A Stillness of Chimes (32 page)

Almost twelve years had passed. Had he thought she wouldn’t miss him?

Sean reached over and laid his hand over hers. She stretched her arm alongside his, matching their pulse points, wrist to wrist. They’d done that as kids, one cold night when their arms were covered with goose bumps. Ghost bumps, she’d thought they were called, but she’d been careful not to let herself believe in ghosts. Her dad had told her ghosts weren’t real.

Now he’d become almost a ghost himself, in a sense. A phantom.

“Why did my dad have to run?” she asked. “Wouldn’t divorce have made more sense than abandoning us?”

“Are you still afraid he stopped loving you?”

“I know parents sometimes abandon their children, Sean. It happens. But most parents wouldn’t try to fool their children into believing they’d died.”

“Maybe he thought that was the kindest way to handle it.”

“Because of the affair, you mean? Or because of his issues?”

“A combination, maybe.”

“Or he sensed that Mom didn’t love him anymore—and that I was just so tired of his moods that I—I might have been glad if he disappeared. Oh, I hope he didn’t think that.” Even though, on some particularly difficult days, it might have been true.

Sean squeezed her hand, then lifted his head to study the sky. “I wonder if it’ll storm tonight.”

Her throat hurt from trying not to cry. She took a deep breath, harnessing her emotions. “No, it’ll blow over. That’s what the weatherman says, anyway.”

“You can take a storm and make music out of it,”
her dad had said with a smile on that long-gone Valentine’s Day when he hung the miniature chimes from the star magnolia. A storm had been rolling over the shoulder of the mountains that day.

“I’m going to stake out the cemetery tonight,” Sean said.

“Because I told you my dad used to put flowers on the family plot? But that was so long ago. And he wouldn’t do it anymore if he doesn’t want people to know he’s hanging around.”

“If he doesn’t want people to know he’s around, seems like he’d stop hanging around—if that’s really him.”

“Maybe he’s conflicted,” she said. “He halfway wants to be caught. Or maybe he has problems beyond PTSD by now, especially after living in the wild for years. He could even have Alzheimer’s.”

Sean only drummed his fingers on the step beside him.

She stilled his restless movement with a firm grip. “What’s wrong? You’re so edgy, you’re practically vibrating.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay at my place tonight?”

“I’m sure. Especially if you’ll be right across the road. If he shows up—it’s just my dad, Sean.”

“Your dad, the guy who flipped out on a regular basis. The guy who caught us snuggling on the porch swing and busted it up with a sledgehammer. The guy who—”

“The daddy who sang lullabies to me even when I was too old for lullabies, just because I loved to hear him sing. The animal lover who fed a tiny starving kitten from a medicine dropper. He had the kindest, softest heart. He would never hurt me.” She took a quick breath. “You just told me to keep remembering the good about him. Stop contradicting yourself. You’re as conflicted as he must be. And I am too.”

After a long silence, Sean nodded. “Okay. You stay here tonight. I’ll have my phone. You can call me if you hear or see anything out of the ordinary. Call even if you’re scared and you don’t know why.”

“No, you call me if
you’re
scared,” she said, trying to lighten the moment.

Sean didn’t even smile.

A gust of wind scattered her thank-you notes that were stamped and ready to go in the mail. She jumped up and chased them down. “It’s too windy,” she said, gathering the rest of her things. “I’m going in.”

“Me too.” But he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off the churchyard.

The night was dry but chilly, the wind wrestling with the trees. He would be half-frozen by morning.

Sean turned his cell phone to vibrate and returned it to his pocket. Armed with a flashlight and a thermos of strong coffee but no gun, he
headed for the graveyard. Unless someone was watching from the woods or the kudzu jungle, nobody knew he was there. Nobody but Laura.

Directly across from the house, he stood in the shadows and took in the view from the graveyard. The interior lights were out, but the security lights illuminated the yard and the porch. Laura would still be awake, listening to every sound.

He’d scouted the lay of the land before nightfall, and he’d found the most logical place for a person to hide and spy on Laura. Then he’d found a place for himself, a place where he could watch for a watcher—a wooden bench, deep in the corner of the graveyard, behind an especially large gravestone. He could see the Gantt family plot, its cement curb barely visible by moonlight.

From this vantage point, he could see a portion of the road too. If he kept scanning, back and forth, he wouldn’t miss a thing—unless someone crept up behind him.

He sat on the bench and settled in for a long wait, his eyes adjusting to the darkness. On his side of the road, the brightest thing around was the steeple, its white paint lit from below, like a beacon trying to point people toward heaven.

Not counting the time he’d hid out in the vestibule to spirit Laura away from the old ladies, the last time he’d been inside that church was for Jess’s funeral. He’d slipped into the service a few minutes late. Standing in the rear, he’d found the back of Laura’s head, in the front row. A lamp had hung on the wall in front of her, perfectly centered, its light making a nimbus of rays around her gold-red hair while her slightest movement had made the lamp’s finial seem to bob like a golden tongue above her head. Like Pentecost and those tongues of fire, he’d thought, remembering her
Pentecostal grandparents, the Flynns. They were buried right there in the same graveyard.

A gust of wind blew down the hill, chilling him. North Georgia could be plenty cold, even in late May. The night would be a long one.

His eyelids were already drooping. He’d never thought he could be sleepy in a graveyard at midnight.

To keep himself awake, he tried to imagine how many lives were represented by gravestones in this one little plot of ground. Each grave held the remains of somebody whose day-to-day doings had added up to a life. Kindergarten, grade school, high school. Cars and cats and ball games. College, jobs, weddings. Kids and grandkids and old-folks’ homes, and finally the graveyard with all its crosses that preached silent sermons about the life to come.

Sean preferred that to Jess’s notion that people died and then came back around again in some new form. He would rather live just one life that mattered. One life that ended with his hopes fixed on the resurrection of the dead.

He unscrewed the lid of his thermos and fortified himself with hot, sweet coffee. He couldn’t doze off on his watch.

When Keith had called back, he’d said Dale had stopped him downtown to rant. He was sure Elliott was the rat who’d made that phone call years ago. Dale intended to find him, somehow. So Dale was roaming around, seeking his prey. Elliott was prowling around too, doing God knows what.

When Mrs. Gibson’s fallen silk flowers had jogged Sean’s memory in the early morning light, he knew who Laura’s prowler was. He couldn’t tell her, though. If he was wrong, it would break her heart.

Last night at dusk, her tall vase full of pink azaleas had toppled in the
wind, like the other tall and top-heavy flowers all over the cemetery. But this morning when he’d stepped onto the porch at first light, Jess’s flowers stood straight and tall again.

Someone had righted them between dusk and dawn. Someone who cared about Jess’s flowers and hers alone.

After a long night of fitful sleep, Laura rose before dawn and dressed. Two minutes into her morning, she could tell it was going to be one of those days.

Her favorite shirt had lost a button. She put on a lightweight sweater instead, and it had a snag in it. She’d run out of hand lotion. And when she went to make the coffee, the grinder finally died for good. She threw it in the trash and headed into her mom’s room to take some lotion from her bureau.

Laura shook her head at the clutter there. She needed to deal with it soon. Reaching for a tube of hand cream, she realized the tiny bottle of Jean Naté cologne was missing. She—or Mikey—must have knocked it to the floor. If it wasn’t tightly capped, it could leak and ruin the hardwood.

On her knees, she felt under the bed. Her fingers bumped into something but she couldn’t get a grip on it. Flat on the floor, she peered under the bed. The Jean Naté wasn’t there, but she pulled out a hardcover book with an illustration of pink columbines on the cover and a lavender grosgrain ribbon peeking out to serve as a bookmark.

Breathing fast, Laura sat on the bed. She opened to the first page and read the date. This was the final journal, starting near the end of March. It was the only one Ardelle hadn’t found.

Her mom had always picked up her pen at first light. The UPS driver had found her on the porch at ten in the morning, so she’d probably written her final entry only a few hours before her death.

Laura started at the beginning. Like the journals she’d found earlier, it was daily trivia. Nothing about possible sightings of a supposedly dead husband.

She’d recorded her dreams, though, as she’d begun to do a few years before, and she’d tried to analyze them. She’d used different colors of ink, perhaps for different moods—light blue, lavender, green, bright red.

Twenty pages in, Laura reached the last entry, written in ordinary blue ink. It closed with
Rain, rain, and more rain, but April showers will work wonders for my May flowers
. It wasn’t an especially significant sentence to close out a lifetime of journaling, but she lingered on it.

Jessamyn Gantt’s last word:
flowers
. And that was the end of her thousands of journal entries. The end of her life—on earth, at least.

Laura ran a finger across the blank page that faced the last entry. She didn’t want to think about what might have come next for a woman who’d been raised on Holy Ghost revivals and altar calls and the blood of Jesus but had drifted into vague beliefs about being at one with the Supreme Being and the universe. According to her mom’s new, enlightened views, there was no such thing as sin. Just failings.

With a sigh, Laura took the journal into the living room and compared it to a cheap spiral notebook from the early years. Her mom had used plain blue or black ink then, and she hadn’t analyzed her dreams. Her penmanship had changed gradually over the years, but her love of flowers had never altered.

In the early volume, Laura studied yet another line about gardening:
Sometimes, a beautiful new plant springs up from the rot, from the dirt
. A few short words followed, but they’d been scratched out, black ink over blue. Laura couldn’t quite make them out.

She turned on a bright lamp and looked again. The last word was probably
me
, but she couldn’t be sure.

Footsteps sounded on the porch. Sean, back from his night in the cemetery.

“Laura,” he called. “It’s me.”

“Coming.” She ran into the kitchen as he unlocked the back door and walked in, unshaven and bleary-eyed.

“Mornin’, Red.”

“Good morning. You look exhausted.”

“I’m all right.” He seemed to be gauging her mood as he closed the door.

“Did you see anything? Hear anything?”

“Nothing but birds and bugs. Anything happen here?”

“Nothing but wind, all night long. Where did you hide out?”

“On a bench, behind a big ol’ tombstone. Nothing happened, nobody came. I guess that’s good news.”

“I guess,” she echoed, studying him.

He acted too casual. Too relaxed. Yet she picked up new worries in the undercurrents of his voice, in the faraway look in his eye. But it became a hungry look when he crooked a finger at her.

“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. Not until you’ve brushed your teeth.”

He smiled. “Did you brush yours?”

“Yes.”

Sean ambled down the hall to the bathroom. She heard the sound of
running water, the toilet flushing, running water again. He came back, not looking any more civilized but smelling like peppermint toothpaste.