A Stillness of Chimes (27 page)

She flopped onto the bed, flinging one arm over her face in a fake swoon. “Let’s ignore her awhile and see what happens.”

“No. Not when she’s this upset. I’d better not stay.”

Cassie lifted her arm just enough so she could peer at Laura. “You’re abandoning me?”

“Sorry, but you’re the one who got her riled up, so you’re the one who gets to calm her down. Don’t be too hard on her, though. She might not want to behave the way she’s behaving.”

“I know,” Cassie said mournfully. She sat up on the bed. “It was really weird, wasn’t it? Really unlike her. I hate to worry Dad, but I’d better tell him.”

“He absolutely needs to know. I’ll call you later and see how she’s doing.”

Laura gathered the things she’d brought and headed out again. She’d stay away for a while. Ardelle’s comments had hurt.

But there was no time for tears. Driving back to town, Laura tried to remember exactly where the Gustafsons lived. With a little luck, shy Mrs. Gustafson might be home alone and able to describe exactly what she saw, without any interference from her bossy husband.

Sean hit the brakes, approaching the long curve by Jess’s house. Laura’s house, now, but probably not for long. A dollar to a doughnut, she’d put it on the market and head back to Denver. He’d move there too, if he thought she might want his company.

It was nearly noon. That gave him time to finish by dark. He was still waiting for a call back from a security company, but he’d already picked up everything he could install himself. If he could talk Laura into staying with the Brights until everything blew over, maybe his precautions weren’t even necessary. But they couldn’t hurt.

The house came into view—and Jess’s SUV stood in the driveway, bold as brass. The vehicle Laura had driven away in.

There she was, at the edge of the road. In one hand, she carried a big plastic pitcher like the kind his mom had always used for mixing up Kool-Aid. In the other hand, she carried a tall tin vase.

Either not noticing him or ignoring him, Laura hurried across the road, her hair somewhat tamed by the black-and-white bandanna she’d adopted as her own. Surefooted as a kid, she started up the steps set into the grassy bank.

Sean parked behind the SUV. Leaving his purchases in the truck and feeling like a paranoid fool, he followed her across the road. He didn’t expect any trouble on a bright, sunny afternoon, with the pastor’s car parked in the
lot, but he wasn’t letting her out of his sight. And he was glad to have his phone in his pocket again, just in case.

A mourning dove burst out of the dogwood by the Gantt family plot as Laura slowed and stopped there. She set both containers on the ground and twisted her hands behind her back, her head bowed.

Not wanting to intrude on her privacy, Sean waited at a distance and looked around the cemetery. Bushes and small trees had been planted beside other graves too.

Some of the headstones were tipping. Some had fallen. Some were covered with lichen and darkened with age. Jess’s grave, though, was all too recent and still unmarked by a headstone, and the bronze plaque that bore Elliott’s name still gleamed as if it were new.

He eyed the jungle of vines that backed the graveyard. A day at a time, an inch at a time, the mass of green crept forward, slashed back annually by a small army of men from the church and browned every winter by the first frost.

The church’s weathered picnic pavilion stood on one side of the property, the cemetery lay on the other, and the church stood in the middle, dividing life from death. Keeping them at arm’s length.

The life side—picnics, parties, supper on the grounds. The death side—funerals, headstones, bones. But all those crosses didn’t mean a thing if death wasn’t the doorway to eternal life.

He looked back at Laura. Her coppery hair spilled down her back from beneath the bandanna, bright as a new penny in the sun. She’d always stood out in a crowd like a redbird in a flock of sparrows.

She reached into the pitcher and pulled out clippers, then walked to a mass of pink azaleas that bordered the church property. Working quickly,
she gathered an armload of long branches bursting with blooms. The hedge was so full, nobody would notice she’d cut some.

Tired of waiting, he moved a step closer. “Laura,” he called in the no-nonsense tone he used on Keith’s boys when they tried to pull a fast one.

She turned to face him. “Hey, Sean.”

“I thought you were staying at the Brights’ place.”

She waved it away. “Long story. Anyway, I thought you were going to work. Why did you come back?”

“I’m installing some new locks and so on. But you won’t be here overnight, will you?”

“Yes, I will. Ardelle got pretty upset with me. She thinks I accused her of being a thief.”

“Did you?”

“Of course not. I was a little irritated with her because she’d let herself in one day when I wasn’t home, but Cassie made a federal case of it and things escalated. Let’s just say Ardelle isn’t the same old fun-loving Ardelle I remember from years ago.”

“Stay at my house, then.”

“No, Sean. Thank you.”

His jaw tightened as she returned to the family plot, where she filled the tin container with azalea branches and placed it at her mom’s grave. She walked to the nearest faucet, filled the pitcher, and came back to pour water into the vase.

No flowers for Elliott, of course. She believed he was alive.

“There,” she said, putting the clippers in the empty plastic pitcher. “Now it doesn’t look so abandoned. So lonesome.”

The almost imperceptible trembling of her voice prompted Sean to take a closer look at her. “You okay?”

“Not really. I just … well, yesterday morning I was so upset about that stupid note in Mom’s drawer that I deleted her number from my phone and I used up the last of the blackberries on purpose, and now I see how petty and mean-spirited that was and I want to tell her I’m sorry, but she’s not here.” She stopped to take a breath. “So I’m putting flowers on her grave, but it doesn’t do any good.”

“Sounds like you’re having a rough day,” he said cautiously.

She made a face. “I’ve crammed a lot of craziness into one morning. After I left Ardelle’s I checked out a rumor about a prowler—”

“The Gustafsons? I heard that one too. Turned out to be their neighbor.”

She nodded sadly. “So that was a wild-goose chase. Then I didn’t know where to go. Ardelle doesn’t want me there, and you don’t want me here. So I went to the cabin.”

Sean tensed, not liking the idea at all. “Why the cabin?”

She studied the ground. “You’ll think this is stupid, but on Friday I left some food and clothes there for my dad. They’re gone.”

“Oh, Laura. Anybody could have taken them.”

She raised her chin. “I know, but it didn’t do any harm to leave them there.”

Sean moved closer. “Don’t go back alone, though. We don’t know who might be hanging around. We still don’t know who was at your window last night either, or what he was up to. If it’s not a good time to stay at the Brights’ house, you can stay at mine. Then your nighttime visitor won’t know where to find you.”

“Don’t you understand? I
want
him to find me.”

“Not if it’s a stranger, you don’t. A criminal. Please, be reasonable.”

“I’m being perfectly reasonable,” she said sweetly. “You’re the one who isn’t.” She looked both ways for traffic and ran back to the house with her plastic pitcher.

That was her idea of being reasonable? Thoroughly exasperated with her irrational decisions, he followed slowly. After she’d gone inside, he glanced over his shoulder, wondering if someone might have been watching them from the far side of the cemetery. In the noonday sun, the azaleas were such a vivid pink that they didn’t look real.

He stopped at his truck to retrieve his tools and the bags from the hardware store. He sorted out his purchases, found one of the new locksets, and sat down on the porch with the front door open so he could remove the old lock.

Laura walked up behind him. “If you have to sit there with the door wide open, I’d better lock Mikey in the bathroom.”

“Thanks. I forgot about Mikey. But I wish you cared about your own safety as much as you care about his. He’s just a cat. If it’s his day to die, it’s his day to die.”

Laura cornered Mikey a few feet from the door and scooped up a writhing armful of resentful feline. “Today isn’t that day.”

She carted Mikey away. Sean heard the soft plop as she deposited the cat on the bathroom floor, and then the click of the latch as she shut him in.

She came back, her face solemn. “I do appreciate everything you’re doing, Sean. Really, I do. Thank you. You need to let me know what I owe you for the locks and all. But as soon as you’ve finished, you need to hole up in your shop and finish those instruments. You want to see some of them on stage in Nashville someday, remember?”

Not as much as he wanted to see them in the hands of children. Children with his last name and Laura’s red hair. But that would never happen if he couldn’t keep her safe.

“In a little while, maybe I’ll run home and bring back some projects to work on,” he said. “You can come with me.”

“Won’t I be safe behind the new deadbolts? In broad daylight?”

He shrugged and went back to work.

“Oh no,” she said. “You know what I just realized?”

“What?”

“The new locks will make it look like I
really
think Ardelle’s a thief.” She sighed. “I’d better call Cassie and see if her mom has calmed down at all.”

She retreated into the depths of the house, leaving Sean alone with his worries.

Her mother’s morning freak-out had left Cassie drowning in guilt. It was her fault for coming down so hard on her.

The sharp knife hit the cutting board in a steady rhythm as Ardelle made exquisitely thin tomato slices—far more than she needed for only two sandwiches. They were going to be awesome sandwiches, though.

Cassie’s folks didn’t eat cheapo white bread anymore. Now they could afford whole-grain bread from the bakery and expensive, thin-sliced meats from the deli. Deli cheese too, and fancy mustard. The kind that cost four bucks for a four-ounce jar. That was sixteen dollars a pound.

Her mom had been fussing with the sandwiches for at least ten minutes, but finally she was satisfied. She sliced them on the diagonal, placed them on pretty plates, and started garnishing the plates with gourmet bread-and-butter pickle slices.

Cassie’s cell phone rang. She’d expected a call back from Drew, but it wasn’t his ring tone. It was Laura’s. “Mom, I’ve got a call. Go ahead and start eating without me.”

“All right, sweetie,” her mom said. “Tell Drew hey for me.”

Cassie walked to the far side of the sunroom and looked out over the glittering turquoise of the pool. “ ’Sup?” she said softly.

“Hi,” Laura said. “I just wanted to check in. Is your mom still upset?”

“Not really. Now she’s being super sweet, like she feels terrible about overreacting. I feel terrible about it too, but it might’ve been good that it happened, you know? She might wake up and realize she needs some help.”

“I hope so.”

“Everything okay over at your place?”

“Pretty much, yes. Sean’s changing the locks, but it has nothing to do with keeping your mom out. It was his idea, in case my prowler comes back.”

“He’s such a great guy. So’s Keith. Their mom must have been a good influence on them before she died, because they’re not a bit like Dale.”

“Enough,” Laura said firmly.

“Right.” Cassie turned toward the kitchen. Now her mom seemed to be rearranging the stacks of pickles on the plates. “You wouldn’t believe how long it took my mom to make a couple of sandwiches just now,” she said softly. “She’s still fiddling with them. It’s insane.”

“Nobody is one hundred percent sane.” Laura’s voice wavered.

“Aw, Laura. You sound like you need a shoulder to cry on.”

“If you try to point me toward Sean’s shoulder, I will hang up on you.”

“All right, all right. Are you okay, though? Really?”

“I’m sorry I snapped at you. I’m just so tired. Once everything calms down, I’ll want to make sure everything’s okay between your mom and me. Bye.”