Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [78]
Lee stared at his mother. This was the first he’d ever heard her mention anything like this.
“Really?” said Kylie, her fork stopped in midair.
Fiona’s expression didn’t change, but her tone was low and mysterious. “When I was a child there was a woman, Mary McFarland, who could see things that had yet to happen.”
“Like what?” Angelica said, leaning so far over the table she nearly upset the salad dressing.
“Gareth McKinney came to her in a dream, and the next day he was dead.”
“Wow,” said Kylie. “That’s cool.”
“How did he die?” Angelica asked. “He fell off the roof trying to mend it.” Meredith sniffed officiously. “Probably just a coincidence.”
“Then one time she told Kerry McClelland not to take the ferry to the mainland, and the next day the ferry sank.” “Wow,” Kylie said.
“How come you never told me any of this?” Lee asked.
Fiona leaned forward and plucked another ear of corn from the platter. “The subject never came up.”
Kylie and Angelica could hardly wait to finish dinner so they could get out the Ouija board, over Meredith’s objections.
Lee joined his mother in the kitchen, where she was busily cleaning up after dinner. Fiona was an exacting housekeeper, and often seemed so eager to begin the “tidying up” process that Lee was worried someday she would snatch a half-finished dish from under her guest’s nose.
He found her rinsing and stacking dishes—she owned a dishwasher, but a dish rarely entered it in anything less than pristine condition.
“Do you really believe those things you told the girls?” Lee asked his mother.
“I am neither a believer nor an unbeliever,” she replied, scraping corncobs into the compost bin. A fanatic gardener, she was intractable when it came to composting, believing that artificial fertilizers were the devil’s work.
“But you told them that story,” he protested. “Why did you tell them if you don’t—”
She stopped working and turned to face him. “Where are you headed with this? Because I won’t talk about—you know what,” she finished, her voice low.
“That’s not why I was asking,” Lee said. “But since you mention it, why can’t we ever talk about it? For God’s sake, she was—”
His mother abruptly dropped the compost bin onto the floor with such a loud bang that it made him jump. “Don‘t you say she ‘was’ anything!” she hissed, her eyes narrowed in fury. “Don’t you dare give up on her!”
“Oh, for God’s sake—I’m not ‘giving up’ on anything!”
he shot back. “When will you accept the fact that she’s gone? She’s not coming back—she’s dead, and all the wishing in the world isn’t going to change that!”
When he saw the look in his mother’s eyes, he immediately regretted his words. She stared at him, her face frozen in an expression of horror and reproach, then turned sharply, whipping her dish towel onto the counter like a punctuation mark, and stalked out of the room.
Lee stood there for a few moments, his head spinning with remorse and anger—anger because this was such predictable behavior on her part, and remorse because he should have known better than to bring it up—and on Kylie’s birthday, of all times.
He heard a sound behind him and turned to see his niece standing in the doorway, a stricken expression on her face.
“What’s the matter? Why are you angry at Grandmother?” she said, her chin beginning to pucker, her lower lip trembling.
“I’m not angry at her, honey,” Lee said, bending to take her in his arms.
“Is it about my mommy coming back? Will she be coming soon?”
“Maybe, honey,” he lied. “I hope so.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
It was just another Sunday night for Roberto Rivera—like all the countless other Sundays he checked into work, thermos under his arm, to work his way through the Midtown office building to clean up the detritus of the past week before everyone arrived back at work Monday morning. It wasn’t a bad job—union pay plus benefits, and he could turn his mind off while he worked, dreaming of his native Guatemala, of the fishing boat he was going to buy in a couple of years. He imagined Carlita’s face