In the Blink of an Eye (25 page)

Now he's brushed that aside in favor of fleeing Lily Dale at the earliest opportunity—before the house is even officially sold to Rupert.

When Paine returned from Chautauqua yesterday and told Julia about the move, there was no opportunity for discussion. For one thing, Pilar had stopped by with a treat for Dulcie, and was still on the porch chatting with Julia about poor Nan Biddle when Paine arrived.

For another, he was late getting back. Julia had to rush right off to her Medium's League Message Circle. As Julia left, glancing at Dulcie's wistful expression, she found herself offering to come and spend time with the little girl again this afternoon since a small brigade of workmen have taken over her house with their noisy tools.

Dulcie's face lit up, of course, and Paine was only too eager to take Julia up on the offer. He apparently enjoys being back at Chautauqua, even if his first visit there on Sunday obviously triggered haunting memories of the summer he met Kristin.

If he would just stick around longer this summer, he can get involved in Chautauqua's musical theater program again, Julia thinks, pouring the vile-smelling stripper into a small plastic bucket and recapping the bottle tightly.

She should point that out to Paine in case he hasn't thought of it.

Yes.

And if he stays—at least through some or all of July—I won't have to say good-bye to Dulcie so soon. She needs me.

But where can Paine and Dulcie stay? He's promised Rupert the house.

And I guess I can't blame him for that.

It was the right thing to do.

The only thing a decent human being would do.

Besides, there's nothing holding Paine and Dulcie in Lily Dale.

Nothing but painful memories of Kristin and Iris.

Nothing but Julia . . .

Who has no business even entertaining the ridiculous notions that keep flitting into her mind.

Notions about Paine . . .

And herself.

He's off-limits, she reminds herself firmly, setting to work rubbing the stripper onto the old, dark-stained wood. I would never get along with a man who thinks that what I do for a living is bogus.

Didn't she say exactly that to Lorraine when she called Julia this morning? Her friend insists on insinuating that romance is brewing between Julia and Paine, refusing to believe that Julia is spending so much time here merely because of Dulcie.

Julia grew impatient with Lorraine's annoying tangent, about to hang up when Lorraine finally got around to the real reason for her call.

“You forgot your raincoat at the auditorium last night after the Message Circle,” Lorraine told her. “I saw it on a seat as I was leaving and I knew it was yours.”

“Ah, yes, the lovely shade of neon orange gave it away, right?”

“Exactiy. I picked it up for you and tried to catch up with you and Andy, but you guys were obviously in a big hurry to get somewhere.”

“Hardly. We were only going out for coffee.”

“So, Jules, tell me . . . what does Andy think about your spending so much time with Paine Landry?”

“Why would he care?” Julia asked, trying to forget Andy's comment yesterday morning about Paine being jealous. “It's not as if Andy and I are a committed couple. We've gone out on a few dates. And like I said, Paine and I are only friends—if that. Get it through your head, Lorraine.”

But Lorraine only laughed.

Why doesn't she get it?

Even if Julia were to foolishly allow herself to fall for Paine, his heart obviously still belongs to Kristin.

And Julia would be wise to acknowledge that it always will.

“
E
DWARD?
I
S THAT
you?”

“Yeah, Ma.” Edward bends to pick up the Jamestown
Post Journal
from the worn mat in front of the door to the trailer before stepping inside. He blinks, his eyes adjusting to the dim interior.

His mother, wrapped in a faded terry cloth robe that was once blue, is smoking a cigarette and watching one of those televised court shows she's so fond of. As usual, neither she nor Edward bothered to fold up the pullout couch where he sleeps. Jocelyn Shuttleworth spends most of her days on it, doing exactly what she's doing now.

“How are you, baby?” she asks in her low-pitched smoker's voice as Edward plods over to the short strip of counter space and deposits his metal lunch bucket amid a clutter of dirty dishes, open food containers, and overflowing ashtrays.

“I'm too damned hot,” he tells her, wiping a trickle of sweat from his brow. “That's how I am. What's up with this weather? Either rainy or humid as hell.”

“It's going to rain again later,” his mother says, her gaze fixed on the TV. “That should cool things off.”

“It should, but it won't.”

“You're in a good mood,” she observes dryly, glancing at him. She pushes a strand of dyed red hair back from her once pretty face, prematurely wrinkled thanks to years of cigarettes and exposure to the elements. As Edward does now, Jocelyn worked on a road construction crew after the divorce from Anson Shuttleworth, for more than a decade until a back injury sidelined her on disability. There was a time when Edward was embarrassed, having a mother who wore a hard hat and tool belt. His friends teased him mercilessly about it when he was in elementary school.

They didn't pull that once he was in junior high though. He grew quite a few inches and pounds over one memorable summer, and nobody pushed him around after that. Those who tried found out the hard way that you didn't mess with Edward Shuttleworth.

You still don't,
he thinks with self-satisfied pride.

“What's to eat, Ma?”

She shrugs, taking a drink from the plastic tumbler on the newspaper-littered table beside the couch. Edward knows his mother well enough to be aware that the amber liquid ain't lemonade.

“You know I can't go to the supermarket till after the first of the month, when my check comes, Edward.”

“That sure as hell hasn't stopped you from shopping at the liquor store,” he mutters under his breath.

Either she doesn't hear, or she chooses to ignore him.

He forages in the cupboard and finds an almost empty box of saltines. Biting into one, he finds that it's limp and soggy. With a grunt, he tosses the stale cracker, and the rest of the box, into the heaping trash bag in a plastic can under the sink. It topples off the pile and lands beside a can of Ajax that hasn't been used in a good month.

“You going back out later?” his mother calls after him as he heads into the bathroom.

“Yeah. Not till after dark. Why?”

“I need more cigarettes.”

He closes the door after him and lifts the toilet seat, muttering, “Get 'em yourself.”

Smoking.

That's one bad habit he never expected to pick up from his mother. As a child he never could stand the stale smell cigarettes leave on your clothes, your hair, your skin, your breath.

His father couldn't stand it, either. He doesn't recall much about the first few years of his life, when he and his mother lived with Anson Shuttleworth over in Lily Dale. But he does remember the big fights his parents had. Many of those arguments were about her smoking. She would try to quit, and then she'd sneak cigarettes, and Anson would find out.

“You can't hide anything from that man,” his mother always said. “That's what I get for marrying a medium.”

Yeah.

That's what she got. A man who quickly caught on to all her secrets—especially when she had an affair with an auto mechanic who lived down in Jamestown. Not that Anson hadn't had affairs of his own, his mother bitterly told Edward later.

But when Anson found out about his wife's indiscretion, he threw her out of the house. Edward was just a preschooler then, but he clearly remembers his mother telling him that his father hadn't even fought to keep custody of him.

He's always wondered if it's true.

Not everything Jocelyn told him is.

Edward found out later—much, much later—that his father really did pay her alimony. Child support, too.

What his mother didn't give to the mechanic—who lived with them on and off for a few years—she spent on booze, or gambled it away at OTB.

Just another of her damaging little habits.

Edward flushes the toilet and washes his hands, staring at his face in the mirror above the sink. Black hair already receding at the temples, close-set brown eyes, aquiline nose . . .

I look just like him,
he thinks, recalling the father who drifted further and further from his life.

The father who died unexpectedly, dropping dead of a heart attack in his fifties . . . without a will.

Everything he had went to his second wife.

Iris.

The bitch.

Edward stares into his own angry gaze.

If it weren't for Iris, Edward and Jocelyn wouldn't still be living in this miserable trailer park.

And now that Iris is dead—and Kristin, too—everything that should have gone to Edward belongs to some little blind kid.

But not for long, Edward thinks with a scowl. And the sooner he gets his ass over to Lily Dale and inside that house, the better. Then he can put his plan in motion and everything will fall into place at last.

What if they're home again tonight?

They were, all yesterday afternoon, and last night. They never freakin' left the place. He thought of waiting around to sneak inside until the lights went off and they were asleep, but that was risky. Besides, he was exhausted, having spent hours lurking in the shadows near the porch, waiting for an opportune moment.

Hopefully, when Edward gets over there tonight, the house will be dark and empty.

If it isn't . . .

He'll worry about that when the time comes.

I
T'S GOING TO
rain again. Soon. Standing on his porch, the mail he just retrieved from the roadside box in his hands, Lincoln can smell it in the air, sense it in the tree branches overhead, as they rustle in a slight breeze, turning their leaves upward.

All this rainy, gloomy weather has been good for his vegetable crops.

Bad for the soul, though.

Makes a man dwell on the dark things in his past.

And there are plenty of those in Lincoln's.

He opens the squeaky screen door and steps inside. He's been listening to it squeak for a lifetime. His mother always asked his father when he was going to oil the spring, just as Corinne used to ask Lincoln.

No sense oiling it now. Not when we're used to the sound. The squeak lets us know when somebody's comin' in.

That was his father's reply to his mother, and Lincoln's to Corinne.

He lets the screen door bang behind him.

In the living room, he dumps the mail on the coffee table and turns to survey the cardboard carton on the floor beside it. A musty smell fills the room. The thing has been stuck in a corner of the attic for decades, along with years' worth of clutter accumulated by Lincoln's parents.

Corinne never went up there. Said she couldn't stand to look at piles of junk.

Lincoln rarely went up, either. Not unless a squirrel got in, or he had to retrieve the Christmas lights or stash them away under the eaves again . . .

Or he wanted to open this box, to go through the contents and allow them to carry him back, over the years, to a time he'd usually rather not think about.

He never brought the box downstairs until now.

He didn't want Corinne asking all kinds of questions.

Lincoln reaches into the box and takes out a record album. Simon and Garfunkel. Kathy gave it to him for his birthday. “This way, you can play my song all the time,” she told him.

Her song.

He carries the album over to the old record player on top of the dining-room sideboard.
It's probably warped,
he thinks, as he sets the old-fashioned black vinyl disk on the turntable.

He doesn't need to check the album sleeve for the song number. He knows it by heart, even after all these years. He sets the needle in the right groove and closes his eyes as the familiar guitar strains and soulful lyrics fill the room.

I hear the drizzle of the rain . . . falling like a memory . . .

Miraculously, the record isn't warped after all. He plays “Kathy's Song” all the way through, standing there, eyes closed, remembering.

Then he lifts the needle and carefully places it at the beginning again.

As the song starts over, he returns to the box and takes out several photographs. The rubber band that once held the stack together has long since grown brittle and snapped. Lincoln flips through the pictures, his mind drifting back over the years.

There's Kathy, perched on top of Lincoln's father's tractor, waving at the camera.

There's Kathy, blowing out the sixteen candles on the devil's food birthday cake Lincoln's mom made to surprise her.

There's Kathy, her long blond hair in pigtails. That was the style then. Kathy usually wore her long, straight hair parted in the middle, hanging down her back. But Lincoln talked her into the pigtails that day, saying she'd look cute. And she did. She tied them with blue ribbons that exactly matched the shade of her eyes.

Outside, the wind picks up, noisily swaying branches overhead.

Lincoln reaches into the box again.

He takes out the small stuffed red dog he won for her playing skee ball at the midway arcade the summer before he was drafted. He and Kathy used to trade it back and forth, giving it to each other whenever one of them needed cheering up. Lincoln was the last one to get it. Kathy gave it to him to take to Vietnam. He slept with it under his pillow the whole time he was away.

On nights when he had a pillow to sleep on.

Lincoln pushes away the memories of steamy, perilous nights in the jungle. He's not willing to go there now. That's a whole other chapter in his painful past.