The Second Silence (43 page)

‘There’s something I don’t get.’ She dropped her voice even lower, cupping a hand over the receiver. ‘Going after my father was one thing, but what does you know who have to gain from trashing a church?’

‘Like I’m some kinda mind reader? How would I know?’ Dante sounded irritated, though she sensed it wasn’t directed at her. ‘Look, I can’t talk about this over the phone. Can you get off work in an hour or so?’

‘I’ll tell Mr Norwood I have cramps if I have to.’ It was the first excuse that popped into her head. Maybe because she was relieved to have her period. She’d heard too many stories about condoms breaking.

They’d been together three times since that first one, each better than the last. With Dante, she was finding out that all those sexy novels she’d devoured were mostly a load of crap. The real thing was a million times better. The thought sent a curl of warmth up her mid-section.

‘Meet me at my place around noon.’ Dante hung up.

The rest of the morning Bronwyn could hardly concentrate. She mixed up orders, giving a woman who’d asked for cinnamon swirl a scoop of coffee almond fudge instead, then forgot to put a filter in the coffee machine so that it filled with sludgy grounds. The last straw was a group of kids who paid for their cones with eight one-dollar bills and received a ten in change. Mr Norwood, mistaking it for a case of teenage hormones run amok—he was more accurate than he could have known—practically shooed her out the door at lunchtime, claiming it was for
his
sake that he was giving her the rest of the day off.

She pedaled furiously down Main Street, turning left at the American Legion Hall. A few blocks down, at the Agway, she turned left again and kept on going until she reached the wrecking yard, a quarter of a mile to the south. As she biked past it, Bronwyn caught a glimpse of a rust-eaten chassis dangling from the steel jaws of an enormous crane. She was mounting the rickety staircase to Dante’s apartment when a loud, thudding crash from across the street caused it to sway slightly.

At the door, Dante greeted her with a kiss. His mind, though, was clearly elsewhere. Inside she watched him pace over to the window, where he stood staring out at the wrecking yard. He was wearing his overalls from work, light blue with his name stitched over the front pocket. Fresh grease marks overlapped the paler ones that hadn’t quite washed out. With a jerky motion he reached for his cigarettes atop the TV.

‘I shouldn’t be talking to you about this,’ he said, lighting one and twisting his mouth to blow out a jet of smoke. ‘You know too much already.’

Bronwyn advanced on him, frowning. ‘Dante, if you’re keeping something from me …’

‘Let’s just say I’ve been tipped off.’

‘By one of Robert’s goons?’

‘No. By a friend.’ He flicked a nervous glance at her. ‘It doesn’t matter who. All you need to know is that something’s coming down. Something a lot bigger than the petty JD stuff that’s come down so far.’

Her stomach lurched. ‘Something involving Noelle?’

‘Maybe I’m getting this second hand. Let’s just say my friend is closer to the Man than yours truly, but there’s a limit to what he knows.’

Fear funneled through her like hot water through ice. You read about it in the papers all the time, she thought: Divorced dad goes berserk and murders his ex-wife. Oh, God. The day she’d tried to warn her sister, Bronwyn had begun to think that maybe Noelle was right: Maybe she
was
overreacting. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. But now she knew better.

‘What am I supposed to tell my sister?’ she demanded. ‘I can’t go to her without some facts. She already thinks I’m blowing this way out of proportion.’

‘Just tell her to get the hell out of town.’

Bronwyn sighed with frustration. ‘Dante, this isn’t helping. I’d never be able to convince her to do that. Not without Emma. Anyway, it could be
months.’
She stepped around behind him to circle his waist with her arms and press her cheek to his back. ‘If you know something more, tell me. Please.’

She felt him tense. His muscles under the worn canvas overalls were as unyielding as a statue’s. Dante was literally scared stiff, she realized with a jolt. Not for Noelle or Emma. For
her.

‘First,’ he growled, ‘you have to promise to stay away.
Far
away.’

‘From
what?’

He spun around to grip her arms. His eyes were dark and hooded; his calloused fingers dug into her flesh. ‘Promise.’

‘Okay, okay.’ She pulled away, rubbing her arm. ‘I promise.’

Dante hesitated, regarding her dubiously. Then he sighed -the sigh of a tough guy who’d just as soon it didn’t get around that he had a thing for a certain dark-eyed girl with trouble written all over her innocent-looking face. ‘Tomorrow night, he’s hitting another church,’ he said. ‘United Methodist out on Grandview.’

She shook her head in confusion. ‘I don’t get it. What, if anything, does Robert hope to accomplish by all this? Is he doing it just for kicks or is there some master plan?’

‘I don’t know. That’s what scares me.’

Bronwyn was scared, too. She stared at Dante while her mind raced.
My sister is in danger,
she thought.
Real danger. The kind that jumps out at you from a dark alley. The kind that means business. But what exactly does that creepy husband of hers have up his sleeve?

One way or another, she was going to find out.

CHAPTER 16

A
T THE OTHER END OF TOWN
Doris had just settled in for her afternoon nap. She was dozing, about to drop off, when the phone ringing down the hall jerked her back to consciousness. Groggily she wondered why no one was answering it before remembering that Mary was off on some business and Noelle next door taking Polly Inklepaugh up on her offer of zucchini from the garden. Polly always planted way too much, she thought. Now that the kids were grown and scattered to the four winds, it was just she and Harry, and honestly, how many jars of pickled beets can two people possibly eat? Polly ought to have done as she’d suggested and donated some of those pickles and preserves to the drive St Vincent’s held each year at Christmas. But the woman rarely listened to her, though you’d think, after forty-odd years of living next door to each other—

The phone rang on and on, mindless of Doris’s infirmity and the fact that she’d just as soon not have to get up and shuffle down the hall only to have the person hang up before she could answer it. Maybe she should have given in to Noelle’s insistence and bought an answering machine. She just hadn’t seen the point, not with her being home all day with nothing better to do than pick up the phone herself. But that was before she’d begun spending more time on her back than up and about. Now it was the trials of Job just to haul her decrepit body out of bed. A body that had begun to seem alien and ill fitting somehow, like a wrong-size dress bought by mistake that she hadn’t gotten around to returning. Lately she even needed help going to the bathroom.

It’s the one thing they never tell you about old age,
she thought,
that it isn’t the aches and pains or even the loneliness that’ll do you in. It’s the humiliation of having to be lowered onto the toilet by someone whose diapers you once changed.

If only that infernal phone would stop its ringing. Shouldn’t Noelle be back by now? Polly was no doubt chewing her ear off, never mind that Noelle had problems of her own,
real
ones, and didn’t need to hear a lot of yammering on and on about Polly’s selfish son and his amnesia every year around her birthday or her daughter’s so far fruitless attempts to bring more silly Inklepaughs into this world. Saints preserve us, she thought, that woman could talk the bark off a tree. A high price to pay for a load of zucchini that anyone with a garden couldn’t give away fast enough this time of year.

Still, the phone rang on. Who could it be? That smarty-pants Buxton girl? The thought gave Doris a little jolt. Suppose it
was
Lacey, with good news about little Emma? My, wouldn’t that be something. And how would it look that she’d been too lazy to walk twenty paces down the hall to take the message?
Shame on you,
a voice scolded.

Doris hauled herself out of bed, every bone in her body creaking with the effort. A wave of dizziness swept over her and she stood rocking on her feet, clinging to the bedpost for support. Oh, how she longed to climb back under the covers! These days she couldn’t move without some part of her yipping in pain. She imagined a small animal—a gopher or a mouse, something beady-eyed with sharp yellow incisors—its teeth sunk to the bone. Clutching her left side, she shuffled out into the hall, biting her lip to keep from crying out.

The phone continued to ring. She could see it atop its little oak table on the landing at the end of the hall. A hall that stretched before her like the tunnels she’d traveled through as a child to visit Grandmother Cates in Boston. She recalled how panicky she used to feel plunged into sudden darkness with the train rocking to and fro, the clacking of its wheels a deafening roar. She felt almost as frightened now, not of being swallowed whole like Jonah but of falling and not being able to get up.

Doris placed a hand on the wall for support, just below the gallery of framed family photos that glinted in the dim light. There was Mary Catherine at three, bundled in her snowsuit, helping Daddy shovel the front walk. And Trish at eight, proudly showing off her brand-new front teeth. Ted had been so patient with the girls, far more patient than she. She’d tried—maybe not hard enough—before reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the Lord hadn’t seen fit to bless her with a forbearing nature.

She winced at the pain in her side, her gaze straying to a more recent photo of her elder daughter and granddaughter, taken nine years ago at Noelle’s wedding. She remembered suddenly that today was Noelle’s anniversary, which they’d almost certainly go out of their way
not
to celebrate. Doris peered at the photo: Noelle, in her white gown and veil smiling too broadly, and Mary Catherine with one arm held stiffly about her waist looking a bit shell-shocked by it all. Yes, a difficult day—most of all for Charlie’s wife, who couldn’t have helped noticing the glances her husband kept stealing at Mary Catherine.

It struck Doris now that in the weeks since her daughter’s return much had changed. Like trees that in reaching for the sun lean into one another, the two of them had grown closer. More relaxed with each other somehow and, perversely, quicker to be short when grouchy, the way family members do when not walking on eggshells. Mary Catherine had blossomed in other ways as well, not just as a mother, but as a woman, though credit for that was due almost exclusively to Charlie.

As she slowly shuffled along the hall, leaning heavily into the wall, Doris thought with genuine regret:
Forgive me, Lord. I know I didn’t make it easy for them. They were young, yes, but so were Ted and I. … only a few years older when we tied
t
he knot. I should have been more understanding. I should have
—

Sudden silence brought Doris to an abrupt halt. The phone had stopped ringing.
Hell’s bells,
she cursed inwardly (the dirty little secret she kept from her children was that she often swore, though never out loud). What if it
had
been for Noelle?

Come to think of it, where was the girl? It seemed hours since she’d stepped out for what was supposed to have been only a few minutes. The sunlight filtering through the transom over the front door had slipped between the stair rails to cast a ladder of shadow over the steps below. On the radio in the kitchen, tuned to WMYY, a band was playing a song from Doris’s girlhood, reminding her of when her husband and she were first married and Ted had surprised her with a romantic weekend in the city. They’d stayed at the Waldorf Hotel, where they’d waltzed to Eddie Duchin’s orchestra. Doris allowed her gaze to alight on a photo of the two of them taken many years later on their silver anniversary. Both stout and gray, Ted’s defeated eyes—he’d been diagnosed with emphysema shortly thereafter—showing no memory of that enchanted evening of dancing and champagne.

A line from a poem drifted into her head:
Allow not love to wither like summer bounty left unplucked.
If she’d been prone to such fanciful turns of phrase, she’d have told her daughters to heed that advice. Trish, with her silly pretensions about that selfish boob she was supposedly engaged to, who had as much intention of marrying her as of buying the gas station where he pumped his gas. And Mary Catherine -dear Lord, what would she have told her eldest?

I was wrong about Charlie. He’s a good man.

When the phone began ringing again, Doris started, lurching unsteadily as she reached to answer it. ‘Hello?’ Her voice was thin and querulous; the receiver huge and clumsy in her hand.

‘Mrs Quinn? Oh, thank goodness! I was about to give up.’ The girlish voice at the other end was high pitched with relief. ‘Did I wake you?’

‘I was lying down. Just resting my eyes,’ Doris was quick to add. ‘Who is this?’

‘Bronwyn. Bronwyn Jeffers.’ As if there could be another girl with such an unlikely name in all of Schoharie County.

Doris felt a stab of irritation that she’d been dragged out of bed for nothing. ‘If you’re looking for Noelle, I’m afraid she’s stepped out.’

‘Do you know when she’ll be back?’

‘Oh, anytime now, I should think. She’s just next door. Why don’t you call back in a few minutes?’

The girl hesitated. ‘I hate to put you to the trouble, Mrs Quinn, but do you think you could get her for me? I wouldn’t ask, except … well, it’s important.’

Just how important could it be? With sixteen-year-old girls there was only one thing important enough to drag some perfectly innocent person to the phone: boyfriend troubles. Doris grew even more irritated. ‘Like I said, she’ll be back any moment. It can wait until then, can’t it?’

‘Actually it’s more of an emergency.’ The girl really
did
sound desperate.