The Price Of Silence

After Grace and Lisa left, while Carol helped Maria carry dishes to the kitchen, Johnny turned to Ruth Ann. “Why did you invite Todd and Barney? You knew I wanted some time with you and Lisa. We have to talk about this idea.”

“I got the impression that it was all settled. Is there anything in writing yet?”

“No. This is preliminary, the planning stage. We’ll get to that.”

Carol came back and picked up the last chafing dish. “I won’t be long,” she said to Johnny. “I want to get that shrimp recipe.”

When she was out of the room again, Ruth Ann said, “Johnny, just a suggestion. Watch your step. Don’t get too wound up with Lisa.”

He stiffened. “What exactly does that mean?”

“I think you know as well as I do what I mean.” For a moment neither of them moved, then he jerked around, faced away from her. “I know, Johnny. I’ve always known. And I know what it did to you before.”

“We might become business associates, Mother. Nothing more than that. Business.”

“Good,” she murmured. “I’ll see if I’m needed in the kitchen.”

If she had been honest, Ruth Ann reflected after all her guests had left, she would have told Johnny that she had invited Barney and Todd to protect him. She smiled slightly as she imagined his indignant reply. But it would have been truthful. She had seen Barney and Todd together enough times to consider Barney safe from Lisa, but she was not at all certain Johnny was. Lisa had snared him once when she was twenty and he was single and twenty-seven, home from college, home from a couple of years of knocking around, uncertain what he intended to do. He would have followed her to California, Ruth Ann knew, but Lisa had met an actor and no longer had time for Johnny. He had been devastated, possibly suicidal for a time. Within a year, he and Carol were married with a child on the way.

It was a good marriage, she knew, and Johnny was a faithful husband. But then there was Lisa. And she had gravitated to Barney as a filing to a magnet, just as Ruth Ann had suspected she would. Ruth Ann had seen her eyeing Barney speculatively as she picked at her food, and even later, gushing about plans for Brindle, she had kept an eye on him. Lisa probably wouldn’t linger more than a week or two, she rarely did, and although she might be planning a campaign to add Barney to her collection, he was safe. Todd would see to that even if he wavered.

Briefly she wondered how Lisa reacted if she failed to bag her catch. More uneasily, she wondered if Lisa had ever failed. She was glad that Barney would be away most of the coming week.

Six

After the mourners began to drift away from the cemetery Monday morning, Todd lingered to stroll among the grave markers, some fairly elaborate, more of them modest stone or even wood. The wooden ones were weathering badly, most of the words illegible on many of them. A harsh wind was blowing out of the north, and she was cold, but she didn’t want to join the caravan of cars crawling along back to Brindle.

The cemetery was bleak, with a few clumps of sage, some tough-looking grass, shards of black obsidian gleaming in the sun, and a spray or two of plastic flowers on some of the graves. A marble headstone marked the grave of Michael Hilliard. Next to it was a smaller marble headstone: Jane Marie Hilliard, 1862–1888, then: Rachel Emmaline Hilliard, 1878–1880.

Todd gazed at the tombstones sadly. To lose a child only two years old must have been tragic. Jane Hilliard had been only sixteen when her child was born, only twenty-six when she herself had died. How lonesome it must have been out here a hundred years ago, just the desert, a few people in the way station, an occasional traveler.

The wind whipped a piece of paper past the graves, sent it skittering into a clump of sage where it clung for a second or two before it was released and blew off into the distance. Todd shivered, turned and left the cemetery. Warmer clothes, she was thinking, which meant a shopping trip on Thursday. High on her list was a warm hat, one she could pull down over her ears.

Ruth Ann was shivering when Thomas Bird stopped the car to let her and Maria out at the front door of the house. Thomas Bird drove on around to put the car in the garage.

“Coffee,” Ruth Ann said inside the house. “Strong and hot.” She started to walk toward the kitchen, but Maria took her elbow and turned her toward the hall.

“You go lay down and cover up. I’ll put on coffee and start some lunch.” Maria was dressed in her formal clothes, a long black dress and a heavy black woolen shawl. Today the ribbons in her braided hair were also black. She looked as broad as she was tall, but she was warm.

“Todd’s coming up with some pictures,” Ruth Ann said, yielding to the tug on her arm. “I won’t go to bed now, but I do want coffee. Let’s have lunch after she’s gone. Point her to the sitting room when she comes.”

Maria looked surprised, then nodded. Very few people were ever allowed in Ruth Ann’s sitting room. “I’ll bring coffee when it’s ready, and a cup for her. She looked frozen out there.”

“It’s the wind,” Ruth Ann said.

Maria agreed. “Change of season. It will blow awhile and settle down again. Summer isn’t done yet. Go on now. I’ll be in directly.”

Ruth Ann often thought of her house in a phrase her mother had used in the distant past: preacher-ready. Maria kept the large living room preacher-ready, the sofa, several chairs, a coffee table, end tables, all so clean they looked unused, and practically were unused, forever ready for the preacher. She entered her sitting room, and it was what the entire house would be like if left to her. The room was cluttered, with books, magazines, photographs of her two grandsons, of Johnny at every stage of his life, his and Carol’s wedding pictures, Maria and Thomas Bird’s wedding, odds and ends various people had given Ruth Ann over the years. A snow-scene paperweight, vases, ashtrays that she actually used now and then, a few very good paintings on the walls, an assortment of polished rocks from Sam, half a dozen beautifully carved birds, a gift from Thomas Bird. She had brought her old school desk to the house and it was in the sitting room, heaped with papers and photographs she had been sorting through. Her kind of room, she thought, sinking into a reclining chair bathed in sunlight. Leone had been right about the windows. From now until spring, the sun would enter this room and it was welcome.

After a few minutes she stood up, took off her coat and tossed it on a chair. Maria came in with coffee and arranged a carafe and cups beside the recliner, drew another chair closer, poured one cup of coffee, and on her way out picked up the coat. Ruth Ann knew that Maria would have this room preacher-ready in a minute if she permitted it.

When Todd arrived, she gasped at the room. She loved Ruth Ann’s house, but she had always thought it was almost too neat and tidy; in contrast, this room was perfect. She hoped she would be allowed in another time when she could linger and examine every object. She suspected that a story lay behind each one of them. “Your parents?” she asked, pointing to a studio portrait of a man and woman stiffly posed, unsmiling. The portrait was in an oval, carved metal frame, the glass bowed slightly.

Ruth Ann nodded. “Why do you suppose they always seated the man and had the woman stand in those old portraits? And they never smiled, did they? My mother was very beautiful.”

“I can tell,” Todd said. “Even without a smile, she’s lovely.”

She began to unpack her laptop. After she had it plugged in and positioned on an end table, they looked at the pictures she had taken with her digital camera at the cemetery. “I thought you would be able to see them better on the monitor than on the small camera screen. After you decide which one you want, I’ll put up the front-page layout with it in place.”

“You have the newspaper on your little computer?”

“Not really. Just on a CD, a compact disk. That’s how I can work at home. And the laptop is small, but it has even more room on the hard drive and more power than the computers in the office.”

Ruth Ann was impressed. She had known that Todd did much of her work at home, but she had assumed it was on a standard computer like hers at the office. She picked out the funeral picture to go with the obituary, and watched as Todd slid in a CD and opened a screen with the front page, then added the new picture. It looked like magic.

After Todd left, and lunch was over with, Ruth Ann thought again about how Todd was able to take old faded photographs and do whatever she did with them to make them as sharp and clear as if they had just been taken. The photograph of Louise when she was a teacher at the one-room school, faded, yellowed and brittle with age, had come to life again with Todd’s tricks. No wonder the new generation loved their toys, she mused.

But she was really thinking of the photographs she had come across in Louise Coombs’s box. She had a box just about like that of her own, as well as whatever her mother had preserved of her father’s papers. At first she had been thinking of no more than a simple print special edition for the centennial, perhaps a one-page insert, but she was reconsidering. Old pictures of the town as it had been, from its first days on. The people who had lived here, even letters…Todd said she could scan anything on paper, digitize it, enhance it, reproduce it.

Second by second, a much more elaborate special edition was reforming in Ruth Ann’s mind.

Usually Todd and Barney cooked dinner together, but since Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were her only really busy days, on those nights he most often made dinner and had it ready when she got home. That night, chilled again by the strong wind, she entered the house, then called out, “Fe, fi, fo, fum. That smells good and I want some.”

“Maniac,” he said from the kitchen. “Lasagna, ten minutes. Wash your hands.”

They ate at the kitchen table and she told him about the funeral. “There must have been a couple hundred people there. And I was freezing. That wind was brutal today.”

“I know. I walked down to Safeway. We need to get out our winter gear. Summer or winter here, no in-between apparently. Guess who I saw at Safeway.”

“I give already. Who?”

“Miss Sexpot herself. She wanted me to buy her a cup of coffee, to warm her up, she said.”

“Oh dear,” Todd said. “You’ll have to come by the office to borrow my whip and chair.”

“I told her I was mentally conjugating Greek verbs and couldn’t be distracted. You might try that line with Shinizer. It worked with the sexpot.”

“Two problems,” she said, shaking her head. “He wouldn’t know what conjugating means, and he doesn’t know a verb from a velocipede. Anyway, after I told him that what he claims is friendliness the law considers sexual harassment, he hasn’t come within ten feet of me. Deal. You take care of the sexpot and I’ll take care of the bum. I can, you know.”

“I know you can, tiger. Deal. What’s a velocipede?”

Grinning, she said, “It’s a two-wheeled horse that little boys rode in Victorian novels.”

He looked doubtful and she laughed and started to clear the table.

Todd was dreaming. She was standing on a vast dun-colored plain with not a landmark in sight, no grasses, no rocks, nothing, just the endless plain. A strong wind was blowing granules of ice at her and no matter how she twisted and turned, they kept blasting her in the face. She ducked her head and tried to protect her face, her eyes, but the wind was too strong. “Don’t cry,” she told herself. “Don’t cry.” Tears would freeze on her cheeks.

“Todd! Wake up!”