They slowly climbed the incline toward the house, guiding their steps through the trail they had carved. Curiously, Jip was not spying on them from the window as usual, and Tim wondered what might be occupying his attention. A trough in the snow skirted along the foundation, and below every window was a tramped-down area, as if their quarry had paused beneath each entry point to the house. The windows were all smudged and wet with dirt and melting snow. On the far side, the tracks veered sharply into the pines along the southern border of the property, and Tim and Nick followed them into the trees. Where the evergreen needles had fallen, the snow cover had thinned to a bare coating, and they nearly lost the scent, but the prints picked up again and the length between strides widened, as though the thing was running now and had crossed the road.
Panting, Tim stopped and considered the child at his side, cold and wet and tired. It could be anywhere, miles away, over the rocks or into the woods. As much as he wanted to put an end to the mystery plaguing them, he decided to abandon the chase. “This is no place for a child,” he hollered into the wind. “Time to get you safe inside.” They retraced the path their own boots had made and circled back to the door by the mudroom. A couple of old towels hanging on pegs allowed them to dry their wet hair into tangled manes. They wrestled free from their coats and boots and their soaking socks, turned up the cuffs on their wet jeans, and marched barefoot into the kitchen. Jip was at the kitchen table, drawing.
“Where were you so long?”
Nick looked like a wild thing, his cheeks bright red and his hair a shock. “We saw footprints out there. It’s a blizzard, and we tried to follow them.”
“What was it?” Jip asked.
“I don’t know. Can’t tell,” his father said. “Did you see anything from inside?”
Bending down to his paper, Jip resumed his drawing. “Nothing. Just waiting.”
They left him at the table and went to change into dry clothes. Tim lit a fire in the fireplace, warm heart to the quiet house, worrying about Holly out in the storm. Nick kept watch at the window, imagining a monster in every shadow. An hour passed before Jip stopped his drawing long enough to report about his mother’s phone call and how she said to take the Jeep and find her at the Star of the Sea.
iii.
“I’ll not have another word about ghosts,” Father Bolden said. “You should be ashamed of yourself, filling Holly’s head with such tales. A ghost is little more than a trick of the mind at war with itself. A temporary manifestation of psychological conflict.” He rubbed his stomach and licked the last of the cherries from the tines of his fork. “No more of your folktales, Miss Tiramaku.” He turned to Holly. “Why don’t you tell us about what brought you here in the first place? Why don’t you tell us about your son?”
At one end of the mahogany table, Father Bolden and Miss Tiramaku sat together as familiar as a long-lost uncle and aunt welcoming her back to the family. The snowy day brought memories of the slant light of other such afternoons, holiday times with her parents and sister, catching up after extended absences, of cups and saucers, dessert plates dotted with crumbs, and feeling that they might never again have the chance to talk this way. She wanted to confess what she had done and what she had failed to do, what she had said and what she had failed to say. She had yearned to tell someone about her dreams and her boy for a long, long time.
“We came to Maine because of Tim. When we were first married, I would have followed him anywhere. It was his dream to come north, find a nice place on the ocean, settle down, and raise a family. His soul, he says, finds its natural rhythm in the tides. He was out of the service and thought he could go back to college here. Study the sea. And I had a postcard view of life, the boats in the harbor, lobster in the summertime, and the light in late September. We were happy here at first, and it seemed that the next part of the dream would come along right away. We’d start making babies, little water nymphs, and set them outside in the sunshine and clean air and salt water and watch them grow big and strong and healthy.”
Miss Tiramaku shifted in her chair, and Holly wondered if her story was hitting a sore spot with her.
“We couldn’t get pregnant for a long time, and I hope you don’t mind, Father, but we tried everything in every conceivable way.…” She blushed at her accidental word. “I don’t mind saying that I even prayed for a child. Hope had all but run dry, and then a small miracle. Pregnant at last, and those first few months I was expecting, I was deliriously happy. And then I found out what happened between Nell and Tim right before I got pregnant.”
“And who is this Nell?” Father Bolden asked.
“She was my best friend. Is. She and Fred invited us over at the end of the summer, and it was nothing really, an indiscretion. We had been drinking, all of us, and they ended up in bed together.”
The priest shoved the strudel in his mouth. “Did your husband confess?”
“He never said a word, but she told me, eventually. Months later. Look, if we hadn’t both been pregnant … I’m over it,” Holly said. “Moved on, and our babies coming together made it easier to forgive and forget. Or forget, at least. Though I’m not so sure about Nell. Maybe she brings Nicholas over so much because she still feels guilty.”
“Nell is Nicholas’s mother?” Miss Tiramaku asked.