Part 28 (2/2)

”What is it, Mother?” I asked.

She started to speak, then stopped, her mind turned inward.

”You can tell me.”

She looked at me brokenly, her face the shattered bust of the once-proud woman she had been. ”I murdered my son.”

”No,” I said. ”No, you didn't.”

Her voice shook with grief and regret. ”Snakes, Cal. He was just a little boy, and I put snakes in his head.”

”Mother, please.”

”Snakes.”

She slumped backward, and in that movement I saw the great wall of her self-a.s.surance crumble into dust, the vast confidence she'd once had in her view of life, and remembered what Billy had said so many years before, that without it, she would surely die.

I bolted forward. ”You taught Billy how to love,” I told her desperately. ”And he did it well, Mother. To the very end.”

She seemed not to hear me, lifted her hand, and began to make the sign of the cross. ”Mea culpa.”

”Don't.”

Her hand crossed her breast. ”Mea culpa.”

”Stop it, please.”

”Mea maxima culpa.”

I s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand from the dark air, held it to my chest. ”You never stopped loving him. Never. Not for a second. Not for the briefest ...” My head dropped forward, heavy as a stone. ”But I ... I...”

A silence settled upon us. Then, after a time, I felt her fingers in my hair.

”Cal?”

I looked up.

She watched me softly for a moment, then reached for the copy of the Sentinel that lay on the table beside her bed and lifted it toward me.

”What?” I asked.

She said nothing, only continued to hold the paper tremblingly in the air between us.

Then I knew.

”I can't take over the paper,” I told her. ”You said it yourself. Years ago. That I didn't have the heart for it.”

She gazed at me more tenderly than she ever had. Her voice was barely a whisper. ”Now you do,” she said.

She died the next morning. I buried her amid a flurry of red leaves.

A few weeks later, I started the paper up again, honoring what had seemed to me the last wish of a great example.

I rehired the old staff, then added Lois Mason, Henry's daughter, to it, teaching her to sweep and clean, greet whoever stepped up to the front desk with her childlike smile.

And each Sunday, I visited their graves. To my mother, I brought mountain laurel. To my father, ivy. To Billy, always a single bloodred rose.

Spring came early the next year, melting the snow first from the cliffs of MacAndrews Island, then from the lip of the seawall, finally from the earthen mounds beneath which, in endless night, my brother Billy slept.

”You're Cal Chase.”

I looked up from the rose I'd just placed upon his grave.

”You came by my house in Royston,” she said. She offered her hand. ”Rachel Ba.s.s.” She pointed to a small stone memorial. ”My husband. I always come here on the anniversary.”

”Of his death?”

She shook her head. ”Of his life. I come once a year. On his birthday.”

”I come every Sunday.”

Her eyes touched the rose. ”You must have loved your brother very much.”

A wave of grief washed over me. ”I can't get over it,” I admitted.

She gazed at me softly. ”Maybe you're not meant to, Cal,” she said.

Then she took my arm, and together we made our way down the hill, talking quietly as we pa.s.sed beneath the old iron gate, then moved on beyond it, through the reeds, and over the pebbled ground, to where the gulls dove and circled, crying distantly in the cold blue air, and the sea swept out forever.

If you enjoyed Thomas H. Cook's.

Places in the Dark,

you won't want to miss any

of his award-winning novels of

superlative psychological suspense,

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