The next morning was biblical: a polished, open sky after the storm, a perfect sign of God's promise to the earth. We'd both fallen asleep on the sofa.
I got up as gently as I could manage and tiptoed into Lucinda's kitchen, dressed in yesterday's black jeans, black T-shirt. Sun shouted in through closed curtains, chickadees clattered in the birch outside.
Standing by the window, I was already lamenting Lucinda's lack of appropriate coffee accoutrements. All she owned was an ancient percolator best suited, in my opinion, for a museum or an antiques show. Espresso is the only genuine beverage for eight in the morning. Still, caffeine was needed, and the percolator was gurgling.
I did my best to keep quiet, closing the kitchen door. Lucy's house was larger than my cabin, better appointed. The living room was to the left of the front door, dining room to the right. A long hall took me to the kitchen at the back of the house; beside it was a sort of den or parlor, home for her television and large bookshelves. Three bedrooms were upstairs, a full bath on each floor.
Her backyard was a half-acre English garden where she spent hours every day. Some Saturdays she delighted in directing me as to what I should dig up, how it should be moved, and where I should plant it next. She rearranged the garden more than she did the living room. It was a spectacular example of the agricultural arts.
While water became coffee, if the brown water I was about to
drink deserved that appellation at all, I dialed the telephone on the wall, blue powder and hospital clean.
“Morning,” the familiar girl's voice answered. “Sheriff's Office, Melissa Mathews speaking.”
“Sheriff Skidmore Needle, please, Melissa.” Even though Skid and I had known each other since boyhood and it had been nearly a year since he had been elected sheriff, I still delighted in asking for him that way on the phone. I liked the fact that he was sheriff, it made the entire county seem saner. I also thought it was somehow amusing to tease Melissa.
“May I tell him who's calling, Dr. Devilin?” Melissa asked me zealously.
“No, you see, Melissa,” I began, “if you know who I am, you don't need to say that part. I mean, you already know who's calling. It's me.”
“Oh, right.”
“But you can tell him it's someone else calling if you want to.”
“Okay.” She put the phone away from her mouth and shouted, “Dr. Devilin's calling!”
The phone clicked and Skidmore's voice was on the other end.
“We have an intercom, but Ms. Mathews still likes to shout.” He took the phone away from his mouth. “I got it!”
There was another click, and the telephone circus was concluded.
“And she still hasn't quite mastered the whole
telephone answering
part of her job,” I said, hoping to lighten the initial moments of my call.
“Fever.” His voice shifted to low tones. “You're calling about Lucinda's little nieces.”
“I'm at Lucy's now, in fact. She's still asleep on the sofa. I'm in the kitchen.”
“I understand,” he surmised. “You want me to do most of the talking in case she walks in.”
“Mm hm.”
“I know she's got to be really upset.” He sighed. “It was terrible at the scene, and that's a fact. Their car was nearly flat. That train hit it good. Girls died instantly. Thank God.”
“Still wearing seat belts?”
“Yes.”
“So they hadn't even tried to get out of the car.”
“Didn't look like it.” He shuffled some papers in his desk. “We're still trying to figure out exactly what happened.”
“But no evidence, that you saw,” I whispered, “of anything out of the ordinary.”
“No,” he sighed. “It was a really bad accident.”
“Lucinda wants me to look into it,” I said quickly. “I understand that you don't want me in your way. All I need to do is go over to Pine City, take a look at the crossing, see the car, examine the bodies, that sort of thing.”
“I could have guessed she'd want you to do this,” he said, a slight irritation growing in his words, “but I have to ask you not to. I don't want her upset. And I
don't
want you in my way.”
“Of course.” I'd heard that tone a lot recently. He was tired, pressedâand it was only eight in the morning.
“Believe me,” he allowed, “you don't want to look at the bodies. What's left of them is seriously messed up.”
“I've seen worse. We've seen worse together.”
“Right,” he agreed after a moment.
We were both thinking about the decomposed bodies we'd found little more than a year before in the woods close to the town mortuary.
“I still don't like to think about that,” he said quietly.
“So you'd understand,” I pressed, “if I just had a look into this for a day or two, completely out of your hair. To appease Lucy. I know it was just an accident.”
“What did I just say?” he snapped, irritation growing for some reason. “I don't want you in this mess. I'm really busy.”
“I know,” I cut him off.
I didn't want to hear the litany of troubles I was afraid he might recite. Not because I was uncaring, but because I knew the effect they were having on himâand his home life. His wife, Girlinda, had called me in tears several times over the summer.
“Keep me posted, then,” I said, clipped.
He knew I'd look into things for Lucinda's sake, but he was so strained I didn't want to press it then.
“Right,” he agreed, but clearly didn't mean it. “âHey' to Lucy.”
“âHey' to Girlinda.”
We hung up.
The kitchen door swung open and Lucinda stood sleepy-eyed in the doorway. “That was Skid?” she managed.
“It was.”
“How's he doing?” She yawned.
“He said âhey.' But he sounded shot. He worries too much.”
“Or something.” Her syllables insinuated what the whole town gossiped: Skid and his secretary, Melissa, were seeing one another.
“I don't want to have this discussion again about Skidmore,” I said, turning toward the percolator. “He's my oldest friend, I trust him, and there's nothing to all the talk about Melissa and him. Plus, you know that if Skidmore was seeing anyone but Girlinda, she would kill him, then call the doctor to revive him
just
so she could kill him again.”
Lucinda didn't seem in the mood for levity.
“Where there's smoke, there's fire,” she said hoarsely, ambling into the kitchen.
“A stitch in time saves nine,” I intoned.
“What?”
“Sorry,” I sniffed, “I thought you wanted to talk in clichés.”
That, of all things, made her smile.
“Very funny. Are you drinking my coffee?” She was content to change the subject. “That's a warning, a danger sign.”
“I know,” I agreed. “It's the last days.”
She shuffled to the table and sat; I poured coffee into her favorite mug. The sun insisted on tidying the room, making it clean of any shadow the night had left behind. Walls were washed in amber morning light, and everything seemed better when I sat beside her, even to drink the awful brew.
Silence spoke volumes; our eyes didn't meet. It was the sort of conversation we'd been having, on and off, since we were both fourteen. Some things are understood between two people who know
each other that well and don't need to be said. Unfortunately, other things that yearn to be said sit silent too and make a palpable wall of longing.
“Will you be all right if I just slip over to Pine City for a few hours now?” I stood and took my cup to the sink.
“Of course,” she said firmly, staring out the window. “I want you to go look into things. I'll be okay.”
“I know, I was just making sure you were ready for me to leave.
Her chair scraped a harsh yelp across the floor as she turned to look at me.
“You know I'm never
ready
for you to leave, Fever,” she said softly, “not to go to college or off to teach, not even to walk into the next room most of the time. I wouldn't mind it if we were never much out of sight. But I don't expect that's what you meant.”
I set the cup down in the sink, didn't look at her.
“I'm here now,” was all I could think to say, staring down at the stainless steel faucet.
“I didn't mean ⦠,” she began, but fell silent.
“You meant,” I told her, swinging slowly around, leaning back against the counter, “that you're glad I'm back, glad I'm here now. You meant you missed me when I was gone. You meant you like it better when I'm here than when I'm not. You can put me down for all of that too, in spades. You think I don't understand something mysterious or secret about our relationship, but I do know a thing or two. I know, for instance, that I'm the only one you called last night. And you know what that means?”
“What?”
I looked down at the clean old linoleum floor.
“I believe you're sweet on me.”
“How much more complex is it than that?” she asked, her eyes brighter. “In your mind.”
“Enormously,” I shot back. “A genuine adult relationship is supposed to be dense; the primary sin of popular culture is a lack of complexity. I consider it our duty to help ameliorate that situation by
indulging in the most complicated emotional miasma of the current century.”
“We've certainly got a head start on
that
. And well begun is half-done.”
“A bird in the hand,” I said, launching my frame away from the counter, “is worth two in the bush, and I'm off.”
“I'll just wait here, then, shall I?” She didn't move.
“Maybe we could have lunch when I come back.” I suggested. “What's today?”
“Saturday.”
“Are you on call at the hospital?”
“I'm supposed to go in,” she said hesitantly.
“You're taking the day off. That's not a question.”
“All right,” she agreed. “I'll call them right now.”
“I'll see myself out.” I headed out the door without looking back.
“I might be in the garden,” she called out, “if you phone.”
I smiled at that: Saturday gardening could mean that she felt better.
I paused a moment in the living room to pick up my black leather jacket and to get a good look at one of the photographs on the mantel. Two teenaged girls stood side-by-side holding a carved pumpkin and a blue ribbon between them. Autumn light brushed their faces, and the clarity of their eyes was piercing, even in the photograph. It was signed at the bottom, “To Aunt Lucinda, love Rory and Tess. Look, first prize!”
Â
Pine City isn't far from Blue Mountain as the crow flies, but if you're forced to take the main road, it twists around for nearly half an hour before you see their town hall. I pulled my ancient green pickup to the side of the road close to the railroad crossing and got out. I hadn't been there in a while, but everything I could see was exactly the same as it had been since I was a boy.
The road I parked on was the axis of town, the railroad crossing about five hundred yards shy of the square. The cross street where I stood had been a gravel road when I was a boy, but blacktop had long since replaced gray rocks. The rails toward town veered off
sharply to the right, away from the square, just after the crossing, and rhododendrons twice my age had grown high enough to hide the trains as they passed. The other side, the direction from which the train would have approached the night before, sloped downward from where I stood, making it impossible to see anything coming until it was less than fifty feet away.
Like a lot of other towns in Appalachia, the railroad had made a city out of a gathering of scattered farms and businesses. The train station, only a little farther on down the tracks after the curve and the rhododendrons, had once been a palace where exotic treasures from strange places arrived on boxcars, where soon-to-be grooms stood on platforms waiting, a bunch of red roses in hand, for strangers to arrive from Atlanta or farther-away towns.
For me it had been a place from which to leave home, glad of freedom; a place to return when the world was too wild.
I left home when I was seventeen, graduated early from high school and shot from Blue Mountain like a cannonball, or a fast train leaving from the Pine City station. My best friend, Skidmore, was the only one there to say good-bye. I could always see that moment in my mind's eye, Skid barely managing not to cry, shaking my hand and telling me he'd never see me again.