Darkside_ A Novel - Belinda Bauer [106]
'Yes.'
'He wouldn't touch it.'
'Jonas doesn't like horses.' She shrugged.
'Not now,' agreed Marvel.
He reached into his inside coat pocket and handed her the photo.
'What's this?' she said, but he thought he'd let her work it out for herself.
She did, but it took her a lot longer than it had taken him. He saw the exact moment she recognized her future husband - the tiny intake of breath and the way she dropped her head to get closer to the photo.
'Jonas,' she said.
'And Danny Marsh.'
She didn't say anything, her head bowed.
'Seemed to like horses plenty then, didn't he?'
Nothing.
'You know what changed?'
She shook her head, unable to tear her eyes away from the photo.
'I'm thinking it might go back to the night the stables burned down. Someone they knew died. All the horses died. Must have been traumatic for a kid.'
Lucy nodded silently.
'Maybe he even felt guilty,' he suggested carefully. 'Maybe Danny burned the stables down and Jonas knew about it.'
'Maybe,' she said, to his surprise. Seeing the photo seemed to have knocked all the spirit out of Lucy Holly, all the defence and all the defiance.
'What did he say about it?' It was worth a shot - tricking her into blurting out something by behaving as if his theory was already established fact.
'He never told me. I don't know. I never knew this.'
Her voice was dull. Dead. Marvel was a little concerned, despite himself, at the radical change in Lucy Holly. Her feisty spirit had seemed real, but he saw now that it had been a mere soap-bubble which, once popped, had disappeared so completely that he could not even see where it used to be.
He stood up, feeling oddly guilty that he had done something to her that might be irreparable.
'I've never seen a picture of him as a boy,' she said, still not looking at him.
'Why is that?' Marvel was surprised. Even in his fucked-up relationships he could remember the mother-bearing-photo-album routine as an early step in the courtship dance.
'I don't know. Can I keep it?'
'I'm afraid I need it.'
But she held on to it in hands that shook just a little.
Marvel stood undecided for a long moment. Lucy Holly stared at the photo in her wasted lap, as if he'd already left.
Jonas looked so happy!
That was Lucy's overwhelming first impression. She had almost not recognized him because of it. His brow, his nose, his lips - all were younger but definite versions of the Jonas she had fallen in love with. But his eyes ... his eyes were completely different. Across the years, ten-year-old Jonas Holly grinned at her - without shyness, without caution.
Without fear.
It was all she could think of.
Nothing bad has happened to him yet.
She had never thought of Jonas as fearful until she'd seen this picture. She might have, if she'd seen others, but there were none to see that she could find. No reminders for her of how he had been as a child.
The photo was a tunnel in time. Danny was taller and bigger than the friend who would eventually tower over him and they held two proud little ponies - no doubt long dead. Lucy could see that this was a snapshot of the boys' whole lives at that moment, plucked from the past and shown to her now: they were at a summer show; they had won; they were happy. That was all that shone from their faces.
Her heart wrenched to see them, so young and so vital together, when now Danny was cold on a slab and Jonas's eyes were sunken with lack of sleep, and his body made too thin by work and fear and the burden of her; it seemed a fate too cruel to befall the two joyous children she held in her trembling hands.
'How could you do this?' she said.
'Hmm?' Marvel bent at the waist to hear her better.
'How could you do this to him?'
'I haven't done anything to him.'
'Look at him,' she said, her voice starting to strengthen once more.
Lucy turned the photo to Marvel and he looked past it to where her eyes had gone dark with anger. Real anger this time - not feistiness.
'I don't know what you mean,' he said.
'Look at him!' she said again. 'Look