The Probable Future (21 page)

“I’m the one who told you!” Marlena called, not in the least tricked by her coworker’s whisperings. “And it’s not exactly a secret. There was a full report in the
Boston Globe
and the
Unity Tribune
.”

Matt had a soft spot for Mrs. Gibson, even though they’d all been terrified of her back when they were kids.
No talking!
the boys in town would scream at the top of their lungs when they saw Mrs. Gibson on Main Street or in the market, but Matt had never resented the fact that she wanted books cared for properly or that she insisted upon peace and quiet.

“My brother had nothing to do with it. Murder takes some kind of effort unless it’s accidental, so you can count Will out. You know he never applies himself at anything. This is one time he’s innocent.”

“Well, that’s nice.” Mrs. Gibson was headed off to the research room, where the founding fathers’ journals were stored in a metal cabinet that had a separate humidity control. “I’m glad it wasn’t Will. To tell you the truth, I always hoped he’d find his way. If only for your mother’s sake.”

Driving through town on his way home, Matt thought about how easy everything had been for his brother. Good fortune stuck to Will like glue. He didn’t even have to try and he came out a winner. On that night when they’d dared each other to sleep beside Hourglass Lake, the payoff had been that whoever chickened out first was bound to be the other’s servant for an entire day. But for all Will’s bravado, Matt had always wondered if his brother had in fact been too scared to sleep that night. Matt had woken early, his bones aching from the damp ground, to find Will watching him, his sleeping bag thrown over his shoulders like a cape, his expression bleary. The boys blinked at each other in the cool, laky air.

“I’ve been keeping my eye on you,” Will had said. “I’ve been waiting for you to bolt and run. Why don’t you go ahead and run right now? I can hear that horse underwater. He’s coming after you.”

They had spent the night so close to the shoreline they both smelled like water weeds. But obviously the dead horse had not yet risen, although the other boys in town swore that when the demon surfaced it would chase them into the lake, forcing them to run until it wasn’t solid ground beneath their feet, but floating lily pads. So far, that hadn’t happened, and Matt had experienced a fairly good night’s sleep.

A bee buzzed around him, and Matt waved it away, mindful of his brother’s allergy. “Well, keep waiting,” he’d responded. “I’m not running.”

The air was green, filled with pollen. It was the first warm day of the season, and the mayflies had already begun to hatch. Matt swore he could smell a dead horse, not that he was about to change his mind. The stink might be nothing more than skunk cabbage in the ditches.

Matt usually deferred to Will, and his sudden defiance made Will laugh. “Okay, little bro. We’ll see who wins.”

Well, who always won? Who walked away with everything? All the same, looking back, Matt was fairly certain Will had been terrified by their night at the lake. He’d never admit it, Will would lie till there wasn’t a breath left in his body, but Matt had seen the haunted look in his eyes; he’d seen Will huddled beneath his sleeping bag, peeking out like a rat from a burrow in the field.

Matt knew only too well that courage was an elusive companion. All he had to do was look at his own life to see what could happen to a man who didn’t step up to the plate. He’d been so afraid of coming in second-best, so sure he’d be repelled and rejected, that he’d never even tried. Not at anything, not really. He just drifted through, until here he was, a grown man, with nothing of his own. Driving along Main Street, his files and books in a jumble behind his
seat, he wondered if he’d have half the courage of some of the old-timers whose journals he spent his afternoons looking through, those men who walked into uncharted territory, those women who suffered a hundred losses.

He had read in Simon Hathaway’s journal that the figure on the horse of the Civil War memorial was indeed modeled after Simon’s own son, Anton. But it was only through reading Morris Hapgood’s diary that he knew the truth beyond the facts and was aware that Anton’s mother, Emily, visited the monument each and every day until she died. Snow or sleet never stopped her. Why, she didn’t even look up; she didn’t once see the sky again after her son died. All that had mattered to Emily in this world had been buried in the ground, and there were people, Morris Hapgood’s wife, Elise, among them, who believed that the lily of the valley that grew at the base of the monument arose from her tears.

Although Matt’s thesis centered on the Sparrow women, he had yet to find a single word written by any of them, other than a few slips of Elisabeth’s recipes. Everything he knew he’d learned from the journals and diaries and letters of the men of Unity, a stew of fact and possibility, salted with gossip. As for the women, they left behind journals filled with shopping lists and newspaper articles, birth announcements and obituaries, specific details anyone would have guessed would have been lost to time. But when it came to Rebecca Sparrow, most of the facts of her life were still unknown. Some history wasn’t just hidden, it was buried, locked away not only to protect the innocent but also to obscure the guilty, and thereby relieve the descendants of both from the burdens of the past.

Matt always slowed down when he passed the town green, as a mark of respect to those citizens who’d come before him. He’d done so even back when he was a boy riding his bike, delivering newspapers. But now he stopped altogether. He put on the brakes and switched on the wipers to clear off the windshield. He had pretty
good vision, so he assumed he was seeing straight. He could feel a chill settle on his skin as he rolled down his window.

“Jenny?” he called.

She was standing near the
Commemoration to the Men Who Fell in the Revolution
, Matt’s favorite monument. Though forbidden by law, Matt had come down here one evening with several large sheets of white paper and black chalk. One of the chalk rubbings he made was now framed, hanging over his bed, an angel to keep watch while he slept.

Matt left his truck idling and got out. It was definitely her.

“Jenny Sparrow?”

Jenny turned when she heard her name called. At that moment, her head was filled with peach pie and dirty dishes and tallies in which the numbers didn’t add up. Minutiae, true enough, but a big relief from obsessing about Will, or her mother, or Stella. She narrowed her eyes as a man walked toward her, waving his hands as though he knew her. It was that tall, good-looking man that Matt Avery had grown up to be. It was the person she’d forced out of her mind.

“Hey, there,” Jenny called back uncertainly. “Matt?”

Matt grinned and hugged Jenny before he could stop himself. Then he took hold of his own stupidity and backed away.

“You look exactly the same,” he told her.

“No one looks the same after all this time, Matt.”

Still, Jenny was flattered. Could it be she never noticed the way he looked at her, that he had been following her, not his brother? Not that Jenny put much stock in anything Liza Hull told her. Love wasn’t like that, was it? Just sitting there in a back drawer for all these years, like a shirt you’d never bothered to try on, but which was still there, neat and pressed and ready to wear at a moment’s notice. At any rate, he couldn’t possibly think she looked anything like she used to. Hadn’t he seen that her hair was much shorter, that there were lines around her eyes and across her forehead, that she was a woman and not the same headstrong girl she once had been?

“I heard you were in town. I met Stella, and I was going to call you at your mother’s, but I didn’t know if you wanted to hear from me. I thought you might hang up.”

Jenny laughed. Funny how Matt seemed so completely changed yet so thoroughly familiar. He’d always been worried and cautious, thinking about others, second-guessing himself. “Why? Because of that fight a million years ago on New Year’s Eve? Whatever happened, I’m sure Will deserved it.”

“Oh, he did.”

Matt’s face had grown moody at the mere mention of his brother. Stella had been right in her assessment, he was nothing like Will. He was thoughtful to a fault, carrying his regret around with him as though every mistake he’d ever made was lashed to his back.

“Well, it was years ago,” Jenny reminded Matt. He looked so adrift, Jenny had the urge to reach out to him, but instead she took a step back and nearly stumbled over the black granite monument.

Matt put out his arm to steady her. He had thought about Jenny Sparrow every single day since that New Year’s Eve when he last saw her. Now he supposed he was staring. He’d been staring that day he was on the ladder, trying to puzzle out if it really was her.

“Actually, I tried to call you,” Jenny told him, just to say something, just to stop him from staring. “But you were never home. I wanted to thank you for paying Henry Elliot’s fee and putting up the bail money.”

“Don’t forget the detective. I’m paying for that, too. Good old Will,” Matt said forlornly. “He can make a pauper out of anyone.”

“I’m well aware of that. Whatever you do, don’t lend him your truck. Not ever. Not if he tells you there’s a pile of gold over the border in New Hampshire, and all he has to do is pick it up and you’ll both be filthy rich. Although I don’t think even Will could do much damage to that old thing.”

Jenny nodded to Matt’s battered warrior of a pickup and they both laughed.
Something very odd is going on here
, Jenny thought. She felt
that line of heat across her skin. The rain had started up again, but neither one had made a move to leave.

“Good old Will,” Matt said.

“Not that he killed anyone.”

It was probably the humidity that was making it difficult for Jenny to breathe. All this country air, the pollen, the dampness. She wished she had a paper bag to breathe into. She wished her nerves were steadier.

“We got a report from the detective that there were fingerprints in the victim’s apartment.” Why did he keep talking about his brother? God, was he his brother’s keeper, his apologist, his second-best? “But they weren’t Will’s.” Matt hadn’t spoken this much at one time for years, except to Mrs. Gibson. He finally shut up and drew a breath. “You smell like sugar,” he said, and immediately thought to himself,
Idiot
.

“First day of work. Over at Liza Hull’s Tea House.”

“Liza’s a great girl.” At the moment, Matt couldn’t quite remember who Liza Hull was. Had he always been so dumb in Jenny’s presence, startled into stupidity? “You must be tired. Do you need a ride?”

“Oh, no.” Jenny took another step backward. She tripped over the granite once more, but this time she salvaged her clumsiness by sitting down on the edge of the memorial. The granite was cold right through her clothes to her skin, but Jenny didn’t care. For some reason, she was burning up. “I’ll walk. It’s good exercise after being cooped up all day.”

Matt realized there was a scent other than sugar. Jenny Sparrow gave off the odor of lake water, the same seductive scent there had been that night when he and Will camped out on the Sparrows’ property, listening to the chorus of the peepers.

“I’ll be in touch if I hear any more news about Will’s case,” he told her.

That damned Will again. Couldn’t he leave his brother out of the
conversation for a minute? What he really wanted was to kiss Jenny Sparrow, right here on the town green. It was what he thought about every single time he drove past, only now she was here, sitting on the edge of the memorial, looking up at him.

“Because I hear from Henry Elliot about Will pretty much every day.”

At this point, he would have liked to kill Will. Matt made a note to himself: erase this most irritating word, this vilest of names, from his vocabulary, starting now.

“Oh, Henry. I work with his daughter, Cynthia. She’s sweet, but mixed up. I’m so glad I’m not a teenager.”

Matt, on the other hand, fervently wished that she was. He wished he could reel back time so that he’d been the one who’d gone inside Cake House and Will had been left in the yard, crouched beside the forsythia. He wished he could go back to the moment when she came across the lawn toward them, barefoot, her long hair tangled from sleep.

“Rosemary Sparrow could run faster than any man in town,” Matt said. Immediately, he was embarrassed by his non sequitur. He tended to do this—use his storehouse of historical information to lead him away from anything resembling emotions or regret. He was terrible at conversation, a little better if he could recite a few facts.

“Excuse me?” The rain was falling in earnest now, but Jenny still felt hot. Daffodil rain could do that to you. It could turn you inside out. Jenny unbuttoned her jacket and fanned herself. “Did you say she could run?”

“She was a relative of yours. A great-great-great-great-great. Revolutionary War. She could outrace a deer, that’s what people said, at any rate. When the British were sweeping through, she ran all the way to North Arthur. She got there in time to save close to a hundred boys, who would have been ambushed by the British, and
who took off for the woods instead to do a little ambushing themselves.”

“Wow.” Jenny laughed. “How do you know all that?”

“The library. Good old Mrs. Gibson.”

“Mrs. Gibson! I think I still owe her money for an overdue book. I never returned anything in those days. God, I was thoughtless. She probably has me down on a most-wanted list.”

“No. Not Mrs. Gibson. She’s a softy. She doesn’t have a list.”

The clock on the tower at Town Hall chimed, and they both turned, startled. Six o’clock. Darkness was falling through the leaves of the plane trees, along with the rain. Yellow rain, light rain, the daffodil rain that made people do foolish things.

“You should come over for dinner sometime.”

From the look on his face, Jenny wondered if she’d said something wrong. He appeared panic-stricken, as though he might turn and run himself, faster, perhaps, than Rosemary Sparrow.

“You don’t have to. I wouldn’t be offended if you didn’t want to.” She offered him a polite out. “Not many people are fond of my mother. I understand that. Believe me.”