The Ferryman (23 page)

Jill smiled, her sensual lips parted slightly. “You said you thought you'd be back around ten. I thought instead of calling I'd just come by.”

A flash of guilt went through Annette. It was almost ten-thirty. “Have you been waiting long?”

“Fifteen minutes. It's a nice night, though. And you're worth waiting for.” Jill seemed a bit uncomfortable then. “I hope it's okay, me coming by. I wanted to surprise you.”

Annette stepped in close, slid her arms around her lover, then let her lips brush against Jill's, gently suggestive.“It's more than okay,” she said.

The smile on Jill's face was conspiratorial, and urgent.

Together they went up to the apartment. Annette turned the lights on at first, but the place was a mess. There were three pairs of sneakers in the foyer, jackets and skirts draped over chairs, videos piled on the coffee table. She turned the lights off again and with just the stars and moon and the lights from the street, they stood close in the living room and touched and kissed and caressed one another.

Breathless, Annette pulled away. She went to the kitchen to retrieve several candles and a book of matches.Without a word she went to her bedroom. The bed was unmade, but otherwise it was clean and tidy. She placed the candles about the room and lit them. Dave Grusin was already in the CD player and she turned the music on. Sweet, soft jazz piano came from the small speakers.

When she turned, her breath caught in her throat. Jill stood in the open doorway of her bedroom, completely nude. The gentle glow of candlelight flickered off her milky skin, made shadows around her small, perfect breasts. Jill's eyes smoldered and she gazed at Annette intensely, no trace of a smile on her face now. Her hair was swept back, and she walked into the room without a sound.

Annette uttered a tiny gasp as Jill came to her and kissed her, then began to undress her, her lips brushing tiny kisses on each newly exposed area.

“Is Janine all right?” she asked breathlessly.

The incongruity of the question was jarring. Annette blinked. “What?”

“You said she was upset about something.”

Jill kissed her throat as she removed Annette's bra. Then she traced circles on Annette's back, raising goose bumps. Her mouth moved lower, but she gazed up, waiting for an answer.

“She's spooked about ... her ex getting killed. She's all right.”

With a shy grin, Jill slid her tracing fingers around to caress Annette's petite breasts. Then her mouth descended and Jill began to lick her nipples, slowly, teasing.

Then she stopped. Again she gazed up at Annette, but now her face was a bit sad. “You love her, don't you?”

Annette stiffened. Her head was swirling with passion, her chest rising and falling quickly with her arousal, but Jill's question seemed almost to cut her.

“No, I ... She's straight, Jill. She'll never be anything but.”

“So you can't have her, but you do love her?”

“She's my friend.”

As if Annette had not spoken, Jill let her tongue trail down Annette's gently sloping belly and worked her fingers to unzip her lover's jeans.

“You don't want her?”

Jill slid the jeans down and she stepped out of them. Annette shivered as her young lover slipped her fingers into the waistband of her panties and began to slide them down as well.

“No,” Annette said, feeling her legs grow weak. She reached out and ran her fingers through Jill's long, silken hair. “I ...”

Jill stood then and pressed her body against Annette's, her breasts warm and her hands moving tenderly over Annette's curves.

“Prove it,” Jill whispered. “Show me.”

Then Annette was lost in her arms, and for a long time, all thoughts of Janine were banished from her mind. Later, though, as they lay tangled together in bed, with Jill just beginning to fall asleep, her mind went back to her best friend. She felt a strange kind of guilt, there in the exhilarating aftermath of making love with Jill. Janine was profoundly troubled, frightened.

Now, though she was not alone, Annette remembered her friend's apprehension all too clearly, and a frisson of fear went through her with a shudder.

The glow of flickering candles cast haunting shadows on the walls. Annette was suddenly, uncomfortably aware that the fear she felt was not merely for Janine, but now also, inexplicably, for herself. The feeling Janine had described, like malevolent eyes upon her; Annette thought she now fully understood what that meant.

Not since she had been a little girl, afraid of the open closet door or the scrape of a tree branch against the window, had she felt the sort of unfocused dread that suffused her now.

Jill's breathing changed; she slept peacefully in the crook of Annette's arm. It ought to have given Annette a kind of serenity. Instead it unnerved her even more.Though Jill aroused in her a lust and a sense of playfulness that she had never felt before, in that quiet moment she was ill at ease, as though a stranger slept in her bed.

This was her place. Annette had never felt afraid in her own apartment.

Until now.

 
A myriad of regrets accompanied Ruth Vale on the long, lonely drive to Boston. Though she had tried her best to get away earlier in the day, her commitments at work could not be so easily circumvented. Meetings had to be rescheduled, fires had to be put out, and she had reluctantly agreed to go into the office for a few hours in the morning to take a look at the mock-up art for a new magazine campaign for a cosmetic company that was one of her biggest clients.

It was after three o'clock before she got out of New York City. Ruth cursed herself all the way home. She had packed her bags the night before, and so they were waiting for her when she arrived. Larry was still at the office, and she called him before getting into the car, just to remind him that she loved him and to call her at the Parker House in downtown Boston if anything came up that required her attention. He promised that he would not allow the agency to disturb her, that the time up in Boston was for her and Janine. But Ruth knew that vow would last only until something truly important came up. She did not blame Larry, though. Ruth was sure he meant it when he said it. It was only that, for both of them, business had always been a little too important. The truth saddened her, but she had long ago resigned herself to it.

By the time she hit the Merritt Parkway north into Connecticut, it was after five o'clock. She hated to drive at night, but there had been no way to avoid it unless she wanted to wait until the next morning. Shortly after seven, she stopped to eat dinner at a strip-mall steakhouse. Ruth could not bring herself to eat fast food, not at her age.

The entire ride, she chided herself for not calling Janine first. It was unlike her to simply show up unannounced, and she doubted her daughter would appreciate the surprise. At the same time, she knew that if she called, Janine would tell her not to come. That was the thing she regretted above all else: that her little girl was hurting, and would not turn to her mother for comfort.

The here and now was immutable. There was no going back to fix the mistakes she had made as a mother. But that did not mean she could ignore her child's pain.

It was a Monday night, so there was very little traffic on the road. She made good time despite her dinner stop. Shortly after nine thirty, she checked into the Parker House. The rooms were beautiful, as was to be expected given the cost and history of the grand old Beacon Hill hotel. There was a phone beside the bed, and after she had used the bathroom and washed her face, she lay on the thick, floral spread and stared at it.

After only a moment's hesitation, she got up and left the room. Ruth had the overwhelming sense that her daughter needed her, and she was not going to be held back by the fear that Janine might tell her to go home.

The drive to Medford took twenty minutes. Though Winthrop Street, where Janine's building was situated, was a main road, it was quiet enough at that time of night. When she pulled into the driveway and saw her daughter's car there in the gleam of starlight, a sigh of relief escaped her lips.

She's all right,
Ruth thought.

Part of her was tempted to just turn around, drive back to the Parker House, and phone in the morning. But Janine would be at the school early, teaching, and they would not have time to speak until after the end of the school day.

She parked next to Janine's car, slung her purse over her shoulder, and stepped out. With a flick of her thumb, she armed the car's alarm system and then dropped the keys in her purse.

A light, warm breeze rustled the leaves of the trees at the edges of the property. The barn at the back of the house was dark, its open doors revealing only blackness within, unmitigated by the moon and stars.

Ruth strode across the pavement, headed for the front of the house.

From the darkness of the barn came a baby's cry.

Startled, Ruth frowned and turned to peer into the night at the ominous face of the barn. She was inclined to treat the cry as something born of her imagination, but then it came again.The whimpering of an infant curled out of the barn and reached out to her heart. Horrified, fearful for the child, Ruth started across the small parking area toward the barn.

No doubt someone had abandoned the child, a drug-addled teenager, more than likely. Ruth was filled with righteous anger at the imagined mother, and also bitter when she considered the purpose of a God who regularly gave children to such women and yet had denied her lovely, intelligent daughter the joy of motherhood.

Her wrath dissipated as she neared the barn. She peered into the dark recesses of that structure, and her footsteps faltered. It was as though the light of the heavens simply stopped at the entrance to the barn, as if it were somehow eaten by the darkness within. She knew what was inside—lawn mower, snowblower, yard tools, storage, and an old car of the landlord's, among other things—but that abyss yawned open before her, and for an instant, the crying child seemed less important. Not her responsibility. Not when it meant going into that darkness.

Then the cry rose higher, the infant's voice ululating with fear and longing, perhaps hunger.

“Is anyone in there?” Ruth asked, her voice a bit raspy from unuse.

Only the baby's cries in response.

She stepped into the barn.

The crying stopped.

B
y late Tuesday morning, the anxiety caused by the accident—a word that David doubted would ever quite fit in his mind—had receded somewhat. His scratches had begun to heal, the insurance company had agreed that the car was totaled, and he had even allowed himself to begin thinking about what he was going to buy to replace it.

Thoughts of shopping for a new car and the conversation he had had with Father Charles the previous morning gave way, as almost everything did of late, to thoughts of Janine. David was not blind. He had been aware on Sunday that she seemed almost as remote and contemplative as he did, even more so in some ways. But they both had plenty of reason; the car accident and the mystery of Spencer's murder, and his activities before the killing, were enough to ruin anybody's week, month, maybe even year.

David was not going to let it get that far. When he had spoken to her on Monday morning and found Janine still in that melancholy state, he had talked to Annette about it. With the wild, disturbing things going on in his own head, he thought it would be better if Annette tried to cheer her up. Annette had instantly agreed, as he had known she would.

Now he stood in the cafeteria just before the first lunch period bell rang and waited for sight of her. Since Ralph Weiss's death, the lunch monitor schedule had been jumbled around quite a bit. David and Annette did the first lunch period together.

The bell rang. A low rumble of voices and laughter and a stampede of feet began to rattle the corridors out in the main school. Moments later, the first of the students began to spill into the room. Behind the counter, a trio of women who reminded him of Shakespeare's witches—the maiden, the matron, and the crone—prepared to serve up heaping helpings of mystery stew or processed stuffed manicotti.

Annette walked in five minutes after lunch had started. Dozens of students were already seated, digging into their meals as though they were unaware that it was awful, tasteless fare.

He greeted her with a hesitant smile. “Good morning, Miss Muscari,” he said in his teacher voice.

“Good morning, Mr. Bairstow,” she replied in hers.

It was a familiar bit of sarcasm for both of them, but it seemed weak that day.

“So, how did it go with Janine last night? I talked to her this morning and she seemed ... I don't know, brighter. Like she was all there. I think you really cheered her up.”

Annette nodded. She glanced around at the tables, at the line of students still waiting for meals. There was a gravity to her expression that made him uncomfortable, but also somehow reassured him.

“You should talk to her, David,” she said, her voice low. “I'll be blunt, because I care about both of you. She wants us all to think that she's dealing with having lost this baby, but I think she's really just pretending. Now this thing with Spencer ... I told her I thought she should see somebody, a professional, someone she could talk to without feeling inhibited. All this grief and death, it's haunting her, giving her nightmares.”

A trio of freshman girls walked by, and one of them glanced at Annette and whispered something to the others. They giggled behind their hands and Annette pretended not to notice. She had always amazed David that way. There was certainly plenty of gossip about her amongst the students, but she took their childishness in stride.