Chat - Archer Mayor [102]
To the general laughter following, he added, “I cannot tell you how happy I am with this outcome. You two scared the bejesus out of me.”
They were all back home at last, Leo having been released earlier in the day, with home nursing and physical therapy visits scheduled for the next few weeks. By pure coincidence, Lyn had said that Coryn was visiting from Boston, so Joe had brought them north for the day’s major event, much to Coryn’s satisfaction—she had wanted to check him out in any case, and now had been handed serendipitous access to the entire diminutive clan.
Joe couldn’t be sure, of course, since he’d only just met the girl, but she seemed to be liking what she saw. Certainly, that was true for him. He found her genuine and honest and funny—a natural offshoot of her mother, all the way down to the same almost lissome frame.
Unfortunately, they weren’t going to have her for long, since she had to be back at work the next morning and was driving south in an hour, leaving Lyn behind to spend the night. This was, therefore, a celebratory dinner for more reasons than just Leo’s return to the fold.
The meal was easy, relaxing, and filled with laughter. Joe kept glancing at his mother and seeing in her expression the pure joy of a return to normalcy. The proximity of her own mortality, which, he knew, had loomed large in her mind with Leo’s disability, seemed to have slipped back once more. She looked more relaxed and self-confident than he’d seen her in weeks.
By the end, when all except Leo were gathered by the door to send Coryn off with hugs and best wishes, Joe was back to feeling that his out-of-kilter world might be resettling on a more even keel. Lyn and he seemed on the right track, with her daughter’s blessing; the double homicide investigation in Brattleboro was gaining credible steam; the source of Leo’s accident had been addressed with Dan Griffis’s flight from the area—even if for unrelated reasons; and Leo was on the mend.
Life had been worse, and not that long ago.
Later, in his old bedroom at the front of the house, with the walls glowing in candlelight and the two of them buried deep under old family quilts, he and Lyn made love quietly, with an ease and a familiarity that each found at once surprising and confirming.
But this peacefulness proved short-lived. In the middle of the night, Joe heard the phone ringing in the living room—an unheard-of occurrence in most rural settings, and a nearly guaranteed harbinger of ill tidings.
He slipped out of bed fast and focused, getting to the phone by its third ring.
“Gunther?” said a familiar male voice.
“Yes.”
“It’s E. T. Griffis. My son Dan is headed your way right now. I told him you got Nugent and that you know why Andy went to jail. Do what you have to do. I’m done with him.”
The phone went dead.
“What’s happening, Joey?”
He turned and saw his mother in the hallway door. Lyn had also appeared across the room.
“Trouble,” he said, dialing the phone to no avail. “That was E. T. Dan Griffis is coming here to take a bite of me, or maybe all of us. Shit.”
Joe gave up on the phone just as the warning system he’d set up—which Willy had triggered earlier—started pinging near the front door, where he’d put the receiver.
He looked at both women. “He’s cut the phone line and is coming up the driveway now. Chances are, he doesn’t know we’re up, so no lights. Lyn, call 911 on a cell, use my name, and say that a home invasion’s about to start. Mom, go back to your room, close the door, grab Dad’s shotgun, park yourself in a corner, and blast whoever comes through without announcing themselves. Can you do that?”
“What about Leo?” she typically asked.
“I’ll take care of him. Will you do what I asked? I want to know where you’ll be.”
“I will,” she said, and swung around in her chair and rolled out of sight.
Lyn was already dialing her phone.
He motioned to the staircase lining the living room wall. “You go upstairs. Can you shoot a gun?”
“Yes.”
He ran back to their bedroom, quickly grabbed his pistol,