The Fury and the Terror Read Online Free Page A

opportunity, but little time for romance. Geoff had met Eden when he volunteered for the all-male scout team that practiced with the women's varsity at Shasta. They were about the same height, five-nine. Both were quick and had thieving hands. Geoff wasn't shy about dumping Eden on her butt when she pressed him too hard. Eden came home from practice one winter afternoon with a split lower lip from an inadvertent elbow and said to Betts, "There's this guy on the scout team I kind of like. From 'down-east,' he says. Has that funny accent, Bahston , you know? But I could get used to it."
    So what did Betts have against Geoff? He and Eden had progressed slowly, from the end of her sophomore year, to what might be a serious relationship, and Betts had received hints that Eden had had sex with Geoff on weekend camping trips the previous summer. So, okay. Must have been a positive experience, or she wouldn't still be seeing him. Eden would be twenty-two in August, old enough and, Betts felt, wise enough to weigh and resolve all of her moral choices. If she'd wanted guidance, she would have asked. Betts the mother was satisfied that Geoff was an appropriate first lover, possessing the sensitivity and loving concern to allow his and Eden's relationship to mature without stress into an affair.
    And yet—
    Betts the psychologist had reservations about Geoff McTyer, not the least of which was a certain vacancy in his life before Innisfall, and his resilience in deflecting reasonable questions about his family, with whom he apparently had no contact. He'd owned up to a comfortable childhood. Parochial schools in a Boston suburb had not left their mark on him in a religious sense; he was not a churchgoer. Mother passed on when he was twelve. He still carried her faded picture in his wallet—a woman with a lipless self-conscious smile from whom Geoff obviously had inherited his cheekbones—but he had no other family photos, as far as Eden knew. Father retired from a middle-management position with a Boston insurance group. Geoff had named as his father's employer two different firms on widely separated occasions, which Betts found curious. No relationship with his father, now living off his comfortable pension in a seaside village in Ireland—Geoff couldn't think of the name—or his older sister, who, he said, had married a couple of times, small businessmen, and was content to be a breeder. Geoff couldn't remember what her married name was now. He thought she was living in Woburn. Other relatives? Sure, here and there. Never kept up with any of them.
    A chilly kind of indifference to his bloodlines, Betts thought, knowing it wasn't unusual. Family members who were all strangers to one another. Some of her patients suffered like the damned because of nonexistent family ties, the deep psychic chill of loveless people. My mother didn't want to have me. My father never looked at me when he talked to me . But Geoff, if there had been similar strain in his formative years, had had the toughness of spirit to survive, with wit and optimism. A steady sort, not inclined to be a cop all of his life—he had lately developed an interest, through his graduate studies, in teaching. Reliable, humorous, intelligent.
    And yet, and yet—
    Geoff was still in uniform; with a couple of hours to go on the twelve-to-eight shift he preferred working. Gave him the freedom of his days, he said, and he was still young enough to get by on a few hours' sleep. Three hours in the morning, a nap after dinner, often on the couch in the downstairs rec room of the Warings' fieldstone ranch house with his head in Eden's lap while she listened on headphones to the guitarists she loved and studied Michael Jordan's moves on videocassettes.
    "I was just passing by and saw all the lights," Geoff said after the kiss from Betts. "Eden got the yips?"
    "Maybe we both have. Anyway, Riley was up before either of us, and you know how that is, when his side of