Devlin's Light

by Mariah Stewart

  “Rather difficult to do, wouldn’t you say,” August said, folding her arms over her chest, “since you live in Paloma and Corri lives in Devlin’s Light.”

  “I don’t know how to resolve that.”

  “I suggest you give it some serious thought, India. Corri needs a younger parental figure in her life on a permanent basis. I won’t live forever.”

  “Of course you will. But you’re right: I need to make some decisions about her future as well as about my own. I’m just not sure I know what’s best.” Looking out the window over the sink, India filled the glass coffeepot with water while watching a V of Canadian geese fly over the garage.

  “Paloma doesn’t have a lock on bad deed doers, India. And I heard that our county D.A. is looking for an experienced trial lawyer,” August said softly, trying not to sound too hopeful.

  “I’ve made a life for myself in Paloma, Aunt August.”

  The back door burst open and Corri flew in, a whirlwind of plaid overalls and light blue long-sleeved T-shirt, little white sneakers and enormous grin. She hesitated only slightly before flinging herself onto India’s lap.

  “You’re home! You did come home!”

  “Told you I’d be home today, silly, didn’t I?”

  “We’re having clam chowder for dinner and gingerbread. I have homework—wanna see my copybook? And I got a red star on my color worksheet today, see?” The serene kitchen of only moments earlier disappeared in a flurry of paper.

  “And look—I spelled my name… see? I don’t make my r backwards anymore, and look…” she said, pointing a small finger, smudged with dirt, at the C. “Isn’t that a good one?”

  “That is one great C, Corri. I’ll bet I couldn’t do better than that myself.” India leaned over and followed Corri’s finger as she traced the letter she had earlier that day printed across the top of the yellow construction paper. “Indy, is my name still Devlin?”

  “Sure.” India wondered where that had come from.

  “Good.” Corri bounced off India’s lap and across the kitchen to hug August. “Everyone I like best is named Devlin, ’cept for Darla and Ollie. And Nick. And Darla and Ollie would have been married to Ry if he hadn’t died, and they would have been Devlins too. Nick never could be, though. Can I have some gingerbread?”

  “After you wash your hands,” August said, laughing.

  “Is she always like this?” Indy laughed with her as the blur that was Corri flew into the powder room and turned on the water.

  “Every day.” August shook her head. “And yes, it’s tiring, but if the truth were to be told, I don’t know what I’d do without her. She’s my heart, India.”

  She met India’s eyes across the room and India got the message, every bit as clearly as if August had spoken the words aloud. Just in case Indy harbored any thoughts of taking Corri to Paloma, August had wanted to go on record to make it known that she wanted the child to remain in Devlin’s Light.

  “Quieta non movere,” August told India pointedly as Corri emerged from the powder room, water sloshed on the front of her overalls where she had tried to remove some paint. Do not move settled things.

  India got the point: Leave well enough alone.

  Later, after dinner had been eaten and homework dispatched, India sat in her father’s old dark blue leather chair in the den, her files spread out around her as she organized her notes and made lists of evidence and witnesses to help her organize for her next trial. At her feet, Corri mimicked Indy’s procedure, stacking her school papers according to the color of the stars that her teacher had placed in the upper right-hand corner of each completed page. The child was uncommonly quiet, as if being very careful not to disturb India’s concentration. August watched from the doorway, acutely aware of just how much Corri’s efforts to please India cost in terms of self-control, and she marveled that the child she’d dubbed Hurricane Corri could actually sit still for close to half an hour.

  Amazing. And for Corri, totally unnatural. And that was exactly what August would tell India in the morning. For now, for August, there was a bridge club waiting at Liddy’s. With India home, August was spared searching for a baby-sitter.

  Imagine, she mused, as she kissed Corri goodnight and reminded India to lock the door, having to worry about getting a babysitter at my age.

  “Indy, will you tuck me in bed tonight?” Corri asked shyly.

  “Sure. Is it bedtime?” Indy frowned and looked at the clock. What time do six-year-olds turn in, anyway?

  “Almost. I have to be in bed by eight, but tonight…” Her eyebrows arched hopefully.

  “Maybe tonight I could read you a story after you get in bed,” India offered. “Don’t you have to take a bath?”

  August hadn’t given her any instructions, and she wasn’t sure what the routine should be.

  “Umm-hmm.” Corri nodded. “I usually take my bath at ten minutes A.J.”

  “’A.J.’? What’s ‘A.J.’?” India thought about that one for a moment.

  “After Jeopardy.”

  “Oh. You mean the television show?”

  Corri nodded.

  “Well, I think it’s a little more than ten minutes A.J., so how ’bout you go up and get your nightgown ready and get your towel and I’ll meet you in the big bathroom, okay?”

  “Are you gonna lock the doors? Aunt August said we have to keep the doors locked.”

  “I will do that right now. I’ll be up in a minute.” Corri went up the steps two at a time, humming the Jeopardy theme song. India hunted around in her purse for her keyring, then locked the back, front, and side porch doors, lamenting as she did so the loss of the Devlin’s Light she had grown up in, where no one ever locked the doors. At least, not until that summer…

  Abruptly, she pulled the curtains across the windows overlooking the yard and followed the back steps to the second floor.

  Corri was already down to her yellow-flowered Carter’s underpants by the time India made it to the big second-floor bathroom. Once a bedroom overlooking the back yard, it had been converted to a bathroom with the advent of indoor plumbing. Due to its considerable size, the floor was covered with several bath mats of varying shapes. Corri instructed India on how much water and how much bubble bath, then settled down in the tub, where she played with mounds of frothy bubbles and washed herself with soap shaped like colored crayons.

  “India, can you come to my school?” Corri asked. “You can meet Miss Millett.”

  “Is she your teacher?” India sat on the floor at the side of the tub and washed Corri’s back.

  “Umm-hmm. She’s real nice. And she’s real pretty too. Not as pretty as you, but she’s fun. She let me pass out snacks this morning.”

  “What was today’s snack?”

  “Pretzels and juice. I just love snacktime. It’s my favorite time of the day.” She yawned mightily. “That and art.”

  “Do you like to draw?”

  “Umm-hmm. And I like to paint. I like fingerpaint best. It’s creamy and thick and it mooshes in your fingers and you don’t even have to use a brush. That’s why it’s called fingerpaint,” she pointed out.

  “I seem to recall that I liked fingerpaint when I was little too.” India smiled, suddenly recalling the way the thick cool paint had felt between her fingers. Mooshes, Corri had called it. The word seemed just right.

  “Now we wash my hair.” Corri pointed to a bottle of shampoo on the window ledge.

  India did her best to wash and rinse Corri’s long hair with the handheld shower attached to the spigot in the old-fashioned tub, Corri singing a song she’d learned in school that day—“Baby Beluga”—and chatting happily. Soon she was dried—hair detangled, dried and brushed smooth— and sporting a clean nightgown, ready to climb into bed and hear a story.

  “I’ll pick out a good book, Indy,” Corri said earnestly as she scanned the bookshelves. “This is a very good good-night book. It’s called Good Night Moon and it’s…”

  Corri stopped halfway be
tween the bookshelves and the bed, watching horrified as Indy, who’d been plumping her pillows, found the prize Corri’d hidden and was drawing it out from under the pillow.

  “Corri, what is this?”

  Corri started to cry soundlessly, as India held up the long green tank top with the number 14 on the front.

  “I didn’t steal it, Indy, not really,” she sobbed.

  “Sweetie, was this Ry’s?” India asked gently.

  Corri nodded. “But you can have it back if you want it.”

  “No, no, Corri, I’m sure that Ry would have wanted you to have it.” India choked back the lump in her throat and opened her arms to the trembling child. “I’m sure there are lots of things that were Ry’s that he would have wanted you to have. And one of these days, we’ll go through some of his things and see what else you might like. But you don’t have to cry, Corri. You were Ry’s little girl, and he loved you.”

  “Indy, he wasn’t my real daddy,” she whispered, “I was only adopted.”

  “Sweetie, adopted is never ‘only’. When he adopted you, he became your daddy, officially. For real.” India’s fingers traced the letters spelling out Devlin, which marked the shirt as Ry’s. “Do you sleep with this every night?”

  Corri’s little hands closed around the green shirt and gathered it to her chest. “Umm-hmm. Ry used to wear it when he played basketball at school sometimes.”

  “Well, I think he would have been happy to know that you keep it close to you.” India pulled the blanket and top sheet down and coaxed Corri, still clutching the green shirt, into bed.

  Halfway through the book, India looked up to see that Corri was sound asleep with the shirt under her cheek, the fingers of one hand entangled in its folds, the other arm draped around the large stuffed Tigger Indy herself had given Corri last Christmas. Quietly, India returned the book to its place on the shelf and turned out the light. In the shadow of the hall light, she straightened the blankets and leaned over to kiss the top of the sleeping child’s head. Corri’s hair was soft and silky, and she smelled like Johnson’s Baby Shampoo and bubble bath.

  Stepping across the hall, Indy paused at the doorway to Ry’s room. Illuminated by the streetlight outside the window that faced the very front of the house, it was clear that the room had changed little since Ry had moved in when he was thirteen. The art was different—gone was the poster of Farrah Fawcett that every male growing up in the seventies had hung on his wall—but the furniture was the same old maple set that had been in this room for God only knew how many years. She turned on the lamp shaped like a pirate’s ship and sat on the edge of the double bed, her hands folded in her lap.

  A slight breeze from an open side window carried the pungent, salty scent of the bay and moved the curtain slightly aside. India rose and drew the curtain back to look out upon the view of the water her brother had loved so dearly. Out at the edge of the inlet Devlin’s Light made a tall dark shadow across the bay. Before she left to return to Paloma, she would visit the lighthouse. She had to. It was part of her, and the longer she postponed the trip, the more difficult it would be. For her own sake—and for Ry’s—she had to go there, to stand where he had last stood on this earth. It wasn’t just a matter of sentimentality, she reminded herself. She could not investigate his death without visiting the scene of the crime.

  Maybe tomorrow, she thought, maybe while Corri was in school she would go.

  She smoothed over the bedspread where she had sat and rose to leave, leaning over to turn off the lamp. As she did so, her toes banged on something under the bed. She reached down with one hand and touched a cardboard box.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said aloud, as she slid the box out and lifted it onto the bed.

  She pulled off the lid and grinned, her fingers automatically walking through the stack of old rock and roll record albums Ry had spent years collecting. Chuck Berry. Little Richard. Elvis. The Temptations. The Four Tops. Little Stevie Wonder. Diana Ross and the Supremes. Indy’s personal favorite, the Shirelles. The Stones. Cream. Traffic. Ry had damn near every album that had been released in the sixties and seventies. Somewhere, there would be his old record player. Maybe before she left, she would find it and play a few of the albums. The thought made her smile.

  “Ry, can I borrow some of your records?”

  “Don’t you have a lot of these on cassette?” he would ask, knowing full well that she did.

  “Yes, but it’s not the same,” she would plead, and he would give in with a smile, knowing she was right, that it wasn’t the same.

  “Just don’t scratch them, okay?” he’d remind her as he handed over whichever she had her heart set on listening to that night.

  “I won’t, Ry,” she whispered to the night breeze. “I promise.”

  Aunt August’s New England Clam Chowder

  ½ pound bacon, cut into small pieces

  2 medium onions, chopped

  2 stalks celery, finely chopped

  2 8-oz bottles of clam juice

  1½ A cups water

  2-3 pounds of potatoes, peeled and chopped

  3 6½-oz cans chopped clams

  1/4 teaspoon thyme

  2 cups heavy cream (light cream or half and half may be substituted)

  salt to taste

  freshly ground pepper to taste

  2 tablespoons softened butter

  1/2 cup parsley, chopped

  Over medium heat, sauté bacon in large Dutch oven until light brown. Drain off fat, leaving just enough to saute the onions and celery. Add onion and celery to bacon, saute until onions are soft (about 5 minutes). Add clam juice, water and potatoes. Bring to a boil. Simmer over low heat until the potatoes are tender (20-25 minutes). Add clams, stir in thyme and continue to simmer. Heat the cream separately, almost to the boiling point, then pour it slowly into the clam mixture. Add the salt and pepper and stir in butter. Sprinkle with parsley before serving.

  Serves six.

  Chapter 7

  “Miss Devlin?” The pert, dark-haired young woman stuck her head into the hallway from the noisy classroom. “I’m Marilyn Millet, Corri’s teacher. If you have just a minute to chat, I’ll get the children started, then we can talk for a few…”

  India watched through the open door as Miss Millet organized the class of some twenty six-year-olds into early morning independent activities and returned in a flash.

  “I was hoping to meet you.” The young woman smiled as she returned, stationing herself in the doorway to keep one eye on the class while seemingly giving India her undivided attention. “Corri talks about you all the time. I have, of course, met your aunt—she’s a lovely woman, we all adore her, including the children—but I think it’s clear that Corri is beginning to see you as her ‘parent’ figure.”

  “Corri has had a very difficult two years, Miss Millet.”

  “So I understand. First her mother, now her stepfather.” The teacher shook her head slowly. “It’s more loss than many adults could reasonably cope with. And Corri is so young.”

  “Is she doing well in class?”

  “Scholastically? She’s a wonderful student. She’s bright, curious, spontaneous.” She smiled and added, “Sometimes maybe a bit too spontaneous. I have to remind her to watch her chattering, but all in all, she’s an asset to the class. Personally, I love her dearly. She’s a darling child. And she is coping well, under the circumstances.”

  “But…” India sensed there was something more the teacher wanted to say.

  “But I think she is developing little habits that I think are indicative of anxiety.”

  “Such as?” India frowned.

  “Biting her nails, going off on her own sometimes for no apparent reason—Excuse me, Miss Devlin. Courtney,” she called to a child in the back row, “please get a pencil out of the box on my desk and stop pestering Allison. … Sorry.” She turned back to India with a smile.

  “Going off where by herself?”

  “I’ve found her all by her
self in the corner of the playground, just sitting quietly in the grass. Sometimes she stares out the window, and I can tell she’s far away.”

  “Is that so unusual for a child?” India recalled many a time she herself had been caught staring out a classroom window, many a recess when she might have opted for solitude rather than a game of kickball.

  “No, of course not. And first-graders have short attention spans. But sometimes it’s more than just daydreaming. I guess you’d have to see her face. I think that inside, she is a scared and lonely little girl. Let me show you a drawing she did the first week of school.”

  Miss Millet went back into the classroom and stopped to speak to several children on her way to her desk, where she opened a drawer and removed a folder. Returning to the doorway, she passed the folder, open to the white construction paper that lay inside, into India’s hands.

  “I told the children to draw a picture of themselves,” Miss Millet explained.

  “And this is how Corri sees herself?” India’s heart nearly broke at the image, the small drawing of the child, all drawn in grays and blacks, at the very center of the paper. She had drawn nothing else.

  “Here are some of the other children’s drawings.” Miss Millet opened a second folder and extracted several sheets of paper. Wordlessly, India looked through them. Whereas Corri’s drawing held a single figure done in somber tones, the other children had drawn whole families and had dressed them in bright colors. Some had dogs or cats. Many had siblings. All had at least one parent depicted. All but Corri.

  “I see,” India said softly.

  “I will tell you she’s been different the past two days since you’ve been here.”

  “How so?”

  “She’s played more with the other children at recess. She’s clearly more focused—just watch her for a minute.” Miss Millet gestured with her head for India to observe the child, who was working diligently at her desk in the front of the third row. “I put her up front so that I could keep an eye on her. I have to reel her back so frequently. But this week she’s been fine. She made a big announcement this morning, by the way. I wanted to mention it to you because I think it is very significant.”