Authors: Margaret Maron
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #North Carolina, #Fiction, #Mystery fiction, #Women Sleuths, #General
Epilogue
This was where they had spent their wedding night. His best man had lent them a four-wheel drive and they’d driven it up to Bendo Falls, then backpacked the rest of the way to a high meadow lake near the Canadian border.
That was four children and a second mortgage ago. Her mother had a romantic streak just as wide as theirs, though, and for an anniversary gift, she’d offered to keep the kids so they could go back up to the lake alone.
“Just don’t bring me home another grandchild,” she’d warned. The lakeshore was as deserted now as ten years ago and now, as then, the first thing they did was cut hemlock boughs for a mattress, zip their sleeping bags together and make love.
Later, they lay entwined and watched stars come out overhead while loons called across the lake and an owl answered somewhere in the woods behind them.
“I wouldn’t mind one more baby,” she said. “Would you?”
The curve of her breast echoed the line of mountains beyond the lake. “Another baby would be fine,” he said, thinking how good the years had been and how much he still loved her.
The air was chilly, but all around them spring rustled into being and a flock of late-arriving geese circled the lake with rich melodic honks, then splashed down right in front of them.
“This place is getting too damn crowded,” he complained.
She laughed and drew him to her and the smell of her hair was like sunlight on new-mown wheat as they made love again, slower and more tenderly.
Afterwards, he lay flat on his back staring straight up into the blueblack midwestern sky with his hand tangled in her hair. He almost never thought of those nightmarish nights in Vietnam when he’d been a damnfool kid who thought he could prove he was a man by quitting school, lying about his age and running away to the army, but the cry of the loons reminded him of monkey howls and he found himself remembering the steaming jungles, the smell of gunsmoke and blood, and those guys on that bad patrol when everybody else got killed. There was one with a bushy black beard, and a tall Southerner who’d been kind to him. What was his name? Jay? Jake?
He felt his wife’s soft breaths slow and deepen; and just before sleep claimed him, too, Willie Thompson thought drowsily, “Wonder what ever happened to those guys?”
END