — that’s all it is … an illusion — was convincing… and terrifying. She tried not to think it, but she couldn’t stop imagining her grandfather was going to sit up in the casket and shout, “Hey, everyone! Surprise!”

John, on Julia’s left, kept his head bowed and his hands clasped together in his lap. His eyes were closed more often than not. Whenever he looked at his father’s body —

That’s all it is … an empty shell …

— waves of guilt and regret swept over him, almost too much to bear. He wanted to stand up and scream to release the tension inside him.

He also still regretted the scene he had pulled in the kitchen this morning, throwing Ellie’s dish of lasagna against the wall. Even though Julia told him dozens of times that she understood and forgave him, in the center of his darkening heart he knew that she didn’t know why he was upset and she could never know.

I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID TO ME!

At precisely ten o’clock, Pastor Vernon, who was seated across the aisle from John, stood and walked to the podium. His forefinger was stuck inside his hymnal, marking his place. After clearing his throat and smiling benevolently at John and Julia, he signaled for the organ music to stop and began the service with a brief eulogy. Unlike that given the day before by Frenchie —”He was one helluva card player!” — Pastor Vernon’s focused on Frank’s faith, his regular attendance at church, and his belief in a better world to come.

Bri and Julia, both teary-eyed, listened to Pastor Vernon, and at first John did; but after a while, he noticed that he began to feel uncomfortable. It wasn’t the simple fact of his father’s funeral … or that all the people sitting behind him were, no doubt, watching him as much as they were Frank … or the knowledge that Randy was sitting behind them, no doubt his eyes glued to Julia.

It was more than that … It was a feeling of being watched.

Cold, clammy fingers brushed against the back of his neck and scalp to the top of his head. The words Pastor Vernon was saying faded until they were nothing more than a distant, droning buzz. The air in the room, already thick with the scent of flowers, thickened and tightened around his throat until he couldn’t breathe deeply enough.

John glanced at Julia and shifted in his seat, trying to break the creeping sensation that somebody was watching him, but nothing he did, short of standing up and turning around to confront whomever it was, would rid him of the feeling.

It was like a dark presence, hovering in the corner of the dim room, flitting in and out of sight in the corner of his eye.

I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID TO ME!

Suddenly, everyone in the room began to recite the Lord’s Prayer, which was printed in the funeral service handout. The sudden sound of everyone speaking in unison caught John by surprise. He tensed, his eyes flitting to the piece of paper in his hand. He had been holding it so tightly it was limp in his hands.

“Our Father … who art in heaven ...”

Mechanically, John moved his mouth along with the words, but even as he listened to the dull rattle of his own voice, he heard something else …something that sent a cold wave through his body. From behind him, faintly, came the same sound he’d heard on Christmas Eve during the candlelight service … a faint ripple of –

Laughter!

Beads of sweat broke out on his brow as everyone continued with the prayer.

“ … on earth … as it is in heaven …”

It felt like a hot coal was lodged in his windpipe, blocking the air he was trying to draw into his lungs. A scream began to build up inside him, seeking an opportunity to break out.

I’m not dead ... but I’m dying!

With steadily mounting fear, he looked at Julia, but she seemed not to notice his rising state of panic.

“ … as we forgive those … who trespass against us …”

Below the sounds of everyone reciting the prayer, like a frigid current of air, the other sound — the laughter! — gathered strength until there was no doubt in John’s mind.

Someone is laughing …

At me!

Finally, when he couldn’t stand it any longer, he kept his head low and turned around to scan the crowd. Everyone seemed to be intent on what he or she was saying — some read from the paper; others had their eyes closed and their heads bowed. But then, at the back of the room beside one of the two doors leading into the room, he saw her.

The young woman with long, black hair and still wearing a heavy, gray sweater was standing by the wall. Her head was bowed, so he couldn’t see her face, but he recognized her as the same person he had seen briefly at the candlelight service. Her shoulders were shaking, and it appeared as if she was sobbing, but then a realization hit John with a force that was almost physical.

Her shoulders are shaking because she’s laughing.

“ … for Thine is the kingdom … and the power …”

It can’t be!

John turned back around so quickly he almost lost his balance.

That cold, cruel laughter filled his ears —

Or is it in my head?

Every nerve and muscle in his body was frozen as the soft, almost feathery sound hit his ears like vagrant puffs of wind. Barely aware that he was moving, he lurched to the side, bumping into Julia.

“… forever and ever … Amen.”

“John?” Julia leaned close, her eyes wide. “Are you all right?”

He was suddenly afraid that he was going to pass out. His face paled, and he couldn’t focus his eyes on anything. He felt unsteady on his feet.

For a moment, he locked eyes with her. In the silence that followed the prayer, he could hear it even better — low, wicked laughter.

“Yeah, I ... I’m okay.” He forced himself to smile even though it was more of a grimace. His mind filled with an image that his face was nothing more than a grinning skull. He was convinced the young woman had raised her face and was looking at his back, drilling him with her cold, piercing, dead eyes. He was also convinced that, if he turned and looked at her, she would lower her face, hiding it behind the cascade of long, dark hair.

The service was nearing an end. As organ music swelled once again, people began filing forward to pay their last respects to Frank while John, Julia, and Bri stood and shook hands with the people as they moved slowly past the casket. Other than Frenchie and the Chadwicks, Julia didn’t know anyone other a couple of people she had noticed in passing. John introduced her to several people, including his friend from work, Barry Cummings, who had taken time off to be here. Bri did her best not to break down and cry, but her face glistened with tears, and she furiously wiped her eyes with a sodden handkerchief.

John shook hands with everyone who went by. Most of them addressed him by first name. He accepted their expression of sadness with a curt nod of the head — particularly, Julia noticed, when Randy and Ellie filed past. Julia whispered her thanks for the lasagna and, wincing with the lie, told Ellie they would have it for supper tonight. She was already trying to concoct another lie to explain how the casserole dish broke when it was time to return it.

The whole time they were standing there greeting people, the back of John’s neck prickled. He was desperate to turn and see if that girl was waiting in line to walk by and shake hands with the family … or if she had left following the service. John couldn’t shake the sensation that her cold eyes were still boring into him, but at least

— Thank God!

— he didn’t still hear her laughing any longer.

He wondered why no one else seemed to have noticed it during the service, but he wasn’t about to mention it to Julia.

Finally, the last few stragglers went past the casket, shook hands and hugged the family, and walked out into the cold, clear morning. John and Julia, with Bri between them, went to their car and brought it around to wait in line behind the hearse while Chuck Lang and his assistants carried the coffin out the back door of the funeral home.

“I can’t believe he’s gone,” Bri said, sniffling as she watched the men slide the casket into the back of the black limo. Sunlight glinted off the polished wood and metal. The men’s breath shot out like smoke in the cold air.

“I mean … whenever I think about how we used to play checkers and stuff, I —” Her voice caught with a wrenching intake of air.

“Take it easy, sweetheart” Julia said, patting the back of her daughter’s hand. “You have to remember that for the last few years, he wasn’t very happy. He wasn’t himself.

You don’t know the half of it, John thought but didn’t say.

“Once he wasn’t able to get around and visit with friends as easily as he used to — He didn’t like living like that.”

“I wish I’d known him before,” Bri said.

She couldn’t accept that anyone could be better off dead. As gruff as her grandfather could be at times, all she could remember were the good times they’d had, and although she had certainly been aware of the tension between Frank and John, she never had any bad feelings about the former.

A few other cars lined up behind theirs as they waited to begin the procession out to Whispering Pines Cemetery. Once the casket and flowers were loaded into the hearse, they drove slowly out of the funeral home parking lot. At the cemetery, Pastor Vernon read a few more passages from his hymnal, took a handful of frozen earth in hand, and sprinkled it onto the coffin. The dirt rattled like hail on the coffin lid. Bri was so emotionally drained she went back to the car to wait while several men lowered the casket into the ground. While the cemetery work crew waited to one side for everyone to leave so they could fill in the grave, John and Julia thanked Pastor Vernon and walked slowly back to the car.

“Well, I guess that’s that.” John took a deep breath and blinked his eyes to fight back tears as he looked up at the sky. He lit a cigarette and inhaled.

Julia grunted and nodded, then opened the car door and slid into the front seat. John came around to the driver’s side, got in, and started up the car. After a few puffs, he crushed the cigarette out in the ashtray.

“Seeing as how we don’t have that lasagna for dinner anymore, what do you say we go in town for supper?” Julia asked. Her voice was tight with suppressed anger. John grunted agreement as he pulled slowly away from the gravesite. Beneath her own feelings about death and funerals and grief, Julia was satisfied with herself for having the courage to mention John’s outburst this morning.

I said it … It’s over …

As John turned from the cemetery drive onto Route One, she looked over her shoulder at the gravesite. Unconsciously, her hand was stroking Bri’s hair.

It sure is over, she thought … especially for Frank …

II

On the drive home from Frank’s funeral, the mood in the car was understandably somber. As the car pulled into the driveway, John was surprised by how small the house appeared to him. Maybe it was his child’s perspective, but the house had always seemed so big.

Until now …

Knowing that his father was dead made the house — his house — look and feel small. Everything about it was diminished with his father’s death.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” John said as he cut the engine and looked at Julia with a long, cold stare. “I think we should sell out now. Get out while we can and move back to Vermont. I’ll bet I could get my old job back at —”

“Did you leave the door unlocked?” Julia asked. Her voice had a sharp edge of sudden worry.

“Umm …Yeah,” John said. “I was the last to leave. I’m positive I locked it.”

“We’ve got trouble,” Julia said.

John looked past her to the kitchen door and saw that it was hanging open, swinging back and forth in the breeze.

“Wait here,” he said as he got out of the car, slid the car keys into his coat pocket, and started up the walkway to the house.

“Hello! … Anyone here!” he called when he got to the door.

His eyes darted from side to side, taking in as much as he could without entering. He saw right away that there was trouble — big trouble. The kitchen table and chairs were overturned. Plates, glasses, pots, and pans were scattered about on the floor. The refrigerator door was open, and fruits and vegetables had been scooped out onto the floor. A gallon of milk was tipped over, and mile gurgled onto the floor, leaving a wide, white puddle.

“For Christ’s sake,” Julia said, coming up behind him and staring in utter disbelief at the mess. “What the hell happened?”

“I told you to stay in the car,” John said. Without another word, he went to the garage, grabbed an ax — the one he had used to break down his father’s bedroom door — and entered the house. Gripping the ax like a baseball bat in both hands, he stepped gingerly over the wreckage and moved into the living room. Julia and Bri followed a few steps behind him.

“Who would have done this?” Bri asked, her voice hushed because she was afraid the culprit might still be in the house.

John shushed her and then gasped when he saw what had been done to the living room. The Christmas tree was knocked over, and all about it were smashed ornaments and lights. The couch and all the chairs and tables were overturned. Magazines and books had been torn open; pages had been ripped out and strewn everywhere. The rugs and carpet were twisted and pulled out of place, lying about in bunches. All the pictures and photographs had been knocked off the walls and lay on the floor in piles of shattered glass and wood frames.

“I can’t believe this,” Julia said as she bent to pick up one of her favorite tree ornaments — an angel who had seemingly had surgery to remove her wings. The sight of it made her stomach churn.

“Someone knew we weren’t going to be home today and took the opportunity to trash us,” John said. He slapped the ax head in the palm of his hand, making a wet smacking sound. “I guarantee you upstairs is just as bad.”

“Who’d do something like this?” Bri asked, her voice whining up the scale. She had never experienced crime directly before, and it terrified her. She felt as if she were in a dream, and if she could wake up, everything would return to normal.

Frank’s bedroom, the downstairs bathroom, the dining room, closets, and all the rooms upstairs looked the same … as if a tornado had ripped through the house, pulling out and overturning everything in its path.

“You think robbers?” Julia asked, but when they checked, they were relieved to find none of their valuables missing. It was going to take days to clean up this mess and get everything that wasn’t broken back into place.

“We have to call the cops,” she said once it was obvious whoever had done this had come and gone.

“And tell them what?”

Assured that she safe for the time being, Bri went to her bedroom and started cleaning up the mess there. Tears streamed down her face when she saw so many of hr treasures broken and thrown about.

In their bedroom, John struggled to get his bureau upright.

“I’m not so sure … I mean, why get them involved?”

He braced his feet and pushed the bureau back into place against the wall. Then he knelt down and began resorting the clothes and putting them back into the drawers.

“Why get them involved? … Because this is a serious threat … Whoever did this might come back and … and try to hurt us.”

“This was planned,” John said.

“They waited until they knew we weren’t home.” She went to the window and, pulling back the curtain, looked outside. “They could be watching us right now.”

Covering her mouth with her hand, she went to the bed and sat down on the bare mattress, staring down at the twisted pile of sheets and blankets on the floor by the closet door.

“Other than a few things broken, nothing’s been taken,” John said with a measure of calm in his voice. “You ask me, this is one more reason to move the hell back to Vermont.”

“Come on, John. We can’t just —”

“Look!” He indicated the mess with a side sweep of his arms. “This isn’t exactly saying ‘welcome home.’”

“I can’t believe someone would … that anyone would do something like this while we’re at your father’s funeral, for God’s sake. Why?”

John had his hand to his mouth and started nibbling on the knuckle of his forefinger so he wouldn’t say what he was thinking, but finally there was no way he could keep it to himself.

“I’ve got a pretty good idea who did it,” he said, his voice a low, animal growl.

Julia looked at him, her eyes wide ovals of fear.

“You think it has something to do with the condo project?” she said. “Someone’s really pissed off about it?”

John shook his head no and looked at her with a cold, intense expression.

“Nope,” he said. He swallowed hard before continuing, “I think it was Randy.”

Julia looked at him dumbfounded. Then a smile crept across her face.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Not at all,” John said. “I think good old Randy might have had a whole lot to do with it.”

“Jesus, John. You’re being ridiculous. He was at your father’s funeral this morning. How could he have —”

“Did you see when he and Ellie got there?” John said sharply. “I sure didn’t. For all we know, he might have come in at the last minute, slipped into the back so he’d have an alibi.”

“You and Randy were best friends, for God’s sake! Why would he do this?”

Julia stared at her husband, wondering how he could even suggest something like that, but John’s only thought was, Hell, I can think of plenty of good reasons.

But that wasn’t what he said. He slowly walked the length of the room, his hands clasped behind his head as he surveyed the damage.

“I’ve told you this a hundred times already, but apparently it hasn’t sunk in yet. Randy and I were friends … in high school. Not anymore. I never saw him or talked to him or written to him until we moved back. And I think he’s always secretly envied me, that I got away.”

“He’s happy enough with his life,” Julia said. She felt a twinge of guilt, remembering that day Ellie had revealed to her how she had trapped Randy by getting pregnant. She also wondered a bit guiltily if that wasn’t what she had done to John … if, in fact, she was pregnant now.

“He was always smarter than me,” John continued. “National Honor Society … star captain and pitcher for the baseball team … all of that stuff. And I was always runner-up. But I’m the one who got out. Maybe my father pushed me too hard, but I went to Orono, got my engineering degree, and didn’t have to stay on this fucking island.”

“I don’t think Randy hates his life, if that’s what you mean.” Julia was thinking about the day she and John had gone out lobstering with him. “I certainly don’t think he holds you responsible for anything that may have gone wrong in his life — not enough to do … this.”

John snorted and said, “Yeah, right.”

He cautiously eyed Julia, trying to see if she would let on that there was something between her and Randy that she wasn’t telling him.

“Come on, John,” she said. “Whoever did this was — well, I certainly don’t think you can blame Randy. He wouldn’t be crazy enough ... or stupid enough.”

“You don’t know Randy,” John said softly.

“And you don’t, either,” she snapped.

“What? You’re saying you do?” John narrowed his gaze at her.

Casting her glance downward, Julia shrugged.

“I’ve spent some time talking with Ellie, and we got together with them those couple of times. I think I’d be able to recognize it if he was a psycho.”

“Maybe he hides it well,” John snapped. “People aren’t always what they appear to be, you know. Everybody’s got their secrets.” His mind added —

Ain’t that the goddamned truth!

“Well, sitting around trying to pin the blame on Randy or whoever isn’t going to get this mess cleaned up,” Julia said. Even though her stomach was a raging storm of acid, she stood up and began sorting through the pile of clothes that had been strewn on the floor.

“So …” she said as she worked. “You’re not gonna call the cops?”

“No need,” John said as he joined her. They worked together silently for a while before he cleared his throat and said, “One thing, though —”

“Yeah?”

“Does this make you want to move?”

Julia considered for a moment but then shook her head.

“No … but I want you to promise me something.”

“Sure. What?”

“That you’ll got to the hardware store and buy dead-bolt locks for the front and back doors. Your father always said it wasn’t necessary, but —” She glanced around at the mess in their bedroom —”I’d say they’d be a good idea now.”

“Sure thing,” John said.

III

By the Wednesday after the funeral, the family was getting back into the groove of normal living. Although Barry told John he could have the week off — and more, if necessary — he decided that getting back to work, even if it meant working on the Surfside Condo Project, was best for him. Bri was on school vacation, and she had gotten up and left to spend the day at Kristin’s by the time Julia — who was still feeling nauseous and was convinced that she had one hell of a case of morning sickness — came downstairs and joined John in the kitchen. He was rinsing his plate off at the sink and staring blankly out the window. She poured a cup of coffee and put a slice of bread into the toaster.

“I can’t get used to him not being here,” Julia said. “I turn around, and I totally expect to see him there in his wheelchair.”

She had a cup of coffee in front of her, but she didn’t touch it. Every few seconds, it seemed as though some sound — a faint rustling … a dull, metallic clank … a creaking floorboard — echoed in the hallway from Frank’s empty room. She looked around, expecting to see Frank rolling his wheelchair into the kitchen.

John had nothing to say as he pulled on his heavy winter coat and gloves, and went out to start the car so it would warm up before he left for work. When he came back into the house, he stood for a moment, leaning against the counter and looking silently at Julia. He picked up the cup of coffee he had left there and gulped down what was left.

“That’s what my dad said the morning after my mother’s funeral,” he said, his voice hushed as he stared vacantly at the ceiling and thought that was probably what everyone who lost a family member said for weeks after the funeral.

“What?” Julia shook her head and looked at him, snapped out of her reverie.

“That he couldn’t get used to her not being here … that he kept thinking he’d see or hear her.”

Julia almost said something about how empty she had felt when her parents died, but she could only make a little grunting sound. The toast popped, and she spread butter on it, but the first bite had hit her stomach like hot metal.

“If I don’t get a move on, I’m going to be stuck in traffic,” he said. He rinsed his cup out under the faucet and put it on the sideboard, grabbed his briefcase from beside the door, came over and gave Julia a kiss, and then was out the door. The glass panes rattled as he swung the door shut behind him, and Julia sat there at the table, listening as the car pulled out of the driveway and staring at her uneaten piece of toast.

“All alone,” she whispered to herself as her eyes skimmed across the kitchen floor. Bri’s gone over to her friend’s house … John’s off to work … and Frank … Frank’s gone for good …

So it’s just you and your thoughts, kiddo!

The dishes John and Bri had used this morning were already rinsed and stacked. Everything was put away. As Julia inventoried what didn’t need to be done in the kitchen, she was suddenly swept up by a feeling of absolute uselessness. It didn’t take long for her to realize how much of her day had depended on having Frank around for company ... not that she had done all that much in the way of taking care of him — Judy Bartlett, the nurse, had done most or that — but she realized now how she had taken for granted Frank’s being there so she had someone to talk to and do things for. Without him and the rest of her family at home, the house was a vast, hollow shell

When she wasn’t gazing down the hallway toward Frank’s bedroom — John still hadn’t replaced the broken door — she found herself sitting with her elbows on the table, her face cradled in her hands as she stared down at her coffee cup. She picked up the cup and took a sip, but it gone cold. Wrinkling her nose, she got up and dumped it out in the sink, but before she could sit back down, a jolt of pain hit her so hard it was like a blue flame shooting behind her eyes. Her stomach squeezed. Groaning, she leaned over the sink, positive that her single bite of toast was on its way up.

Sweat broke out across her forehead as she waited.

She considered shoving her finger down her throat to speed things along —

Hurry up and get it over with!

— but she couldn’t bring herself to do that. The pain became spiraling waves of nausea.

“Jesus H.,” she whispered as she bent down until her eyes were level with the faucet. “If this is how it’s going to be for nine months, I don’t want a baby.”

She fumbled for the cold-water tap, turned it on, filled her cupped hands, and splashed her face several times. Sputtering, she straightened up and was reaching for a paper towel to dry her face when the phone rang. She jumped and spun around, and her hand knocked the pile of clean dishes over into the sink. Something broke, but she didn’t see what it was as she lurched across the floor to the phone.

“Yeah — ?” she said.

“Julia?” It was Ellie Chadwick’s voice. “Is this a bad time to call?”

Julia licked her lips, took a breath, and said, “No … not at all.” She couldn’t believe how good it was to hear another human voice.

“I can call back later if you’d like,” Ellie said.

“No ... no,” Julia replied. “I was — ahh, washing my hair in the sink, and the phone surprised me. Oh, I have to tell you —” Holding the receiver to her ear with her shoulder, she went back to the sink and looked down at the two broken plates. “I’m sorry, but I dropped your casserole dish, and it totally shattered.”

The lie tasted like the sourness bubbling in her stomach, but she was silently grateful for the opportunity to explain why Ellie wasn’t going to be getting her lasagna dish back.

“Oh, don’t worry about that old thing,” Ellie said. “As long as you enjoyed the lasagna.”

“Umm … we sure did” Julia said, wincing even more at the second lie. “We had it last night. You’ll have to tell me what you used for spices. It had a unique flavor.”

“Nothing special,” Ellie said.

“How are you guys doing?” Ellie asked. “I haven’t been by to see you ‘cause … well … you know …”

Her words trailed off, but Julia filled in the rest of the sentence for her —

Because Randy told me what a jerk John acted like when he brought the lasagna over.

“Oh, you know — it’s tough adjusting to it all,” Julie said. “I think Bri’s taking it the hardest.”

She thought about the morning of the funeral … when John flung the dish of lasagna against the kitchen wail. He had cleaned it up, but even after he apologized and said he felt like such an ass, and she told him to forget about it, she knew that incident was going to fester in her mind and become one of those things she would hold against him for a long time to come.

“Aww, that sucks,” Ellie said. After a pause, she added, “Are you sure you’re doing all right? You sound kind of … funny.”

“Funny? No, I’m fine … honest. It’s just … well, today’s the first day John’s gone back to work, and it’s pretty lonely around here.”

“You want me to come over? If you want me to, I will.”

For a second or two, Julia considered saying, Yes! Of course, but she realized, if she got sick to her stomach while Ellie was here, she would have to tell her that she thought she was pregnant —

No … I’m positive

Because John had been so wound up lately, she hadn’t even hinted at it to him other than what she had said the night it had happened.

“That did it … I know it. Women have a way of knowing.”

Barely aware she was still on the phone with Ellie, she thought, Christmas Eve … We made love on the couch a couple of hours before Frank died.

She entertained the notion that, if there is such a thing as a soul, Frank’s soul, so recently freed from his body, had somehow transferred to her womb and was now growing with the embryo inside her. Carrying that idea further, she wondered if the universe might not be chock full of disembodied souls drifting around in limbo … souls waiting to be born.

Whatever she thought, one thing was certain — once she was positive she was pregnant and it was time to let people know, John would be the first person she’d tell.

“No, I — I’ve got some stuff I have to do … some errands,” Julia said, cringing at her third lie of the morning. A sour bubble rose in her throat and made her burp. She covered the receiver with her hand, hoping Ellie hadn’t heard.

“I’m just checking,” Ellie said. “Don’t hesitate to call if you want company, ‘kay?”

“For sure,” she said. “Maybe I’ll drop by later this afternoon.”

She cut herself off quickly as she burped again, and the sour taste flooded her mouth. Panic filled her.

Oh, Christ! … Here it comes!

“Any time,” Ellie said, but Julia barely heard her.

Saying a sharp “good-bye,” she practically threw the receiver onto the hook as she spun around and raced back to the kitchen sink. With three hard convulsive gags, her bite of toast and a glob of thick, yellow mucus shot from her mouth, covering the broken dishes in the kitchen sink.

IV

“Has anyone been in my office?” John asked, walking up to the knot of people gathered around the coffee urn in the conference room. Barry along with everyone else shrugged and looked at the others questioningly.

“Oh, is it about your electric pencil sharpener” Barry asked with a guilty grin. “Mine broke a couple of days ago, and I borrowed yours. I thought I put it back.”

John stood a few feet away from the group, his hands clenched at his sides. He was trembling, and everyone watching him assumed he was overreacting because of his father’s death.

‘No ... no,” he snapped, shaking his head vigorously. “My pencil sharpener’s there. I mean … has someone who doesn’t work here — someone off the street — been up here poking around?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Barry said. He was concerned when he saw the sadness etched on John’s face. Moving closer to him, he put his hand gently on John’s shoulder and guided him over to a corner away from the group.

“You know,” he said, “I wish you’d taken my advice and stayed home for a week or two. It takes time to get over this kind of —”

“It isn’t that!” John said. His voice carried so loudly several people looked at them. He lowered his voice to an intense snarl. “I want to know if you’ve seen anyone in my office … someone who doesn’t belong here.”

“No,” Barry said with a shrug. “I dunno … I mean — there’ve been clients and other people up here. Are you expecting someone or something?”

“No, I —” John wiped his hand over his face, then fished his pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He had to fight to control his shaking hands as he lit up, and even after the first drag, he wanted to bellow out his frustration.

“I’m telling you, man,” Barry said, lowering his voice. “It ain’t good for you to be here. Everyone knows what you’ve been through, and —”

“It’s not that,” John said, shaking his head. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, and thin, blue smoke curled up into his face. He hesitated for a second and then reached into his pants pocket.

“Do you recognize this?”

With trembling hands, he pulled out a piece of notebook paper, which had been crumpled up into a tight ball, smoothed it out, and held it up for Barry to see.

Barry’s eyes took a moment to register the single word written in heavy pencil lines. Then he looked at John and shook his head.

“Meet?” Barry said. “That’s it? What the hell does it mean … Meet?”

“I thought you might know,” John said. He took a nervous puff on his cigarette and then flicked the lengthening ash into the nearby trashcan. “Someone was in my office and left this on my desk. I want to know who!”

Frowning with confusion, Barry said, “What’s the big deal? Okay, so someone started to write you a note and didn’t finish it. So what?”

“This isn’t the first one,” John said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve found a couple of others.” His voice had a jittery edge, and he suddenly wished he had never mentioned this to Barry or anyone.

I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID TO ME!

“Like this?” Barry asked. “Saying ‘meet?’”

“No,” John replied. “There were other messages. And, frankly, I don’t like the idea that just anyone can wander in off the street and get into my office. Can we lock the doors?”

“Yeah, that’d be good for business,” Barry said.

“Well I would think I could expect a little more privacy than that.”

“Look, John.” Barry rested his hand on John’s shoulder again. “I haven’t seen anything unusual, all right? If someone’s coming up here and bugging you, I don’t know a thing about it. Looks to me like a piece of scrap paper someone meant to throw away.”

John winced as he inhaled on his cigarette and thought, You don’t know the half of it!

“You’ve been under a lot of stress lately,” Barry said kindly. “I could insist you should take my advice and go home … be with your family for a few days. We’ve got the company New Year’s Eve party coming up Friday night. Show up for that, and maybe you and your wife — who I still haven’t met, by the way other than at the funeral — can unwind a little. Until then —”

“I’m fine?” John said, struggling to keep his anger from boiling over. For added emphasis, he sliced the air between them with a sharp chopping-motion of his hand. “I want work to do, and I’m gonna do it. I just want you to know that I don’t appreciate feeling like my office is a place where just anyone can walk in off the street.”

“Fine,” Barry said, stepping back a pace. “Duly noted. But if you won’t take some time off like I tell you, I sure as hell don’t want you unloading your bullshit on me. Understood?” He was bristling, and he frowned as he stared at John.

Clamping the cigarette between his teeth, John nodded and turned to go back to his office.

I sure as hell do understand, he thought angrily.

Barry’s reaction only strengthened his resolve to convince Julia that they had to move back to Vermont as soon as possible.

TWENTY-ONE

“See what he did …”

I

Throughout the week following Frank’s funeral, everyone in the family was tense and out of sorts as though, in order to deal with Frank’s death, they each turned inward. Julia knew from losing her parents as a child that it was better to share thoughts and feelings, but she also kept reminding herself that people have different ways of handling the harsh reality of losing a family member.

Bri, it seemed, was bouncing back the quickest … maybe simply because of her youth, which couldn’t dwell too long or too morbidly on death … maybe for other reasons. But whatever her reasons, she spent a large part of the week at Kristin’s. Suspecting she did it partly to be out of the house where her grandfather had died, Julia didn’t mind even though it left her alone for most of the day. In her mind, the important thing was that Bri didn’t dwell on negative things. And more and more, whenever she mentioned Frank, it was within the context of how much fun they had had together, not how much she missed him.

John began leaving for work early and coming home later than usual. And in the evening, he seemed increasingly tense. He’d lose his patience over the simplest thing and end up yelling at both of them. His outbursts were out of line, Julia thought, but at least so far —

Thank God

! — he hadn’t gotten violent. There were no repetitions of the lasagna-throwing incident. As each day passed, Julia became increasingly sure that she was pregnant. She was aware of subtle changes in her body as hormones kicked in to support the new life she was bearing. The early morning sickness had decreased, thankfully.

It wounded her deeply that she couldn’t tell John that — like it or not — he was going to be a father — a real father — for the first time. When she was honest with herself, she dreaded how he would react. It might be what finally set him off. Just as time would gradually dull the pain and regret he was feeling following his father’s death —

Must be feeling because he certainly isn’t talking to me about it

— there would be time later to let him know what had happened on Christmas Eve … time for him to get used to the idea that they were having a baby.

Alone in the house most of every day, Julia had plenty of time to think, and not just about Frank’s death, but about the other tragedies she had suffered in her life as well.

There were memories, sad reflections ... her parents’ deaths, her divorce from Sam Mullen, Bri’s real father, the pain and misery Sam had put her through before finally admitting that, for the past three years, he had been having an affair with a girl half his age. And there was the time when Bri, only nine years old, had been hit by a car and — thank God again! — received no more than a broken wrist. The weeks and months of having a cast had been a strain that had affected Julia more than she admitted. There were other painful memories, but none of them touched her as deeply as the rift now widening between her and John.

Yes … She had to admit it … They were drifting apart …

She was aware that, like Ellie had done with Randy back in high school, she might have used getting pregnant as a last, desperate means of hanging on to him. As much as she wanted to deny it, she saw that, ever since they moved back to Glooscap, John had been acting more and more … foreign to her. Even before his father died — hell … on the day they moved to Maine, he had seemed darker, more withdrawn … as though he was hiding something from her, and his secret was eating him up on the inside.

These and other thoughts haunted her during the day and kept her awake long into the night, hours after John had sunk into sleep. She would lie in bed, hands clasped behind her head, and stare up at the dark ceiling for so long that, at times, she couldn’t be sure if her eyes were opened or closed. She would blink and not have the slightest physical sensation that she had done anything. The dense darkness of the room … of the insides of her eyelids … stayed unvaryingly the same. There was no sleep, and certainly no rest in darkness like that.

On Thursday evening, well after dark, John arrived home from work wound tight as usual. After supper and long, drawn-out stretches of awkward silence as they sat in the living room with the TV blaring away, they went to bed, but — as usual — sleep didn’t come to Julia. She lay in bed, feeling the heavy warmth of her husband beside her and started thinking how nice it would be —

The way things used to be

— if she could nudge him, and he would roll over and wind an arm around her and pull her close. And then —

As they used to

— she would respond, making low throaty sounds, and he would come awake until, after some foreplay, they would make soft, slow love in the darkness.

But not tonight …

Julia shivered as streams of tears ran down both sides of her face.

Not tonight … and maybe not ever again.

The thought cut her like a dull knife.

Heaving a sigh, she swung her legs out from under the covers and sat up on the edge of the bed. The bedsprings creaked beneath her weight. Through the window, she caught a glimpse of the dusky black night sky sprinkled with stars. The light hurt her eyes with its brightness as she stood up and walked over to the bedroom door.

If I’m not going to sleep, I might as well go downstairs and do something to make myself tired.

Maybe a cup of warm milk would soothe her nerves, she thought as she glided silently down the stairs and turned toward the kitchen.

But at the foot of the stairs, she paused — frozen in mid-step.

Her eyes widened as she turned and looked down the length of the hallway leading to Frank’s bedroom. As dark as the house was, she could barely make out the darker rectangle where the shattered remains of the bedroom door had been removed. The blackness in the doorway was so intense Julia had the impression it was flickering with barely perceptible flashes of dull blue light.

She stood motionless, her hand resting on the railing as a thin ripple of chills slithered up her back, across her shoulders, and down her arms.

Why does the stair railing feel so cold? she wondered as her teeth chattered.

Looking at her hand, it appeared to be vaguely translucent … pearly white in the diffused light of the night.

Her breath came in short, painful gulps as she strained to see if that really was a figure standing in the doorway.

It’s only the moonlight, she thought, but a quick glance behind her at the living room picture window showed that the night was thick and dark. There were no moon-cast shadows in the front yard.

When she looked at Frank’s opened door again, she saw — undeniably — something ... a dim light filtering into the hallway. It pulsated in time with her throbbing heartbeat.

“Julia …”

Her name came to her from the darkness, a fleeting ripple … a whooshing in her ears that could have been — had to be — blood, racing through her head. The coldness on the back of her neck spread out, sliding down her back and like a dash of cool water. The knot in her stomach tightened as she placed one foot in front of the other and started, ever so slowly, walking down the hallway.

Don’t go down there! … You don’t want to go down there! … You don’t want to see what’s in there!

But the pale blue light was there … and now the rectangle of Frank’s open door was a solid blue gel of shifting light …

As she took one … two … three steps closer, the light got steadily brighter. And when she had taken another few steps, the voice —

Christ! No! … That’s not Frank’s voice …

— whispered her name again the way he used to pronounce it … as though it had two syllables instead of three.

“Jule-yah …”

Every muscle, every nerve in her body vibrated with the sound as though a low electric current was tingling up from the floor through her feet. As she neared the door, the corner of her mind kept whispering, Don’t go in there! … You don’t want to go in there! … You don’t want to see what’s in there!

But then another thought intruded, and Julia was convinced Frank was still alive. He was lying in bed, and he needed help.

“Jule-yah ...”

The voice was louder, more commanding, and Julia knew no matter how impossible this was, no matter how much she knew Frank couldn’t be there ... that she shouldn’t enter the bedroom, her feet kept shuffling forward as though someone else was directing them.

At the open doorway, she reached out and touched the splintered door frame. She knew why the door was broken and gone.

John smashed it with an ax, a quiet corner of her mind whispered. He broke it down on Christmas Eve … when his father was …

“No,” she whispered, surprising herself by the nearness of her own voice.

Frank’s not dead! … He’s in there! … And he needs help!

The whooshing sound in her ears became a loud roar as she stared at the glowing blue light streaming through the bedroom doorway, lighting a kiltered rectangle of the floor and opposite wall. When she got to the door, Julia turned the corner and, looking into Frank’s room, gasped with shock.

He was there!

He was lying in his bed.

The covers were pulled up to his chin, and he was turned away so she couldn’t see his face, but she knew it was Frank.

“Jule-yah!”

The voice came from the bed.

Against her will, Julia moved closer, her hands out in front of her while all around, the bedroom glowed with eerie, iridescent blue light that cast no shadow.

All she could think was, It’s Frank! … He needs help!

When she was beside the bed, she reached out, preparing to roll Frank over and ask what he needed. In the instant before her hands touched the figure that she noticed something … odd.

Frank was wearing a thick sweater. It looked gray in the strange light … a bulky-knit gray sweater.

Where have I seen this before?

The instant before she touched the figure, it rolled over under the bed covers.

In a flash of horror, Julia saw that it wasn’t Frank.

A skeleton face looked up at her with black, eyeless sockets that, deep within, radiated cold, red light. Loose strands of long, dark hair hung in clumps down to its shoulders and spread across the pillow. Flaps of decaying gray skin were peeling away, exposing the white skull beneath. Tiny worms — maggots — were seething in the rotting flesh. When the figure sat up in the bed, the motion sent them raining onto the sheets and pillow like hard, dry rice.

Julia was so frightened she couldn’t grab enough breath to scream. She felt herself falling backwards … as though someone were yanking her roughly by the collar from behind. The blue light in the room stung her eyes as she watched the figure slowly heave itself into a sitting position on the bed. Thick, dark clots that must be dirt or lumps of decayed flesh dribbled onto the sheets. The bedsprings creaked beneath its shifting weight, but below that was another sound … a harsh, grating sound. It took Julia a moment to recognize it — dry bones rubbing against each other!

“Jule-yah ...” the figure said, its lipless mouth moving mechanically up and down as those empty eye sockets glared at her, spinning pools of blackness that even the ghostly blue light couldn’t reach.

“He did this to me, Jule-yah … “ the skeleton mouth whispered, its voice dry and muffled as though the tongue had swollen and now blocked its throat.

“See what he did to me? ...”

“No …” Julia said, her voice only a hint of sound.

She still felt like she was tumbling backwards in a slow, spiraling spin.

“See what he did to me, Jule-yah? ...”

The thing on the bed reached for her. Thin, bony fingers with long, cracked fingernails clicked like insect shells as they clenched and unclenched. The bulky sweater was thick with mold and coming apart at the shoulders. Julia’s nostrils filled with the damp, earthy smell of the grave.

Then, in an instant of pain that flashed red across her vision, Julia backed into the bedroom wall hard enough to hurt and bring her to her senses. Frank’s bedroom — and the thing sitting up in his bed — kiltered sickeningly to one side, and Julia’s lungs finally took in enough air so she could let out a single piercing wail.

The scream cut off abruptly when she dropped to the floor, and she had no idea how much later it was that she woke up to find John gently slapping her face and whispering to her.

As consciousness returned, she found herself lying on the couch with both John and Bri leaning over her, their faces twisted with concern. The back of her head was tender, and when she tried to move, her shoulders and neck burned with pain.

“What the hell?”

John’s face was lit by the single light he had switched on. She could read concern in his eyes, and she was filled with love for him —

Like I used to feel …

— as she shifted forward and wrapped her arms — damn the pain! — around him. Heart-wrenching sobs were building up inside her, but she clamped her jaw tightly, not letting them out. When she closed her eyes, blinking back the tears, she saw in her mind the horror that had been lying on Frank’s bed. The need to cry and scream threatened to overwhelm her.

“There ... there,” John cooed, his mouth close to her ear, his breath warm and reassuring on her the side of her neck. “You had a bit of a fall, but everything’s all right now.”

They stayed that way, embracing desperately, for several minutes. Eventually the burning need to scream subsided as the strength of her husband’s arms held her. With a shuddering breath, she pulled back and looked at him.

“What happened? … I can’t remember,” she said, her voice sounding unnaturally thin in her ears. “WsI sleepwalking?”

“I have no idea,” John said.

“I — how did I get downstairs? I must’ve … It must have been a dream.” Her voice trailed away as she recalled some of what she had seen …

No! she commanded herself. Not seen! … What I dreamed! … It had to have been a dream!

“You must have tripped on the bottom stair there, or maybe bumped into the couch in the dark,” John said, indicating the stairway with a curt nod of the head. “Are you okay? You didn’t break anything, did you?”

“The bottom of the stairs?” Julia asked, looking at him with surprise. “I thought I was in —” Again, she cut herself off, thinking — at least for now — it was better not to mention what she had seen in Frank’s bedroom.

“Hey, babe — all I know is, I was sound asleep until you let out a horrible scream.” John chuckled and shook his head. “I must’ve jumped right out of bed.”

“I — I hope I ….I didn’t scare you guys.”

Julia looked from John to Bri, feeling suddenly foolish.

“Oh, no … nothing like that,” Bri said. Her tight smile let Julia know that she felt the exact opposite.

“Well,” she said, shrugging helplessly, “I have no idea what happened. I mean, the last thing I remember was … I couldn’t sleep. I was lying there, tossing and turning, and the next thing I know, I’m on the couch with you two goobers leaning over me.”

You’re getting pretty damned good at lying,, she thought bitterly.

The horror in Frank’s bedroom was still clearly etched in her mind.

Every sight, every sound, even the heavy smell of dirt and that decomposing sweater —

And those empty eyes!

— were a clear memory —

As clear as if it actually happened, she thought, looking deeply into her husband’s eyes and trying not to see spinning wells of black, eyeless sockets throbbing with a dull red glow.

“It’s almost four o’clock,” John said after glancing over his shoulder at the clock on the mantel. “I think what we all need to do is get back to bed.”

Bri stood up, leaned back, and yawned widely. Watching her, Julia commanded herself not to think it looked like her mouth was frozen in a long, silent scream.

“I think I’m tired enough to sleep,” Julia said as she swung her legs around and slipped off the couch. Every muscle in her body complained, and the back of her head throbbed like she’d been beaten with hammers, but she forced herself not to let it show.

“You’re sure you didn’t get hurt?” John asked, watching her with concern. “If you banged your head hard enough when you fell, maybe you should go to the hospital and get an X-ray.”

“I’m fine … honest,” Julia said, and she followed her assurance with a yawn that was only half-forced. “I’m glad you don’t have school and work tomorrow, ‘cause I feel like sleeping till noon.”

II

Once Julia fell asleep, she stayed asleep until well after sunrise the next morning. When she finally got out of bed a little after ten o’clock, she actually felt rested. The dream — she convinced herself that’s what it had been — had lost some of its clarity, but it hovered at the edge of her mind, dimly lit by an eerie blue glow. Whenever she caught herself thinking about it, she would shake her head and look outside the nearest window at the bright, snowy day to anchor herself.

It was New Year’s Eve day. The family spent most of the time lazing around the house. It was too cold outside to do anything, and Bri — who was cross because Kristin was visiting relatives for the day — had gone for a walk by the ocean. She soon turned back because of the biting wind off the ocean.

“You sure you don’t mind staying home alone tonight?” Julia asked Bri during supper. They were eating early because John’s office party was that evening in Portland.

“What, do you mean am I afraid to stay here by myself?” Bri said.

It bothered her to remember how they had found their house trashed after her grandfather’s funeral, but her stepfather — as promised — had put new dead-bolt locks on the doors. She figured she would keep turning lights on and off throughout the evening, so any prospective burglars would see that someone was home.

“I mean …” Julia paused when, again, the memory of that thing in Frank’s bed rose in her mind.

“Yeah?”

“Huh?” Julia shook her head, trying to force the memory away and focus.

“If you’d like, we could ask someone … maybe Ellie Chadwick wouldn’t mind staying with you.”

“Yeah, great,” John whispered, but neither of them heard him.

“I’ll be fine,” Bri said. “Actually, I probably ought to get started on that paper for English.”

“You haven’t started it yet?” Julia said. She clicked her tongue and shook her head with mild disgust.

“I’ve been busy,” Bri said, and that — thankfully — was the end of it.

“If you don’t mind cleaning up the supper dishes, your father and I will get ready to go,” Julia said.

John looked up from his plate.

“Yeah, I am so looking forward to this,” he said.

The sour downward turn of his mouth spoke otherwise, but Julia, who also wasn’t keen on going to parties, smiled.

“If you want to sit around and moan, it’s fine with me,” she said, pushing herself away from the table and standing up. “It means I’ll get the shower first.”

“Fine,” John said.

Once upstairs, Julia — even knowing that both Bri and John were downstairs — felt subtle waves of uneasiness. All day long, no matter how hard she tried to put the events of last night from her mind, they kept intruding. The most ridiculous thing would remind her of some aspect of the dream —

Nightmare!

— and she would find her thoughts wandering far afield, thinking about that odd blue light … the skeleton face with peeling, rotting skin … the horrible, choking stench of rotten flesh … those black, bottomless eyes with a dull red glow …

She undressed and went into the bathroom, but even after she turned the shower on and stepped under the warm spray, she felt even tenser. Maybe it was the hissing sound of the shower. It could mask any other sounds so she wouldn’t hear …

What?

Am I expecting someone to sneak up on me from behind?

She wet her hair and started working up a lather of shampoo, but as long as possible, she kept her eyes opened, focused on the translucent shower curtain, expecting at any moment to see a dim, distorted shadow shift by on the other side. Her imagination went into overdrive, and she carried it further, imagining the figure raising a long-bladed knife over its head and bringing it down in a vicious arc like in the movie Psycho to slice through the shower curtain —

And into my flesh!

She rinsed her hair in a hurry and decided to skip her customary second lathering. She told herself she had to hurry to get ready for the party.

The warm water soothed her as she rubbed the soapy washcloth over her body, but then an odd sensation blossomed deep in her stomach.

It wasn’t much.

At first, she mistook took it for the warm rush of water running over her belly and legs … the last knot of tension unwinding.

But when she looked down, her heart did a cold flip.

The insides of her thighs were streaked with blood.

“Oh, Jesus! … Oh, shit!”

She stared in disbelief as the thin trickles of blood ribboned over her white skin. The suds down by her feet had already turned pink as before being sucked down the drain. From deep inside the pipes, there came a hollow, gurgling sound —

Almost like laughter, Julia thought in a rush of panic … Or satisfaction …

Arching her back, she probed her pubic hair with her fingertips, afraid — and positive — that the source of the blood wasn’t a razor cut from shaving her legs. It was coming from inside her.

I can’t be having a period!

Her eyes began to burn with tears.

I’m going to lose the baby! … Jesus, no! … I’m losing it now!

Frantically, she looked from her bloodstained legs to the shower curtain. Her imagination was spinning into high gear. She fully expected the thin plastic to be ripped aside as a grinning skull face leered at her, laughing with deep, hollow sound —

Like the shower drain, gurgling as it drinks my blood!

“Jule-yah! ...”

The voice whispered like tearing paper in her mind.

“See what he did to me? ...”

“No,” she said, her voice a feeble whisper. “I’m not going to lose my baby!”

Gently probing her lower belly with her fingertips, she pressed against her pubic bone, trying to feel if it was true, that the embryo that was — What? Only five days old? — was tearing away its anchor from her uterus wall. She drew her finger under her vagina and then stared numbly at the thick clots of blood on her hand, so red they were almost purple.

It’s normal to show a little spotting, she told herself as she rinsed away the blood under the full stream of the shower.

All it is is a little bloody show from the period I was supposed to have but won’t now that I’m pregnant.

A last little kick from my fertilized body.

“I can’t lose it,” she said louder but still barely hearing herself above the rushing sound of the shower.

“I can’t!”

She remembered thinking a while ago about how the universe was full of wandering, drifting souls who are waiting to be born. Perhaps they were the souls of people who had already died — like Frank — and if the concept of reincarnation was true, these souls were waiting to be reborn. She closed her eyes, praying silently that the little soul inside her would hang tough and hold on to the promise of life nine months from now.

When she opened her eyes again, she wanted to believe it looked worse than it was. Already, the water slipping down the drain was almost completely clear. No deep-throated laughter vibrated in the drain. Her legs had only a few thin traces of blood — not much at all, she told herself.

A little blood can look like a lot because it’s scary.

“This is all perfectly normal,” she said, still unable to keep her hands from pushing below her belly. “This has to be normal!”

She laughed to herself when she wondered how “normal” it was to have morning sickness the morning after getting pregnant.

Isn’t that supposed to come only after you miss your first period?

Maybe real morning sickness and the rest of it was all ahead of her.

“If it’s one last period you want, here you go,” she said.

“What?” a voice spoke out suddenly.

Julia let out a startled shriek.

“What the hell are you doing?” she shouted once she recognized John’s voice.

Gripping the shower curtain in one hand, she pulled it aside, almost ripping it off the curtain rings. It was only with a slight measure of relief that she saw her husband standing in his undershorts by the bathroom sink, his face slathered with shaving cream.

“What’s it look like I’m doing?” he said, holding up his hands innocently.

Julia’s eyes fastened on the tiny razor nick on his chin. A trickle of blood not much thicker than a piece of hair snaked down the curve of his jaw.

See! she told herself. A little blood looks like more than it is …

“You startled me, is all,” she said, fighting to control her trembling voice, “I didn’t hear you come in.”

Shaking his head, John turned back to his reflection in the mirror and ran the razor blade down his cheek.

‘‘I’ll be done showering in a sec, and you can have it,” Julia said as she ducked back under the stream of water. Taking the wet washcloth, she rubbed between her legs to make sure there were no more traces of blood.

False alarm … I hope, she thought even though her stomach tingled with tension.

III

The party was loud … too loud, Julia thought as they walked into the plush home of William Atkins, the owner of the company. Mrs. Atkins, a fragile but still attractive woman in her mid-fifties, greeted them at the door and took their coats. Although it was still early — only a little before nine o’clock — it looked as though everyone from the office was already here, and things were getting into high gear. From the richly-furnished living room came the babbly of several simultaneous conversations. Julia couldn’t make out a single word. Classical music — Vivaldi, she guess — was playing low on the stereo.

“There’s plenty to eat and drink on the dining room table,” Mrs. Atkins said after John introduced himself and Julia. “Please — enjoy yourself.”

John nodded and, holding Julia by the crook of her elbow, steered her through the crowd to the spread of food on a table in the elegant dining room. Along the way, he paused and introduced her to a few people … all of them, she assumed, were from work, but the only person whose name she remembered was Barry Cummings. He was grinning widely, and his eyes were red-rimmed as though he had started celebrating the New Year a bit earlier in the afternoon.

“Now we know where our holiday bonuses went,” Barry said, smiling as he nodded toward the table. He was unsteady on his feet and spilled some of the drink he was holding onto his shirtfront.

John smiled, nodded, and moved away as fast as he could without being rude.

“I’m not going to last long,” Julia said as they moved along the length of the table, loading up their plates with sliced roast beef, Swedish meatballs, lasagna, fresh-baked Italian bread, salad, and an assortment of condiments. As good as the food looked, the pit of Julia’s stomach was in turmoil. She knew she wasn’t going to be able to eat much. After what had happened in the shower, she had put on a Maxi-Pad and was already anxious to excuse herself and go to the bathroom to check it.

Please, God, when I do, let there be no more blood! she silently prayed.

“Be right back,” she said, putting her plate down and edging away from John. “I have to find the powder room.”

“Can I grab you a glass of wine while you’re gone?” John asked as Julia pushed past him. He was standing beside the table where the drinks were being served.

Julia paused and shook her head.

“I think I’ll stick with ginger ale tonight,” she said.

The muscles in the backs of her knees felt as though they were unstrung, and all she wanted to do was get to the bathroom.

John regarded her with wide-eyed surprise.

“Ginger ale? You usually don’t drink —”

‘‘I’m the designated driver tonight,” Julia said. “This is your crew. Have fun.”

“You want that ginger ale straight up or on the rocks?” John said with a snorting laugh. Then he turned and ordered their drinks from the tuxedoed bartender. He asked for a double whiskey and took a gulp of it before taking Julia’s ginger ale.

She weaved through the throng to the bathroom. After locking the door, she hiked up her dress, pulled her panties down, and saw — with a flood of relief — that the pad was only tinged pink.

“Thank God!” she muttered.

She pulled her panties up, smoothed out her dress, and flushed the toilet for good measure before leaving to rejoin John. As they mingled with his coworkers, their spouses or dates, several people offered — along with the New Year’s wishes — their condolences to John concerning his father’s death. He accepted them gracefully, but Julia could tell — both by the way he nodded and by how fast he put away his first three drinks — that he was nervous about something. Like her, he left the food on his plate mostly untasted, but his reason was that he was so busy getting hammered.

Conversation, as usual at parties like this, was superficial and tended to revolve around work, no matter how much people protested that they wanted to leave the office behind. Small knots of people discussed this or that project, the relative merits of this or that building material, and whether or not they had seen the peak of Portland’s development boom. Only in the living room, on the couch by the picture window with a wide vista of the Portland skyline across the bay, were there people — obviously the younger co-workers trying to impress their dates — talking about other things, either politics or astrology.

About an hour into the party, after John had finished his fourth drink and was seeming decidedly unsteady, Julia nudged him and whispered in his ear, “Can we head home now?” She tried to keep any trace of desperation out of her voice, but the longer she was on her feet, the worse she felt. The queasiness in her stomach was still there in spite of two glasses of ginger ale.

John looked at her, bleary-eyed, and then shrugged.

“Whassa’ matter?” he said, his voice slurred. “Aren’t you having a good time?”

Julia stopped herself from saying how much she loved talking about how the concrete footings for practically every condominium along the shore will be underwater by mid-century. Instead, she gave a helpless shrug, as if to say, Please get me the hell out of here!

“We can’t split before midnight,” John said.

Someone knocked into him from behind, and he turned, glaring, until he saw who it was — Lorraine, from accounting — and then he smiled at her.

“Maybe we could finagle a seat in the living room,” Julia said. “My dogs are barkin’.” She didn’t care how the evening went, now that she was sure the blood flow had stopped.

“I’ll get refills,” John said, taking her glass from her even though she hadn’t offered it. “See if you can find someplace to sit.”

Unable to get a seat on the couch, Julia leaned against the wall by the sliding glass door that led out onto a balcony. Whenever the conversation stopped holding her interest, she would turn and look out at the brightly lit city. A myriad of building lights and blinking holiday lights reflected in the glass. Everything outside was crisp and clear compared to the smoky blue haze inside the Atkins’s apartment. Twisting the lock, Julia slid the door open a crack and took a deep breath of frigid air. She tried to ignore the dull ache deep in her belly, but she was still terrified of losing the baby.

“Ahh, there he is,” one of the men on the couch said. “You can ask him yourself.”

Turning around, Julia saw John making his way over to her, carefully sidestepping the intervening people until he got to her. He handed her both glasses before sliding down onto the floor next to her. His drink was already half gone, she noticed. Julia sat down on the floor next to him.

“Ask me what?” John said, looking up at the two young couples on the couch. He recognized the man who had spoken from around the office, but he couldn’t quite place his name. He worked downstairs in the blueprint department.

“I heard the state police have been investigating the Surfside project site,” the other man on the couch said, looking down at the floor for a moment.

“Really?” John said. “News to me. What for?”

His first thought was that the man who had been punched by a truck driver while protesting at the construction site was suing the condo corporation.

“You know,” the young man said. “Because of them bones they found —”

“Hah!”

The sudden burst of laughter made them all look at Barry Cummings, who had turned his attention to their conversation.

“‘Dem bones … ‘dem bones gonna rise!” he said, adopting a faux-Southern accent and raising his hands menacingly. His face wrinkled with mirth as he looked from one person to the next, finally looking at John.

“Last I knew,” John said, “they decided they were cow bones.”

Apparently only Julia noticed the tightness in his voice, but she hadn’t missed how, as soon as the man had mentioned the bones, John’s face paled, and he put his drink down on the floor and clasped his hands between his knees. He shivered and, turning around, pushed the sliding glass down shut.

“You shoulda seen it,” Barry said, wobbling drunkenly on his feet. “I was there when it happened, ‘n’ nobody knew what the hell was goin’ on. Those friggin’ staties were as lost as everyone else … everybody thinkin’ they was human bones. Huh!” He snorted. “As if that’s the first time someone with a backhoe’s uncovered bones, fer Christ’s sake!”

Turning to John, Barry smiled.

“Christ! John, you was there, ‘n’ you was as freaked out as th’ rest of ‘em.”

Noticeably pale, John held up his hands helplessly.

“I was … surprised. That’s all.” He glanced at Julia, wondering how much of this he had told her.

“Surprised?” Barry said, looming over him. “You looked ‘bout ready to shit yourself. Hell, in all the years I’ve been doin’ work like this, whenever we turned up bones, we just kept right on diggin’.”

“You wouldn’t report it?” one of the women on the couch asked.”I thought you had to — legally.”

Barry nodded and turned the motion into an effort to stay standing.

“Sure as hell. When you’re workin’, the last thing you need is to waste time dickin’ around with shit like that. ‘Sides, nine times out of ten — hell, ninety-nine times out of a hunnert, they’re nothing but animal bones — deer or cows or dogs or whatever.”

“But what about that one time in a hundred when they are human bone?” the woman asked. “What if you find, say, remains of an Indian campsite or a colonial graveyard — something of archaeological importance? Wouldn’t you have to contact someone to check it out?”

“And slow down the project?” Barry said. “Fuck, no!”

“That seems an awful waste,” the woman said, glancing at her date for moral support. “But then, what if the bones belonged to a person who’s been missing? I mean, you must have to contact the police for that.”

Barry shrugged as he stared pensively at the small amount of booze in the bottom of his glass. He drained it off before answering.

“‘N’ ‘zactly how are we supposed to tell? I don’t know what other people do, but my experience has been you keep right on workin’. We’re there to get a goddamned job done, not screw around with … with shit like that ... ‘less, I ‘spoze, it’s a briefcase full of money or somethin’. Then I might take an interest.” He snorted with laughter, and snot sprayed from his nose, which people pretended not to see. “Hell, I’m runnin’ dry.”

As he turned to get a refill, John tried to catch his attention to ask if he’d refill him, too, but Barry didn’t hear him and was soon swallowed by the noisy crowd. Glancing at Julia, John held up his glass and asked, “Ready for another?”

Biting her lower lip, Julia shook her head. “No. But I’m guessing you are.”

“You told me to have fun,” he said. He started to stand up, but the effort proved too much, so he sagged back down onto the floor and considered. With a huff, he shook his head. “Just one more.”

“Make it a weak one, okay?”

“Sure,” he said as one of his co-workers helped him stand. He weaved from side to side as he pushed toward the bar. He was in a somewhat better mood … as long as he didn’t let himself think about the discussion they had just finished. He was angry at Barry for bringing it up in the first place, but no one seemed to pay him much heed because he was so drunk. The last thing John wanted to think about or talk about was those damned bones.

Contrary to Julia’s request, he ordered another double. As he was turning to head back to Julia, he spun around a little too fast and bumped into a woman standing behind him. His hand was knocked back, and he spilled his drink all over his chest.

“How clumsy of me. I’m so sorry,” the woman said. As with nearly everyone else at the party, John didn’t recognize her.

“My fault entirely,” he stammered as he grabbed a handful of napkins from the table and wiped his jacket front. The whiskey soaked through his shirt, chilling him. “Maybe I’ll get lucky and absorb it through my skin.”

The woman laughed at his lame joke, and he continued blotting his chest and hands, sheepishly glancing at her from time to time.

“I gotta watch where I’m going,” he said once the pile of napkins was a soggy mess in his hands.

“Let me get you another drink,” the woman said. “What are you drinking?”

“Whiskey — a double,” John said, looking around for someplace to toss the wet napkins. He didn’t see a wastebasket nearby and was about to hand them to the bartender when he noticed a thin, black streak on the back of his hand. Confused for a moment, he looked at both hands, trying to see what might have made the mark. He froze, and his heart gave a cold thump in his chest when he unfolded the ball of napkins.

“What the —” he muttered.

He opened the whiskey-soaked napkins carefully so the paper wouldn’t dissolve in his hands. His heart thumped once — hard when he saw something written on the bottom napkin. Two words were printed in bold, dark pencil marks.

MEET ME…

John had the sensation of hands closing tightly around his throat as he stared in amazement at those two words. He recognized the printing. It was the same hand that had printed all those other notes he’d found.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, hearing his voice distantly.

“Excuse me?” the woman said, glancing at him. Her heavily made up face wrinkled with her smile, but in his panic, John saw her cheerful expression as a grimace … a taunting, evil grimace!

“No — I, uhh ... nothing. Thank you,” John said, shaking his head as he took the drink she offered him. His hand was trembling, and he was positive he would spill this one, too.

“I hope you can get your jacket clean,” the woman said.

“Don’t worry about it,” John said. His mind was a roaring blank. “It’s nothing,.”

He couldn’t shake the impression that, as pleasant as this woman was trying to be, she had known about the message written on the napkin …

MEET ME … !

Did she give it to me on purpose? John wondered, giving her a sidelong glance. Did she set me up for this?

What if she was enjoying his panic?

Beneath the sparkling friendliness in her eyes and her smile, was there a wicked gleam of pleasure at his expense?

Any second now, he expected her to throw her head back and laugh, long and loud at him.

Positive either a whimper or a scream would come out if he tried to say anything, John nodded before making his way back to Julia. The whole time, he could feel the woman watching his back as if she was secretly enjoying the panic that note had stirred up inside him.

“I saw that,” Julia said, smirking as John sat down beside her. “Can’t say that was one of your better moves, can we?”

“What? She bumped into me.”

“I hope you didn’t spill anything on her dress. It looks expensive.”

“Give me a break,” John said as he sipped his drink. It burned the back of his throat, but for the first time tonight, it didn’t help calm him. If anything, it made him more uneasy. He was tensed and ready as though expecting to fight. In his right hand, on the side away from Julia, he still clenched the ball of whiskey-soaked napkins. To his fevered imagination, he could feel those two words — MEET ME! — searing the palm of his hand as if they had been written in fire instead of pencil.

“I’ll finish this, and we can go,” he said, raising his glass in her direction.

Julia nodded.

“Happy New Year!”

“Same to you.”

IV

In spite of what she had told her parents — that she didn’t mind being alone while they went to the party — Bri was nervous all evening. As soon as her folks pulled out of the driveway, and several times during the evening, she went to both doors and double-checked to make sure the locks were secure. Even then, she didn’t like being in the house alone for the first time since her grandfather had died.

Drawing all the shades in the living room, she settled on the couch and watched TV for most of the evening, but nothing caught her interest. She called Kristin, even though she knew she was in Massachusetts, visiting her grandmother, and ended up sitting on the couch, fighting the tension gathering inside her.

Her discomfort had a lot to do with her grandfather’s death. Even though she kept reminding herself Frank hadn’t been her real grandfather, in the short time she had known him, she had developed a deep attachment to him. She missed his dry sense of humor, which only she — and sometimes her mother — caught. She missed their evening checkers games, too. And he seemed, in turn, to have opened up to her — certainly as much, if not more, than he had with her mother.

She couldn’t deny how creepy it was in the house, knowing someone had died there recently. Her overactive imagination magnified every rumble of the furnace, every clank of water pipes, and every creak of the floor. It wouldn’t be difficult to convince herself that the house was haunted when her mind distorted one sound into another. What she noticed most was missing the sounds she expected to hear. Now she understood how someone who had lost a husband or wife or child could still to hear the familiar sounds of that person’s activities. Looking into a dimly lit room or down a dark corridor, it would be easy to think you saw the person standing or sitting there.

As much as she tried not to think like this, Bri kept thinking how every little thing reminded her of her grandfather. After all, this had been his house for so long. It was only natural that — somehow — it had stored up pieces of his presence. Too many times to count, she would find herself sitting bolt upright on the couch and looking around, trying to determine the source of the creaking or clanking or scraping sounds she heard. She stared down the hallway long and hard, her heart pulsing in her throat as she strained to see Granddad, rolling his wheelchair toward the living room to watch TV with her.

Throughout the evening, Bri’s imagination kept getting tweaked by the lonesome quiet of the house. Besides remembering her grandfather, she thought about Audrey and some of the other strange things that had happened since they had moved into this house. Before long, she was so scared she cringed into the easy chair in the corner where her back was to the wall and pulled the afghan up under her chin.

She tried not to think about the time she and her parents had climbed Bald Hill and she had seen Audrey in the woods, signaling for her to follow her under the shadows of the trees … and the thing she had tripped over …

She tried not to think about the time after the snowstorm, when she had gone for a walk on Indian Point and seen Audrey’s footsteps in the snow … footsteps that circled around with no apparent beginning or end …

She tried not to think about how, during the first few nights in the house, she had heard organ music —”church wood” — resonating in the wooden frame of the house … or the time she had gone to the window and looked out to see Audrey standing in the street, looking up at her, her face ghostly pale in the moonlight.

She tried not to think about any of these things … but it did no good.

They arose in her mind unbidden, and she convinced herself that — somehow — they were all related.

Audrey … the church wood … the thing in the woods … her grandfather dying had to be connected. She knew they were … She just couldn’t see how.

Faces and New Year’s Eve party scenes in Times Square flashed by silently on the TV. Bri’s loneliness built up until, before she knew it, she was quietly sobbing and shivering. She cried because she missed her grandfather … because she missed her life back in Vermont … all of her friends there. She cried because she knew, until her parents came home, she didn’t dare move from where she was sitting with her knees tucked up against her chest, her chin wrapped in the afghan..

And that’s how she stayed until half an hour before midnight.

When their car pulled up into the driveway, she dashed over to the couch and flopped face down with the afghan over her shoulders. She listened as her parents came into the kitchen. Her stepfather had obviously had too much to drink and joked about how she had fallen before the ball in Time square dropped. Her mother led John upstairs to bed and then came down to rouse her.

“You gonna go up to bed or sleep here?” she asked.

“I’m going up,” she mumbled, sitting up and feigning that she was more tired than she actually was.

All she could think was how happy she was, now that her parents were safely home. After wishing her mom a Happy New Year, she trudged up the stairs to bed, trying to get those foolish thoughts she’d been having out of her head.

TWENTY-TWO

Storm Watch

I

“You mean I can go?” Bri said, incredulous. “Really?”

She had the phone pressed to her ear, braced by her shoulder, and was looking at her mother, who was sitting at the kitchen table. Into the phone, she said, “She said I can come! ... I dunno. I’ll see if my father —”

Julia signaled her to silence with a wagging finger.

“Wait a sec,” Bri said, frowning as she looked at her mother with raised eyebrows.

Julia leaned across the table, her eyes shifting toward the doorway. From the living room came the flickering light of the TV and the low, indistinct buzz of voices.

“I’ll drive you,” Julia whispered. “I don’t want to disturb your father.”

“Kristin? My mom says she’ll give me a ride over.” Bri’s voice rose with excitement. “Okay — great! Give me ten minutes to pack, and we’ll be there … Okay? … Yup … ‘Bye.”

Bri let out an excited whoop as she hung up the phone. Spinning on her heel, she almost ran out of the kitchen but then checked herself. Turning back to her mother, she smiled and said, “Thanks a million, Mom!”

Julia waved both hands at her and muttered, “No problem.”

With that, Bri dashed upstairs, taking the steps two at a time.

As she listened to her daughter’s footsteps on the stairway, Julia cringed and looked back at the living room. The last thing she wanted was for Bri — or anyone — to bother John. He was hung over from the New Year’s Eve party and had been quiet and sullen even after having a shower.

After a light breakfast, he had complained of still having a headache and, mumbling something about having some of the “hair of the dog that bit me,” sat down in front of the TV with a glass of whiskey in hand. That had been at eleven o’clock in the morning, and he kept it up into the afternoon.

That worried Julia more than anything else right now. She was relieved that Kristin Alexander had invited Bri for an overnight stay at her house. Her maternal instinct warned her that it might be best if Bri wasn’t around the house … at least until John got out from whatever fog he was in.

Bri’s not the problem, Julia thought, staring morosely at the living room doorway.

John’s is ... a serious problem …

The night before, while they had been getting ready to go to the party, he had seemed edgy —

No, admit it … to yourself, at least … He’s been acting downright wired!

She’d had high hopes that he would unwind at the party. He had good reason to be feeling down, especially about his father’s death. She and Bri weren’t over it, either, nor would they be for a long time. But John was internalizing this way too much. He was stewing on it and not talking to her about it to get it out. Sure, he and his father had a lot of unresolved conflicts, and now they would never get them worked out ... and — sure, John regretted things he had said and done — and not said or done — but the one thing he shouldn’t do is bottle it all up. Something was smoldering deep inside him, and like a white-hot coal, it was ready to burst into a blinding flash of heat and flame. She thought he was taking things entirely too far if he thought he could spend the whole weekend sitting in front of the TV and drinking.

From upstairs, she could hear Bri as she dashed around her room, collecting her things for the overnight. The distant, thumping sound reminded Julia of the time last fall, after they had first moved in, when she’d heard rats scampering around inside the walls.

God! she thought. That feels like years ago.

She shivered at the memory.

Of course that thought stirred other memories … of the day she and Frank had met Frenchie down by the harbor … of how happy she was, watching Frank and Bri play checkers … of the pure joy on Frank’s face when they attended church with him on Christmas Eve.

Before long, Julia’s eyes were brimming with tears.

And now look at us, she thought, not caring as the tears carved slick tracks down her cheeks.

Frank is dead … Bri, although she had made one new friend, is still lonely and homesick for Vermont … and John is depressed and quietly fuming with repressed anger, and he’s drinking too much and talking about selling his father’s house …

“And what about you?” she whispered, cradling her head in her hands. Her breath was sour as it rebounded into her face from her cupped palms. “What the Christ are you going to do about it?”

Emotions twisted and coiled inside of her … especially when she thought about the baby growing inside her.

Who do I have growing inside me? she wondered, gently rubbing her lower stomach with both hands.

For the second time in my life … I’ve got new life growing inside me … and what am I going to do? …

She found it terribly sad that she was so scared she didn’t dare tell her husband that she was carrying his baby.

But no matter how much she thought about it, she had no idea what she was going to do.

Maybe John was right, and they should sell the family home. Back in Vermont, they had jobs and friends and schools and doctors and … everything. They could pick up right where they left off, as if this time on Glooscap Island had been nothing but a short, sad interlude. But now that Frank was dead, she realized she hadn’t planned anything beyond that. Foolishly, she had assumed that Frank would need their help for a long time, and they would be there to give it.

So … now what?

No matter what they did, she had the gnawing fear that their lives would never be the same again. Even if they packed up this weekend and moved back to Shelburne Falls, they had lost some things and misused and misplaced others … like affections and emotions. Even more importantly, they were going to have a new baby in their lives. They could never go back to the ay things were after that.

So far, John didn’t know he was going to be a father for the first time in his life. As much as she despised her own reaction, Julia cringed whenever she thought about telling him she was pregnant. The way he had been acting lately — God! If he’s drunk already at noontime! — she dreaded to find out how he would react —

With anger? … Hostility? … No doubt!

Certainly not with joy!

It cut her to the quick when she realized a negative reaction was all she expected from John.

When she closed her eyes, she could imagine she was alone, far out to sea, being tossed back and forth by towering waves. The memory of her seasickness the day they had gone lobstering with Randy came back.

That was exactly how she felt now.

“It’s the pregnancy,” she whispered softly. “That’s what’s screwing me up! I’ve got to get a doctor’s appointment and get a grip on this.”

Even as the words came out of her mouth, washing over her hands cuped over her face, she knew that wasn’t it at all.

She jumped with a start when Bri came clomping down the stairs. Breathless with excitement, she entered the kitchen, her suitcase dragging from one arm and her rolled-up sleeping bag clutched under the other.

“I’m ready,” she chirped, but then she noticed her mother’s expression and pulled up short.

“Mom? … Are you all right?” Her face wrinkled with concern.

Julia forced a smile and nodded.

“I’m fine,” she said, her voice low and gravelly. “I was just missing Granddad, and ... well, it’s that time of the month for me, so I guess I’m a little on edge emotionally.”

The lie tasted like acid in the back of her throat, and she thought bitterly, Boy, are you getting good at this lying … It’s downright habitual …

Bri’s mouth was set in a firm, straight line as she nodded her understanding.

“Yeah,” she said, “I know exactly what you mean. I’m still not used to Grandad not being here.”

“Come on,” Julia said. “Let’s not keep Kristin waiting.”

She picked up the car keys and headed to the front hall closet for her coat. On her way, she paused and looked into the living room. She almost said something to John about where she was going, but even from the side, the scowl that darkened his face forced the words back down her throat. Without another word she walked out to the car with Bri a few steps ahead of her.

II

On the drive over to Kristin’s, Julia wished she could tell Bri that there was more to her emotional state than missing Frank or having her period. She was dying to tell her that she was pregnant, and Bri would have a new baby brother or sister in nine months, but she held back because of her personal vow that John would be the first to know … when — and if — the time was ever right.

When she got back to the house, John met her at the door.

“Where the hell have you been?” he shouted, his face flushed with anger.

When Julia told him, he snorted, refilled his glass from the bottle on the counter, and without another word, walked unsteadily back to his place on the couch, muttering something unintelligible under his breath.

And that’s how they spent Saturday night and most of Sunday — John putting the whiskey away until he ran out, then starting on beer; and Julia sitting by herself, usually in the kitchen or silently in a corner of the living room, wishing she could get through to John but knowing she couldn’t … not until this black mood passed … if ever …

Bri called on Sunday afternoon and asked if she could spend another night at Kristin’s. She could go to school from there. Julia readily agreed.

“Make sure you come home right after school, though. ‘Kay?” she said.

All she could think was she didn’t want Bri to see John in his current condition. He would have to stop drinking tonight so he would be able to go to work in the morning. If he didn’t pull himself together soon …

Well, she wouldn’t think along those lines … not until she absolutely had to.

Just like on Saturday night, on Sunday night Julia went to bed at her usual time. When she tried to coax John out of his sullen rage, he flared at her and told her to mind her own damned business and leave him alone. Both nights he fell asleep — passed out — on the couch and woke up — came to — sometime early in the morning and crawled upstairs to bed. Both nights Julia, who had finally drifted off to sleep, woke up as he was climbing under the covers, fully clothed. She feigned sleep and lay there in the dark, staring at the gradually lightening ceiling.

Over the weekend, Julia cried silently to herself more than she had since … probably since her parents died. One thing she and John had always prided themselves on was their communication — both physically and emotionally. They had always been able to talk things through and express themselves with each other.

But not anymore, Julia thought as tears burned her eyes.

Not anymore!

It’s over, you know, a thin voice whispered to her in the dark. If he keeps this up much longer — any longer, you’d better buck up and face it … It’s all over!

III

“I feel like such an asshole,” John said.

He sat at the breakfast table, listlessly stirring his scrambled eggs with his fork and trying to look Julia in the eye. She sat across from him but also kept looking away. Through the kitchen window, the early morning light was thin and gray. Specks of snow were spitting out of the sky.

“You were an asshole,” Julia said, her brow tightening as she finally looked at him. “And if you want the goddamned truth, you had me scared out of my mind all weekend.”

“I — I don’t know …” he said, but then he shook his head and winced from the sudden jolt of pain that shot sparkling light across his vision.

“You deserve every bit of that hangover,” Julia said. Even though her voice was mild, John knew she meant it.

Trying not to make any sudden moves, John nodded his agreement.

“I know ... I know … It’s just that I — I don’t know … once I started drinking at that damned party, I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. Look, I jumped down into the well … maybe … I guess I was thinking if I wallowed in it long enough, I’d work come out the other end.”

“And? … Did you?”

“I don’t know … I think so.”

“You better.”

John’s smirk looked pained, and he narrowed his eyes.

Should I tell him about the baby now? Julia wondered, feeling a sudden buoyant rush in her lower abdomen.

Maybe while he’s feeling repentant … this is the best time to hit him with it.

She cleared her throat but couldn’t do it.

“You want to talk about it?” she asked, pushing aside — for now — any thoughts of telling him. “What was getting to you so bad?”

John shrugged and again squinted with pain. His hand holding the fork dropped to the table. His gaze drifted past Julia to the living room doorway. It struck him as strange how overpowering the idea was that, any second now, his father would come rolling into the kitchen in his wheelchair.

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice hushed. “I mean … everything seems to have piled up all at once ... my father dying, stuff at work — and … just everything.” He almost mentioned his suspicion that she and Randy were having an affair, but he let it drop. The idea seemed ludicrous in the daylight.

“You feel good enough to go to work?” Julia got up from her chair and, leaning over the sink, looked outside. Since she had last gotten up to check, the gray clouds had thickened and lowered. “The TV news says we might get a pretty hefty storm this afternoon and on into tonight.”

“I’ve got to get to work,” John said even though he knew Barry wouldn’t mind if he took off a few days — hell, he had practically insisted he take some time off.

“Pay attention to the forecast, and if it starts getting bad, come home early. No way do I want a repeat of what happened the last time.”

Neither do I, John thought with a sudden cold rush of panic. He managed to keep his voice even when he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be careful.”

He got up from the table and came over to her. Wrapping his arms around her waist, he pulled her tightly against him and gave her a long, lingering kiss. When they separated, he smiled at her and asked, “Forgive me? … Please?”

Although he was looking right at her and smiling, it was as if there was a thin curtain behind his eyes, veiling his true feelings. His face was as thin and insubstantial as a plastic Halloween mask. And as warm and strong as his embrace was, something about it made her feel cold inside … cold and trapped and desperate …

“Well?” he said. “Am I?”

Not really feeling it, and thinking that she wasn’t going to let her guard down that easily —

Not yet, anyway

— she nodded and said, “I guess so … But if you ever —” She grabbed him by the arms and squeezed as hard as she could. “If you ever do something like that again …”

“I know … I know. God, don’t shake me like that! My head is killing me.”

When he looked up at the clock, his eyes widened.

“Holy shit! I’ve gotta get a move on.”

He started toward the closet for his coat, then stopped short.

“Hey. I just noticed … Where’s Bri? She already leave for school?”

“She spent the night at Kristin’s and went to school from there.”

“Oh, yeah ... right,” John said, but his face betrayed that he had no memory of it. He headed for the closet again, saying, “I’ve really got to get going.”

“Just remember what I said.” Julia shook a warning finger at him as he shrugged into his heavy coat and went to the front door. “If this storm picks up, you get your ass home, pronto!”

“Don’t worry. I will!”

IV

After a minimum of socializing at the coffee urn, where most of the conversation revolved around what everyone had done over the holiday and how drunk some people — especially Barry — got at the party, John managed — with some effort — to throw himself into work, Barry interrupted him briefly to apologize for acting like such an idiot and embarrassing him, but John dismissed him with a wave of the hand, joking that it was exactly what he had expected. John started to feel better simply because he concentrated on a sewer design. It was some kind of refuge from the steady hammering pain in the back of his head that was gradually diminishing.

By the time lunch rolled around, John noticed that his headache was little more than a dull roar. He was beginning to hope that — as he had told Julia this morning — the worst was over. He was clearing his desk, preparing to leave for lunch, when his intercom buzzed.

“Yeah?” he said, holding down the TALK button.

“There’s a Mr. Chadwick to see you,” Ellen, his secretary, said. “I don’t see his name on the appointment book.” Generally Ellen’s voice sounded only slightly tinny over the intercom, but when she said the name Chadwick, her tone suddenly took on the sharp whine of a dentist’s drill.

John stared long and hard at his finger depressing the button. The fingernail had gone white. He could easily tell Ellen to tell “Mr. Chadwick” that he was busy or that he had left early because of the storm, but then he thought, What the hell? … If we’re really going to clear the air, I might as well start.

“Uh, tell him I’ll be right out,” John said.

A few minutes later, John walked into the outer office and, smiling, greeted Randy with a hearty handshake.

“So, what brings you into town on a day like this?”

Randy scratched his head, looking decidedly uncomfortable.

“I had to pick up some engine parts for my boat at Harris’ ‘n I thought I’d swing by ‘n’ see if you were free for lunch. Should I have called first?”

John considered and then shook his head, forcing himself not to wince when the echoing pain snapped like a string of firecrackers behind his eyes.

“Oh — no, not at all.” He glanced at his wristwatch, “Let’s zip over to Carbur’s? That’s not far.”

“Sounds good to me,” Randy said. “You’ll wanna grab your coat. The snow’s starting to pick up.”

They left the building and walked side-by-side up Fore Street and over to Middle Street. Thick flakes of snow were blowing at an angle, straight into their faces. Already the sidewalks were slick with a few inches of freshly fallen snow. It was marred by a few recent footprints. The wind whistled down the street, and from somewhere there came a low, vibrating hum.

John and Randy barely spoke as they crossed the street and entered the restaurant. The whole time John was thinking, This is it! … I’m gonna confront him and find out once and for all what the hell’s going on with him and Julia … but he smiled and chatted pleasantly to the waitress as he and Randy sat at a window table and ordered their drinks. As much as he wanted — needed — something strong, John satisfied himself ginger ale. The last thing he wanted to do was cloud his mind.

“So,” Randy said, leaning back and sipping from the beer he had ordered, “how’ve you folks been doing? Is everyone — you know — okay?”

“Sure,” John said. “As well as can be expected, considering what’s happened.”

Randy nodded.

“I know it can be tough.”

John noticed that Randy kept shifting his eyes to the side, never maintaining eye contact for more than a few seconds. The dark weather outside made the soft orange glow inside the restaurant feel warm and comforting, but icy tension filled John’s stomach as he watched his high school friend and waited for an opening to pounce.

“Actually,” John said, “we’re been thinking about moving.”

“Off the island?” Randy’s face registered genuine surprise.

Is that a trace of disappointment on his face? John wondered.

“Back to Vermont,” John said.

“Christ!”

“We only came to help my dad, and now that he’s gone … why stick around?”

Randy stroked the side of his face, his beard stubble making a harsh sandpaper sound.

“I thought you guys liked it here,” he said. “‘Specially Julia.”

Hit him with it now? John thought, his stomach tightening. Ask him straight out if he’s been fucking her?

But even as the words were forming in his head, the waitress arrived with their sandwiches. Both John and Randy sat in awkward silence as she placed the dishes in front of them, asked if they wanted refills, and left.

No … Not yet … Better to hit him with those notes about Abby first …

John waved his hand casually above his head, then took a sip of ginger ale.

“Nothing but a bunch of rotten memories in that house for all of us, now. I said it right after high school and I’ll say it again now — I can’t wait to get the fuck off that island!”

Randy leaned an elbow on the table and cupped his chin in his hand. Now — for the first time — he looked long and hard at John as though trying to fathom him. After a moment, he took a bite of sandwich and chewed thoughtfully before speaking.

“I guess I don’t understand you,” he said, shaking his head.

“What do you mean?”

“‘Xactly what I said,” Randy replied. “Back in high school, I knew you — at least I thought I did. Hell, maybe I didn’t know you even back then, and I’m so fucking dense I’m only now beginning to realize it.”

John chuckled softly.

“You knew me, all right,” he said, leaning forward and folding his hands on the table in front of him. “You knew me … but you know, there’s something I’ve been wondering.”

“What’s that?”

In the silence that followed, the two friends locked eyes. A thin sheen of sweat broke out on John’s brow. His impulse was to let it drop. He told himself he should pick up his sandwich, enjoy it — even though his stomach felt about the size of a walnut — and bullshit the time away with Randy. They were leaving the island — if not soon, certainly by spring. So let it all drop! The pressure in his chest, the cold sweat on his brow — they were the leftovers from his weekend-long drinking.

Lowering his voice, John leaned across the table and said, “Ever since I came back, I’ve been wondering about what you really know.”

“What d’you mean?” Randy asked, shrugging and looking genuinely confused. He took another bite of sandwich and chased it down with a swallow of beer.

“Come on, mn! You can cut the I — don’t — know — anything shit, all right?” John said.

Randy sill looked confused.

“It may work with some people, but you can’t bullshit me.”

Frowning, Randy nodded and said,

“Yeah ... sure. Okay.”

“You can’t bullshit me and tell me that you never knew what happened.”

“I’m not trying to bulshit you.”

“Even about what happened to Abby?”

John leaned farther across the table, scowling deeply.

“Is that what this is all about?” Randy’s voice slid a few notes up the scale.

“You know damned right well it is! I’ll bet you know exactly what happened, and I’d place a pretty hefty bet you’re the one who’s been trying to freak me out.”

“Freak you out? How?”

“By leaving those notes around.”

“Notes? What notes? I haven’t got the faintest fucking clue what you’re talking about.” Randy’s anger was beginning to rise. “Look, I was in town and thought it’d be a friendly gesture to drop by and see if you wanted to have lunch. And yeah — I’ll admit it. I feel a little bit ‘funny’ about you. It’s not my idea of a great Christmas Eve, answering an ambulance call to my best friend’s — my former best friend’s house because his father is dead!”

“Sounds good,” John said, his voice taking on a cool edge as he leaned back in his chair and hooked his thumbs through his belt loops. “Real convincing.”

“You can think whatever the fuck you want. It’s not my problem.” Randy thumped himself on the chest and then glanced around to see if they were getting loud and bothering anyone.

“If you really want to know what I think,” John said, “I think you’ve known all along why Abby disappeared … that she killed herself —”

“She what?”

“You heard me.”

“I don’t know what the hell are you talking about?”

Genuine shock — at least it looked genuine — registered on his face.

“I think you do,” John said. “I think you knew back when it happened that I knocked her up. Oh, yeah — I did. You look real surprised!”

He jabbed an accusing finger at Randy.

“You knew I knocked her up. I’ll bet she told you exactly what I said — that there was no way I was going to fuck up my life by marrying her. I’ll bet she confided in you because you were my best friend, and she thought you’d say or do something to make me change my mind.”

“Jesus Christ, John! You got to believe me. I didn’t —”

John cut him off by pounding his fist onto the table, making the silverware jump. A few people at nearby tables glanced over at them, and Randy shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

Lowering his voice to a hiss, John said, “Come on! She told you fucking everything, didn’t she? And I’ll bet she even told you she planned to kill herself if I didn’t marry her!”

“Come on, John — for Christ’s sake! Calm down.” Randy said. He reached across the table to put a restraining hand on John, but John tore away and glared at him.

“Cut the bullshit, all right?” John said, snarling. If his headache had retreated, it was back now in full force. Tight pressure was building up inside his chest, and spinning little dots of light tracked wildly across his vision. In the back of his head, he heard a faint crinkling … like tissue paper being torn and crumpled.

“Did she tell you how she was going to do it, too?” John snarled. “Did she?”

Randy sagged back in his chair, trying — and not succeeding — to absorb what he was hearing. He shook his head as bitter sadness filled him — for Abby and for John.

Abby Snow is dead … has been for almost twenty years!

“She never told me a thing,” he said, forcing his voice to stay steady. “You gotta believe me.”

John sniffed with laughter. A thin line of snot ran from his nose, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand.

“You think I’m a real fucking idiot, don’t you?”

“No … I thought we were —”

“I don’t believe you! Not for one fucking second! I know you’re the one who’s been leaving those notes around.”

“I don’t know what notes you’re talking about,” Randy said.

“‘I won’t forget what you did to me!’” John recited in an irritating singsong voice. “I’ve gotta hand it to you — writing ‘me’ instead of ‘Abby’ gave me quite a jolt.”

Randy started to say something, but John cut him off.

“And you probably do know what I did to her.” John smiled. “But I couldn’t let her being pregnant ruin my life, could I? After all, I had a full scholarship to Orono. I was going to get the fuck out of town! So when I found her dead, hanging from the rafters in Haskins’ barn, you think I could let anyone else know? How could I?”

John was staring at Randy, his mouth hanging open, but he had the unnerving feeling that John wasn’t seeing him … that he was looking right through him.

“The stupid bitch even wrote a note and pinned it to the pocket of her sweater,” John said, his eyes staring wide open with the horror of the memory. “‘You did this to me!’ That’s what her note said. Did you know about that? Did she tell you I did it to her! … The stupid, fucking bitch.”

“I … I had no idea.” Randy’s voice was hushed with shock.

“Do you know where I buried her, too?” John asked as if he hadn’t been listening to Randy. “I’ll bet my fuckin’ life you know!”

Randy took a deep breath and let it out slowly. His mind was overloaded, and he was speechless. He was convinced that John wasn’t making any of this up. This had happened. The thought that Abby had been dead all these years was like a gunshot blast to the gut.

Unable to check himself now that the pressure of hiding that horrible discovery for all those years was flooding out of him, John gripped the edges of the table so hard his knuckles turned white. A roaring sound filled his ears. It sounded like crashing surf. His breath came in short, sharp gasps that stitched his sides.

“That’s right,” he said, his voice nothing more than a low growl. “I found her hanging in Haskins’ barn and I cut her down from the rafters and buried her out by the oak tree behind the barn. This fall, they found bones out in the field. Fucking-A!”

He shook his head and, with a shaking hand, wiped his forehead with his napkin, pausing to look at the heavy wet streak it left on the cloth.

“That was too fucking close for comfort. I was sure those had to be her bones. Turns out they weren’t, but I figure sometime this spring, once the ground thaws, I’m gonna have to dig her up and move her so they won’t find her. You can’t tell me you didn’t know she was buried out there! You had to know!”

“Honest to Christ, John, I didn’t.” Randy cast his eyes back and forth to see if anyone could overhear them. “You’ve got to believe me, man. I had no fuckin’ idea.”

John slumped in his chair, and for several stunned seconds he stared blankly at Randy, his mouth hanging open. The pressure inside him was so strong he thought his head was about to explode. His throat felt flayed, and his hand shook as he reached for his drink. His sandwich lay untouched on the plate.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” he said. His voice sounded strangled, as though someone’s fingers were closing off his windpipe.

Randy leaned with both elbows on the table, his head in his hands. As much as he told himself to breathe evenly and deeply, he couldn’t slow his rapid panting. Looking up at John and realizing that he absolutely didn’t know this man, he shook his head.

“Never … never in my life did I suspect you of … that,” he said, fighting for control of his voice. “You may not believe me, but I did — and I still consider you a friend, whatever the hell that means. If you had told me back then what you just told me … Christ! I don’t know what I would have done. I mean — Jesus! She really killed herself!”

Unable to catch his breath to speak, John nodded.

“And she blamed you,” Randy said, sounding awe-struck. “Because you’re the one who got her pregnant.”

“I — I couldn’t let anyone find her ... not like that.” John’s voice almost broke. His eyes stung as long repressed emotions escaped. “How could I?”

“But … Jesus Christ, man! She was fucking dead! She killed herself because of you!”

“Not because of me,” John said, clenching his hands into white-knuckled fists. He raised his fists but didn’t know if he was going to smash them onto the table or into his friend’s face. “Not because of me! She was …”

“It doesn’t matter what she was.” Randy leaned close to John. “She’s been dead for twenty years, and … I dunno. Even after all these years, you ought to do something about it.”

He’s going to use it against me, John thought with a brilliant flash of panic. He didn’t know before, but now he does ... and he’ll use it!

Do what?” he asked. Looking long and hard at his friend, John tried to see beneath the surface of surprise and concern, and read what Randy was really thinking.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” John said.

“You hid her body. No one — her family never knew what happened to her.”

“But I didn’t kill her … All I did was bury her.”

“Without telling anyone?” Randy said. “Think about what her family must’ve gone through … All those years, wondering if she’s alive or dead.”

Biting his lower lip, John nodded.

“My dad mentioned that her mother died — what? Ten years ago or so. And her father died about a year after that. Her sister … I don’t know.” He shook his head, but whether in confusion or dismissal, Randy wasn’t sure.

“I’ve been living here all that time, and I can tell you — her parents went absolutely nuts trying to find out what happened to her. It’s what eventually killed both of them. And her sister — Sally … I know she got married to some guy from Westbrook and lived — on Spring Street in Westbrook, I think, until they moved out to the Midwest somewhere. Ohio, maybe. Every year she’d run a memorial notice in the newspaper for Abby as if she knew she had died. But I heard a few months ago that Sally —”

“Wait a minute.”

John sagged in his chair, stunned. The instant Randy mentioned Sally’s name, John stopped paying attention to anything else he said. His mind was caught in a whirlwind.

It’s been her sister all along!

Cold rushed up his back in stinging prickles.

Here I’ve been suspecting Randy all along, and I never even thought about Sally! … It was probably her I saw on the bridge during that last storm ... and she’s the one who’s been lurking outside the house … and leaving those notes …

“Jesus Christ, Randy,” he said. “I feel like a goddamned fool.”

“Randy lowered his gaze.

“What am I gonna do?”

Randy’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.

A fool? … No … Crazy is more like it.

“Here I’ve been thinking you knew what happened and because you’ve —” He stopped from saying anything about his suspicions about him and Julia, and looked at his fists clenched in his lap. “Jesus Christ, man …”

“Hey … what’s done is done,” Randy said with a mildness that wasn’t genuine. “But you gotta report what happened. Even after twenty years … You have to.”

“No I don’t,” John said, shaking his head firmly.

“They’ll find her eventually,” Randy said. “With all that construction out there? Sooner or later, someone will be out for a walk with their dog, or some kids will be playing in the woods, and they’ll find her bones. If you don’t come clean with what you did, when they do find her, they might think you killed her.”

“Is there something wrong with your sandwich?” The waitress’s voice, speaking so suddenly behind him, made John jump and look around quickly.

“Uhh, no … not at all,” he said. “We were —” Smiling weakly at Randy, he finished, “having a pretty intense discussion.”

“I can wrap it for you to have later,” the waitress said. “With this storm comin’, the manager’s talking about closing early.”

“Yeah — That’d be fine.” John handed her the plate but didn’t take his gaze away from Randy as he took a bite of his sandwich.

Once the waitress left their table, Randy looked at John intensely and said, “You’ve got to do it, man. You’ve got to report what happened!”

“And if I don’t?”

Randy shook his head.

“No way! I can’t do it. Julia doesn’t know a thing about this, and I’m not about to tell her.”

A small voice in the back of his mind was whispering, All you have to do is make sure you get Sally off your back … Make sure she doesn’t do anything to blow it … How much could she know, anyway?…

Plenty, another, fainter but colder voice said. She could know everything if Abby told her before she hanged herself …

Now that he thought about it, it all made sense that Abby’s sister was doing this to him — leaving notes around, sneaking around outside the house at night, trying to make him —

What?

Give himself up?

Destroy himself with the guilt over what happened?

He wasn’t sure exactly what she was up to, but he didn’t intend to find out. What most surprised him, shocked him, in fact, was that he had never suspected Sally … hadn’t even remembered her until now.

Sally had been a couple of years ahead of Abby and John in school, maybe three or four … enough so John had paid no attention to her other than noticing how much the two girls looked alike.

But now that he remembered her, he thought if he had seen her outside the house at night … during a snowstorm … or with her back to him in a candlelit church, he could easily have mistaken her for her sister.

So he had been wrong about Randy, and it was too bad he had blown it by spilling his guts to him, but … someone was tormenting him, stirring up things that should have stayed buried and forgotten, and he had to find out who so he could stop it.

Randy let out a low, whistling sigh as he scratched his neck.

“I don’t see how you can live with it, man. I mean — knowing someone you loved killed herself because of something you did — or what you wouldn’t do?”

John took a sip of his ginger ale and, for the first time, actually tasted it. He smacked his lips, wishing it were something stronger — a beer or, better yet, whiskey.

“I’ve had to learn,” he said with a casual shrug. Then, leaning forward and giving Randy a cold, steady stare, he added, “And I sure hope to hell you can, too.”

Slowly, and resenting himself for doing so, Randy nodded his agreement.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice so low John barely heard it above the other sounds in the restaurant. “What are friends for?”

Smiling thinly, John held out his hand for Randy to shake. Their clasp was cold and hard.

Like his soul, Randy thought bitterly.

“Done deal, then,” John said, squeezing Randy’s hand and smiling at him. “You’ll carry this to your grave!”

V

But this isn’t the end of it, John thought as he and Randy left Carbur’s and walked out into the dark afternoon. The storm had picked up considerable strength, and now snow was falling in wind-whipped, blinding sheets. The streetlights were on, illuminating the sidewalks, which were already slippery with several inches of accumulated snow. The few cars that passed were moving at a crawl. At the corner of Exchange Street and Middle, a Chevy had skidded into a telephone pole, crimping its front fender.

As they walked back to John’s office building, both men huddled into their coats and were silent, each thinking about what he had learned and how distant they were even though they now shared a horrible secret. At the front door to the office building, they stopped and awkwardly looked at each other.

“So,” John said, holding his hand out again for a handshake, “we understand each other?”

Randy nodded and quickly broke off the handshake, sticking his hand back into his pocket.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice almost lost in the deep-throated howl of the wind. “I’m parked down on Commercial Street. Probably ought to get on home before the roads are total shit.”

“Probably are already.” John smiled tightly as he contemplated his own drive home. He figured people had already started leaving the office but decided he’d go upstairs for a minute to clean up a few things.

“So — uhh, I’ll catch’cha later,” Randy said tightly as he backed away from the doorway. Even with only a short distance between them, his features were lost in the swirling snow. A menacing chill took hold of John when he remembered that other figure he had seen looming out of the snow at him.

“Sure thing,” he said, reaching for the door handle. Before he went inside, he turned and called out to Randy, “Oh … before you go. Do you remember Sally’s married name?”

From out of the swirling snow, Randy’s voice drifted to him with an odd, disembodied distance.

“Curry ... I think. Her name’s Sally Curry. But I told you, she —” Randy’s words were sliced off cleanly as the door slammed shut, and John raced upstairs to his office. He expected to find another pencil-written note on notebook paper. The hammering in his ears only softened a fraction when he saw a While-U-Were-Out note, informing him that Julia had called three times while he was having lunch with Randy.

His hands were shaking as he dialed his home number and waited five rings before she answered.

“Oh, good — it’s you.” Julia sounded out of breath. “You still at the office?”

“Yeah,” John replied. “I’m heading out now.”

“We’re in for a doozy,” Julia said. “I was hoping you’d already left.”

“Ahh — yeah. Everybody’s bailing out now. I’m gonna grab some things off my desk so I can work at home.”

As he spoke, he wasn’t shuffling through the plans and papers on his desk; he was flipping through the pages of the Portland phone directory, looking for anyone named Curry who lived in Westbrook. Randy had said she lived on Spring Street but might have moved to somewhere in the Midwest. He was hoping, if he found a number, that by calling it he would get a taped message telling him the new number … if, indeed, Sally was somewhere in the Midwest. John suspected she might be back in Maine.

“All right,” he whispered when he found a listing.

“What?” Julia said.

“Oh — nothing,” John replied. “I got everything put away.”

He took a drafting pencil and, turning over the While-U-Were-Out note, scribbled down the phone number. Looking at his own handwriting, he couldn’t help but wonder what Sally Curry’s looked like. Perhaps exactly like that on those notes he’d been finding?

He folded the note in half and stuck it into his pants pocket.

“Okay, Jule. I’m heading out,” he said. “But don’t get all agitated. The roads are pretty slick, and I’m going to drive extra careful. I may be an hour or more.”

“Just be careful,” Julia said. “See you then.”

“Yup. ‘Bye.”

John hung up and, figuring that tomorrow was going to be another snowed-in day at home, decided that he wasn’t going to bring home any work. Another day off would be fine with him. Maybe he would paw through the junk in the garage and see if he could find his old Flexible Flyer, if his father hadn’t trashed it, and take Julia and Bri sliding.

“Night, Barry,” he called as he walked out into the main office.

His boss was hunched over his desk, busily working on a plan. Without even looking up, he waved to John and muttered, “G’night.”

“You staying here all night?”

Barry didn’t answer.

On his way down the stairs to the street and parking lot, John kept patting his leg with his gloved hand. It was a thin piece of paper in his pocket, and through the layers of pants material and his glove it was impossible to feel it, but just knowing it was there, and that tonight — when Julia can’t hear me — he would get Sally Curry’s forwarding phone number and call her. The thought made him feel light-headed. Of course, he didn’t expect her to be home, wherever she lived in the Midwest, because he was sure she was already back in Maine.

VI

The drive home was terrible. This blizzard was as bad as the one before if not worse. Being so close to the ocean made for wetter, heavier snow. The roads felt like they were covered with grease. When John finally arrived home — after almost two hours — he was relieved to see both Julia and Bri. He hugged them and, clapping his hands together, eagerly asked them what was for supper.

“Hamburgers, French fries, and a veggie,” Julia said. She scowled when John pulled a paper bag from his coat pocket and extracted a fifth of whiskey.

“Care for a before-supper drink?” he asked, smiling.

Julia was relieved to see him safe at home and in such a good mood. She had been thinking, as she unconsciously rubbed her stomach, that maybe tonight she would give him the news that she was pregnant. But she didn’t appreciate that, as bad as the weather was, John still had time to stop at the liquor store on the way home.

Perish the thought of being snowbound without a fifth.

“No, and I don’t think —”

“Don’t sweat it. I’m just having one to calm my nerves after a drive like that,” John said. He followed his explanation with a laugh that seemed forced and unnatural.

Julia watched as he broke the seal on the bottle and poured a splash into a glass, adding enough water to turn the whiskey a thin, amber color.

“So,” John said, looking at Bri after taking a sip and smacking his lips with satisfaction, “I haven’t seen you for a while. How things?”

“Fine,” Bri said.

“How’s Kirsten”

“Kristen,” Bri corrected him, “and she’s fine. There probably won’t be school tomorrow, and I was hoping maybe she could come over.”

“As long as you get your homework done tonight, I don’t see why not,” Julia said. She went to the refrigerator, took out the hamburger patties she had made, and set them on the broiler pan.

While the storm gathered strength outside, slamming against the sides of the house and rattling the windows, the family sat down and shared a warm and relaxing meal. Julia was surprised — and pleased — that John seemed so much better. Even his appetite was back. As they ate supper, she found herself thinking that maybe the talk they’d had this morning had done him some good.

Maybe — although she hated even to think it — last weekend’s binge had been what he needed to work his anger and grief out of his system, and that was the end of it.

Whatever, she decided, she wasn’t going to examine things too closely. It seemed as if John — the John I know and love — was back, smiling and laughing the way he used to … before their move to Maine.

“It’s neat, ain’t it?” Bri said.

“Isn’t it,” Julia said, automatically correcting her.”

“Being so cozy inside while it’s snowing like crazy outside.”

“Maybe we can get a fire going,” Julia said, turning to John. She was finished eating before they were, so she stood up and started clearing the table. Maybe tonight would be a good time to tell him her news. She wanted to make sure he was relaxed and jovial … and didn’t keep drinking.

“Sure, we can have a fire.” John mopped up the last bit of meat juice and ketchup from his plate with his last bit of hamburger roll. “But let me take care of the kitchen. You guys go sit and watch the snow fall. It’ll only take a minute.”

“You sure?” Julia asked. “You’re the one who worked all day. You should —”

“I got it, he said, and Julia heard a tone that said no argument. She and Bri exchanged glances of exaggerated surprise, but neither of them complained as they went into the living room and settled down on the couch. From the living room, they could hear John whistling to himself as he set to work.

The whole time he stood at the sink, washing and rinsing each plate and glass and then carefully lining them up in the dish drainer, John was aware of the piece of note paper with Sally Curry’s phone number in his pants pocket. He barely paid attention to what he was doing. The clank of dishes and jangle of silverware barely invaded his thoughts as he stared out the kitchen window into the thickly falling snow. Long, white streaks showed against the soot-dark night as they flew through the light from the window. He considered what — if anything — he would say to Sally. Or would he hang up on the off chance he actually got her on the phone. He certainly wasn’t going to come right out and ask if she knew what he had done to her sister. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake he had made with Randy, so he wanted to think this all through very carefully.

Before he realized it, he was done with the dishes. He pulled the plug, and watched as the dishwater, greasy with meat juice, sucked down the drain. He had everything in mind: how — if Sally answered — he would explain why he was calling. He ad moved back to town recently and had been thinking about Abby and wanted to contact someone who had been close to her. Maybe he would hint at why he was calling. He had been thinking about Abby — as he often did — and wondered if anyone ever heard from her.

He would be crafty and shrewd this time, and not let on that he suspected anything … unless Sally blew it and spilled her guts.

But, of course, he didn’t think he would get an answer because Sally Curry wasn’t somewhere in the Midwest. Her phone would ring all right, but it would go unanswered because — John clenched his hands into fists as he looked out at the raging snowstorm — for all he knew, Sally Curry was outside the house right now … masked by the snow … and watching the house of the man she was convinced had killed her sister.

Using the spray attachment, John rinsed the greasy soap residue down the drain and then reached for a paper towel to dry his hands. As he spun the roll and tore off a single sheet, his stomach tensed.

He saw something —

A small, white square

— drop from inside the roll of paper towels. It fluttered onto the counter — a single sheet of notebook paper folded in half.

John’s breath cut off sharply as he stared in amazement at the paper.

He knew that, inside, he would find a message written in heavy-handed pencil strokes …

How the Christ did she get this here? he wondered as he stared at the paper.

He didn’t dare pick it up. His heart was thudding loudly in his ears, and a tightening constriction closed around his throat.

Don’t pick it up! he thought. His hands made wet, squishy sounds as they clenched and unclenched. Don’t touch it! … Don’t even think about it!

But he knew he would pick it up … and he knew he would read it.

He had to!

Slowly, he reached out for the paper, the tips of his fingers tingling as they drew closer … When he touched it, he was surprised by a sudden wash of coolness that shot up his arm like a spike of ice. With one fearful glance over his shoulder to make sure Julia or Bri wasn’t standing in the doorway, watching him, he grabbed the paper. Shielding it with his body, he almost tore it as he unfolded it and read —

MEET ME… TONIGHT

John let out a low, tortured gasp as the choking sensation around his throat got tighter. His hand reflexively clenched shut, wrinkling the paper, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the message.

MEET ME ... TONIGHT!

“You goddamned lousy bitch,” he whispered under his breath. “You rotten cunt! Where … where the fuck do you want me to meet you?”

The sudden ringing of the telephone made him jump and spin around. Without thinking, he shouted, “I’ve got it!” and quickly crossed the kitchen to the phone. He shoved the wrinkled note into his pocket.

“Ill bet it’s Kristin,” Bri hollered from the living room.

“I’ve said I’ve got it,” John shouted and he grabbed the receiver and said, “Hello?”

At the other end of the line, he heard … nothing — absolute dead silence. No voice — no hiss — nothing! Only a black, cold silence so deep it was dizzying.

“Hello?” John repeated, his hand slick with sweat on the phone. “Who is this?”

The silence on the other end of the line seemed to mock him.

Finally, after several seconds, he heard a faint click, and at the edge of hearing, he detected a low huffing sound as though someone was taking in a deep breath with great effort.

“Meet me … tonight,” the soft voice whispered.

It sounded like the dry crackle of fire, and in his mind, John saw the three words of the note sparkling with deep orange flame.

“Who the hell — ?” he stammered, but his throat closed off, and he got an instant mental image of an old building — a weather-stained, falling-down barn. He hadn’t meant to think of it, but inexplicably, it was there.

“Meet me … tonight,” the voice repeated with labored intensity. “You know where …”

Haskins’ barn!

The thought tore into John’s mind as if it had claws. He found himself staring at the blank kitchen wall no more than a foot from his face, but all he could see was the blank, gray, moonlit side of Haskins’ barn surrounded by a deep, cold night sky that vibrated with intensity.

“You know where,” the voice repeated, and then the line went dead.

After a moment of chilling silence, the rasping dial tone hit John’s ear like a drill. With a grunt, he slammed the phone back into the cradle so hard it made a little br-ing sound.

“Who was it?” Julia called from the living room.

Frantic, John looked around but saw that he was alone in the kitchen. His ears still echoed with the hollow sound of that voice.

“Meet me … tonight … You know where!”

His face was bathed with sweat. He tried to wipe it away with the back of his hand.

“Ahh — wrong number. They asked for … a Sally Curry,” John said. He would have laughed out loud, but his chest felt like it was bound by steel bands that were steadily squeezing … squeezing …

He glanced at the clock and then looked out at the snow streaking past the kitchen window. Clenching his fists, he took a breath deep enough to make his lungs ache. Then he went to the hall closet and grabbed his coat, hat, and gloves. Julia looked at him over the back of the couch, a surprised expression on her face.

“You don’t have to go out for firewood. We have plenty,” she said.

“I’ve got to do something,” he said sharply.

Julia saw the dark tension had returned to his face, and she knew — even as she asked — what his answer would be.

“I’ll be right back,” John snapped as he jammed his arms into the coat sleeves and yanked on his gloves. Before either Julia or Bri could react, he was out the kitchen door. The door slammed shut behind him. He trudged through the deepening snow and got into the car. After shoving the key into the ignition, he ground the starter until the engine caught. Slamming the shift into reverse, he slewed down the driveway onto Oak Street and then stomped down on the gas. The car fishtailed down the road to the intersection of Shore Drive, and he took the turn without slowing down.

“I’m gonna end it tonight,” he muttered as he hunched over the steering wheel, trying to pierce the darkness and the blowing snow. The headlights illuminated no more than a few feet ahead of him, and it was only with effort — and good guesswork — that he kept the car on the road.

“I’ll meet you out at Haskins’ barn, you bitch, and we can fucking settle it once and for all!”

TWENTY-THREE

The Blizzard

I

John pulled to a stop at the side of the road. He couldn’t see Haskins’ barn, but he knew it was straight across the field in front of him. The storm howled around him like a raging beast. Gusts of wind punched the car, rocking it on its suspension. The air was so cold it burned his lungs as he breathed rapidly in and out. Clenching his fists, he got out the car and started walking.

The snow was already knee-deep. His flashlight beam didn’t do much to illuminate anything except the snow whipping past him. The night was filled with the deafening roar of the wind in the trees.

More than once, he was afraid he would lose his sense of direction and walk past Haskins’ barn and into the woods without even knowing it. He had to find the barn soon, if only to get out of the numbing wind.

No one could last long outside on a night like this.

Why the hell am I doing this? he thought as he lurched ahead, the snow tugging at his legs like a powerful undertow. Thin but powerful fingers yanked at his coat collar and slapped him from behind. Snow stung his face, numbing it.

Then — like a mirage — the massive bulk of the barn appeared up ahead, blacker than the night. In the blowing snow, it appeared much larger than he knew it was. It loomed up out of the darkness like a towering ocean wave threatening to crash down on him. A clutching chill ran through him as he approached the building. It appeared to sway back and forth in the gusting wind, its ancient wood creaking and snapping from the stress of the storm. He walked to the door and shouldered it open in a blind panic, desperate to get out of the weather.

The instant he stepped inside and swung the door shut, the sound of the storm dropped to a low, whistling roar. Anxious with mounting fear, and wondering why anyone — Sally Curry … or Randy … or whomever — would ask to meet him here on a night like this, he swept his flashlight beam around the inside. Snow filtered through the many cracks and gaps in the walls and ceiling, but inside the barn was a hushed quiet … as if he had entered another world that provided him a distant view of the outside world.

Grunting to himself, John walked across the hard-packed dirt floor, his flashlight playing over the angled ridges of snow that had drifted inside. The gray-ribbed walls rose above him with dark clots of cobwebs drifting in the eddying winds. He couldn’t help but wonder what creatures found refuge up there in the dark rafters.

John knew it was foolish to be out here … especially on a night like this. As he surveyed the barn, his mind couldn’t help but go back to the night twenty years ago when he and Abby had arranged to meet here …

For the last time, as it turned out, he thought.

The memory made his eyes sting. His stomach churned with sour acid.

So far he hadn’t dared to look up at the hayloft … up to the rafter where Abby had hanged herself.

He wondered if he would see traces of the frayed rope on the thick beam.

He had come out here that warm spring night to meet her. They had planned to talk things over, work things out if they could … but they never got to talk.

Instead, he found her swinging from a length of rope … swinging slowly back and forth like those clots of cobwebs overhead. And she had a hand-printed note pinned to the pocket of her gray sweater.

“YOU DID THIS TO ME!”

All around him, the barn creaked and groaned as the storm hammered its sides. Indistinct whisperings drifted to his ears, sounding almost like words … vague, angry accusations. He couldn’t tell where they came from. They seemed to come from every direction. He turned frantically this way and that, trying to locate the sources of the sounds.

“This is fucking ridiculous,” he muttered, letting his flashlight beam swing around but not quite daring to point it up to the hayloft because of what he was afraid he’d see.

“No,” he whispered, his voice raw. “No one’s going to be —”

“John …”

That single word — had it really been my name? — drifted from out of the dark and sent a cold bolt of fear racing up his spine. Aware that he had been holding his breath, he let it out slowly as he pointed the flashlight up … up … to the hayloft.

Although Haskins was long since dead, and his barn was scheduled to be torn down to make way for the condo project, John was surprised to see the loft still piled high with bales of hay. The dirt floor was littered with dull brown chaff that had sifted through the cracks in the loft floor. On one side of the barn wall, two-by-fours had been nailed across the inside studs to form a crude ladder.

The ladder Abby climbed up that night ... with a coil of old rope over her shoulder.

A hard, dry lump formed in John’s throat.

“John …”

He tensed, positive now that someone was calling his name. It wasn’t the wind or his imagination.

The voice had come from up in the hayloft.

“Sally?” he called out, his voice barely vibrating in his throat. “Are you up there?”

There was no reply, and for several heartbeats — heartbeats that came rapidly — John stared up at the bales of rotting hay, not daring to shine his flashlight on the rafter Abby had used.

Is someone up there? he wondered, tingling with fear. How can there be? … Not tonight … Not on a night like this …

“This isn’t funny, you know,” John shouted, forcing strength into his voice he didn’t feel. “I don’t think it’s one damn bit funny!”

“John …”

Again, the voice came, faintly and, seemingly, from several directions at once.

John tried to convince himself that it was the wind, whistling through the cracks in the barn. He was imagining hearing someone call his name. There couldn’t be anyone up in the hayloft.

“Come up …” the voice whispered.

As crazy — as impossible as it seemed, John was now convinced someone was up there.

It had to be Sally Curry.

In a perverted sort of way, it made sense that she would do this. Abby must have told her sister everything, and now — after twenty years — Sally had heard that John was back on Glooscap, and she had come home to set him up. The notes, the creeping around the house, the telephone calls — everything was so she could get her revenge!

It was insane, but that had to be the answer.

“I — I’m not coming up there, Sally,” John shouted. He smiled to himself, thinking maybe there wasn’t anyone up there, that the tiny voice was a product of his overworked imagination.

Talk about crazy. He chuckled to himself. I’m nuts to be out here on a night like this talking to myself in an empty barn …

“Come up … here.”

“Whoever you are, if you’re not going to show yourself, I’m leaving,” John said.

He was staring at the underside of the loft floor, and his heart froze in mid-beat when the floorboards creaked overhead. Fine grit and chaff sifted down, caught and swirled by errant breezes — a miniature version of the blizzard raging outside. Heavy, dragging footsteps moved from the back of the loft toward the front — the open end.

John’s hand involuntarily clenched the tube of the flashlight. Inside his glove, his hand was slick with sweat.

Slowly, feeling every heavy thump his heart made, John directed the flashlight beam up … up …

At first, he saw nothing but piles of pale yellow straw and the dark ribs and walls of the barn. But then the darkness shifted as though a portion of the impenetrable night had seeped into the barn.

And then a face coalesced and resolved out of the darkness.

When it registered who —

Or what

— it was, he tried to scream, but his throat clamped shut.

Long, black hair framed a thin face so pale it hovered in the darkness of the loft like a cloud-masked moon. Dark circled eyes stared down at him, and the mouth — harsh, bloodless lips set in a firm line — slowly widened into a smile that showed yellowed teeth. Beneath the mass of black hair, a heavy gray sweater hung loosely over the shoulders. Thick globs of moss and dirt and rot stained the sweater. It hung heavily, as though it was damp and moldy with age,

“Jesus Christ … No!” John whispered, taking an involuntary step back.

The face loomed above him, the mouth widening into a cruel smile as the lips peeled back.

“You still recognize me … after all this time?”

Her voice had a razor edge that cut into John’s awareness.

“No … It can’t be! … It’s impossible! … Abby?”

A sudden rushing noise inside his head masked every sound other than her voice. He recognized the face — the same one that had been outside his house … looking in through the window — the same one he had seen, pale and staring at him from inside the noose twenty years ago!

“YOU DID THIS TO ME!”

The thought clapped in his mind like thunder.

“This can’t be!” he wailed, taking more steps backward.

As much as he wanted to, he didn’t dare take his flashlight beam away from Abby’s leering face.

It’s no hallucination! … It’s real!

“Oh, yes … it can be! It is,” Abby said.

With that, she threw her head back and let out a long, cackling laugh that swept around and through John as if he had become immaterial.

John’s breath came in sharp, painful gasps. The sounds of the raging storm outside faded to a distant memory as his mind reeled, trying to grasp the actuality of who — or what — he was looking at. The pale face, like the gray sweater, was smeared with dirt and mold and rot.

“See what you did to me?” Abby said. She raked her fingers down across her cheek, carving deep furrows into her rotting flesh. Gray swatches of skin peeled away in strips, exposing the dull gray bones beneath. The flesh was seething with worms and maggots.

It’s not possible! his mind wailed, while taking on its own lunatic giggle. It’s not possible!

“You made me kill myself … I had no other choice … because you didn’t want my baby … our baby!” Abby’s voice was a low, evil rasp. “And then you buried me … Did you think you could get rid of me as easily as that?” Her voice was as sheer as black pond ice. “You actually thought you could hide what you did? ... That you could bury me and no one would find out? What a fool!” Again her laughter filled the barn, spinning around John like a whirlpool that threatened to suck him under.

“You can’t be Abby!” John cried, his voice winding up the scale. “Abby’s dead! I saw her! I buried her!”

To save the last, few shreds of sanity he had remaining, he had to believe this was Abby’s sister in an elaborate show to force him to admit what he had done, to drive him insane with guilt.

“You buried me,” Abby said, laughing hollowly. “And you thought … if I was dead and buried … you’d be through with me … that you could go right on living. But you were wrong!”

A terrible fury flashed inside her eyes, and she raised her hands into the air — thin, talon-like fingers with cracked and yellowed nails. Her black hair was caught in an updraft and twisted around her head like a tangled knot of snakes.

“You were wrong, John!” Abby said, her voice low and measured, chilling in its hollowness. “Spite and anger never die! They can’t be buried! They grow in the dark. They feed on the dark until they become strong!”

She clenched one hand into a fist in front of her face and shook it viciously. Thin tendons worked beneath the layer of rotting flesh.

“And in all that time, I waited … growing stronger in the cold and the darkness where you left me.” She jabbed a pointed finger at him in accusation. “But I was patient … I waited … because I knew you’d come back … I knew I’d have you again!”

“I never did anything to you,” John wailed. “You did it to yourself!”

Tears flooded from his eyes, blurring his vision and freezing on his face. Abby shattered into dozens of sparkling reflections. Everything around him — the barn, the hayloft, the face leering over him in the darkness — all of it whirled around, smearing and blending into chaos.

“You had your chance, John!” Abby wailed.

He had the momentary impression that there was no flesh left on her face. She was a grinning skull face.

“And now … after all this time … and eternity spent waiting in the dark … I’ll get my revenge! On you … and your daughter … and your wife … and — best of all — on the baby she’s carrying!”

John shook his head, not grasping the full impact of what Abby had just said.

“You didn’t even know, did you?” Abby laughed again, the sound seeming to come from the bottom of a deep well. “You didn’t know your wife was pregnant.”

“No, I … I —” John stammered, but words failed him.

I would have been content to get my revenge on you for what you did to me, but as soon as I sensed the baby growing in her womb — like the baby growing in my womb that you killed! — I decided you would all have to die! I’ve already killed your father. Remember his face? Do you remember how he struggled the night he died?”

Stunned at the memory, John could do nothing but nod.

“I killed him!” Abby smiled wickedly. “He saw me that night at church, and he almost remembered … he almost told you that I was back, so he had to die first. You remember that night, don’t you? How he suffered? How he screamed as I tore his soul apart? I was in the room with him. It took me a while to gather the strength I needed. Even though people could see me, I couldn’t do anything … not at first. But the more I saw you and your family, the more I let the cold darkness and the hatred grow inside me — like my baby that you killed! The more I hated you, the stronger I got and the more I could do.”

“The notes …” John said with a gasp. “You wrote those notes?”

Slowly, Abby nodded. A cold, red glow burned in her eyes.

“I WON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID TO ME!”

Her laughter rose shrilly.

“Of course I did … I had to learn how to use things again. I had to get strong so I could make things happen. At first, the best I could do was scrawl those pathetic notes and then —” She laughed again, a cold, thin laugh. “It brought me such pleasure to feel your panic, your gnawing fear and guilt grow as you read each new word. And as I grew stronger, I found I could do more … like move things around ... the furniture in your house.”

“After the funeral,” John said, more to himself than to Abby.

“And so — first your father … and eventually your family. I have to destroy the baby your wife is carrying just as you murdered the baby I was carrying. But first … first, it’s your turn to die!”

With a sudden forward lurch, she jumped off the edge of the loft. For a frozen moment, John expected her fetch to up and snap backward at the end of a rope. He was prepared to hear the broken board snap of her neck. But with her arms upraised and her mouth wide open, Abby’s dark form drifted, rather than fell, as it swooped down on him like a black hawk. She landed lightly on the barn floor only a few feet from him.

The circle of his flashlight underlit Abby’s face as she leaned closer. Her skin — skin he remembered as being so soft … so smooth and healthy — was mottled and blotched with rot, crawling with white worms. Through the shreds of torn skin on her cheek, John saw her dirt-crusted teeth. When she opened her mouth, a sickly wash of foul breath made his stomach revolt.

“Blood will answer blood!” Abby shouted. “You will all die!”

She raised her hands above her head again, and with a bone-chilling whoosh, she vanished. The space in the barn where she had been standing a mere second ago sucked in with a dull concussion.

John stood, amazed, as he glanced back and forth. His only thought was that he had to have imagined what just happened. Outside, in the storm, his overwrought nerves had worn down. They tricked him, making him hallucinate everything because of twenty years of guilt.

But then, at first faintly but steadily growing stronger, something — a sense of menacing presence drew his attention upward. The oval of light from his flashlight swept back and forth over the stacked bales of hay and across the rotting rafters. At first, he saw nothing, but below the howling of the storm, he heard a high-pitched squeaking sound that soon took on the sound of a chorus, like ...

Like rats, he thought.

Cold fear tightened around his heart.

Rats in the wall!

The stacked bales of hay in the loft seemed to be throbbing as the squeaking sounds rose in intensity. Before long, there was no doubt in John’s mind — the hay bales were moving. He took another two steps backward but stopped when he backed into the barn wall. A jolt of pain shot up his shoulder to his neck, but that was nothing compared to what he felt when the hay bales suddenly exploded into a dark, quivering mass that spilled out across the loft floor.

“Mother of Christ!” John shouted as the hay bales surged to life.

And then the shattering realization hit him. It wasn’t the hay bales. It was something coming out of the bales. A heartbeat later, a tangled mass of rats scrambled over the hayloft floor to the edge of the loft. Dozens — hundreds — of beady eyes gleamed red in the glow of his flashlight.

John turned and started to run, but his foot snagged on something, and he fell to the floor. The flashlight flew from his hand and rolled away, its beam spinning wildly before winking out. Above and behind him, the chattering sounds of the rats — hundreds of them — rose until it filled his ears like a storm wind. In the darkness behind him, he heard them as they plopped heavily onto the barn floor, sounding like pelting rain.

The first jolt of pain that hit his leg was like a hot, bright sliver of metal jabbing into his flesh. Within seconds, an ever-increasing weight piled up — first on his legs … then it swept up over his hips. The tide of squealing rats cascaded over him, threatening to smother him. Tiny claws raked exposed face, ripping his pants and coat. Chisel-sharp teeth slashed him. Throwing his head back, John let out a lung-ripping scream that was cut off when a fat-bodied rat jammed itself into his mouth. He bit down hard, severing the body in half, gagging as a hot gush of blood filled his throat. He spit out the rat’s body and covered his face with his arms to protect his eyes from the whirlwind of claws and teeth.

John’s arms and legs worked furiously to get him out from under the crushing mass of rats, but it was too much. His boots kept slipping on the dirt floor, and he flopped onto his back, unable to shake loose. The darkness in the barn masked the scene of horror as more and more rats tumbled from the loft to the floor and swarmed over him.

Before long, his coat and pants and body were nothing more than shreds. The rats bit and chewed at any portion of him they could get at. He felt like he was being splashed with acid as the claws raked his skin open. The flow of hot blood drove the rats to an even greater frenzy.

Their combined weight was crushing as John kicked and flailed to extricate himself. As he rolled and flopped around on the floor, every now and then he caught a glimpse of the barn door and the solid sheet of falling snow beyond. He realized that, even if he made it outside, the chances of getting to his car and making it home in this storm were slim to impossible …

But he had to warn Julia and Bri.

The horrible thought tormented him that Abby was headed there next. She had left the rats to finish him off while she went to the house to do what she had said ... kill Julia ... and Bri ... and the baby she said Julia was carrying.

With a sudden jolt of adrenaline, John thrashed at the overwhelming crush of squirming, furry bodies and, miraculously, the weight shifted. With his arms free, he scrambled to shake his legs loose. With a sudden forward lurch, he stood up and, crouching low, running off balance, his arms pin-wheeling wildly, he made a desperate dash for the barn door. His shoulder slammed into the rough wood, and the door gave grudgingly against the snow that had piled up against it.

Wind and snow tore into his face as he charged outside. Knowing that seething mass of rats was close behind drove him forward through the high drifts toward his car. He ran, swinging his torn and bleeding legs high above the wind-whipped surface of the snow.

If I can only find the frigging car! he thought frantically. If the snow hasn’t buried it!

The frigid air tore like flames into his lungs as he ran, encased in the storm. All he knew was that Haskins’ barn and the rats were behind him, and Abby was ahead of him. As he ran, he expected her decomposed face, grinning a wide, maniacal smile, to dart out at him from the night … laughing … screaming before clawed fingers grabbed his throat and ripped the life out of him.

Time stretched into a numbing eternity as he forged his way through the deep snow, his legs churning wildly. Ahead, without even the feeble security of a flashlight, he could see nothing ... no streetlights, no shadowed bulk of his car — just an endless, windswept snowfield of howling gray. He wouldn’t be at all surprised to find he had gone around a complete circle and ended up back at the barn.

Maybe that would be best, he thought bitterly. Let the rats finish me … or run off a cliff into the ocean and drown …

But he couldn’t let that happen!

He couldn’t let Abby — as impossible as this seemed — get her revenge.

“I didn’t do anything wrong! I didn’t do anything wrong!” he kept mumbling to himself.

And then he saw something ahead of him — the snow-covered lump of his car.

With one frantic glance over his shoulder, he saw something else — a mind-numbing sight that, like Abby, was impossible ... impossible but there. Closing the gap between them, leaping and burrowing over and through the snow, came an onrushing tide of rats, squeaking and chittering, lusting to taste his heated lifeblood.

In a sudden surge of speed, John reached the edge of the field and scrambled over the humped plow ridge. Every square inch of his exposed skin was numbed, and the dim thought chilled him that, even if he made it home, it wouldn’t matter.

Abby would have gotten them already.

Julia and Bri would be dead.

And Abby would be waiting for him!

He slammed into the side of the car, almost knocking the wind out of himself. Peeling off a glove, he jammed his hand into his coat pocket, suddenly afraid that he had lost the keys back in the barn. He tried not to imagine turning around and cringing back against the car, trying to scream but unable to as the seething black mass of rats swarmed over him, their teeth and claws tearing the last shreds of life from him. Inside the middle of the mass of rodents, an image of Abby’s face appeared as she was twenty years ago.Her face was horribly pale … her neck strangled … her bloated tongue sticking out between her teeth … dried blood dribbling down to the point of her chin.

“YOU DID THIS TO ME!”

Abby’s face slowly dissolved into his own, and he screamed a silent death knell as imagined being dragged to the ground and covered by rats and drifting snow.

But then the cold shock of what was in his pocket ripped him back to reality.

The car keys! … I’ve got them!

His hand trembled out of control as he unlocked the car door, swung it open, and flopped onto the front seat. The sudden glare of the dome light stung his eyes, and he almost screamed when he caught a glimpse of his face in the rearview mirror. It looked as pale and rotted as Abby’s.

He slammed the car door shut, but something stopped it from closing tightly. Down by his feet, he heard a loud squawk. When he opened the door a crack, enough to turn the dome light back on, he saw that the door had crushed the skull of one rat that had scrambled up into the car.

“Almost, you bastard!” John hissed as he kicked the dead rat out onto the snow.

He had time to swing the door out and yank it shut before the rest of the rats slammed into it. In a sudden and furious barrage, the rats hurled themselves against the car, their claws scraping the car’s side and roof like a sudden blast of hail.

“Not tonight, you bastards!” John shouted with maniacal glee.

He stuck the key into the ignition, praying silently that the car would start.

The engine cranked loudly, almost died, and then caught. John pushed the accelerator down hard and let the engine roar.

The car was buffeted by strong gusts of wind. From every side came the heavy thumping sounds of rats bouncing off the metal and glass. Pumping the gas pedal, John let the engine warm up. He didn’t want to kill it now. Then, snapping on the headlights, he popped the shift into gear. The windshield was covered with heavy, black bodies, but these were whisked aside when he turned on the windshield wipers. With tires spinning wildly in the deep snow, the car shifting from side to side, John turned the car around and drove as fast as he dared back to the house. The only thing on his mind was, even if he ended up dying from these rat bites, he had to warn Julia and Bri.

II

Julia was crazy with worry after John left. She tried — unsuccessfully — to hide it from Bri, and the two of them, not knowing what else to do, sat at the kitchen table, their attention fastened on the telephone. An hour — which felt more like twenty hours — later, the harsh ringing of the phone made them both jump and shriek with surprise. Trembling, dreading what this call would be, Julia grabbed the phone.

“Yes,” she said breathlessly.

“Julia? Hey, it’s Randy,” the voice on the phone said. “Did I call at a bad time?”

“No — I ...” But that was all she could say.

“Well, uh, look — I don’t know if John mentioned this to you,” Randy went on, “but he and I had lunch today and I was — uh, I’d like to talk to him if he ain’t busy.”

Julia glanced at Bri, her eyes signaling her helplessness.

“Julia?” Randy said. “Can I talk to John?”

“He ... umm, he’s not home,” Julia said when she was unable to come up with a convincing lie.

“He went out? On a night like this?” Randy said. “Where the hell’d he go?”

“I don’t know,” Julia replied as a flood of tears spilled from her eyes. “He got a phone call and said it was a wrong number, but then he left.”

“He didn’t say who the call was from?” Randy asked.

Biting her lower lip, Julia shook her head.

“No — he said it was someone asking for ... I think he said ‘Sally.’”

“Sally … Sally Curry?” Randy said.

“That’s the name.” Julia swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Why? What do you know about it?”

There was a long pause at Randy’s end of the line. Then his voice, low and tentative, said, “I don’t know how much — if anything — you know about what’s going on, but today at lunch, I mentioned Sally Curry to John.”

“Who is she?” Julia shouted, filled with a sudden flash of panic. “What the hell is going on?”

“Sally Curry’s the sister of John’s old girlfriend, Abby,” Randy said softly. “But when we were talking about her, I was gonna tell John I heard that Sally had died. Bone cancer, I think.”

“Why would someone call here asking for her?”

The queasiness in her stomach was worse, and she feared she would throw up if she didn’t find out what the hell was going on.

“I have no idea,” Randy said, keeping his voice mild and controlled. “Look, Julia, are you all right? If you want, I can come over until John gets home.”

Julia’s eyes locked onto Bri’s. As much as she wanted to push aside the swelling tide of panic, she couldn’t. In the core of her soul, she knew that something was desperately wrong with John … and maybe them.

“That’s not necessary,” Julia said after a long pause. “It’s not safe to be out in a storm like this, and, anyway” — she forced a lilt into her voice that she didn’t feel —”I’m sure John will be home soon.”

“You’re sure?” Randy said. “I don’t want you worrying yourself sick.”

“I’m sure,” Julia replied.

“Call me as soon as he gets home, ‘kay?”

“I promise,” Julia said. “‘Bye-bye.”

Julia carefully replaced the phone on the hook and took a deep, dry breath. She didn’t want to turn around, fearful of letting Bri see her so shattered, so uncertain.

“Who was that?” Bri asked, her voice trembling with suppressed fear. “Is Dad all right? He didn’t have an accident, did he?”

Julia was about to answer her, but she and Bri both screamed when John suddenly burst through the kitchen door. At first, neither of them recognized this horrible, bloodied person. Even after he called out their names, his bleeding face and hands and his shredded coat were unrecognizable. His eyes … the wild, crazy look in his eyes sent spikes of terror through both of them.

“She’s back! ... Abby’s back!” John wailed, his throat so raw he didn’t sound like himself. “She isn’t dead! Not anymore!”

Grabbing Julia by both arms, he shook her wildly, staring crazily at her.

He’s out of his mind! Julia thought, torn between pity for him and fear for her own and Bri’s safety. He’s been drinking, and he’s out of his mind.

“I saw her! She was at the barn! Haskins’ barn!” John was panting heavily, his face close to hers. His breath washed over her, and she was surprised that she didn’t smell alcohol.

“What are you talking about? Calm down” Julia said, trying to sound rational, but looking at him unnerved her. She knew Bri was watching them in stark, silent terror. After glancing over her shoulder at her daughter — and seeing her own shock and horror mirrored in her face — Julia turned to John. Her mind frantically searched for something she could do. It was pitch black outside … in the middle of a blizzard … and they were alone in the house with a madman.

“We’ve got to get out of here! Now!” John shouted. “We’ve got to get off the island! That’s it. She can’t leave the island! She couldn’t! Otherwise, she would have done something to me before now! She must be trapped here. Come on! Get your coats! We’ve got to leave!”

“We aren’t going anywhere except to a hospital,” Julia said. “Look at these cuts. Bri, call the —”

“You don’t understand!” John shouted. “I’ve seen her, and she’s coming here!”

“Who? Who’s coming?”

“Abby ... Abby Snow!”

“Your girlfriend from high school?” Julia shook her head, trying to push aside her panic and confusion, and think rationally. “You or Randy said she didn’t live here anymore. I was just talking to Randy on the phone, and he said something about Abby’s sister —”

“It’s not her sister!” John shouted, flecks of foam flying from his mouth. “It’s her! Abby!”

“But you said Abby was —”

“She is dead!” John yelled, his bloodshot eyes bulging from his head. “She killed herself! She hanged herself in the barn, and when I found her, I — I buried her. But now she’s come back!”

“Jesus Christ, John. Get a grip,” Julia said. “Do you hear what you’re saying?” There was a trace of calmness in her voice, but she didn’t feel it. All she could think was, John is crazy — dangerously crazy — and he could turn whatever the hell he’s thinking on us.

Hurt us.

Maybe even kill us.

“I saw her ... in Haskins’ barn! You’ve got to believe me!”

With that, he ran to the front hall closet, grabbed Julia’s and Bri’s winter coats, and rushed back into the kitchen.

“Put these on!”

All this time, Bri had been standing by the kitchen table, both hands covering her mouth so she wouldn’t scream. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing, and she was too frightened to say or do anything.

“Take it!” John shouted at her, shoving her coat into her hands. “Will you do what you’re told, for Christ’s sake? She’s coming!”

Thinking the only way they would be safe was to do what he said, Julia cast a quick glance at Bri and nodded, signaling for her to put on her coat.

“Get your hats and gloves, too,” John commanded as he darted over to the kitchen window and looked out at the storm. Snow was streaking past the streetlight, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that Abby was out there and coming steadily closer.

“John,” Julia said mildly. “You’re cut up pretty bad. You’re hurt. Sit down, and let me take a look at those wounds? How did this happen?”

As she spoke, she pulled on her coat and tucked her hair up under her woolen hat.

“We don’t have time,” John shouted at her. “She’s gonna be here any —”

“Audrey?” Bri said suddenly, turning around as a dark figure filled the living room doorway. “What are you …?”

The question was barely out of her mouth when the figure glided into the glaring light of the kitchen. Bri saw Audrey’s face clearly. It was a sickly gray that matched the color of her heavy wool sweater. Her long, dark hair was tangled and knotted, caked with snow and ice around her shoulders. But it was the side of her face that sent blinding terror singing along Bri’s nerves. Long strips of skin hung in loose flaps from her cheek, exposing pale bone beneath. Bri’s hands covering her mouth muffled the piercing scream she let out.

“Oh, Christ!” John shouted. Standing by the kitchen sink, his face turned a sickly white.

Julia looked at the horror facing them. She immediately recognized the face and hair. This was the same person she had seen swimming alongside Randy’s boat the day they had gone lobstering.

I didn’t imagine it!

“You didn’t honestly think you could get away from me, did you?” Abby said in low, even tones. Her voice was curiously muffled and, as she spoke, clumps of dirt and mold rained onto the linoleum floor.

Abby looked from John to Bri to Julia, her rounded yellow eyes widening as her dead lips twisted into a horrible grin.

“Did you think that?” she said, her voice rising gleefully.

Slowly, she reached out. Her arms were pale and thin; her fingernails yellowed and cracked and crusted with dirt.

“But you realize, I hope, all of you have to die! All four of you!”

Instinctively, Julia’s hands went down to her stomach in a protective gesture.

“No!” Julia said, thinking no matter who or what this horrible vision was, she would do anything and everything to protect her unborn child.

“Oh, yes ... You will all die,” Abby said, followed by a mocking laugh. “It has to be that way!”

The family stood frozen in place, looking unbelievingly as Abby shifted slowly toward John. When she waved her hands, her fingernails made tiny clicking sounds that sounded like insects as she raised her hands level to his throat.

Suddenly Bri became aware of a low, trembling sound … barely audible below the howling of the wind whipping around the house. It sounded like … organ music.

“The church wood,” she whispered so softly no one could hear her.

But Abby —

Audrey!

— turned and looked at her over her shoulder and laughed.

John started backing away as Abby turned to him again and continued moving foward. As she got closer, a drafty chill washed over him. The cold reached into his muscles, freezing muscles and nerves.

“Starting with you,” Abby said, glaring balefully at John, her shuffling steps bringing her closer.

Neither Bri nor Julia could move. They watched in absolute terror as the strains of organ music rose.

“Catch!” John shouted. “Get the hell out of here!”

He spun around and lobbed the car keys to Julia, who surprised herself when she caught them on reflex.

Abby tilted her head back, exposing the rotten gray flesh of her neck, and let out a wild, warbling laugh.

“As if that will do you any good! … Killer! … Murderer!”

With a sudden burst of speed, John moved around the kitchen table and then headed into the living room. Abby’s face contorted into a wild expression of anger and hatred as she wheeled around and went after him. In the flurry of activity, Julia grabbed Bri by the arm and shook her.

“Go on! Get into the car!” she yelled, giving her such a rough push toward the door it almost knocked her down.

Numbed by what she had seen, Bri stumbled across the kitchen floor, swung the door open wide, and stepped out into the snow. A frigid blast of air and snow swept into the kitchen, but the whistling sound of the wind and the pealing organ music didn’t mask the sounds coming from the living room. Julia ran to the living room doorway and looked on in stunned horror.

John was slowly backing away from Abby as she steadily, unrelentingly approached him. Her arms waved in wild circles over her head, and everything in the living room — all the furniture and rugs and pictures on the walls — were spinning and tumbling around as if caught in a tornado. The organ music throbbed and pulsated with a weird Doppler effect, making Julia feel dizzy.

Suddenly there was an ear-shattering crash as something — Julia couldn’t see what — careened through the picture window. Snow came howling into the room like a leaping wolf and started sweeping around the raging circle of flying furniture.

“Get the hell out of here!” John shouted when he saw Julia in the doorway.

She could barely hear his voice above the insane roaring in the living room. He held his arms up protectively and ducked as a footstool flew past his head,

Abby glanced over her shoulder at Julia and smiled. Pointing at her, she shouted, “You’re next!”

With that, Abby thrush her hands forward as if against great resistance. The motion made Julia think she was pantomiming trying to close — or open — an unyielding door. The organ music shot up the scale until it was an irritating, high-pitched buzz. John was yanked back, his arms and legs flopping in the air as though some unseen person had grabbed him by the coat collar and tugged him. He flipped over, and with his legs aimed up at the ceiling, he flew through the gaping hole in the picture window.

For an instant, Julia thought he had been sucked outside, but then she saw that he hadn’t made it. His legs had snagged onto the fang-like edges of broken glass. With a horrified scream, she watched as his full weight came down on the inverted spikes of glass that stuck like spears through his stomach.

“No!” Julia screamed, only distantly aware that it was her own voice.

Through the spiral of airborne furniture and snow, she saw John’s lifeless body impaled on the daggers of glass. There was a loud crunching sound as slivers of glass broke beneath his weight. Blood as black as India ink gushed from underneath him and ran down the glass and stained the living room carpet.

As Abby lowered her hands, the furniture crashed to the floor in a wild jumble. Turning to Julia, a wild gleam shined in her eyes, but there was also a trace of …

What?

Exhaustion, Julia thought.

That took a lot of her strength.

Abby’s arms sagged, and her head drooped.

She’s exhausted,, Julia thought. She’s losing her power!

“You’ll … be ... next,” Abby rasped, her voice distant and hollow as she raised her hand and pointed a bony finger at Julia. “You and that bastard child you’re carrying!”

Darkness enveloped Abby, sweeping over her like a dark wing.

Then, in an instant, she was gone.

For a stunned moment, Julia stood there staring in complete shock at the devastation in the living room. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the motionless body of her husband, hanging halfway out through the hole in the window. Already, his body was covered with drifting snow. One of his legs dangling into the living room was still twitching. His boot made a tap-tap sound on the floor like a distant drum. By the dim light coming from the kitchen, she could see large red splotches soaking into the snow.

John’s dead, she thought. Whatever else happened, that is real!

“No ... no,” she said in a deep-throated wail as her mind tried to absorb what she had witnessed. She started backing away, knowing there was nothing she could do. John was dead, and if Abby — whatever in the name of Christ she was — had the power to return, Julia knew she would make good her threat to kill them all.

She suddenly became aware that she had been clutching the keys John had thrown to her. One sharp edge had cut into the heel of her hand, and a thin stream of blood was dripping onto the floor. Still feeling stunned, numb with disbelief that any of this could be happening, she raised her hand and looked at the keys, only distantly aware of what they were and what they might mean.

Suddenly, it hit her.

Uttering a low whimper, she ran from the living room, through the kitchen, and out to the car. Her hands fumbled to open the door on the driver’s side. Then she dropped onto the car seat.

“What … what happened?” Bri asked, her eyes sparkling circles of fear. Her voice hit Julia’s ears with a distant, metallic rattle.

“Your father’s —”

She gulped a breath of air and swallowed, wincing at the pain in her throat.

“He’s dead.”

All around the car, wind and snow spun. Even in the short time since John had gotten home —

When was that? Julia wondered vacantly. A lifetime ago …

— snow had covered the windshield, freezing to ice where the windshield was still warm and had melted it. Julia had a curious sense of being disembodied as she slipped the key into the ignition and started the car. The windshield wipers scraped loudly over the glass as they pushed aside the accumulated snow. Julia snapped on the headlights but could see nothing but a wall of falling snow in front of her.

“You’ll be next.”

The voice echoed in her mind like words shouted into a canyon.

“You and that bastard child you’re carrying.”

Shaking her head and gritting her teeth, Julia looked at her daughter, aware that she was crying and trembling. Low, tortured moans vibrated above the sounds of the storm. As she looked at Bri, though, something else clicked in Julia’s mind — the only thing, in this explosion of insanity, that made any sense.

“Come on,” Julia said as she gunned the engine. “We’ve got to get off this island!”

“Who — what was that?” Bri looked at her mother as tears streamed down her face. “I ... I thought she was my friend … Audrey! What the hell is she?”

She crumpled forward, covering her face with both hands and cried out her misery and confusion.

“I haven’t got the faintest goddamned idea,” Julia said as she slipped the car into reverse and started backing slowly out of the driveway. The wheels spun in the deep snow, and the tail end of the car swinging back and forth as Julia tugged to keep moving. She got to what had to be the road — with snow this deep, there was no telling — and shifted into drive. Slowly, carefully, she eased down on the accelerator, thinking the last thing she wanted now was to have an accident.

“How could she do that?” Bri asked, her voice muffled by her hands over her face. “How could she appear like that and ... and make those things happen?”

She couldn’t bring herself to say, And how could she kill Daddy?

Julia was chewing her lower lip as she concentrated on her driving.

Nothing she had seen in the house made any sense, but it was real — it had happened. And now, whatever may have happened in the house didn’t matter. They had to get to safety. If John was right, they would be safe if they got off the island. They had to try. Normally, that wouldn’t have been much of a problem, but with two miles of snow-covered road that already reached above the car’s wheel wells and whiteout conditions, the bridge to the mainland may as well have been a hundred miles away.

The headlights made two solid cones of yellow light as they pushed against the onrushing snow. The snow driving straight at them created the weird illusion that they were moving fast even when the speedometer registered less than ten miles per hour. No matter what speed Julia drove, the wipers couldn’t keep the windshield clear for more than a second or two. She drove hunched over the steering wheel, playing it easily back and forth as she used the streetlights — nothing more than hazy blue globes — to keep on the road.

If only a town snowplow would go by, she thought; but if one did, and if she managed to stop it and talk to the driver, what would she tell him?

My husband’s dead …and we have to get off the island … The ghost of a dead girl is trying to kill my daughter …and me …and my unborn child … My husband’s at the house … dead!

Julia hissed nervously under her breath, trying to rationalize the night’s events, but absolutely nothing made sense.

For a panicked instant, she thought she had missed a turn and was driving along Shore Road, the long way around. But then she passed Pottle’s store and realized they had driven a little more than half mile from their house. All around the car, all she could see were white streaks of wind-whipped snow against a solid black night. Below the steady rumble of the car’s engine, the only sound was the howling wind blowing in off the ocean and bulldozing into the car with hammer-like gusts.

Suddenly something shifted in the snow ahead of her.

Julia’s foot went to the brake, but she caught herself before she pressed down too hard and sent the car into a spin. With a few quick taps, she pumped the brakes to slow down and then screamed when a face surrounded by wind-torn black hair shot out of the night at her.

“Jesus!” Julia shouted, her hands clutching the steering wheel so hard the palms of her hands ached.

Abby flew out of the storm, straight at the car, her mouth open wide and her eyes glowing wickedly.

Julia flinched back and prepared for the heavy thud of the body against the car, but before the silently screaming face, underlit by the headlights, zipped up over the car roof and then was gone.

Bri cowered on the car seat, her knees drawn up in front of her. Without a word, Julia pressed down on the gas pedal harder.

“You’ll be next! … You and that bastard child you’re carrying!”

The words rang in her memory as clearly as if the figure flying over the car had screamed them in passing. The wind whistled shrilly, like voices joining in chorus.

Gritting her teeth, Julia tried to steady her nerves and hold the road. Her last and only hope was that John had been right … that this thing — whatever it was — wouldn’t be able to cross the water and follow them to the mainland.

Maybe Abby was trapped on the island.

How can any of this be happening?

The road unwound slowly as the car, enveloped by blinding snow, swerved and slewed its way down the road. The only reprieve was when they got around to the landward side of the island. Visibility improved slightly, now that the wind was coming at them from behind. It was impossible for Julia to know exactly where they were, and her fear now became, What if I miss the turn for the bridge? … What if I drive past it?

Aware that Bri was still cringing on the seat beside her, crying, Julia reached out to comfort her. Bri flinched at her mother’s touch and screamed.

“You’ve got to pull yourself together,” Julia said sharply. “Wipe your eyes and keep looking ahead. I need all the help I can get if we’re going to get out of this alive. Tell me when you can see the bridge.”

Sniffing back her tears, Bri leaned forward and peered into the dark night ahead. Every streetlight they passed had a watery halo around it that broke into dazzling light fragments. She kept wiping her eyes with the back of her glove, watching the lights dissolve into spears of fading color.

Pointing off to the left, she suddenly shouted, “There it — No! Maybe not.”

“Jesus, Bri! Don’t shout,” Julia said as she jerked the steering wheel to the left, then quickly corrected herself. Her hands were throbbing with pain from gripping the steering wheel. A low, steady crunch-crunch sound filled her head, and she was vaguely aware that she was grinding her teeth from side to side. Ice thickened on the windshield, and when the wipers tried to whisk it away, they smeared it into wide, arced streaks.

“We’d better get to that bridge pretty damned fast,” Julia whispered under her breath. “‘Cause if we don’t ...”

Then, up ahead — she and Bri saw it at the same instant. The snow-filled turn onto the bridge, barely illuminated by the streetlight. They had almost driven past it, but Julia hit the brakes hard …harder than she wanted to … to avoid missing it entirely. She played the steering wheel back and forth to compensate, but the wheels didn’t have any grip on the snow-packed road. Before she could stop it, they were spinning out of control, heading for the edge of the road.

“Hold on,” Julia said, fighting to keep her voice calm.

The tail end of the car started swinging around in a slow, stomach-spinning glide. Slush splattered the underside of the car, and in the glow of the dashboard lights, she saw the stark fright on Bri’s face.

“We’ll be all right … we’ll be all —”

But that was all she could say.

Suddenly Abby was there. Her arms in front of her like a diver, she swept out of the darkness surrounding the bridge and slammed into the windshield. In an ear-shattering explosion of glass, she burst through into the front seat. Julia tried to scream as Abby’s frigid hands closed around her throat and choked her.

As the car shot off the road and down toward the frozen bay, the only thing Julia was aware of was the utter blackness … infinitely darker than the surrounding night that closed over her like a tidal wave. And then there came a long, trailing scream that could have been Bri’s —

— or my own.

TWENTY-FOUR

Across the Bay

I

“ ... don’t die! ... Please … don’t die! ...”

The words came to her as though someone —

Who? ... How can I see who it is in this pitch-dark?

— was speaking to her from the end of a long tunnel.

She sensed a rough rocking motion and thought crazily that she was on a boat at sea. She expected at any moment to feel icy waves splash over her face.

Maybe Randy Chadwick’s lobster boat, she thought. But how can I tell where I am if I can’t see?

“Come on, Mom! … Wake up! Say something! … Please, don’t die! …”

“… I’m …”

That single word seemed to originate at the bottoms of her feet and rip through her body to her mouth like a chainsaw blade, tearing and burning her flesh as it went. She was distantly aware that trying to speak caused intense pain, but with that came the realization — If I can feel pain … I’m alive ... I’m not dead .

“Come on, Mom!”

In a tiny corner of her mind, she finally recognized Bri’s voice, calling her back from the night-stained edge of … what?

She saw herself as nothing more than a feather being sucked into a whirling, black vortex.

Although the movement sent spikes of pain racing through every cell of her body, she managed to shake her head from side to side. Something soft and cold yielded beneath her head when she rolled I from side to side.

What is that? she wondered. Is that snow ... or the crushed pulp of my skull?

She opened her eyes, but at first could see nothing.

She might as well have left her eyes shut.

Maybe she had.

She was surrounded by darkness, and then the darkness shifted with a bluish, grainy look … like an old-fashioned photograph.

After a few more seconds, she realized that she was looking up at snow blowing past a streetlight overhead. With that realization came the sudden awareness of being cold ... freezing cold.

“Mom? … Mom!” Bri shouted.

Julia forced her eyes to focus, and finally she could make out a dark shape leaning over her.

It’s Bri … It has to be Bri!

Her daughter’s eyes glowed unnaturally bright — twin spots of glistening blue that gushed tears. For a moment, Bri forgot all about the raw wind tearing at her face or the horror she had felt when the car spun out of control and rolled down the hill toward the bay and that horrible thing that looked like Audrey —

But couldn’t be!

— careened through the windshield and wrapped its hands around her mother’s throat. A stomach-dropping emptiness filled her when she recalled her mother’s words:

“Your father’s dead!”

And now, if my mother dies, too …

As she slowly came around, Julia frantically thought, It didn’t happen! … None of it happened … It was all a dream!

But her mind cleared, and she became aware that she was lying on her back in several feet of snow. Something had happened … something bad.

She wondered if, when her car skidded off the road, in the instant before blacking out she had imagined everything that had happened back at the house.

Or had it … could it really have happened?

John wasn’t dead … and that thing Bri called Audrey ... it couldn’t possibly have been real …

“What the … What happened?” Julia said, struggling to shift up onto her elbows. The snowy night came more clearly into focus, and she shivered wildly.

“You skidded off the road,” Bri said tightly. “You don’t remember?”

With a sudden sickening rush, Julia’s mind replayed the last few seconds before the crash. She saw the face of that girl … that horrible skeleton face, loom out of the darkness at her over me hood of the car. She clearly remembered hearing the windshield exploding inward, the glass sparkling with diamond-like brilliance. She saw those bony hands reach out for her … and feel them wrap around her neck … and squeeze.

Involuntarily, she reached to her throat where the flesh felt like it had been seared by red-hot irons. Even through her gloves, the skin felt hot and raw.

“Is … she … still here?” Julia asked.

Forgetting the pain in her legs and back, she lurched to her feet, brushing the snow off herself. Grabbing Bri by the arm, Julia started to pull her after her and shouted, “Come on! We have to get out of here! We have to get off the island!”

The streetlight was at the beginning of the bridge — their escape route.

The family car had plowed over the embankment and down into the smooth, deep snow beside the frozen bay. The car had rolled to one side and was tipped forward, its tail-end aimed straight up into the air. The taillights glowed a baleful red, staining the snow like blood.

“How did you — ?” Julia started to say, but Bri interrupted her.

“The car was going real slow when we went off the road. The deep snow slowed it down. I jumped out and, once it stopped, came down to get you out. Good thing it stopped, too, ‘cause we were a couple of feet away from going into the water.”

“What about … her?” Julia said, still rubbing the hot ring around her throat. She found it difficult to swallow, and breathing the freezing air was painful.

Bri shrugged.

“She wasn’t there when I got to the car,” she said. “I don’t know where she went … or if she was even there.”

“Jesus Christ!” Julia muttered. “She’s still around somewhere … Come on. Let’s get the hell across that bridge!”

Struggling through snow that was well over her knees, she started climbing up the embankment with Bri at her side. The grade was steep, and they kept slipping back down almost as much as they climbed, but eventually Julia got a grip on one of the railings and pulled Bri up after her. As soon as they were out of the shelter of the bridge embankment, the full force of the storm slammed into them and almost blew them back down.

“Hold on to my hand so we don’t get separated,” Julia said.

She had to shout to be heard above the roar of the wind. Snow, like tiny shotgun pellets, stung as it whipped into her face. She snuggled deep into the collar of her coat, and Bri’s reply was lost in the sound of snow splattering against her coat.

It was obvious the town plows hadn’t been by for some time. The road across the bridge wasn’t any clearer than the road they’d been on. But the bridge would take them across water — to safety.

As they struggled down the road, Julia became aware of a pain deep inside her gut. At first she gave it, like the other pains, little credence; but she suddenly realized that this pain was different.

This one was …

The baby!

Oh, God — please, no!

Don’t let me lose my baby, too!

Slowing her pace, she led the way across the bridge, tugging Bri’s hand. Above them, the storm wailed as it vibrated the bridge’s suspension cables. The line of lights along the bridge receded in the snow until they disappeared into blue puffs of lights. The wind off the ocean was razor sharp. It sliced into their backs, pushing them roughly forward.

At first, Julia didn’t care if they stayed on the snow-blanketed pedestrian sidewalk or not. If a car or truck, maybe a town snowplow, came along, they could flag it down. But then she realized that a driver might not see them until it was too late, so they held close to the side of the bridge, using the outside rail as a guide through the blinding snow.

Although it was difficult to see it overhead, they passed by one of the two support towers. The blinking red lights at the top were lost to sight in the storm, but this told Julia they were a little more than halfway across the bridge. It felt as if they had already walked miles. Wet snow dragged at their legs. The wind, pushing at their backs like a schoolyard bully, threatened to knock them down with every other step. Through the curtain of falling snow, Julia couldn’t see the black hump of the mainland yet, but knowing it — and safety — were up ahead gave her strength and courage.

Suddenly, she jerked to an abrupt stop. Bri, who had been mindlessly chugging along beside her, knocked into her shoulder.

“What is it?” Bri asked. Her words were whisked away by the wind as soon as they left her mouth.

Unable to speak, Julia pointed down the length of the bridge.

At first, Bri couldn’t see anything through the snow, but then, beneath one of the lights, she saw a slumped black shape.

It looked like a person, hunched over and back to them, peering out over the bay, but that was impossible … ridiculous! No one would be out sightseeing on a night like this.

Julia started moving forward again, taking short, cautious steps closer to the figure. She was wishing …praying it was nothing more than an unpainted spot on one of the bridge’s trusses … or a windblown piece of trash that had gotten hung up in the railing.

It couldn’t possibly be …

“No!” Julia said, gasping when the figure —

Yes! It’s a person!

— slowly turned and looked in their direction.

Was this some local nutcase who liked to come out onto the bridge during a storm and watch the snow blow across the frozen bay? she wondered. Or was this precisely the person —

The thing

— she and Bri were fleeing?

Julia didn’t stop walking. With Bri beside her, clutching her hand, she kept moving forward. They both screamed in unison when the figure raised its arm over its head and shrieked at them, its voice piercing the night like a bullet.

“You can’t get away! … Not that easily!”

Both Julia and Bri saw the figure clearly now as it started toward them.

It was Abby!

The wind caught her heavy snow-caked sweater and made it snap viciously at her hips. The long strands of black hair seemed to rise and twist, framing her pale face like an explosion of writhing black snakes.

“You can’t get away!” Abby wailed, her voice rising and falling like a siren in the wind. Burning red sparks flashed from the cores of her eyes as she came closer … closer.

Frozen with fear, Julia started to back up as the horrible skull-faced figure closed the distance between them. Her heart pounded like a jackhammer in her ears, drowning out everything except the shrill wail of the hideous creature.

And then an idea struck her.

It was desperate, but right now she was past the point of rationally analyzing anything.

Turning to Bri, she shouted, “Jump!”

“What?”

“I said jump!”

“Are you crazy?”

“Do it! Now!”

She pushed her daughter toward the railing.

“Can’t you see? She doesn’t have as much power this close to the water! It’s our only chance.”

“The fall will kill us!” Bri yelled. “What if we fall through the ice?”

“It’s frozen solid,” Julia gasped. “And the snow ... it’s deep enough. It’ll cushion the impact. Jump! … Now!”

After casting one last, frightened glance at the thing approaching them, Bri — against her better judgment — clambered up onto the iron railing. Needle-sharp blasts of wind tried to knock her back, but she gripped the railing, crouched, and then — trying to empty her mind — leaped out into the night and then plummeted into the darkness.

Julia watched as the blackness below the bridge swallowed her daughter. Her slowly diminishing scream trailed back to her out of the storm like an unspooling ribbon …

And then it was gone.

As she turned to face the creature, Julia couldn’t shake the terrifying thought that she would never see Bri again … alive, anyway.

Closer and closer Abby came, her arms upraised, her face glowing with a bone-chilling light. Her mouth was opened wide as if she intended to eat her.

Trembling with fear and the cold, Julia backed up, giving ground. The overhead light cast a cold wash across Abby’s face, which loomed ever closer, revealing with hallucinatory sharpness cold, staring eyes … flaps of shredded, rotting skin … coils of black hair …and glistening bone.

“She’ll be next,” the horrifying visage said. “After I’m through with you!”

Her lips barely moved, and she looked more like a talking skull than any semblance of human being.

“First, though, you … and the bastard child you’re carrying!”

Abby darted forward like a cobra, but Julia ducked to one side and grabbed the bridge railing. With a nimbleness and strength that surprised her, she vaulted over the railing and then was falling down … down into the darkness beneath the bridge.

The landing came sooner than she expected, and was surprisingly hard. As the cushion of snow swallowed her, she let out one violent grunt. Then she scrambled to her feet, trying to get her bearings. Using the black slash of the bridge above her as a guide, she started plowing through the heavily drifted snow over the frozen bay toward the mainland.

“Bri! … Where are you, Bri?” Julia shouted as she staggered forward, tripping in the deep snow. She could see only a few feet in front of her, and there was no trace of Bri anywhere. The wind tore underneath the bridge, making a low-throated howl.

“Bri!’ she wailed. “If you can hear me, head for the mainland! … Head for the mainland!”

II

For the second or two that she was falling, Bri had the sensation that the storm winds has scooped her up into the dark, roiling storm clouds, and she was flying. She expected to look down and see the bridge and the entire island below her as she sailed away, tossing and turning like a dandelion puff in the wind. The jarring shock of impact hit her like a hammer, and for a while — she had no idea how long — she lay crumpled with her face in the snow. She lay there, the wind knocked out of her as brilliant zigzags of light traced across her inner eye. Every time she took a breath, her lungs felt as though they had frozen solid and wouldn’t absorb any oxygen. She had landed on her left side, but after struggling to her feet, a quick check proved that she hadn’t broken any bones.

Snuggling deep into her collar, she looked up at the bridge.

Even the nearest light was now almost entirely masked by falling snow. She waited, expecting to see — or at least hear — her mother when she jumped, but all she could see or hear was the storm as it swept across land and ocean. Thick pellets of snow rattled like marbles on the hard crust of snow.

“Mom!” she cried, cupping her hands to her face and looking up. “Where are you?”

The storm pressed her voice back in on her, making her feel like she was locked in a tiny room. The raging night was like a cold, stinging cloak wrapped around her. She laughed when she thought how strange it was to experience claustrophobia out in the middle of the frozen bay, and she realized that laughing in a situation like this probably meant she was losing her grip on reality.

But then again — after everything she had seen and been through — what other choice was there other than to slip a few gears!

“Mom!” she wailed, listening to how feeble her voice sounded against the heavy thrumming of the storm.

Finally, convinced that her mother had already jumped — unheard and unseen — and must be heading toward the mainland, she started out across the snow-covered ice.

The only alternative was too terrible to contemplate. Audrey had gotten her mother … and was now coming after her.

As she plowed through the snow, hip-deep in places, Bri’s body was tensed as she expected, any second now, to plunge through the ice and into the frigid bay. As much as she tried not to think it, she couldn’t get what had happened to her father back at her Granddad’s house.

Is he really dead?… How can he be dead just like that? … like Granddad … And now maybe Mom’s dead?

She remembered what her father had said about the time he and his friend Randy had crossed the frozen bay.

“You fall in, and you’ll be dead in a minute!”

With that came the memory of when she had followed Audrey along the rocks at Indian Point and had fallen into the ocean. For the first time, she realized something with a stomach-churning jolt.

“She wanted me to drown!” she whispered into the wind. “She wanted me to fall in and drown! She was out to kill us even then!”

As if in answer, a gust of wind echoed on the underside of the bridge and seemed to say … “You’ll … die … now! …”

All along, Audrey has been trying to hurt me … to play on how lonely I was … and use it to get to my father … to get to my whole family!

With that came the bitter realization that it might have worked.

If she and her mother didn’t get out of this blizzard — and soon — they would both die of exposure, and Audrey would have her revenge.

“Mom! …” she wailed, pushing blindly forward through the snow, her face numb from exposure. Sweat dripped down her back inside her coat. Her face was flushed, and she knew she was going to die soon if she didn’t find her mother and some shelter soon.

Then, below the high-pitched hiss of the snow as it sliced across the frozen bay and the deep-throated moaning sounds coming from beneath the bridge, Bri heard something else — a low, vibrating rumble.

Is that thunder during a snowstorm? she wondered, looking frantically up at the sky. Tatters of clouds and shifting snow created an oddly disorienting view.

Bri tensed, waiting for the rumbling sound to be repeated. Everywhere around her, the snow spun madly, and everywhere she looked, she could imagine seeing someone —

My mother ... or Audrey?

— lurching across the frozen bay toward her.

For several drawn-out seconds, the sound wasn’t repeated, but then it came again, and it almost knocked Bri off her feet. Beneath her, the ice vibrated as a long, steady rumbling sound built in intensity. Within seconds, it was as deafening as a roaring cannon shot.

The ice is breaking up!

She crouched low, holding her arms out wide for balance. It could have been her nerves or maybe her leg muscles going into spasm, but she thought she could feel the ice subtly heaving.

The tides … That’s what’s doing it … The tides are shifting the ice! … It’s breaking up!

She imagined the ice suddenly heaving upward — hugh blocks and spears of it rearing skyward like mountains — and she saw herself scrambling, trying to find solid footing and then being yanked down into the numbing black water.

You’ll be dead in a minute!

The words of her stepfather rang in her memory like a hammer striking iron.

From some hidden reservoir of strength, she found what she needed to start running. Kicking her legs up high to clear the snow, she took awkward, leaping giant steps toward the mainland.

The bridge is still above me, she told herself. I’ll be safe as long as I stay under it!

The wind tore into her lungs as she ran. The headway she was making didn’t seem worth the effort, though, and she would have quit if the wind had been in her face instead of at her back.

But on she went, struggling to push back her fear, thinking …

If I don’t make it out of here soon, I’m gonna scream and scream and scream until my lungs burst!

She ran blindly now, her breath coming in painful stitches that lanced her side like hot knife blades. When the ice suddenly opened up underneath her feet, she didn’t have enough air left in her lungs to scream … and with the storm raging all around her, her mother, no matter where she was, wouldn’t hear her scream, anyway.

III

Although neither of them knew it, Julia was less than a hundred feet behind Bri. She was also several paces further out into the bay, so she didn’t see the tracks Bri left behind in the snow. Besides, the wind quickly smoothed over any signs of her passing, so the two of them might as well have been a hundred miles apart.

Julia’s overriding concern — besides Bri’s safety — was worrying about the baby she was carrying.

“You’ll be next! ... You and that bastard child you’re carrying!”

“Is it a boy? … Am I going to have a son?” Julia whispered.

She found no pleasure in the thought. The reality of where she was — even if there wasn’t a supernatural creature pursuing her — made her realize she would die of exposure soon — probably within minutes. Her face was already completely numb. If she didn’t make it to the mainland, if she didn’t find warmth and shelter soon, she would die.

And even if she did get out of this alive, would it matter?

Not with John dead!

Not if Bri died!

The storm raged like a wolf pack, howling, hunting her down, and pulling at her as she struggled through the snow alongside the bridge. Her body ached, every muscle cramping, every nerve tingling. She expected any second now to see a darker-than-night shape swoop down at her off the bridge. Her mind was filled with a vibrating, white buzz as she forged ahead, barely conscious of the cold fingers tugging at every inch of her clothes.

The walk stretched out, and Julia began to wonder if there would ever be an end to the frozen bay.

Maybe, she thought with a sudden dash of panic, I’m already dead! … Maybe this will go on forever!

But before the panic raging inside her crested, she looked down at her legs mechanically churning through the snow, her alms pumping to keep her moving, and she knew she wasn’t dead …

Not goddamned yet!

She stumbled several times, pitching face first into the snow, but each cold dash of snow on her face revived her and made her grit her teeth to keep from screaming out as she struggled to stand and keep going. The overhanging black slash of the bridge couldn’t go on forever — it couldn’t. There had to be an end to it, and that end would bring her to the mainland … and safety!

And she would find Bri, she told herself.

She would save herself and her daughter and her unborn baby.

“You’ll be next … You and that bastard child you’re carrying!”

“No way in hell, bitch!” she cried out, even though she could barely hear her own voice above the howling wind.

That bridge can be twenty miles long … two hundred miles long, but as long as I follow it, I’ll be safe … We’ll all be safe …

“We’ll all be safe! ... We’ll all be safe! ...”

The words became a mantra in her mind, but she was barely aware she was chanting them as she walked. In the blindness of her effort, she even crossed Bri’s fresh tracks, less than a minute old, but she never noticed the churned-up snow. When she finally walked past the second of the two bridge tower bases, she knew she was close, and hope — like a faint spark — began to kindle inside her.

“Bri!” she shouted, her voice weak with exhaustion.

She was looking around frantically, lost in the blackout of the snow, when suddenly a loud, roaring explosion knocked her onto her back. She lost any sense of direction as the night around her was filled with a violent surging. Tremendous cracking sounds boomed like cannons in the night, and Julia was vaguely surprised that the darkness wasn’t filled with flashes of light as well.

But she had little time to think. Completely disoriented, she was thrown first to one side, then the other. The earth and sky started rocking wildly back and forth, pitching her around. And then an intense cold grabbed her legs like a shark bite. Only a small part of her rational mind registered her legs were incredibly cold … and wet. And then she was slipping downward, her gloved hands clawing at the tilting ice, trying to find some handhold.

Her legs were useless as she tried to climb up the ever-increasing incline. She couldn’t hold on forever. She realized that the ice was breaking up, and she was going to be in over her head within seconds. Coiling her legs under herself, she waited a split second before pushing off. For a horrifyingly long moment she was sailing through the air — long enough to have the panicked thought that maybe all of this had been a hallucination, and she was still falling from her jump off the bridge — but then she hit the ice hard … and it was level… solid …

Behind her, she watched as a chunk of ice thrust into the air. Snow curled like frozen mist around it, and choppy seawater splashed beneath across the thick ice. Black terror gripped her heart when she considered — only for a moment — how close she had been to drowning.

“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” she shouted, shaking her hands over her head. “You want me dead! But you’re not going to get it! Goddamn you! You’re not!”

She pitched forward into the night, confident now that the mainland was only a few dozen feet away. When she peered into the storm, she was positive she could see the dark slope of a road embankment.

The road … a house … safety …

The hazy yellow glow of a streetlight loomed up out of the darkness, and Julia realized that this one was different — it wasn’t the blue kind they used on the bridge. It was a real streetlight.

She had made it.

With a final burst of energy, she crossed the last stretch of the frozen bay. Tears blurred her vision, and she was cackling with laughter as she scrambled up the hillside and onto solid ground.

It’s all behind me ... everything! … My husband is dead, and ... Bri!

“Bri! … Bri! … Answer me!”

She hurled her words into the throat of the storm. Turning to look back toward the island across the bay, the full force of the snow blasted into her face, choking her, smothering her.

Bri can’t be lost! she thought, wild with fear. She can’t be!

But what if Bri hadn’t been as lucky as she had been?

What if Bri had fallen into the ocean when the ice split open?

With a violent grunt, Julia doubled over as hot pain shot through her abdomen. Her instant thought was, This feels like a birth contraction! But there was also a warm, gushing sensation, as though …

I’m bleeding! ….I’m losing the baby! …

She fell to her knees, convinced that, even though she had made it across the bay, she hadn’t made it far enough. She wasn’t out of the storm, and with her husband dead and maybe Bri dead back there on the ice —

My God! … What if Abby gets her?

— she might just as well die here, hemorrhaging to death in the snow.

“Mom! ...”

The voice came to her from out of the storm … so faint she was sure she had imagined it.

It couldn’t possibly be …

Looking up, she saw the diffused glow of the streetlight and, standing beneath the light was a snow-masked figure.

“Bri! Oh, my God! Bri!”

She struggled to her feet, but the snow tugged at her, holding her back. Still, she forged ahead as the figure by the streetlight moved toward her.

She made it… Bri made it! she thought as tears of joy ran from her eyes and froze on her face.

My baby made it!

They rushed toward each other, each of them slowed by the deep snow and exhaustion. It seemed to take forever to close the distance between them, but finally--amazingly, when they were no more than ten feet apart, Julia shrank back in blinding terror.

She screamed.

Staring at her, her face framed by wind-whipped black hair, was the leering face of Abby!

“No! … No! ... You can’t be!”

Julia staggered back in total disbelief.

How is it possible?

Could John have been wrong? Did Abby’s influence extend off the island as well?

I’m hallucinating! … I’m imagining this! she told herself, but as she stared at Abby’s grinning skull face, the reality sank into the core of her soul, and she knew that death was near.

“What do you want from me?” Julia wailed, falling to her knees in the snow and beating her fists uselessly against her legs.

“What do you want?”

Abby’s dead mouth twitched into a lopsided grin, and her red-rimmed eyes bored into Julia.

“What do I want?” Abby said, her voice low and mocking. “What do I want? Nothing more than your life!”

She pointed a bony forefinger at Julia and then twisted her hand over to make a clenched fist. When she squeezed, her knucklebones stood out in sharp relief.

“I want you and your bastard child to die!”

Raw, burning tears flooded down Julia’s face. Her head felt as though a giant had gripped it and was squeezing until the bones began to crack and collapse inward.

“I never did anything to you,” Julia wailed, her throat stripped raw and sounding like an old woman’s … pitiful … broken.

“No — you never did,” Abby said, bringing her face close to Julia’s. She could feel the arctic blast of her breath on her skin. “You didn’t, but your husband did. His father had to pay. And John had to pay for what he did to me. And now you, your daughter, and your bastard child have to pay!”

“Why?” Julia said, holding her hands out helplessly.

The mention of Bri — that she had to die — told Julia that Bri was still alive somewhere in the storm. With that thought came a flicker of hope.

“Why us, too? John never told me about you. I never even heard your name until Randy Chadwick mentioned you.”

“Your husband killed me!” Abby said, her voice edging into a hollow cackle. “As surely as if he had tied the rope around my neck and pushed me off the hayloft, he killed me and the baby — his baby — inside me! And once I was dead, he tried to hide it! He buried me so no one would know! And I was dead!” Abby’s voice took on a low, mournful tone. “My baby and I were dead!”

“But I never knew,” Julia said. Staring up at Abby with the streetlight behind her made the shadows hiding her face deepen. All Julia could see was the red glow of her eyes, but she forgot all about the raging storm as she looked into the face of death itself and felt its cold, mind-numbing power.

Abby snickered, her laughter like dry, crackling leaves.

“You never knew! … As if that matters.”

“But I didn’t! I never suspected,” Julia cried. “No one knew except John, so …please. Please let us live!”

A sudden cramp made her double over, but Julia maintained eye contact with the horrible thing confronting her.

“I had a baby who wanted to live, too!” Abby shouted, her voice shrieking like the wind. “But my baby died … so yours has to, too!”

Desperate, Julia folded her hands in front of her, pleading. “I can’t help what happened,” she said, feeling emotion drawn up from the pit of her stomach. “No one could. I couldn’t have known then, but if I had ever suspected what John had done, I would have told someone — the authorities. I would have —”

Abby laughed again — low, deep, and hollow. The storm raged around her, alternately hiding and uncovering her. Julia had the disturbing sensation that she was talking to nothing but a figment of her imagination. But then Abby leaned forward and extended her hands, and when her frozen fingers gently caressed Julia’s face, she knew this was not an illusion.

“Get up,” Abby said, her voice low and commanding.

Julia was afraid her legs wouldn’t support her, but she struggled to stand. The wind off the frozen bay hit her in the back like an iron fist.

“You said my daughter had to die,” Julia said, forcing out the words through cracked and numbed lips. “She’s still alive … out there.”

Abby nodded slowly.

“She’s still alive,” she said. “But not for long.”

She held Julia’s face in her hands, and now she brought her face up close to her, meeting her eye to eye. As Julia looked deeply into the cold, red fire inside Abby’s eyes, she felt as though she were standing naked in the raging storm. Every fiber of her being, every shred of her soul was exposed as Abby stared long and hard into her eyes.

“Why does anyone else have to die?” Julia pleaded weakly.

“You have to die because your husband killed me,” Abby said, “and tried to hide it!” She tilted her head back, as though gaining strength from the storm around them. “But I have another idea.”

Looking past Julia, out over the bay, Abby’s eyes scanned the darkness. “I would be willing to let you live — all three of you — under one condition.”

“What?” Julia said, her voice almost a wail. “Tell me! … Anything!”

“Like you, I have a baby inside me … waiting to be born,” Abby said. “When I died, my child died, but its life force is still inside me. Now that my murderer and his father are dead, I’ll let you and your daughter and your baby live if you will allow the life force — the soul of my unborn baby to enter your womb!”

Julia was too stunned to speak. It was unthinkable. She lurched away from Abby so violently she almost lost her balance against the buffeting wind.

“It can be our little deal,” Abby said. In the surrounding darkness, Julia could see her wicked gleaming smile. “Allow the soul of my baby, who never got a chance to be born, to enter your baby … so he will have a chance to live. You do this, and you can all live.”

“No! ... No, I can’t,” Julia stammered.

She was looking straight ahead at Abby, but all around her, the snow was spinning like a dark whirlpool.

“It’s a simple choice,” Abby said, tossing her head back and laughing, high and cruel.

“You have … have no idea what you’re asking,” Julia said, frantic with fear. “I can’t allow my baby to … to —”

“But you can ... and you must,” Abby said, leering at her. “A small part of John will live — a part from the time before he did this to me —”

“I can’t! … I won’t!” Julia shouted.

But the darkness was all around her, tearing and tugging at her like a thousand tiny hands. Abby suddenly swept her arms around as if to embrace her. Screaming, Julia shielded herself with her hands, but instead of the expected impact, nothing more than blinding cold passed through her body. Then thick, cloying darkness surrounded her, pushing her backwards until she tripped and collapsed into the snow. She looked up, focusing on the glow of the streetlight overhead. Then the light exploded into painful shards that sprinkled down around her, piercing her like a million silver nails.

IV

Minutes ... hours ... a lifetime later, Julia came to.

At first, all she could hear was a loud, rumbling roar. Thinking she was still on the ice as it was breaking up, she screamed and scrambled frantically to hold onto something. What she saw, when she opened her eyes, was a man dressed in a heavy winter coat with a woolen hat pulled down over his eyes. Behind him, two huge glowing lights stabbed through spinning snow. Julia’s first thought was that she looking at a UFO. It took her a long time to realize that she was lying on the ground in the path of a Falmouth town snowplow.

“Mrs. Carlson ...?” the man said, leaning close.

With the truck lights flashing behind him, his face was lost in shadow. Julia wanted to scream — and she would have if her throat hadn’t been stripped raw.

“Are you all right?” the man asked. The tone of earnest concern in his voice cut through her panic, and she tried to indicate that she was all right by nodding.

Yes … I’m alive … maybe not all right … but alive …

“My name’s Larry Fire. Folks ‘round here call me Smokey. I, uhh — found your daughter down the road a’piece, n’she —”

“Bri?” Julia forced the words through the shredded flesh of her throat. “Is she — ?”

“She was unconscious when I found her, but she come to,” Smokey said as he patted Julia’s shoulder. “She’s wicked cold ‘n’ scared outta her wits, but she’s in the truck cab, drinkin’ a slug of coffee.”

“She … she’s all right?” Julia said, gasping. “She’s alive?”

The roaring of the storm almost drowned her out, but she felt warmer … safer … She realized the driver had put a coat or blanket over her.

“She’ll be fine,” Smokey said. “Don’t you go frettin’ ‘bout anyone ‘cept yourself.”

“I —”

That was all Julia could say. The events of the night crashed over her like a tidal wave threatening to pull her back out onto the frozen bay and down into the cold, dark water.

“You rest easy there, ma’am,” Smokey said. “I called for an ambulance. It’s on its way.”

Julia sagged back onto the snowy ground. Darkness pressed in on her, rubbing up against her like some gigantic, dangerous animal, but she wasn’t afraid.

“I’ll tell yah,” Smokey said, shaking his head. “‘S a goddamned good thing I saw your daughter when I did. Christ!” He wiped his forehead with the back of his gloved hand. “I came purty damned close to coverin’ her up with the plow. Christ on a crutch, I could hardly see ten feet in front o’ me. Almost didn’t see you lyin’ there in the road, either.” He whistled and shook his head, looking up the length of the road to the bridge.

Bri’s safe, Julia thought, taking hold of that single idea and hanging on to it as if it were her only lifeline.

She didn’t want to struggle anymore.

She didn’t have the strength.

Let the darkness come down now, she thought, satisfied ... What does it matter? … Whatever else happens — or will happen — it’s all okay … Bri’s safe!

EPILOGUE:

Waiting to be Born

I

Spring finally came after one of the hardest winters on record, and after that, summer with temperatures reached record highs throughout most of July and into August. But even after all that time had passed, with autumn returning once again and the trees on Glooscap changing from green to yellow and brown, the sea shifting from brilliant blue to gunmetal gray, neither Julia nor Bri could satisfactorily explain — much less understand and accept — what had happened to them during that January blizzard. Much of what they had been through, Bri — apparently — had blocked out. For that, Julia was silently grateful.

The birth of Nathan Edward Carlson on August twenty-seventh gave them both something to live for — a promise of the future to help assuage the ache of losing both John and Frank. Healing was slow and difficult, but for Julia, at least, there was emotional scar tissue — deep and thick — that would always remain.

As painful as it was, Julia decided not to sell Frank’s house right away and move back to Vermont. In many ways, the decision was taken out of her hands because Dr. Flaherty, her obstetrician, strongly advised her against doing anything that could further jeopardize the baby’s and her health. Although her recovery from the night of the blizzard didn’t require hospitalization, it was slow.

But time, like physical distance, will eventually heal the body and dull at least the sharpest pain. Even before winter was gone, most of the events of the previous January had begun to take on the vagueness of a vivid but fading nightmare. Although Julia never discussed it with Bri, she knew that it had all been more than a bad dream. John’s death had been real … the havoc inside their house had been real … the rolled-over station wagon buried nose-deep in the snow beside the bridge had been real … and the trauma they both had suffered out on the frozen bay that night had been — and still was — real. All that — and more — had been verified by the police and medics when they arrived on scene.

But there were other aspects of their ordeal that only Julia knew about, and they still made her wonder …

The state authorities investigated, and after feeble protestations, Julia accepted their official version of the night’s events — at least in public. What the police pieced together was this.

John, as several people from the Atkins Company could testify, had been increasingly moody and irritable at work. Almost everyone who had been at the New Year’s Eve party commented on how much he had been drinking — heavily enough, so Barry Cummings testified, that his performance at work was affected. Coming home late on the night of the storm, the police concluded, John had started — or continued — drinking and, in a drunken rage, had trashed the house. After threatening Julia and Bri — enough so they fled the house for their own safety — he stumbled and fell through the picture window in the living room, dying almost instantly, bleeding to death from the massive cuts to his lower abdomen. The rest — Julia and Bri’s desperate attempt to get off the island during the blizzard, their subsequent crash and near-fatal attempt to cross the frozen bay, Larry “Smokey” Fire’s finding them — was all pretty self-evident.

As long as I don’t tell them what else I saw and heard out there in the storm, Julia told herself.

As long as I never mention — to anyone — Abby ... or Audrey ... and what she offered me …

Within weeks, the authorities closed the case, ruling the John’s death as “accidental.” There would be no criminal proceedings against Julia, and it was all right if she wanted to leave Maine.

That bad been her intention, to move back to Vermont where she and Bri had friends and support … where they could try to pick up the pieces of their lives … until Dr. Flaherty recommended that she stay put at least until after the baby was born.

With the resilience of the young, Bri bounced back from the physical and emotional trauma of her ordeal in fine form. On the night of the blizzard, she had suffered serious frostbite and had to be hospitalized for a few weeks. For a while, it bad been touch and go. The doctors thought they may have to remove several frostbitten toes, but she recovered fully and by the end of February vacation was back to her usual bright and cheerful self. The only outward physical change was a rather large bleached splotch on her left cheek where tissue and blood vessels had been permanently damaged. If she suffered any long-lasting psychological effects, Julia sure as hell couldn’t tell by her outward appearance or behavior.

It took an immense amount of courage for Julia to stay in Frank’s house — especially alone during the time Bri was in the hospital. And after that, once Bri was back home, Julia never let her sleep over at Kristin’s house. Bri never complained … not much, anyway. She wanted the security of being with her mother, too.

Although she never mentioned it to Bri, all through the winter and spring and into the summer, Julia was plagued by nightmares and fitful sleep. Several times a night, she would wake up bathed in sweat, stifling a scream as some distortion of what she and Bri had been through replayed in her dreams. Sometimes late at night, she would wake up with the feeling that someone was lying in bed beside her. Convinced it was John, she would reach for him in the dark and then realize that John was dead. The bed was empty. When she touched the other side of the bed, though, she was positive the mattress had a warm, rumpled depression as if someone had been lying there recently. The worst dreams, though, were the ones in which she confronted the combined fury of John and Abby, both of whom in her dreams were in horrible states of decomposition.

The effect this lack of sleep had on her pregnancy — especially after the physical stress of the night of the storm — concerned Dr. Flaherty, but he kept her on a regimen of vitamins and constantly reassured her that if she kept taking good care of herself, she and the baby would be fine.

And she earnestly believed him in spite of the dark thoughts that tracked her like hungry dogs.

The closer she got to her due date, the more Julia wondered how much of her last conversation with Abby had been real and how much she had imagined.

She wanted — maybe more than she had ever wanted anything before — to believe that none of it had happened … that, exhausted from her trek across the frozen bay, she had been so far gone she hallucinated her final confrontation with Abby.

Perhaps, she told herself, her fear for her own and for Bri’s survival — not to mention her baby’s — had overloaded her mind which had already been pushed beyond its limits. She hoped that Abby’s power — whatever it had been — had, like that of the Headless Horseman in the story by Washington Irving, stopped at the bridge.

Perhaps …

But perhaps not! her mind whispered late at night when she wanted to sleep but spent too much time staring at the ceiling instead.

Perhaps not …

One night in late August, thankfully after the heat wave had broken, she started having contractions that increased in both intensity and frequency. She knew the time had come. Bri came with her when Randy and Ellie drove her to the Osteopathic Hospital in Portland where, after more than eighteen hours of labor — hours edged with a bit more than the usual fear involved with childbirth — she delivered an eight pound, five ounce boy. He seemed hale and hearty, if the strength of his lungs and the avidness of his breastfeeding were any gauge. She wanted to name him after either Frank or John, but heeding some deep-seated fear, she opted for a name that had absolutely no family connection — Nathan Edward Carlson.

The gloom that pervaded the Carlson house since the night of the blizzard was dispelled the day Julia brought little Nathan home from the hospital. Bri immediately dubbed him “Nate,” and Julia didn’t mind if the nickname stuck. She liked it.

And Bri — God bless her! — was an incredible help during the first few weeks after Nate came home. She had started school, eighth grade in Falmouth, even though they planned to move soon. But even with homework and being so busy with her friend Kristin, she never complained about helping out with feedings and diapers. Randy and Ellie Chadwick visited almost daily, bringing dishes of food and helping with the cleaning. The Chadwicks and Kristin were probably the only three people on Glooscap island who were upset the day Merilee Bryant, from Century 21, put a For-Sale sign on the front lawn of Frank’s house.

After a few weeks, Nate began to sleep ... well, mostly through the night, and Julia and Bri got busy packing for the move back to Vermont. Within two weeks, the house sold for a nice price, but the closing was more than a month away, so they didn’t feel any hurry to get out of the house. The painful memories associated with living on Glooscap had lost much of their sting, so Julia decided to take her time packing and, as painful as it was, weed out a lot of their accumulated trash. The hardest part was the day she gathered up John’s clothes and took them to Goodwill. But once that job was done, the rest of the work of getting ready to move went much more easily. On the last weekend of September, they had a yard sale and put up for sale everything they didn’t want to cart back to Vermont. Bri cried when someone bought her granddad’s wheelchair.

II

It was a gorgeous October day — clear and chilly — the Saturday before they were to move. Towering white clouds floated like cotton puffs across a blue sky so bright it hurt to look at it for long. Almost every room in the house was packed and ready to go. The van was scheduled to arrive on Monday morning. Julia and Bri were getting tired of living out of boxes, and both of them were anxious to get moved and resettled. Julia set up a small Port-A-Crib in the living room so Nate could take his nap while she finished packing the remaining dishes and pots and pans in the kitchen.

“You know what?” Julia said as she rolled a cup into a sheet of newspaper and placed it into the box.

Bri looked at her, eyebrows raised.

“It’s hard to believe, but it was exactly a year ago today that we moved here.”

Bri had finished giving Nate a bottle of distilled water and was sitting at the kitchen table. Her eyes continually drifted to the bright slash of sky that she could see out of the kitchen window. She took a shuddering breath and let it out with a slow sigh.

Bri didn’t know what to say to that. Her eyes got dreamily distant.

Julia perked up her ears when Nate, in his crib in the living room, started fussing. “He’s not settling down,” she said. “Did you change his diaper?”

“‘Course I did,” Bri replied, but Julia wasn’t convinced because Bri looked so distracted. She turned back to packing glasses and cups, hoping this was a momentary fussiness on Nate’s part, and that he would drift off to sleep so she could finish the job.

But Nate didn’t drift off. What had started as a low-level squawking soon turned into a full-scale cry. His high-pitched wailing set Julia’s sleep-deprived nerves on edge, and before long, she found herself shoving the glasses into the box with enough force to break something if she wasn’t careful. She was fuming when she turned and saw Bri still sitting at the table with her chin resting in her hands, staring out the window.

“Well?” she said, crumpling a piece of newspaper and throwing it onto the counter.

“Huh, wha — ?” Bri said, shaking her head and looking up at her.

“Maybe you could do something for him so I can get this done,” Julia said, trying to tamp down her sudden anger. “Or take over here so I can handle him.”

She knew she sounded a snappy, but her nerves were worn particularly thin today. That surprised her because for the last three nights she hadn’t had any bad dreams … that she remembered, anyway. Two A.M. feedings were keeping her busy enough at night without nightmares.

“Umm … yeah … Sure,” Bri said, getting up from the table and looking toward the living room with a confused expression on her face. She looked as if she didn’t know who — or what — was making that noise in there.

“Maybe pop him into the stroller and take him for a walk,” Julia said, forcing herself to tone her voice down. “Give me another half hour, and then maybe we’ll drive into town for lunch. Most of the cooking stuff’s packed, anyway.”

“Sure,” Bri said as she started toward the living room. “Lemme … ahh, get a sweater or something. It looks kinda cold outside.”

“Make sure you bundle Nate up good, too,” Julia said. “And would you mind getting a move on? His crying is driving me nuts!”

Nate was still wailing away in the living room as Bri trudged upstairs. Julia turned back to her job at hand, but she couldn’t keep her attention from drifting back to the living room as she waited for Bri to return. After what seemed much too long a time, while Nate’s crying rose more shrilly, she finally heard the heavy tread of footsteps on the stairs.

“Put that white hooded sweatshirt on him,” Julia called out. “I don’t want him getting a chill.”

Bri didn’t answer her, but, figuring she knew what she was doing, Julia kept on packing. After another five minutes or so, Nate was still crying, and it seemed to Julia as though Bri was taking entirely too long.

“You two all right in there?” Julia called out.

“Sure…” Bri answered, but there was a vacant tone in her voice that bothered Julia. It sounded as though Bri was still upstairs, not in the living room.

“Bri …?” Julia called out as she walked into the living room. Bright daylight filtered through the windows, and soft, gauzy shadows shifted across the carpet.

“If you — What the hell!”

Julia felt a flood of panic when she saw Bri leaning over the portable crib. Her hands looked unnaturally pale and thin, and she was gripping the crib’s side rail, jiggling the crib gently as she made soft, cooing noises.

What surprised Julia was what Bri wearing — a long, gray sweater that was hanging down heavily at her sides as though it was saturated with water. White patches covered the sides and back looking like … mold. The sweater brushed against the edge of the crib with a soft thump-thump sound as Bri shook the crib, trying to calm Nate.

“Where did you get that old thing?” Julia asked as she took a few cautious closer.

The fuzzy-edged shadows on the floor shifted subtly, making her feel off balance … disoriented.

Did a cloud cover the sun, changing the light? she wondered. Or is it my vision?

An alarm went off somewhere in her mind as recognition gradually dawned.

She gasped aloud, unable to believe what she was seeing.

“Bri?”

“You know,” Bri said, her voice sounding muffled, distant.

“When he’s crying like this, I can see that he has your mouth and chin.”

“Jesus Christ, Bri! What are you doing?” Julia shouted as panic roared inside her. “What in the name of God are you doing?”

Moving stiffly, Bri shifted her shoulders as she straightened up. The heavy folds of the gray sweater rippled like sludgy, scum-topped water. Her mouth drooped open in mute horror as Julia tried to take a deep breath.

“But I think …” Bri said, but that was all as she slowly turned to face her mother.

When she looked at Julia, cold, numbing fear slammed her, tugging like an irresistible wave.

Bri’s face was gone.

In its place was the rotted, peeling visage of Abby Snow. Her long black hair, tangled and stringy, dangling clumps of dirt and bloated crawling things, hung loosely down around the sides of her face. Exposed bone showed between shredded strips of dead flesh, and her eyes glow with a wild intensity.

Julia started backing away until she banged into the living room wall.

Then, as her knees gave way, she crumpled slowly to the floor.

“I think, though, that he has my eyes,” the thing that wasn’t her daughter said. Its jaw made hollow clacking sounds as the blackened lips peeled back, exposing the top row of yellow, dirt-crusted teeth.

“Don’t you think so?” the creature said. “Definitely … He has my eyes!”

Julia’s throat was making odd little clicking sounds as the creature threw its head back, exposing the mottled gray flesh of its neck, and began to laugh.

Julia felt herself falling … spinning backwards into darkness as the laughter spiraled higher ... and higher ... and higher …

The End