Silk and Stone

by Deborah Smith

  And she would not be satisfied until she got it back. Alexandra went to a casket, glanced furtively toward the closed door, then lifted the lid. Grimacing, she looked at Hugh. A stethoscope and an aged, fire-ravaged copy of Tom Sawyer were tucked inside one of his arms. A spray of eagle’s feathers had been inserted between the lapels of his suit, covering his tie, placed directly over his heart. Alexandra reached down slowly, cringing at the thought of touching his cold, hard skin, and felt inside the collar of his shirt for a necklace. Finding nothing, she quickly shut the lid and went to the next casket.

  “Well, Sarah,” she whispered, “it’s clear who won, isn’t it? Look what your incessant cruelty to me has accomplished. I’ve taken far more from you than you ever took from me.”

  Alexandra was beyond any sense of repulsion now. She quickly checked under the lacy neckline of Sarah’s green dress, hoping to feel the cool metal of a chain. Disappointed, she toyed contemptuously with the artist’s brushes that had been placed under Sarah’s folded hands, then frowned at the magnificent square of satiny red-and-silver material that had been arranged on the white pillow beneath her old enemy’s red hair.

  Alexandra stroked it with a fingertip. The threads were extraordinarly delicate, woven with such care that the silver seemed to float among the darker background.

  Samantha made this for her. Samantha loved her enough to honor her in a way she’d never honor me. Alexandra drew back, furious.

  She pulled the lid down and strode to the last casket. Ellie concerned her less than Hugh and Sarah; Alexandra wasted no time mulling over the whimsical items that had been placed with her and pushed apart the narrow scalloped V at the neck of her gold dress. No chain. No chain bearing Alexandra’s ruby. Of course, it could be hidden elsewhere on the bodies, but Alexandra decided it was not.

  Jake had it now. So retrieving it was only a matter of time and patience. She had proved the wisdom of both, hadn’t she?

  She closed the casket and smoothed her coat, then turned to leave.

  Clara Big Stick stared at her with glittering, hateful old eyes.

  Alexandra gasped involuntarily. Somehow the fat, dreary old woman had managed to slip into the room and shut the door again without her noticing. A bulky cloth bag hung from one of her shoulders. She clenched the strap of it with one beefy brown hand and pointed the other at Alexandra, then advanced slowly.

  “In the cold land where you live, O red spirit, we two have fixed your arrows for the soul of the Night Goer,” she chanted. “We have them lying by the path. Quickly we two will take her soul.”

  Alexandra backed up, overwhelmed by the eerie words and the old crone’s sinister, commanding voice. Clara marched onward. “Listen, O purple spirit, in the cold land where you live. Quickly we two have fixed your arrows for the soul of the Night Goer. We have them lying by the path.”

  “Stay away from me,” Alexandra said. She took another step back and felt a soft wall of flowers blocking her retreat. The old woman halted, her unwavering finger stabbing directly at Alexandra’s face. “Quickly!” she said. “We two will cut her soul in two!”

  “Stop this, you babbling old fool.”

  Clara’s hand dropped. She nodded. “It is done. When the arrows fall on your head, you will die. The great stone will find you, and you will die.”

  Alexandra made a sound of disgust, but even to her ears it sounded nervous. Clara laughed. It was the most chilling thing Alexandra had ever heard. She skirted the old woman with as much dignity as she could muster, then nearly ran from the room.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Two

  Each thing he touched brought him no closer to an answer, but he couldn’t give up until he had one. Jake moved through what remained of the house—the first floor, with its blackened and water-damaged furnishings, the piles of debris that had once been his home. Jagged, sooty timbers crushed the hall staircase; shards of glass from the hall lamps crunched under the soles of his lace-up boots as he sidestepped a fallen painting of Mother’s, the canvas burned beyond recognition.

  Rain drizzled outside and found its way through cracks in the ceiling. He stared up at it, cursing weakly. He was covered in dirt and soot, and exhausted to the point where misery receded into a dull throb behind his aching eyes.

  He stopped outside the door to Ellie’s bedroom. He hadn’t been inside her room since the day after the fire, when he’d forced himself to dig through the scorched jumble until he found the ruby. Sam had been with him that day, horrified and confused by an obsession he would not discuss with her.

  He had clenched the stone in his hand and, feeling nothing, slung it into a jar that he kept on a shelf in their bedroom. When they lay in bed at night, sleepless, he would catch her staring across the room at the jar, and when he held her he felt her questions, her fear, her loathing for the morbid value she thought he gave the stone.

  He hated it too, because it might hold some clue to the fire but would not help him.

  A state arson inspector had turned up nothing; he and Pandora’s fire marshal concluded that the fire started in a stack of old newspapers stored in a cardboard box by the wall under the window eaves. They’d found the ash bucket nearby, and when Jake had recalled Father cleaning out the fireplace Thanksgiving night and carrying the bucket to the porch, they speculated that some exploring raccoon or ’possum had knocked it over after the family went to bed. A live ember must have rolled against the box.

  Jake moved down the hall, running his grime-streaked hands over the log walls. He could not hear screams or feel his family dying; he wouldn’t let himself, because he’d never sleep again if he did.

  “You in there?” a male voice called. “Jake?”

  Jake emerged from the house, blinking even in the gray December light, furious that someone had interrupted him.

  Joe Gunther stood in the ravaged yard, steel-gray cowboy boots mired in the mud and charred leaves, rain dripping from the brim of his western hat onto a gray slicker. The older man frowned at Jake’s filthy, gaunt appearance. “Hadn’t been to see you since the funerals,” Joe said, his face grim. “Sammie called me today. Asked me to talk to you. She’s worried half out of her mind.”

  Jake shivered. Thoughts of Samantha’s misery weighed him down. He knew what she feared, what scared her so much she wouldn’t even say it. He, too, lived with the terrible thought that Clara’s predictions had been right in the first place. During the funerals, Clara had only shaken her head at him when he’d tried to talk to her.

  Which was why he came here every day, alone, and tried to learn the truth.

  “You’ve got to let go of this,” Joe said, sweeping a jeweled hand at the house. “You’re making yourself sick.”

  “I’ve got to know exactly what happened here.”

  Joe looked at him sadly. “An accident, Jake. A goddamned, senseless accident. Now, look, I know it’s hard, but the best thing you can do is clear all this out. I can have bulldozers and dump trucks down here in the morning. We’ll scrape this spot clean.”

  “No.”

  “You’ve got Sammie to think about, and poor Charlotte too. You weren’t even at home to help Sammie set up a bed for her. You’ve got a wife and a teenaged sister-in-law who are grieving their hearts out, and Sammie would feel a helluva lot better if you’d grieve with her instead of prowling around this god-awful place by yourself.”

  “When I’m done, you can send bulldozers.”

  “Done with what, man? Done making yourself and Sammie so crazy, neither of you’ll ever get over it?”

  “When I’m done,” Jake repeated between clenched teeth.

  It was almost dark, the dreary day sinking into a wet dusk whipped by the wind. Huddled miserably in a thick coat, Sam sidestepped piles of scorched timbers, broken glass, and ruined furniture. Bo walked beside her, his tail and head low. Jake had ignored him for days.

  She knew how Bo felt.

  Jake had shut her out, and that made the horrible aftermath so much lonelier
. She had her hands full with Charlotte, who had lost another set of parents, another home. Visitors came by the house every day, shy people from Cawatie, who brought small gifts of food and asked how Jake was doing.

  What could she tell them? That he came here every morning and stayed all day, then sat by himself on their porch at night, until finally she coaxed him to bed, where he held her with wordless, almost savage intensity, and they both pretended to sleep.

  She wanted to cry when she saw him now, coatless, hatless, his shirt plastered to his broad back, mud streaking his jeans. He was picking through a pile of refuse near the ruins of the back porch, wet, dirty, pulling each bit of soggy cloth, each broken dish out of the pile, holding it a moment, then dropping it by his feet and reaching for the next.

  “Jake.” He straightened and turned wearily. Sam moved up to him cautiously, unable to read his bleary, hooded eyes. She took her coat off and put it around his shoulders. Sam could barely speak past the sorrow in her throat. Finally she said, “I’m not letting you come here alone anymore. Whatever you’re doing, I want to help. Please, please don’t shut me out.”

  “You can’t help.” His voice was hollow. He shrugged her coat off and draped it around her. His hands lingered near her face. Slowly, gently, he cupped her jaw. Sam gave a helpless sob. “Say it. I’d rather hear you say it than go on this way. You think we caused this somehow. If you hadn’t given me a home, if we hadn’t gotten married, if you didn’t love me—”

  He jerked her to him and wound his arms around her, stroking the back of her head, pulling her face deep into the crook of his neck. “I’ll love you forever,” he whispered. “I don’t know what happened, or why, and I have to find out. But we didn’t cause it.”

  Sam trembled with relief. “I keep thinking that I should have stayed here that night. That maybe, with more people in the house, one of us would have smelled the smoke in time.”

  “And I keep thinking that I could have saved them if I hadn’t gone to track a stranger.”

  She moaned. He had never confessed that private torture before. “No, no. The house burned too quick. Everyone says so. The logs were so old, so dry. Oh, Jake, don’t blame yourself.” She raised her head and looked at him desperately. “Don’t blame anyone. I don’t believe in curses. I won’t.” She shook her head wildly. “If you believe in them, it means you think my aunt had something to do with this.”

  He grasped her by the shoulders. His face was hard, his eyes full of pain. “I don’t know what to believe yet. I can’t even think. Because when I do, and when I fall asleep and dream, I see my parents and Ellie waking up in smoke so thick, they couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. I see them trying to find each other and get out together, while the house burned up around them.”

  “Don’t you think I see that too?”

  “Not the way I do.”

  “Oh, Jake.”

  He released her and stepped back, holding her away as if it took all his willpower. “Go back home. Charlotte needs you.”

  And you don’t, she thought with despair. “What are you looking for? Tell me, and I’ll look too.”

  “I don’t know what I’m looking for. Or if it’s even here. But I can’t stop looking, and you can’t do it for me.”

  “I can do one thing—I can get the ruby out of your sight. I can make sure you don’t lie awake, staring at it at night. You’re thinking about it. You’re thinking about all the bad blood between your family and Alexandra because of it. That’s why I hate it, and I wish you’d let me take it to the highest cliff around here and throw it away.”

  His hands tightened fiercely on her shoulders, then quickly relaxed. He looked more beaten than angry. “It’s the only thing that survived.”

  Sam stared at him. “We survived.” Crying, she pulled away from him. “Try not to forget that.”

  He wanted to go home to Samantha. He wanted to kiss her and tell her that the night of the fire, when he was driving home frantically, he’d been thinking of her more than anyone else. That when he arrived and saw her he felt he could bear anything else since she was safe.

  And that no matter what he learned now, he would never believe that he had doomed his family by loving her.

  He crawled in the rainy, cold darkness on his hands and knees, searching among the wilted shrubbery, digging his fingers into the flower beds of the backyard, where cars and feet had churned Mother’s careful winter mulch into sludge. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d gone over every inch of ground, maybe every inch of the Cove. He shivered; he was cold to the bone, soaked. Every muscle ached, and his fingers were numb.

  He didn’t know what time it was when he finished with the yard. He found himself at the edge of the dirt lane, swaying with fatigue and battered by loneliness. He fought a desperate need to be inside Samantha’s arms, to feel the soothing warmth of her incredible hands on his skin. To forget his pain, if only for a little while.

  He threw his head back. “Talk to me, Ellie. Help me. Tell me what I’m looking for. I don’t care if it hurts. I’ll listen. Because not knowing is worse.”

  Emptiness. Only the sound of wind soughing through the bare branches of the forest and the patter of rain. He slumped. His twin was gone, the one person who would have understood without question. She had seen this time coming, but not well enough to avoid it. The ruby had warned her. It would not, however, help him. Because he had misused it once and caused their uncle’s death.

  Defeated, his legs numb and weak, he concentrated on getting to his feet. He reached down with one hand to brace himself. His hand sank into dripping grass at the road’s edge.

  His fingers closed on something small, a soggy rectangle of material that crumpled in his grip. The familiar, trancelike rush of sensation jerked him upright. Instantly his mind filled with images. An emaciated but familiar face capped with thin brown hair. A huge, stately brick building with its name marching across a dignified marble marker on the lawn. The words Durham First disappeared behind an enormous magnolia tree.

  The face. The face. It belonged to someone inside a car that had sat here on the road. It turned toward him, illuminated by the greenish lights of the car’s dashboard. A hand flung something out the window. The something Jake held in his hand now.

  Jake fumbled a flashlight from his back pocket and posed it over the mysterious object. In the bright beam he saw a matchbox.

  In his mind he saw the face transformed into one he recognized without doubt. He bent his head to his hands and groaned.

  Malcolm Drury.

  Sam paced the living room, every nerve tuned to the light tattoo of rain on the roof and the ticking of a mantel clock that had belonged to Jake’s grandmother. The clock chimed loud and long as its hands met at midnight. She hurried, barefooted, down the hall and shut the door to Charlotte’s bedroom, peeking in briefly as she did. Charlotte, her face wan and sad even in sleep, turned fitfully in the twin bed Sam had bought for her, then settled again.

  Sam sighed with weary relief and walked back to the living room. Bo rose morosely from a rug before the couch, padding to her and sticking his jowly red face into her hands. “If he’s not back by twelve-thirty, we’ll go after him,” she told the bloodhound. Sam knelt and gave him a sympathetic hug that she was certain helped her feelings more than Bo’s.

  Suddenly Bo scrambled out of her embrace and galloped to the door, his tail wagging madly. Sam jumped up at the sound of footsteps on the porch. She ran to the door and pulled it open.

  Jake looked the worst she’d ever seen him, his shirt and jeans filthy, matted to his body, water dripping from his dark hair, and the expression on his face … her hands rose to her throat in alarm.

  Haunted. Tormented. Something dark and urgent had wiped out the young husband she knew, yet he stared at her as if he’d never needed her more. Without a word he picked her up and kicked the door shut. Nameless dread trapped Sam in her own silence. She sank her hands into his drenched, gritty shirt and felt the ragged pulse of his
heart. He carried her to their bedroom, shoved that door shut too, then lay down with her on their bed in the dark.

  Instantly his mouth moved over her face, kissing her fiercely, his dirty, wet cheeks leaving streaks on her skin, his hands shaking as he dragged her robe off her shoulders, then finding her breasts under her nightgown. She responded to his agonized frenzy with a soft cry of compassion.

  They took each other frantically, half-undressed, wound together in a breathless tangle with her hugging his head into the crook of her neck. Afterward they continued to hold each other, his shivering body pressed deeply inside hers, his arms wound tightly around her back and waist.

  Sam was afraid—for him, not herself. She tried to talk to him, but he dragged his mouth back and forth over hers, repeating I love you, in a raw, desperate tone until she murmured plaintively and pressed her fingertips over his lips. “I know. I love you too. Be still now. Let me take care of you.” She searched with one hand until she found an edge of the damp, jumbled quilt and pulled it over them.

  A long time passed before he moved just enough to lay beside her, facing her. She burrowed into his unrelaxed grip and rubbed his back desperately, trying to impart warmth and comfort to the inflexible column of muscle and sinew. Finally she felt a slight giving. “I want to sleep,” he said. The pleading tone in his voice brought a ragged murmur of agreement from her. “I’ll get you a dry shirt,” she told him. “And fill the bathtub. You can soak, and I’ll wash your hair for you—”

  “No. Please. I just want to stay here and forget about everything but the way it feels to be with you. I wish I could sleep the rest of my life.”

  “Shhh. Don’t talk that way. Just … sleep, for now. I’ll hold you. I won’t let go. I never have. I never will.”