Bad boy! You're a bad, bad boy, and you deserve to be punished for it. Did you really think you could humiliate me and get away with it? Well, you're about to learn your lesson. All bad boys learn their lesson sooner or later.
Caleb turned the dial on his police scanner until he picked up the call from Patrol Unit 85. He smiled as he heard the officer's voice-the familiar, flat intonation of a cop reporting a routine stop.
"Suspect in drunk driving apprehended, white male, being taken to Tombs for booking. His companion is also inebriated, so car is being impounded following suspect's release."
He leaned back in his seat, letting his head fall back onto the headrest. They would take Joe to spend the night at the Tombs, then release him in the morning. He would emerge into the bright daylight, hungover, disgusted with himself and the world, and Caleb would be waiting.
It was a wonderful summer meal, the kind Laura would have loved. George outdid himself on the grill, the salad was mixed greens and juicy tomatoes from local farms, and the sweet corn was tender and perfectly cooked. Lee's mother had something of a corn fetish. She would set the timer for precisely one minute once the water came to a boil, standing over the pot to pluck out the ears with her tongs, her face red and sweating as the rising steam slowly enveloped her.
They sat at the oblong oak table in the tiny dining room with the burnished maple-wood paneling. They had planned to eat outside at the picnic table, but a plague of mosquitoes plummeted down like tiny dive bombers when dusk fell. They grabbed their plates and scurried inside, abandoning the bucolic splendor of the front lawn for the comfort of the small but elegant eighteenth-century dining room, with its smell of apples and ancient wood.
As a great concession to her granddaughter, Fiona had agreed to serve-horrors-hamburgers and French fries along with the corn and salad. In the Campbell family the birthday child always chose the menu for the birthday dinner. Fiona favored fish and chicken and vegetables. Born in
Scotland and forced to endure Scottish cuisine as a child, she had a horror of what she called "stodgy food," but tonight Kylie would have her way. This pleased George Callahan no end, as he was the appointed chef-he loved to stand at the grill, a cold beer at his side, inhaling charcoal smoke and wielding the specially fashioned grill tools he had designed himself. It was his dream to someday have enough to invest in a small business and make outdoor grilling equipment. The one concession made to Fiona was that the meat was pure grass-fed Angus beef, ninety-seven percent lean, organic, and hormone free.
They all sat around Fiona's long oak table, halfway through Kylie's birthday dinner. "Great burgers, George," Lee said, as he finished his, medium rare, dripping with caramelized onions. George had cooked each one to order, and seasoned them with a special sauce he made himself, guarding the recipe as carefully as if it were a state secret.
"Thanks," George replied, snapping open another Rolling Rock and taking a long swig. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve, then looked sheepishly at Fiona, but fortunately for him she wasn't watching.
The girls chatted and giggled all throughout dinner, and though Fiona shot her granddaughter looks from time to time, Kylie ignored her and continued enjoying her friends.
The subject at the moment was Ouija boards-the girls had discovered the one Lee and Laura used to play with in the upstairs guest bedroom closet. When he explained what they were for, Meredith immediately scoffed at the idea, but Kylie and Angelica were intrigued and wanted to play with the board after dinner.
"There's no such thing as foretelling the future!" Meredith declared, spreading a liberal amount of butter on her ear of corn.
"How do you know?" said Kylie. "What if there is?"
"Well, even if there is, you wouldn't be able to do it with a wooden board with a few letters painted on it!"
"My granny says that she can tell the future from the scratches our chickens leave in their feed on the ground," Angelica said, her chin shiny from beef fat and butter.
"You have chickens?" Kylie said. "That's cool!"
Angelica lowered her eyes and glanced at Fiona, who sat stiff as ever in her chair, delicately nibbling on an ear of corn. Her fastidiousness extended to her eating habits. Though she enjoyed her food, she was never one to throw herself into any activity too vigorously, as if an excess of enthusiasm was itself a character flaw.
"Why do people want to believe they can foretell the future?" Meredith grumbled. "Why can't they just live their lives without this… need to believe in things that can't be proven?"
"Speaking of the future, you sound like a future scientist," George remarked, helping himself to more steak and salad.
Meredith set her fork down with a clank. "Yes," she said portentously. "I intend to be a forensic specialist."
"What's for-ensics?" asked Angelica.
"The study of evidence in crime scenes," Meredith replied, popping a cherry tomato into her mouth. The juice squirted out through her teeth and hit Fiona square in the forehead.
"Less chatter and more attention to what we're doing, please," she said sternly.
"I think the reason people want to believe in the unproven is because we all want to be able to touch the past and the future," George said. "We don't want to think that this is all there is."
Meredith snorted and rolled her eyes.
"You're too young to understand," George continued, "but by the time you're our age, you will. We're all afraid of death, and we've all lost someone we love. So if we can believe that maybe-just maybe-there's something else, then we feel better."
"Well, I think it's silly!" Meredith scoffed, stuffing a piece of bread in her mouth.
Lee looked at George, taken aback by his uncharacteristically serious response. He knew that George was referring to Laura, but he was surprised that he would allude to her in front of the children-especially his daughter. But Kylie appeared to miss the reference, and was happily dipping her bread into a little pool of melted butter on her plate.
"In Scotland, some people were said to have what we called the Second Sight," Fiona said.
Lee stared at his mother. This was the first he'd ever heard her mention anything like this.
"Really?" said Kylie, her fork stopped in midair.
Fiona's expression didn't change, but her tone was low and mysterious. "When I was a child there was a woman, Mary McFarland, who could see things that had yet to happen."
"Like what?" Angelica said, leaning so far over the table she nearly upset the salad dressing.
"Gareth McKinney came to her in a dream, and the next day he was dead."
"Wow," said Kylie. "That's cool."
"How did he die?" Angelica asked. "He fell off the roof trying to mend it." Meredith sniffed officiously. "Probably just a coincidence."
"Then one time she told Kerry McClelland not to take the ferry to the mainland, and the next day the ferry sank." "Wow," Kylie said.
"How come you never told me any of this?" Lee asked.
Fiona leaned forward and plucked another ear of corn from the platter. "The subject never came up."
Kylie and Angelica could hardly wait to finish dinner so they could get out the Ouija board, over Meredith's objections.
Lee joined his mother in the kitchen, where she was busily cleaning up after dinner. Fiona was an exacting housekeeper, and often seemed so eager to begin the "tidying up" process that Lee was worried someday she would snatch a half-finished dish from under her guest's nose.
He found her rinsing and stacking dishes-she owned a dishwasher, but a dish rarely entered it in anything less than pristine condition.
"Do you really believe those things you told the girls?" Lee asked his mother.
"I am neither a believer nor an unbeliever," she replied, scraping corncobs into the compost bin. A fanatic gardener, she was intractable when it came to composting, believing that artificial fertilizers were the devil's work.
"But you told them that story," he protested. "Why did you tell them if you don't-"
She stopped working and turned to face him. "Where are you headed with this? Because I won't talk about-you know what," she finished, her voice low.
"That's not why I was asking," Lee said. "But since you mention it, why can't we ever talk about it? For God's sake, she was-"
His mother abruptly dropped the compost bin onto the floor with such a loud bang that it made him jump. "Don't you say she 'was' anything!" she hissed, her eyes narrowed in fury. "Don't you dare give up on her!"
"Oh, for God's sake-I'm not 'giving up' on anything!"
he shot back. "When will you accept the fact that she's gone? She's not coming back-she's dead, and all the wishing in the world isn't going to change that!"
When he saw the look in his mother's eyes, he immediately regretted his words. She stared at him, her face frozen in an expression of horror and reproach, then turned sharply, whipping her dish towel onto the counter like a punctuation mark, and stalked out of the room.
Lee stood there for a few moments, his head spinning with remorse and anger-anger because this was such predictable behavior on her part, and remorse because he should have known better than to bring it up-and on Kylie's birthday, of all times.
He heard a sound behind him and turned to see his niece standing in the doorway, a stricken expression on her face.
"What's the matter? Why are you angry at Grandmother?" she said, her chin beginning to pucker, her lower lip trembling.
"I'm not angry at her, honey," Lee said, bending to take her in his arms.
"Is it about my mommy coming back? Will she be coming soon?"
"Maybe, honey," he lied. "I hope so."