Blue Willow (63 page)

He was plunging to the end, taking his last breath. “Alise,
don’t—
”

“I’m coming home. It’s that easy, if you trust me.”

He leaned back in the chair, shutting his eyes against the tears, then letting them go. The deepest peace came at the end of a nightmare, when all was safe. “It’s that easy then,” he said.

Thirty-one

There was a place for her at the table, adjacent to Artemas’s place at its head. Lily stood behind her chair, looking tentatively at the others, who stood behind theirs, waiting for Artemas to sit down. But he continued to stand, his gaze shifting from each person to the next. Cass and John Lee, Elizabeth and Leo, Michael, James, and Tamberlaine. No one had any appetite for breakfast, but it was a ritual everyone needed.

“Some of you may feel that we opened a Pandora’s box yesterday,” Artemas said. “But we can move forward now. There’s no need to pretend it will be easy to find our balance again. There’s no need for any kind of pretense. I think that’s a blessing.”

He pulled his chair back. “Wait!” Cass said. “There’s something we need to do.” She left her place and walked around to Lily. Lily looked at her with a twinge of the old wariness. Cass saw it and shook her head. “Welcome,” she said. She held out her hands.

Formality dissolved into tears and emotion. Lily hugged Cass, and then Elizabeth came to her, and Michael. Tamberlaine waited for the others to return to their places, then walked over. She hugged him, too, and whispered “Thank you,” in his ear, and he mumbled something like
this time he had not needed to initiate anything, it was spontaneous.

James had not moved. But now he walked over to her and halted, staring at her with a terrible sorrow on his face. He started to say something, but Mr. Upton appeared in the dining-room doorway. “Excuse me,” the butler said excitedly. He smiled at James. “She’s arrived, sir.”

Lily grabbed one of James’s hands. “Go see Alise.”

He seemed startled by her touch. “Thank you.” He left the room without a backward glance. She and Artemas traded a troubled look.

He held Alise close, so close that even the damp heat of sex had been less intimate. Her bare legs were tangled with his, one lying over his scarred thigh, and for the first time he loved the sleek feel of her skin on it, without any sense that he hated having her touch the damaged part of himself.

They were in the plush bed of a guest room on the mansion’s second floor. It was the quickest privacy they had been able to find, and Mr. Upton had been left with a stack of Alise’s luggage in the entrance hall, trying to figure out where they’d gone.

She rose to one elbow and took his face between her hands. “I have to tell you something.” She hesitated. Her fingers were very still on his cheeks, but he felt the tremors in them. She cleared her throat and said in a low, careful tone. “I was so disappointed, so afraid we had no future, when I left you.”

“I know. I understand,” he said, his chest tight with regret.

“You
can’t
entirely understand why I felt so desperate to change your attitude,” she continued, studying him sadly. “Because you don’t know my other reason.” She hesitated. “We were fighting so often—sometimes we didn’t touch each other for weeks. I was so angry and hurt. Toward the end I threw my pills away. There seemed to be no point in taking them.” Taking a deep breath, she finished, “We’re going to have a baby.”

The immediate conflict of joy and anguish was a claw inside him. Alise saw his mysterious dilemma and sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“
No.
” He pulled her head down to his shoulder again, caressing her hair and the tense slope of her back. “You have nothing to be sorry about.
A baby
,” he said with slow wonder.

“Do you really feel happy about it?” She sounded astonished.

He shut his eyes. “I want to be a good father … the best father in the world. I’m afraid I won’t be.”

“Yes,
yes
, you will be, if you’re happy about our having a child.”

James rolled her to her back and looked into her worried eyes. “I am
very
happy.”

They made love again, slower this time, and when they were quiet and still once more, he lay with his head on her abdomen, imagining he could hear the beat of an embryonic heart.

He couldn’t bring their child into the world with any shadows over it.

Lily loved the solitude of the farm. The house and greenhouse and barn roofs were still covered in snow. The land was as smooth as a white porcelain plate. The willows’ bare branches were sheathed in crystals that caught the last glimmer of light.

She parked the truck in the yard, put her arm around Lupa, and pulled the old dog to her for a hug. Lupa licked her cheek. Nuzzling her head against Lupa’s, Lily told her, “You’re the simplest old friend I’ve got right now. I’m going to change clothes and feed the critters, and then you and I are going to sit in front of the fireplace for a while.”

Lupa followed her out of the truck’s cab but immediately veered off to one side, sniffing the unbroken snow. Lily watched her hustle around in anxious circles, checking out some unknown scent. “It was probably just a deer,” Lily told her.

Lupa continued her frantic scouting as Lily went into the house and turned on a lamp. She changed hurriedly in the cold air, trading a dress for a heavy sweater and overalls, sliding thick socks and ankle-high brogans over her feet. She flicked on the floodlights at the corners of the house as she went back outside. Lupa was still racing around. As Lily walked up the knoll toward the barn, the dog rushed past her, head down.

Lupa galloped to the barn door, snuffled furiously at its base, then drew back, growling. Lily halted a few feet away and frowned. This was something other than excitement over the invasion of a deer or two. Maybe a fox, a hungry opossum, or—or what? She didn’t like the prickle of fear on the back of her neck. Arguing with herself that her nerves were frayed and it was a silly, suburbanite thing to do, Lily went back to the house and got the shotgun she always left standing in a corner near the front door.

With it balanced in the crook of one arm, she hurried back to the barn. Lupa whined and scratched at the barn’s double doors. Lily flipped the wooden latch and pulled one of the heavy doors open as quickly as she could. Rather than bolting inside as Lily had expected, Lupa advanced a few inches with stiff-legged uncertainty, then halted.

Staring into the dim interior, Lily saw only the earth-floored central hall as it had always been, lined with yard tools, stacks of plastic pots, and other mundane items. Chicken wire rose above the sides of a large stall at the far end. It was too dark to tell whether any of her chickens were at roost on the two pine poles that stretched across the enclosure at head height.

Lily stepped inside and pulled a chain connected to the bare bulb overhead. The barn’s interior filled with reassuring light, but it showed that the roosts were empty. She took the shotgun in both hands, pumped a shell into the chamber, and moved forward slowly The stall that served as the chicken roost had a small door on its back wall, leading to a large, fenced pen. The chickens should have been on the roosts by now.

Harlette’s stall, across the hallway, had a larger door to her pen. Lily glanced into it and saw that it was empty, the deep bed of hay hardly marred by droppings. Through the opening to the pen she saw nothing but snowy ground and a glimpse of the fence.

The silence was eerie. The stillness made her hands clammy.

And the smell. She grimaced. Then she recognized it, and her stomach lurched. The smell of butchering time. Acrid. Natural but unnatural. Blood.

She vaulted forward and stared down through the chicken wire. They were all dead, all lying in mangled clumps of dark red feathers, their necks twisted at impossible angles. Lily whirled and ran back outside, wanting to gag but swallowing it. She circled the barn and stopped outside Harlette’s large pen, bile rising in her mouth again.

She forced herself to open the gate and walk inside. Harlette lay on her side, a black apron of dried blood fanning out from under her head. Shaking, Lily dropped to her heels and looked at the awful gash in the hog’s throat.

With sick regret, she thought of James.
No, please not him
. She tried to shove the idea out of her mind. But who else would want to do this to her? Her breath caught.
Joe
? Why? Did he hate Artemas that much and therefore her? She had to find out. Tonight.

She jumped to her feet, her hands clenched on the shotgun. Blind rage and grief overwhelmed her. She walked swiftly down the hill, patting a hand on the bulging thigh pocket of her overalls where she’d stored extra shotgun shells. If the person who’d done this had stepped from the shadows at the moment, she would have shot him without a second thought.

Lupa crept along beside her, frightened by her furious energy. Lily caught her by the ruff and held tight. “Halfman isn’t going to get us,
goddamn him.
” Lily shouted. She dragged Lupa into the truck’s cab.

A few minutes later they were on the public road, roaring toward the estate’s entrance, where tall, handsome lamps cast bright light on the snow and the majestic
wrought-iron gates. Lily slid the truck to a stop and got out, leading Lupa by the ruff again. The elderly guard came outside, squinted in the truck’s headlamps, then smiled at her.

Hiding her distress, she politely asked him to call the house and leave word that she’d gone to visit Aunt Maude. The small lie would keep Artemas from worrying while she took care of this mission in her own way, for her own pride’s sake. She asked the guard to keep Lupa until she returned.

Then she drove on, the shotgun hidden behind the truck’s seat.

Hopewell opened his door and stared at Lily with poignant welcome. It took a second to notice that her face was ashen and angry, a cold white mask centered in her mane of tangled red hair. “What is it?” he asked.

She looked him straight in the eyes. “I went home a little while ago and found all my chickens with their necks wrung, and Harlette with her throat cut.”

He recoiled, grasping at the air with one hand, then sinking it into his hair.
Joe
. She studied his reaction and made a low sound of rage. “It was Joe, wasn’t it?” she asked. “You think so too. Why?”

It was a death. Hopewell felt it to the marrow of his bones. Joe was dead to him. He loved the son he’d raised, but the monster that existed now was not that son. His shoulders drooped. “Joe. Joe,” he mumbled. “I tried to fix everything for him. I gave up all my pride. I was willin’ to hurt innocent people to help him. God forgive me.”

“What do you mean?” she asked desperately.

“He’s tryin’ to scare you off, so he can get what he wants. But it’s over. I won’t back down again. It has to be over, this time.”

“What
does he want
?” She clutched his shoulders. Her eyes glittered. “Did he come home expecting to live at the farm again? Is that why you have to make me leave?”

Hopewell shuddered. “I don’t want you to leave.” He
dropped his hands limply. “Colebrook does. And Joe knows that.”

“
What
? What kind of crazy idea is this?”

“Joe wants money. All the money Colebrook has been promisin’ him since right after you moved back to the place.”

“What are you talking about?” Her dazed expression gave way to a frown. Hopewell tried to speak, but the words had barbed hooks that caught in his throat.

Lily watched his torment with distracted shock, while what he’d just said about Artemas promising Joe money made a dizzy spiral in her mind. She remembered the time in September after the incident with Elizabeth’s children, when Artemas had urged her to let him use his money to help Joe—to encourage Mr. Estes to let her stay at the farm, or even buy it back. She remembered all the other attempts he’d made to help her without her knowing. She remembered that even before he’d given her Grandmother Colebrook’s ring, he’d said that he wouldn’t let her lose her old home again because of him.

She felt as if a vise were squeezing her chest. Had he gone behind her back after she’d trusted him to honor her wishes? Was Joe’s viciousness the result of some misguided deal?
Oh, no, please
, she prayed.
So many dreams have died because of the best intentions
.

Mr. Estes was still hesitating, his florid, rusty cheeks flinching with the effort to talk without breaking down completely. Lily’s knees felt weak. She latched a hand onto the doorframe. “Whatever Artemas did, it wasn’t meant to hurt me,” she told Mr. Estes.

Her defensive words freed his voice. His eyes were tearful, but he thrust his jaw forward belligerently. “Oh, he’s got you convinced, but it ain’t true. He sent a lawyer to see me last spring. This lawyer said all I have to do is kick you off your place when the lease is up, and Joe’ll never have another worry as long as he lives. That Joe would be cared for, so he’d never be tempted to go back to his old ways.” He jabbed a finger at himself. “I can’t go through with it.
Joe’s tryin’ to scare me into agreein’, and he’s using you to do it.”

Lily felt cold to the pit of her stomach. A terrible fear flashed through her. Maybe Artemas
had
wanted, at one time, to drive her away.

No
. Even had their past few days together not been absolute proof of faith, the man she had loved since childhood wasn’t capable of what Mr. Estes claimed.

Lily leaned against the doorframe, feeling sick to her stomach. “This lawyer told you who’d sent him?”

“Hell, no. He was too smart for that. But I knew. It had to be one of the Colebrooks. It has to be Artemas.”

Not Artemas. Please, not Artemas. A stark suspicion slammed into her thoughts.
James
?

After what she’d learned about James yesterday—had it only been yesterday, when it seemed centuries ago?—she knew his pain, his confusion, the shame that had made him fight so hard for Julia’s reputation.

She had to believe she’d witnessed his turning point. His openness, his vulnerability, the reassurance Artemas and the others had given him—he was poised to close a door on the past. He hadn’t shown overt remorse for his bitterness toward her, but she had sensed strongly that he no longer considered her an enemy.