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  Geof pressed: “Do you, Dave?”

  He shook his head, evidently answering us.

  But still, he wouldn’t speak.

  14

  WE ALL SAT IN SILENCE FOR QUITE A LONG TIME.

  A nurse came in and checked the bindings that held David’s left arm clamped to his side, to help keep his broken bone temporarily immobilized. Another nurse came in and offered him pain medication, which he refused with a stubborn set to his jaw and a careful shake of his head.

  The phone in his room rang, and Geof picked it up.

  “Wrong room,” he said, setting it back again.

  An orderly came whistling in with David’s lunch tray, cheerfully set it up on the silver tray that wheeled into place over the bed, said, “How’re you, folks?” and whistled out again.

  David ignored the food, which, even under silver covers, smelled like broccoli. I was hungry and wished I could eat it if he wasn’t going to. And still, the doctor hadn’t arrived to release him. And still, the kid didn’t respond to Geof’s explanation of the doctor’s theory about what had happened to him.

  We didn’t rush him.

  He had a lot of fears and memories to filter through.

  Geof got up and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. In a few minutes, I heard the toilet flush, then the water run, and then he came back out and this time came over by me, turned his back on David, and commenced to stare out the window.

  David spoke, in a small voice that was trying to sound cynical.

  “Has anybody seen my uncles?”

  I let out my breath.

  Geof turned around again and said, “Your uncles are still in jail, Dave.”

  For murdering David’s stepfather.

  David had testified against them.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Actually, I checked, last night.”

  “What about my grandfather?”

  Who had probably ordered the murder, and other crimes, and who could not be charged, much less convicted, for a number of frustrating reasons.

  “The rest of the family is gone, David, still gone.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “We’ll find out who did this, and it will turn out not to be personal, Dave. It won’t be about you. It will turn out that you just happened to be there, at the wrong time. Believe me, it will all turn out to have nothing to do with you.”

  I believed him, but there was no reason for David to.

  At which moment, the doctor finally appeared.

  We took a subdued teenager home an hour later.

  Once there, he took the pain pills and went to sleep on one of our living room couches. But only after he had made us close and lock all of our doors and windows, and only after the last thing he saw before he dozed off was Geof sitting opposite him, holding his favorite Colt .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol under his hand on an end table. When Geof was sure David slept, he quietly got up, put the gun away in his hiding place on top of the refrigerator, and joined me in the kitchen for lunch.

  Before he put the gun up, though, he showed me the open window in the top of it: no magazine. No ammunition. It had been only for show, for David, to make him feel safe enough to go to sleep.

  “What am I going to do about him?” Geof asked me, over take-out gyro sandwiches I heated in the microwave, and potato chips and beers for each of us. “I can’t stay here and play bodyguard for him until he gets his nerve back.”

  “Just do it today and tonight,” I suggested. “By tomorrow, he’ll begin to feel stupid, and he’ll start accusing you of babying him. You weren’t planning on going anywhere today anyway, were you?”

  “No, although I thought I might help look for some answers.”

  “It looks like you can be the most help right here.”

  “What are you doing to do this afternoon, Jen?”

  I smiled at him. “Escape from this prison, warden. I’m gonna go build me an autumn festival right smack-dab in the middle of the town common.”

  Exactly one week to go.

  “Oh, may next Saturday be a twin to this one,” was my prayer as I nosed the Miata into one of the few remaining parking slots that slanted into the north curb at the commons. Today, everything was perfect: sunshine, temperature in the fifties, only a hint of wind, a mere lilting lift to the spirits and the hemline. Perfection.

  My heart was full as I observed the activity that filled the broad swath of community property. To each volunteer carpenter, architect, painter, and pounder, I sang a silent hymn of praise and gratitude. I felt, in fact, overwhelmed at that moment. Not, for once, by responsibility. Rather, by the reality of all of it.

  “You,” I told myself, “are privileged today to watch a dream coming true.”

  How could I ever say to anyone how marvelous it felt to realize that all of those people, all of that activity, had coalesced around an idea in my head? I probably couldn’t utter it, at least not without sounding as if my ego had inflated with helium.

  Which, in figurative fact, it had.

  I felt lightheaded as I got out of my car and walked toward an afternoon of physical labor. I practically floated, a few inches off the grass, over to pick up a hammer and pitch in.

  There’s nothing like hearing people talk about you to bring you back down to earth.

  The volunteers were singing, whistling, laughing, cussing, complaining. In my oldest jeans and one of Geof’s old flannel shirts, I got to be one of the crowd for most of the day, and I didn’t have to supervise anybody, didn’t organize anything. I just carried lumber, unloaded cars, twisted screws, and picked up trash with everybody else. It was a nice place to visit, though I wouldn’t have wanted to live in that position. I did so enjoy being in charge, God help me!

  Some of the volunteers—quite a few—didn’t know who I was, so I got to hear, firsthand, the local gossip.

  “Do you think there’s any point doing this?”

  “Doing what? What d’ya mean?”

  “All this work. Today. Building these booths. You read the paper? You think this thing’s really going to happen?”

  “The festival, you mean? Hell, it better. I could be home watching football this weekend.”

  “Why don’t you bring that little portable set of yours tomorrow? Hell, we’ve got electricity here, we could plug it in and watch the Pats tomorrow.”

  The New England Patriots, they meant, they who had lost ignominiously to Kansas City last week. I thought of Bill Kennedy’s dumb joke and vowed to dig up a better conversational gambit than football for the next time I saw him. I was listening to the two women football fans, while unobtrusively—I hoped—holding up one end of a plywood sheet for them to nail into the booth frame that would become a demonstration quilting bee for the ladies from our local Salvation Army. I just did my job and kept my ears open.

  It wasn’t only the future of the festival that I overheard being dished that day in lively discourse.” God’s Highway, the trail crossing, the previous night’s incident, and yours truly all came up for debate, too.

  “You watch, they’re going to spend our tax money fixing that intersection, all because a couple of damn fools couldn’t remember to look both ways before they crossed a street. It just burns me up—”

  “I don’t think that’s what happened. One of them was just a child, anyway. And what I heard is, those drivers were drunk—”

  “Huh?” I thought.

  “No, they were speeding—”

  “Whatever anybody was doing,” said the first speaker, “you can bet it’s going to cost us money.”

  Then, a little later, over by the booth for the used book sale by the Brandeis University women, I heard two of them, college age, talking:

  “Can you imagine being in charge of all this?”

  “God! I know who is, it’s a woman, I just can’t remember her name. My mom doesn’t know her, but she knows her sister real well, and Mom says the sister is a major volunteer in town, like she�
��s in charge of the docents over at the museum, and she ran the symphony benefit last year, and she’s some big deal with the Episcopal church women. And the sister’s not having anything to do with this festival. And Mom says, what does that tell you?”

  It told me that Sherry had grown understandably fed up after a lifetime of having a big sister who was always getting her name or picture in the newspaper (for better or for worse). It told me she still felt as if she were always walking in my shadow, and that she still hated it. I never had known what to do about that, so I still did nothing. Sherry Cain Guthrie cast a pretty impressive shadow, herself, it seemed to me, just hearing that partial list of her recent accomplishments. But it was hard to know if she did all those things because she really wanted to, or if she was still competing with me. It was a competition I’d never felt and that she fought alone, but then older siblings never had to engage in that nasty battle, by and large. It was one of the advantages of being born first, I supposed. Unlike Sherry, I’d had a couple of years to feel like the center of the universe, with everybody doting on me all by myself. When you think you’re the sun, you don’t pay much attention to shadows, which can be a problem of its own, of course, but one that would not have reaped any sympathy from a younger sister. Poor Sherry. I didn’t know how to detach my shadow from the soles of my feet, so I could only hope that she would eventually step boldly away from me, in the direction of something she really loved to do, where nothing I had ever done would make any difference to her, or to anybody else. I hoped that, someday, she would get to see my shadow shrink to a mere wisp of fog in her path.

  It was while I was dumping trash into a bin that I heard the patronizing tone of my own thoughts about my sister, and I grimaced. Yuck, I thought.

  “You hear what happened out to the east edge of town last night?”

  I shamelessly eavesdropped on two burly fellows waiting in line at the port-a-potty next to the ones the women were using.

  “Something about the highway being shut down? Some car wreck down on the bridge?”

  “No, some kids on motorcycles, they blocked off the whole damn road, just so they could race their bikes up and down the hills. Can you believe that?”

  “No shit? How’d they do it?”

  “Parked their cars across the whole damn road, is what I heard, so nobody could pass in either direction.”

  “Damn kids. They get caught?”

  “Cops nabbed one of them.”

  “Good. I hope they get all of them. They ought to string them all up, pulling a stunt like that.”

  “That’s no stunt, that’s criminal behavior. Rush hour, too.”

  “Damn kids.”

  I boggled at their version and decided that I just couldn’t let it pass. The men were nice about it, when I gave them the right story—leaving myself and David’s name out of it—but just before one of them stepped into the tall blue cubicle he said, “Probably turn out to be teenagers, anyway.”

  “No doubt,” said his buddy.

  I gave up the good fight.

  Anyway, they could be right, I supposed, it could have been a kid’s “prank.”

  But it was as I lay on my back in the dark in the dirt, underneath the elevated platform for the clog dancers and square dancers, that I overheard the most interesting—and disturbing—bit of gossip.

  It seemed to be three voices whispering.

  “Meeting tonight”

  “What time?”

  “Eleven-thirty. On the trail, this side of the bridge.”

  “Who’s gonna be there?”

  “Central committee and some outta-towners, bunch of folks from national.”

  “No kidding?”

  That whisper sounded impressed, excited.

  “Yeah, did you know the national director’s here? Things are going to get hot, man.”

  “Hot damn! It’s about time we saw some action around here!”

  “The cops think we shut down the highway yesterday.”

  I heard quiet laughter.

  “Are we admitting anything?”

  “Are you kidding? FTF doesn’t talk to the gestapo, ever.”

  I was trying to see them through cracks in the wood flooring of the stage, but all I glimpse were shoe soles and flashes of sunlight. I wanted to crawl out from under, to identify the whisperers, but my job at the moment was to steady a perpendicular post that served as a major support for the whole structure. I was stuck, and the whispering voices moved away from my hearing. When I emerged from down under, I stared around, searching for whispering trios, but I didn’t succeed in recognizing any such groups of conspirators.

  There was political talk that day, too, some of it favorable to my friend the mayor, and some of it decidedly not. Taking my own internal poll of what I heard, I still put Mary ahead of Ardyth by about 51 percent to 49 percent, which was worse than it sounded, because Mary had been a shoo-in in her last election. From what I was overhearing, everything rode on this festival, which she had backed with all of her clout and reputation. Folks who thought we’d pull it off tended to favor Mary; the doubters were coming down increasingly on Ardyth’s side.

  “Still,” I reminded one of Mary’s other supporters, quietly, “even the doubters are here. Every nail they drive is actually a nail in Ardyth’s political coffin, whether they know it or not And, at the same time, they’re nailing Mary’s flag to the wall.”

  “May the best woman win,” she responded, smiling at the pleasure of hearing those words that would have been so improbable only a couple of decades before.

  “That,” I remarked dryly, “should leave very little choice.”

  Along toward the end of the afternoon, the Halloween protestors straggled onto the common, carrying their familiar posters. When they’d all come together in a group, they hoisted their posters on high and began their familiar, peaceful circling.

  “Damn” slipped out of my mouth.

  “Who are those people?” inquired one of the volunteers, a woman who was obviously new to town.

  I waited to see how somebody else would answer that.

  “Oh, they’re just our local fruitcakes,” came the quick response, and I heard both condescension and irritation in the words. “They’ve been around Port Frederick for years. They’re fundamentalists from some little nobody-ever-heard-of-it church in town. They’ve never done any harm, that I know of, but they always show up in October, I guess to try to stop us poor foolish heathens from giving any candy to children. They don’t approve of Halloween, they don’t approve of trick-or-treat, they do not approve of goblins or ghosts. I think the idea is that we’re not supposed to do anything they don’t approve of.”

  The sarcasm was blistering, but fortunately it was being voiced too far away from the protestors for them to hear it.

  The first questioner said, “What’s the matter with them? Haven’t they ever heard of the Holy Ghost?”

  Everybody around her broke up in laughter, and then we all got back to work. Unfortunately, that last joke gave one of the volunteers an idea. About fifteen minutes later, hearing exclamations around me, I looked up from sweeping sawdust off the dancer’s platform to witness a strange spectacle: A tall man had thrown a painter’s drop cloth over his body, covering himself down to his shins, and he’d nailed together a couple of crossbars and was advancing toward the little circle of protestors, the cross held out in front of him.

  Dropping my broom, I jumped off the platform and started running.

  One by one, the protestors noticed the apparition advancing toward them, and they each abruptly stopped moving, causing the one behind them to run into them, backing up the circle almost comically.

  I was not laughing as I raced their way.

  Breathless, I pulled up beside the joker in the drop cloth, grabbed his arm through the thick material and, pulling at him roughly, said, “What the hell are you supposed to be?”

  A sepulchral chuckle sounded under the cloth. I could see where he’d poked holes
for vision. “I am the Holy Ghost!”

  He shouted the words, long enough for all of us to hear.

  “Oh, no, you’re not!” I grabbed his shoulders and swung him around, which made him stagger. “If you go over there and insult those people, you’re definitely a dead man—because I promise I will personally kill you—but you are not a ghost. Please do not offend those people. Please save your costumes for Halloween.”

  “Goddammit!” yelled the Holy Ghost. He struggled with the drop cloth and me, pushing me backward by pressing the cross against me. Then he threw it to the ground and pulled the material off over his head. He was a young guy, I saw, but certainly old enough to know better. When his mouth was clear of the fabric, so was the smell of beer on his breath. My chest hurt, where a corner of the cross had dug into me.

  With his face contorted, he shouted at me.

  “You bitch! You ruined my joke!”

  He started toward me, and I saw that the general idea was to bowl me over and keep marching toward the protestors. God only knew what he would do or say when he got there. Or, how they would respond. I had no choice but to stand my ground as he advanced. He lowered his head and bunched his arms in front of him. I put my own arms up to protect myself and propped my legs wide apart. But I was no match for his size or his drunkenness. He just bulldozed me, scooping me off the ground and dumping me on my side. From down there, I rolled out of the way of his big feet and looked back at the protestors. With stiff backs and injured expressions on their faces, they were staring at the two of us, and then, to my dismay, I realized they were disbanding and heading back to their cars. Not that I blamed them; it was a mighty intelligent move on their parts to avoid contact with the drunk who’d upended me. I tried to scramble to my feet, but I was having trouble getting my breath. It wasn’t that I wanted them to continue their protest, necessarily, it was just that I wished they would stick around long enough for me to offer apologies.

  And meanwhile, the drunken idiot kept on charging.

  He didn’t get more than a few feet beyond me, however, because other volunteers arrived en masse to tackle him. A couple of men who were even bigger than he was, grabbed him and then marched him smartly away, putting up with no verbal guff in the process.