by E. A. House
“You trust him that much?” Maddison asked.
“I’ve known Professor Griffin since I was a baby,” Chris explained. “He was Aunt Elsie’s best friend. I think he’d really want to help, plus he has a boat.”
“Oh, I see.”
“No, it’s not like that. I mean kind of, that is—”
“I’m teasing you,” Maddison said. “But Chris—when you mentioned him at the rectory the day before yesterday?”
“Yeah?”
“Okay, so my dad has this blank face he does when he can’t decide how to respond to a situation,” Maddison said, and she must have seen that Chris wasn’t following her because she went on. “Like for example, when I was four I got into the art supplies when nobody was watching and put a line of handprints along all four living room walls, but I did it in a color that complemented the rest of the room and it looked like someone did it on purpose. And Dad walked in and saw me and got this utterly blank look on his face because he knew I’d been misbehaving but I’d accidentally made everything better, right?”
“Okay, I see,” Chris said.
“He got that face again when you brought up Professor Griffin. And I don’t have any idea why.”
“Because they’re colleagues, of a sort?” Chris suggested. “Where did your dad go to school?”
“That would be one of the many things he refuses to tell anyone,” Maddison said, picking up a rock and tossing it.
“I’ll avoid mentioning your dad to Professor Griffin until we find out why he made faces, then,” Chris said. “It’s probably just because he saw Professor Griffin walk into a door too many times, people get weird about that.”
“True,” Maddison said. “And dad was slowly dying of cat allergies, so I could have been misreading his expressions.”
“And as for the other question,” Chris added. “Don’t you and Carrie determine that? I don’t have a summer job to worry about.”
“Carrie and I kind of already asked Mrs. Hadler if she would mind us skipping a day or so next week,” Maddison explained. “And it turns out she’s going on vacation with her grandkids for the next two weeks. Starting Tuesday. She was just waiting for her book club’s tea to be over.”
Well in that case.
“So, do you want to go hiking this week, say, Monday through Wednesday?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Maddison said. “And then I thought you’d never tell, either,” she added, which Chris could admit he deserved.
“That little comment about seeing it through rather than ignoring it was for me, wasn’t it?”
“Well, you and dad, who is still worried about something he can’t figure out how to tell me,” Maddison said. She found a respectable skipping stone among the gravel and got a good three hops out of it before it sank. “And now he’s decided to also worry about me dating, which is silly, because . . . ”
“You’re not, and we’re not, and we probably won’t ever if I don’t grow out of the habit of keeping secrets?” Chris offered, and was surprised to find that it didn’t even hurt very much.
“Chris,” Maddison said patiently. “Sending an apology for being cryptic in code is not romantic.”
“Um.”
“I didn’t even know what kind of cypher it was,” Maddison added, and it shouldn’t have made Chris so happy that she knew it was a cypher.
The cemetery was quiet, and deserted, and it being just past midnight this wasn’t an odd occurrence. In a quiet corner near a statue of a weeping angel, a bouquet of asters rustled in the light breeze and shone in the light of a nearly full moon like tiny silvery stars. Or at least, they did until a shadow fell over them and plunged the grave of Elsie Kingsolver into inky blackness.
“You always did look good in moonlight,” the man casting the shadow said. He was tall, and wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt that hid his face, and feeling—although he wasn’t about to admit it to anyone, except perhaps the dead, who don’t tell tales nor make you take a nap—overwhelmed.
“And there was some silly poem from an old werewolf film you liked, about the moon all bright and white, and the one”—he sighed, and sat down on the grass before the grave—“about the moon in the sky, and the tears in my eye, and all the world’s moonlight can’t lead me to you.” He laughed. “And bless us all and curse the day I ever heard the name San Telmo,” he finished. This wasn’t actually how the rhyme went, but he didn’t care.
“Because call me a liar if you want, but they might actually find it,” he continued, plucking clovers from the grass in front of him with fast, skilled fingers. “They’ve gotten further in two weeks than we did in two years, and that’s with you-know-who dogging their every footstep.”
He was now wrapping clover stems together.
“He’s gone and insinuated himself, the jerk,” he said, conversationally. “Got the kids to trust him. It’s enough to make you bite someone, Elsie, and that someone might just be him, and then won’t work the next morning be awkward?”
He tucked in a few green stems and poked a last flower or two into some of the empty spaces, and a delicate flower crown lay in his lap, woven entirely from clovers. He took the old, wilted flower crown and tossed it into a nearby tuft of ornamental grass, where it would be able to decompose in peace. Then he pulled three of the asters from their bouquet and twisted them into the crown as a finishing touch, and laid the completed flower crown at the base of the headstone.
“At some point,” he said, hauling himself to his feet, “I’ll get out of this terrible habit of haunting graveyards like some sort of ghost. But, well, secrets. So it won’t be anytime soon. So”—he started to turn away, and then abruptly turned back—“you’d be proud of them, Elsie,” he said, honestly but reluctantly, after standing before the grave for a long moment. “Chris and Carrie and even Maddison McRae. Proud and a little unnerved, and Carrie looks so much like you at that age. You’d be unnerved, and very frustrated, and very worried . . . ” He sighed. “But very, very proud.”