He took the package, but his gaze remained on her face. “Are you all right?”
“I’m okay. I guess you heard that Mrs. Horatio …” She paused, swallowing back tears.
He nodded. “My mom told me.”
Amelia touched the bandage on her face. Again he saw a flash of tears in her eyes. “I met your mom. In the emergency room. She was really nice to me …” She turned and glanced over her shoulder at the darkness, as though expecting to see someone watching her. “I’ve got to go now—”
“Did someone drive you here?”
“I walked.”
“You walked? In the dark?”
“It’s not so far. I live just the other side of the lake, right past the boat ramp.” She backed away from the door, blond hair swaying. “I’ll see you in school.”
“Wait. Amelia!” He held up the gift. “What’s this for?”
“To thank you. For what you did today.” She took another retreating step, and was almost swallowed up in darkness.
“Amelia!”
“Yes?”
Noah paused, not knowing what to say. The silence was broken only by the rustle of dead leaves scattering across the lawn. Amelia stood on the farthest edge of the light spilling from the open doorway, her face a pale oval eclipsing into night.
“You want to come inside?” he asked.
To his surprise she seemed to consider the invitation. For a moment she lingered between darkness and light, advance and retreat. She looked over her shoulder again, as though seeking permission. Then she nodded.
Noah found himself panicking over the disorder in the front parlor. His mom had been home for only a few hours that afternoon, to comfort him and cook dinner. Then she’d driven back to the hospital to see Taylor. No one had tidied up the parlor, and everything was still lying where Noah had dropped it that afternoon—backpack on the couch, sweatshirt on the coffee table, dirty tennis shoes in front of the fireplace. He decided to bypass the parlor and led Amelia into the kitchen instead.
They sat down, not looking at each other, two foreign species struggling to find a common language.
She glanced up as the phone rang. “Aren’t you going to answer that?”
“Naw. It’s another one of those reporters. They’ve been calling all afternoon, ever since I got home.”
The answering machine picked up, and as he’d predicted, a woman’s voice came on: “This is Damaris Horne of the Weekly Informer. I’d really, really like to talk to Noah Elliot, if I could, about that amazing act of heroism today in the classroom. The whole country wants to hear about it, Noah. I’ll be staying at the Lakeside B and B, and I could offer some financial compensation for your time, if that would make it more worth your while …”
“She’s offering to pay you just to talk?” asked Amelia.
“Crazy, isn’t it? My mom says it’s a sure sign I shouldn’t talk to that lady.”
“But people do want to hear about it. About what you did.”
What I did.
He gave a shrug, feeling unworthy of all the praise, of Amelia’s praise, most of all. He sat listening as the call ended. The silence returned, interrupted only by the soft beep of the message reminder.
“You can open it now. If you want,” said Amelia.
He looked down at the gift. Though the wrapping was plain brown paper, he took great effort not to tear it, because it seemed uncouth to go ripping it open in front of her. Gingerly he peeled off the tape and folded back the wrapping.
The pocket knife was neither large nor impressive. He saw scratches on the handle, and realized it was not even new. She’d given him a used knife.
“Wow,” he managed to say with some measure of enthusiasm. “This is a nice one.”
“It belonged to my dad.” She added, quietly: “My real dad.”
He looked up as the implication of those words sank in.
“Jack is my stepfather.” She uttered that last word as though it were an object of disgust.
“Then J.D. and Eddie …”
“They’re not my real brothers. They’re Jack’s boys.”
“I guess I wondered about it. They don’t look like you.”
“Thank god.”
Noah laughed. “Yeah, that’s not a family resemblance I’d want to have, either.”
“I’m not even allowed to talk about my real dad, because it makes Jack mad. He hates to be reminded there was someone else before him. But I want people to know. I want them to know Jack has nothing to do with who I am.”
Gently he placed the knife back in her hand. “I can’t take this, Amelia.”
“I want you to.”
“But it’s got to mean a lot to you, if it belonged to him.”
“That’s why I want you to have it.” She touched the bandage on her temple, as though pointing to the evidence of her debt to him. “You were the only one who did anything. The only one who didn’t run.”
He didn’t confess the humiliating truth: I wanted to run, but I was so terrified I couldn’t move my legs.
She looked up at the kitchen clock. With a start of panic, she abruptly stood up. “I didn’t know it was so late.”
He followed her to the front door. Amelia had just stepped out when headlights suddenly cut through the trees. She spun around to face them, and then seemed to freeze as the pickup truck roared up the driveway.
The door swung open and Jack Reid stepped out, whippet thin and scowling. “Get in the truck, Amelia,” he said.
“Jack, how did you—”
“Eddie told me you’d be here.”
“I was just about to walk home.”
“Get in the truck now.”
Instantly she clammed up and obediently slid into the passenger seat.
Her stepfather was about to climb back behind the wheel when he met Noah’s gaze.
“She doesn’t hang out with boys,” he said. “I want you to know that.”
“She only came by to say hello,” said Noah angrily. “What’s the big deal?”
“The deal, boy, is that my daughter’s off limits.” He climbed in and slammed the door.
“She’s not even your daughter!” Noah yelled, but he knew the man couldn’t hear him over the revving engine.
As the truck swung around in the driveway, Noah caught one last glimpse of Amelia’s profile, framed by the passenger window, her terrified gaze focused straight ahead.
6
The first snowflakes spiraled down through the bare branches and gently dusted the excavation site. Lucy Overlock glanced up at the sky and said, “This snow’s going to stop, isn’t it? It has to stop, or it’ll obscure everything.”
“It’s already melting,” said Lincoln. He sniffed the air and knew, by some instinct developed during a lifetime in these woods, that the snow would not last long. These flakes were merely a whispered warning, deceptively gentle, of the wintry months to come. He did not mind the snow, did not even resent all the inconveniences that came with it, the shoveling, the plowing out, the nights without power when the lines went down from the weight of it. It was the darkness he disliked. Darkness fell so early these days. Already daylight was fading, and the trees were featureless black slashes against the sky.
“Well, we might as well pack it up for the day,” said Lucy. “And hope it’s not buried under a foot of snow by tomorrow.”
Now that the bones were no longer of interest to the police, Lucy and her grad students had assumed the responsibility of protecting the dig. The two students pulled a tarp over the excavation site and staked it in place. It was a futile precaution; a marauding raccoon could rip it away with one slash of its claws.
“When will you finish here?” asked Lincoln.
“I’d like to take several weeks,” said Lucy. “But with the weather turning bad, we’ll have to rush. One hard freeze, and that’s it for the season.”
Headlights flickered through the trees. Lincoln saw that another vehicle had pulled into Rachel Sorkin’s driveway.
He tramped back through the woods, toward the house. In the last few days, the front yard had become a parking lot. Next to Lincoln’s vehicle was Lucy Overlock’s Jeep and a beat-up Honda, which he assumed belonged to her grad student.
At the far end of the driveway, parked under the trees, was yet another vehicle—a dark blue Volvo. He recognized it, and he crossed the yard to the driver’s side.
The window hummed open an inch. “Lincoln,” the woman said.
“Evening, Judge Keating.”
“You have time to talk?” He heard the locks click open.
Lincoln circled to the passenger side and slid in, shutting the door. They sat for a moment, cocooned in silence.
“Have they found anything else?” she asked. She didn’t look at him but gazed straight ahead, her eyes focused somewhere among the trees. In the car’s gloom, she seemed younger than her sixty-six years, the lines in her face fading to uniform smoothness. Younger and not so formidable.
“There were only the two skeletons,” said Lincoln.
“Both were children?”
“Yes. Dr. Overlock estimates their ages at around nine or ten years old.”
“Not a natural death?”
“No. Both deaths were violent.”
There was a long pause. “And when did this happen?”
“That’s not so easy to determine. All they have to go on are some artifacts found with the remains. They’ve dug up some buttons, a coffin handle. Dr. Overlock thinks it’s probably part of a family cemetery.”
She took her time absorbing this information. Her next question came out softly tentative: “So the remains are quite old?”
“A hundred years, more or less.”
She released a deep breath. Was it Lincoln’s imagination or did the tension suddenly melt from her silhouette? She seemed to fall almost limp with relief, her head tilting back against the neck rest. “A hundred years,” she said. “Then it’s nothing to worry about. It’s not from—”
“No. It’s unrelated.”
She gazed ahead, at the congealing darkness. “Still, it’s such a strange coincidence, isn’t it? That very same part of the lake …” She paused. “I wonder if it happened in the fall.”
“People die every day, Judge Keating. A century’s worth of skeletons—they all have to be buried somewhere.”
“I heard there was a hatchet mark on one of the thigh bones.”
“That’s true.”
“It will have people wondering. Remembering.”
Lincoln heard the woman’s fear, and he wanted to reassure her, but could not bring himself to make physical contact. Iris Keating was not a touchable woman. Her emotional barrier was so thick, it would not have surprised him to reach out and feel a shell.
He said, “It was a long time ago. No one remembers.”
“This town remembers.”
“Only a few. The older ones. And they don’t want to talk about it any more than you do.”
“Still, it’s a matter of public record. And now all those reporters are in town. They’ll be asking questions.”
“What happened half a century ago isn’t relevant.”
“Isn’t it?” She looked at him. “This is how it began last time. The killings. It started in the fall.”
“You can’t interpret every violent act as history repeating itself.”
“But history is violence.” Once again, she faced forward, her gaze directed toward the lake. Night had fallen and through the bare trees, the water was only a faint glimmer. “Don’t you feel it, Lincoln?” she asked softly. “There’s something wrong about this place. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve felt it since I was small. I didn’t like living here, even then. And now …” She reached for the ignition and started the engine.
Lincoln stepped out of the car. “It’s a slippery road tonight. Drive carefully.”
“I will. Oh, and Lincoln?”
“Yes?”
“I’m told there’s a new opening in that alcohol rehab program in Augusta. It might be the place for Doreen. If you can talk her into it.”
“I’ll try. I just keep hoping that one of these days it’ll take.”
He thought he saw pity in her eyes. “I wish you luck. You deserve a lot better, Lincoln.”
“I’m managing all right.”
“Of course you are.” He realized, then, that it wasn’t pity, but admiration he heard in her voice. “You’re one of the few men in this world who would.”
A photo of Mrs. Horatio was propped up on the coffin, a picture of her as a young woman of eighteen, smiling, almost pretty. Noah had never thought of his biology teacher as pretty, nor had he imagined her as ever having been young. In his mind, Dorothy Horatio had sprung up on this earth already middle-aged, and now, in death, she would remain eternally so.
Moving with the long line of students, he shuffled dutifully toward the coffin, past the photo of Mrs. Horatio in her past incarnation as an actual human female. It was a shock to confront that eerily familiar image of Mrs. Horatio before the extra pounds and wrinkles and gray hair. To realize that the photo had been taken when she was not much older than Noah. What happens when we get old? he wondered. Where does the kid part of us go?
He stopped before the coffin. It was closed, which was a mercy; he didn’t think he could handle seeing his dead teacher’s face. It was terrible enough just to imagine how she must look, hidden beneath that mahogany lid. He had not particularly liked Dorothy Horatio. Not at all, in fact. But today he had met her husband and adult daughter, had seen them both sobbing, their arms flung around each other, and had come to realize a startling truth: that even the Mrs. Horatios of this world have people who love them.
In the coffin’s polished surface, he could see his own face, bland and composed. Emotions hidden beneath an expressionless mask.
He had not been so composed at the last funeral he’d attended.
Two years ago, he and his mother had stood holding hands as they gazed at his father’s coffin. The lid had been left open, so people could gaze down at his gaunt face as they said their good-byes. When the time had come to leave, Noah had refused to go. His mother had tried to lead him away, but he had sobbed: You can’t leave Daddy in there! Go back, go back!
He blinked and touched his hand to Mrs. Horatio’s coffin. It was smooth and glossy. Like fine furniture.
Where does the kid part of us go?
He realized that the line ahead of him had vanished, that people behind him were waiting for him to move forward. He continued past the coffin, walked up the aisle, and fled out the mortuary doors.
Outside it was lightly snowing, the cold kiss of flakes soothing to his face. He was relieved none of the reporters had followed him out. All afternoon, they’d chased him around with their tape recorders, wanting just a sentence from the boy who’d courageously wrestled the gun away from the killer. The hero of Knox High School.
What a joke.
He stood across the street from the mortuary, shivering in the gloom as he watched people walk out of the building. They each performed the identical into-the-cold ritual: the appraising glance at the sky, the shudder, the hugging close of one’s coat. Just about everyone in town had come to pay their last respects, but he scarcely recognized some of them, so transformed were they by their suits and ties and mourning dresses. No one wearing the usual flannels and jeans. Even Chief Kelly was wearing a suit and tie.
Noah watched as Amelia Reid stepped out the mortuary doors. She was breathing quickly, deeply, and she sagged against the building as though she’d been pursued and was desperately trying to catch her breath.
A car drove by, its tires crunching across the crystalline snow as it passed between them.
Noah called out to her: “Amelia?”
She looked up, startled, and saw him. She hesitated, glancing up and down the street, as though to assure herself it was safe to proceed. He felt his heart beat faster as she crossed the street to join him.
br /> “Pretty grim in there,” he said.
She nodded. “I couldn’t listen to it anymore. I didn’t want to start crying in front of everyone.”
Neither did I, he thought, but would never admit it.
They stood together in the gloom, not looking at each other, both of them moving their feet to stay warm. Both of them searching for some thread of conversation. He took a deep breath and said, suddenly, “I hate funerals. They remind me of …” He stopped.
“They remind me of my dad’s funeral, too,” she said softly. And she looked up as snowflakes spiraled down from the darkening sky.
Warren Emerson walked on the side of the road, his boots crunching the frost-stiffened grass. He wore a blaze-orange vest and an orange cap, yet he couldn’t help flinching every time another gun went off in the woods. Bullets, after all, were colorblind. It was cold this morning, far colder than yesterday, and his fingers ached in their thin woolen gloves. He shoved his hands into his pockets and kept trudging, not worried about the cold, knowing that in another mile he would cease to notice it.
He had walked this road over a thousand times, in every season of the year, and could trace his progress by the landmarks he passed. The toppled stone wall was four hundred paces from his front yard. The Murrays’ tumbledown barn was nine hundred fifty paces. At two thousand paces, the turnoff to Toddy Point Road, he reached the halfway mark. The landmarks became more frequent as he approached the outskirts of town. So did the traffic, every so often a car or truck rattling by, tires spitting up dirt.
Local drivers seldom stopped to offer Warren a ride into town. In the summertime he caught plenty of rides, from tourists who considered Warren Emerson, shuffling along in his boots and baggy trousers, an example of living, breathing local color. They’d pull over and invite him to climb in for a lift. During the drive they’d ply him with an endless stream of questions, always the same ones: “What do you folks do in the winter?” “You lived here all your life?” “You ever met Stephen King?” Warren’s answers never went beyond a simple yes or no, an economy of words which the tourists invariably found amusing. They’d pull into town, let him off at the general store, and wave so sincerely you’d think they were saying good-bye to their best friend. Wicked friendly people, those tourists; every autumn, he was sorry to see them go, because it meant another nine months of walking down this road, with not a single driver who’d stop for him.