Stony River (2 page)

Linda hid herself behind a bush and held her punk down by her knees so the smoke wouldn't give her away. She stuck the thin, hard stem in her mouth and
puh-puh-puhed
as she'd seen Daddy do to get his pipe going. The stem tasted like potato peel.

Tereza snorted. “Ain't nothing to inhale, genius. This your first punk?”

So what if it was? “Of course not. It's just more fun this way.”

Tereza tried
puh-puh-puhing,
too, and then sucked on the stem so hard her eyes crossed. “No it ain't.” She plopped on the ground without a care for the mud.

Linda kept crouching, though her knees and thighs had started to burn. “What should we do this summer?” she asked. Tereza was the only girl even close to her age on the “right” side of the highway Linda wasn't allowed to cross alone. Tereza moving in was like finding an extra gift under the Christmas tree.

“I don't know. Hang out. Play baseball. I seen a couple of cute guys at the store.”

Hoods. Rude boys who made Linda feel ashamed even when she hadn't done anything.

Tereza was first to spot the police car as it crept down the street. “Shit.” She snuffed out her punk and spidered up the riverbank.

Linda was right behind her. Both girls wore pedal pushers, but Tereza looked better in hers. Her skin was the color of a root beer float and her body wasn't lumpy. Linda squinted; she'd left her ugly glasses at home, but she could still make out two shapes in uniform emerging from the car. They scaled the hilly lawn to Crazy Haggerty's and took the steps to the wraparound porch. One was stout enough to be the crotchety officer who gave talks at school on what to do if someone tried to force you into a car. All Linda could ever remember was: scratch the license plate number in the dirt with a stick. What if there was no dirt, no stick?

“Somebody must've got bumped off.”

“No one gets murdered in this boring town,” Linda said.

THE DOG HAS ABANDONED
his post at the foot of the lad's bed.

He bounds down the once fine staircase to the shadowy front entrance where Miranda stands awash in her own fear. His growl is a deep rumble she feels through her bare feet. Nicholas wouldn't be growling if the footsteps belonged to James. And James wouldn't be coming in the front. He'd be shuffling through the back where Miranda has looked for him off and on since last sunset, slipping up and down the stairs stealthy as a shadow, risking more than one furtive glance under the back-door window shade. She's had to keep the lad amused on her own and cope with Nicholas doing his business all over the house.

James never leaves her overnight. And they've not been apart before on Summer Sun Standing: the day of the year when the sun stands still before retracing his steps down the sky; when night holds
her breath, beguiling you for a moment into believing mortal life can exist without death. James should be here, dancing with her on the summer king's tomb.

Nicholas's growls become short sharp barks as one pair of feet and then another reach the porch: Miranda's Veranda, as James named it when she was learning to rhyme. He tells her she trod on its boards when they crossed the threshold. She doesn't remember. She was only three.

Strangers knock from time to time. Most leave quickly after hearing the dog. Not these. Nicholas hurls himself against the ponderous oak door so violently it shudders. The impact throws him to the floor. Miranda winces, feeling his pain in her shoulder and hip.

“Police!” A clean, hard voice, not breathy and musical like James's. “Anyone home?”

Nicholas's nails click against the pegged wood floor as he scrambles up, readying himself for a second assault. If James were here, he'd be retrieving his shotgun from the closet and making sure she and the lad were hidden.

The doorknob rattles. She ponders the lock and the long black key she's never turned.

Should they appear one day when I'm away, James said, welcome them a thousand times over but deny all knowledge. She closes her eyes and summons the memory, hoping to extract more guidance from his words, but the memory gets lost in the dog's barking and the mewling of the lad upstairs who has woken to find Nicholas gone.

Is there still time to hide?

The door shudders again, this time from pounding on the outside. “Anyone in there?” Louder now. “Don't make us break the door down and shoot the dog.”

Miranda drops to the floor next to Nicholas and wraps her arms around his quivering body. He smells of decay. His heart thumps so hard she fears it will burst.

“Breathe my air,” she whispers.

He licks her face, his tongue hot and frantic. He's already lapped up more than his measure of years, but she can't bear the thought of anyone shooting him.

“Open up!”

One arm about the dog, Miranda drags him with her as she sidles on knees to the keyhole. She pinches and turns the key with thumb and forefinger until she hears the click. Stands and grips Nicholas by the ruff. She pulls open the door enough to detect two bodies, one near enough to touch. Muggy air infiltrates the entryway.

“Good day,” she says, summoning the courage of Alice facing the Queen. But her voice comes out as thick as cold treacle and her legs go weak. Nicholas howls and a gun materializes in the closer man's hand. Miranda presses her free hand against the wall to steady herself.

“Silence,” she hisses. Nicholas obeys.

“This Mr. James Haggerty's home?” asks the man with the gun.

“Aye.” In twelve years she has spoken only to James, the lad and Nicholas. She knows not how much or how little to say.1

“This your home, too, Miss?”

“Aye.”

He inhales sharply and says to the other man, “Thought they said he lived alone.” He turns back to her. “We have news. Are you able to control the dog?”

She points and says firmly, “Nicholas, go.”

He backs up through the dining room into the kitchen and, with an extravagant sigh, slumps to the floor by the wood stove, in eyeshot of the door.

Miranda's arm shakes as she opens the door a smidgen wider and blinks into unfamiliar daylight. The one who spoke is tall and wiry, younger than James but clearly a man, a beautiful one, garbed in black trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt bearing a shiny metal emblem. Miranda would like to stroke the light brown hairs covering
his arms. Although she means to admit only him, the second one, dressed the same, slides in behind. He's older and potato-shaped, a gun belt hanging low under his belly.

“Should we wait while you cover up?” that one asks. She shakes her head. On sweltering days she always wears her mother's white cotton petticoat if she wears anything at all.

The men remove their hats, revealing hair damp with perspiration. They exchange looks she cannot decipher. “It's dark in here,” the tall one says. The house is illuminated only by sunlight splintered through gaps in the midnight-blue drapes drawn full across the windows. The older man flicks a switch on the wall up and down.

“Power out?”

“We use candles.” She doesn't offer to squander any so early in the day. She anxiously follows the tall one's gaze to the room on his right with the mahogany table where they eat and she does her sums, and then to the library, on the opposite side of the entryway, where she and James play the wind-up phonograph and he reads to her of “a time before time.” She sees nothing a spy could report. Our way of knowing isn't wrong, James says, but others fear it and therein lies the danger for us.

The tall one's ears stick out like handles and she stares at them frankly. Curiosity instructs, James likes to say, and a sense of wonder is a gift. Is it wonder or dread making her draw a jagged breath? The house has shrunk with the men in it; they've swallowed all the air.

The tall one dips his head, smiles and says, “Officer Nolan, Miss. Don't be afraid. We won't bite.” He shows her a thin black billfold with his photograph and name. “My partner here's Officer Dunn. That a baby crying?”

“Cian!”The lad's old enough to climb from his cot, but he's never tried. James says it's a sign of Cian's advanced trust in the universe to provide for his needs. She starts toward the staircase.

“I'll go with you,” Dunn says.

Miranda turns back and searches his face, round and pale as the moon but with small, cold eyes. It looks as if the man's spirit has been nearly pinched out of him, which is what James says about his own spirit on days he can't bear to be human anymore.

“You'll vex him,” she says.

“Where're you from?” Dunn asks. “The way you talk is strange.”

How to answer? She speaks like James. The officers are the strange-sounding ones.
Dawg
.
Tawk
.

“How 'bout you radio the station, Frank?” Nolan nods toward the door. “Let 'em know what's up.” Officer Dunn leaves.

Miranda climbs the stairs and hurries down the hallway to Cian, who's rattling the bars of his cot and bleating.

“Mandy!” he cries, his mouth pitifully distorted. He stands in his cot, hiccuping little sobs. A sodden nappy rings his ankles. Ammonia from it and others in a nearby bucket stings Miranda's eyes. Cian's fair hair is sweaty, his wee organ an angry red from rash. When James left yesterday, he said he'd return with the ingredients for a healing salve.

“Mandy's here, poor biscuit.”

If she had the lad's trusting nature she'd chance opening a window in hopes of a cooling breeze. If she didn't fear exhausting the drinking water, she'd bathe Cian and launder his nappies. Fear is the mortal's curse, James says. Look at me, so dreadfully afraid of losing you. She lifts the slight child, shaking the wet nappy from his feet. She carries him down the stairs.

Nolan peers up from a notepad. His eyebrows lift. In surprise? Dismay? For a moment Miranda forgets to wonder why he's here. Perhaps he isn't. It's easy to imagine herself, James and Cian as the only souls alive.

She heads for the burgundy horsehair sofa in the library. As she sits, dust motes rise in a slow dance and drift back down. She drapes
Cian across her lap and wriggles one arm free of the petticoat. He clamps his mouth on her breast and wraps a spindly arm about her waist. His head is warm and damp in the crook of her arm.

Nolan remains in the entryway. To see him, Miranda would have to wrench her head around. “So the child is yours?” he asks. “You look too young.”

In three years, when she's eighteen, nobody can wrest her from James. She will stand beside him under a ceiling of stars while he invokes the mighty ones. When she's eighteen, she'll venture out on her own for Cian's earthly needs. James won't have to bring her lilacs each spring. She'll seek them where they grow and drown her nose in their drunken scent. She'll lie on soft grass, garbed in gossamer and sunlight. She will climb Merlin's oak tree and Heidi's mountain, row a boat down the enchanted river behind the house, tread on hot sand and sing as boldly as she wants without worrying someone will hear. She and Nicholas will lope over carpets of dandelions as they do in her dreams.
Lope
is a word she likes to say out loud for the way her tongue starts it off before disappearing behind her lips.

“You say you have news?”

“Yes.”

She hears him inhale deeply, hears his belt jangle as he shifts weight from one foot to the other. “Mr. Haggerty died on the three-forty-two from Penn Station yesterday,” he says.

“What's a three-forty-two?”

“You serious?” When she doesn't answer, he says, “A train.”

“Did he jump?”

“Why would you even think that?” He jangles again.

“Anna Karenina did.”

“Who?”

“A woman in a book.” The longest she's ever read, one James challenged her to get through, hoping to seduce her from the youthful
fantasies she prefers. “
But truly, truly, it's not my fault, or only my fault a little bit
,” she says aloud, trying to say it daintily like Anna.

Nolan releases a short, tuneless whistle and says, “Jeez, it's stifling in here. How can you breathe?” His shoes squeak behind her as he goes to the window and pulls back the drapes. He grunts with the effort of hoisting a sash that's not been lifted since the lad was born for fear his cries would be heard. Panic rises in her throat, a reflex. She tenses, ready to flee upstairs with Cian, until she remembers it's too late to avoid detection.

“Okay if I take a seat?” He's at the chair on her left.

She nods and he sits, his face in profile, his gaze averted. She runs an imaginary finger over the small bump on his long nose as he hangs his hat on one knee. World scents cling to him, as they do to James when he's been out. She likes to guess at them, surprising James with her accuracy. Nolan smells of leather and smoke.

“Several passengers witnessed him collapse and die. The coroner determined it was a heart attack. He won't order an autopsy unless the family insists.”