surprised to find a container of it sitting on the top shelf. There was also a container of potato salad, one of raw vegetables soaking in water, and a bowl of Jell-O. When had Gran done all this? Had she done it while they were in church?
She glanced over her shoulder at the old woman. "I'm amazed," she said, smiling. "It looks great."
Gran nodded. "I had help from the wood fairies." She shot Old Bob a pointed look.
Old Bob responded with a strangely sweet, lopsided grin. "You've never needed any help from wood fairies, Evelyn. Why, you could teach them a thing or two."
Gran actually blushed. "Old man," she muttered, smiling back at him. Then the smile fell away, and she reached down for her drink. "Nest, I'm sorry about Mrs. Browning. She was a good woman."
Nest nodded. "Thanks, Gran."
"Are you feeling all right now?"
"I'm fine."
"Good. You both had phone calls while you were in church. Cass Minter called for you, Nest. And Mel Riorden wants you to call him right away, Robert. He said it was urgent."
Old Bob watched wordlessly as she took a long pull on her drink. He was still wearing his suit coat, and he took time now to slip it off. He looked suddenly rumpled and tired. "All right. I'll take care of it. Excuse me, please."
He turned and disappeared down the hallway. Nest took a deep breath, walked over to the kitchen table, and sat down across from her grandmother. Sunlight spilled through the south window and streaked the tabletop, its brightness diffused by the limbs of the shade trees and the lace curtains so that intricate patterns formed on the laminated surface. It fell across Gran's hands as they lay resting beside her ashtray and drink and made them look mottled and scaly. The tabletop felt warm, and Nest pressed her palms against it, edging her fingers into one of the more decorative markings of shadows and light, disrupting its symmetry.
"Gran," she said, then waited for the old woman to look at her. "I was in the park last night."
Gran nodded. "I know. I was up and looked in on you. You weren't there, so I knew where you'd gone. What were you doing?"
Nest told her. "I know it sounds a little weird, but it wasn't. It was interesting." She paused. "Actually, it was scary, too. At least, part of it was. I saw something I don't understand. I had this … vision, I guess. A sort of daydream–except it was night, of course. It was about you."
She watched her grandmother's eyes turn cloudy and unfocused. Gran reached for her cigarette and drew the smoke deep into her lungs. "About me?"
Nest held her gaze. "You were much younger, and you were in the park at night, just like me. But you weren't alone. You were surrounded by feeders. You were running with them. You were part of them."
The silence that followed was palpable.
Old Bob closed the door to his den and stood looking into space. His den was on the north side of the house and shaded by a massive old shagbark hickory, but the July heat penetrated even here. Old Bob didn't notice. He laid his suit coat on his leather easy chair and put his hands on his hips, He loved Evelyn, but he was losing her. It was the drinking and the cigarettes, but it was mostly Caitlin and all the things the two of them had shared and kept from him. There was a secret history between them, one that went all the way back to the time of Caitlin's birth–maybe even further than that. It involved this nonsense about feeders and magic. It involved Nest's father. It went way beyond anything reasonable, and it imprisoned Evelyn behind a wall he could not scale, a wall that had become impenetrable since Caitlin had killed herself.
There. He had said the words. Since Caitlin had killed herself.
He closed his eyes to stop the tears from coming. It might have been an accident, of course. She might have gone into the park that night, just as she had done as a child, and slipped and fallen from the cliffs. But he didn't believe it for a minute. Caitlin knew the park like she knew the back of her hand. Like Nest did. Like Evelyn. It had always been a part of their lives. Even Evelyn had grown up in a house that adjoined the park. They were a part of it in the same way as the trees and the burial mounds and the squirrels and birds and all the rest. No, Caitlin didn't slip and fall. She killed herself.
And he still didn't know why.
He stared out the window at the drive leading up to Sinnis–sippi Road. It was hard losing Caitlin, but he thought it would be unbearable if he lost Evelyn. Their time together spanned almost fifty years; he couldn't remember what his life had been like before her. There really wasn't anything without her. He hated the drinking and the smoking, hated the way she had retired to the kitchen table and taken up residence, and hated the hard way she had come to view her life. But he would rather have her that way than not have her at all.
But what was he going to do to keep her? She was slipping away from him, one day at a time, as if she were sitting in a raft with the mooring lines slipped, drifting slowly out to sea while he stood helplessly on the shore and watched. He clasped h'is big hands before him and shrugged his shoulders. He was strong and smart and his life was marked by his accomplishments, but he did not know what to do to save her.
He reached up and loosened his tie. What could he do, after all, that would make a difference? Was there anyone who could tell him? He had spoken with Ralph Emery, but the minister had told him that Evelyn had to want to be helped before anyone could reach her. He had come out to the house to talk with her once or twice, but Evelyn had shown no interest in reaching out. Nest was the only one she cared about, and he thought sometimes that maybe Nest made a small difference in Evelyn just by being there. But Nest was still a child, and there was only so much a child could do.
Besides, he thought uneasily, Nest was too much like her grandmother for comfort.
He pulled off his tie, draped it over the easy chair with his coat, and walked to the phone to call Mel Riorden. He dialed, and the phone rang only once before Mel picked up.
"Riorden."
"Mel? It's Bob Freemark."
"Yeah, thanks for calling back. I appreciate it."
Old Bob smiled to himself. "What were you doing, standing by the phone waiting for me?"
"Something like that. This isn't funny. I've got a problem." Mel Riorden's tone of voice made that abundantly apparent, but Old Bob said nothing, waiting Mel out. "You have to keep this to yourself, Bob, if I tell you. You have to promise me that. I wouldn't involve you if I didn't have to, but I can't let this thing slide and I don't know how to deal with it. I've already tried and been told to go to hell."
Old Bob pulled back the desk chair and seated himself. "Well, this doesn't have to go beyond you and me if you don't want it to, Mel. Why don't you just tell me what it is?"
Mel Riorden gave a worried sigh. "It's Deny. The kid's more trouble than a dozen alligators in the laundry chute and stupid to boot. If he wasn't my sister's kid …" He trailed off. "Well, you've heard it all before. Anyway, I'm in church for the early mass with Carol and a couple of the grandkids. Al Garcia's there, too. With Angie and their kids. So afterward, I go in for a coffee and a cookie like everyone else. I say hello to Al and Angie, to a couple of others. Everyone's having a nice visit. I'm standing there, munching my cookie, sipping my coffee, Carol's off with the grandkids, all's right with the world, and up comes my sister. She looks really bad, worried as can be, all bent out of shape. First off, I think she's been drinking. But then I see it's something else. She says to me, 'Mel, you got to talk to him. You got to find out what's going on and put a stop to it.' "
"Put a stop to. what?"
"I'm coming to that." Mel Riorden paused, arranging his thoughts in the silence. "See, I keep thinking of those newspaper stories we joke about over coffee at Josie's. The ones about the people who suddenly go berserk. Their minds snap and they go crazy, insane, for no real reason. You wonder how it could happen, how the people who know them could let it. It's like that. Like that schoolteacher walking in and killing all those kindergarten kids in Mississippi because he'd lost his job. You read about that in today's paper?"