Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [77]
They all sat around Fiona’s long oak table, halfway through Kylie’s birthday dinner. “Great burgers, George,” Lee said, as he finished his, medium rare, dripping with caramelized onions. George had cooked each one to order, and seasoned them with a special sauce he made himself, guarding the recipe as carefully as if it were a state secret.
“Thanks,” George replied, snapping open another Rolling Rock and taking a long swig. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve, then looked sheepishly at Fiona, but fortunately for him she wasn’t watching.
The girls chatted and giggled all throughout dinner, and though Fiona shot her granddaughter looks from time to time, Kylie ignored her and continued enjoying her friends.
The subject at the moment was Ouija boards—the girls had discovered the one Lee and Laura used to play with in the upstairs guest bedroom closet. When he explained what they were for, Meredith immediately scoffed at the idea, but Kylie and Angelica were intrigued and wanted to play with the board after dinner.
“There’s no such thing as foretelling the future!” Meredith declared, spreading a liberal amount of butter on her ear of corn.
“How do you know?” said Kylie. “What if there is?”
“Well, even if there is, you wouldn’t be able to do it with a wooden board with a few letters painted on it!”
“My granny says that she can tell the future from the scratches our chickens leave in their feed on the ground,” Angelica said, her chin shiny from beef fat and butter.
“You have chickens?” Kylie said. “That’s cool!”
Angelica lowered her eyes and glanced at Fiona, who sat stiff as ever in her chair, delicately nibbling on an ear of corn. Her fastidiousness extended to her eating habits. Though she enjoyed her food, she was never one to throw herself into any activity too vigorously, as if an excess of enthusiasm was itself a character flaw.
“Why do people want to believe they can foretell the future?” Meredith grumbled. “Why can’t they just live their lives without this … need to believe in things that can’t be proven?”
“Speaking of the future, you sound like a future scientist,” George remarked, helping himself to more steak and salad.
Meredith set her fork down with a clank. “Yes,” she said portentously. “I intend to be a forensic specialist.”
“What’s for-ensics?” asked Angelica.
“The study of evidence in crime scenes,” Meredith replied, popping a cherry tomato into her mouth. The juice squirted out through her teeth and hit Fiona square in the forehead.
“Less chatter and more attention to what we’re doing, please,” she said sternly.
“I think the reason people want to believe in the unproven is because we all want to be able to touch the past and the future,” George said. “We don’t want to think that this is all there is.”
Meredith snorted and rolled her eyes.
“You’re too young to understand,” George continued, “but by the time you’re our age, you will. We’re all afraid of death, and we’ve all lost someone we love. So if we can believe that maybe—just maybe—there’s something else, then we feel better.”
“Well, I think it’s silly!” Meredith scoffed, stuffing a piece of bread in her mouth.
Lee looked at George, taken aback by his uncharacteristically serious response. He knew that George was referring to Laura, but he was surprised that he would allude to her in front of the children—especially his daughter. But Kylie appeared to miss the reference, and was happily dipping her bread into a little pool of melted butter on her plate.
“In Scotland, some people were