Devlin's Light

by Mariah Stewart

  “Heaven forbid.” Indy chuckled and excused herself from the room after liberating a cookie from the plate. She knew they had been baked with her in mind and knew too that if she looked in the kitchen she’d find a whole batch of the fragrant treats all packed up for her to take back to Paloma.

  The stairwell felt chilly after the warmth of the little sitting room. India’s hands, so recently cozied by the fire, were cooling rapidly. She found the problem with the tail and took Corri by the hand as they walked down the steps.

  “She’ll know it’s me.” Corri shifted the mask on her face, trying to line up her eyes with the slits in the heavy fabric.

  “Well, I think that’s unavoidable, don’t you? I mean, sooner or later, she’d figure it out.”

  “Umm …” Corri poked her face into the room from the doorway.

  “Eeek!” August shrieked. “It’s a giant mouse!” Corri giggled and flew into the room, holding her tail in one hand and peeling the mask off with the other.

  “Oh, it’s a mouse child!” August laughed and held her arms open to the child who bounced into those arms and filled them.

  “Do you like it?” Corri asked. “Indy bought it for me.”

  “I love it.” August beamed. “And you’re the most adorable mouse I’ve ever seen. Don’t you agree, Nick?”

  “She certainly is.” Nick nodded.

  “I didn’t know you were here.” Corri frowned. “Now I won’t be able to trick-or-treat at your house. You already saw my costume.”

  “Hmmm. That is a problem.” Nick pretended to ponder this. “Tell you what. No one is likely to come all the way out to the cabin, so how ’bout if I bring your treat to you, since you already tricked me tonight?”

  “Really?” Corri’s face brightened. “Were you surprised it was me?”

  She pulled the mask down over her face, once again twisting it this way and that, trying to line up eyes, nose and mouth.

  “Corri, that mask is cute, but you’re really having problems with it, aren’t you?” August frowned.

  “Maybe we should forget the mask and use face paint instead,” suggested India.

  “Ollie has face paint.” Corri remembered. “She is going to be an Egyptian queen and she has face paint.”

  “We could do whiskers and do something with your eyes.” Indy nodded.

  “But you won’t be here,” Corri reminded her, her little face darkening in spite of herself. “You won’t be here on Halloween night to paint my face or take me trick-or-treating.”

  “You’re right, sweetie.” India sighed, feeling an unexpected sting of disappointment. “Maybe Darla can do your face.”

  “Nonsense,” August told them. “I can paint whiskers with the best of them.”

  “And I’d be happy to take you out,” Nick said. “I can’t remember how long it’s been since I went out on Halloween. But you might have to share a treat or two.”

  “Okay. Except for the peppermint patties.” As if lecturing, Corri pointed with her index finger, her face turning solemn once again.

  “That’s a deal.” Nick nodded. “Peppermint patties for you, Snickers for me.”

  “Sure.” Corri grinned. “I don’t like peanuts anyway.”

  “Okay, mouse child,” August told her, “go up and take that off and leave it in the sewing room so that I can put an extra stitch or two in that tail.”

  “Can I have cocoa before I go to bed?” Corri asked from the doorway.

  “It’s almost bedtime now,” August reminded her, “so if you can get ready quickly, there might be a half cup of something for you.”

  Corri scurried out of the room and up the steps.

  “It’s like living with a baby tornado, having that child around.” August chuckled. “And yet I don’t know what I’d do without her. She keeps me young and fit and sharp. It’s not possible to feel like an old lady when there’s such youthful energy in the house.”

  “Doesn’t it get to be a bit much sometimes?” India turned her face from the fire to study her aunt’s expression. “Don’t you get tired?”

  “Oh, sometimes a bit, maybe. But I’d not be without her, Indy. Not for the world. There’s eternity to rest, if rest is what you seek. I’m not in a hurry for it. Well, if you’ll excuse me, I have cocoa to make.”

  August scooped up the tray as she passed by

  “I really can’t thank you enough for offering to take Corri,” India started.

  He held up one hand. “We’ve already talked about this. You don’t have to thank me.”

  “I just didn’t feel I could leave without saying it again.”

  “When are you leaving?” His eyes narrowed and seemed to darken.

  “In the morning,” she told him. “I need to get back to the city. I have a trial slated to begin the end of next week. I have a lot of work to do.”

  “When were you planning on telling me?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “That you were leaving. When were you going to tell me?” He stood up, obviously agitated.

  She looked up at him, somewhat confused.

  “You were just going to go, weren’t you?”

  Numbly, she nodded.

  “Why?”

  “I guess because I’m just used to coming and going on my own,” she told him.

  “Didn’t it occur to you that maybe I’d want to say goodbye?”

  She shook her head.

  “Or that maybe I’d be interested in when you were coming back?”

  She was wide-eyed, watching him try to control his growing anger.

  “Nick, I’m sorry that you’re angry. I just didn’t know how to call and say ‘So. I’m leaving tomorrow, I’ll be back in a few weeks.’”

  “You just said it. You just said all you had to say.”

  “I’m just not used to having anyone to say goodbye to,” she said quietly. “I didn’t know how.”

  “You want to know how to say goodbye?” He stood in the doorway, his hands on his hips. “I’ll show you how to say goodbye.”

  He crossed the room in two strides and drew her to him, his mouth seeking hers before she could so much as squeak. He kissed her, long and hard, before drawing back and telling her, “And that is how you say goodbye, India.”

  By the time she came to her senses, he was already out the front door.

  “Oh no, you don’t,” she sputtered, and she took off down the steps.

  “Nick Enright, don’t you think you can come into my house, and … and …” She stood on the sidewalk, hands fisted in anger set menacingly on her hips.

  In spite of his own pique, Nick laughed.

  “What is so funny?” she demanded.

  “You are,” he told her. “You come racing out the front door like some hundred-pound avenging angel, hissing and sputtering.” He cleared his throat and leaned back against his car. “I’m sorry, India, you were saying something. Don’t think I can come into your house and … and do what?”

  She paused, wondering how anyone ever stayed angry with this man.

  “Don’t think you can come into my house and kiss me senseless and then walk away.”

  “Well then, I believe we’re beginning to understand each other. Yes, that is exactly my point.”

  She walked toward him slowly, her arms crossed in front of her.

  “Were you? Senseless, I mean?” She raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “Totally.”

  “Good.” She grinned.

  He reached out to her and drew her close, uncrossing her arms and wrapping them around his neck. “Wanna say goodbye again?”

  She did—his way, not with words but with kisses that would burn into her and make her giddy with their warmth.

  “Do you realize that we are standing right under a streetlamp?” She pulled her lips from his long enough to get the words out.

  “Umm-hmm,” he murmured. “Guess that’s why Mrs. Ellis there across the street is hanging out her second-floor window.”

  �
��She’s not!” India jumped and peeked over his shoulder. “Oh, for crying out loud,” she said with a grimace, “she was looking out the window!”

  Nick laughed.

  “Well, I guess that by tomorrow morning, everyone in Devlin’s Light will know that something was going on outside the Devlin house.”

  “Oh, brother. Just like when I was in high school.”

  “The joys of small-town living.” Nick laughed. “Come back more often and stay longer, so we’d have time to really give them something to talk about.”

  He leaned down and kissed her again, whispering, “Don’t ever do that again, India. Don’t think for a minute that it doesn’t matter to me that you’re leaving.”

  “Nick, I’m sorry. It’s no excuse, but I just wasn’t thinking. And no, I wasn’t sure that it would matter to you. My mind is on this trial that’s coming up. I’m nervous about it; some of the witness statements aren’t as strong as I would like them to be.”

  “Do you know that your face changes when you start talking about your work?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You lose the softness. Your eyes narrow and your jaw sets differently, and your face develops an attitude all its own.”

  She shrugged off the comment.

  “When you’re with Corri, you lose that edge. And I like to think that when you’re with me, you don’t need the attitude. It’s almost as if you are two different women.”

  “Well, maybe in a sense, I am. My life in Paloma is very different from life here in Devlin’s Light.”

  “Must be hard, having your life split in two like that,” he said, all too perceptively.

  India watched him warily.

  “Have you been talking to Darla?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Not for a few days.” He shook his head. “Why?”

  “No reason.”

  “You know, I don’t know that I could do that.” He opened the car door slowly, his brows closing in on each other as if he was considering an impossible task.

  “Do what?”

  “Have part of me in one place and part of me someplace-else,” he said over his shoulder as he got in and slammed the door of the Pathfinder. “I like my head and my heart to be in the same place.”

  He started the ignition and rolled down the window.

  “Good luck with your case, India.” Nick reached through the open window with an outstretched hand to touch the side of her face with his fingertips. “I’ll be in touch.”

  She saluted him with her right hand as he pulled away from the curb, then stood in the middle of the street and watched the white car disappear into the fog at the corner.

  India had stopped at her office—just to pick up the mail, she told herself—on her way through Paloma. It was almost eight o’clock at night before she finally left, two files and a week’s worth of mail under her right arm. By the time she arrived at the townhouse and unloaded the car, it was nearing eight-thirty. Just in time to call Corri and say goodnight if she hurried. Ignoring the blinking light on the answering machine, which seemed to be counting out a week’s worth of messages, she dialed the number and waited for Aunt August’s cheery hello. Flipping through the mail, which had slid onto the foyer floor from the mail slot, she kicked off her shoes while Corri was called to the phone, using the time to separate bills from junk mail from magazines from letters, of which there were few. An envelope with a Texas postmark went into the read-me-first pile. It was, she knew, from a woman whose only son had been murdered by a man who now rested more comfortably than he deserved behind bars that should forever separate him from the rest of society. Every year, on the anniversary of the boy’s death, his mother sent India a card, thanking her for her relentless prosecution of the animal who had taken her son’s life. That was how the mother had always referred to the defendant. That animal. India wondered if the woman had ever bothered to learn the man’s name.

  India remembered.

  Billy Kidman.

  He was nineteen years old, hard-faced and smart-mouthed, when he was caught attempting to hide the corpse of a young boy—his third in as many weeks—in the storage bin of a basement apartment on the outskirts of Paloma. India went after him like a hound on the heels of a fox. Kidman never had a chance. He was Indy’s first big case. She won with a combination of preparation and information, and by keeping her promise to the jury that she would prove, beyond doubt, that the defendant had in fact committed the dreadful acts of which he had been accused. Once convicted in Pennsylvania, he was extradited to Texas, where he would eventually stand trial for similar crimes for which he could possibly be given the death penalty. He still, she knew, awaited his fate—death by lethal injection—which he had successfully managed to avoid by filing appeal after appeal. India took no pleasure in knowing that eventually his appeals would be exhausted.

  Kidman’s mother, a too young, too pale, too timid, too tired woman who had aged long before her time, had been at the trial for the first two days before returning to Houston, where her job as a janitress and her three younger children awaited her. She seemed unmoved by her son’s crimes as much as by his fate. India hadn’t been able to decide which bothered her more. No, India had not forgotten Billy Kidman.

  Corri’s girlish giggles on the phone brought her back to the present. India made Corri promise to have lots of pictures taken in her mouse costume, and in return she promised Corri a weekend in Paloma, just the two of them. They talked about what they might do, what movie they might see, what exhibit might be at the museum that weekend, what clothes Corri should pack. By the time she hung up the phone, Corri was squealing with anticipation, prompting August to thank India for getting Corri “all wound up just before bedtime.”

  India locked up the house and carried her stack of mail upstairs to her second-floor office, her bare feet sinking silently into the plush blue carpet. She turned on the light and dumped the junk mail into the trash and the real mail in the middle of her desk. She wanted a hot shower and a quick dinner before surrendering the rest of the night to reading over the investigative reports on a new case that had opened and been assigned to her while she had been home.

  She headed back downstairs for her suitcases, which had been dropped unceremoniously inside the front hall. She passed the second bedroom, the small one with the two windows that faced the back yard, and turned on the light. The room was empty. She’d always planned to make it into a guest room, for Aunt August or Darla, but since neither of them had ever expressed an interest in staying overnight in Paloma, she hadn’t bothered.

  It would make a cute room for Corri, though.

  India tried to envision the room in perhaps a pale yellow, or maybe a very light pink. A striped wallpaper, maybe, or a floral. She snapped the light off. Corri should decide for herself. It would, after all, be her room.

  And maybe, if she likes it well enough, just maybe, someday, she’ll want to stay.

  Chapter 12

  Waking to a Paloma morning was never quite the same as waking in Devlin’s Light, India conceded after she had slapped the alarm clock silly, hoping to silence its uncivil buzz. For one thing, her bedroom in the city, while pretty and bright and comfortable, overlooked a city street, with all its attendant noises and bustle. For another, she missed the smell of the bay sifting through the windows. In Devlin’s Light, one awoke with an awareness of the sea. In Paloma, one’s awareness centered more on traffic reports and alarm clocks and the sounds coming through the common wall she shared with her next-door neighbors. A retired army officer, Colonel Danvers was nearly deaf and a devotee of John Philip Sousa. India looked at the clock next to the bed and held her breath. It was almost time for the cymbals to meet and greet the dawn with a thunderous welcome.

  There! The marching band had gathered to send the good captain to his shower with an invigorated step. India shook her head and laughed goodnaturedly. He was a dear, the colonel was, as was his lady. They were well into their seventies, and India figured if it to
ok a good Sousa march to get them moving in the morning, then they were entitled to it. She always awoke before them anyway, so other than the first week, when she had been unprepared and therefore a bit disconcerted, she figured a little wall-rattling crescendo in the morning never hurt anyone. And besides, it was still preferable to the previous owner of the house on her other side, who had watched horror movies late into the night. For months, she’d spent evening after evening listening to Freddy Krueger’s victims shrieking on the other side of the wall. Given the choice, she’d take the marching bands any day.

  While her morning coffee brewed, she played the messages on her answering machine. Shirley, the secretary she shared with Roxie and two other A.D.A.s, reminding her about a department meeting on Monday morning at nine; a woman she’d met at the library last month telling her about a new mystery book club that was just forming; a neighbor across the street who was putting together a petition regarding the need for a stop sign at the end of the next block; Gif, her boxing coach, wanting to know “where ya bin” and three hang-ups. She poured her coffee and stepped out onto the deck, her inquisitive nose seeking the scent of autumn in the crisp morning air. It was there, but barely. No matter how hard she tried, October simply did not smell the same in Paloma as it did in Devlin’s Light.

  Oh, there were oak leaves, orange and yellow and brown, from a tree in the colonel’s yard, and the leaves from the sugar maple that stood back behind the small shed. But they didn’t seem to hold the scent of the season as they did back on Darien Road. And they didn’t seem to crunch underfoot with the same decisiveness, the peremptory crackle, as those that plumped up like feather beds on the sidewalk in front of the old Devlin place. The acorns were smaller too, little gumballs compared to the rocks that fell from the tree in front of the library in Devlin’s Light. And here, in Paloma, one might see an occasional formation of Canadian geese winging south, whereas a day couldn’t pass on the beach without dozens of honkers passing overhead. For years she and Ry had staged their own Christmas Day bird count out on the point where the Light stood, keeping record of the sightings of the migratory flocks and the occasional strays. The trees around the townhouse seemed to hold little other than pigeons, crows, grackles and various members of the sparrow family.