He gave an apologetic shrug. “I don’t know his name. All I can tell you is that I’ve seen them together in, shall we say, close contact. Dark hair, medium build. Works the night shift.”
She nodded grimly. “I’ll figure it out.”
Lincoln climbed the stairs to the handsome Victorian, each step bringing him closer to exhaustion. It was well past midnight. He had spent the last few hours at an emergency meeting of the Board of Selectmen, held at Glen Ryder’s house, where Lincoln had been told in no uncertain terms that his job was in jeopardy. The board had hired him, and they could fire him. He was an employee of the Town of Tranquility, and therefore a guardian of its welfare. How could he support Dr. Elliot’s suggestion to close down the lake?
I was just stating my honest opinion, he’d told them.
But in this case, honesty was clearly not the best policy.
What had followed was a mind-numbing litany of financial statistics, provided by the town treasurer. How much money came in every summer from tourists. How many jobs were created as a result. How many local businesses existed only to service the visitor trade.
Where Lincoln’s salary came from.
The town lived and died by Locust Lake, and there would be no calls to close it, no health alerts, not even a whisper of public debate.
He’d left the meeting uncertain whether he still had a job, uncertain whether he even wanted the job. He’d climbed into his cruiser, had been halfway home, when he’d received the message from Dispatch that someone else wanted to speak to him tonight.
He rang the bell. As he waited for the door to open, he glanced up the street and saw that every house was dark, all the curtains drawn against this black and frigid night.
The door swung open, and Judge Iris Keating said: “Thank you for coming, Lincoln.”
He stepped into the house. It felt airless, suffocating. “You said it was urgent.”
“You’ve already met with the board?”
“A little while ago.”
“And they won’t consider closing the lake. Will they?”
He gave her a resigned smile. “Was there any doubt?”
“I know this town too well. I know how people think, and what they’re afraid of. How far they’ll go to protect their own.”
“Then you know what I’m dealing with.”
She gestured toward the library. “Let’s sit down, Lincoln. I have something to tell you.”
A fire was dying behind the grate, only a few listless flames puffing up from the mound of cinders. Still, the room felt overwarm, and as Lincoln sank deeply into an overstuffed chair, he wondered if he could summon the energy to stay awake. To rise to his feet again and walk back out into the cold. Iris sat across from him, her face illuminated only by the fire’s glow. The dim light was kind to her features, deepening her eyes, smoothing the wrinkles of sixty-six years into velvety shadow. Only her hands, thin and gnarled by arthritis, betrayed her age.
“I should have said something at the meeting tonight, but I didn’t have the courage,” she confessed.
“Courage to say what?”
“When Claire Elliot spoke about the lake—about the night she saw the water glow—I should have added my voice to hers.”
Lincoln sat forward, the meaning of her words at last piercing his fatigue. “You’ve seen it too.”
“Yes.”
“When?”
She looked down at her hands, grasping the armrests. “It was in late summer. I was fourteen years old, and we had a house by the Boulders. It’s gone, now. Torn down years ago.” Her gaze shifted to the fire and remained there, focused on the sputtering flames. She leaned back, her hair like a halo of silver against the dark fabric of the chair. “I remember that night, it was raining hard. I woke up, and I heard thunder. I went to the window, and there was something in the water. A light. A glow. It was there for only a few minutes, and then …” She paused. “By the time I woke my parents, it was gone, and the water was dark again.” She shook her head. “Of course they didn’t believe me.”
“Did you ever see the glow again?”
“Once. A few weeks later, also during a rainstorm. Just the briefest shimmer, and then nothing.”
“The night Claire and I saw it, it was raining hard, too.”
Her gaze lifted to Lincoln’s. “All these years, I thought it was lightning. Or a trick of the eyes. But then tonight, for the first time, I learned I’m not the only one who’s seen it.”
“Why didn’t you say something? The town would have listened to you.”
“And people would ask all sorts of questions. When I saw it, which year it was.”
“Which year was it, Judge Keating?”
She looked away, but he saw the flash of tears in her eyes. “Nineteen forty-six,” she whispered. “It was the summer of ’46.”
The year Iris Keating’s parents had died at the hands of her fifteen-year-old brother. The year Iris, too, had killed, but in self-defense. She had pushed her own brother through the turret window, had watched him fall to his death.
“You understand now why I didn’t speak,” she said.
“You could have made a difference.”
“No one wants to hear about it. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“It was so long ago. Fifty-two years—”
“Fifty-two years is nothing! Look at how they still treat Warren Emerson. I’m just as guilty of it. When we were children, he and I were so close. I used to think that someday, we would …” She suddenly stopped. Her gaze settled on the fire, by now little more than glowing ashes. “All these years, I’ve avoided him. Pretended he didn’t exist. And now I hear it may not have been his fault at all, but merely a sickness. An infection of the brain. And it’s too late to make it up to him.”
“It’s not too late. Warren had surgery last week, and he’s fine now. You could visit him.”
“I don’t know what I’d say after all these years. I don’t know that he’d want to see me.”
“Let Warren make that decision.”
She thought it over, her eyes glistening in the dying light of the embers. Then she rose stiffly from the chair. “I believe the fire’s gone out,” she said. And she turned and left the room.
There was a car parked in Lincoln’s driveway.
He pulled up behind it and groaned. Though he had not been home all day, the lights were on in his living room, and he knew what awaited him inside the house. Not again, he thought. Not tonight.
He trudged up the steps to his porch and found the front door was unlocked. When had Doreen stolen his new key?
He found her asleep on the couch. The sour stench of liquor permeated the room. If he woke her now, there would be another drunken scene, crying and shouting, neighbors awakened. Better to let her sleep it off, and deal with it in the morning when she was sober and he wasn’t reeling from exhaustion. He stood looking down at her, regarding, with a sense of sad bewilderment, the woman he’d married. Her red hair was matted, shot through with gray. Her mouth hung open. Her sleep was a noisy rhythm of whistles and grunts. And yet he did not feel disgust when he looked at her. Rather he felt pity, and disbelief that he had ever been in love with her.
And a sense of stifling and never-ending responsibility for her welfare.
She would need a blanket. He turned toward the hall closet and heard the telephone ring. Quickly he answered it, afraid that it would wake Doreen and ignite the scene he dreaded.
It was Pete Sparks on the line. “I’m sorry to call you so late,” he said, “but Dr. Elliot insisted. She was going to call you herself if I didn’t.”
“Is this about the slashed tires? Mark already called me about it.”
“No, it’s something else.”
“What happened?”
“I’m at her medical building. Someone’s smashed all the windows.”
16
Glass was everywhere, bright shards littering the carpet, the magazine table, the waiting room couch. Th
rough the broken windows, now open to the night air, wisps of snow slithered in and settled like fine lace on the furniture.
Stunned and silent, Claire moved through the waiting room to the business office. The window above Vera’s desk had been smashed as well, and slivers of glass and broken icicles sparkled on the computer keyboard. Wind had blown loose papers and snow into drifts throughout the room, a blizzard of white that would soon melt to soggy heaps on the carpet.
She heard Lincoln’s boots crunch across the glass. “Plywood’s on the way, Claire. There’s more snow predicted, so they’ll get those windows boarded up tonight.”
She just kept staring down at the snow on her carpet. “It’s because of what I said at the meeting tonight. Isn’t it?”
“This isn’t the only building that’s been vandalized. There’ve been several this week.”
“But this is the second time for me in one night. First my tires. Now this. Don’t you dare tell me this is a coincidence.”
Officer Pete Sparks came into the room. “Not having much luck with the neighbors, Lincoln. They called in when they heard the breaking glass, but they didn’t see who did it. It’s like that incident down at Bartlett’s garage last week. Smash and run.”
“But Joe Bartlett had only one broken window,” she said. “They’ve smashed all of mine. This is going to shut me down for weeks.”
Sparks tried to be reassuring. “It should only take a few days to get those windows replaced.”
“What about my computer? The ruined carpet? The snow’s gotten into everything. The data will have to be replaced, and all my billing records reconstructed. I don’t know if it’s worth it. I don’t know if I even want to start over again.”
She turned and walked out of the building.
She was huddled in her truck when Lincoln and Sparks emerged a short time later. They exchanged a few words, then Lincoln crossed the street to her pickup truck and slid into the seat beside her.
For a moment neither of them spoke. She kept her gaze focused straight ahead, and her vision blurred, the twirling lights of Sparks’s cruiser softening to a pulsating haze. Quickly, angrily, she wiped her hand across her eyes. “I’d say the message came through loud and clear. This town doesn’t want me here.”
“Not the whole town, Claire. One vandal. One person—”
“Who probably speaks for a lot of other people. I might as well pack up and leave tonight. Before they decide to burn down my house.”
He said nothing.
“That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” she said, and she finally looked at him. “That I’ve lost any chance of making it here.”
“You made it hard on yourself tonight. When you talk about shutting down the lake, it threatens a lot of people.”
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No, you had to say it, Claire. You did the right thing, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.”
“No one’s come up to shake my hand.”
“Take my word for it. There are others who have concerns about the lake.”
“But they’re not going to close it down, are they? They can’t afford to. So they shut me up instead, by doing this. By trying to drive me out of town.” She looked at her building. “It’s going to work, too.”
“You’ve been here less than a year. It takes time—”
“How long does it take to be accepted in this town? Five years, ten? A lifetime?” Reaching down, she turned on the ignition, and felt the initial blast of cold air from the heater.
“Your office can be repaired.”
“Yes, buildings are easy to fix.”
“It can all be replaced. The windows, the computer.”
“And what about my patients? I don’t think I have any left after tonight.”
“You don’t know that. You haven’t given Tranquility a chance.”
“Haven’t I?” She straightened and looked at him in fury. “I’ve given it nine months of my life! Every minute, I worry about my practice, about why my appointment book is still half empty. Why someone hates me enough to send anonymous letters to my patients. There are people here who want me to fail, and they’re doing their best to drive me out of town. It’s taken me this long to realize it’s never going to get better. Tranquility doesn’t want me, Lincoln. They want another Dr. Pomeroy, or maybe Marcus Welby. But not me.”
“It takes time, Claire. You’re from away, and people need to get used to you, to feel confident you’re not going to abandon them. That’s where Adam DelRay has the advantage. He’s a local boy, and everyone assumes he’ll stay. The last doctor who came here from another state left after eighteen months. Couldn’t take the winters. The doctor before him stayed less than a year. The town doesn’t think you’ll last, either. They’re holding back, waiting to see if you make it through the winter. Or if you’ll give up and leave town like the other two did.”
“It’s not winter that’s driving me away. I can take the darkness and the cold. What I can’t take is the feeling I don’t belong. That I’ll never belong.” She released a deep breath, and her anger suddenly dissolved, leaving only a feeling of weariness. “I don’t know why I thought this would work. Noah didn’t want to move here, but I forced him. And now I see what a stupid thing it was to do …”
“Why did you come, Claire?” He’d asked the question so softly it was almost lost in the whisper of air from the heater.
It was a question he had never asked her, an elementary piece of information about herself she had never shared. Why I came to Tranquility. Now as he waited for her answer, the silence stretched between them, magnifying her reluctance to confide in him.
He sensed her discomfort and shifted his gaze to the street, granting her some measure of privacy. When he spoke again, it was almost as if the words weren’t directed at her, that he was merely sharing his thoughts with no one in particular.
“The people who move here, from other places,” he said, “most times it seems to me they’re running away from something. A job they hate, an ex-husband. An ex-wife. Some tragedy that’s shaken their lives.”
She sagged sideways and felt the icy window against her cheek. How does he know? she wondered. How much has he guessed?
“They come here, these people from away, and they think they’ve found paradise. Maybe they’re on summer vacation. Maybe they’re just driving through, and the name of the town catches their fancy. Tranquility. It sounds safe, a place to run to, a place to hide. They stop at the local realty office and look at the photos on the wall. All the farmhouses for sale, the cottages on the lake.”
It was a picture of a white farmhouse with daffodils nodding in the front yard and a maple tree just beginning to show its spring blush. I’d never had a house with a maple tree. I’d never lived in a town where I could look up at the sky at night and see stars, instead of the glare of city lights.
“They wonder what it’d be like, to live in a small town,” said Lincoln. “A place where no one locks their doors, and neighbors welcome you with casseroles. A place that’s more fantasy than reality, because the small town they imagine doesn’t exist. And the problems they’re trying to leave behind just follow them to their next home. And the next.”
Noah told me he didn’t want to come. He told me he’d hate me if I forced him to leave Baltimore, to leave behind all his friends. But you can’t let a fourteen-year-old boy run your life. I’m the parent. I’m in charge. I knew what was good for him, good for both of us.
I thought I did.
“For a while, maybe, it seems to work out,” he said. “A new house, a new town—it keeps your mind off the things you were running away from. Everyone hopes for a new beginning, a chance to make things right. And they think, what better time and place to start a new life than a summer by the lake?”
“He stole a car,” she said.
He didn’t respond. She wondered what she’d see in his eyes if she were to turn and look at him now. Surely not surprise; somehow
he had already known or guessed that her coming to Tranquility had been an act of desperation.
“It wasn’t the only crime he committed, of course. After he was arrested, I learned about all the other things he’d done. The shoplifting. The graffiti. The break-ins at the neighborhood grocery store. They did it together, Noah and his friends. Three boys who just got bored and decided to add a little excitement to their lives. To their parents’ lives.” She leaned back, her gaze focused on the empty street. Snow was beginning to fall, and as the flakes slithered onto the windshield they melted and slid down like tears on the glass. “The worst part about it was I didn’t know. That’s how little he told me, how completely out of touch I was with my own son.
“When the police called me that night, and told me there’d been an accident—that Noah had been in a stolen car—I told them it was a mistake. My son wouldn’t do something like that. My son was spending the night at a friend’s house. But he wasn’t. He was sitting in the emergency room with a scalp laceration. And his friend—one of the boys—was in a coma. I guess I should be grateful for the fact that my son never forgets to buckle his seat belt. Even in the act of stealing a car.” She shook her head and gave an ironic sigh. “The other parents were as stunned as I was. They couldn’t believe their boys would do such a thing. They thought Noah talked them into it. Noah was the bad influence. What could you expect from a boy who has no father?
“It made no difference to them that my son was the youngest of the three. They blamed it on his lack of a father. And the fact I was too busy working as a doctor, taking care of other peoples’ families, to pay attention to my own.”
Outside the snow was falling more thickly now, blanketing the windshield, cutting off her view of the street.
“The worst part about it was, I agreed with them. I had to be doing something wrong, failing him in some way. And all I could think of was, how could I set things right again?”
“Packing up and leaving home is a pretty drastic measure.”
“I was looking for a miracle. A magic solution. We’d gotten to the point where we hated each other. I couldn’t control where he went or what he did. Worst of all, I couldn’t choose his friends. I could see where it was leading. Another stolen car, another arrest. Another round of useless family counseling …” She took a deep breath. The windshield was covered by snow now, and she felt buried away, entombed with this man beside her.