Halt at X: A North of Boston Novel

by Sally Ann Sims

  “Got a great shot of the sea from Jean’s boulder,” Bart said, approaching her. “With something arcing out of the water, I don’t know what, and the sky was almost totally bled of sunlight. Coulda been a harbor porpoise.”

  Bart peered briefly into Lucinda’s eyes as he passed close by her on the way over to the van. Lucinda inhaled the ripe scent of his new brown leather jacket she’d never seen before and noticed his face was thinner. From behind, she watched him place his camera in its carrier and then lock the van. His dark blond hair ended two inches below his collar. She’d been waiting for this moment for months. Now what was she going to say to him? Without realizing it, she’d begun to shiver.

  “Hey, you’re cold,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

  They walked to the farmhouse, Bart following Lucinda. In the entryway, she glanced into the dining room at the round table with its stack of Saturday mail and flashed on the night she told Bart about Jay. She at this table, he on the stairs.

  “Let’s sit in the living room. We can light a fire,” she said, hurrying past the dining area. Bart picked the upholstered wing chair opposite the couch by the fire. Gabriel landed on his lap a second after he sat down.

  She’d cleaned the fireplace out that morning. Then she laid out dried white pine twigs and sticks, figuring she’d want a fire tonight since it was forecasted to turn cold and blustery after a relatively warm spell for February. Lucinda lit the fire and stood near the modest blaze, shepherding it to greater heat and light, deciding what to say first.

  Before she turned around to face him, Bart said, “I’m kinda seeing someone.”

  Lucinda heaved the log she was holding onto the top of the fire, without her usual careful placement, showering the air above with a temporary galaxy of sparks.

  She might have expected something like that, given his recent success and all the adulation Martin spoke of, but it just struck her like the whack of a hurled brick. She turned and sat lightly on the edge of the couch closest to Bart’s chair, leaning toward him.

  “Bart. I just want to tell you what happened. So that maybe someday… I can earn the right to ask you to forgive me.”

  Bart rose, ambled to the kitchen, and poured himself a whiskey from the same bottle at the same level as the night he walked out of their married life with the rocks glass.

  “Go ahead,” he said, returning to the living room. He stood behind the wing chair, his elbows resting on the back. Drink in his right hand over empty space. Now displaced, Gabriel jumped onto Lucinda’s lap. She placed a trembling hand on his back. Her hand stopped shaking in the plush fur. The cat purred thunderously.

  “I’ve thought a lot about… it,” she said. “I don’t really know what to say. But you deserve to know… not the gory details as you said, but why. I was lonely, Bart. That’s all I can come up with. You were gone all the time — ”

  “I was trying to get contacts to get a show together.” He sniffed, took a swig, and grimaced as the whiskey slid down his throat.

  “After the second miscarriage, I… .” Lucinda looked up in time to see Bart wince. “I know it was hard. All of it was hard, especially those awful three years. But I needed someone to be with. I guess I thought you were frustrated that there weren’t enough contacts here to get your art off the ground. And maybe you were punishing me for making us stay in this town when you needed to be in the city. And those babies we — ”

  “I was punishing you?” he said, incredulous.

  “No, I don’t see it that way now. But that’s what it felt like. That I, the farm, my job, our life together were holding you back.”

  “But I — ”

  “Please just let me finish. I don’t think I can bear to tell — ”

  “I’m all ears,” he said, emptying the glass.

  “I guess it was my sick way of justifying being with him,” she said, shifting her gaze to the fire instead of Bart’s face. Then, gathering courage, she turned toward him.

  “I was selfish and rash and god-awful lonely. Even when I was with him.”

  Parched. I felt parched. And Jay satisfied that, for a time.

  They stared at each other for half a minute, and then Lucinda looked away from his closed, weary face, the way he hunched his shoulders as if for protection. And now he had someone else. How serious was that?

  Her palm was sweating onto Gabriel’s fur, and he began licking himself vigorously where she had dampened him. With great effort, she held poised tears back against gravity.

  The phone rang on the kitchen counter. Odd, most people called her on her cell. She let the machine pick up. A male voice she didn’t recognize left a simple message.

  Is Orion out tonight?

  Their eyes locked. Bart straightened his spine and pulled his shoulders back, his eyes flashing with a sudden self-assurance.

  “Who’s that? Another boyfriend?”

  Lucinda shut her eyes, seeing the flames dancing in the dark behind her eyelids. When she opened them, Bart was at the counter pouring a refill. She gathered Gabriel up from her lap. His fur was hot, his muscles relaxed from the fire, and he oozed out onto the couch where she placed him. In the kitchen she felt brittle and shivered as she checked the caller ID. Private name, Private number.

  “No, Bart. There is no boyfriend.” Her voice held no hope, no more tension of persuasion.

  Bart stood, waiting for an explanation. She thought for few seconds that it might make things easier for him with his announcement of “kinda seeing someone” if she did have a new boyfriend. They could both slip away from each other, no hard feelings. Well, few hard feelings. But she didn’t have a new boyfriend. Didn’t want a boyfriend. And this was certainly no boyfriend calling.

  “I’m being stalked. I think. Actually, I don’t know who it is,” Lucinda said. She slumped down into a chair at the kitchen table.

  “Stalked! You’re kidding, right?” Bart took the seat next to her.

  “I wish,” she said. “It started Friday.”

  “Have you reported it?”

  “Honor has. I’ll tell them about this one too.”

  “What else have they done? More than phone calls?” His voice seemed to seek the consolation she wanted for herself.

  “Friday was a note, something else about Orion. Saturday they tried to drive me off the road. If it’s the same people and not just a coincidence.”

  “Christ!” Bart said.

  “I doubt it’s him.” She finally looked into his face.

  “I didn’t mean… ” Bart said. Lucinda smiled. She knew for him it was just a word, a swear, not a person who tried too hard and died too young. Bart smiled at her. He looked at his almost empty glass and then at the whiskey bottle on the counter by the coffee maker.

  “I shouldn’t have any more,” he said.

  “If you do, you’re not driving anywhere.”

  Lucinda examined her hands. She still wore her rose gold wedding ring, although she noticed Bart had taken his matching one off. When she looked up, Bart was teasing a photographic equipment catalog out of the bottom of a stack of mail. Although his pores were larger now and his nose a little longer, he was still that cute artist guy she’d stumbled into on the beach the day of high school graduation. The one who asked to take her photo in the surf. The one whose generosity and passion she fell in love with two decades ago.

  Was that it? she wondered. That she fell in love with those transient qualities and not with the man? She got up, walked to the fridge, took out a bottle, and poured herself some wine.

  “Who are you seeing?” she said, leaning on the counter, trying not to sound possessive. She had yet to win back the right to be possessive where he was concerned.

  “Janice Minot. A woman I met at the gallery.” He flipped through the zoom lenses.

  “She didn’t happen to buy your blue mitten photo, did she?”

  “Shit! How did you know?” He pushed the catalog aside.

  “I was there when she bought it. She seemed like some
one you’d like. Artsy, intense. Attractive,” she added reluctantly. Hot, she thought. Feverish.

  She sat back down at the table and peered out the big bay window. There was none of the forecasted wind yet, and the waning moon shone a clear-cut brilliant disk, like pure pulsing heat. But she could feel the cold settling in from where she sat four feet from the window. The white oak trees surrounding the house threw inky striated shadows onto the frozen moonlit grass, the snow having disappeared yesterday. She thought she saw a shadow moving — a figure — crossing through the paddock by the barn.

  “Bart!” She grabbed his arm without thinking. “There’s someone crossing the paddock! Or some thing.”

  Bart looked out the window.

  “Probably a coyote. They’re coming back around here you know. I’m glad you’ve got the cats in.” He lifted her hand gently off his arm.

  “Maybe.”

  Maybe I should have a gun, she thought, for the first time in her life. Not that she knew anything about guns. It wasn’t for the coyote, whom she had no reason to fear, but if there was a person out there, prowling. A man most likely. It was good just to be sitting with someone, especially Bart — the one she’d always leaned on, trusted for most of the last eighteen years — at this table so close to the darkness. And the fear.

  Bart grabbed the photographic equipment catalog.

  “I gotta go,” he said. “You’ll be fine. But call the cops.”

  Lucinda, startled as if she’d been slapped, reached out for his arm again, without thinking, then stopped herself. No. Don’t go! He was already standing.

  “I told Janice I’d be back tonight.”

  Ouch. Were they living together?

  “Can we talk again? About us?” Lucinda asked.

  “Yes.” His eyes are softer, she thought. Or is it the whiskey?

  “Bart? I am sorry. Really sorry for breaking our vows. I hope someday you can forgive me, that you’ll want to forgive me. And come home.”

  They were both quiet for a moment. A Great Horned Owl spilled out a volley of low hoots behind the house. Catcher, poised over his water bowl, scampered through to the back window.

  “I’m glad we talked,” he said. “G’night, Cinda. Lock up tight.” He moved toward the door, the catalog tucked under his arm.

  She saw the shadow moving outside again between the paddock fence and the barn. Or was she just imagining it? She said nothing. She wasn’t going to trick, or guilt, him into staying. Play the defenseless female. Whatever it was, she’d face it alone.

  * * * * *

  She poured whiskey into her empty wine glass from the bottle on the table. Still in view through the window, the moon appeared tethered among the pines along the driveway west of the orchard. Gabriel and Catcher joined her, on the table, where she never lets them sit.

  He’d never seen them sit there. Gazing in from the side of the barn through binoculars, he thought they looked like miniature lion gargoyles on either side of her. For protection.

  Her hair, dark like a mink, gleamed in the incandescent light from above. Jay knew what she would feel like. He missed what she felt like. He wondered whether this was the time he was going to have her back to himself again. Or whether —

  He stepped toward the house, paused at the sound of car tires turning on crushed stone, and then disappeared into the barn.

  * * * * *

  A car whooshed down the driveway, crunching to a halt on the white stones. Then silence. Lucinda looked out, her hand at her throat. The overhead light prevented her from seeing into the driveway. She rushed to the wall and cut the indoor light, switched the outdoor lights on, and checked the front door. She’d dead bolted it after Bart left, but had to be sure.

  She grabbed her cell on the way to the first-floor landing window to see whether anyone approached the door. Soon a man appeared under the outdoor light.

  Short blond hair. Navy down coat. Aden. He scanned the front of the house behind the boxwood and lilac bushes and scowled in the direction of the barn.

  She rushed back down the stairs and unbolted and opened the door.

  “Lucinda! There’s someone in your barn. I saw him just now. Do you have any weapon?” His words were rapid and urgent.

  “Are you kidding? I thought I was imagining — ” She looked out past him toward the barn.

  “No.” He pushed past her and ran to the living room. He’d grabbed the fireplace poker by the time Lucinda had caught up with him.

  “Flashlight?”

  She retrieved one from the junk drawer in the kitchen.

  “Stay inside,” he said. “Bolt the door.”

  “No way! I’m coming with you. At least we’ll outnumber him.”

  “Let’s hope it’s just one. But you’re still limping.”

  “It’s nothing. I’ve wrapped it.”

  Armed with fireplace poker and tongs, they approached the barn. When they reached the front entrance door, Lucinda turned on the inside and outside barn lights. There was no one there, although the flashlight beam revealed fresh footprints, depressions in the hoar-frosted grass, from the back stall leading up toward the orchard. The top Dutch door was open. Lucinda closed it.

  “We need more serious weapons,” Aden said.

  She held up her tongs. “I know. I feel like the Minutemen at Concord.”

  “Well, I’m glad you can joke about it. Let’s go back inside.”

  They both looked up toward the orchard. A branch creaked, and then cold silence sounded an accompanying echo.

  “After you,” he said.

  They settled in the living room, Lucinda reviving the fire with newspaper and twigs. Aden sat on the couch closest to the blaze, holding out his hands to it. Lucinda sat on the floor in front of the fire.

  “Why did you drive all the way out here, Aden?”

  “I spent the afternoon with John Pringle. He’s going to paint Gretel. He gave me an update on Frank’s nefarious exploits, gleaned from longer than we’ve been at this game. As I was driving home at about five-thirty, I got this weird feeling that you might be in trouble. I tried to ignore it and rationalize to myself that I was overreacting. But later on I couldn’t sleep. So here I am. At your service.”

  He pulled his hands back from the flames.

  “God, this feels good. I miss having a fireplace. We had a great one in Providence — ”

  “Aden, that’s spooky,” Lucinda said. She got up and sat next to him on the couch. “Five-thirty is just about when I got the second communication from our Orion friend. Bart was here. We were finally talking about what happened between us, and then I started seeing these weird shadows by the barn. I was going to call you about the message, but… .”

  “But?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I was too upset from talking to Bart. He’s seeing someone else. And he was ok, but it’s not the same. I don’t know if I’ve got any chance of getting him back.”

  The owl started up again. They’re mating this time of year, Lucinda thought. What an odd thing to think of now.

  “What was the message?”

  “Here, I’ll play it. He left a phone message, if you believe it. At least we know today’s Orion is a he.”

  They went to the kitchen, and Lucinda pressed the playback button.

  Is Orion out tonight?

  Aden checked the caller ID.

  “I already tried that. Private.”

  “I don’t recognize the voice.”

  “Me neither. But that accent is from some other part of New England. New Hampshire? Vermont?”

  “I don’t like this at all, Lucinda. This might have nothing to do with the guy in the barn. Have you considered that? That there are two things going on?”

  “Or three. But it could be all bluster. Trying to scare me.” She looked down at Aden’s lined boots. He had prepared himself for anything, to protect her.

  “But you don’t believe that, do you?” Aden said. He lifted her chin to search in her eyes for the truth.
r />   “No, I don’t.”

  Aden released her chin and looked away.

  They returned to the living room. The couch. She sat next to him. Aden turned toward the fire.

  “Yikes!” Lucinda said, checking the wall clock. “It’s after two. We’re going to be useless tomorrow.”

  “We could call in sick,” Aden teased, turning toward her.

  “We’ve got Development Committee tomorrow. Nice try,” she said.

  Aden watched Lucinda smile as the flame shadows writhed on her face. His whole body ached with desire, a kind of longing that was painful. So close to that face he dreamed of. Often. He forgot everything else when he leaned forward and kissed her. The kiss deepened into a flame firing his groin and flushing up to his chest. He pulled away when she put her hands around his neck.

  “Oh my god, Lucinda! What am I doing? What are we doing?” He stood up.

  “I don’t know, but it was nice. I — ”

  “Nice. Hah! Yes, but, God! I told myself a million times not to do that.” They looked at each other. It was as if the whole world had shifted, Aden thought, but Lucinda had not experienced the same magnitude of tremor.

  “A million times?” She looked surprised. Or was she kidding him?

  “Yes, but — ”

  “Look, Aden, a kiss is a kiss. No, we probably shouldn’t have. But we’re adults, we can stop. We stopped. Right? I’m not sure what possessed me either.” Yes, she did. She was thinking of Bart. And the whiskey hadn’t helped matters either.

  “Yes. We can,” he said, relieved that she was so calm about it. “I’d better go. Yes, I should go now.” He sprung off the couch. “No! I can’t go, there’s a whacko prowling around.”

  Lucinda laughed. “We scared ‘em off for tonight. And I’m too exhausted to worry about Orion. I think he’s just going to hang out there in the sky.”

  “I’m staying in your guest bedroom. At least tonight. Or what’s left of it.”

  “Are you serious?” Lucinda said.

  “He might come back. If anything were to happen….” Aden stopped in mid-sentence and looked at the fire. Then he turned to Lucinda and said, “You should report this tonight. The cops might still be able to catch him.”