A Stillness of Chimes (14 page)

She laughed. “You’re right. It’s not especially good anywhere. Now, tell me what you saw. And when.”

“It was early Sunday morning, still dark but not too dark,” he said, striding away from her. “I’ll show you where I was when I first spotted
him.” He crossed to the other side of the road, turned, and looked in both directions. “Yeah, I was about here, and your dad”—he pointed to a thick tree trunk to Laura’s left—“was about there, passing in front of that big oak. Moving fast, like he always did.”

“Could you see his face, though?”

“Not clearly.” With one finger, Preston pushed his wonky glasses higher on his nose. “It was more the total package that convinced me. His height, his build. The way he moved. And the way he obviously didn’t want to be seen.”

“But he must have heard your vehicle, must have seen your headlights, so why didn’t he get off the road in time?”

“I was on foot too. Didn’t Sean mention that? I was out for my morning walk, so I wasn’t making any more noise than your dad was. But once he spotted me, he slipped into the underbrush and made himself scarce.”

“Did you call out to him?”

“Several times. I called his name and yelled ‘Come back’ a couple of times, and I tried to follow him. But he’d vanished.” Preston gestured toward the camp property. “There are lots of places to hide over there. He could have run from one building to another, from one stand of trees to another.”

“But why would he hide out here, especially this time of year? There are too many people. Campers, staff, parents.”

“Correct. I don’t think he was hiding out here. Just passing through, maybe, before everybody was up and about. Like he was returning to the scene of the crime.”

Laura didn’t answer. It wasn’t a crime for a man to go on a long wilderness
trek without notifying his wife and daughter first. It was perfectly legal even if it broke their hearts.

“You look skeptical,” Preston said. “Did Sean get to you? I know he’s a skeptic, but that doesn’t mean you have to be one too.”

“I have mixed feelings. I’m trying to see it from all angles.”

“Good. You know I always want solid evidence, and we don’t have any yet.” Preston squinted toward the mountains. “But the Nantahala Wilderness is the perfect refuge for a man who doesn’t want to be found. He could live off the land for years too. When I was scoutmaster, twenty years ago, he did some demonstrations for my scout troop. He knew how to make his own fishhooks and rabbit snares. How to build a solid shelter from practically nothing—and camouflage it. How to doctor himself with wild plants. He’d mastered every survival trick in the book.”

She tried to smile. “I remember.” Still, she felt sick as she pictured her dad in the wild with no medical care. He was in his midsixties, the same age Grandpa Gantt was when he started showing signs of mental deterioration.

“So,” Preston continued, “I wonder what happened. Did he drown or did he walk? If he walked … why did he walk? That’s the important question.”

She only nodded. Those were some of her questions too, but she didn’t trust her voice not to crack from the utter confusion of her conflicted emotions.

Together, they headed back to the parking lot. Preston reached his vehicle first. After a few minutes of small talk, he said good-bye and drove away.

Laura stood beside her own car, taking in the sights and smells and sounds. Church vans and buses crowded the lot, but there wasn’t a soul in
sight. Young campers were gathered in the chapel, singing with shrill, happy voices. The clatter of pots and pans came from the mess hall as the staff cleaned up after lunch. A leftover lunchtime aroma wafted through the air. Spaghetti, maybe, or sloppy joes.

Those turkey sandwiches, the night her dad disappeared, must have come from that very building. The mess hall.

Some of the camp staff had driven around to the southern side of the lake that night, bringing coffee and sandwiches for the dive team and everyone else who’d gathered there. Not that anyone had felt like eating. The staffers had prayed with her mom—or they’d prayed
for
her, anyway. Looking dazed, she hadn’t done much talking. If she suspected that they should be hunting for her husband’s footprints instead of diving for his body, she didn’t mention it.

Laura never went back to Hamlin Lake after that night. It was time to face it, and it might be easier from this side. The northern shore.

Half expecting a camp employee to stop her and ask if she had a visitor’s pass, Laura set off across the parking lot. She walked across a weedy lawn, then continued to the coarse sand of the shore and the weathered planks of a fishing dock. The water lapped softly against the dock, and the wind tugged her hair.

Except for the spring flowers in the woods, everything probably looked much as it had on a hot summer day years before. In August, the kudzu’s purple blossoms would have been giving off their sweet, musky scent, and the leaves would have been wilting and aging in the summer heat. Today, though, the vines hadn’t bloomed yet. Their leaves were fresh and young.

Across the blue water lay the ramp where her dad had launched his boat one last time, and the shore where the sheriff had gathered his dive crew.

Laura had hung back from the commotion that night. In shock, trying not to think too hard, she kept looking at the camp’s buildings on the other side of the lake, their windows spilling light across the dark water. She hadn’t wanted to look at the lake itself. Every time she did, she imagined her dad’s lifeless body in it.

Now she could imagine him alive and well. Not drowning, but swimming to shore—to this shore. He might have come out of the water on the rough, reddish sand and run lightly into the pines, abandoning everything. Not just his boat, truck, and trailer, but his business. His friends. His wife and daughter.

Laura squeezed her eyes shut against the hurt that threatened to overwhelm her. She needed to focus, instead, on learning what had really happened when her dad took his boat out for the last time.

The sun beat down on her head as she returned to her car. Its Colorado license plate reminded her she wasn’t a resident of Georgia anymore. Little more than a month before, she’d been busy winding down the school year in Denver. She’d had one living parent and one dead parent. Now, maybe, they’d traded places.

The sun had barely set, but after hours of boxing up her mother’s books, Laura was ready for the day to be over. Contacts out and teeth brushed, wearing warm pajamas and her mom’s white terry-cloth robe, she’d made a comfy nest for herself on the couch. She had ten or twelve journals, a quilt tucked around her feet, and a cat sleeping in her lap. She was enjoying Mikey’s company although he wasn’t entirely conscious of hers.

Wanting to read for fun tonight, not for clues, she’d chosen early
journals that ranged from before her birth to her toddler years. She opened one at random.

My honey redhead, my redhead honey. Poor little carrot-top baby, you look more like your mama than your daddy
. Laura browsed for a while, but her mother’s obvious enjoyment of motherhood only stirred up grief and remorse.

The mother-daughter bond could have been so much stronger. No doubt they’d used up most of their emotional energy on her dad’s issues, but surely they could have talked more often and more openly. It might have helped them stay close even through the tough times. But they’d drifted apart just when they needed each other most.

Laura closed her eyes, recalling the heated remark her mom had made while they were still awash in shock and grief.
“Stop living in a little-girl fantasy and get off to college.”
Then and there, a wall had gone up between them. It had never become a real estrangement, fortunately. They loved each other. They talked on the phone often. Their conversations were often strained, though, with mysterious undercurrents flowing below the surface of their chitchat.

Regret couldn’t change a thing. Trying to steer herself out of a weepy mood, Laura focused on a droll description of one of her toddler tantrums. Apparently they’d been frequent and ferocious.

She jumped when she became aware of a familiar rumble outside. Sean’s truck.

“Shoot,” she whispered, slapping the journal closed and fluffing her hair in a hurry. “Move, Mikey.”

The cat flexed one paw, dug a claw into the robe, and made himself a dead weight on her lap.

The truck’s door slammed.

“Move, tuna breath!” She finally nudged Mikey away. He departed in a huff, but Sean’s feet were already pounding up the back steps.

“Laura,” he called, knocking on the door. “It’s me.”

She sighed, resigned to being caught in her pajamas. “Come on in.” She heard the opening and closing of the door and then his footsteps crossing the kitchen.

He loomed in the doorway to the living room, frowning. “Why wasn’t the door locked?”

“Old habits are hard to break. Why didn’t you call first?”

He smiled. “Sorry. Old habits.” He inclined his head toward the kitchen. “It looks bare in there. Where’d all the plants go?”

“I gave ’em to Ardelle.”

“Good idea.” He noticed the journals. “Hey, you found them.”

“Yes, but they’re not terribly riveting so far. It’s mostly stuff like this. Listen.” Unwilling to give him a glimpse of herself as a bratty toddler, she chose an earlier volume and picked a page at random, near the end. “How soon the brightest blossoms can fade and wilt and fall, and then they rot on the ground.” She shook her head. “That’s not typical, though.”

“She must have been in a bad mood that day. But are they all like that? Philosophical rambling?”

“No, it’s mostly trivia. Cheerful trivia. She wrote a million words about practically nothing. The garden and the weather and what she planned to buy herself for her birthday.”

Laura flipped back to the book’s first page and frowned at its opening sentence.
How quickly things can blossom overnight …
It was followed by a line about splurging on freesia-scented hand lotion. She shut the journal without reading the lines aloud.

“Actually, most of it’s superficial,” she said. “Shallow. Was my mom shallow?”

He didn’t answer right away. “I don’t know if that’s the right word. From the times we talked religion and politics, I’d say she was a deep thinker. And you know she was a saint, the way she devoted herself to helping your dad deal with his moods.”

“Still, she was sort of … self-centered. The journals are all about her.”

Sean gave her a sidelong look. “Isn’t that what a diary is for? To vent about your own life? Anyway, I’m not surprised. Every conversation somehow ended up being about her too.”

“True. Well, at least that’s one thing we can agree on.”

“Two things. One, she had her faults. Two, we loved her.”

Laura laughed so she wouldn’t cry. “We can’t even agree on how many things we agree on?”

Sean tilted his head and examined her. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Are you? What’s on your mind?”

She must have fooled him into believing she was okay, because he settled back against the couch cushions.

“I ran into Cassie this afternoon,” he said. “She told me about your prowler.”

“Oh boy. This is why I can’t tell her anything. She’s a blabbermouth.”

“You told Cassie the blabbermouth but you didn’t tell me?”

“I knew you would overreact.”

“I’m not. I’d just like to change your locks.”

“Why?”

“Because, as we’ve discussed before, half the county has a key.”

“That’s an exaggeration and you know it. Mom only gave keys to people she trusted.”

“Please, Laura. Let me change your locks.”

“And then you’ll tell me I need bars on the windows and an alarm system and a loaded gun by my bed. And a watchdog. No, thank you. I appreciate your concern, but I’m fine.”

“I know why you think you’re fine,” he said. “You’ve talked yourself into believing your visitor was your dad.”

“Just about. And why not? I met Preston at the church camp today so he could show me exactly where he thought he saw my dad, and his story is pretty darned believable.”

“Let’s discuss what I call prowler logic,” Sean said. The familiar cynical smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “If there’s a prowler at your house
and
miles away—at the church camp on the lake, for instance—it’s probably not Elliott. Therefore you should be on your guard.”

“You think it’s some random pervert, as Cassie put it?”

“That’s a good possibility, anyway.”

“What if it’s my dad, crossing town to get where he’s going? Isn’t that possible?”

“Possible but not probable. Look, the whole town’s on edge like it was years ago when Slattery was our prowler. Now, seems there’s a new one around, and people are jumping to crazy conclusions. I can come up with a few other explanations too, including the fact that it just might be Dale. No matter who it is, I’d sleep a lot better if you had new deadbolts on your doors. And if you
used
them.”

“Oh, Sean. You’re such a worrywart.”

“Only because you worry me. By the way, I drove past your grandparents’ old place today and noticed somebody has posted No Trespassing signs.”