A Stillness of Chimes (41 page)

“I don’t think my dad’s sorry that he walked right into God’s arms. There really is a sweet by-and-by. Oh, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I only know there’s a kind of love that never fails.”

“There is,” Sean managed to whisper.

Her fingers ran lightly across his hand. “Remember how my dad always called you son? I’m sure he meant it. He still would.”

Sean was silent for a moment. “I had something else to tell you. Can’t remember.”

“It’s all right.” She gave him that wobbly smile again. “Kim saved your life. The doctors said she got there just in time.”

“Mikey?”

“He came back. That poor old cat. It wasn’t his day to die.”

The cat lived. Gary lived. But Elliott died.

For Gary, picnics and parties. For Elliott, the graveyard. The doorway to heaven.

“Elliott was a good man,” Sean said.

“You’re right about that.” The old lady, there. Granny Colfax. She clicked her tongue. “He was a good soldier too. Sometimes soldiers give their lives for innocents. You know it’s Memorial Day?”

Why wouldn’t she just go away?

“There’s a proverb in the Good Book,” Granny continued. “Goes like this. ‘The wicked shall be a ransom for the righteous.’ But sometimes, it’s the other way ’round. Sometimes, the righteous give themselves as ransom too.” She sighed, long and loud. “Nobody took his life. He gave it. He gave it.”

Laura, blessedly silent, bent over Sean, her hair falling like a curtain of flame. Her warm tears spilled onto his cheek, mixing with his. She smoothed his hair off his forehead and bent to kiss him.

Then it came to him. The message for Laura.

“He told me,” Sean whispered. “Your dad told me why he ran. It wasn’t … that he stopped loving you or your mom.”

“I know he loved me. I saw it.” But her eyes were sad. “Why did he run, then?”

The thin old voice came back to him.
“I couldn’t trust myself not to harm a friend or … the woman I loved.”

“He didn’t trust himself … not to harm Gary,” Sean said.

She drew in a long breath, her face softening, her eyes filled with tears.

She didn’t need to know the rest. It would be their secret, his and Elliott’s.

Sean mustered his strength for a few more words. “And he still called you ‘my girl’ to the end.”

With that off his chest, Sean fought to stay awake. To keep his angel’s face before him. To hang on to the light.

Weeks later

A blue jay flew into a pine grayed by the morning mist. Sean lifted his eyes, as blue as the bird’s feathers, to follow its flight.

Laura settled back on the damp seat of Keith’s rowboat and savored the view.

It was becoming a habit to slow down at random moments. To savor a little piece of life. To listen to the ripple of the water, to smell the pines.

To feast her eyes on Sean’s living face.

She shook her head. So close. He’d come so close.

He regarded her with a mixture of amusement and suspicion. “What?”

“Just thinking.” Just picturing a gravestone. Sean Michael Halloran, luthier, laid to rest among his moonshine-running ancestors. But he’d lived. Thank God, he’d lived.

She clamped her lips together to keep them from trembling.

“No crying,” he ordered with a half smile.

“I thought you wanted me to cry. Make up your mind.”

“It all depends on what you’re crying about.” He reached into the cooler for a Coke—for breakfast—and popped the top. “If you’re still fretting about
Slattery, stop it.” He eyed her over his Coke can. “It’s over. No blabbing. We don’t need to share our information with the law.”

“You’re only saying that because you’ve never had a particularly friendly relationship with law enforcement.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t think straight. What good would it do to dredge up the car? To dredge up the past?”

“Slattery’s family, whoever they are, might like to know what happened to him.”

“He wasn’t the kind of man a family could be proud of. Maybe it’s best if they never know.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

Let Slattery’s sins die with him, then—whatever they were.

Let her dad’s sins die too. And her mom’s. And Gary’s. And the sins of selfish girls who’d been too busy painting their nails to keep an eye on Tigger.

Every day, the bittersweet shock hit her all over again. Cassie and Tigger were her sisters. But Gary was … just Gary. He wasn’t her father except in the biological sense, but he’d been her father’s friend. Her dad had loved him to the end. Had forgiven everything.

Laura gazed into the deep blue water—the water she’d once thought had swallowed her dad’s body.

When she was twelve, another lake, a small one, had taken a little brown car and the body of its owner. Someone might find the remains one day, but she hoped it would be beyond her time. A hundred years in the future. Two hundred years. It didn’t matter now; it couldn’t change Slattery’s fate, but she still had questions.

It was June. Flowers bloomed everywhere. Soon, the purple kudzu
blossoms would fill the air with their sweet, musty spice. Not long after that, the leaves would turn brown. The cold would kill the luxuriant vines and expose whatever ugliness they had been hiding.

You could cover up the truth, but you couldn’t change it. That was one kind of covering. There was another kind too. Love that covered a multitude of sins.

“All right,” Laura said. “Let’s say nobody ever needs to know my dad engaged in some vigilante justice. Maybe even pre-emptive justice, if there’s any such thing.”

“Good.” Sean tipped his Coke up for another swig. “Let’s say that. We can’t change what happened, so we’ll let it lie. Like we’ll let Slattery’s bones lie at the bottom of Bennett’s lake.”

“But how could my dad be sure Slattery intended to harm Tigger?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.” Sean leaned forward. “I only know your dad will be remembered for giving his life. Not for taking a life.” He pointed at her. “And don’t feel guilty because we lived and he died. It was his choice. Like it was Dale’s choice to pull a gun.” He lowered his finger but kept his glistening eyes on hers.

She ached for him. She wasn’t the only one who’d loved a father and lost him. In spite of everything, Sean had never shut Dale out of his life.

“It still hurts,” she said slowly. “And I know it hurts you too.”

“It’ll hurt for a long time. All of it. But I hope you know how much he loved you. And I hope he knew how much you loved him even when you still weren’t entirely sure he loved you back.” He smiled. “I’ll never forget the sight of you flying up that bank screaming ‘Daddy’ like a banshee.”

“I guess he never forgot it either. He didn’t have time to.”

Sean was quiet for a while. “Sometimes, I don’t like the way God
handles the details. But when I look at the big picture, I know we’re in good hands.”

A woodworker’s hands. Scarred, with blood on them. But beautiful. So beautiful.

Some hearts were broken by another person’s sin. Some hearts were mended by another person’s sacrifice. Sometimes life just didn’t make sense.

Ardelle was in counseling. So was Gary. Cassie, home with Drew now, kept nagging Laura to start counseling too. She probably should.

Back in May, when she’d sat in church smelling stale perfume and dusty hymnals, she’d doubted God’s ability to run the world. Now, breathing fresh air and the sweetness of summer flowers, she’d gone from death to life without quite knowing how. Sean had too. He’d never said much about it, but he’d changed during those days in the hospital.

He stifled a groan. He’d reached for the bait bucket too quickly.

“Don’t move so fast,” she said. “Are you due for another pain pill?”

“No,” he said curtly.

She hid a smile. Sean could hardly stand to let anybody look after him. His hospital stay had been pure torture for him, but far worse for his nurses. Laura, though, rather enjoyed the challenge.

“Here, let me bait your hook for you,” she offered.

He hesitated but handed over his pole. “I knew there had to be some advantages to dating a tomboy.”

“You call this a date?”

“Yeah, and if I can make my girl fish for her own supper—and even row the boat for me—that’s better still.”

She reached into the bait bucket and proceeded with the job. “Why do I put up with you?”

“Because I love you and you know it.”

On the verge of telling him she loved him too, she hesitated, collecting her thoughts.

When her dad came back, she hadn’t told him she loved him. Everything had happened too fast. She’d had only a few minutes, and she’d missed her chance.

Her dad had said it, though. Those had been his last words, said with clear-eyed certainty just before he took a bullet for a friend. Then he was past hearing. Past seeing. Past pain. He was … mended.

Sean, too, had loved her with his very life, putting his flesh and blood between her and the pansy gun. The last remnant of the Halloran inheritance. But there was a new Halloran heritage now. Kindness, honor, courage.

“Here.” She handed his fishing pole back.

“Thank you.”

She rinsed her fingers in the lake and looked up. The sunlight made a bright path across the water, leading to the pines on the far shore where the camp’s early-bird chapel service was in full swing. An old hymn floated across the water, jazzed up with guitars and drums. The “Doxology.”

She’d sung that song with her dad, years ago, during those days when he’d walked her across the road to Sunday school. He’d taught her to fold her hands and pray. She’d copied him and mouthed the words of a creed she didn’t quite understand.

“I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”

She would never understand any of it completely. Not this side of heaven.

Sean heard the music too. He cocked his head, listening, and sang along so softly that it was barely above a whisper. “Praise Him above, ye heav’nly host; praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

She studied his lean, clean-shaven face and pondered what had made him the man he was. Dale Halloran’s son, like it or not. Elliott Gantt’s protégé, nearly a son.

Laura Gantt’s … boyfriend? Again? They had never exactly defined their relationship. Just enjoyed it. As May lazed along into June and she’d decided she belonged in Georgia, she and Sean had drifted into cozy companionship punctuated by occasional quarrels and frequent moments of sheer joy.

Yet she’d never told him she loved him. Not even when he was about to die. Why was it so hard to say?

Because it meant taking the next step too. It meant believing love was stronger than fear. Stronger than hatred. Longer than time. Worth every risk. It meant accepting the sorrows of the past and giving her heart to a brand-new family with its own share of sorrows.

Sean, very much alive, was looking across the water toward the camp. Hard times hadn’t made him hard. They’d made him kind. They’d made him—

She blew out a puff of air, a surrender to the truth. The hard times of Sean’s life had made him the man she loved.

Her heart soared on dreams for the future.
First comes lave …

“Sean?” Her voice sounded tiny, even to her own ears.

“Yeah?”

“Have I ever told you I love you?”

His head swiveled her way. “No ma’am, you’ve always been real careful to skirt around that issue.”

She dabbled her fingers in the cool water. A fish splashed, close to the surface. A silver dart, full of life.

She glanced over at Sean. He leaned forward. Waited.

“Well?” he prompted, eyebrows lifting. That sarcastic tilt to his mouth, not quite a smile, was the same one she’d adored practically forever.

“Well.” She clasped her hands in her lap, dribbling lake water on her jeans. “I love you.”

He really smiled then, the crow’s feet touching the corners of his eyes. “I know you do.”

Her lips parted. “Is that all you’ve got to say about it?”

His laughter echoed across the water like a song. “Darlin’, you know I love you too, and I’d give you a big ol’ kiss, but we’d tip the boat over.”

She felt a grin coming from somewhere deep inside her, from long-ago happy times with Sean, her best friend, the first boy she’d ever kissed. “We sure would.”

“Just wait till we’re on solid ground.” He winked.

The wind picked up, a chilly note. Sun and wind, mingled together. Love and loss, life and death, all mixed up together. All held in good hands.

She closed her eyes. The sunlight warmed her face, so much like a soft kiss that she almost thought Sean had somehow moved close without rocking the boat. No, it wasn’t him. It was someone even closer. Someone who brushed her ears with old whisperings she’d only begun to understand.