Down River Read Online Free Page B

asked.
    I shrugged. “Strange dreams.”
    She looked away, and I knew that seeing her had been no dream. She’d been watching me sleep and crying to herself.
    “I stretched out on the sofa,” she said. “I’ve been up for a few hours. Not used to having people over.”
    “Glad to hear it.”
    “Are you?” The mist seemed to blow off of her eyes.
    “Yes.”
    She studied me over the rim of her mug, her face full of doubt. “Your car’s outside,” she finally said. “Keys on the counter. You’re welcome to stay here as long as you’d like. Get some sleep. There’s cable, some decent books.”
    “You’re leaving?” I asked.
    “No rest for the wicked,” she said, but did not get up.
    I rose to pour a cup of coffee.
    “I saw your father last night.” Her words pounded into my back. I said nothing, couldn’t let her see my face, didn’t want her to know what her words were doing to me. “After I got your car. I drove out to the farm, spoke to him on the porch.”
    “Is that right?” I tried to keep the sudden dismay from my voice. She should not have done that. But I could see them there, on the porch—the distant curl of dark water and the post my father liked to lean against when he stared across it.
    Robin sensed my displeasure. “He would have heard, Adam. Better he learn from me that you’re back, not from some idiot at the lunch counter. Not from the sheriff. He should know that you’ve been hurt, so that he wouldn’t wonder if you didn’t show up today. I bought you some time to heal up, get yourself together. I thought you’d appreciate it.”
    “And my stepmother?”
    “She stayed in the house. She didn’t want anything to do with me.” She stopped.
    “Or with me.”
    “She testified against you, Adam. Let it go.”
    I still didn’t turn around. Nothing was happening as I’d hoped. My hands settled on the counter’s edge and squeezed. I thought of my father, and of the rift between us.
    “How is he?” I asked.
    A moment’s silence, then, “He’s aged.”
    “Is he okay?”
    “I don’t know.”
    There was something in her voice that made me turn around. “What?” I asked, and she raised her eyes to mine.
    “It was a quiet thing, you understand, very dignified. But when I told him that you’d come home, your father wept.”
    I tried to hide my dismay. “He was upset?” I asked.
    “That’s not what I meant.”
    I waited.
    “I think he wept for joy.”
    Robin waited for me to say something, but I couldn’t answer. I looked out the window before she could see that tears were rising in my eyes, too.
     
     
       Robin left a few minutes later to catch the seven o’clock briefing at the police station. I took some Percocet and pulled her sheets around me. Pain tunneled through my head; hammer blows at the temples, a cold nail at the hairline. In all of my life, I’d seen two things make my father cry. When my mother died, he’d wept for days; slow, constant tears, as if they welled from the seams of his face. Then tears of joy, once.
    My father had saved a life.
    The girl’s name was Grace Shepherd. Her grandfather was Dolf Shepherd, the farm’s foreman and my father’s oldest friend. Dolf and Grace lived in a small cottage on the southern edge of the property. I never knew what had happened to the child’s parents, only that they were gone. Whatever the reason, Dolf stepped up to raise the girl by himself. It was a trial for him—everybody knew it—but he’d been doing well.
    Until the day she’d wandered off.
    It was a cool day, early fall. Dry leaves clattered and scraped under a dull, heavy sky. She was barely two, and let herself out the back door while Dolf thought she was upstairs, sleeping. It was my father who found her. He was high in one of the pastures when he saw her on the dock below the house, watching leaves spin on the surging current. I’d never seen my father move so fast.
    She went in without a splash. She leaned too far and the water